›Escalada à Torre dos Clérigos‹ P 1917, Direction: Raul de Caldevilla
Copyright: Cinemateca Portuguesa
Hold your breath: early action in cinema
Si̇nema Transtopia
Presentations and screenings
Presentation 1
Thrills, stunts and daredevils: express train action
Hemma M. Prainsack (Film historian)
The key element of the action film is the chase, which keeps the audience on the edge of their seats with nerve-racking staging. In early action films, the depiction of breakneck speed and modern transport methods became symbolic of the mastery of technology—and the body. When the first pictures of the Cinématographe Lumière rolled across the screen, ‘L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat’ stirred the audience’s emotions in particular. With the arrival of the train, the greatest means of transport in the country was filmed in motion, and continues to captivate people to this day. The railway quickly became a powerful subject in films and a setting for acrobatics and action on trains. In ‘Abenteuer im Nachtexpress’ (D 1925), the German action hero Harry Piel dares to take on the “giant of the primeval world” (Illustrierter Film-Kurier No. 361, 1925) with spectacular stunts.
Presentation 2
Submerged action: underwater filming technologies of the silent era, as represented in the collection of the San Francisco Film Preserve
Kathy Rose O’Regan (San Francisco Film Preserve)
Underwater filming was surprisingly prolific during the early decades of cinema. In the collection of the San Francisco Film Preserve alone, two features—Maurice Tourneur’s ‘The White Heather’ (1919) and Irvin Willat’s ‘Below the Surface’ (1920)—feature underwater sequences, including sunken wrecks and fights on the seafloor. This presentation will use these two films to explore advances made in underwater filming during the silent era. We will also discuss the innovative marketing techniques used by studios to tell the general public about these groundbreaking technologies.
Film
›Escalada à Torre dos Clérigos‹
P 1917, Raul de Caldevilla, 9 min, stumm
Introduction: Joana de Sousa (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
In 1917, the Torre dos Clérigos in Porto (to this day, the highest church tower in Portugal at 75 meters) set the stage for a remarkable feat: two Spanish acrobats successfully climbed the tower in front of a massive crowd that had gathered to witness the event. This film records their daring stunt, which was part of an advertising campaign for a biscuit manufacturer. The climbers were meant to enjoy tea and biscuits at the top of the tower, in what was advertised as “Tea in the Clouds!”. For decades, it was the most innovative Portuguese promotional film experiment.
Presentations and introduction in English
| Tickets | €9 |
| When | Sat 25.10.25, 10:00 |
| Where |
Si̇nema Transtopia |
Zusatzinfo Referenz
Zusatzinfos im Slider
Event details
Hemma M. Prainsack
works as a film historian, journalist and curator. In her PhD thesis, “Grober Unfug! Harry Piel und das Kino der Sensationen”, she focused on the film star Harry Piel and the history of suspense films. Before that, she worked for the General Directorate of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF). During her studies, she worked in direction and video-making at the Burgtheater in Vienna and assisted Christoph Schlingensief, Andrea Breth, Jan Bosse and Martin Wuttke, among others. She is currently researching the Austrian filmmaker Rudolf Meinert (1882–1943) and the history of film production during the Kaiserzeit, the Weimar Republic and the transition to sound film.
Kathy Rose O’Regan
is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Preserve (SFFP). SFFP’s mission is to restore, preserve and provide access to the world’s cinematic heritage. She served as the Senior Film Restorer for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, overseeing all operations of the preservation department and managing the restoration of dozens of silent era titles. Previously, she managed the preservation department of the Bay Area Video Coalition. She is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, a recipient of a National Film and Sound Archive of Australia fellowship and a steering committee member of Women and Film History International.
Joana de Sousa
holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication Sciences and a master’s in Documentary Filmmaking. From 2015 to 2023, she was a programmer at the Doclisboa International Film Festival, serving on its supervising team from 2019 to 2022. She has curated programs bridging cinema, performance and the visual arts, and frequently takes part in panels, lectures and festival juries. Since 2023, she has worked at Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, leading the Distribution and Cultural Outreach department, and promoting Portuguese film heritage nationally and internationally.
Film data
D: Raul de Caldevilla
DoP: Manuel Cardoso Pereira
P: Invicta Film
Prod: Raul de Caldevilla
Original format: 35 mm, 1:1.33, b/w, silent
Screening print: DCP, 9 min, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema
Restoration info
The film was digitized by the Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, as part of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Plan. This copy is a result of the Ultra HD digitization of a 35 mm interpositive, produced in 2007. The digital image restoration was carried out in 2023, using the print preserved in 2007 as a reference.