1921-1930

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Gustaf Molander was the one who primarily would be asked to continue Sjöström’s and Stiller’s work. He was also the film company’s chief negotiator with Lagerlöf, and someone she did not like. “Molander has just left. He is a remarkably dead and uninteresting character, although he is such a fine person. The matter concerned that which you had just told me about, to ask whether I had any good ideas in stock, which I could pass on to them […] He was not very informed about my novels, I must say […].

Swedish Film: An Introduction And Reader (2014)Read More »

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The count Henri d’Ursel shot La perle (The Pearl) under the pseudonym of Henri d’Arche “in the flush of inexperience”, as he put it. D’Ursel made only one film, based on a screenplay by the poet Georges Hugnet. In a Paris straight out of the serials of Louis Feuillade, the hero goes in search of a pearl which constantly disappears in a string of bizarre encounters – sneak thieves in a hotel wearing body stockings à la Musidora, a beautiful fiancée on a bicycle and a somnambulist walking the rooftops in a night-shirt, amorous fantasies in the undergrowth. Hugnet himself played this waking dreamer, haunted by an unending eroticism reflected in the images.Read More »

This is a love story, a story of rivalry and revenge but, above all, a story about sport. The great passion is about union rugby.Read More »

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In 1929, Steiner made his first film, H2O, a poetic evocation of water that captured the abstract patterns generated by waves. Although it was not the only film of its kind at the time – Joris Ivens made REGEN that same year, and Henwar Rodekiewicz worked on his similar film PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN (1931) through this whole period – it made a significant impression in its day and since has become recognized as a classic: H2O was added to the National Film Registry in December 2005. Among Steiner’s other early films, SURF AND SEAWEED (1931) expands on the concept of H2O as Steiner turns his camera to the shoreline; MECHANICAL PRINCIPLES (1930) was an abstraction based on gears and machinery.Read More »

Leni Riefenstahl made her film debut in this “mountain film” by writer/director Arnold Fanck, and went on to appear in five more under his direction. In Der Heilige Berg she plays the professional dancer Diotima who finds herself the apex of a love triangle when she is pursued by two mountain climbers, Vigo (Ernst Petersen) and his unnamed older friend (Luis Trenker). Diotima is drawn to the elder climber but can’t refrain from encouraging Vigo’s attentions as well in a spirited skiing session. She has a moment of intimacy with Vigo, and when the friend sees them together he angrily challenges Vigo to a dangerous climbing tour. During the trek he causes Vigo to fall but repents and rescues him. Both men, however, soon become lost in the mountains, and they perish before Diotima and the rescue team can reach them.Read More »

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One need only look at the phenomenal The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra to see that even in the cinema’s youth filmmakers were not limited by their budgets, but by their imaginations.

Made in 1928, it had a budget of $96 (adjusted for inflation, that’s $1191.33). Sources say that the money was divvied up as such: Film Negative, $25 ($310.24), Store Props, $3 ($27.23), Development and Printing, $55 ($682.54), Transportation, etc, $14 ($173.74). The sets were made of toys and cardboard buildings that were projected like shadows.Read More »

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Stella F. Simon and Miklos Bandy’s 1927–28 16mm film, Hands: The Life and Love of a Gentle Sex, is a short, experimental, feminist film whose aesthetic is drawn from American and European modernist photography movements and early avant-garde film traditions. The film’s underlying melodramatic narrative formula is complicated by the use of hands as both protagonists and as the central aspect of its modernist mise-en-scène.Read More »

The most celebrated and exquisitely perverse of the many collaborations between Tod Browning and his legendary leading man Lon Chaney, The Unknown features a wrenchingly physical performance from “the Man of a Thousand Faces” as the armless Spanish knife thrower Alonzo (he flings daggers with his feet) whose dastardly infatuation with his beautiful assistant (Joan Crawford)—a woman, it just so happens, who cannot bear to be touched by the hands of any man—drives him to unspeakable extremes. Sadomasochistic obsession, deception, murder, disfigurement, and a spectacular Grand Guignol climax—Browning wrings every last frisson from the lurid premise.Read More »

Zulu South Africa anthropology Dramatic feature with strong ethnographic element, (silent film) first look at Zulu life in South Africa

directed by: Attilio Gatti
1928 60 minutes

This is a heavily fictionalized account of Zulu life in 1927. Made by an Italian team that included the famous anthropologist Lidio Cipriani, it weaves genuine enthnographical elements into a fantasy of love, witchcraft, and betrayal.Read More »