the silent film thread

And, yeah obviously, Sunrise is the tops. Ivan Mosjoukine is plenty hot, but Murnau was a fox. Forget Malkovich, he should've been played by Dermot Mulroney or Guy Pearce or... but I get off on the tangent.

Amateurist, recommend to me a really good, reasonably priced (say... $70) multi-region DVD player.

...just some of my favorites. And Fairbanks swashbucklers, just about anything with Lon Chaney are also wonderful.

I've also always wanted to see the silent Wizard Of Oz serials. Have these ever been rereleased?

where are you, in the us? best buy was selling some cyberhome 500 models for $60 about nine months ago, and then they disappeared. but they might be back. they're not top of the line players but they can be switched to all-region very easily and are quite cheap.

I'm ashamed that I've yet to see Sjostrom, but I'm also excited that I haven't yet seen Sjostrom. Both he and Mizoguchi are just waiting for me at this point and I'm so looking forward to visiting.

"Greed" and "He Who Gets Slapped" I would rate nearly as highly; as Amateurist says above, HWGS is a truly macabre and impressionistic melodrama. Lon Chaney... magnifique. Such an eerie and sympathetic physical and facial performance.

I'd like to see more of Sjostrom's work...

Wish I could see the 4hr reconstruction of "Greed"; how do people feel that plays...?

How do people rate "The Crowd" and "Flesh and the Devil", out of interest? Those two show up on TCM quite a lot, and I always tend to say I'll get round to watching them.
How would people rate FWM's "Faust"? This looks a very tempting bargain in Fopp @ £7 on DVD.

i've seen like 20 silent films this past month or so, one today in fact, ozu's "i was born but."

i was supposed to go to some hipster silent film expo at the palais de tokyo tonight but it was sold out.

the crowd is beyond excellent, i haven't seen flesh and the devil.

Not being much near London in general, don't think I'd be able to make any such showings. A shame as seeing silents in the cinema is a great experience: I got the full effect from "Sunrise" in seeing it at the local Arts Cinema.

I don't get his reveence for "Sunrise" that so many people have. Maybe it is because critics don't like the genre films in which Murnau really excels.

the reverance is because it's an astounding film

are those other films "genre" films i dunno. they predate current understandings of their genres.

i still "nosferatu" is his best film btw.

The Three Ages, while a good concept and parody, seems to fall a little flatter than the other features I've seen yet (The General, The Navigator, and The Saphead). I'd say my favorite two of his are The General and The Navigator.

His shorts are absolutely k-classic in a way that a feature couldn't possibly be.

the reverance is because it's an astounding film

but doesn't it have no plot?

(spoilers)

a woman from the city convinces a man from a little resort town to kill his wife and run off to the big city with her.

he takes his wife, who has been sad because her husband spends his time off with the woman from the city, on a boat trip and intends to drown her, but he can't bring himself to do it. when they land ashore, she runs away in fright but he follows her. they take a cable car into the city where they gradually reconcile after he apologizes. the catharsis is such that they renew their love affair. they take a boat back to their town, but it is rocked by a storm and the wife disappears. the man is inconsolable when a search party fails to find his wife. when the woman from the city seeks him out, he tries to kill her. but later a fisherman finds the wife, alive, holding on to some reeds. they are reuinted and share a beautiful moment alone as the sun rises on a new day.

are there any other movies you would like explained?

"Plot bores me. These days Noda and I don't rate story very highly. Content, social relevance, and story logic aren't what we're after....What we seek to leave is a good aftertaste."

according to the recent cahiers before making his new movie alain resnais rewatched lubitsch's lady windermere's fan and a bunch of charley chase comdies. (he also professes to own lots of dvds and to have loved "unbreakable")

Meaning? This is rot, you ask me. I don't hate Ozu, but this sort of thing is incredibly dumb -- assuming that it's even possible to leave out 'social relevance'.

i think he means that he was interested in giving a sense of life and emotions which would affect the audience, but without recourse to conventions of plot design and structure or to the kind of contrivances that usually equate to social relevance.

B-b-but of course he was using conventions! Just not the same as, I dunno, Stanley Kramer. His decision not to have much sense of society is just another political position -- I'm curious about it, I've only seen 'Tokyo Story', and as I've said I'd like to see a reading of Japan's tumultuous decades through his films. I think it would be very strange to go out to make films during such a time without paying any attention to what goes on around, don't you? But I really don't see that his m.o. is any less 'contrived' than anyone else's.

yeah yeah, very funny. I can follow what happened in the film, but it is very much this happens then this happens then this happens, and is essentially all a bit so what. It does not have the kind of narrative coherence that the other Murnau films I've seen have, nor is anything that happens in it as interesting.

I feel that Murnau's "Nosferatu" is one of the ten greatest films ever made, and suspect that the only reason people go on about "Sunrise" is that critical opinion does not like to accord just levels of acclaim to a film about a bloodsucking vampire (although I accept that you prefer this film).

i dont prefer sunrise. i think nosferatu is if anything more popular, witness the umpteen versions available on dvd. perhaps in certain critical circles its not as highly rated but that is due as much to the fact of its unavailability for several decades as its being retroactively considered a genre film.

everything has to be a simple conspiracy it seems with some of you...there always have to be a reason, one reason, why something is supposedly not in critical favor (even though you are talking about two movies that are among the most well known of all 1920s films) and if it is in favor you have to denigrate it.

sunrise is a very different film from nosferatu in many ways not just the theme and plot. although i'd agree that there is something very canny and perfect about nosferatu, its various subplots and themes are articulated with great precision and beauty.

i dunno about form/content i find sunrise pretty fucking movng and so do a lot of other people.

see gilberto perez's wonderful essay on that film in his book "the material ghost"

also you are being disingenuous. i of course dont expect everyone to like or love sunrise, nor do i care if you like it (as i said above, i prefer nosferatu, and there are many films i prefer to both) but you made some hypotheses about why sunrise has a supposed greater critical reputation than nosferatu, and speculated that it might be "overrated" for sundry reasons, and i was contesting those reasons.

i'm not really a lumieriste though

also the one of the baby walking is pretty great.

I'm going to ge silent movies on DVD to play in my new computer. 1st chouce = steamboat bill jr, 2nd = Pandora's Box. Can "The Perils of Pauline" be obtained on DVD I wonder.