More on Dovzhenko's "Earth"

The LA blog Film Journey has a short piece on a UK release of a restored version of Dovzhenko's Earth featuring side-by-side comparison of a few shots with the dark, grainy, indistinct Kino DVD we viewed in class. It gives you a little bit of a sense of how the film should look. It's always evident that Dovzhenko intends to take advantage of the luminosity of cinematic images.
  You can view  a clip  on the Mr. Bongo site here.
You can see in this comparison that the Kino version crops the image, too, which may explain why characters' heads were sometimes out of frame. The article also says the the version we saw is over-cranked, which may explain why some characters' movements are a little too fast and jerky and may threaten to verge on comedy. I would really love to see this release.
If anyone knows how to get at this version, please let me know.

Dziga Vertov - Man with a Movie Camera

Almost unique among documentary films in its complexity and influence.

Dovzhenko - Earth

An unusually beautiful film - very influential among filmmakers and artists, though not much known among the general public.

Eisenstein - Battleship Potemkin

The Birth of Soviet Cinema - Part One

The Birth of Soviet Cinema (as seen in class), now available on YouTube, due to my extraordinary efforts.

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City - Walter Ruttmann, 1927

Secrets of a Soul - G. W. Pabst, 1926

Pabst is known especially for an extraordinarily fluid and vivid realism. In this film, undertaken with the participation of two members of Freud's psychoanalytic circle, he seizes the opportunity to create a symbolic visual language of dreams, memories, and fantasies.

Pandora's Box - G. W. Pabst, 1929

This film from 1929 is still radiant, beautiful, fresh, and deeply disturbing.

The Last Laugh - F. W. Murnau, 1924

Nosferatu - F. W. Murnau, 1922

The first of 13 parts. YouTube also has the complete film in one post, but the quality of this version is somewhat better.

From Siegfried (The Nibelungen) - Fritz Lang, 1922

The celebrated scene in which Siegfried slays the dragon. Bathing in its blood, he becomes invincible--except for one tiny patch on his shoulderblade where the blood did not reach. It is there that he is ultimately struck by a spear and killed.

The Golem (1920)

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

Serials: Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires, 1915 - Part Two: The Ring That Kills

Serials kept the cinema audience returning from week to week to see how an exciting story developed and turned out, in 10-15-minute installments. "Les Vampires" is one of the most successful examples in film history. (The "vampires" of the title are a criminal gang, not the vampires of Dracula, Twilight, or True Blood.)

The conventions are borrowed from 19th-century stage melodrama (as in Griffith's 2-reelers): increasingly bizarre and arcane ways to endanger the heroes and the innocent, cliff-hangers that pose apparently inescapable threats, conspiracies that draw stark lines between good and evil, depravity and innocence.

The posters for Feuillade's serials, including Fantomas and Judex, are a major contribution to French and international popular art in the early 20th-century, and are quoted in the work of Braque, Picasso, and Margritte.

Feuillade was criticized for making his criminal villains appear glamorous. He tried a serial focused on a police detective, but the villains continued to be more interesting than the good guys--another great cinematic tradition.

The figure in bat costume in this episode is said to have inspired Bob Kane to create the Bat-Man.