1920s

Light Industry wrote:
In 1926, André Gide set sail from Bordeaux to French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo with Marc Allégret, his 25-year-old former student and lover of nearly a decade, who was brought on the trip officially as Gide’s “secretary.” Gide had been inspired to visit Africa by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and planned his itinerary with Allégret as something of a recapitulation of Conrad’s fictional expedition. Travelling for thousands of miles by railway, river, and foot, through areas that today comprise the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Cameroon, the pair spent time with colonial agents and indigenous communities. Both Gide and Allégret produced important records of their epic journey. Gide kept diaries that he quickly published in two volumes, Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le Retour du Tchad (1928), while Allégret took some seven hundred photographs and shot the film Voyage au Congo: Scènes de la Vie Indigène en Afrique Équatoriale, one of the earliest feature-length ethnographic documentaries to be made on the continent.Read More »

Synopsis
In Gossette (1923), Dulac experimented with and designed a number of special lenses and prisms to produce a variety of effects and multiply the expressive means which translate the characters’ visions and mental states. She also reversed class and gender roles, as she made the female character Gossette come to the aid of Phillipe de Savières, falsely accused of murder, in order to save his name.Read More »

Quote:
Martha, a peasant woman expecting a child, experiences the fears typical of a woman in her condition. Encouraged by a neighbor, she decides to venture out into the world and join the working class fighting for a better future.Read More »

In a Villeville bustling with the upcoming jousting tournament, two men covet young Isabelle Ginori: François de Baynes, womanizer and overbearing leader of the Protestants, and Henri de Rogier, a Catholic nobleman and Isabelle’s beloved. Queen Catherine de Medicis is aware of the conflict opposing the two men, and commands that the adversaries fight in the Tournament according to the Rules of Divine Judgement; the champion will win Isabelle’s hand.Read More »

Synopsis
An ironic look at what it is like to be beautiful for a woman (and handsome for a few men) in the Paris of the late twenties…Read More »

Wikipedia wrote:
Folly of Love (German: Unfug der Liebe) is a 1928 German silent comedy film directed by Robert Wiene and starring Maria Jacobini, Jack Trevor and Betty Astor. While several of Wiene’s previous films had met with mixed responses, Folly of Love was universally praised by critics. The film was made at the Marienfelde Studios of Terra Film. It was Wiene’s last silent film.Read More »

The great French filmmaker René Clair crafted this elegant sepia-toned profile of Paris’s iconic landmark almost forty years after the Eiffel Tower took its first bow (at the 1889 Exposition Universelle). It clearly still fascinates and awes in this loving and playful tribute. LA TOUR takes the viewer first up and then down the mighty structure while also acting as a tribute to its eponymous designer, Gustave Eiffel. The film initially burrows into blueprints and photographs of the earliest stages of its construction ahead of the opening of the World’s Fair but Clair’s film revels in the completed structure itself, reverently scaling its heights and accompanying tourists on up through the various levels toward the topmost landing. Read More »

Ernst Lubitsch’s So This is Paris stars Monte Blue and Patsy Ruth Miller as a doctor and his wife. The couple is as faithful as the day is long–but when a dance team comprised of Lilyan Tashman and Andre Beranger make the scene, the days grow mighty short. Blue, Miller, Tashman and Berander spend the lion’s share of the film hiding their various peccadilloes from each other. The beauty of the Lubitsch touch is that, while So This is Paris suggests much, there isn’t a single censurable image throughout. Based on a play by Henry Meillac and Ludovic Halevy, this was a favorite of audiences and critics alike.Read More »

El Dorado is the fifth film directed by Marcel L’Herbier for Gaumont’s prestige collection ‘Pax’ which was characterised by high production quality. Its most striking aspect is the invention of new elements of the cinematographic language. L’Herbier uses distortions of the images to convey different messages or impressions: the faces of drinkers become distorted as they become drunk, Sibilla’s face becomes blurred as she thinks about her sick child, or photographs of the Alhambra are distorted to express the artistic vision of the painter intending to represent them.Read More »