Few films have made an impact on the history of cinema like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin). In 2016 it was ranked the eleventh best film of all time in a Sight and Sound magazine critics poll, one of only a handful of silent-era films to make the … [Read more...] about Battleship Potemkin
Avant-Garde Paris
EMAK-BAKIA Directed by Man Ray, France, 1926 | Print Source Cohen Film Collection Live Musical Accompaniment by Earplay from an Original Score by Nicolas Tzortzis MÉNILMONTANT Directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, France, 1926 | Print Source Cinémathèque française Live Musical Accompaniment by … [Read more...] about Avant-Garde Paris
Au Bonheur des Dames
Soaring camerawork, luminous decor, and stylish montage sequences make Au bonheur des dames (“Ladies’ paradise”) appear strikingly modern, yet it can be seen as an elegy to silent filmmaking. Directed by Julien Duvivier, the film was shot in the autumn of 1929, just as the first French sound films … [Read more...] about Au Bonheur des Dames
Around China with a Movie Camera: A Journey from Beijing to Shanghai (1900–1948)
This program was compiled in 2015 by the British Film Institute National Archive from their collections Excerpts from documentaries, newsreels, travelogues, home movies, and missionary films shot by pros and amateurs alike chart the geography and culture of pre-revolutionary China from the … [Read more...] about Around China with a Movie Camera: A Journey from Beijing to Shanghai (1900–1948)
Animation Rarities, 1917-1928
A MODERN MOTHER GOOSE (Issue #1 of Fleischer Fun Shop series, 1924) KOKO PACKS UP (Directed by Dave Fleischer; Out of the Inkwell Films, 1925) KOKO’S EARTH CONTROL (Directed by Dave Fleischer, Inkwell Studios, 1928) Max Fleischer was a New York cartoonist whose interest in mechanics led to … [Read more...] about Animation Rarities, 1917-1928
Animation Rarities
Animated cartoons were a regular attraction at movie theaters in the silent era, yet they were appreciated for the most part as disposable novelty items of little artistic value. The vast majority of animated films produced in the first 30 years of the 20th century have been lost because of … [Read more...] about Animation Rarities
The Ancient Law
It’s not true, as some recent news articles have it, that Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law) was forgotten, nor was it lost. Highly praised by Lotte Eisner, the grande dame of Weimar cinema criticism, the film has received a fair amount of attention in academic circles ever since a 1984 restoration, … [Read more...] about The Ancient Law
An Inn in Tokyo
For such a professionally modest filmmaker—“I just want to make a tray of good tofu,” is the oft-quoted self-assessment—Yasujiro Ozu generates a surprising amount of critical discord. Is he a neorealist or a formalist? Radical or conservative? The most or least Japanese of Japan’s filmmakers? … [Read more...] about An Inn in Tokyo