The Story of Film 1896 - 1929 : Silent
From Mark Cousins' book "The Story of Film" with some additional movies that changed the way I look at movies or really moved me.
Thank you Mr. Cousins for opening my eyes to see a whole new world of movies and the path it took to get where it is today. Your book is an inspiration!
A quotation for the intro from Mark Cousins' book that explains these lists and the Story of Film:
"This book tells the story of the art of cinema. It narrates the history of a medium which began as a photographic, largely silent, shadowy novelty and became a digital, multi-billion dollar global business.
Although the business elements of film are important, you will find few details in my book of what films cost and how the industry organises itself and markets its wares. I wanted to write a purer book than that, one more focused on the medium than the industry. As you read, therefore, you will come across works that you may not have seen and may never see. I make no apology for this because I do not want to tell a history of cinema that is distorted by the vagaries of the market place. There are mainstream films described in what follows, but mostly I have focused on what I consider to be the most innovative films from any country at any period."
All quotations in quotation marks are from The Story of Film, unless otherwise indicated.
Thank you Mr. Cousins for opening my eyes to see a whole new world of movies and the path it took to get where it is today. Your book is an inspiration!
A quotation for the intro from Mark Cousins' book that explains these lists and the Story of Film:
"This book tells the story of the art of cinema. It narrates the history of a medium which began as a photographic, largely silent, shadowy novelty and became a digital, multi-billion dollar global business.
Although the business elements of film are important, you will find few details in my book of what films cost and how the industry organises itself and markets its wares. I wanted to write a purer book than that, one more focused on the medium than the industry. As you read, therefore, you will come across works that you may not have seen and may never see. I make no apology for this because I do not want to tell a history of cinema that is distorted by the vagaries of the market place. There are mainstream films described in what follows, but mostly I have focused on what I consider to be the most innovative films from any country at any period."
All quotations in quotation marks are from The Story of Film, unless otherwise indicated.
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- DirectorAuguste LumièreLouis LumièreStarsMadeleine KoehlerMarcel KoehlerMrs. Auguste LumiereA train arrives at La Ciotat station."On 28 December 1895, a date many film historians consider the birth of cinema, the Lumière brothers showed a short programme of their documentary films to a paying audience in a room on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Included a now famous single shot film called L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat"
- DirectorAlice GuyStarsAlice GuyGermaine SerandYvonne SerandThe first film directed by a female director, "The Cabbage Fairy" presents a brief fantasy tale involving a strange fairy who can produce and deliver babies coming out of cabbages. Gently moving through the cabbages and using of lovely gestures, she takes one baby out of there, then makes more magic and delivers two more.The Cabbage Fairy. "Alice Guy-Blaché started as a secretary to Léon Gaumont and directed perhaps the first ever scripted film and established one of the first movie studios, Solax."
- DirectorEnoch J. RectorStarsJames J. CorbettBob FitzsimmonsBilly MaddenDocumentary film depicting the 1897 boxing match between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada on St. Patrick's Day. Originally running for more than 100 minutes, it is the world's first feature film."Filmed by Rector using a film format that would not become popular for nearly fifty years – widescreen. He invented a new camera for the process and named it a Veriscope. The film was 63mm wide. Most other film of the time was 35mm.
What makes this film so interesting is that is helps reveal the changing social standing of cinema in America at that time. A local newspaper, The Brooklyn Eye, commented on its sheer spectacle, “The man who would have predicted … that an event of the prior month would be reproduced before the eyes of a multitude in pictures that moved like life, and that lightning would move them and light them, would have been avoided as a lunatic or hanged as a wizard.” - DirectorGeorge Albert SmithThe ghost of a man's twin shows him a vision of how he was killed in a duel."Mr. Smith draped part of his set in black velvet, filmed a shot, rewound the film and then re-exposed the film to include the image of a ghost, which appeared to float through the original set."
- DirectorGeorges MélièsStarsJehanne d'AlcyGeorges MélièsAn astronomer falls asleep and has a strange dream involving a fairy queen and the Moon.La Lune à un Mètre (Original title).
"Georges Méliès combined painted theatrical imagery and trick effects to explore the magical and stylized possibilities of cinema.
While filming his camera jammed and, a moment later, it started up again. He noticed that since no film was exposed during the jam, streetcars suddenly jumped forward and people disappeared. This discovery of another magical quality of film inspired him to make this film." - DirectorGeorge Albert SmithStarsLaura BayleyGeorge Albert SmithA humorous subject intended to be run as a part of a railroad scene during the period in which the train is passing through a tunnel."Mr. Smith was among the first to film action and then project it in reverse. In 1898, he shot what has since been called a “phantom ride”. This was a new visual experience achieved by putting the camera on the front of a moving train. Films with more than one shot started to emerge only in the late 1890s, and Smith’s combination of interior and travelling shot was one of cinema’s first attempts to say “Meanwhile”
- DirectorGeorge Albert SmithStarsLaura BayleyTom GreenA man dreams he is flirting with an attractive young lady, then he wakes up in bed next to his wife."what was perhaps the first example of a “focus pull” – a shot where a photographer twists the barrel of the lens to make the image go from sharp to soft focus"
- DirectorGeorge Albert SmithStarsHarold SmithA boy looks through glasses at various objects, seen magnified."One of the earliest close-ups in film"
- DirectorGeorge Albert SmithA girl gives a spoonful of medicine to a kitten."Only later did filmmakers use close-ups simply to show their audiences a dramatic incident in more detail, as in The Sick Kitten, a remake of G.A. Smith’s The Little Doctor, which was lost."
- DirectorGeorge S. FlemingEdwin S. PorterStarsEdwin S. PorterVivian VaughanArthur WhiteA fireman rushes into a carriage to rescue a woman from a house fire. He breaks the windowpanes and carries the woman to safety; after dangerous and uncertain moments he also saves the woman's son."Its most celebrated sequence is the arrival of a fireman outside a blazing house. The image cuts to a room inside the house where the fireman rescues a mother, then cuts to an exterior shot of the mother left on the street. The camera then returns inside the house to show the rescue of the mother’s child by the fireman and then reestablishes itself outside again.
Cinema had learned to follow the flow of the action from one space to another. This made chase sequences possible, liberated movies and emphasised movement." - DirectorEdwin S. PorterStarsGilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' AndersonA.C. AbadieGeorge BarnesA group of bandits stage a brazen train hold-up, only to find a determined posse hot on their heels.One of the first films in the world to be made that actually told a story.
- DirectorCharles TaitStarsElizabeth TaitJohn TaitNicholas BrierleyOriginally 70 minutes in running time, only 17 minutes of the world's first full-length narrative feature film survived in stills and other fragments and tell the story of Ned Kelly, an infamous 19th-century Australian outlaw.Perhaps the first feature-length film
- DirectorLouis J. GasnierA laundry man parks his horse-drawn cart to make a delivery. While he is inside, his horse sees a bag of oats and starts to eat them. By the time the man comes back outside, the horse has eaten a whole bag of oats, and has so much energy that he begins to race out of control."The action of the horse and its rider were separate, simultaneous events. Unlike continuity editing, this was parallel editing, the origin of “Meanwhile” in the cinema"
- DirectorAndré CalmettesCharles Le BargyStarsCharles Le BargyAlbert LambertGabrielle RobinneFrance, at the end of the sixteenth century. Henry III decided to eliminate his rival, the Duke of Guise, and, therefore, calls him in the castle of Blois. The mistress of the duke, warned of the King's intentions, informs him, but the noble, sure of his own authority, went there anyway. In Cabinet-Vieux castle Duke is stabbed by guards of the King, while he attends the murder hidden behind the curtains. Eventually, Henry III does burn the duke body to discard."Actors turning their backs to the camera marked the beginning of the end of frontal, theatrical cinema"
- DirectorSiegmund LubinDirector Lubin was first Jewish-American filmmaker. In the film, Moses uses his last pennies to help a friend in need. 25 years later the men meet again. The film is remarkable in its depiction of tradition in the face of oppressive circumstances."a man in a street fight remembers an event from twenty-five years earlier. The shot of that memory is the first flashback acknowledged by film historians."
- DirectorD.W. GriffithMack SennettStarsMack SennettHarry SolterFlorence LawrenceAn upper class drawing room. A gentleman breaks the curtain pole and goes in search of a replacement, but he stops into a pub first. He buys a very long pole, and causes havoc everywhere he passes, accumulating an ever-growing entourage chasing him, until he escapes them through a bit of movie magic, only to discover that the pole has already been replaced."From 1908 to 1913 D.W. Griffith made 400 short films, including The Curtain Pole, one of his rare comedies which nonetheless established a crazy style that would dominate comic movies for the remainder of the silent period"
- DirectorN.G. ChitreP.R. TipnisRamchandra Gopal TorneyThe film about the Hindu saint Pudalik is based on a Marathi play by Ramrao Kirtikar. The entire 'film' is 'played' out on Grant Road, Bombay."Some say the first film made in India, it was shot on location in Bombay by P.R. Tipnis and N.G. Chitre"
- DirectorChristy CabanneStarsPancho VillaDon Luis TerrazasAlthough some scenes were re-enacted after the fact, this is a real documentary on the struggle of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa to overthrow dictator Porfirio Díaz . Directors Christy Cabanne and Raoul Walsh took a camera crew to Mexico during the Mexican Revolution of 1912 and traveled with Villa, filming footage of his army on the march and engaged in battle with federal troops (director Walsh confirmed in an interview the long-rumored story that Villa insisted on the filming of execution by firing squad of several dozen federal prisoners, but that when he returned to Hollywood the studio thought the footage too grisly and cut it out)."Cinema was playing an important role in Mexico’s bloody civil war which would claim over a million lives between 1911 and 1917. Cameramen in the north of Mexico, like the intrepid Lumière employee Francis Doublier outside Moscow in 1896, filmed the battles of the revolutionary Pancho Villa. Although some scenes were re-enacted after the fact, this is a real documentary on the struggle of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. La vista de la revuetta/View of the Uprising (Mexico)
- DirectorWilliam FosterStarsWilliam FosterLottie GradyEdgar LittersonThe first race comedy made inaugurating the chase idea, later copied by Lubin, Keystone Cops,etc.."The Railroad Porter was a type of chase comedy that was becoming popular, but it had an all-black cast and a black director, Bill Foster. Despite some further pioneers in the 1930s, it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that a range of black filmmakers emerged in the US and that the very first black film would be made in Britain. "
- DirectorArthur MackleyStarsArthur MackleyJulia MackleyMarguerite ToddJoe Simmons, the town loafer, is warned by the ranch boys that he had better get to work and provide for his family on the penalty of a severe horse whipping if he does not do so. After repeated warnings the boys fake action and Joe is given the lashing he has been promised. Jim threatens that he will kill the ring leader of the band if he ever finds him out, but the boys scoff at the idea. The next morning Jim Wrayburn, the leader in the horsewhipping incident of the day before, calls on Joe, and presents him with a team of horses and kindly advice to get to work. Years go by. Joe has become a wealthy ranchman when he learns that it was Wrayburn who had horsewhipped him. Joe has never forgotten the whipping he received and plans to carry out the threat. However, finding Jim about to be turned out of his home, Joe pays off the mortgage and presents it to Jim with a note which says, "Given in payment for the good a whipping and two horses did for me.""Eye-line matching had still not been perfected in 1911. Two men in the film appear to be staring in opposite directions, yet they are supposed to be talking to, and looking at, each other."
- DirectorDhundiraj Govind PhalkeStarsD.D. DabkeAnna SalunkeGanpat G. ShindeThe film opens with a Ravi Varma like tableau showing King Harishchandra, his wife Taramati and his young son. The king is teaching his son archery. They go on a hunt. The king enters an area controlled by the Sage Vishwamitra. Three furies appear before the king caught in flames. The king tries to rescue them. These fairies try to seduce the king into renouncing his kingdom for his love of truth. The king endures much hardship including being banished from his kingdom before a god appears to reassure everyone that the whole narrative was merely a test of the king's integrity."Phalke took the ancient stories of Indian myth which form The Mahabharata (collected between 400BC and 400AD), and adapted them for screen. He created a whole genre, the mythological, which has survived to this day"
- DirectorEnrico GuazzoniStarsAmleto NovelliGustavo SerenaCarlo CattaneoAn epic Italian film, "Quo Vadis" influenced many of the later movies."Quo Vadis? was a landmark in early Italian historical epic films and certainly Enrico Guazzoni's grand scale masterpiece laid the foundations for what genuine kolossal Italian spectacles should be. It had a great deal of influence on Giovanni Pastrone's "Cabiria" and D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance"
- DirectorYevgeny BauerStarsNina ChernovaA. UgrjumovV. DemertA young, rich woman decides to dedicate her life to helping the poor, but a tragic incident changes her life."...developed early tracking shot even further. Like many of the eighty or more films he would make in the next four years, Twilight of a Woman’s Soul derived from the heady fatalistic naturalism of Russian literature in the second half of the nineteenth century."
- DirectorRalph InceStarsRalph InceAnita StewartGladden JamesThe fighter is a "second-rater" and loses his fight for the championship title. After his defeat he goes downhill very rapidly until he meets the captain of the sloop "Wasp," which is manned by desperadoes. The captain is a second edition of Wolf Larsen, of Jack London's story, a very bad man. The down-and-out fighter ships with the captain and goes to sea with him. On an ocean steamer, a young heiress and young man, newly married, are going abroad on their honeymoon The steamer founders in mid-ocean, all hands going down with it except the young couple, who escape in a life-boat. Later they are picked up at sea by the "Wasp." The captain takes advantage of the girl's helpless position, after setting her husband to work in the forecastle. The young couple try to reason with the captain by promising him a liberal reward. The ex-fighter, now a sailor of the sloop crew, takes their part. While he is fighting off the captain and some of his gang, the young husband and wife manage to escape from the sloop in one of the dories. They are later picked up by another steamer and saved. While they are getting away, their protector fights off the captain and his villainous desperadoes, and finally falls dead in the struggle. The last seen of the young couple is a view of them in the cabin of another steamer, thinking of what may have befallen the man who sacrificed his life for them."An early example of the now familiar technique of reverse-angle cutting, in which we are shown the main character first and then what she is looking at"
- DirectorVictor SjöströmStarsHilda BorgströmGeorg GrönroosAron LindgrenFinancial struggles separate a single mother from her children."Victor Sjöström's early feature film "Ingeborg Holm" is not only considered by many the first film in the golden age of Swedish cinema lasting from 1913 to 1924 but also the real beginning of Swedish cinema in general."
- DirectorPhillips SmalleyLois WeberStarsPhillips SmalleyLois WeberLule WarrentonIsaac and his faithful wife Rachel deplore that in America their children are forced to work on the Jewish Sabbath. Leah and Sam are not so strict as their parents and the old customs pall about their more American spirits. Sam is employed in a cloak house and secretly loves his employer's daughter, but she refuses to recognize him. Leah is loved by the handsome gentile floorwalker, and despite her father's objections, she marries him. Isaac orders Leah from the house. Later, the daughter of the cloak manufacturer marries an admirer and Sam is invited to the wedding. He drinks and disgraces himself; returning home, is turned out by the heartbroken rabbi. He leaves, telling the old man that he will return when the father celebrates the Christian Christmas. Two years pass. Leah presents herself at her father's door with a baby in her arms. The old Jew refuses to see, but the mother longs to take the girl to her bosom. Julian falls under a street car; his legs are severed at the knees. Leah visits him at the hospital and is grief-stricken. Ten years later the rabbi and his wife are in poor circumstances, though he is as rigid as ever. Leah and Julian have adopted flower-making as a means of livelihood. Without knowing, the family have taken rooms above those of the rabbi. One afternoon their little girl meets the old man in the yard and assists him. An attachment springs up between the child and the old man, and the latter is impressed many times by instances of the kindness of the gentiles towards the Jews in this country. It is this child, on a Christmas night, that finally brings about reconciliation between the girl and the old father."Despite her celebrity, from her earliest films she addressed themes beyond the conventional reach of closed romantic realism. The Jew’s Christmas attacked religious prejudice. Like Alice Guy-Blaché (see Chapter One), her role in film history is seldom acknowledged."
- DirectorGiovanni PastroneStarsItalia Almirante-ManziniLidia QuarantaBartolomeo PaganoCabiria is a Roman child when her home is destroyed by a volcano. Sold in Carthage to be sacrificed in a temple, she is saved by Fulvio, a Roman spy. But danger lurks, and hatred between Rome and Carthage can only lead to war."Pastrone filmed Cabiria’s near-sacrifice to Baal, Maciste’s adventures in Carthage and Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants. He shot for six months, at a time when many films were still completed in a matter of days. “The technical innovations and spectacular sets revolutionized cinema”, wrote film historian Georges Sadoul in 1965"
- DirectorHenry LehrmanStarsCharles ChaplinHenry LehrmanGordon GriffithThe Tramp wanders into and disrupts the filming of a go-kart race."In his second film he used a costume of bowler hat, scruffy baggy trousers, walking stick and over-sized boots which became his trademark. His outfit was that of a penniless tramp, but also that of a gentleman and dilettante."
- DirectorYevgeny BauerStarsVitold PolonskyOlga RakhmanovaVera KaralliAndrei lives a secluded life with his aunt, studying and thinking about his now-deceased mother. His friend Tsenin is concerned, and tries to get Andrei to accompany him to social events. After watching the actress Zoya Kadmina perform, Andrei is fascinated with her, and is then astounded to receive a note from her. He has only one brief meeting with her, and then three months later he is shocked to learn of her death. He now becomes obsessed with her memory, and he decides that he must find out all that he can about her."The melancholic tone of Bauer’s film anticipated an intriguing divergence that emerged between Russian and American cinema in the years 1913 and 1914. In the second of these years, Russia’s entrance into the First World War closed its borders and no international films were shown. Isolated thus, in the three years prior to the Russian revolutions. Russian directors made a string of great, sombre movies, only recently rediscovered"
- DirectorLois WeberStarsCourtenay FooteMyrtle StedmanHerbert StandingThe parallel stories of a modern preacher and a medieval monk, Gabriel the Ascetic, who is killed by an ignorant mob for making a nude statue representing Truth, which is also represented by a ghostly naked girl who flits throughout the film.This film marks a distinct change in the way narrative film making took place, with a plot that included flashbacks and interlaced story lines. The story presents itself as a series of allegorical quips meant to criticise the religious crowd of the time. The blatant presentation of truth as a naked woman along with the way the wrath of God is simplified to the economies of a child (do something bad and you get hurt) will likely bother those inclined to religious belief"
- DirectorD.W. GriffithStarsLillian GishMae MarshHenry B. WalthallThe Stoneman family finds its friendship with the Camerons affected by the Civil War, both fighting in opposite armies. The development of the war in their lives plays through to Lincoln's assassination and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan."Perhaps the most famous and certainly the most controversial film of the whole silent era. As the storyline suggests, it was appallingly racist. Black senators were shown as drunk and unclean. Demonstrations for and against the film took place after some screenings; many protested the film’s depictions of African Americans, others attacked black audience members. The KKK had been disbanded in 1877, but such was the power of this film that historian Kevin Brownlow wrote that “On Thanksgiving Night, 1915, in Stone Mountain, Atlana, 2500 former Clansmen marched down Peach Tree Avenue to celebrate the opening of the film. By the mid-1920s, KKK membership was four million."
- DirectorBenjamin ChristensenStarsBenjamin ChristensenKaren CaspersenPeter FjelstrupA criminal escapes from prison, however a betrayal leads to his second arrest.Hævnens Nat (original title).
"The film features the common (in Denmark) technique of flipping a light switch or turning on a lamp to seemingly light up rooms" - DirectorYevgeny BauerStarsOlga RakhmanovaLidiya KorenevaVera KholodnayaWealthy Mrs. Khromova has a natural daughter, Musya, and an adopted daughter, Nata. The merchant Zhurov is in love with Nata, and hopes to marry her, but she is non-committal. When Zhurov introduces his friend Prince Bartinsky to the family, both young women soon fall in love with the dashing but irresponsible prince. The prince is in love with Nata, but because of his enormous debts, he decides to marry Musya to get her dowry, and he allows Nata to marry Zhurov. All the while, Mrs. Khromova remains very uneasy, fearing that marriage is unlikely to cause the self-indulgent prince to change his ways.This movie share the same aesthetic, as is visible in much of Bauer's work: that is, the art of mise-en-scène. The sets and production values of this film are especially lavish. A fantasy scene resembles epics such as "Quo Vadis?" or "Cabiria", and columns are visible throughout the mansion. The melodrama is sensational, and the suspense is befitting of D.W. Griffith. Nonetheless, the picture still mostly resembles Bauer's own oeuvre.
- DirectorLois WeberStarsHarry De MoreEvelyn SelbieWillis MarksA fictionalized composite of several celebrated murder cases, particularly the Stielow case, in which an innocent man is convicted and sentenced to death on purely speculative evidence."Despite her celebrity, from her earliest films she addressed themes beyond the conventional reach of closed romantic realism. People vs. Joe Doe campaigned against capital punishment. Like Alice Guy-Blaché (see Chapter One), her role in film history is seldom acknowledged."
- DirectorYakov ProtazanovStarsTamara DuvanIvan MozzhukhinVera OrlovaWhile hosting a game of cards one night, Narumov tells his friends a story about his grandmother, a Countess. As a young woman, she had once incurred an enormous gambling debt, which she was able to erase by learning a secret that guaranteed that she could win by playing her cards in a certain order. One of Narumov's friends, German, has never gambled, but he is intrigued by the story about the Countess and her secret. He soon becomes obsessed with learning this secret from her, and he starts by courting her young ward Lizaveta, hoping to use her to gain access to the Countess."...indebted to the bleakness of Scandinavian films as well as Russian literature. Adapted from a short story by Alexander Pushkin, it tells of the haunting of a Russian officer after he has sold his soul to the devil. Fate, destiny and natural forces foil human desire. ... bleakly pessimistic in it's endings, yet hugely popular with the paying Russian audiences."
- DirectorD.W. GriffithStarsLillian GishRobert HarronMae MarshThe story of a poor young woman separated by prejudice from her husband and baby is interwoven with tales of intolerance from throughout history."Griffith filmed the Babylon sequence from hot-air balloons and rigged up a shot in mid-air, by placing the camera on a moving tower, which was a first. He was innovative: he would take storyline A so far, stop it, then go to storyline B, advance it a certain amount and return to storyline A and pick up where he had left off. This confused many of the audiences and the film did less well commercially then A Birth of a Nation for which, to some critics of the time, it seemed like an apology.
Intolerance’s greatest contribution to the history of cinema was that it ambitiously showed that a cut between shots could be a thematic tool, that it could be an intellectual signpost, asking the audience to notice, not something about the action or story, but about the meaning of the sequence. Secondly, it had a huge impact on other filmmakers... in 1921 Minoru Murata made an atypical Japanese film that didn’t follow the tradition of flattened imagery and heavy benshi narration, having been encouraged to do so after seeing Intolerance." - DirectorYevgeny BauerStarsVera KaralliAleksandr KheruvimovVitold PolonskyA grief-stricken ballerina becomes the obsession of an increasingly unhinged artist.Russia. Umirayushchiy lebed (Original title).
"The melancholic tone of Bauer’s film anticipated an intriguing divergence that emerged between Russian and American cinema in the years 1913 and 1914. In the second of these years, Russia’s entrance into the First World War closed its borders and no international films were shown. Isolated thus, in the three years prior to the Russian revolutions. Russian directors made a string of great, sombre movies, only recently rediscovered" - DirectorErnst LubitschStarsPola NegriHarry LiedtkeEmil JanningsA girl is kidnapped and held captive in an ancient Egyptian temple. She is rescued and flees to England, but soon finds that her mysterious captor is still haunting her."Begins with the mocking caption, “This film had a big budget, that is two palm trees, and was shot on locations in Egypt, that is in the Rudesdorf limestone mountains [near Berlin]”
- DirectorD.W. GriffithStarsLillian GishRichard BarthelmessDonald CrispA frail waif, abused by her brutal boxer father in London's seedy Limehouse District, is befriended by a sensitive Chinese immigrant with tragic consequences."...to put gauzes over their lenses to flatter the look of their actresses, to soften the mood and to make the imagery more romantic. One of the first to do this, anticipating the trend by several years, was D.W. Griffith’s cinematographer, Billy Bitzer"
- DirectorErnst LubitschStarsPola NegriEmil JanningsHarry LiedtkeThe story of Madame DuBarry, the mistress of Louis XV of France, and her loves in the time of the French revolution.The story of Madame DuBarry, the mistress of Louis XV of France, and her loves in the time of the French revolution. The first movie made about the French revolution.
- DirectorErnst LubitschStarsVictor JansonOssi OswaldaHarry LiedtkeAn American heiress seeks the hand of an impoverished German prince.Die Austernprinzessin (Original title).
What makes these pictures very different to their American counterparts, is that in Hollywood silent comedies revolved around a star. Germany had no Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd, but they had a lot of decent comedy supporting players. In Lubitsch's best comedies the humour is all derived from arrangements and exaggeration. He was, in effect, a choreographer of comedy. - DirectorAbel GanceStarsRomuald JoubéMaxime DesjardinsSéverin-MarsThe story of two men, one married, the other the lover of the other's wife, who meet in the trenches of the First World War, and how their tale becomes a microcosm for the horrors of war."a three-hour meditation on pacifism, J’Accuse, was inspired by several months he had spent in the army during the First World War"
- DirectorFritz LangStarsCarl de VogtLil DagoverRessel OrlaKay Hoog finds a message that indicates that some Incas are still alive, but the secret organisation "Die Spinnen" wants the Incas' gold...."Fritz Lang’s wildly exotic and successful adventure-drama"
- DirectorFritz LangStarsCarl de VogtRessel OrlaGeorg JohnKay Hoog wants to stop the organisation "Die Spinnen" to get a certain diamond, that will give the owning woman the crown of Asia, but the man, who should be the owner of that diamond, doesn't know of its existence...."Fritz Lang’s wildly exotic and successful adventure-drama"
- DirectorEdward F. ClineBuster KeatonStarsBuster KeatonSybil SeelyJoe RobertsA newly wedded couple attempts to build a house with a prefabricated kit, unaware that a rival sabotaged the kit's component numbering."Born Joseph Frank Keaton, he got his nickname Buster from world famous escapologist, Harry Houdini. One Week, about a week in the life of a newly married couple, was a revelation. In a key sequence, their lopsided house is whirled around by a tornado, and Keaton is somehow catapulted through the building to its other side. In another, Keaton puts his hand in front of the camera to protect his wife’s modesty as she takes a bath."
- DirectorD.W. GriffithStarsLillian GishRichard BarthelmessMrs. David LandauA naive country girl is tricked into a sham marriage by a wealthy womanizer, then must rebuild her life despite the taint of having borne a child out of wedlock.Never one to shy away from expressing his personal beliefs in his films, Griffith uses this simple story to sermonize about the moral character of men while also finding time to criticize the idle rich and prop up women as madonna figures.
- DirectorOscar MicheauxStarsEvelyn PreerFlo ClementsJames D. RuffinAbandoned by her fiancé, an educated black woman with a shocking past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished black youths."Oscar Micheaux engaged with reality in ways which studio films did not. Micheaux was born in 1884, the black son of freed slaves. He raised money for the forty or so films he made between 1919–48, by selling shares in his work to communities and taking advance bookings from black specialist cinemas. His films were often bawdy and technically crude, but are said to have portrayed slavery and lynching themes, although few survive. "
- DirectorRobert WieneStarsWerner KraussConrad VeidtFriedrich FeherHypnotist Dr. Caligari uses a somnambulist, Cesare, to commit murders."... not only launched the German expressionist film movement, but was also one of the first landmark films in the West to challenge closed romantic realism.
Although Wiene was the only famous German director who did not to go to Hollywood, it is impossible to imagine the later dark Hollywood thrillers made by European directors such as Lang, Wilder, Curtiz and Siodmak without Caligari’s formative lesson: that the view point of film imagery can be ambiguous, both outside looking into its characters’ neuroses, and inside them. Movies were becoming more complex as their form and content danced around each other." - DirectorPaul WegenerCarl BoeseStarsPaul WegenerAlbert SteinrückErnst DeutschIn 16th-century Prague, a rabbi creates the Golem - a giant creature made of clay. Using sorcery, he brings the creature to life in order to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution.One of the very striking early German horror movies.
- DirectorMinoru MurataStarsKaoru OsanaiHaruko SawamuraDenmei SuzukiA small town boy dreams of being a famous fiddler; meanwhile, two convicts escape from prison and hide in the woods"...intertwined four storylines, including one about a penniless son returning home and another about two convicts who are greeted with kindness by people they meet. The inter-cutting between time periods is handled with greater complexity than in Intolerance. At the end of the film, the stories come together when the two convicts find the impoverished son, dead in the snow. The result is the first landmark film in Japanese history."
- DirectorFred NibloStarsDouglas FairbanksNigel De BrulierGeorge SiegmannCardinal Richelieu, engaged in intrigue at the court of Louis XIII, attempts to rule by threatening the queen, who is secretly in love with the Duke of Buckingham. From Gascony comes D'Artagnan to join the King's Musketeers in his quest for adventure. He wins the right to membership by proving his prowess with the sword and forms an eternal alliance with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, the Three Musketeers. After many adventures, he embarks on a dangerous mission to England to recover a diamond brooch, a gift of the king, which the queen has given to Buckingham as a token of affection. He recovers it and returns in time to save the queen from the wrath of Louis, defeat the cardinal's intrigue, and win Constance, the queen's seamstress.
- DirectorRex IngramStarsRudolph ValentinoAlice TerryPomeroy CannonAn extended family split up in France and Germany find themselves on opposing sides of the battlefield during World War I.World War One had only ended in 1918, barely three years before Four Horseman was released. The effects of the War - maimed men and fatherless children - were everywhere, and much devastation still remained in Europe. Director Rex Ingram took Vicente Blasco Ibáñez' novel and turned it into a powerful & disturbing anti-war polemic. The imagery of the Four Horsemen, riding across the screen, becomes a compelling symbol of man's inhumanity.
- DirectorWalter RuttmannAs early as 1909, Walter Ruttmann explored the artistic properties of the film. His theoretical and practical work led in 1919 to the first "absolute film", Opus I. Ruttmann placed "painting more time" halfway between painting and music.Walter Ruttmann painted directly onto glass and would film the result; he would then wipe the still-wet paint, adding more pigment, and then re-film it. Perhaps the first abstract animation
- DirectorCharles ChaplinStarsCharles ChaplinEdna PurvianceJackie CooganThe Tramp cares for an abandoned child, but events put their relationship in jeopardy."Chaplin's first feature. It is possible to see The Kid and hardly laugh. Indeed this is true of much of Chaplin, but it is impossible to ignore his deeply felt work. Some of the imagery of The Kid, for example, derives directly from Chaplin’s own childhood. The room inhabited by father and son is based on one that Chaplin lived in as a boy."
- DirectorVictor SjöströmStarsVictor SjöströmHilda BorgströmTore SvennbergOn New Year's Eve, the driver of a ghostly carriage forces a drunken man to reflect on his selfish, wasted life."...has moments of such power that it is no wonder that some consider him the best director of this period. The film begins with David Holm in a graveyard at New Year’s Eve, laughing drunkenly at a phantom chariot driven by Death, which is coming to take him to the underworld."
- DirectorErnst LubitschStarsPola NegriVictor JansonPaul HeidemannA charismatic lieutenant newly assigned to a remote fort is captured by a group of mountain bandits, thus setting in motion a madcap farce that is Lubitsch at his most unrestrained.Die Bergkatze (original title). Also known as The Mountain Cat.
"...in which a rampant lieutenant gets a new posting and must leave town. His legions of former lovers mob him and a group of their daughters wave goodbye to their father in a scene filled with the sexual innuendo that would soon be banned in Hollywood. In transit, a robber’s daughter falls in love with him and in an astonishing dream sequence, he gives her his heart, which she eats, then snowmen dance. Lubitsch’s masking of parts of the screen and surreal production design in The Mountain Cat was particularly daring." - DirectorEdward F. ClineBuster KeatonStarsBuster KeatonEdward F. ClineMonte CollinsAfter waking up from his wacky dream, a theater stage hand inadvertently causes havoc everywhere he works."While at the theatre, Keaton discovers that it is entirely staffed and its production performed by himself as stagehands, musicians, conductor, actors and an audience of mixed sexes and ages. In order to achieve these effects, the film had to be shot, masked, rewound and re-exposed with unparalleled precision, constantly building up composite images on the negative. The precision required showed Keaton’s mastery of the technicalities of the medium."
- DirectorBenjamin ChristensenStarsBenjamin ChristensenElisabeth ChristensenMaren PedersenFictionalized documentary showing the evolution of witchcraft, from its pagan roots to its confusion with hysteria in Eastern Europe."This 1922 Danish silent film about black magic, witches, satanism, (a semi-documentary on witchcraft) and the persecution of said subjects during the middle-ages, which attempts to make a connection between the ancient phenomena and the modern study of hysteria (modern in 1922)"
- DirectorAllan DwanStarsDouglas FairbanksWallace BeerySam De GrasseA nobleman becomes the vigilante Robin Hood who protects the oppressed English people from the tyrannical Prince John.
- DirectorRobert J. FlahertyStarsAllakariallakAlice NevalingaCunayouIn this silent predecessor to the modern documentary, film-maker Robert J. Flaherty spends one year following the lives of Nanook and his family, Inuits living in the Arctic Circle."First full length documentray. Robert Flaherty semi-staged and then filmed the Itivinuits hunting walrus and constructing igloos using methods which had in some cases become obsolete. The film was an international success, ice cream bars were named after Nanook and his death of starvation two years later made headlines around the world."
- DirectorF.W. MurnauStarsMax SchreckAlexander GranachGustav von WangenheimVampire Count Orlok expresses interest in a new residence and real estate agent Hutter's wife."Directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, perhaps the most talented director of the whole silent period, who studied art and literature and then established himself with a dreamy vampire film, Nosferatu"
- DirectorVictor SjöströmStarsJenny HasselqvistIvan HedqvistTore SvennbergThe young girl Ursula is forced to marry an older man that she hates.His Loves’s Crucible aka Mortal Clay.
"Sjöström and his cinematographer, Julius Jaenzon, capture the bleak natural beauty of the landscape and contrast it to the society within which the main character is struggling" - DirectorFritz LangStarsRudolf Klein-RoggeAud Egede-NissenGertrude WelckerArch-criminal Dr. Mabuse sets out to make a fortune and run Berlin. Detective Wenk sets out to stop him."Like Caligari, Mabuse was intended as a critique of the lawlessness and moral decline of 1920s Germany, although its visuals were less stylized than in the former film. Instead it was the details of Lang’s narrative that were expressionist. Mabuse’s instincts are excessive and underneath the rich and decadent surface of the characters’ lives lie primitive urges."
- DirectorWladyslaw StarewiczThe frogs are bored with their lot, and ask God to give them a king - but God, irritated with their inability to govern themselves, quickly makes them change their minds.Les grenouilles qui demandent un roi (Original title).
"The animator Wladyslaw Starewicz was born in Wilno, Poland (then Russia, now Lithuania) in 1892 and from 1910 onward started making bizarre childrens’ films, using stop-frame animation technique for the first time in cinema, which involved manipulating the puppets slightly for each filmed or re-filmed frame." - DirectorCecil B. DeMilleStarsTheodore RobertsCharles de RochefortEstelle TaylorAfter hearing the story of Moses, the sons of a devout Christian mother go their own ways, and the atheist brother's breaking of the Ten Commandments leads to tragedy.
- DirectorWallace WorsleyStarsLon ChaneyPatsy Ruth MillerNorman KerryIn 15th-century Paris, the brother of the archdeacon plots with the gypsy king to foment a peasant revolt. Meanwhile, a freakish hunchback falls in love with a gypsy dancer.
- DirectorJohn G. BlystoneBuster KeatonStarsBuster KeatonNatalie TalmadgeJoe KeatonA man returns to his Appalachian homestead. On the trip, he falls for a young woman. The only problem is her family has vowed to kill every member of his family."Keaton’s success in short films led to features, each extravagantly physical, exacting and architectural. The scenario alone of Our Hospitality (USA, 1923) is brilliant: Buster is in the home of a family intent on murdering him. However, their Southern hospitality forbids them to be anything other than kind to him while he remains their guest. So he is trapped in the strained embrace of his hosts."
- DirectorFred C. NewmeyerSam TaylorStarsHarold LloydMildred DavisBill StrotherA boy leaves his small country town and heads to the big city to get a job. As soon as he makes it big his sweetheart will join him and marry him. His enthusiasm to get ahead leads to some interesting adventures." “The cunning thought behind all this was to reverse the Chaplin outfit … All his clothes were too large, mine were too small.” But it was not a simple reversal. Lloyd’s comic presence was as rich as Chaplin’s. Although he did not take a director credit for his films, he was the driving force behind them and frequently vetoed pieces of action as well as camera angles. The early deception scenes are reasonably inventive, but Lloyd’s twenty-minute climb at the end of the film engenders applause in cinemas to this day for its ingenious vertical choreography. Floor after floor, with the street below almost always visible in shot, Lloyd encounters ropes, guns, nets, a dog, a mouse, a plank and a clock. He did most of the climbing himself without trick photography and with just a narrow platform out of shot below."
- DirectorGermaine DulacStarsGermaine DermozMadeleine GuittyJean d'YdAn unhappily married woman devises a scheme to get rid of her husband."Dulac expresses her main character’s erotic daydreams and bottled rage not only through acting and incident, but also by placing netting in front of the lens and by manipulating the camera. When Beudet is light-headed, a gauze makes her viewpoint look dreamy. When Beudet spies a handsome man in a magazine, slow-motion photography pictures her reverie, as if the audience were looking at the world through Beudet’s eyes. Visual distortions express her anger."
- DirectorAbel GanceStarsGabriel de GravonePierre MagnierGeorges TérofA railway engineer adopts a young girl orphaned by a train crash. Years later when she starts getting suitors, he grapples with whether or not to tell her the truth about her parentage.La Roue (Original title).
"... extended Dulac’s impressionism in certain sequences. After a fight in the Alps between Elie and Norma’s husband, Elie is left hanging over the edge of a cliff. To represent Elie’s life flashing before his eyes, Gance edited together a series of single frame images from earlier moments within his relationship with Norma. These single frames were just one twenty-fourth of a second in length. When viewed on the cinema screen in real time, they rush past in a disorienting blur. To give the impression of panic in his main character, the sense of perception and feeling accelerating intolerably. The scene was revolutionary and caused artist, poet and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau to say, “There is cinema before and after La Roue, just as there is painting before and after Picasso.” - DirectorRaoul WalshStarsDouglas FairbanksJulanne JohnstonSnitz EdwardsA recalcitrant thief vies with a duplicitous Mongol ruler for the hand of a beautiful princess.... remains one of the most visually stunning of all silent films with trick photography and lavish sets
- DirectorDonald CrispBuster KeatonStarsBuster KeatonKathryn McGuireFrederick VroomTwo spoiled rich people find themselves trapped on an empty passenger ship."A scene illustrates Keaton’s inventive discipline: While his character is welding the submerged hull of a ship, he notices that huge shoals of fish are colliding and so becomes an ocean floor traffic policeman as he directs one shoal to wait as the other swims by. In order to stage this visual gag, he had 1500 rubber fish manufactured and mounted on a lattice that would make them appear to swim in front of the camera. The edited gag was shown in the film’s trailer and had the audience in stitches of laughter, but when it was incorporated in the final film, raised not a single giggle. This was because as Buster was doing his underwater point duty, the heroine was above, alone on the ship and being approached by cannibals. The audience was therefore too tense and cared too much about the girl to laugh. When tension and laughter were part of the same scene, as in Lloyd’s Safety Last, they worked in combination. However, when they were inter-cut in this sequence, they detracted from each other. Keaton’s response was to cut the expensive joke"
- DirectorErnst LubitschStarsPola NegriAdolphe MenjouRod La RocqueAlexei saves the Czarina from conspirators and is rewarded with her love. He deserts his sweetheart Anna, but discovers that his Queen is unfaithful too. Enraged, Alexei becomes a leader in the ongoing revolution against the royals."a stand-off between a chancellor and disloyal officers is portrayed in a series of close-ups. One officer pulls a sword on the chancellor, who in response reaches into his jacket. The camera cuts to the officer who has suddenly stopped the challenge. Perhaps the chancellor brandishes a more impressive weapon? No, he has pulled out a cheque book. The confrontation will be resolved in a more business-like fashion."
- DirectorErnst LubitschStarsFlorence VidorMonte BlueMarie PrevostProfessor Stock and his wife Mizzi are always bickering. Mizzi tries to seduce Dr. Franz Braun, the new husband of her good friend Charlotte."His films were, rather daringly, about the delights of desire in stark contrast to the coy Victorian portrayal of sexuality in American cinema as practised by D.W. Griffith. In this movie, a psychiatrist and his wife are at breakfast. A close-up of an egg, then of a coffee cup is revealed. The psychiatrist’s hand cuts the top off the egg and his wife stirs the coffee. Suddenly his hand disappears and then hers. A more urgent desire than eating has overtaken them and though Lubitsch does not film their lovemaking, his use of objects, of implication, is masterly."
- DirectorMauritz StillerStarsLars HansonSven ScholanderEllen Hartman-CederströmA drunkard priest who has been cast out by his community struggles to atone and regain his honour and dignity."contains individual scenes which suggest a stately photographic realism in its flowing adaptation of Selma Lagerlof’s novel"
- DirectorHomi MasterStarsRaja Sandow P.K.Mohammed NoorGang RamThis social film attacks Bombay's industrial parvenu class, initiating the realist-reformist melodrama as a genre. It tells of the street hawker Devdas, who goes to the city to make his fortune but, once successful, becomes an exploitative cotton mill owner and a callous snob knighted by the British. There is a violent factory worker's revolt. His wife, the kindly Hirabai, is made to suffer and his daughter Rukmini is dishonored.Also known as Twentieth Century. (India).
"created the genre of the reformist melodrama arguing for social change through the portrayal of gripping human problems. In the film, a street seller makes a fortune in Bombay, becomes an exploitative employer and cosies up to the colonial British." - DirectorErich von StroheimStarsGibson GowlandZasu PittsJean HersholtThe sudden fortune won from a lottery fans such destructive greed that it ruins the lives of the three people involved."Erich Von Stroheim expressed a hope shared by every dissident Naturalist: “It is possible to tell a great story in motion pictures in such a way that the spectator … will come to believe that what he is looking at is real.”
This was American cinema without hope; many have compared Von Stroheim’s vision to that of nineteenth-century Russian literature, with which Greed shares a determination to reveal the unvarnished truth about human beings. In one startling scene, McTeague’s wife writhes as she rubs gold coins on her naked body, originally all the gold in the film, including the coins, picture frames, gold teeth, even a canary, was hand-tinted yellow. In another scene, he beats her after she has served him rotten meat." - DirectorF.W. MurnauStarsEmil JanningsMaly DelschaftMax HillerAn aging doorman is forced to face the scorn of his friends, neighbors and society after being fired from his prestigious job at a luxurious hotel."F. W Murnau works are rare things - he made very few compared to other directors of his day, and many of those he did make have been lost. The reason he made so few can perhaps be understood by watching The Last Laugh. Like Chaplin, Kubrick and Leone, the effort that went into a single picture was the same effort another director might spread across ten.
Lillian Gish once said that she never approved of the talkies - she felt that silents were starting to create a whole new art form. This movie is also notable for its brilliant use of expressionism, and the first brilliant use of a tracking shot. In Murnau's The Last Laugh, silent movies metaphorically were given movement, and learned to run" - DirectorRené ClairStarsJean BörlinInge FrïssFrancis PicabiaAn absolute dada movie. Somebody gets killed, his coffin gets out of control and after a chase it stops. The person gets out of it and let everybody who followed the coffin dissapear."... the first significant Dadaist film. It featured Picabia and a roster of other Dadaists including Man Ray, Georges Auric and Marcel Duchamp. It was a wild abstract farce involving, among other things, a camel, a cannon and dolls with ballooning heads and was influenced by the chase comedies of Mack Sennett."
- DirectorFernand LégerDudley MurphyStarsKiki of MontparnasseFernand LégerDudley MurphyA pulsing, kaleidoscope of images set to an energetic soundtrack. A young women swings in a garden; a woman's face smiles. The rest is spinning cylinders, pistons, gears and turbines, kitchen objects in concentric circles or rows - pots, pan lids, and funnels, cars passing overhead, a spinning carnival ride. Over and over, a heavy-set woman climbs stairs carrying a large bag on her shoulder. An Art Deco cartoon figure appears, dancing. This is a world in motion, dominated by mechanical and repetitive images, with a few moments of solitude in a garden.Filmed by Man Ray.
The Mechanical Ballet features a series of metal objects and machines photographed abstractly, moving around in a sometimes random, sometimes in a choreographed way. - DirectorFred NibloCharles BrabinChristy CabanneStarsRamon NovarroFrancis X. BushmanMay McAvoyA Jewish prince seeks to find his family and revenge himself upon his childhood friend who had him wrongly imprisoned.With the record number of Oscars won by the William Wyler 1959 version of BEN-HUR, there is a tendency to overlook the monumental 1925 production, which established MGM as a studio to be reckoned with. This production is superior in nearly every way.
- DirectorCharles ChaplinStarsCharles ChaplinMack SwainTom MurrayA prospector goes to the Klondike during the 1890s gold rush in hopes of making his fortune, and is smitten with a girl he sees in a dance hall."George Bernard Shaw called him “the only genius developed in motion pictures”. Chaplin changed not only the imagery of cinema, but also its sociology and grammar."
- DirectorOscar MicheauxStarsPaul RobesonMarshall RogersLawrence ChenaultA malevolent phony preacher plots to take advantage of a woman from his congregation who happens to be in love with his long-estranged identical twin brother." features distinguished black actor and singer Paul Robeson in the role of a priest who exploits the piety of black churchgoers. One wonders how black American cinema would have developed if Micheaux had been admitted into and been trained by one of the studios"
- DirectorBaburao PainterStarsShantaram Rajaram VankudreZunzharrao PawarKamala DeviA social film with high melodrama, concerning a peasant (Shantaram) who loses his land to a greedy money-lender and moves to the city where he becomes a mill worker. Taking its cue from the realist tradition, the film counterposes an idyllic rural life (destroyed but the greedy money-lender who uses forged papers to steal the peasant's land) with the harsh city life. The shot of a hut accompanied by a howling dog are regarded as one of the most memorable moments of Indian cinema to date.Also known as Indian Shylock (India).
Former craftsman and painter Baburao Painter had more impact on the themes of Indian cinema... and instigated the historical and social genres in Indian cinema. He used painted backdrops and coloured filters over the lens to control his film’s tonal range of greys and blacks." - DirectorEwald André DupontStarsEmil JanningsMaly DelschaftLya De PuttiPrologue: The murderer "Boss" Huller - after having spent ten years in prison - breaks his silence to tell the warden his story. "Boss", a former trapeze artist, and his wife own a cheap side-show that displays ''erotic sensations''. But he longs for his former glamorous life in the circus. When he meets the orphan Berta-Marie, he falls under her spell and leaves his wife and young son behind. He makes Berta-Marie his partner in a new trapeze number. One day, the famous trapeze artist Artinelli takes note of them and engages them for his trapeze show in Berlin. Their salto mortale becomes an immediate sensation. Calculatedly and cold, Artinelli seduces Berta-Marie and destroys "Boss'" happiness.Varieté (original title).
"The film was photographed by Karl Freund, an Austrian cinematographer who shot some of the most significant films of the 1920s, and ended his career shooting 1950s American television comedy. He uses the camera almost as subjectively as Able Gance. When Jannings looks jealously at his girl with another man, a close-up of Jannings’ eyes is shown as the lighting changes. Then the camera cuts to her with an out-of-focus background. Within the same shot, the focus shifts to reveal her suitor beside her. This is one of many sequences which illustrate this kind of intricate geometry of looking and longing." - DirectorSergei EisensteinStarsGrigoriy AleksandrovMaksim ShtraukhMikhail GomorovA group of oppressed factory workers go on strike in pre-revolutionary Russia."Eisenstein began filming Strike (Soviet Union, 1925) which starts with a worker’s suicide. A strike follows and in the climactic attack at the end of the film, police brutality is intercut with the bloody slaughter of an ox, whose tongue is pulled through the gash in its throat, creating the idea that the police are slaughterers. The main Soviet newspaper called it, “The first revolutionary creation of our cinema.”
- DirectorSergei EisensteinStarsAleksandr AntonovVladimir BarskiyGrigoriy AleksandrovIn the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutiny against the brutal, tyrannical regime of the vessel's officers. The resulting street demonstration in Odessa brings on a police massacre."Eisenstein wanted to make a film that began with the war between Russia and Japan in 1904–05 and climaxed with the St. Petersburg uprising, covering dozens of events in the interim. However, when he saw a set of steps in the coastal town of Odessa, he realized their cinematic potential. Odessa had been the location of a shoot-out between the military and mutinous sailers from a battleship moored nearby in the Black Sea. Eisenstein decided to restage the mutiny on the steps, using them like a tilted stage set for a grand opera. The uprising took up a single page in the screenplay, but gradually became the whole film’s focus. The director would later write “When can a particular episode take the place of the whole logically and completely? Only in the cases where the detail … is typical. In other words, when it reflects the whole like a piece of broken mirror.” The mutiny in Odessa would be the splintered piece of mirror reflecting the oppression of the Tsarist regimes."
- DirectorVsevolod PudovkinStarsVera BaranovskayaNikolay BatalovAleksandr ChistyakovA story about a family torn apart by a worker's strike. At first, the mother wants to protect her family from the troublemakers, but eventually she realizes that her son is right and the workers should strike."Mother was almost as influential as Potemkin. There was rivalry between Pudovkin and Eisenstein, so the former devised a musical structure for the film – allegro – adagio – allegro – which was very different to the intercutting of Eisenstein. Mother is dominated by close-ups, some of which, such as those in a bar scene with a band, are vivid portraits of real human beings. When the son reaches for his gun to begin to fight back against the authorities who are trying to put down the strike, the mother, in a series of half-second dissolves, imagines his death. She rises and two short shots show her panic-stricken shriek (73 top). Pudovkin tracks along the length of the apparently dead son’s body. At the end of the film, before the mother is killed by the passing Tsarist cavalry, her terrified face appears again, but for just sixteen frames."
- DirectorAlan CroslandStarsJane WintonJohn RocheWarner OlandIn 16th-century Italy, devil-may-care playboy Don Juan runs afoul of the despotic Borgias."... this was the first feature film with a Vitaphone soundtrack (therefore being the first film with a completely synchronized soundtrack), it is by no means the first sound film. The first sound film can be dated back to 1895"
- DirectorClarence BrownStarsJohn GilbertGreta GarboLars HansonChildhood friends are torn apart when one of them marries the woman the other fiercely loves."Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were shot with new 75mm or 100mm lenses in Flesh and The Devil. The resulting intimate and flattering imagery became the norm in romantic filmmaking"
- DirectorClyde BruckmanBuster KeatonStarsBuster KeatonMarion MackGlen CavenderAfter being rejected by the Confederate military, not realizing it was due to his crucial civilian role, an engineer must single-handedly recapture his beloved locomotive after it is seized by Union spies and return it through enemy lines."For the first half of the film, he travels north to the thieves hideout and in the second, escapes south again on the locomotive. All the visual jokes and set-ups in the first section are repeated and amplified in reverse order in the second half. The film’s climax is, according to Walter Kerr, “the most stunning visual event ever arranged for a comedy, perhaps for any kind of film.” Keaton has returned the train to his native South and as the Northern enemy armies advance, he sets fire to a strategically important bridge. The burning bridge cracks under the weight of the engine, which rolls and topples into the river. No trick shots were used in this sequence and the train wreck was visible for years to come in Cottage Grove, Oregon."
- DirectorTeinosuke KinugasaStarsMasuo InoueAyako IijimaYoshie NakagawaA man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife.49“Although the Japanese cinema has known … independent artists who correspond to the Western image of the original creative temperament, Kinugasa was undoubtedly the first of these.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and A Page of Madness challenge the clarity of mainstream studio filmmaking by telling their stories from the outside and inside concurrently. This film was for many years considered lost, until Kinugasa discovered a print of it in his garden shed in 1971. When he struck a new print, commissioned a new score and re-released the film around the world, many considered it the most personal Japanese film of the 1920s.” - DirectorLotte ReinigerCarl KochA handsome prince rides a flying horse to faraway lands and embarks on magical adventures, which include befriending a witch, meeting Aladdin, battling demons and falling in love with a princess."... one of the first animated feature films. Lotte Reiniger's painstaking technique involved adapting the methods of Victorian silhouette portraiture. She hand-cut each frame and the process took nearly three years."
- DirectorAlberto CavalcantiStarsBlanche BernisNina ChousvalowaPhilippe HériatThe life of a great city (Paris) from dawn until dusk, including the beautiful and the ragged, the rich and the poor, with little or no comment (intertitles) from the director, Cavalcanti (whose first film this was).Rien que les heures (Original title).
Similar to Berlin, Symphony of a City. - DirectorClyde BruckmanStarsStan LaurelOliver HardyChester A. BachmanPompous J. Piedmont Mumblethunder, greets his nephew from Scotland, who arrives in kilts. He is immediately taken to a tailor for a pair of proper pants.“Laurel and Hardy's first significant pairing, in which Laurel plays a Scotsman who must swap a kilt for trousers. As the tailor approaches, he goes all weepy and a scrum ensues. Hardy thinks of himself as a courtly, genteel Southerner, an aspiring sophisticate who insists that a man in a skirt is indecent. He has Chaplin’s delusions of grandeur, but combined with the grace of a bull-in-a-china-shop. He eases Laurel aside and says, “Let me do it” and the world collapses.”
- DirectorWilliam A. WellmanHarry d'Abbadie d'ArrastStarsClara BowCharles 'Buddy' RogersRichard ArlenTwo young men, one rich, one middle class, who are in love with the same woman, become fighter pilots in World War I."Famous of course for winning the first Oscar for best film, WINGS is also one hell of a good film. Spectacular aerial photography highlights the terrific performances of the three leads: Clara Bow, Buddy Rogers, and Richard Arlen. Director William Wellman creates a solid and moving anti-war statement as he shows us the brutality and stupidity of war, its waste of youth, and its power to destroy the lives of all involved."
- DirectorAlfred HitchcockStarsJune TrippIvor NovelloMarie AultA landlady suspects that her new lodger is the madman killing women in London."Alfred Hitchcock, who had been working in Germany in 1924 and 1925, made his first distinctive film"
- DirectorBoris BarnetStarsAnna StenVladimir MikhaylovVladimir FogelNatasha and her grandfather live in a cottage near Moscow, making hats for Madame Irène. Madame and her husband have told the housing committee that Natasha rents a room from them; this fiddle gives Madame's lazy husband a room for lounging. The local railroad clerk, Fogelev, loves Natasha but she takes a shine to Ilya, a clumsy student who sleeps in the train station. To help Ilya, Natasha marries him and takes him to Madame's to live in the room the house committee thinks is hers. Meanwhile, Madame's husband pays Natasha with a lottery ticket he thinks is a loser, and when it comes up big, just as Ilya and Natasha are falling in love, everything gets complicatedSoviet Union. Devushka s korobkoy (Original title). Also known as The Girl with a Hat Box.
"Is a jaunty and irreverent story about a country girl, Natasha, who makes hats and sells them to a Moscow milliner (52). She fakes marriage to a student in order that they can rent a room together. The scenes in the rented room portray the couple’s flirtations with particular invention, especially when the landlady becomes suspicious of their marital status and removes everything from their living space, including the carpet. The hints that they are sleeping with one another could have been directed by Lubitsch or Chaplin, but Barnet raises the chutzpah further than either." - DirectorAbel GanceStarsAlbert DieudonnéVladimir RoudenkoEdmond Van DaëleA film about the French general's youth and early military career."Gance rethought the camera’s relationship to movement to capture the dynamism of the man, his fist fights and horse rides, grand society dances, battle charges and storms at sea. The camera did not merely witness the speeding, swinging, lunging events, but it rolled and lurched, swung and sped in the same way as Napoleon’s life had. The Los Angeles Times described the results as “The measure for all other films, ever.”
- DirectorF.W. MurnauStarsGeorge O'BrienJanet GaynorMargaret LivingstonA sophisticated city woman seduces a farmer and convinces him to murder his wife and join her in the city, but he ends up rekindling his romance with his wife when he changes his mind at the last moment."The last great movie of German silent cinema, voted the best film of all time.
Sunrise, was like many 1920s films already considered, about the contrasting values of country and the city. In this fable-morality subtitled "A Song of Two Humans", the "evil" temptress is a city woman who bewitches farmer Anses and tries to convince him to murder his neglected wife, Indre. This skeletal outline describes the elemental nature of Sunrise, but does not capture its poetic force.
In keeping with Caligari’s expressionism, the interiors were built with slanted walls and sloping ceilings to reflect the characters’ distorted perspectives."