Funny, Entertaining. Charley Chase is great!, 4 April 2005
Author: chris-glo from So.CA
I happened to catch this on TCM one day – what a scream! A very entertaining short. Charley Chase was very talented! My husband and I try to watch the “silents” whenever we can but have mostly watched dramas with the bigger stars such as Valentino, Garbo, Chaney, etc. It is really a shame that the younger people today do not take the time to watch and appreciate the ones really responsible for the success of the movie industry. Back then, without sound to convey feelings with the spoken word, it took, I think, a great more amount of talent as an actor or actress to get the point across in mime. Facial expression and body movements were the only way this could be achieved. Just for fun, watch a new movie with the sound off. I think you would be surprised to find that you cannot follow it very well. Anyway, if you get the chance, check out silent movies. They are better than you think. And Charley Chase? I will be looking for more of his movies.Read More »

In 1938 Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler sponsored an expedition to Tibet lead by several Nazi SS scientists to study the regions flora and fauna, and to take scientific measurements of the Earths magnetic fields. The expedition was also sent to find traces of the orgins of the “Aryan” race in Tibet which was where Himmler thought evidence of could be found. This film is a Nazi era documentary of that expedition.Read More »

Stories about workers determined to use their own initiative

On October 29, 1972, the first part of Fassbinder’s five-part family series flickered across West German TV screens. Over the next months, the public broadcaster ARD showed all five episodes, in each case on a Saturday evening in the prime-time slot: I. Jochen and Marion, (October 29, 1972), II. Grandma and Gregor (December 17, 1972), III. Franz and Ernst (January 2, 1973), IV. Harald and Monika (February 18, 1973), and V. Irmgard and Rolf (March 18, 1973). Ratings during this time ranged between 45 and 60%, figures comparable with those for the broadcaster’s top-rating crime series TATORT.Read More »

Quote:
THE EYE OF ISTANBUL tells the story of Ara Guler, the legendary Armenian-Turkish photographer, through the culmination of his retrospective exhibition in Istanbul. The documentary follows a non-linear narrative, which explores the artistic process and impulses of this great master. Ara’s curiosity, resourcefulness and fearlessness are revealed through a series of stories in the film. At 87 years old, Ara is a complex and unforgettable character; he is still sharp, irreverent, funny and philosophical. Although he is mostly recognized for his black and white photographs of Istanbul, he has enjoyed an international career, which has spanned over sixty years and has generated more than one million photographs. A student and a follower of Henri-Cartier Bresson, Ara’s mastery lies in capturing the stories and interactions among people at the right moment in history.Read More »

Storyline
Sacrifice (Orphan of Zhao Family): To save the only child of the Zhao Family, whose whole clan is massacred at the hands of a nefarious minister, a doctor sacrifices his own son, and later becomes intent on seeking vengeance against the minister after the child grows up. For generations, the Zhao family has wielded power, even extending over the king. In a well-planned coup, their mortal enemy TU’AN GU (Wang Xue Qi) slaughters the entire clan, determined to wipe out their influence forever. However, a solitary Zhao baby survives the massacre, and is hidden and taken home by CHENG YING (Ge You), the doctor who delivered him, to live with his WIFE (Hai Qing) and their own newborn baby. Set on revenge, and raising the Zhao child as his own, Cheng Ying bides his time, enrolling himself and the Zhao orphan (whom he calls Cheng Bo) into the service of the Tu’an Gu household. Tu’ an Gu grows very fond of Cheng Bo and makes Cheng Bo his godson… Written by BronzeKeilani26Read More »

A Russian Expatriate Adrift in Berlin
The most striking image in “Gorilla Bathes at Noon,” Dusan Makavejev’s whimsical cinematic collage set in present-day Berlin, is a gigantic statue of Lenin that stands as a ludicrous anachronism in the post-Communist era. In one of the film’s zanier scenes, Victor Borisovich (Svetozar Cvetkovic), an expatriate Russian soldier and the film’s main character, impulsively hoists himself on ropes to the statue’s head to wash its face. Moments later, the police arrive and ensnare him in a net from which he protests, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Not long afterward, workers begin detaching the head of the statue from its body. Lifted by crane, the severed head is lowered slowly onto a flatbed truck and carted off through the streets of Berlin. So much for Communism and kitsch monuments exalting its heroes.
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Synopsis
Edmund Kean is a popular and flamboyant British actor of the nineteenth century, addicted however to vices and in debt. He argues with the Prince of Wales, his companion in intemperance, the wife of the Danish ambassador, but eventually falls in love with Anna, a young but promising beginning actress.Read More »

With a sense of place and historical research, Kevin Jerome Everson films combine scripted and documentary moments with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent. The conditions are usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather. Instead of standard realism he favors a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making.Read More »

The debut film by Alexander Rekhviashvili, one of the leaders of the new wave’s first flow, Georgian Chronicle of the 19th Century (Gruzinskaya hronika XIX veka, 1979), places us in a Kafkaesque city where a lonely student goes through all the circles of bureaucratic hell to help the peasants of his home village win back their land from bourgeois industrialists. The distorted urban sets in the Chronicle remind one of German expressionism and Caligari. The horrifyingly circular structure of the narrative, the morose suspense of the slow-paced action, the atmosphere of silent torture in a vacuum, bring to mind Orson Welles’s The Trial. The long sequence in the forest where two assassins chase the student and finally eliminate him, leaving the rest of the film without a hero, is obviously influenced by Kurosawa’s Rashomon. What is harder to find in Georgian Chronicle is the influence of Rekhviashvili’s native predecessors in the Georgian school.Read More »