A reminder, if needed, of how rigorous the film-maker can be (even more so than the theatre director, the musician, the novelist, no matter how unlikely the nature of his medium may make that seem). Moliere’s words are necessarily forsaken in an adaptation of his work during the silent era, but no matter for Murnau … Continue reading Tartuffe (1925, F.W. Murnau)
Two more silent Mikio Naruse films, both from 1933. Every-Night Dreams is currently the more acclaimed of this pair, perhaps because it’s story and feel is closer to some of the social realist Hollywood films or melodramas of roughly the same period (albeit while remaining distinctly Japanese). It is a film which attempts to present … Continue reading Apart from You (1933, Mikio Naruse) /Every-Night Dreams (1933, Mikio Naruse)
There was something in the air in the 1930s; in the shadow and under the influence of the Great Depression the great, good and average film-makers dedicated themselves to a cinema that now seems the warmest, most sympathetic and charitable (yet angry and sorrowful) there has been on a wide scale. This cinema, to speak … Continue reading Passing Fancy (1933, Yasujiro Ozu)
In writing about a film like Lang’s one must succumb, for better or worse, to a cliché that has been in existence since shortly after F.W. Murnau released Sunrise, and it became clear that in those celluloid strips containing the look on Janet Gaynor’s face and the way the camera followed her down the frantic … Continue reading Destiny (Der Mude Tod), Fritz Lang, 1921
Directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, written by Curt Siodmak and Billy (or Billie) Wilder, shot by Edgar Schufftan and Fred Zinnemann, all while they were still young Berliners. People on Sunday is an act of democracy from a country about to plunge into the depths of something much darker. It is a … Continue reading People On Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, 1930)
