Silent & Loud Film Festival 2025 in Vienna: The Program

Fantastic themes dominate this year's Stumm & Laut Film Festival in Vienna-Favoriten. It opens with the last Soviet silent film COSMIC JOURNEY by Vasily Zhuravlyov on August 21. The science fiction film, produced with great effort and astonishing special effects, depicts the fictional Moscow of 1946 - as Stalin planned it but never realized. At the center of the story is an astonishingly realistic journey in a spaceship to the moon.

On the second day, W.W. Young's early adaptation of Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND will be shown, and on the third and final day of the festival, Hans Neumann's modernist and parodic film version of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM will be screened.

The silent films will be musically accompanied by MUSIKKREIS MS 20 (Wolfgang Kopper, Hans Holler), LÜFTEN + STERZINGER (Rainer Binder-Krieglstein, Andi Fränzl), and ENFLEURAGE (Anna Anderluh, Lukas Aichinger, David Gratzer).

Film Program at the Stumm & Laut Festival 2025

Originally, the Stumm & Laut took place in the concert garden of the Laaer Berg Recreation Park. From 1922 to 1925, the "Filmstadt Laaer Berg" existed here. After 10 years, the film festival moved a bit closer to the city center in 2011 and found an ideal and lively venue at Columbusplatz. Due to the redesign and greening of Favoritenstraße, the Stumm & Laut will take place this year in Helmut-Zilk-Park. Films begin at approximately 8:00 PM.

Thursday, 21.08.2025
Live Music: MUSIKKREIS MS20 (Wolfgang Kopper, Hans Holler)
Film: COSMIC JOURNEY, USSR 1936, 82 min.
Director: Vasily Zhuravlyov, with Sergey Komarov, Ksenia Moskalenko, Vassili Gaponenko, Nikolay
Feoktistov, among others.

It is the last silent feature film produced in the Soviet Union, commissioned by the youth organization of the Communist Party, the Komsomol. The goal was to inspire the youth with technology, a central concept of the Great Turn initiated by Stalin in 1929. Space technology, as an advanced form of rocket technology, was chosen to engage young viewers, with the Komsomol member Andrjuscha serving as their figure of identification. In the same year, the film was withdrawn for reasons lost in censorship archives. It was rediscovered only after 2010 during international silent film events. COSMIC JOURNEY is, despite its limited contemporary reception, the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY of the 1930s. Model building and special effects are state-of-the-art with excellent cinematography. The panorama of Moscow in 1946, the year of the plot, corresponds to the new plans from 1935. The Institute for Space Travel closely resembles the Soviet Union pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. There are virtuoso camera movements through a rocket hangar, where various vehicles are moved using magnetic strips attached to the underside of the model. Stop-motion technology is used for walking and hopping on the moon's surface. This science fiction is, down to the details, constructivism of Soviet style with a technical-functional orientation. Striking in its anticipation is the idea that the cosmonauts spend their journey in sleep chambers filled with liquid. The plot itself is entertaining and largely free of ideology.

Friday, 22.08.2025
Live Music: LÜFTEN & STERZINGER (Rainer Binder-Krieglstein, Andi Fränzl)
Film: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, US 1915, 52 min.
Director: W.W. Young, with Viola Savoy, Herbert Rice, et al.

It is the third film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and, with a restored runtime of 52 minutes, the first feature film based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Today, there are only two known copies of the film, which originally spanned six reels. Several scenes, including those with the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Through the Looking-Glass, are missing. Notable is the costume design: the actors wear oversized papier-mâché heads and imaginative costumes inspired by John Tenniel's illustrations. The sets were also built with great attention to detail. W. W. Young refrained from using special effects in his film, resulting in the omission of some scenes. For example, Alice does not change her size, as filming a believable depiction of this was deemed too complicated.

Saturday, 23.08.2025
Live Music: ENFLEURAGE (Anna Anderluh, Lukas Aichinger, David Gratzer)
Film: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, DE 1925, 80 min.
Director: Hans Neumann, with Theodor Becker, Ruth Weyher, Charlotte Ander, Hans Albers, Werner
Krauss, Tamara Geva, Lori Leux, Valeska Gert, et al.

Loosely adhering to Shakespeare's original plot, Neumann's film features various modernist – for example, Theseus uses a telephone – and anarchic ideas – such as a battle scene between Greek warriors and an Amazon army – that enliven the classic material and could be seen as provocative by an audience preferring conventional perspectives. The actors repeatedly step out of their roles and seem to improvise in these moments. The fairy king Oberon is played not by a man, as usual, but by a woman, the 17-year-old Russian dancer and wife of George Balanchine, Tamara Geva, at the time of filming.

(Red)

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