Denver Silent Film Festival highlights upcoming feature film

Denver Film is hosting its Silent Film Festival beginning Friday, including eight feature films and 11 shorts with live musical accompaniment.

Howie Movshovitz, Programmer for the Denver Silent Film Festival, joined CBS Colorado in the studio on Tuesday to highlight the film “Queen Kelly” and share what festivalgoers have to look forward to.

In the film “Queen Kelly”, produced in 1928-1929, a convent girl is abducted and seduced by a prince betrothed to a mad queen, an event that drastically changes the course of her life.

“People talk about ‘Queen Kelly’ as a restoration, but it isn’t because it was never finished. In 1928, Gloria Swanson got together with her producer/lover Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, and they got together with Eric von Stroheim, a celebrity director, and they went to make Queen Kelly. And about halfway into it, Gloria Swanson fired him,” Movshovitz said.

He said that it’s unlikely the three of them would have been able to get along. Although the film was incomplete, he says there have been many attempts to restore it.

“A man named Dennis Doros and his partner/wife, Amy Heller, at Milestone Films did a reconstruction of it, and then a reconstruction of it. It’s been done a number of times, and this is the most recent,” Movshovitz explained. “They work from script. They work from outtakes, the visual quality of what von Stroheim shot, he was a genius, is fabulous. But it’s, of course, an imaginative response to a 1929 movie.”

Movshovitz says the love of silent films is not just about nostalgia.

“There are many films that are utterly brilliant, utterly fabulous, and still work perfectly well today,” he said. “So, it’s a kind of film that people don’t look at very much, but it doesn’t need sympathy, it doesn’t need nostalgia. It needs people to understand that, just as we read old books and don’t think of them as old books, silent film has its own majesty.”

Watching silent films with musical accompaniment makes the experience unique, said Movshovitz, adding that the festival has a skilled group of musicians performing.

The Denver Silent Film Festival runs from April 10-12 at the Sie Film Center in Denver. Click here to learn more about the featured films and to purchase tickets.