Plot/Description: from IMDB
This documentary tells of the struggles during the Spanish Civil War. It deals with the war at different levels: from the political level, at the ground military level focusing on battles in Madrid and the road from Madrid to Valencia, and at the support level. With the latter, a key project was building an irrigation system for an agricultural field near Fuentedueña so that food could be grown to feed the soldiers.Read More »
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Four-generation story-saga dealing with the decline of a middle-class Lübeck family.
The first adaptation of a Thomas Mann book was also Gerhard Lamprecht’s first major film.Read More »
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The Zuiderzee Works episode of We Are Building was elaborated to the much longer film Zuiderzee by Joris Ivens in 1930. In 1934 Ivens used the same material, and additional footage, to make another version: New Earth. This time the film got a political message, and the editing became more compact and stronger, sustained by the stirring Music of Hanns Eisler. After the part on the reclamation and the closing of the dyke the film continues with images of the economic crisis and the poverty among labourers. Ivens opposes this with the speculation on the market: those who helped with the reclamation of new land for agriculture are now unemployed and starving, while grain is dumped at see to keep the prices up. The closing of the dyke is still one of the strongest editing sequences in the films of Joris Ivens.Read More »
An industrial film which shows the operations inside the Philips Radio plant: In a mêlée of activity, glassblowers make delicate glass bulbs. Machinery assists the bulb manufacture. A virtuoso glassblower begins a more complex tube used in radio broadcasting; it is then turned, fired, and sculpted. Conveyors carry partially completed units. Workers perform their various specific assembly-line tasks. Cases are manufactured and machined, wire harnesses are assembled, loudspeakers are produced. As radios near completion, they are run through a series of tests. Engineers and draughtsmen define future developments. In a closing stop-motion sequence, in a style reminiscent of Norman McLaren, a group of loudspeakers performs a playful dance. The film overall is a poetic depiction of an industrial process.Read More »
The musician Wolo is in love with the beautiful peasant girl Anjuta. She is forced, by her stepmother who runs a speakeasy, to dance for the drunken guests of the tavern. Restored by The Swedish Film Institute in 2016.
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A first preservation of Mauritz Stiller’s Balettprimadonnan was carried out in 1994, from a fragment of a tinted and toned nitrate print with Spanish intertitles found in Zaragoza, Spain. In 2015, the Filmoteca Espanola in Madrid identified a second fragment with Spanish intertitles of the film in its collections, originating from the same nitrate print, meaning that approximately half of the film has survived.Read More »
Nana (1926)
When the vivacious and beautiful Nana bombs at the Théâtre des Variétés, she embarks on the life of a courtesan, using her allure and charisma to entice and pleasure men.Read More »
A chivalrous British officer takes the blame for his cousin’s embezzlement and journeys to the American West to start a new life on a cattle ranch.Read More »
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Despite the fact that, contrary to Bettauer’s book, the film is more a comedy rather than a real plea against antisemitism, and that it includes pretty negative archetypes against Jews, screenings of the film were actually subject to disturbances by NSDAP members. Furthermore Bettauer, who had not approved the changes made by Brelauer, was assassinated a few months later by a Nazi who, although accused as an “assassin”, had to spend only a few months in various mental hospitals and was released in 1927 without further requirements.Read More »
Yay! Another Danish silent melodrama. Actually, this is a particularly superior example. The Danish Film Institute’s website, from which this copy comes, descrbes it thusly:
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A wealthy young man, Edgar, sees a shopgirl, Ellen, and is immediately attracted to her. He buys her flowers. They meet next Sunday and, presumably, often thereafter. Three months later Ellen is pregnant. The couple decide to marry, and Edgar tells his mother. His father convinces him not to marry Ellen and sends him away to visit friends in the country. The daughter of the family he visits, Lily, gets him to write to Ellen when she finds out about her. Edgar’s fahter, however, has convinced Ellen’s former employer, to whom the letters have been sent, to turn them over to him. When Edgar gets no reply from Ellen, he secretly returns to the city. Read More »