SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 @ 7pm (Eastern) The Pittsburgh Silent Film Society and Row House Cinema join forces this September 29 to mark the first National Silent Movie Day, an event taking place around the country to celebrate silent film history and raise awareness about the race to preserve surviving silent films. An estimated 80% of all American silent feature films produced between 1890 and 1930 are now considered “lost” forever.
The Pittsburgh screening, using the British Film Institute’s restoration from the original camera negative, will feature auteur Alfred Hitchcock’s silent masterwork Blackmail (1929) - one of the best British films, if not the best, of the late 1920s. Tom Roberts, former piano player for Leon Redbone and composer and performer of the music for the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s film The Aviator, will accompany the film live on piano. Dr. Adam Hart, film scholar and author of Monstrous Forms, will provide a short introduction.
From the BFI:
Made in 1929, during the transition to the sound era, it was commissioned as both a silent and as a part-talkie with music and some dialogue scenes. With remarkable skill (and an eye to building a solid career in the new medium), Hitchcock managed to produce both a beautifully crafted silent and a groundbreaking sound version. Indeed, he tackled the considerable technical obstacles with such imagination that the latter has tended to obscure the reputation of the silent version, which is in fact superior in a number of ways.
As Hitchcock said ‘The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema’ and indeed the film contains more shots, more camera movement and the fluidity of the cutting conveys the narrative with greater style. Every scene counts and every shot either enhances the atmosphere or moves the story along. The opening eight minutes of the film is a tour de force of montage in which we see the forces of the Law hunt down and ‘process’ a career villain from capture to the police cell.
Blackmail displays many of the stylistic elements and themes with which Hitchcock would come to be associated: particularly a fascination with male sexual aggression and female vulnerability. Like the later Sabotage (1936) it features a woman who is protected from the Law by her policeman lover. It is also one of a number of Hitchcock’s films to feature a heroine who enters a dazed or ‘fugue’ state in which she acts mechanically and apparently without control of her actions – other examples are Murder! (1930), Sabotage and, more ambiguously, Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960).
Tickets at https://rowhousecinema.com/events/.