the silent film thread

city lights is way too low imo.

has anyone seen lang's frau im mond? any good?

tempted to order it unseen b/c i'm kind of in love with the cover:

http://diaboliquemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/91yPP9r1YqL._SL1500_.jpg

I think the other version of House Of Usher is much better.

no Haxan! no Girl in Every Port!

spione is definitely a refinement of the first dr. mabuse films, but i have a very soft spot in my heart for the latter. hard to choose from among lang's silents, which despite being very obviously the work of the same couple (harbou is as important as lang i think), have very different virtues. the two nibelungen films are as startling and involving in their way as the mabuse films, spione, metropolis, etc.

i find that i /admire/ the first sound mabuse more than i really love it. there are some profoundly, wonderfully strange and disturbing things in there, but it also seems a little lumpy, in a way that you could probably chalk up to the relatively new sound technology -- IF lang hadn't already made one of the most fluid and assured of early sound films in "M."

i didn't look at that list b/c i don't need the grief today, but if there's no sjostrom in the top five, no credibility.

xpost

woman in the moon is great! you are not likely to be disappointed.

Oh, had blanked Lang's Nibelungen films - amazing, alien performance from Margarete Schön in Kriemhilds Rache:
https://silentsplease.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/kriemhildsrache_eyebrow.gif

Surprised they couldn't find room for The Goddess or New Woman (or even Piccadilly, heh). No Die Sinfonie der Großstadt!

you guys are really doing this, huh?

where's Heavy Love by Ton of Fun (aka the Three Fatties)?

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/81/1164570497.jpg

forthcoming bio of the comedy pioneer Clyde Bruckman, gettin good word

http://thecriticalpress.com/books/the-gag-man/

Homunculus, restored German scifi serial screening today in NYC

http://www.moma.org/calendar/events/1514

Kristin and David pick the ten best of '25 (think i've only missed Lazybones and Tartuffe:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/12/28/the-ten-best-films-of-1925/

^now only Lazybones

Yet more of Gance's Napoleon on the way:

http://news.sky.com/story/1631395/epic-five-hour-napoleon-film-restored

last year's top video releases, he says

http://moviessilently.com/2015/12/08/the-best-silent-movie-home-video-releases-of-2015/

dude and I saw the first 4 parts of Les Vampires yesterday and they were GREAT!! I think we wanna watch the rest.

just saw a newly restored 35mm print of Mantrap (1926, Victor Fleming) with Clara Bow laying waste to Minneapolis and the rural Canadian backwoods, along with the libidos of Ernest Torrence and Percy Marmont (who looks like a rougher middle-aged Bowie). A sex comedy adapted from a grim Sinclair Lewis novel!

L'Inhumaine (1924) Blu out, never before on disc... an "infamous, long-sought mega-splash of au courant cinematic futurism, and one of silent cinema's most notorious follies"

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_reviews_70/l_inhumaine_blu-ray.htm

http://criticsroundup.com/film/linhumaine/

it's a fascinating film, totally worth watching, though in a strong sense it's not really very... good.

on Roscoe Arbuckle

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/fatty-arbuckle/

seen any Lois Weber?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/rare-classic-films-by-female-directors

Well, whaddaya know?

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

Roscoe!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Duoo7z0kJM

^the concluding minutes feature some wild stuntfighting by Arbuckle

Not sure I'd ever heard of this Clara Bow-Gary Cooper from '27:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/children-of-divorce

My curator friend's latest comedy series at MoMA, in January; gotta see the one that the lead photo's from:

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/3630?locale=en

HELLO

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51xn1yV9z5L._SY445_.jpg

amazed Coop can hold his head up with that much mmakeup on

best of the year in silent video

http://moviessilently.com/2016/12/28/the-best-silent-movie-home-video-releases-of-2016/

on MoMA's comedy shorts series

http://www.filmjournal.com/moma-showcases-cruel-and-unusual-slapstick-shorts-fifth-year-running

“Without the pioneering work of film preservationist David Shepard, who died this week, our understanding of silent cinema would be much poorer. Shepard not only sought out and restored silent films, but he was determined to release as many as possible on to home video, where they could be enjoyed by the widest audiences. He owned the formidable BlackHawk Films library and ran Film Preservation Associates, but also collaborated with imprints and festivals worldwide—as well as contributing Méliès clips to Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011). Among many other names, he preserved and shared films by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Cecil B. DeMille, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, Abel Gance and D.W. Griffith.”

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/david-shepard-silent-film-hunter-sharer

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/david-shepard-dead-silent-film-preservation-giant-was-76-970975

was going through a stack of letters from a recently deceased buddy who used to send us lists. he mentioned a 5 star review for Maya Deren in a 1992 film guide (dont' know which) and i just watched meshes of the afternoon yesterday. not a expert on this stuff by any means, but it seemed to have a awful lot in common with some Bunuel which means it may be some of the best art of its kind. i dunno. just throwing this out there since search is broken and i was wondering if anyone (Dr M?) was into this stuff

i haven't seen much Maya Deren besides Meshes, i see mostly omnibus shows of avant-garde stuff now and then

there's a dvd that contains all of her released short films. meshes is great, at land is pretty good, everything else is minor.

RIP Stuart Oderman, longtime accompanist at NYC MoMA and elsewhere

http://www.silentfilmmusicblog.com/2017/08/stuart-oderman-1940-2017-silent-film.html

The Vortex (Brunel, 1928): A coherent and competently made drama (I'm not familiar with the original play; I gather that it was somewhat watered down in the adaptation).

Canned Harmony (Guy, 1911): A rewatch to try to figure out if the phone call sequence is true split-screen (I don't think so, but it would help if I knew more than the basics of film composition and theory).

Algie the Miner (Guy, 1912): Question to anyone who is familiar with The Celluloid Closet: does it attempt to assess how contemporary audiences perceived material that viewers who have been conditioned to look for subtext now read as gay? This dirty-minded fangirl smirked her way through the bits with Algie's tiny gun, and when Algie kissed the men he met upon arriving in the west, but...do we know anything about how the original audiences received these images?

i've been thinking of watching every available movie from exactly 100 years ago. is this a crazy idea?

well, imdb lists 5,498 titles from 1917. assume that 90% of them are lost (the standard estimate), and you've only got about 550 to watch. actually tracking down copies of all those films, however, is, yes, probably very crazy.

is this a project you would continue indefinitely? seems like it would become impossible after a certain point, maybe around like the mid-30s. might be cool for 1920 and before.

RIP Stuart Oderman, longtime accompanist at NYC MoMA and elsewhere

http://www.silentfilmmusicblog.com/2017/08/stuart-oderman-1940-2017-silent-film.html🕸

I'd probably continue it until I finished one full year. I haven't done any planning for it yet, just one of those big hobby project ideas I throw around in my head. like watching every Best Picture winner or everything Hitchcock did.

i've seen Algie, j.lu, but i don't know the answer to your second question and i don't have my copy of the Russo book handy. But in every era surely there'd be different responses by different sectors of the audience.

abanana, on a more manageable level, the film-log site Letterboxd lists 392 films for 1917, around 300 of which have been logged as 'seen' by at least one person. I doubt you could get your eyes on more than 150-200 if you tried exhaustively.

mostly silent, anyway:

You can watch the entire out-of-print TREASURES FROM AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVES set legally & for free here:https://t.co/pVytte9vZu

— Movies Silently (@MoviesSilently) October 2, 2017

Saw Pandora's Box restoration w/ a new orchestral score at NYFF last night. Janus/Criterion was thanked, so BR from them shortly?

That Pabst was somethin' else.

Kristin Thompson's best of 1927

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/12/27/the-ten-best-films-of-1927/

att Londoners, 10-11 March

https://us16.campaign-archive.com/?u=09e702562c5a537dc524bded5&id=e5b23c015b

http://www.kenningtonbioscope.com/

A hell of a program! If you have any interest in silent comedy, do not miss "Seven Years Bad Luck" or "Battle of the Century." There's nothing quite like a good comedy as seen with an appreciative audience.

some nice 110-year-old animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu-1t9sId5I

oh wow, thanks for the heads-up! And Kevin Brownlow will be there.

Steven Spielberg came into my curator/librarian friend's workplace the other day to watch something, and they had a chat about silent comedy. :o

Only got to catch one session of that festival mentioned above. As a silent cinema neophyte I was particularly impressed by the previously unknown to me Lupino Lane!

The Holy Mountain (Arnold Fanck) - I loved this. The Skiing, dancing, views of the moutains, the dream images and even Leni Riefenstahl. She's an unusual leading actress, her posture is often bent over and I've never seen anyone quite like her.
Eureka disc came with documentary The Wonderful Horrible life Of Leni Riefenstahl (3 hours long) which is great too. Kind of incredible to see her filming underwater at 90 and stroking the backs of stingrays. Really want to see Blue Light, Tiefland and maybe Olympia. What could have been if she hadn't got involved with Nazis.

anyone been to the SF Silent Fest?

https://prod3.agileticketing.net/websales/pages/list.aspx?epguid=7ecd8d33-d7d0-46b0-a62a-af16bcbe6fc6&