“Old black-and-white movies” is a phrase that trips easily off the tongue but, like many common beliefs about silent cinema, it is inaccurate. Color has accompanied motion pictures since the beginning with some of the earliest public screenings featuring hand-colored films in their programs. Because … [Read more...] about Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema
The Fall of the House of Usher
One evening in the mid-1930s Henri Langlois took Georges Franju to Montmartre’s Studio 28, where a few years earlier the first Surrealist films had played to riotous crowds. The program included screenings of Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) and Buñuel and … [Read more...] about The Fall of the House of Usher
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
It’s 1924 and the kindly, well-meaning Mr. West, a director of the YMCA, decides to undertake an international mission to civilize the Bolsheviks whom he has been told are a pack of wild savages who dress up in animal skins and arm themselves with hammers and sickles. For protection, he brings along … [Read more...] about The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
Exit Smiling
In 1926 Beatrice Lillie was a catch, and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio had sufficient line to reel her in. A hit on the British stage, the Toronto-born Lillie had been called “the Charlie Chaplin of London” and hailed for being able not only to “raise her eyebrow and get a laugh” but also “turn … [Read more...] about Exit Smiling
Erotikon
Czech cinema is nearly as old as cinema itself. Yet with one dramatic exception, it did not gain international attention until the Czech New Wave dazzled the world in the 1960s. The exception, 1933’s Ecstase (Ecstasy), was part of an earlier modernist movement encompassing art, literature, and film … [Read more...] about Erotikon
Erotikon
An elegant, cheeky comedy, Erotikon influenced Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game 1939), and much of the later work of Ernst Lubitsch. Its warmly erotic echoes could still be heard decades later in Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). … [Read more...] about Erotikon
The Epic of Everest
The idea of the filmmaker as a modern-day explorer is as old as cinema itself. As soon as the Lumière brothers introduced their lightweight motion picture cameras in 1895, operators began setting out around the globe to produce actuality films. Within 20 years, enterprising filmmakers like Herbert … [Read more...] about The Epic of Everest
Easy Virtue
In Picturegoer of July 1927 a photomontage advertises the coming attraction of Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the recent stage play Easy Virtue with the caption; “Screening a Noel Coward play sounds rather difficult—Mr. Hitchcock has just done it!” In fact all of the trade reviews focused on the … [Read more...] about Easy Virtue