the silent film thread

UK version apparently poo, rubly substituting shite talkie Abraham Lincoln for fantastic Orphans Of The Storm, which contains the best car* chase ever.

(* OK, so its really a carriage chase. Still nearly gave me a heart attack.)

silent hitchcoct it had ivor novello

Not mentioned yet: von Stroheim's Greed (saw the 4hr reconstructed version in one of its very few theatrical screenings, es war InSaNe) and Lillian Gish's performance in The Wind.

http://www.monteuve.com/miradas/libreria/avarf1.jpg

In any event, a precis: Search: VICTOR SJÖSTRÖM, the greatest director of silents there was. He made films in Sweden from 1912 to 1922 and in the U.S. from 1922 to 1928. If you can find them: Ingeborg Holm, Terje Vigen, The Girl from the Marsh Croft, The Outlaw and His Wife (available on NTSC VHS), Sons of Ingmar, The Monastery of Sendomir (available on PAL VHS), The Phantom Chariot aka The Phantom Carriage aka The Stroke of Midnight aka Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness (available on PAL VHS), Mortal Clay, He Who Gets Slapped, The Wind (easily available).

Search also: Fritz Lang (Destiny/The Three Lights, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, The Nibelungen, Spies), Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires, Fantômas), Carl Dreyer (The Pardon's Widow, Michael, Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife, The Passion of Joan of Arc), and anything you can find by Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. Those of you in London, keep your eyes peeled, it is a good town for silents.

Many American cities have silent film festivals. New York is of course one of the world's great film towns (Paris being an uncontested no. 1). Chicago is OK, there is a summer silent festival but the Film Center of the Art Institute passed up a recent Mauritz Stiller retrospective (he's another good Swedish filmmaker and the guy who discovered Garbo).

http://www.filmkultura.iif.hu:8080/articles/prints/images/boyer/1.jpg

so, right then, who do you fancy then?

I still have a backlog of world-conquering ambition (from my childhood you understand) to work past (to once and finally convince myself I have neither the tenacity nor the self-confidence to actually see through a film on my own), but once that's done I think I might be suited to the fields of film preservation and programming.

To veer back on-topic:

My favorite moments in Buster Keaton films, and perhaps in all silent films put together, are when Buster submits dutifully and without complaint to what he perceives to be the natural order of things. For instance in Steamboat Bill Jr. when after a succession of folllies involving people being hurled from a steamboat when someone steps in front of them, Buster simply leaps into the water when he sees that someone is approaching. Or in College, when after having knocked over a long succession of hurdles, Buster finally makes the last, he turns around, does a double take, and then with a faint sigh tips over the final hurdle and walks off.

The greatest silent comic though was Jacques Tati who never made a silent film. He was the center of his films, always silent or nearly so, with the madness of the modern world buzzing and creaking and crashing and whirring and dripping around him.

Bauer was a major director of the pre-Soviet era in Russian film, an era which was basically completely ignored until glasnost allowed some such films to seep out of the archives where they had been surprsingly well-preserved (those that survived, anyway--I think about 10-20%). He only made films for a few years (1913-17) before an early death but on the evidence of this DVD they were extraordinary. Bauer excelled at complex lighting effects, carefully coordinated tracking shots (very unusual for the time), deep staging, and really astonishingly vivid and terrifying dream sequences. He began as a stage designer and his sets are perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his cinema--they are often quite elaborate and frequently macabre in keeping with the morbid plots of the movies. (He really was Russian.)

The notes to the DVD assert that Bauer was the superior of contemporaries like Sjöström and Griffith. I don't buy that, esp. not in the case of Sjöström, but he's a great find nonetheless. The DVD also includes a 30-minute lesson in Bauer's style from Yuri Tsivian, a Russian film scholar who teaches at the University of Chicago. It's put out by the BFI and is Region 2. All of you in Europe might take a look at this.

don't be, your information is very valuable

I really don't know French Impressionist cinema well at all, and it's hard to track stuff down.

Have you ever seen "Bed and Sofa" by Avram Room?

This is all I will say for now.

I know precious fuck-all about prewar Soviet cinema outside of the usual suspects--Eisenstein, Kushelov, Vertov, Pudovkin. I've long wanted to see stuff by Kozintsev and Trauberg, Room, Boris Barnet. A lot of good people insist that Barnet's By the Bluest of Seas (actually from 1936) is one of the greatest films ever made. I've always wanted to see Chapayev too. I mean we all know the line about Tarkovsky and Parazhanov rebelling against Socialist Realism or Momumentalism but where are the examples of those genres?

This October the major silent film festival at Pordenone in Italy is featuring a tribute to as Ivan Mosjoukine, the Russian actor and director who left for France during the Revolution and there made Le Brasier ardent (1923) which supposedly anticipates both Soviet montage and French impressionist cinema! He also starred in L'Herbier's Feu Matthia Pascal and Volkoff's Casanova.

Pordenone

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, made by the same folks who, eight years later, would make King Kong is also pretty damned incredible -- it involves nomadic tribes in Iran carrying their livestock up mountains. It's absolutely exhausting to watch them, in a good way.

The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra. It's like something Joel Hodgson might put together if he was a young turk in the 20's: delirious experimentation, short, art deco, lights and shadow, puppets. Shares the look and feel with more than a few eighties videos.

anyway i'm off to see this film for the umpteenth time at the action ecoles. sadly i couldn't round up anyway to go with me because this is like the greatest date movie ever, except that it's so beautiful you'll probably completely forget about your date which depending on your date might be a good thing!

though...

(swedish and bay area ILXors take notes)

a COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE OF THE SILENT FILMS OF VICTOR SJOSTROM is coming first to sweden, some time in january i think, and then eventually to the pacific film archive in berkeley, in february. GO GO GO GO GO

http://cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/comunicati_stampa/COMUNICATI_LIVE_03/COMUNICATI_STAMPA_imgs/Mosjoukine.jpg

rowr

sad about the remainder of murnau's career: one film now lost, another cut to ribbons by the producers, the final film a flawed bit of brilliance which only premiered after his death in a car accident.

"found in a toy projector"
Does this mean it was an 8mm film? Especially impressive restoration if so.

Was really impressed by Pandora's Box (the new Eureka bluray) and all the backstory about Brooks in the bonus features. Silent films and this one in particular give me a feeling of "what could have been" like little else and I really want to see more because it's been a long time since I seen many. Was wondering if a Bluray of Diary Of A Lost Girl would follow but there already is one from 2014.

Haven't watched this yet but I'll just leave it here
https://archive.org/details/Wind1928

Silent Film Day 2024: https://silentmovieday.org/participate-1

Did anyone besides me observe Silent Film Day (rewatches of Coeur Fidele & The Dragon Painter)?

If you have access to TCM, tonight they're premiering the recent restoration of The Enchanted Cottage (1924) (haven't seen it yet but I know the guy who did the restoration).

For your consideration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qApoxM41NGQ

Who's up for L'Inhumaine at the Film Forum later today?

Heh, sold out anyway.

When I saw it I was reminded of extremely lol 80s music videos. But then they were being made by film students that had been trained on whatever versions of Caligari and Metropolis were in circulation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpy8L8B_3WQ
Been meaning to watch this forever, soundtrack seems very interesting, surely not the original

talking pictures has been showing Message from Mars with a new soundtrack. makes them look like they are dancing to Aphex Twin in the one scene. it's on the bfi website for free, if you can get that to work.

The Wind is kind of a must-see. Have no idea about that soundtrack.

The highest of recommendations for the Gold Ninja Video release of Canadian silent The Devil Bear. The film itself is an ok melodrama enlivened by the presence of a man in a gorilla suit, but the extras and presentation are an amazing look into a fascinating story: basically the movie was a con, this American producer showing up in Canada and asking ppl to finance an adaptation of a story by a locally beloved author; it's kind of a miracle it got made at all. The larger context of this was also US producers trying to skirt the UK national cinema quotas by filming in Canada, which being commonwealth did not count against those.

Another wrinkle is that the copy they dug up was modified to prepare for a sound version that never materialised, so if you've ever wondered "did we really need all those dialogue intertitles?", now you can find out.

did Guy Maddin make this up?

From Morn to Midnight (1920) is utterly insane. Imagine The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reworked as a comedic satire on capitalism but making less sense. You can watch it direct from Wikipedia, sans soundtrack unfortunately so you'll have to find your own music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Morn_to_Midnight