silent movies
David Kettle
A fat cat who gobbles up everything in sight. A king who tests his wife’s fidelity with increasingly horrific trials. A man whose flatmate is Poverty. It’s hard to ignore the scathing contemporary resonances in theatre company 1927’s sly, witty new Roots, getting its first European performances at the Edinburgh International Festival.The 1927 team cut their teeth in Edinburgh, way back in 2007 at the Fringe, with the gleefully gruesome Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a succession of miniature tableaux telling of devilish deeds and worrysome characters. Since then, they’ve gone on to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Haley Fohr’s disquiet at the “wildly outmoded” sexual politics of this notorious 1923 Wilde adaptation led her to cut its intertitles, relying only on sometimes delirious imagery and her throbbing live score. The inherent misogyny of the story of Herod’s step-daughter erotically dancing to gain John the Baptist’s head is, though, already undercut by Alla Nazimova’s bizarrely beautiful version. The Jewish-Russian émigré was a major Broadway and Hollywood star when her uncompromising, ruinously expensive vision for Salomé, and the scandal of her fake marriage to its director Charles Bryant, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself. But it goes further, too, to achieve something that's close to a meditation on history itself, on time, on the organic process of development and decay. In the 21-minute interview that is the main extra on this Second Run release, Morrison calls it a “window into a time that’s gone”, his phrase capturing nicely the film’s treatment of the four decades or so of North Read more ...
David Nice
Let's face it, Robert "Cabinet of Dr Caligari" Wiene's 1926 film loosely based on Strauss and Hofmannsthal's 1911 "comedy for music" is a mostly inartistic ramble. Historically, though, it proves fascinating. The composer mostly left it to Otto Singer and Carl Alwin to cut and paste large chunks of his opera, adding four old pieces and one new one - a major contribution to the art of through-composed scoring for silent film (Shostakovich's wholly original New Babylon music came three years later). Strauss's "house poet" saw the chance to shed new light on fascinating characters and to Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth. A black-and-white silent movie about the silent era itself, starring Dujardin alongside Hazanavicius's wife and frequent collaborator Bérénice Bejo, The Artist Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making Read more ...
graham.rickson
Director Alex Barrett’s wordless London Symphony is a conscious throwback to the silent "city symphonies" of the 1920s, specifically Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin - Symphony of a Great City. You’re also reminded of Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City and Patrick Keillor’s discursive Robinson trilogy, though these feature narrators.Mostly monochrome and made in close collaboration with composer James McWilliam, London Symphony grew out of a silent short about Hungerford Bridge. Just a little longer than an hour, it’s divided into four themed movements, in Barrett’s words “an optimistic Read more ...
Darius Battiwalla, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester review - improvisation extraordinaire
Robert Beale
Organ improvisation is a remarkable art, prized in French musical culture particularly, and there was something highly appropriate in the choice of The Phantom of the Opera – a screening of the 1925 silent film with live accompaniment on the RNCM concert hall organ by Darius Battiwalla – as part of the "French Connections" year-long festival at the Manchester conservatoire.The story is, after all, set in the Paris Opéra, and taken from the 19th century novel by Gaston Leroux. Those who know the Lloyd Webber version will be familiar with the outline of it, but the silent film follows its Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The German director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is best known for the insouciant screwball comedies he made in Hollywood. Many who haven’t seen his films will have heard of “the Lubitsch Touch” – at its most basic, his winking way of signifying sexual activity was afoot without breaking the censorious Production Code. A form of visual evasiveness, it reminds us Lubitsch was the slyest of sophisticates.The six films included on Masters of Cinema’s Lubitsch in Berlin are packed with moments of deftness that seldom require the imprimatur of sex. Having said that, the comedy Ich möchte kein Mann Read more ...
David Nice
Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come to hearing the massive score composed by Austrian-born Edmund Meisel for the greatest of the master's 1920s films. It was intended for large-scale screenings of October in Berlin and Moscow, which never took place in the expected format. Bernd Thewes' reconstruction plays its essential part in a giddying, baroque experience of Eisenstein's Read more ...
theartsdesk
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).AUGUSTThe Odyssey. Director: Jérôme Salle, starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. Jacques Cousteau: le movie. Released 18 AugFinal Portrait. Read more ...
David Nice
"Weary Death" – "Destiny", the English-language title, is weak by comparison – settles in a small German town, an impressive simulation constructed on a back lot of the Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin. He buys a plot in the churchyard, builds himself a dwelling with an impenetrable wall around it and casts his blight over a young betrothed couple, hoping that the young woman can conquer him and bring him respite from his wretched duty.This is the gist of Fritz Lang's early (1921) "German folksong in six verses", but its format allows for three stories-within-a-story casting far and wide in Read more ...