The May 5, 1920, headline in the Los Angeles Times for the recurring “Flash” column about Hollywood read, “Blanche Going Abroad.” In the short item, the correspondent bemoaned, in her slightly purple prose: “We shan’t have a single star left in our American firmament if the emigration of our … [Read more...] about The Deadlier Sex
The Curator and the Composer: Creating a New Song for Two Humans
This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans at SFSFF 2011 Behind the film’s artistry, technical innovations, and outsize budget, Sunrise is ultimately the story of two people. A woman from the city takes her summer holiday in a quaint lakeside … [Read more...] about The Curator and the Composer: Creating a New Song for Two Humans
The Crowd
Director King Vidor (1894–1982) had a long and distinguished career in both silent and sound films, but his masterpiece is unquestionably The Crowd. Within the simple framework of the life of an ordinary man trying to make his way in the big city, Vidor created a landmark American film. Vidor … [Read more...] about The Crowd
Covering Dorothy Arzner
This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of Get Your Man at SFSFF 2017 A misplaced scrap of the “A Little from Lots” column in a 1927 edition of Film Daily obscures a review with, among other sundries, a correction in bold type: “A newspaper report to the effect that Dorothy … [Read more...] about Covering Dorothy Arzner
A Cottage on Dartmoor
British director Anthony Asquith is best remembered today for his elegant film adaptations of plays by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Terence Rattigan, and also for the star-studded international melodramas he made at the end of his career, such as The VIPS (1963) and The Yellow … [Read more...] about A Cottage on Dartmoor
Cosmic Voyage
Cinema, as it ages, does not remain merely art and entertainment but also evolves into a panoply of unique cultural qualities—captured time, shared memory, social evidence, cured history sliced for sandwiches, sociopolitical realities fermented into nostalgic headtrips. The range of organic … [Read more...] about Cosmic Voyage
The Color of Silents
This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Inhuman Woman (L'Inhumaine) at A Day of Silents 2015 The moment in 1939 when Dorothy Gale steps out of her monochromatic, tornado-tossed house into Oz’s richly saturated Technicolor world, her jumper transformed from checkered … [Read more...] about The Color of Silents
Coeur Fidèle
Who is Jean Epstein? Historian Tom Gunning tells the academic version of the two-guys-walk-into-a-bar story: two film scholars are at conference. One says to the other, “Why didn’t you mention the influence of Epstein?” The second looks confused. “Do you mean Eisenstein?” Epstein is that other … [Read more...] about Coeur Fidèle