Rich bill of a silent nature

The Killruddery Film Festival celebrates 'lost, overlooked and forgotten' films, writes STEPHEN DIXON

GROTESQUE policemen tumble into a disintegrating jalopy and career wildly around the suburbs of LA. Moustache-twirling villains tie a struggling girl to a railway track. Huge, kohl-rimmed eyes blink back tears. Charlie Chaplin waddles down a dusty road and fades into history.

But silent films were much more than slapstick and melodrama. “The period is so rich,” says Daniel Fitzpatrick, director of Wicklow’s Killruddery Film Festival (March 11-14), which has been opened-out this year and sub-titled Celebrating Lost, Overlooked and Forgotten Cinema. “The films could be very sophisticated. When the silent era was gone a kind of purity and beauty was lost as well, and I don’t think it came back until the days of the Nouvelle Vague movement of the 1960s. It was then that resonances between different periods of film-making began, for me, to be apparent.”

It was such resonances that led to the incorporation of several unusual and intriguing talkies in this year’s festival. Fitzpatrick picked some and others were chosen by special guests such as John Boorman. “We’ve expanded the festival because we were ambitious, I suppose,” says Fitzpatrick. “From previous years we had people saying, ‘Well, I had no idea it would be this kind of experience – I didn’t know these kind of films existed’.”

So Killruddery has become a home for films that have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. “We’ve pushed the boat out and this year we’re contextualising films more. I asked interesting people, knowing that they would pick unusual films. I asked John Boorman to choose any film he was enthusiastic about and he came up with Seven Days to Noon, a 1950 thriller made in Britain by the Boulting Brothers. Once you see it you can see how it fits in with his oeuvre. When he was very young he met someone who worked on it and I think it made him start to understand how films are put together, and that perhaps film was something he might one day work in. It’s a very personal film for him, as well as being a very good one.”

There will also be film by gallery video artists at the festival. “We don’t make distinctions between different kinds of film – experimental or commercial or whatever,” says Fitzpatrick. “Gallery artists making experimental video ignored the language of film for a long time but now they understand it more. There is more of a dialogue between different forms of film as artists respond to film grammar.”

The celebration of silent film remains at the core of this lovely little festival, though, set in the interior and grounds of one of our most distinctive grand houses, home to the Brabazon family since 1618 and currently occupied by the 15th Earl of Meath. As previously, the festival has drawn on the expertise of cinema historian Kevin Brownlow, who introduces tonight's opening film A Cottage on Dartmoor, Anthony Asquith's 1929 drama of jealousy and illicit passion. On Saturday, he presents Chang, a 1927 documentary filmed in Siam (Thailand) by the team that went on to make King Kongin 1933.

"Killruddery is a wonderfully atmospheric place," says Brownlow. "Last year, the festival opened with The Cat and the Canaryfrom 1927 – it must have been the first time an old dark house thriller was shown in an old dark house. The early l9th-century building is surrounded by a magnificent 17th-century garden, laid out with walks and water features, with statues lurking among the trees and a modest amphitheatre, where one of the films will this year be shown in the open air.

“It is an estate that many will recognise, because it has been used as a location for so many films and television dramas.”

Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going, a strange 1945 romantic drama set in the Scottish Highlands, will be screened outdoors on Saturday, weather permitting. "We're using more of the house and grounds this year," says Kilruddery arts director Fionnuala Aston-Ardee. "It will be shown in the theatre space, which is one of the oldest parts of Killruddery."

There'll also be a sound effects workshop for children hosted by Caoimhe Doyle and Jean McGrath, foley artists who worked on The Lovely Bones. "They will be bringing their own equipment," says Aston-Ardee, "but will also work with old stuff from around the house and gardens – barrels, suitcases, etc."

Sunniva O'Flynn, Irish Film Institute curator, will once again be showing a selection of film shot around Wicklow in the 1920s and 1930s, plus From Time to Time,a 1953 ghost story partly shot near Roundwood and written by George Morrison and Micheál MacLiammóir.

Other festival delights include The Unknown Chaplin, an illustrated talk by the charming and diffident Brownlow; Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in the steamy Red Dust(1932), and Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, just two years old and about which Daniel Fitzpatrick is particularly enthusiastic: "It never got a proper distribution because of copyright problems involving some of the music on the soundtrack. It's a very personal story involving quite different levels of animation, and it is quite beautiful." A lost film – to be found again in Wicklow this weekend.

killrudderyfilmfestival.com