silent movies
graham.rickson
F Percy Smith was a maverick film-maker whose most important work was created in a house in suburban Southgate, North London. Born in Islington in 1880, he joined the Quekett Microscopical Club as a teenager, all the better to pursue a healthy interest in “those members of the animal kingdom which have been for one reason or another neglected.” Initially, Smith used his microscope to create exquisite glass slides, moving into film making at the behest of Charles Urban, the influential producer of 1903’s still terrifying Cheese Mites short.Several of Smith’s early films feature on this BFI Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.There is no expressionist horror like 1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens nor intense romantic drama akin to Murnau’s first American film, 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Instead, Read more ...
David Nice
From Hollywood in 1928 back to Petrograd in 1917 and forward again, the fortunes of Emil Jannings' General Sergius Alexander encapsulate the ambivalence of Austrian-American Josef von Sternberg's silent masterpiece. Our protagonist seems heartless and complacent at the beginning of the central flashback, but loves his country; a smouldering-eyed revolutionary girl (Evelyn Brent), persuaded of his patriotism, seems ultimately happy to become his sex-slave; and her boyfriend (William Powell), head of the Kiev Imperial Theatre entertaining the troops as an actor, is later free as movie mogul to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Asquith didn’t call the shots on the silent movie that launched his distinguished directorial career, but the screenplay he co-wrote with JOC Orton included elaborate scenarist notes that told his designated co-director, AV Bramble, exactly what he intended. It was a gamble that paid off – 1927’s Shooting Stars proved a dazzling combination of tragicomedy and early docudrama, its subject being life in a film studio (Cricklewood in North London).The essays that accompany the British Film Institute’s dual-format release of the restored film emphasise that it Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 2007, a tiny British theatre company called 1927 staged their first ever show at the Edinburgh Fringe – the darkly reimagined collection of fairytales and fables Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Now, almost a decade on, they are back where it all began – not at the Fringe but the Edinburgh International Festival, with their acclaimed Komische Oper production of The Magic Flute.If you’ve seen any of 1927’s recent theatre work – The Animals and Children Took to the Streets or Golem – you’ll be familiar with an aesthetic that blends live action and animation to create dystopian worlds Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Associates is not the title of a new Scandi crime drama, though in dance world terms we’re perhaps approaching that level of Event. Associates are what Sadler’s Wells, London’s dance powerhouse, calls the selected band of dancemakers it deems serioulsy interesting, and worth co-commissioning. Last night’s show featured the work of three superficially rather different Associates, with premières from hip-hop maestra Kate Prince and provocative Israeli Hofesh Shechter, and a restaged duet from the back catalogue of cerebral Canadian Crystal Pite. With the kind of serendipity which must Read more ...
David Nice
If you have trouble grasping all the plot-lines of Fritz Lang’s 1928 silent thriller, fear not: they’re chimerical, existing only to display all the accoutrements of a spy-movie genre which Lang is credited with having launched. All paths lead to the sinister Lenin-Trotsky visage of master-spy Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, slickly transformed from his villainous roles in the Doctor Mabuse films and Metropolis). The essence is a love-triangle between him, the infinitely various Sonja Barnikowa of Gerda Maurus, Russian exile at his command, and “No. 326” as played by Willy Fritsch, who brushes up Read more ...
graham.rickson
So much of Fritz Lang's 1929 silent film Frau im Mond rings true that you're inclined to forgive its shortcomings – notably a protracted, slow first act which takes far too long to set the plot in motion. Which involves brooding engineer Helius (an intense Willy Fritsch) whose space programme is hijacked by a sinister, cigar-smoking cabal intent on plundering gold reserves located on the moon's dark side. Lang's slow opening does have some choice moments – there's an entertaining robbery in the back of a car, and the film's oleaginous baddie (Fritz Rasp) reveals his colours in style. There's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The forces of death and life come up against each other in the strange, somehow impressive Slovenian war drama Silent Sonata. I say “Slovenian” only because director Janez Burger hails from there, and that’s where some of the filming took place (the rest was in Ireland, which was the major, but not the only European co-producer of the film), but the cast and crew are markedly international. And though we can see it’s a war situation loosely based on the former Yugoslavia, there’s no hint at what corner of that conflict it’s refering to.There’s a risk with such projects that the result becomes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.As one of the extras on this new edition makes clear, the path which led to Wellman helming the film was collaborative and needed to be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Common sense indicates it’s a rare film which retains the impact it had on first exposure. Films can often reveal new depths and fresh detail with repeated viewing, but that initial effect is tough to duplicate. This new release of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens actually captures the thrill of the first-time experience. Partly, that’s due to the extraordinary restoration. It’s also because experiencing the film in the cinema is utterly unlike seeing it at home.Nosferatu should be experienced before a screen in darkness, with the film flooding your senses. It is a powerful, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Cinema's unrivalled silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) was influenced by Arthur Rackham's illustrations and by Chinese and Indonesian puppet theatre. Like her fellow German filmmaker Fritz Lang, she must have appreciated the intricacy and spite in Rackham's pictures. Those qualities abound in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surving animated feature and, at 65 minutes, the longest film Reininger made.It's a near-avant garde pastiche of Arabian Nights stories, primarily The Ebony Horse and the 18th-century addition Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp. Handsome Achmed is Read more ...