Mel Novikoff Award Presented to Paolo Cherchi Usai
Jon Mirsalis on Piano

Paolo Cherchi Usai, winner of this year's Mel Novikoff Award, is senior curator of the motion picture department at George Eastman House and co-director of the Pordenone festival of silent cinema. Cherchi Usai will be interviewed by Russell Merritt and present this sampler from George Eastman House.

Within the beginnings of cinema lurk the gorgeous and the strange, the whimsical and the poetic, visions dreamed but never seen again. From Italian divas to American comics, silhouette animation to social realism, here is a guided tour through some rarely seen ghosts of silent film, restored and preserved by George Eastman House. Une Indigestion (Georges Méliès, France, 1902, 4 mins): “A Sure Cure for Indigestion,” indeed. This was made the same year as his famous Voyage to the Moon. Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (Lotte Reininger, Germany, 1919, 7 mins): Reininger's debut marks the first flowering of her silhouette animation technique. This graceful fantasy is, as she wrote, “a ballet between a man and a woman within an animated garland.” Fedora (Gustave Serena, Italy, 1916, 15 mins): A 15-minute fragment from a thought-lost Italian silent feature, starring the immortal Francesca Bertini, legendary Italian diva. The Breath of a Nation (Gregory La Cava, U.S., 1919, 7 mins): “This spoof of D.W. Griffith's title is a lighthearted, anarchic celebration of the strategems devised against Prohibition.”-Paolo Cherchi Usai. There It Is (Charles R. Bowers, U.S., 1928, 15 mins): “The house looks haunted-we better call Scotland Yard. Stop-motion photography and surrealism galore in this Bowers rediscovery.”-Paolo Cherchi Usai. The Land Beyond the Sunset (Harold M. Shaw, U.S., 1912, 15 mins): Social problem film, pastoral fantasy, and cine-poem: this short sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund made Paolo Cherchi Usai's top-ten films of all time list for Sight and Sound. Pass the Gravy (Fred Guiol, Leo McCarey, U.S., 1928, 22 mins): Max Davidson was one of the silent era's premier comedians, a silent Woody Allen. Here he demonstrates how, or how not, to eat a chicken.