Silent Movie Matinee

Die Börsenkönigin

Tragedia al Cinematographo

The historical Silent Movie Matinee on Sunday mornings is a fine tradition at the festival. This year we present Asta Nielsen with her movie The Queen of the Stock Exchange. Nielsen acts in a powerful and dramatic way the owner of a copper mine, of which the resources are depleted in the meantime.
On the piano: Ruth Bieri

“It is without a doubt one of Asta Nielsen’s greatest character roles. The dramatic scene in which she races through her firm in full evening dress and the contrast of woman set against industrial landscape – all convincingly conveyed in terms of both pace and photography – is a vintage moment for the cinema of the 1910s cinema” (Eric de Kuyper).

The filmologists Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann from Frankfurt (Kinemathek Asta Nielsen) induct the audience into the movie and the act of the outstanding star of the silent era. Like all her films, this one has moments of self-promotion and self-reflection. By 1916, La Nielsen could already look back – both financially and artistically – on a successful career that had begun in Germany at the Projektions-AG Union where she was not only contracted as an actress but also as the co-producer of her films. Again and again, La Nielsen portrays the conflicts faced by women in a patriarchal society and the collision of their emotions with the ruthlessness of the male bourgeois world. As Queen of the Stock Exchange, she shows how this conflict must be borne by liberated women at great cost to themselves.

Programme Picture with live music
No silent movie without programme picture. The short film Una tragedia al cinematografo is one of those self-reflexive comedies that take cinema itself as a central theme: A jealous man stalks his vivacious wife to a cinema foyer where she talks to another man. Convinced that she and her presumed lover are “having a good time” inside the cinema, Antonio fights his way in and threatens to shoot his unfaithful wife.

The music will be composed during the festival. The Swiss musician Ruth Bieri will lead a score workshop – the outcomes will have its debut during the matinee.