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This documentary promoting the joys of life in a Soviet village, centers around the activities of the Young Pioneers. These children are constantly busy, pasting propaganda posters on walls, distributing hand bills, exhorting all to “buy from the cooperative“ as opposed to the Public Sector, promoting temperance, and helping poor widows. Experimental portions of the film, projected in reverse, feature the un-slaughtering of a bull and the un-baking of bread.Read More »
No relation to the 1952 Toulouse Lautrec biopic of the same name, Moulin Rouge was produced, directed and written by German-filmmaker E. A. Dupont. Olga Tschechowa plays the star dancer of Paris’ famed Moulin Rouge nightspot. Her daughter Eve Gray is in love with impressionable Jean Bradin. Alas, Jean adores another – Eve’s own mother. A blessed relief from the usual turgid, slapped-together British films of the period, Moulin Rouge has visual moments that approach the brilliance of Dupont’s previous backstage melodrama, the German Variety. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »
A 1927 British silent sports film directed and written by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Carl Brisson, Lillian Hall-Davis and Ian Hunter. It is one of Hitchcock’s nine surviving silent films. The Ring is Hitchcock’s only original screenplay although he worked extensively alongside other writers throughout his career.Read More »
Colonel Pepper brings his daughter, Peggy, to Hollywood from Georgia to be an actress. There she meets Billy who gets her work at Comet Studio doing comedies with him. But Peggy is discovered by High Art Studio and she leaves Billy and Comet to work there. Read More »
Set in the bleak aftermath and devastation of the World War I, a recently demobbed soldier, Timosh, returns to his hometown Kiev, after having survived a train wreck. His arrival coincides with a national celebration of Ukrainian freedom, but the festivities are not to last as a disenchanted.
In Arsenal, Alexander Dovzhenko, perhaps the most radical of the Soviet directors of the silent period, altered the already extended conventions of cinematic structure to a degree greater than had even the innovative Sergei Eisenstein in his bold October. The effect of this tinkering with the more or less accepted proprieties of motion picture construction produced a work that is actually less a film than it is a highly symbolic visual poem. For example, in a more linearly structured piece like October, the metaphors, allusions, and analogies that arise through the construction of the various montages replace rather than comment on essential actions within the film. In Arsenal, however, the symbolism is so purposely esoteric, with seemingly deliberate barriers established to block the viewer’s perception, that the relationship of individual symbols or sequences to the various actions of the film is not immediately clear.Read More »
The story of the North Sea herring fisheries, filmed at Lerwick, in the Shetlands, Lowestoft and Yarmouth and in the North Sea.
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— Henry K Miller, From Battleship Potemkin to Drifters, BFI booklet wrote:
The London Film Society’s screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) on Sunday 10 November 1929, at the Tivoli cinema in the Strand, is the most celebrated double-bill in British film history. Potemkin, making its British debut more than three years after it shook the film world, had a formidable reputation to live up to. Drifters, on the other hand, was the first film of a director whose only prior filmmaking experience was the preparation of the American release print of Potemkin.Read More »
Synopsis:
The husband and wife acting team of Mae Feather and Julian Gordon is torn apart when he discovers she is having an affair with the screen comedian Andy Wilks. Mae hatches a plot to kill her husband by putting a real bullet in the prop gun which will be fired at him during the making of their new film, ‘Prairie Love’.Read More »
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Victor Frandsen is a domestic tyrant. His wife Ida has to work as a slave for him and the rest of the family. She rises early to prepare everything for the day, she toils all day long, and she is often up also in the night, doing some sewing to earn extra money for the household. In daytime she is supported by an old woman called Mads, who was Victors’ nanny when he was a child. Mads is filled with loathing for Victor’s behavior towards his wife, and calls him a brute. She understands that Ida is on the verge of a serious breakdown, and persuades Ida’s mother, Mrs. Kryer, to take Ida away.Read More »
Gabrielle, an ambitious but innocent would-be young chorine, trumps a music hall publicity stunt to become the new Parisian nightclub Cinderella. But this lighter-than-champagne-bubbles story is only a pretext for LA REVUE DES REVUES’s white-hot, non-stop procession of outrageously and scantily attired exotic dancers, showgirls, and acrobats including the Tiller’s Follies Girls, Ruth Zackey and the Hoffmann Girls, and danseuse russe Lila Nikolska. But it’s Josephine Baker, “the high priestess of primitivism”, who triumphs in two show stopping numbers in which “her clownish backfield-in-motion Charleston shimmy is unlike anything else in the movie and perhaps unlike anything anyone ever did”.Read More »