Silent

One of the few pre-Revolution Russian feature films to survive, Father Sergius is an elaborate picturization of a Tolstoy novel. Ivan Mozzhukin plays a young, libertine officer who thinks nothing of committing casual sins while in the service of the Czar. He comes to regret his misdeeds as he grows older, his past debaucheries manifesting themselves in his wizened face and desiccated body. He wanders up and down the countryside, searching for redemption. Director Feodor Protazanov emphasized the high and low points of Mozhukin’s life by filming in the actual palaces and private clubs described by Tolstoy in his novel. The overall theme of corruption in high places automatically resulted in Father Sergius being banned by the Czarist censors, though the film found a more receptive audience once the government passed into the hands of the revolutionaries. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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Based on story by Ivan Shmelev.
The movie action starts very close before February democratic revolution in Russia in 1917.
Fate is cruel to waiter of capital city restaurant Skorohodov: his son dies on front, his wife perishes from grief, his daughter is excluded from grammar school because of lack of money to pay tuition.
Skorohodov decides to rent one of rooms in his poor apartment to a decent young man named Sokolin who is working as a courier in war industry committee .
The lodger and a girl fall in love with each other and soon decide to get married.
In meantime the father appoints his daughter as a violiinist in restaurant orchestra.
But rich factory owner Karasev rudely molests young blonde violinist and through blackmail expects to make her his mistress.
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Careless and merciless bureaucratic machine turns a case of 80 year old peasant Pelageya Demina about crossing a railroad in a wrong place into criminal offense. Her oldman seeking help to get her out of jail.Read More »

Quote:
The Forty-First, Boris Lavrenyev’s novella, written in only two days, has proven enduringly popular. It tells the story of a young woman snarpshooter fighting with the Reds in Turkestan. She misses her forty-first victim, a handsome White lieutenant, and ends up escorting him, by boat, into captivity across the Aral Sea. A storm, however, strands the two on an island. Sick with pneumonia, the lieutenant is nursed back to health by his Red escort, and the two fall in love. At the last, however, Mariutka shoots him dead when he tries to escape, thus making him “the forty-first.”
Sorok pervyy had been filmed as a silent, from the author’s own script, by Yakov Protazanov in 1927.Read More »

Here is an HDTV rip of the brand new digitally restored version of the absolute masterpiece “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. The film has been restored using the original camera negative, the result premiered on February 9th 2014 at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.

New York composer and multi-instrumentalist John Zorn presented a new composition on the Karl Schuke organ at Berlin’s philharmonic to accompany the film. This is the version that has been shown at the festival with his music.
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Wikipedia wrote:
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a 1923 American film directed by Wallace Worsley and produced by Carl Laemmle and Irving Thalberg. It stars Lon Chaney, Sr., Patsy Ruth Miller, Norman Kerry, Nigel de Brulier, Brandon Hurst. The film is probably the second most famous adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, following the critically acclaimed, much reissued 1939 masterpiece by RKO Pictures. The film was Universal’s “Super Jewel” of 1923 and was their most successful silent film, grossing over $3 million.

The film is most notable for the grand sets that recall 15th century Paris as well as Lon Chaney’s performance and spectacular make-up as the tortured bell-ringer of Notre Dame. The film elevated Chaney, already a well-known character actor, to full star status in Hollywood. It also helped set a standard for many later horror films, including Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera in 1925. In 1951, the film entered the public domain (in the USA) due to the claimants failure to renew its copyright registration in the 28th year after publication.Read More »

Silvia Breuss wrote:
It is one of those hidden big-city asylums where light-shy existences meet. Many paths lead into the demimonde of Café Elektric, but only a few lead out again. Women looking for the buyers of their bodies in the glow of the street lamps find their way in, as do night owls and all kinds of sinister figures. Truth meets deception here, drive meets dreams and feelings, possession and money meet dependence. Gustav Ucicky’s atmospherically dense “film of manners”, still captivating today in its direct and unsentimental portrayal of the Viennese milieu, with the young Willi Forst and Marlene Dietrich in her first leading role, was intended to show “how easy it is in our time to stray from the right path”. The signpost for three great careers.Read More »

Feature film 1903 UK

This was the very first film version of “Alice” and encapsulated much of the “Wonderland” story into a short ten minute feature. Despite the infancy of the film-making process, the production included some creditable special effects and Alice grew and shrank to good effect. The film is preserved by the British Film Institute, although two of the sixteen scenes are missing.
“The History of the British Film: 1896-1906” by Rachael Low and Roger Manvell (distributed in the USA by R.R. Bowker, 1948, 1973) offers this description: (see above right)
“The film is composed of sixteen scenes, dissolving very beautifully from one to another, but preceded, where necessary for the elucidation of the story, by descriptive titles.”
The book proceeds to describe the 16 scenes in considerable detail and also offers a brief entry on the Hepworth Manufacturing Company and its founder, Cecil Hepworth (born 1874).Read More »

In Ropin’ Fool (1922) Rogers plays Ropes Reilly, a cowboy who ropes anything that moves until a lynch mob decides to use Reilly’s rope for a hanging party, with Reilly as the guest of honor. Motion Picture World wrote: “Plentiful use of slow motion photography shows how it is done and dispels any possible belief that the stunts are faked. No audience can help but marvel as Rogers throws a figure eight around a galloping horse, or lassoes a rat with a piece of string, or brings to term a cat melodiously inclined.” Later Rogers would wryly claim fame as America’s “Poet Lariat.”
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