Silent

Synopsis:Factory owner Pardon, meets Olga, daughter of clairvoyant Stefanie Lesczynska at a ball. Their brief acquaintance is interrupted when Olga and her mother have to leave. Fifi Hrazánková has her sights set on the elligible Pardon. Pardon asks his Uncle Cyril Ponděliček if the girl could take over his position at work so that she may be dissuaded of her amorous intentions. Fifi seduces Pondělíček. In the meantime, Pardon meets Olga and Stefanie again by chance and offers them a place to stay at Ponděliček’s while Pondělíček passes himself off as Pardon. Ponděliček recognises Stefanie as his former lover, Olga is their daughter. Stefanie also recognises him, but Pondělíček declares that he is the thief named Kanibal whom the newspapers are all writing about. He locks Pardon, Stefanie and Olga in the cellar and, together with Fifi, he escapes. In the inn they happen to come across the real Kanibal who is being pursued by the police. The police mistakenly arrest Pondělíček. Pardon explains to the Police who Pondělíček really is. The real Kanibal is then apprehended. Pondělíček then marries Stefanie and they wish their daughter luck with the factory owner, Pardon. Fifi is thus finally cured of her romantic notions.Read More »

Imdb:
Extraordinary Soap Opera
12 August 2009 | by GManfred (Ramsey, NJ)

I am not a fan of Soaps. Too often they are predictable and boring and descend into bathos -‘Womens’ Pictures’. But this picture was so spectacular in all respects that I was taken aback by its sheer accomplishment. Critic Kenneth Tynan said that one must ‘suspend one’s disbelief’ to take part in the movie experience. If that is the case, this picture became real; it was not a play on the screen performed by mere actors.

The story is familiar but the production is not. Direction is skillful and the photography is perfect. The picture moves quickly and the acting is superb. Francis Lederer was good, Brigitte Helm was even better, and Warwick Ward, who plays Col. Beranoff, spit and polish and bent on revenge, was outstanding. He was the glue that held the cast together and was a riveting presence whenever he was on screen.Read More »

Quote:
By the time Michelangelo Antonioni released Michelangelo Eye to EyeBeyond the Clouds in 1995, his keen sense of patient, intimate observation had seemed to give way to a kind of leering, gratuitous voyeurism in the film’s repeated, over-lingering shots of the female form. It is, however, precisely this painstaking attention to the voluptuousness of form and tactileness of surfaces that makes his subsequent short film, Michelangelo Eye to Eye particularly sensual and textural in its execution. Prefaced with a text description of the filmmaker’s recent health problems (in particular, a debilitating stroke that left him partially paralyzed), the film opens with a shot of a frail Antonioni emerging from the shadows as he walks in slow, awkward gait into an unpopulated hall where Michelangelo Buonarotti’s marble statue of Moses – a scaled down version of an ambitiously conceived wall tomb for Pope Julius II – is once again in display after a period of meticulous restoration. Composed of a series of detailed observations of the sculpture’s composition from several camera angles and vantage points, Antonioni continually refocuses to the shot of Moses’ opaque gaze – an image that is sublimely matched by the filmmaker’s own occluded, returned gaze as he examines the object of his attention through limpid, watery eyes. In addition to creating a thorough, meticulous, and deliberative objective study of the Renaissance sculpture’s robust physical form and timeless, universal beauty, Antonioni’s juxtaposition of his own weakened, aging frame against the larger-than-life sculpture of Moses creates an indelible, thoughtful, and poignant image on human frailty, transience, creative compromise, and the enduring legacy of – and mortal transcendence through – enlightened art.
filmref.comRead More »

Description: Cohl made “Fantasmagorie” from February to May or June 1908. This is considered the first fully animated film ever made. It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed, leading to a running time of almost two minutes. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a “stream of consciousness” style. It borrowed from Blackton in using a “chalk-line effect” (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard), having the main character drawn by the artist’s hand on camera, and the main characters of a clown and a gentleman (this taken from Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”). The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.Read More »

Summary:
After the death of Claudius, Agrippina announced Nero the heir to the throne, which leads to despair of the true heir – Brittanicus.
Not daring to oppose Agrippina, Senators declare Nero the emperor.
Agrippina is against of an affair of Nero and Poppaea.
Agrippina threaten Nero that if he neglect his wife Octavius, she will give the throne to Brittanicus.
The threats of Agrippina had their effect. Brittanicus is poisoned.
Perversity of Nero is insatiable and he gives his trusted man, Anicetus a terrible order.
Agrippina is looking for salvation, but the indomitable hatred of Emperor Nero decides the fate of Agrippina…Read More »

Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo / 大人の見る繪本 生れてはみたけれど

PLOT: Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Ozu’s charming film is a social satire that draws from the antics of childhood as well as the tragedy of maturity.Read More »

In Puritan Boston, seamstress Hester Prynne is punished for playing on the Sabbath day; but kindly minister Arthur Dimmesdale takes pity on her. The two fall in love, but their relationship cannot be: Hester is already married to Roger Prynne, a physician who has been missing seven years. Dimmesdale has to go away to England; when he returns, he finds Hester pregnant with their child, and the focus of the town’s censure. In a humiliating public ceremony, she is forced to don the scarlet letter A – for adultery – and wear it the rest of her life. Dimmesdale is encouraged by the church fathers to demand of Hester the person with whom she sinned.Read More »

Plot: The story of the famous battle between the Scots clans of Macdonald and Campbell, and the young woman who comes between them, Annie Laurie.Read More »

PLOT SUMMARY and OTHER INFORMATION
from Waldo’s announce

Reels one, two and five — all that survives, unfortunately, of this late silent film by John Ford, though it’s enough to suggest that it might have been a major work. The story, supposedly based on the sentimental Irish ballad, is a blend of “Sylvia Scarlet” and “Stella Dallas,” about a single mother who joins a traveling circus (lead by Victor McLaglen) to support her child, only to eventually lose him to a rich couple. She meets her son (Neil Hamilton) years later when she’s employed as a domestic, and now he’s a swaggering young society man. Does she reveal her identity to him? We’ll never know, since the end of the film is missing. What you do get is one heck of a storm sequence in the first reel, filmed by Ford in the high expressionist style he was then absorbing from FW Murnau.Read More »