A twelve part serial following the adventures of the masked vigilante Judex as he fights against criminals led by the corrupt banker Favrauxom.Read More »
Silent
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Louis Feuillade – Judex (1916)
Louis Feuillade1911-1920DramaFranceSilentThe Birth of Cinema -
Åke Karlung – Generalrepetition för självmord AKA General Rehearsal for Suicide (1963)
1961-1970Åke KarlungExperimentalSilentSwedenA surrealistic montage of pop culture that attacks the followers of the genre.
Quote:
Ett surrealistiskt montage som angriper popkulturen och konstvärlden av konstnären och filmaren Åke Karlung, en av den svenska experimentfilmens pionjärer.Read More » -
Wallace Worsley – The Penalty (1920)
Wallace Worsley1911-1920CrimeSilentUSAIn a role that established him as one of the most dynamically terrifying performers of the silent screen, Lon Chaney stars in THE PENALTY, a grotesque thriller from director Wallace Worsley (The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
When an incompetent doctor amputates the legs of a young boy, he has no idea that the youth will grow up to be the immoral and embittered Blizzard, a criminal mastermind who orchestrates a bizarre and heinous plot to avenge himself upon his malefactor. THE PENALTY teems with irony and sexual menace as Blizzard befriends the surgeon’s daughter and serves as an artist’s model for her sculptural rendition of Satan, waiting for his moment to show the depth of his demonic desires.Read More »
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James W. Horne – Big Business (1929)
James W. Horne1921-1930Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtComedySilentUSAQuote:
Brilliant farce propels two ineffectual Christmas tree salesmen (played by Laurel and Hardy) into a prolonged bout of savage destruction directed against a customer who refuses to buy. Mutual insults, tie snipping, and small violence escalate from controlled disturbance to surrealist cataclysm, in which the American Home is levelled once and for all.Read More » -
Frank Borzage – The Pride of Palomar (1922)
1921-1930CampFrank BorzageSilentUSA

Synopsis
A soldier inaccurately reported as dead returns home to his Spanish family’s estate in California, only to find his father deceased and his ancestral land in the hands of strangers.Read More » -
William A. Wellman – Beggars of Life [+commentaries] (1928)
William A. Wellman1921-1930DramaQueer Cinema(s)SilentUSA

Synopsis:
After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police, and reach Canada.Read More » -
Jean Epstein – Finis terrae AKA End of the Earth (1929)
Jean Epstein1921-1930DramaFranceSilent

Synopsis:
The Ushant archipelago is a group of small islands situated off the coast of Brittany at the northwest extremity of France. Each year, four fishermen from the most populated island Ushant set up camp for three months on the uninhabited islet of Bannec to gather and process seaweed, producing a valuable soda-rich resource for factories along the coast. JeanMarie and Ambroise, the two youngest members of the four, fall out when the latter drops his friend’s last bottle of wine. Ambroise finds himself ostracised when Jean-Marie accuses him of stealing his pocket knife and then develops a fever when infection sets in on a hand wound. Read More » -
Bertolt Brecht & Carl Koch – Mann ist Mann AKA A Man’s a Man AKA Man Equals Man (1931)
Bertolt Brecht1931-1940Carl KochDramaGermanySilent

quote:
Stage play directed by Berthold Brecht, filmed by Carl Koch, about a civilian who is press-ganged into a machine-gunner’s squadron and transformed into the perfect soldier.Man is Man, a tragi-comedy written in 1927, a work of Brecht’s youth that marks his entry into epic theatre. How can Man manage to adapt to all the different roles that the industrial society of the 20th Century demands, in an apparently intransigent call for change ? Galy Gay is this unorthodox hero who starts out as a messenger and becomes an active soldier under nauseating pressure from dubious soldiers. French critic Bernard Dort noted that the construction and dismantling of Widow Begbick’s refreshments carriage in this play take place at the same time as the transformation of Galy Gay into Jeramiah Jip. The mobility of the location, theatrically points to the instability of the characters in the epic form. Thomas Ostermeier seized upon the theme of deconstruction, and has his actors play furiously with the different states of reality.Read More »
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Vladimir Gardin – Krest i mauzer aka Cross and Mauser (1925)
1921-1930DramaSilentUSSRVladimir GardinA powerful and utterly brutal Soviet propaganda broadside levelled at the Catholic church.
Compelling in its prolific use of facial close-up shots.Cast note:
Krest I Mauzer marks the first film appearance of; Nikolay Kutuzov, who would later appear in Tarkovskys Andrei Rublev (1966) and in the film Viy (1967) and Alexei Pirogov, who would go on to become a Bolshoi soloist (1931-48).Read More »




