Silent

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A leading member of the French cinema’s avant-garde movement and the director of the Impressionist classic Coeur fidèle (1923), Jean Epstein broke with his more modernist colleagues in the late 1920s to make documentaries and fiction films grounded in the realities of everyday life. Before that evolution, however, Epstein filmed this adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Oval Portrait” (1850). The film’s significance lies not so much in its fidelity to Poe’s stories as in its atmospheric evocation of the author’s gothic sensibility. Read More »

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Hanni, the shop girl, comes from a milieu like Zille, from which she is freed, so to speak, by Ferdinand, a wealthy elderly gentleman. The first date turns into a shopping spree, and after the new clothes come a new home. Since we write the year 1913 and at that time the cinema was still chaste, Max Mack saved us the details of the Techtelmechtel. To keep the story going, they both learn the new fashion dance: Tango, which Lieutenant Lulu has tried in vain. A tango competition makes the comedy a mix-up comedy: it wins – who wouldn’t have thought it – Hanni as the tango queen.
(International Forum of Young Films 1984)Read More »

A serial killer known as “The Avenger” is on the loose in London, murdering blonde women. A mysterious man arrives at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting looking for a room to rent. The Bunting’s daughter is a blonde model and is seeing one of the detectives assigned to the case. The detective becomes jealous of the lodger and begins to suspect he may be the avenger.Read More »

The Magic of Méliès
Director: Georges Méliès
Country: France
Year: 1904-1908
Tribute is paid to the screen’s first special effects wizard in this special collection of marvelously restored prints. In addition to more than a dozen of his early trompes l’oeil – such as Untamable Wiskers, Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjurer, and The Mermaid – this volume boasts the illuminating documentary, Georges Méliès, Cinema Magician and a rare hand-tinted print of the fantastic spectacle An Impossible Voyage.Read More »

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Three boys escape their strict stepparents, steal a sailboat and have adventures on Lake Mälaren northeast of Stockholm. This successful version of Sigfrid Siwertz’s popular young peoples’ novel, which was also adapted for the screen several times in the sound film era, is a pleasant summer film with convincing actors that feels fresh even today. The film copy, restored by the Swedish Film Institute, initially shows slight nitrate deterioration but otherwise features beautiful picture quality and original intertitles.Read More »

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Circus and variety films were a popular genre in the silent film era. This was Robert Reinert’s last film collaboration; he died before the production was finished. It tells the story of a clown who hides his identity while courting a young female artist. The atmospheric sets by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, the masterful direction by Arthur Robison, and especially the dramatic performance by Werner Krauss raise the film considerably over other works in the genre. The elaborate digital restoration by the Munich Film Museum displays the film’s visual beauty.Read More »

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Luise Kolm-Fleck staged a number of melodramas and Heimat films with her husband in Germany and Austria before they fled together to Shanghai ahead of rising fascism. The Filmarchiv Austria has restored several films by this previously forgotten film pioneer which demonstrate her impressive directorial skill and astonishing commitment to the treatment of societal and social problems. The focus of CRUCIFIED GIRL is a young woman whose carefree life changes when she is the victim of rape.Read More »

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Three reporters and an office girl are trying to stop a bacteriological strike by some powerful western business leaders against the USSR.Read More »

Marie Seton wrote:
When he made Potemkin in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein was not only a man with his total personality dedicated to creative work — albeit a creative work aimed at destroying all orthodox concepts of ‘art’ — but he was also a revolutionary fighter, a propagandist for the Russian Revolution. Thus, his work had a utilitarian purpose as well as an artistic one. He was educator and artist. At its most obvious level, Potemkin was regarded as propaganda for the Revolution; at a deeper level it was a highly complex work of art which Eisenstein thought would affect every man who beheld it, from the humblest to the most learned.Read More »