“Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism” proclaims Hopper. Having struggled to crack his brief he decides the only honorable act is to throw himself off a roof. Before this final act, Sir Peter Ustinov appears and bestows the Ten Commandments of Creativity upon the desperate advertising executive. The Ten Commandments become a template to navigate the state of creativity. Featuring Tarantino, Jeff Koons, Sean Penn, David Bowie and Malcolm McClaren.

The Ten Commandments of Creativity.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 11mn
Size:	3.46 GiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	1920x1080 ~> 1920x1440
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 598 kb/s
Audio
English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 157 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A82E5F89CE0F7A0/The_Ten_Commandments_of_Creativity.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:Hardcoded English subtitles for non-English parts.

The post Hermann Vaske – Die zehn Gebote der Kreativität AKA The 10 Commandments of Creativity (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The Baron of Chanterelle (Max Kronert) demands that his nephew Lancelot (Hermann Thimig) get married to preserve the family line. A skittish and effeminate fellow, Lancelot does not wish to marry, so when his uncle presents him with 40 enthusiastic brides, he hides out with a group of monks. The gluttonous monks learn about Lancelot’s potential cash reward for his nuptials, so they cook up a plan: he can marry a doll…

Quote:
A sort of anti-“Pygmalion,” it’s the story of a puppetmaker who creates a life sized, wind-up replica of his daugther (the charming Ossi Oswalda, Lubitsch’s favorite comedienne during his German period) and is thrilled to find it working so wonderfully well — unaware that the puppet has been broken, and the daughter has taken its place. For the graciously cynical Lubitsch, art is not a life-giving miracle, but a convincing illusion.

Berlin Film Festival program notes:
The set is straight out of a winter wonderland, the comedy straight out of pantomime. The Doll conjures up the charm of childhood and amateurish helplessness using fake fairytale drapery and papier-mâché imagination. Lubitsch himself is seen building a doll’s house – only to have a real actor emerge from it. The scene isn’t a joke, rather a coup de theatre. The film is about boozing, gluttony, money, love and the fact that the most practical woman is a doll. This particular doll is neither soullessly evil or driven by fate, merely a little mischievous and ungainly. One mouse is all it takes to unmask her as a living, timorous girl. The main characters are a puppet-maker, his beautiful daughter, a doll who bears a striking resemblance to the daughter, an impudent apprentice who pesters both and breaks the doll while dancing with her, a mummy’s boy unfit for marriage and his rich uncle, who wants to buy his nephew’s bliss with a fat dowry. Whereupon the cissy – pursued by forty virgins – flees to a monastery, where bigoted monks out to fund their decadent life-styles with precisely this dowry suggest a fateful con-trick involving the doll. Lubitsch juggles with the ancient tools of the pantomime theatre: crude jokes, blunt sexual innuendo and surprise comedy. The result is a constant contrast between fairytale innocence and revealing comedy.

856MB | 1:03:39 | 704×512 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/155889A7A1D2E3B/Die_Puppe.avi
https://nitroflare.com/view/E91DF827DD920E3/Die_Puppe.idx
https://nitroflare.com/view/DA125CC7E39767D/Die_Puppe.sub

Language(s):Silent
Subtitles: German (intertitles) + English sub/idx

The post Ernst Lubitsch – Die Puppe AKA The Doll (1919) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A teenaged tomboy, tired of being bossed around by her strict guardian, impersonates a man so she can have more fun, but discovers that being the opposite sex isn’t as easy as she had hoped.

Quote:
I Don’t Want To Be A Man is like The Oyster Princess an early example of Ernst Lubitsch’s comic skills, and it also shares The Oyster Princess’ star, the irrepressible comedienne Ossi Oswalda, who in both films lends her name to the characters she plays. Here she plays a wild, rambunctious late teen barely under the control of her guardian/uncle and governess. (In reality it takes a while to work out that this middle-aged couple glaring disapprovingly out the window at Ossi’s mild antics outside are not her parents; they seemed rather coded as such.)

In the early scenes Ossi’s desires are constantly thwarted by the combined opposition of guardian and governess. So, right at the start she’s called inside after being found smoking and playing cards with some young men in the garden, she’s stopped in the middle of having a quick drink in the drawing room, and the troupe of young men serenading her outside – to whom she responds by rather libidinously tossing candies into their open mouths – is quickly driven way.

Of course the naturalness of these desires to cut loose and have a bit of fun are emphasised comically by the way, when Ossi is off the scene, the governess takes her own quick drag of a cigarette and the guardian helps himself to a drink. Still, it leaves Ossi tremulous with pent-up desires and emotions, with no means of release. Everything with her becomes expressed in sudden outbursts of excessive, physical gesture—watch how she wildly tosses her shoes over her shoulder when she takes them off while sitting on the bed, how she leaps on the butler for a piggy-back the minute her guardian has headed off on a business trip, or her wild dancing around her home. The latter two are comic gags as well, reactions on the one hand to her guardian’s plea that she be good to her governess and on the other to his subsequent musings on board his ship of how miserable she will be in his absence.

That these restrictions on Ossi’s behaviour are social ones and not those of this individual household becomes clear when a substitute guardian appears on the scene, the much younger Dr Kersten, who proceeds to institute an even more draconian set of restrictions. And when Ossi responds with an almost despairing “Why wasn’t I born a man?” she’s clearly aware that what she is suffering from here is the social construction of her role as a woman.

Hence, her decision to escape from the strictures of her life through disguising herself as a man. Dressing up as a man about the town is a liberating experience, expressed in the way that she now has the power to look where she will, to take pleasure in such male prerogatives as turning around to stare at women she passes in the street. Still, even if there is an underpinning of serious social commentary to the film, it’s all essentially played for laughs as in her first appearance to the world as a male when she kisses (and completely fools) the governess. And ultimately any leanings there might be here to a radical reconsideration of gender roles are pretty much abandoned in favour of drawing as essentially equivalent the male and female experience of the restrictions placed on them by society. This is played out through the way Ossi can experience social life in the ballroom alternatively as a female and as a male. So, her reaction to being jostled back and forth by a crowd of men and then again by the dancing couples is “These menfolk are so rough.” This is then paralleled when she’s subsequently chased by a crowd of women addressing her as “Sonny” and she cries “These womenfolk are so inconsiderate.”
There are some nice pieces of comic business in the scenes at the ballroom, such as when the need to visit the bathroom comes calling: dressed as a male, Ossi’s attempts to approach the ladies’ are inevitably thwarted, but at the same time she can’t quite bring herself to enter the men’s. It’s at this point she meets up with her substitute guardian Dr Kersten and in her new male persona ends up as his newfound buddy, smoking cigars with him in ideal male camaraderie. There’s plenty of critical opportunity now to tease out a homoerotic subtext, but I suspect what’s happening here is a sign more of Lubitsch’s taste for the absurd (as you also get in The Oyster Princess.)

At any rate, Dr Kersten and Ossi-as-male get increasingly inebriated and when they entwine arms to toast, their lips touch briefly and then return again for a kiss. The light brushing of the lips in a kiss returns in the carriage on their return home, where the standard comedy of mistaken identity plays itself out as the coachman delivers each to the other’s home. But any hints there are of gender fluidity and the crossing of the barriers delineating sexual identity are quickly dispelled as Ossi returns with relief to her female persona (“Being a man is really very exhausting”). They are dispelled too with her final, decisive declaration “I don’t want to be a man” as she ends up in a clinch with Dr Kersten, who has now evolved into a suitable romantic partner. This conclusion may seem disappointingly conservative given the film’s initial promise of a far more radical development of its story, but it’s still a fun, frothy ride on the way here.
By Ian Johnston ©2007 NotComing.com

https://nitro.download/view/4BC8D815F5448DF/i.dont.want.to.be.a.man.1918.720p.bluray.x264-ghouls.mkv

Language(s):German Intertitles
Subtitles:English

The post Ernst Lubitsch – Ich möchte kein Mann sein AKA I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1918) first appeared on Cinema of the World.