02 July 2014

The 1st Silent Film Festival in Thailand


The 1st Silent Film Festival in Thailand

Next month, Thailand’s first Silent Film Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์เงียบ ประเทศไทย ครั้งที่ ๑) will be held in Bangkok. The event, organised by the British Council with restored prints supplied by the BFI, begins on 7th August. Most screenings will take place at Lido, though the final screening will be at Scala.

Three silent films by Alfred Hitchcock will be shown: The Pleasure Garden (his directorial debut; 7th and 10th August), The Ring (an atypical Hitchcock production, and his only solo screenwriting credit; 8th and 10th August), and The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (13th August, at Scala). All film screenings will be accompanied by a live pianist, to recreate the original silent cinema atmosphere. (Composer Somtow Sucharitkul will be the pianist for The Lodger; previously, the BFI commissioned an orchestral score for the film by Nitin Sawhney.)

The Lodger, an Expressionist thriller based on the Jack the Ripper case, is certainly Hitchcock’s greatest silent movie, and arguably one of his masterpieces. It’s the first truly Hitchcockian film, and the Silent Film Festival provides a rare opportunity to see it on the big screen. (The title character’s arrival at a boarding house influenced a similarly suspenseful moment in The Ladykillers.)

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