Le Voyage Imaginaire” is full of suggestions in which different genres are mixed (avant-garde, comedy, surrealism) without any real connection. It’s a really bizarre film that relates the complicated relationship between three bank clerks (and their boss) for the typist girl that works in the same office. Clair creates a dream world which plunges the audience into a universe full of fantasy. Read More »
Cine-Gazzettino, 23 September 1929 wrote:
Wilhelm Dieterle’s strong and manly art and Marcella Albani’s suave charm intermingle here in a splendid natural setting, to depict a drama where love and duty, compassion and hate, purity and crime merge together in a very interesting story.Read More »
A monumental masterpiece of silent cinema, Abel Gance’s 1927 fresco has been reedited many times, to the point that for a long time it was impossible to determine its original form. Director and researcher Georges Mourier and his team have now completed the restoration after sixteen years of hard work. This unedited 7-hour version was presented as a world premiere in an exceptional two-part ciné-concert on July 4 and 5 at La Seine Musicale.Read More »
Based on the story by Honoré de Balzac. Caught in a storm, two young doctors book into an inn for the night and find themselves sharing a room with a Dutch diamond merchant. During the night Prosper steals from the merchant, but when he awakes in the morning he finds the merchant dead and his friend gone. When the stolen property is found on him he is arrested for the crime and executed. 25 years later the innkeeper’s daughter relates the tale to a traveler, who in turn later relates it at a dinner party. At that party is Frederic Taillefer, the missing friend and murderer.Read More »
Synopsis
Despite its semi-amateur production in a relatively rural area, the small city of Cataguases in the state of Minas Gerais, the film is one of the most visually sophisticated works of silent film to be produced in Brazil. Its melodramatic plot spanning city and countryside – a dissipated youth living in Rio de Janeiro is regenerated through his work at a sugar factory in the interior and the love of the owner’s daughter – posits the reconciliation of a rapidly expanding metropolis with the less developed interior by means of an individual romance.Read More »
‘Rainbow Girls’ has just opened and closed on Broadway when Dixie, a actress in it, runs into smooth-talking Hollywood Director Frank Buelow. He tells her she would be a natural and promises her a movie contract, so she goes to Hollywood, but there is no contract for her. She meets washed-up actress Donny (Blanche Sweet) on the lot and they become friends. Frank is fired from his studio and the new director finds that Frank’s storyline is actually a copy of ‘Rainbow Girls,’ the Broadway stage play. They call Jimmy, the author and Dixie’s boyfriend, for the rights and he goes to Hollywood to produce it as a movie. Dixie gets the lead, but things start going wrong when dizzy Dixie, spurred on by the fired Director Buelow, thinks that she is better than the picture or the studio and starts to make demands. Interesting note: Good look at early Hollywood, with cameos by Loretta Young, Walter Pigeon, Noah Beery and a young Noah Beery, Jr. make the film fun to watch.Read More »
Obsessed with a general’s woman, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism.Read More »
One of the most exciting novelties of cinema: the possibility to present objects in technical-aethetical pointed ways, like the time-lapse in “Das Blumenwunder” that turn ones own garden into a distant planet.
Sponsored by the chemical corporation BASF (Badische Soda and Anilin Factory), “Das Blumenwunder” – a hybrid of “Kulturfilm” and “Lehrfilm” (instructional film) — set out an almost impossible task, to give time-lapse cinematography a “feature length” run.
A new spin on the art of macroprojection, the “film symphony of the life and death of flowers” premiered on February 25th, 1926 in Berlin’s Piccadilly-Theater with an original music score and elaborate frame narrative.Read More »
Quote:
Every country has its peculiarities (Germans like dark atmosphere, Japanese like trains and Britons like tea…), so consequently these were reflected in their old silent pictures; with the French, it’s rivers and barges. This led to a kind of subgenre in that country, the “barge films” of which there are excellent examples during the 20s.Read More »