Silent Beauties

This site is dedicated to the preservation of memory of silent films. Although they were quite important in the evolution of cinema, they remain virtually forgotten nowadays. Since the best way to understand the present is taking an attentive look at the past, here you have some movies, pictures, interviews, etc. on silent cinema. Some occasional material on sound films will also be presented. I hope you enjoy getting to know a bit more about the beauty and sheer fun of these golden oldies.

Friday, February 24, 2012

La Glace à Trois Faces - 1927

Country: France

Director: Jean Epstein

Writers: Jean Epstein (adaptation), Paul Morand (novel)

Stars: Jeanne Helbling, Suzy Pierson and Olga Day

Also known as: Der dreiflügelige Spiegel (Germany), El espejo de las tres caras (Spain), Lustro o trzech twarzach (Poland), The Three-Sided Mirror (International - English title)

Filming Locations: L'Isle-Adam, Val-d'Oise, France, Paris, France

Production Co: Films Jean Epstein

Sound Mix: Silent

Color: Black and White

Genres: Drama

Psychological narrative avantgarde film about a wealthy young businessman who consecutively falls in love with a classy English woman (Pearl), a Russian sculptress (Athalia), and a naive working-class girl (Lucie). Overpowered by weakness, the coward sidesteps the obligations that love affairs impose: rather than living up to his dates he takes his sports-car from an ultra-modern garage and speeds to the fashionable beaches of Deauville. On his way, he is fatally hit by a descending swallow. The film is divided into three segments each of which consists of events the woman experienced. These sequences are embedded in scenes in which each of the three women is telling and casting her mind back to her own love affair. Thus, present, future and past merge and cannot be distinguished clearly. The intertwinement of several layers of time experience, recollection, telling and showing have been..

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

La Folie du Docteur Tube - 1915

Country: France

Director: Abel Gance

Writer: Abel Gance

Stars: Albert Dieudonné

Also known as: La follia del dottor Tube (Italy)

Production Co: Le Film d'Art

Runtime: USA: 6 min | USA: 10 min (DVD version)

Sound Mix: Silent

Color: Black and White

Genres: Short

In this early short film from the pioneering Abel Gance, a scientist playing around with some white powder in his lab, begins either changing his body or how he sees the world, I couldn't figure out which. Regardless, this allows Gance to use trick mirrors to distort the picture. Then more people wander in, more powder gets thrown around, more distortion (until 80% of the screen is incomprehensible), until things are finally restored to normal.

La Coquille et le Clergyman - 1928

Country: France

Director: Germaine Dulac

Writer: Antonin Artaud, Germaine Dulac (uncredited)

Stars: Alex Allin, Genica Athanasiou and Lucien Bataille

Also known as: A kagyló és a lelkész (Hungary), El clérigo y la caracola (Argentina),

Muszelka i pastor (Poland), The Seashell and the Clergyman (International - English title)

Filming Locations: Paris, France

Production Co: Délia Film

Sound Mix: Silent

Color: Black and White

Trivia

The British Board of Film Censors banned this film in the UK in 1927, saying, "This film is so obscure as to have no apparent meaning. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable."

At the film's premier, writer Antonin Artaud, who was obviously not pleased by what director Germaine Dulac did to his screenplay, shouted at the screen, calling her a cow.

Genres: Short

Obsessed with a general's woman, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism.

The predecessor of Un Chien Andalou and directed by the lone woman filmmaker of her time, La Coquille et le Clergyman is one of the most celebrated of French avant-garde movies of the '20s, partly because Antonin Artaud wrote the script, partly because the British censor of the time banned it with the legendary words 'If this film has a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable'. Artaud was reputedly unhappy with Dulac's realization of his scenario, and it's true that the story's anti-clericalism (a priest develops a lustful passion that plunges him into bizarre fantasies) is somewhat undermined by the director's determined visual lyricism. But the fragmentation of the narrative and the innovative imagery remain provocative, and the film is of course fascinating testimony to the currents of its time.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Bombs! - 1916

Country: United States

Language: English

Director: Frank Griffin

Stars: Charles Murray, Louise Fazenda and Mary Thurman

Release Date: 8 October 1916 (USA)

Also known as: Bombs and Blunders (USA - working title), Bombs and Brides (USA - alternative title)

Production Co: Keystone Film Company

Sound Mix: Silent

Color: Black and White

Monday, February 20, 2012

No Noise - 1923

Country: United States

Director: Robert F. McGowan

Writers: Hal Roach (story), H.M. Walker (titles)

Stars: Charles A. Bachman, Joe Cobb and Jackie Condon

Release Date: 23 September 1923 (USA)

Production Co: Hal Roach Studios

Sound Mix: Silent

Color: Black and White

Genres: Comedy | Family | Short

"No Noise" is an interesting early silent Our Gang comedy involving the gang visiting Mickey Daniels in the hospital and running wild in said institution. The doctors try to scare them away and.....watch the results and laugh! Although a few of the gags are elaborate for a 1920's comedy (those involving the x-ray machine in particular), the naturalness and likability of the kids make this a winner, as is the case with most of the Gang/Rascals films. Some of the PC killjoys will shudder at seeing the doctors ham it up by scaring the kids while chasing them with saws, but most viewers to have enough sense to lighten up and see this for what it is, for entertainment purposes only and let the PC crowd gag on DVD's of the nauseating Care Bears and Barney the Dinosaur.

It may be surprising that the richly comic device of the Gang on the loose in a hospital was rarely repeated in later Gang/rascals comedies that most viewers are familiar with, but the syrup and Castor oil gag with Mickey Daneils and his nurse was remade with Dickie Moore in "Free Wheeling" (itself a remake of the silent "Tire Trouble" and "One Wild Ride"-Hal Roach and Bob McGowan were really big on self-referencing) and this episode was redone in the later MGM post Little Rascals Our Gang comedy "Men in Fright," with Alfalfa reprising Mickey Daniels' role. Like other early Gang films, it is a truly pleasant way to spend 20 minutes.

The Last of the Mohicans - 1920

Country: United States

Language: English (intertitles)

Directors: Clarence Brown, Maurice Tourneur

Writers: James Fenimore Cooper (novel), Robert Dillon (scenario)

Stars: Wallace Beery, Barbara Bedford and Alan Roscoe

Release Date: 21 November 1920 (USA)

Also known as: Az utolsó mohikán (Hungary), Der letzte Mohikaner (Germany), El último Mohicano (Spain), Le dernier des Mohicans (France), O Último dos Mohicanos (Portugal), Ostatni Mohikanin (Poland)

Filming locations: Big Bear Lake, Big Bear Valley, San Bernardino National Forest, California, USA; Yosemite National Park, California, USA

Production Co: Maurice Tourneur Productions

Sound Mix: Silent

Color: Black and White

Trivia

This film was selected to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress, in 1995.

Genres: Adventure | Drama

As Alice and Cora Munro attempt to find their father, a British officer in the French and Indian War, they are set upon by French soldiers and their cohorts, Huron tribesmen led by the evil Magua. Fighting to rescue the women are Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last of the Mohican tribe, and their white ally, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, known as Hawkeye.

Going Straight - 1916

Country: USA

Language: English

Directors: Chester M. Franklin, Sidney Franklin

Writer: Bernard McConville

Stars: Norma Talmadge, Ralph Lewis and Ninon Fovieri

Release Date: 4 June 1916 (USA)

Also known as: Corruption (undefined), Playmates (USA - working title), Uskollinen nainen (Finland)

Production Co: Fine Arts Film Company

Sound Mix: Silent

Color: Black and White (tinted)

Plot Keywords: Blackmail | Flashback | Safecracking | Rehabilitation

Taglines: Have we killed him?

Genres: Crime | Drama

A man and his wife both have criminal pasts, but have quit crime and are now respectable citizens. One day a member of their old gang shows up and threatens to expose them if they don't help him pull a heist.