City of Pordenone
Spring 1996 Issue of KINEMA
LE GIORNATE DEL CINEMA MUTO: 14th PORDENONE SILENT FILM FESTIVAL
Treasures from the Past and Words from the Present: A Festival Speaks for Itself
Much of the excitement engendered by film festivals comes from the first showings of the newest films from around the world. Feelings of anticipation and the promise of discovery keep festivaliers on the edge and on the move from cinema to cinema. But disappointment is all too frequently the order of the day as too many of the latest productions fail to live up to our expectations. Pordenone, a small historic city north of Venice, is the one and only festival at which those in attendance know what to expect. For them, it is a journey into rediscovering the greatness of the past where anticipations are fully realised. Pordenone as a general rule never shows anything made after 1930. It is a festival of Silent Films and 1995 provided it with the opportunity to mark the 100th Year of Cinema with 30 years of a silent dream existence. Here there is no rush and crush to see the latest films and to interview the newest stars among batches of journalists fifteen at a time and running late at that!
Pordenone has been organised and run since its inception by movie lovers and enthusiasts who work more for love than money. They include Livio Jacob, the President, and Paolo Cerchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Piero Colussi, Andrea Crozzoli, Carlo Montanaro, Piera Patat and Davide Turconi who make up the Board of Directors and Programmers. Funding comes from several sources including the state and regional and provincial arts councils and tourist boards. This of course is fraught with uncertainties, but we were greeted on arrival with some positive news...
The Pordenone regulars have become used to hearing about our financial hardships. Our program notes invariably start with sour remarks on the scarcity of public funding, the progressive erosion of institutional support, the biblical delays in receiving grants already awarded. But in the centenary of cinema it looks like the trend has been reversed. Last year a longtime friend of the festival was impressed enough by our plea for help to foster a contract with J. Paul Getty in London, who decided to underwrite our 1995 publications. Thanks to Mr. Getty's generous support, for the first time in fourteen years we have organised the festival without facing a deficit; we can spend more time dealing with issues of programming and selection instead of bank interests and unpaid bills. Mr. Getty has made possible a miracle we would have never dreamed of.
This may not however, provide for future Giornate and when the Istituto Luce and the Cineteca Nazionale presented their latest restorations the President of Ente Cinema, Giovanni Grazzini, declared that "Italy does not know how to make the most of its cultural patrimony" and went on to say that
...the Silent Film Festival of Pordenone is a jewel in the Italian cultural scene, and it is sad to see how little attention it is comparatively given by the State and the national press. By denying the due attention to an internationally known and consolidated event, Italy proves once again unable to make the most of its cultural patrimony. Every year Le Giornate del Cinema Muto draws to Pordenone hundreds of historians, critics, collectors and students, all of them interested in silent cinema, that is to say a cinema which has strict relations with figurative arts, with light and shadow, with the tastes of a society that does not need words to understand the expressivity of a narrative and to be moved by it.
Grazzini concluded his discourse by saying that we should regret that Le Giornate had to have recourse to a foreign sponsor whereas it should be Italy that takes upon itself the costs of such an interesting, didactic and often amusing event, for which grand and great-grand parents "wake up and walk."
The Programme was a feast to delight and satisfy the eye, the mind and the emotions embracing the silent films of China, the work of Henry King, a retrospective devoted to the animation of Dave Fleischer, films from the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive in Jerusalem, the Jonathan Dennis collection from the New Zealand Film Archive, and a programme from The Cinematheque Québécoise.
And what of Cinema's centenary? The festival has worked for many years with the eminent British film historian, David Robinson, who organised for this occasion a splendid exhibition entitled One Hundred Steps to the Cinema. In his own words
"100 steps to the cinema" sets out to analyse and illustrate the centuries-long evolution which finally culminated in the motion picture as we know it today. The artefacts and documents have been selected with the special aim of showing that these progenitors of the cinema -- shadow theatres, magic lanterns, dark chambers, panoramas, peepshows, thaumatropes, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes, photographs and chronophotographs -- were not just technological experiments. All of them were devised with the intention of creating pictures out of light, to delight and astonish the eyes of their viewers. Displayed against the majestic background of the ancient Chiesa di San Francesco, the exhibition sets out to recapture something of the amusement, delight and magic which these ancestors of the movies brought to their first spectators. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Torino and the Cinematheque Française and with the special personal participation of Donata Pesenti Compagnoni and Laurent Mannoni. A special publication, linked to the exhibition, presents in facsimile a selection of texts and images that were crucial in the evolution of motion pictures.
And at the beginning was non-fiction, the basis for A Discovery Programme...
For almost a decade since the invention of the moving image, cinema was mostly identified with actuality, the reconstruction of actual events in sports, politics, war and culture; the availability of these images to mass audience was in itself a major technological and cultural revolution. It was only after 1900 that film production oriented itself towards the creation of imaginary worlds, imaginary realities -- stories. Gradually, whatever seemed to belong to the realm of reality became a separate point of reference, a marginal galaxy, parallel to comedy and drama. Hence the common distinction between "fiction" and "non fiction," which became a hegemonic framework for the creation and the understanding of moving images as a whole.
Where is the dividing line between fiction and nonfiction? In what extent is narrative cinema something to be seen as independent from the representation of actual events? Is "documentary" something separated from the concept of "fiction"? Finally, does the depiction of reality -- whatever "reality" actually means -- imply a refusal of a narrative intention? In discussing these issues, Pordenone tackles the most challenging theme ever addressed at the Silent Film Festival.
In this respect, this is less a structured self-contained retrospective than a discovery programme, designed with the aim of addressing conceptions and prejudices so rooted in our mind that we tend to take for granted that a history of cinema must deal with "fictional" cinema, without questioning the ambiguity of the thin line dividing two ways of seeing. In doing so, Pordenone raises a debate with a twofold aim. The first is to demonstrate that "non-fiction" cinema -- as it is currently defined in opposition to "fiction" -- can be highly appealing to a contemporary viewer. In other words, all reduction of events related to such things as fashion, war, health care and medicine, and advertising may well be as enticing to our sense of aesthetic thought as much as any "fictional" film, once we accept the idea of reconsidering our patterns of visual pleasure.
A second aim, admittedly more ambitious, consists in establishing the foundations of an analysis of nonfiction cinema based on the continuity between two categories of intrinsically limited value. Ideally, we hope that our project may actually help to recast the terms "fiction" and "non-fiction" within less constricting (and ultimately authoritarian) values.
While Edison has quite properly been demoted as being the first and sole inventor of the motion picture, his work was given generous recognition in the Non-Fiction Programme, an ambitious undertaking...
Between 1890 and 1900, the Edison Laboratory and the Edison Manufacturing Company produced or legally distributed (through special licensing arrangements) hundreds of films. Surprisingly more than half of these pictures survive. As part of the celebration of cinema's 100th anniversary, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival gathered together these films from the world's archives and is screening them in chronological order. Many of these films survive in the Paper Print Collection at the U.S. Library of Congress and are being specially restored in their original 35mm format for this event.
The showing will be accompanied by a catalogue written and edited by Charles Musser, professor of American Studies and Film Studies at Yale University. This book, Before the Rapidly Firing Kinetograph: Edison Motion Pictures, a Filmography with Documentation, 1890-1900, will offer detailed information about many of these films and their performers for the first time. Until now many of these films have remained unidentified and their historical significance lost -- flotsam of a forgotten past. Presenting them in a rough chronological order, the catalogue takes the form of a documentary history in which these pictures gain a new materiality through the selective inclusion of period documents, including Edison catalogue descriptions, trade journal commentary, newspaper articles, and letters.
Eagerly awaited was the Festival's presentation of the largest and most complete Retrospective of Chinese silent cinema ever staged. With the full co-operation of Beijing's China Film Archives and assisted by Asian film historian, Derek Elley, Pordenone showed a programme of over 20 feature-length films and numerous short subjects many of which had never been seen outside China...
Between 1905 and the mid-1930s, China produced almost 1,000 silent films, the vast majority of which have been lost forever. Production began in earnest in the early 1920s and, from then until the 1937 Japanese invasion, Shanghai was a thriving film production metropolis equalling any in the world. Dozens of companies competed for business, with movies reflecting the growing political and social tensions in Chinese society.
The earliest known surviving work of fiction is the 1922 three-reel melodrama Love's Labours. Several other silent titles, such as A String of Pearls(1925), Tale of the Western Chamber (1927), Spring Silkworms (1933), The Goddess (1935), and The Highway (1935), have already achieved classic status from showing at Chinese retrospectives in the past 15 years. By screening the fullest selection of silent Chinese films available, we hope to re-establish to their rightful place in world cinema such pioneers as directors Zhang Schichuan, Sun Yu, Bu Wandang, Cai Cusheng, Cheng Bugao, Shi Dongshan, and Hou Yao. Audiences and scholars will also have the opportunity to become more closely acquainted with the work of other artists, such as legendary actress Ruan Lingyu (the subject of Stanley Kwan's biopic Center Stage) and Hu Die ("Butterfly Hu"), and master cinematographer Huang Shaofen. The complete filmography of the silent Chinese production will be published in Griffithiana #54-55."
City of Pordenone
And the classic film, Man with a Movie Camera returned, this time with a difference...
Hailed as one of the most daring experiments in Soviet filmmaking, Man With a Movie Camera is one of the icons of silent cinema. Several attempts have been made at giving the dazzling masterwork the most appropriate sound accompaniment, yet few scholars knew that Dziga Vertov had written a set of music instructions, never performed after the 1929 premiere of the film; the original manuscript has now been found in the Moscow archives, and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival commissioned the highly acclaimed Alloy Orchestra to recreate its fascinating atmospheres for the first time in more than 65 years. A sparkling mixture of avant-garde, concrete, and popular music of the Twenties, Vertov's music combines innovation and tradition in a striking synthesis of noises and melodies that provide a fresh, exciting insight to this visual symphony at the edge between nonfiction and abstract cinema.
Music too for Lubitsch. Though Als Ich Tot War (When I Was Dead) released on 2 February 1916 is not the first film directed by Ernst Lubitsch, it is the earliest to be preserved so far.
Believed to be lost, it was found last year by Liliana Nedic and Silvan Furlan of the National Theatre and Film Museum, Ljubljana, and after restoration it was shown at Pordenone with a new piano and clarinet accompaniment by Urban Koder. It is a 3-reel comedy featuring director Lubitsch as a young husband who pretends to be dead in order to get rid of his mother-in-law. The film was reissued under the title of Wo ist mein Schatz? (Where Is My Treasure?) after an intervention by the censorship board. Despite the title change, however, the film was declared unsuitable for children and its diffusion remained limited to an adult audience.
And what more could one ask for than a complete retrospective of Henry King's surviving silent films...
"I love Americana and do not feel we have to create it. It is already here but I do like to interpret it for the screen."
This sentence summarizes the aesthetic vocation of director Henry King (1886-1982), and characterizes him as the poet of an unblemished nature and culture threatened by dissolution. Nicknamed "the flying director" because of his passion for airplanes, King has piloted an impressive artistic journey through the history of cinema. While his masterworks of the sound period are mostly connected to the aesthetic and economic evolution of 20th Century Fox, the films of the silent era made for several independent firms seem to crosscut all genres, from serials to westerns, adventure (The Devil's Bait, 1917), and social melodramas (Little Mary Sunshine (1916), in which he performs in the leading role - a tinted print of this film has just been found and will be presented at Pordenone. After having put together with Richard Barthelmess his own production company, emblematically called Inspiration Pictures, King directed Tol'able David (1921), a startling rural drama set in his native Virginia. He coproduced with MGM, and directed in Italy, two ambitious films with Lillian Gish, The White Sister (1923) and Romola (1924). He then scored a box-office triumph with his first picture for Samuel Goldwyn, Stella Dallas, the first adaptation from the famous novel on motherly love. In 1926, he discovered a Montana cowboy named Gary Cooper and featured him in one of his best accomplishments before the advent of sound, The Winning of Barbara Worth.
The 1995 Pordenone Festival is honouring Henry King with a complete retrospective of his surviving silent films. The event will be followed up in 1996 by the Filmoteca Española with a comprehensive overview of his creative output and an illustrated catalogue. The Pordenone / Madrid project has prompted the Directors Guild of America to publish an extensive interview with the director by Frank Thompson as part of the 'oral history series' initiated by David Shepard.
Among the many guests and celebrities who moved easily among the visitors, mingling and talking about the priceless programmes of the silent screen, one was a particular delight, Richard Fleischer, the well known American director whose father Max Fleischer, was honoured with a Retrospective Out of the Inkwell with a valuable contribution from Canada ...
Out of the Inkwell: The Silent Films of Max and Dave Fleischer is devoted to the early work of the animators who later became famous for bringing the characters Popeye, Betty Boop and Superman to the screen. Until its demise in 1942, the Fleischer Studios, Inc. was the chief competitor to Walt Disney Productions. The Fleischers were pioneers in the development of technology and techniques which have become standard in the animation industry. As early as 1915, they invented the Rotoscope, which allowed the use of live-action film as a guide to animation, resulting in far smoother and lifelike movement than had been possible before. This technology has been copied by others, most notably by Walt Disney in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Max Fleischer also invented the Rotograph, which allowed the efficient combination of live-action and animation -- a technique still in use in films as recent as Ralph Bakshi's Cool World or Richard Williams' Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The silent Fleischer Out of the Inkwell and Inkwell Imps films used this technique to depict their cartoon protagonist Ko Ko the Clown in conflict with his live-action creator Max in a series of fantastic adventures set in the gritty environments of Manhattan and Brooklyn. During the mid-1920s, in cooperation with Dr. Lee DeForest, Max and Dave Fleischer produced what were probably the first sound cartoons -- the Ko Ko Song Car-Tunes. These were the rock videos of the 1920s. While a popular musical hit played on the sound track, theatre audiences were encouraged to sing along, while on a screen a bouncing ball or animated character jumped from word to word on the lyrics.
In the silent period, the Fleischers produced the first feature-length animated films on scientific topics, The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923) and Evolution (1925), as the culmination of a series of educational pictures which reflected their continuing interest in science and technology. But it was as entertainers that the filmmakers left their most indelible impression. The Fleischers' early work exhibited a surreal experimental quality, dark humour and urban New York sophistication that stood in contrast to the films of their contemporaries and served as a wildly creative prelude to the later and better-known adventures of Popeye and Betty Boop. Over the past year, Professor Mark Langer from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and the Cineteca del Friuli have conducted an international search through archives and private collections.
Several Fleischer films thought to be lost have been found and films for which no projectable prints existed have been restored. Many of these have never been seen in Europe. Others will be exhibited for the first time in sixty to seventy years in their original form. These include the earliest surviving Fleischer film The Electric Bell (1918) restored by the Visual and Sound Archives in Ottawa, The Clown's Pup (1919) discovered by the Cinemateca Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, examples of the previously lost Inklings series (1927-28) preserved by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, new prints of the Out of the Inkwell and Inkwell Imps films preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, The Runaway (1925) from the Southwest Film/Video Archives at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and a host of unique silent rarities and early sound experiments from private collectors such as Jan Zaalberg, whose many treasures are preserved by the Nederlands Filmmuseum. (A book by Mark Langer, including a complete and accurate filmography, will accompany the retrospective.)
A lecture and screening, Les Beautés de Québec, designed and produced by Andre Gaudreault in cooperation with the Cinematheque Québécoise and the Delegation General du Québec in Paris, consisted of early American and French films shot in the magnificent City of Old Québec, presented by
...the one and only Henry de Grandsaignes d'Hauterives, from Brittany (France) -- the first lecturer to lead his art in French Canada from 1897 to 1907. Today the role of Henry is played by Jean Guy; the music is provided by Gabriel Thibaudeau; Edouard Faribault, a Québec inventor, demonstrates his "Faribographe," a crank projector he has recently rebuilt.
Not many festivals publish books. Pordenone is a welcome exception. Its publications about silent cinema and the Retrospectives it holds are beautifully designed and printed and written by historians who know and love the period. One such book recognised by Canada was announced at the Festival...
The Society for Animation Studies and the National Film Board of Canada have awarded Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman the Norman McLaren/Evelyn Lambart Award for Best Scholarly Book on Animation 1992-93 for their Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney, published by the Giornate del Cinema Muto and distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pordenone is the one festival where the world's indispensable film archives come into their own. Most of the classic works come out of the vaults for this event and each year, several are given prominent places on the programme. On this occasion, it was Israel and New Zealand...
At Pordenone 1995 the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, Jerusalem, presented a collection of pre-state Israeli cinema, including the earliest known films by Jews in the Holy Land, as well as the work of the motion picture pioneers Yaacov Ben Dov (The First Film of Palestine, La Palestine en marche, Shivat Tzion, etc.), Chaim Halachmi and Baruch Agadati, plus cartoons and home movies. All films (some of them have survived under incredible circumstances and are currently being preserved from nitrate) come from the holdings of the Spielberg Archive, which is the official film archive of Israel's national institutions and houses many public and private collections of Jewish interest. A publication on the history of cinema in Israel, from the beginnings in the Ottoman era to the silents made after the advent of sound, will be edited by Hillel Tryster. The screening opened with a special surprise: a film dating from 1899, showing Captain Alfred Dreyfus. This rare glimpse of the Jew whose trial for treason was the catalyst for Zionism, was discovered by the Nederlands Filmmuseum. Another important screening was the film Springtime in Palestine (1928), last known to have been shown in India in 1932 and long considered "lost." A copy recently surfaced in the German Bundesarchiv.
And from New Zealand...
Thanks to the efforts of Jonathan Dennis (winner of the Jean Mitry Award in 1993), the New Zealand Film Archive has retrieved and saved from destruction a unique collection of early films gathered together by Alan Roberts in over twenty years of relentless search for the last surviving nitrate prints in Australasia. Thanks to the cooperation of the Project Lumière for the preservation of the European film heritage, these rare documents of the very first years of cinema -- mostly produced in France, but also in Italy and Great Britain -- have been brought back to a condition as close as possible to the original. The entire Alan Roberts collection is presented for the first time in Pordenone as a contribution to the study of the diffusion of European cinema in the most remote outpost of film distribution during the first decade of the century.
Where archives are involved then the Cinémathèque française cannot be far away. The Festival made a special announcement...
Chaque jour, tandis que nous luttons à contrecourant, on detruit des uvres d'art essentielles à nôtre patrimoine intellectuel parce qu'il s'agit d'uvres filmées, non pas dans des pays barbares, mais dans les nations les plus civilisées. (Henri Langlois)
We have offered carte blanche to the Cinémathèque française -- the institution founded in 1936 by Henri Langlois, Georges Franju and Jean Mitry, and currently directed by Dominique Paini - to know more about its activity in film preservation and programming. Langlois believed that "Une cinémathèque ne doit pas être un cimitière!" This is the rationale for the Cinémathèque's choice for Pordenone, with newly restored films from the Saint Cyr vaults. Among the titles scheduled for screening are William S. Hart's western masterpiece produced by Triangle in 1917, The Cold Deck; Soleil et ombre (Sol y sombra, 1922), "vision cruelle digne de Goya" (Francis Lacassin), directed and performed by the legendary Musidora; La Commune (1914), a historical reconstruction by the Cinéma du Peuple militant collective; and gems by Julien Duvivier, Léonce Perret and others. The programme also includes Citizen Langlois (1995) -- a "portrait du dragon en artiste" (Le Monde) - directed by Argentine filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky.
And from Rochester (New York)
...Among the offerings of the 1995 Giornate, two lovely fairy films preserved at George Eastman House: Snow White (1916), directed by J. Searle Dawley and starring Marguerite Clark -- Walt Disney saw it when he was 15 and never forgot it; Herbert Brenon's Peter Pan (1924), "an unblemished delight today" (Jack Lodge), with Betty Bronson in the title role and camerawork by the great James Wong Howe.
Among the many new discoveries ...
Also scheduled at the Verdi Theatre a programme of shorts recently identified by Bo Berglund and restored by Det Danske Filmmuseum. Among the many enticing titles, Peintres modernes (Pathé, 1907), a very nice trick film with wonderful colours, Linder's Max veut grandir(1912), and Kri Kri ha perduto il cappello (Cines, 1913).
As a fitting farewell to the Centenary,
... the Giornate will publish a book of cartoons and caricatures on the theme of film from 1895 to 1915. The book by Stephen Bottomore will be richly illustrated and bring together printed cartoons of the period from a variety of sources and countries.
How best to sum-up and describe this remarkable festival? Kenneth Turan writing in the Los Angeles Times calls it "A Film Buff's Cinema Paradiso" ... Who could disagree?
I found the festival of my dreams, the one that delivers what all the others only promise, perhaps the most satisfying and enjoyable film event in the world ... Known as Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (The Days of Silent Film) and devoted to the art of film before the coming of sound, its combination of conviviality and comprehensiveness cannot be matched. What makes Le Giornate so special? Let us count the ways. It is held in only one location, the venerable Teatro Cinema Verdi ... This may seem like a small thing, but anyone who has spent frantic hours first trying to figure out which of several conflicting films to see and then rushing around trying to get from one venue to another knows what bliss that single setting is ... It is human scaled ... It has a great feeling of warmth and camaraderie ... It is truly an international event ... Its selection of films is spectacular, not only in terms of what is picked to be shown but also how they are exhibited. Prints at Le Giornate are the best available anywhere, they are shown at the correct speed ... and they always have musical accompaniment, with a brace of pianists spelling each other at two-hour intervals.
And Jan-Christopher Horak writing in The Journal of Film Preservation provides a lively finish to a joyful event in a world where silence is golden ...
Despite fears that the Pordenone Silent Film Festival would be upended by a combination of financial debts, the threatened loss of the Verdi Theatre, and an endless struggle for hotel rooms occupied by Nato airmen flying missions over Bosnia, this year's Giornate del Cinema Muto once again sent film historians, archivists and collectors home with happy faces. Everyone had made personal discoveries and engaged in the kind of discussion and reevaluation of film history for which this festival is justifiably famous.
In Memoriam
Walking from the railway Station at Pordenone down a tree-lined street under a sunny autumn sky I saw a lone figure sitting silently at an out-doors café. As I came near I recognised my dear friend, John Gillet, with whom I have attended a hundred festivals during the past 35 years. He looked up and smiled a welcome, but seemed and was quite ill. We walked slowly as he showed me the way to the Press Office. We met in the Teatro Verdi several times but his conversation was limited and he never stayed long. Before the festival was over John was taken to hospital and later flown to London where he died shortly after. John was everything a great lover of film could be: he wrote and spoke well, he was dedicated, he was an authority and a realist; he saw everything and forgot nothing. He specialised in Japanese and British cinema and was awarded the MBE by the Queen. He was a pillar of knowledge and dependability at the British Film Institute and its National Film Theatre for most of his working life. It is painful to think of the cinema without him and festivals bereft of his presence.
Gerald PRATLEY, OC, LLD, started his career as film critic with the CBC. In 1969, he founded the Ontario Film Institute which he directed until 1990. He has written several books and numerous articles on film, including Torn Sprockets, a history of Canadian cinema. He taught Film History in universities in Toronto and Waterloo, Canada and holds three honorary degrees from Canadian and US universities.
Gerald A. Pratley (1923-2011) was born and educated in London, England, and came to Canada in 1946. He started working in Toronto for the CBC as a scriptwriter. He was drawn toward working in motion pictures, and became, in 1948, the CBC's first film critic and commentator.
Gerald Pratley broadcast three programmes a week, Pratley at the Movies, The Movie Scene, Music From the Films, and others, until 1975. During this time he also became the first post-war chairman of the Toronto Film Society, chairman of the Toronto and District Film Council and co-founder of the A-G-E Film Society and correspondent for international magazines such as Films and Filming, Film In Review, Variety, Hollywood Quarterly and International Film Guide. During the 1950s he wrote for Canadian Film Weekly and Canadian Film Digest.
He became known as a speaker on all aspects of motion picture art and industry, and was invited to teach film history at the University of Toronto, York University, University of Waterloo, Seneca College and Ryerson Polytechnical University, with individual lectures being given at many other Canadian and US universities and colleges. He has served as a member of various judging panels of competitions and festivals, being one of the members of the first Canadian Film Awards in 1949.
From 1970 to 1975 he was the director of the Stratford (Ontario) International Film Festival, and from 1969 to 1976 he was Chairman of the International Jury of the Canadian Film Awards. He has attended all the world's leading festivals of film, and in particular, for 30 years, the Cannes Festival as CBC correspondent. He has written six books, The Films of Frankenheimer: Forty Years in Film; The Cinema of John Frankenheimer; The Cinema of Otto Preminger; The Cinema of David Lean; The Cinema of John Huston, and Torn Sprockets, a history of the Canadian cinema.
Gerald Pratley has served on the Advisory Boards of the film departments of Ryerson Polytechnical University and Humber College, and as a member of the programme committee of TV Ontario. In 1968 he became the founder-director of the Ontario Film Institute of the Province of Ontario, an organization which has distinguished itself in archival holdings and public service and is known since 1990 as the Cinematheque of Ontario. He taught Film History courses at the Department of Film and Photography, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto and the University of Waterloo.
In 1984, Gerald Pratley was made a Member of the Order of Canada and in 2003 Officer of the Order of Canada for his service to Canada through film appreciation. He holds Honorary Degrees in Letters and Fine Arts from York and Waterloo Universities (Ont., Canada) and Bowling Green State University (Ohio, USA).
In 2002, Gerald Pratley received a Special Genie Award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television in recognition of his lifelong dedication to the promotion and his exceptional support of Canadian cinema.
He died on 14 March 2011 in Ontario, Canada.