The 2025 Dublin International Film Festival has gotten off to a roaring start.
Thursday’s Opening Night Gala saw Light House Cinema’s Screen 1 hosting everyone’s favourite ‘King of the Conclave’, Ralph Fiennes, in attendance for the Irish premiere of his new film, The Return, alongside the film’s director, Uberto Pasolini.
Friday saw a fantastic celebration of Moroccan Cinema at The Complex, the beginning of the festival’s shorts programmes, a conversation with legendary Irish actress Fiona Shaw, and premieres for exciting and challenging new films like Sister Midnight and Spermageddon. Saturday continued apace with more shorts programmes, a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Justin Chang, a retrospective on the animation of Don Hertzfeldt, and premieres for two exciting new Irish films: Aontas and Ready or Not.
Film festivals offer a unique opportunity for cinematic outreach, affording both young and old the chance to engage with exciting new talent, but also to celebrate some of the luminaries who established it. What better way to celebrate cinema history than with an exhibition of some of its earliest icons, the stars of 1920s Silent Cinema.
A showing in Screen 1 is always going to go well for me if I get my favourite seat: H1. There is no rhyme or reason as to why this is my favourite seat, but I’m delighted to get it given the substantial crowd that has gathered prior to the opening of the doors. The gentleman in front of me as I enter gives my favourite seat the once-over consideration as he ascends the steps and, in a panic, I begin working out what the least insane way is of explaining to him that it’s my birthday and I really want to sit in my favourite seat (this is true, not that it would make him think me any less of a weirdo). Thankfully, he has higher environs in mind.
The crowd is a pleasant mix of ages. An older couple sits in front of me. Two friends in their thirties are beside me. A father enters my row with his boy and girl, both somewhere between eight and twelve years old. A mother with an excited five or six year old is sat near the front, and the child gazes intently at the piano, which sits centre stage before the screen and will be used for our live accompaniment. Our host is Serge Blomberg, a multi-hyphenate film restorer and three-time guest of DIFF. He is to be our guide, both musical and historical, for the trio of silent comedy shorts that will play over the next hour. An enthusiastic and affable host, Blomberg seems as excited for the screening as we the crowd are.
The first film of the trio is 1926’s Mighty Like A Moose, a mistaken-identity farce about a man with big teeth married to a woman with a big nose who both secretly and separately undergo plastic surgery. They meet in the hallway after their respective facelifts and don’t recognise each other, but proceed to strike up a flirtation, both believing themselves to be cheating on their partner with someone new. This is the type of premise that was very common in early two-reelers, giving the audience equal chance to root for and laugh at the film’s protagonists’ buffoonery. It is clear from the first notes that Blomberg is a highly-accomplished and intuitive pianist, and he warms up both himself and the crowd with jaunty ragtime that settles us into a 1920s frame of mind. The grounded familiarity of the music is welcome given the effort required for suspension of disbelief in accepting the two leads, Mr. and Mrs. Moose (played by silent-era legends Charley Chase and Vivien Oakland), not recognising their spouse after a minuscule aesthetic alteration, or not seeing each other walking out of the same house at the same time to two separate taxis parked on perpendicular street corners, prompting a few ironic titters from the audience. However, after the plot is set in motion, the recognisable comedic beats begin to reel in the crowd. A classic of the genre, a man fighting himself at a corner wall with quickfire costume changes and dramatic falls, elicits the biggest laughs. We’ve all seen Bugs Bunny cartoons, this is the good stuff.
Our second film is Buster Keaton’s One Week from 1920. As Blomberg explains to us in the interlude, this film is the first that Keaton wrote, directed and starred in for himself after parting ways with his mentor, silent comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. It is clear from his introduction that Blomberg has a huge amount of reverence for Keaton, and this helps to build my own excitement. With respect to Charley Chase and to Laurel & Hardy, this film was the driving force behind my attendance at the gala, and I can see from the various members of the crowd sitting upright, tapping their partners on the arm, or cleaning their glasses, that I am not the only one for whom that is the case. Buster Keaton is, quite simply, a Mount Rushmore-filmmaker for me. I count him as my favourite star of the silent film era, and one of my three favourite comedic actors ever. Not only that, but One Week is, in my opinion, his greatest achievement in filmmaking, a perfect distillation of his incredible timing, staging, athleticism and grace.
If you’ve never seen One Week, stop reading right now, take twenty minutes out of your day, and watch.
From the moment early on in the film where Buster, doing the splits between two moving cars, is suddenly carried off on a motorbike driving in the opposite direction, the screening is one of the most palpably joyous experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema audience. Every dramatic fall draws howls of laughter, every ill-conceived act of DIY elicits an “Oooooohhhhhh” of anticipation. Blomberg, inspired by the genius at work on screen, gives a much more virtuosic and varied piano accompaniment than the previous film. One well-timed rest in his playing as Buster falls through the roof even prompts a cheer from someone in the crowd. I turn to see that the boy and girl in my row are sitting all the way forward, utterly transfixed by what this little man is doing on screen. When the house begins spinning around in the storm, the little girl near the front yelps “WHOA!” I think to myself that this is an experience of genuine purity and mentally thank the decision-makers at DIFF for giving me the chance to see one of my favourite films of all time on the big screen on my birthday.
Our final film is a Laurel & Hardy short from 1929 entitled Big Business. Blomberg explains that this was one of Laurel & Hardy’s final silent shorts, made in the year that “the talkies” really took off. Despite its arrival later in the duo’s career, the film was only available in poor transfers for many years, and Blomberg enthuses that the newly-restored print of the film, completed only two weeks ago, was getting its world premiere as part of the Silent Shorts Gala, drawing murmurs of appreciation from the audience.
Big Business is a classic Laurel & Hardy caper. The duo are attempting to sell Christmas trees to residents of sunny California, and little-to-no success (other than Hardy getting bonked on the noggin with a hammer by a hand reaching out a door, which drew the gentleman behind me to make a hilarious Twitter-adjacent reference to his friend: “Is he secretly E.T.?”)
After a number of failures, Laurel & Hardy get into a conflict with one Homeowner after their sample tree keeps getting stuck in his door-frame, prompting them to keep ringing his doorbell. After some back-and-forth antics, the action descends into an all-out war with the Homeowner systematically destroying the duo’s Christmas trees and car, and Laurel & Hardy in turn destroying the Homeowner’s garden and the facade of his house. This film highlights the clever programming work done in the selection of the three shorts. After the goofiness of Mighty Like A Moose and the breathless genius of One Week, Big Business allows us the most fun possible to conclude the show: watching some angry guys unabashedly destroy a bunch of stuff. The laughter at this stage is uncontained and uproarious, and Blomberg’s piano is frenetic and bouncy. The polarisation of modern comedy into punching up vs. punching down is dissolved for the beauty of comedy that is just simply punching.
After a deserved round of applause for the films and our magnificent host and musician, Serge Blomberg, the show concludes. On my way out, I compliment Blomberg and tell him that it’s one of my favourite festival screenings that I’ve ever attended, to which he replies, “It’s a pleasure to do it.” Seeing the smiles on the faces of audience members, both young and old, when leaving Lighthouse Screen 1, it’s easy to see the value of a festival like DIFF putting on exhibitions like this alongside the slate of industry talks and new films. I think of the young boy and girl from my row, and the pleasure that seeing this kind of show alongside their father must bring, and how it might impact their appreciation of cinema for years to come. The festival organisers and programmers deserve huge credit in this regard.
I’m getting married in a few weeks time, and as I left the Light House to drive home to eat some of the delightful birthday cake my fiancée had made for me, it occurred to me that the trio of shorts I had just watched formed an interesting loose relationship arc. Mighty Like A Moose is about realising that you’re destined to be with someone, no matter what version of yourself you present, and that the universe sometimes conspires to ensure you end up together. One Week is about all of the trials and tribulations you may go through as a couple (such as your house getting hit by a train), and how all of them are manageable as long you are with the person you love. And finally, Big Business is about how sometimes, when you’re with your soulmate for a long time, other people find you and your schtick really annoying, but that you can get back at them by one of you throwing up their plant pots for the other to smash with a baseball bat.
With some big events and screenings still to come, this is proving to be another hugely successful year for Dublin International Film Festival, and we at Film In Dublin would highly recommend you get to one of the many screenings for which tickets are still available before the festival concludes this Sunday.