Thursday, February 9, 2012
Pandora's Box - G. W. Pabst, 1929
This film from 1929 is still radiant, beautiful, fresh, and deeply disturbing.
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.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
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.
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