At the Minghella Studios on the 6th and 7th of December, audiences experienced the restaging of two Silent Movie Prologues, together with a screening of the films they were designed to accompany: Buster Keaton’s wonderful comedy feature Go West (US, 1925) and the surviving fragment of another extraordinary 1920s film, Beggar on Horseback (US, James Cruze, 1925). Preceding the prologues themselves, students at the University of Reading staged the immersive experience of a 1920s Movie Palace, engaging with audiences as they entered the space.

The two prologues, “The Stylised Cowboy” and “Doing it the Pirandello way…”, were originally created to accompany the presentation of the films in Cinelândia, the area of marquee cinemas in Rio de Janeiro, in 1926. As part of the AHRC-FAPESP funded IntermIdia project, in conjunction with Reading Film Theatre and integrated into the final year of their degree programme, students from the Department of Film, Theatre & Television performed the prologues as a prelude to these classics of silent cinema.

This video is a summary of audience and student impact.