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1923 - Political instability and inflation dominate the everyday life of the people in Germany, who feel the consequences of the lost First World War. The consolation: the comedies of Buster Keaton (Our Hospitality, Three Ages), Charlie Chaplin (The Pilgrim), Harold Lloyd (Safety Last, Why Worry) or Ernst Lubitsch (Rosita) also run in German cinemas and dispel the worries of their audiences.
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32 FILMS - 28 MUSICIANS - 11 DAYS
But the first German democracy also arouses powerful creative impulses. Outstanding for the year 1923: Arthur Robison's Shadow - A Nocturnal Hallucination. A film that relies entirely on the language of silently moving images, on light and shadow, and does without any intertitles. The comedy about a husband who is jealous for no reason gave the audience a lesson along the way: not everything that seems real to you is.
In the German productions of 1923, serious tones predominate: for example in E. A. Dupont's touching actor biography Das alte Gesetz, Karl Grune's Die Straße about the temptations of the big city, G.W. Pabst's Schlagende Wetter, Gerhard Lamprecht's Buddenbrooks about the decline of a bourgeois family or Leopold Jessner's Wedekind adaptation Erdgeist with Asta Nielsen.
One exception: Richard Eichberg's shrill satire Fräulein Raffke about a wartime crisis profiteer who wants to marry off his daughter in a manner befitting his station - and ends up with an impostor. The fact that cinematography was not a German invention but a European phenomenon is shown by aesthetically innovative works such as Jean Epstein's Coeur fidèle or L'Auberge rouge, proven by the works of the cinema revolutionary Germaine Dulac, but especially by masterpieces by the Swedes Mauritz Stiller (Herrenhofsaga) or Victor Sjöström (Eld Ombord).
2023: Slapstick comedies, tragedies, melodramas, avant-garde cinema, the four-and-a-half-hour marathon La roue by Abel Gance and, last but not least, a film-musical highlight with Lubitsch's Rosita, accompanied by the Babylon Orchestra, provide a colourful bouquet of touching, fascinating, stirring films, fascinating, stirring films on ten days and nights of the StummfilmLIVEfestival 2023, the only silent film festival to show the most important films of an entire year - with free admission! (except orchestral performances).
The world's best silent film musicians such as Neil Brand, Günter Buchwald, Frank Bockius, Stephen Horne (piano) Eduardo Raon (harp), John Sweeney (piano), Anna Vavilkina (organ), Jonas Wilfert (organ) or Ekkehard Wölk (piano) will play.
- BIG OPENING with Lubitsch's Rosita - LIVE Babylon Orchester Berlin
