Silent

This film comes from the Schloss Archive of His Highness, Herr Graf Ferdinand von Galitzien:

Quote:
Born Franz Wygand Wüstenhöfer in Malstatt (Saarland), Hofer began his career as a stage actor and playwright in 1909. A year later he began working as a screenwriter for Messter’s Henny Porten series and for directors such as Viggo Larsen—Die schwarze Katze [The Black Cat] (1910)—and Walter Schmidthässler—Das Weib ohne Herz [The Woman Without a Heart] and Der Zug des Herzens [The Pull of the Heart] (both 1912).Read More »

IMDB:
A poor woman, with no money for Christmas presents, tucks her three children in for the night, on Christmas Eve. Later, a poor, old beggar comes to her door and she lets him in to rest and warm up. When he suddenly leaves, she follows him to the front door of a church, where she finds an abandoned baby. The woman takes the baby home to care for it, even though she has almost nothing. Her acts of kindness are repaid with a Christmas miracle. Written by Detour 1945 Read More »

Although Georges Méliès’ The Conjuror (L’ Impressionniste fin de siècle) was was one of his earliest movies, it’s also an excellently realized example of Méliès’ basic style of cinematic magic.

The Conjuror revisits a scene that Méliès had explored before, and is basically a cinematic adaptation of the traditional magic trick “making the assistant disappear”. Méliès first presented this scene in his 1896 film The Vanishing Lady, which used simple camera stop-substitution to achieve the affect (no motion involved, and no in-camera dissolve). Méliès revisited the idea in his 1898 film The Magician, which made further use of the substitution effect, which by that time was only one of many effects that Méliès was using in his films.Read More »

It’s another one of Guazzoni’s ancient dramas, this time about Agrippina, the mother of Nero. After she manages to make him emperor of Rome, he finds her a nuisance.
Sadly she is immune to poison and sinking her ship didn’t kill her either – she simply swam ashore. In the end a sword through her stomach did the trick: Few people are immune to that.
Actually not all of the above features in the film… Basically Nero’s just cross because mamma doesn’t like his new mistress. Read More »

THE SCREEN
In the William Fox screen version of Austin Strong’s play, “Seventh Heaven,” which was presented last night at the Sam H. Harris Theatre, you can once again meet those lovable characters—Chico, Diane, Papa Boule and Pere Chevillon—in that little patch of Paris within sight of the Eiffel Tower. This picture grips your interest from the very beginning and even though the ending is melodramatic you are glad that the sympathetic but self-satisfied Chico is brought back to his heart-broken Diane.Read More »

“Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-three, 1914/1921) by Albert Capellani & André Antoine with Paul Capellani, Henry Krauss and Philippe Garnier

The story takes place in Brittany in 1793 during the Terror. While the Marquess of Lantenac (P. Garnier) joins the Chouans (royalist insurgents), his nephew Gauvain (P. Capellani) becomes a soldier in the Revolutionary army. The third character is the former priest, Cimourdain, who becomes the head of the Revolutionary army. He was the one who opened Gauvain’s eyes to the new ideas by giving him Rousseau to read. In this adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel the destiny of the three characters are heading for collision. The film shooting was stopped abruptly by the beginning of WWI. A few years later, André Antoine took over as Capellani was unavailable to finish it as he was in America. The film didn’t came out until 1921. Obviously, in the space of 7 years, cinema had moved forward dramatically and Quatre-vingt-treize was undoubtedly dated when it came out.Read More »

This tale of a crook’s reform takes place in the San Francisco of the early 1900s. Predictably, Lon Chaney plays a crook and a misshapen cripple (the type of role almost expected of him at this point in his career). Anne Vincent, better known as “Queen Anne” (Christine Mayo), sends Wilse Dilling (Chaney) to a small town to keep an eye on Mischa Hadley (William Welsh), an embezzling banker who is her lover. Dilling falls in love with Hadley’s daughter, Gertrude (Virginia Valli), and blows up the bank’s safe to destroy incriminating records. The blast, however, leaves Gertrude a cripple, and Dilling uses his savings to restore her to health. Queen Anne, whose greed knows no end, has told Hadley that he will either give her more money or give her his daughter. Ultimately, she has Gertrude kidnapped and taken to a Chinese den. Dilling rescues her and she helps in his regeneration. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake shakes everything up, and Dilling’s reform is complete.~Janiss Garza @allmovie.comRead More »

No story.. just a promenade with Isabelle in a park… Read More »

Thomas A. Edison
Eleven Films (1894-1901)

Edison Kinetoscopic Record of A Sneeze (1894)
IMDb: link
00:07 (1.1 Mb)

Crissie Sheridan (1897)
IMDb: link
00:37 (6.1 Mb)

Giant Coal Dumper (1897)
IMDb: link
00:37 (6.2 Mb)
Read More »