PODCAST. Matt Micucci interviews Sebastian Köthe, winner of the Collegium Award at the 36th Pordenone Silent Film Festival.
Sebastian Köthe was the winner of the Collegium Award at the 36th Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto). Each year, the festival invites 12 “scholarship” collegians, with the aim of attracting new, young generations to the discovery of silent cinema, and to infiltrate these newcomers into the very special community that has evolved around the Giornate during its three decades. At the end of the collegium experience, which besides film screenings also includes masterclasses with some of the best qualified experts in film history (film scholars, historians, archivists, collectors, critics, academics, and just plain enthusiasts), each collegian is required to contribute an essay, which could not have been produced without the “Giornate experience.”
Köthe, as mentioned, was awarded the Collegium Award this year for his paper. In this interview, he talks about the subjects he dealt with in it, which is published on the Giornate del Cinema Muto website. He also talks about where his passion for silent cinema originated and whether it has informed his work as a filmmaker and film writer. He also discusses the topic of watching silent films from the first thirty years or so of cinema from a 21st-century perspective and, finally, concludes the interview by commenting on the 2017 edition of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and what some of the highlights of this year’s program have been.