As Cherchi notes, film courses which analyze cultural impact tend to outdraw those in esthetic history. Pew can exper ience the quality of Lumiere's images, but off of videotape it is easy to study them for encoded social attitudes. Time and again at Pordenone, it is visual pleasure that counts. Howe, whose exquisite cinematography suggests Ansel Adams. This esthetic predicament must give us pause.
Literary issues are always there for the seeking in silent films.
Pordenone also reveals more silent stars than we have charted in our heavens. We all remember Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and maybe Theda Bara and Douglas Fairbanks for fun. Her work is all the more startling once we learn she killed herself at the height of her popularity. Or we rediscover Betty Bronson and Lon Chaney. She has a dream, the movie's most extravagant sequence, as she is starving to death.