Kateryna KOT
Mute Nights:
Few Words about Beauty, Memory and Justicy The lights snatched out dark blue density of the sky, light modern wall of the St. Nickolas Church and white wingspan of seagulls above orange domes. Lower there are stairs to the improvised audience hall on the berth of Odessa Marina. Spiers of drowsing yachts, meditative dots of red lighthouse, and Marion Davies in the screen, disturbed by evening sea wind moving. The fourth «Mute Nights Festival», the fest of silent movie and modern music, was held on the 21-23 of June in Odessa. It is created by National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre, and for the second time was supported by the State Agency for Cinema
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atching early cinematography, l often remember: this is from where they are — cliché’s legs: illustration pictures with literal images, dynamic stories with veins of a couple of story line, lapidary intertitles. The majority of all these things are canonic and template today but at the beginning of the 20th century — all this was an experiment, research and discovery. The detective by Petro Chardynin «Ucrasia (7+2)» was released in 1925 to the screens of great and inviolable. This film became the biggest box-office film of its genre and gained ringing fame in Ukraine as well as abroad. Besides already in 1938 the biggest part of the two-series 209 minute film was destroyed. In 2013 the Dovjenko Center found the base novel of the same name «Ukrasia» Mykola Borysov (by the way, best-seller of its time too) and 67 minutes of remained film and reconstructed the new version. The film was dubbed by MINIMATIKON Polish Project (It was created on purpose to dub mute films by Orange the Juice group). Young, expressive pianists organized incredible audio performance. Polish created bright sound revolution for the same young, revolutionary and energetic Odesa of 1919 with riots and struggle, chases, intrigues, opium clubs and red bins. It’s interesting and pleasant a priori to watch in Odesa of 2013 about Odesa of 1919 as listen to amazing soundtrack to unsurpassed horror by Robert Wiene «The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari». Petro Chardynin passes the relay race to Czech and in particular screening of Leo Tolstoy novel «The Kreutzer Sonata» on which he worked in 1911. The Czech center in Kyiv brought to «Mute Nights» the single copy of the same name film by Gustav Machatý of 1926 and out-
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standing, one of the most famous Czech underground musicians Pavel Fight who played in Odesa for the second time. The film became the first independent work and the first step to the field of erotic and temptation for Gustav Machatý on which he grew into notable master and classic. Surely Gustav Machatý plunged into sin not a single person, choosing for the main role Eve Bironova who generously flirted from the screen with her sad, dark eyes and put together lips. It’s she — the woman, the wishes of whom remained incomprehensible and not taken into consideration (by her as well), brought up with limited idea about the role and place, who threw herself from children to fashion, from fashion to music. Persuasively looked Yan V. Shperger in the role of Postyshev, the person who decided to sober down
Yuriy Kuznetsov accompanies charming King Vidor's «The Patsy»