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Since a mysterious stranger and his servant settled in a manor near a Provençal village, a wave of crimes has beenfall the country and spread terror among the inhabitants. Young Jean Lormeau, refusing to give in to fear, leaves to meet the disturbing owner to discover his secret.

The restoration of the original negative belonging to the CNC made it possible to print a silver copy, itself digitized. The version presented offers original music by François Puyalto, arranged and performed by Tarik Chaouach, Rafaël Koerner and François Puyalto, produced in 2012 by the Anères festival and recorded live at 3 Cinés Robespierre in Vitry-sur-Seine. Thanks to Sylvain Airault and the Anères festival.

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L’Homme noir is the first fantastic film directed by Alfred Machin in his studio in Nice, after a series of comedies, dramas and satires which met with great success, in particular thanks to the presence on the screen of the animals which have surrounded since his two stays in Africa in 1908 and 1910. Thus, we find, after L’Énigme du Mont-Agel (1924) and Les Héritiers de uncle James(1924), Auguste the chimpanzee which this time takes on a disturbing role. In the village of Gattières, twenty kilometers north of Nice, he finds austere façades, narrow and winding streets which allow him to create a strange atmosphere, reinforced by the use of artificial lighting, innovative at the time. . Romuald Joubé, draped in a large cape, under a large black hat, camps a romantic character with a worried soul. Add a mansion standing out against a tortured sky which is accessed by crossing an abandoned cemetery, distorted interior decorations captured through unusual perspectives and you are, not in a German expressionist film, but in an innovative French work. Too much, certainly, for the critics and the public of the time, who weren’t expecting to meet Alfred Machin on this strange and fantastic terrain little surveyed by French directors. The film also struggled to find a distributor. It was in 1927, almost three years after its realization, that Universal, an American company which then watered the popular theaters of action films andserials , releases the film renamed The Manor of Fear. Skillful creator of atmospheres, Alfred Machin also knows how to stage spectacular sequences like that of the accident of a train on a viaduct which precipitates him at the bottom of a ravine in the explosion of the boiler of the locomotive. Shot at night, this episode certainly owes a lot to the memories of the director, who was one of the witnesses of the Saujon disaster in 1910. That evening, Machin takes place in Bordeaux on the train which must take him back to Paris, and derailed. Unharmed, Machin rescues the many injured until the arrival of the rescuers. He then grabs his camera and turns. This made a good sequence for the Pathé-Journal, of which he was then one of the operators. And, some fifteen years later, an anthology scene in one of the first French fantasy films,

Beatrice de Pastre

2.33GB | 1h 17mn | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0CF1D39BC175E70/Le.manoir.de.la.peur.1924.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-KG.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/1BE1F8B67293450/Le.manoir.de.la.peur.1924.1080p.ENG.srt

Language(s):French intertitles
Subtitles:English

The post Alfred Machin & Henry Wulschleger – Le manoir de la peur AKA The Manor House of Fear (1924) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Flicker Alley says…

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Never before released in the United States, this monumental French film is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the whole history of cinema. Written and directed by Abel Gance (Napoleon, J’Accuse), three years in production, and for its time unprecedented in length and complexity of emotion, La Roue pushed the frontiers of film art beyond all previous efforts. Said Gance, “Cinema endows man with a new sense. It is the music of light. He listens with his eyes.”

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Taken to its bare bones, the story deals with Sisif, a locomotive engineer who saves Norma, an infant girl, from a train wreck and raises her as his adopted daughter. Norma thinks Sisif’s son Elie is her brother, and when the two fall in love, she leaves to marry a virtual stranger. Sisif is also obsessed with her and the plot elaborates this triangular relationship. German director G. W. Pabst, an ardent admirer of La Roue, was encouraged by Gance’s example to undertake his own remarkable explorations of human psychology in such silent films as Secrets of a Soul, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.

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Yet La Roue is even more remarkable for its cinematic accomplishment than for its story. The film was taken almost entirely on location. Sets were built along the railroad tracks in the yard at St. Roch, near Nice, and at an elevation of 13,000 feet on Mount Blanc. Gance pioneered a dazzlingly innovative style of rapid montage that revolutionized filmmaking around the world, especially in the works of Eisenstein and his contemporaries in the Soviet Union. Almost every sequence was experimental; as his cinematographer, L-H Burel recalled, “I’d never come to the end of it if I were to list all the tests we did, all the special effects I invented, and all the innovations we launched.” Like Intolerance and Citizen Kane, La Roue became a source book of cinematic invention that reverberated in countless other classic films over the decades. It was hailed by artists and intellectuals, who recognized it as a stunning advance in modern art. Said Akira Kurosawa, “The first film that really impressed me was La Roue.”

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This new restoration with a running time of nearly four and a half hours, accompanied by Robert Israel’s symphonic score, is the fullest presentation of La Roue to reach the public since 1923. It at last allows audiences today to experience the amazing, poetic vision that Abel Gance brought to the world. The DVD also includes a short film that provides a vivid documentary record of the great work in production, along with a booklet containing an outstanding essay by William M. Drew on the history and impact of La Roue, and comments by Robert Israel on the score.

2.98GB | 4:23:18 | 608*464 | avi

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/EE615A409AB3EA5/La.Roue.-1-.1923.Gance.avi
https://nitro.download/view/BF9F19183B58B10/La.Roue.-2-.1923.Gance.avi

Language:French – English Intert
Subtitles:French – English Intert

The post Abel Gance – La Roue (1923) first appeared on Cinema of the World.