Silent

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The Georgian-born filmmaker Michail Kalatozov (19031973) is best remembered for directing some of the most innovative and successful Soviet films of the 1950s and 1960s. This DVD presents digitally restored versions of two of his lesser-known, early works, which were highly controversial in their time but now rank among the finest achievements in Soviet silent cinema. Salt for Svanetia is an austere depiction of peasant life in the inhospitable terrain of the Caucasus Mountains. Nail in the Boot, a biting parable of wartime irresponsibility, chillingly prefigures the later Stalinist purge trials. Günter Buchwald’s and Stephen Horne’s prize-winning scores and the experimental accompaniment by Masha Khotimshi underline the poetic and expressive visual style of these exceptional masterpieces.Read More »

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Around 1900, the issues of poverty and poor relief were the source of heated controversy. This DVD illustrates in seven chapters how examinations of the ‘Social Question’ were presented in magic lantern slide sets and early films. On the screens of auditoriums, Sunday schools, music-halls, cinemas and churches, visitors could witness orphans freezing to death in the snow, drunkards plunging their families into misery and helpless old people begging for a scrap of bread. Audiences experienced poignant moving pictures in performances with music, singing and recitations. The photographic and film industries delivered glass slide sets and films in very large runs on a variety of themes relating to poverty.Read More »

Jannings’ character, the doorman for a famous hotel, is demoted to washroom (bathroom) attendant, as he is considered too old and infirm to be the image of the hotel. He tries to conceal his demotion from his friends and family, but to his shame, he is discovered. His friends, thinking he has lied to them all along about his prestigious job, taunt him mercilessly while his family rejects him out of shame. The man, shocked and in incredible grief, returns to the hotel to sleep in the bathroom where he works. The only person to be kind towards him is the night watchman, who covers him with his coat as he falls asleep.Read More »

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A handsome prince rides a flying horse to faraway lands and embarks on magical adventures, which include befriending a witch, meeting Aladdin, battling demons and falling in love with a princess.Read More »

Mike Pinsky, DVDVerdict wrote:
Russian film poet Evgeni Bauer combined the technical virtuosity of D.W. Griffith with the haunting terror of Edgar Allan Poe and the artist’s eye of Johannes Vermeer. He is — perhaps — the greatest film director you have never heard of. During his brief four-year career, Evgeni Bauer created macabre masterpieces. They are dramas darkly obsessed with doomed love and death, astonishing for their graceful camera movements, risqué themes, opulent sets and chiaroscuro lighting. Tragically, Bauer died in 1917, succumbing to pneumonia after breaking his leg.Read More »

IMDB Says:
A pig dressed in fancy clothes flirts with a pretty girl, but she humiliates him and tears off his suit; she then makes him dance for her affections. 104 years later, a GIF will be created to scare Bobby Burke as plotted by John Davison.Read More »

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The tangled story that unfolds in the torrid melodrama The Wandering Shadow centers around the character of Irmgard (played by actress Mia May), a virtuous woman who, like many such heroines past and present, gets involved with the wrong kind of man. As the film opens, she is seen fussing on a train headed for the picturesque mountains of Germany, fleeing an unidentified gentleman. Through flashbacks, we learn that Irmgard once found employment with a wealthy free-love advocate (Hans Marr). The two have an affair and, with Irmgard pregnant and desperate, she schemes to secretly marry the man’s brother (also played by Hans Marr) so it at least appears that the child is being raised properly. The confusing story eventually has Irmgard trudging through the mountainous terrain to come across a generous monk who offers her a chance at the redemption she so desperately desires.Read More »

Many famous stars began their career in pornography, Marilyn Monroe being one of the greatest examples, who when financially stable declared she no longer had to gratify the sexual demands of studio executives.

A pornographic short film of Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe recently surfaced in Spain. This grainy black-and-white footage was made in 1947 when Monroe was 21. The American Film Institute, though has denied reports from Spain that it had authenticated the 50-year-old pornographic film purportedly showing Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe engaging in a sexual act.

As early as 1944 Marilyn Monroe was in Los Angeles modeling and acting and in 1949 posed nude for Tom Kelley in a series of photographs that would later galvanize her image as a sex symbol and fuel her rise to fame. The late 1940’s was a difficult time for Monroe, having lost her 20th Century Fox contract in 1946 she allegedly returned to less reputable means of making money to support herself.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
This structuralist dissection, enumeration, decomposition and reconstruction of a 1905 Biograph film of the same title provides a painstaking metaphysical exploration of the nature of cinema. Practically every shot and scene of the original 10-minute film is ominously “analyzed” and re-interpreted into a feature-length work by manipulation of image, introduction of slow motion, repetition, freeze-frames, abstracting, and other “subversions” of the original. Shades of Vertov!Read More »