Extravaganza of Silent Films About Filmmaking – to Help The Cinema Museum Buy its Home

About this event

A special Kennington Bioscope Gala Show, with all proceeds going towards our host venue the Cinema Museum to help it raise the funds to buy its building. For our main feature, we will be screening A Girl’s Folly (1917), directed by Maurice Tourneur, and edited by future director Clarence Brown. The film shows filmmaking at Fort Lee, New Jersey, including the lab, editing room, and film sets. Variety noted ‘The public should be greatly interested in seeing how moving pictures are made – it is all here.’ Maurice Tourneur appears in front of the camera, as do an uncredited Leatrice Joy and Josef von Sternberg. We will have a full programme of rare supporting shorts, including unseen footage of a British studio at work in 1921, a tinted 35mm print of Hello Hollywood (1927), Chaplin’s Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) in which we see the birth of the Tramp character, a short film taking us behind the scenes of French productions of 1929 and the world premiere of Dave Glass’s brand new restoration of the rare Snub Pollard film In the Movies (1922) – plus anything else we can cram in! We will also have some antique 35mm movie cameras from the silent era on display. This special evening will showcase both filmmaking and film exhibition, to provide a completely unique evening celebrating making and screening films during the silent era – all in aid of the only museum in London dedicated to the golden age of the cinema. Live piano accompaniment. Ashley Valentine will be playing for A Girl’s Folly, and Colin Sell and John Sweeney will be playing for the shorts in the first half.