1910s

A film shot as a serial, searching for a real cinematographic form, far from its fairy origins. Beautiful trip to Nice where you can feel Perret’s joy to film. The walk of Bosco-Maurice Lagrénée in the city and on the Promenade des Anglais, the triumph of the return of Captain de Valen-Emile Keppens from the colonies, the poor orphan Marie-Laure, every thing recalls the poetic realism that will be in fashion later in the French cinema, even if there is a reactionnary background in L’enfant de Paris. It makes us think of Duvivier, Carné, Vigo already…Read More »

Quote:
Charlie and a rival vie for the favors of their landlady. In the park they each fall for different girls, though Charlie’s has a male friend already. Charlie considers suicide, is talked out of it by a policeman, and later throws his girl’s friend into the lake. Frightened, the girls go off to a movie. Charlie shows up there and flirts with them. Later both rivals substitute themselves for the girls and attack the unwitting Charlie. In an audience-wide fight, Charlie is tossed from the screen.Read More »

Jacques d’Athys, a French adventurer, returns to his home in Nice after an expedition to Indochina where he has picked up a Eurasian fiancée and a book that, unbeknownst to him, contains a coded message revealing the whereabouts of both secret treasures and sensitive government intelligence. This makes him the target of foreign spies, including a Marquise of mysterious Latin origin, a Hindu hypnotist and an evil German doctor, who will stop at nothing to obtain the book.Read More »

Rudolph Strelitz, known as ‘Barrabas’, is the brutal leader of an underground gang who causes mayhe [dropcap][/dropcap]m and destruction to the lives of civilized people. A lawyer, Claude Varèse, is strongly determined to bring Strelitz to justice for the purpose of revenge, after his father was wrongly guillotined for the murder of Laure d’Hérigny, a mistress of a missing American millionaire. Later Claude Varèse’s sister, Françoise, is then abducted by the evil Dr Lucius, one of Barrabas’ henchmen.Read More »

The first scenario work of Anatoliy Lunacharsky.

The first Soviet kinopostanovka Petrograd kinokomiteta (now – Lenfilm Studio).

November 7, 1918 – the date of the first issue on the screens of Soviet films. On this day it was released four paintings, three of them – campaign.

In order to seal one of the rooms of Professor relocated from raw basement working with his daughter. Flats start attending the factory workers. Guests are becoming more and more, and the professor begins to read popular lectures in the workers’ club. Between the younger son of a professor and his daughter working there is a feeling and the characters decide to get married …Read More »

Ivan Orloff and his wife decide to emigrate to America with a group of several others.
Ivan is used to treating his wife roughly, and on arrival in America, he forces her to carry their baggage, while he repeatedly prods her with his cane.
A passer-by rebukes Ivan, and forces him to carry the load. But this is only the first of several lessons that Ivan will learn in his new country.Read More »

Raoul Walsh had just come off The Birth of a Nation both as one of Griffith’s assistant directors and as an actor (most prominently as John Wilkes Booth), when he made this film. In his autobiography, Walsh credits Griffith with “teaching” him not only about much of the art of fiction filmmaking, but also about production management technics that aided him in taking full advantage of many of New York City’s most pictorial exterior locations. The locations play an important role in adding to the naturalism of an otherwise highly melodramatic plot with the high society young woman turned heroine social worker (much overplayed by a major star of the 1910s, Anna Q Nilsson) and the regeneration of the one-time Lower Manhatan gang leader. The wonder of this film is the performance of the male “star”, Rockliffe Fellowes, who played in over a dozen nearly unremembered films until he died in 1950. His performance is so subtly varied and electrically alive that one is reminded of Brando in his early 1950s films.Read More »

Quote:
A Parisian museum director believes his wife has lost interest in him and so places a poisoned cigarette in the box on his desk – thus allowing chance to decide the moment of his death.Read More »

Quote:
It is ironic that the very few references to this excellent film that I was able to find online all referred simply to the fact that this was Vittorio De Sica’s first film!? And, it is true of course that the young De Sica appears in the film briefly as the son of the Clemenceaus, but the film has so much more to offer… Based on Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel, the film stars Francesca Bertinini as Iza in this tragedy of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. At 107 minutes, this was a lengthy film for 1917. It is divided into two parts, chronicling the life of Iza as a girl or young woman, and her life as an adult. The story is told through the pen of her husband, and this is in several ways important in appreciating the subtle weight of what could on the surface look like a “typical” Diva film of the era, but which does in fact carry more psychological weight, and was inspired by the more complex dramas that Asta Nielsen starred in during the early teens.Read More »