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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2005 |
21st Century Silents |
| Film Title |
THE UNUSUAL INVENTIONS OF HENRY CAVENDISH |
| Alternative Title 1 |
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| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
Ireland |
| Release Date |
2005 |
| Production Co. |
RTE/Filmbase/Restoration Film |
| Director |
Andrew Legge |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
|
25 |
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| Footage |
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Time |
| 1440 ft. |
|
16' |
| Archive Source |
Andrew Legge |
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| Print Notes |
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles. |
| Cast |
| Fiona O’Shaughnessy (Catherine Palmerston), Hugh O’Connor (Henry Cavendish), Frank Kelly (Thomas Palmerston), Shaun Boylan (Salacious Sommerfeld Smythe) |
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| Other Credits |
| f./ph: Andrew Legge; prod: Katie Lincoln; scen: Isaac Cavendish, Herbert Carlson; mont./ed: Conor McMahon; scg./des: Ger Clancy; cost: Cathy Young; mus: Jürgen Simpson |
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| Other Information |
| Alle Giornate la partitura per pianoforte di Jürgen Simpson sarà eseguita dal vivo da Mauro Colombis. / For the Giornate performance Jürgen Simpson’s piano score will be performed live by Mauro Colombis. |
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| Program Notes |
| Andrew Legge’s intrepid incursion into the world of silent film affords an extraordinarily rich and concentrated experience. An Irish tale of a young inventor in Victorian Dublin, who, thanks to his time machine, undoes the villainies of the cad who has stolen the woman he loves (the kind of man who hangs a Union Jack in his drawing room), it lightly brushes a range of visual and literary references – Verne, Keaton, The Thief of Bagdad, Feuillade, Frankenstein, H.G. Wells. Most striking is the film’s visual integrity and beauty: scenes of Dublin shot by Lumière cameramen in 1897 and still photographs from the same era are, by discreet digital means, seamlessly combined with the new dramatic material. Remarkably, most of the film was originally shot on a clockwork 16mm Russian “Krasnogorsk” camera, partly home-processed by Legge himself, and blown up on a digital intermediate to 35mm. The actors – notably Hugh O’Connor, with his Buster melancholy, and the graceful Fiona O’Shaughnessy – achieve an authentic language of silent performance. To guide and assist them Legge had the composer Jürgen Simpson on set, accompanying the shooting on piano. – DAVID ROBINSON |
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