1921-1930

Waterloo is a German made movie that depicts the soldiers of Belgium + The Netherlands; Brunswick; England, Ireland, Scotland + Wales; Hanover; Nassau; and Prussia’s victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.Read More »

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This visually magnificent and poetic city symphony of Paris in the late 1920s earned Sauvage the admiration of Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. Sauvage maps the metropolis through its street life, monuments, ports, and automobile traffic.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
Turksib itself, a silent film presented here with a newly commissioned score by Guy Bartell focuses on the problems faced by regional farmers in Turkestan and the creation of the Turkestan-Siberian railway. It is filled with impressionistic images of the land and its people juxtaposed with the inevitable juggernaut of Soviet industrial expansion. I’m not so certain that the new score is always in harmony, no pun intended, with the subject matter here. The electronic instrumentation and trance music seems rather anachronistic and jarring, really a bit out of place, if I may be redundant.Read More »

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The ringmaster of an impoverished circus hires Chaplin’s Little Tramp as a clown, when he discovers that he can only be funny unintentionally, not on purpose.Read More »

Synopsis: This crime story centres around Anna, the prisoner, who was drawn into stealing by her lover and that’s what got her in prison. The girl would like to meet Jenő, her sweetheart again. She begs the prison physician until she lets her out for one night. She visits the man, but the womaniser hotel waiter has long forgotten her. He has already coaxed the naive do-all girl, Birdie, courted the chambermaid, and is now planning to rob the cash-register with his new lover, an acrobat. The acrobat falls on the run with an elevator out of order and dies. Anna forgives the disloyal Jenőnek, whom she still loves, but when she learns of Birdie expecting a child from him, she convinces Jenő to marry the girl and then returns to the prison.Read More »

A young man, the night watchman on the iconic Eiffel Tower, wakes to find he is alone in the world. Descending from his iron eyrie, all is eerily frozen, apart from a few souls who have escaped a mad scientist’s immobilising ray. The streets of Paris briefly become a Garden of Eden to play in, as the friends indulge in their new-found liberty. Like Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, this is a film to be carried in the heart.Read More »

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Made at the height of Anna May Wong’s fame in Europe, Pavement Butterfly was a coproduction between Germany and Britain and filmed on location in Nice, France. In this silent film, Wong plays a dancer in the French Riviera who, after her act takes a deadly turn, finds refuge in the arms of a young painter.Read More »

A series of newsreel films from Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman which document Russian Life in the early 1920s.Read More »

Dziga Vertov records the achievements, and some failures, of the Moscow soviet.Read More »