BEST OF WORLD CINEMA | ACCORDING TO MAVI BONCUK
SILENT (1891-1936)
Part 1 (1891-1913)| Part 2 (1914-1919)
Part 3 (1920-1936)
SILENT TO SOUND (1926-1929)
SOUND (1926-2022)
Part 1 (1926-2022)| Part 2 (1930-1959)
Part 3 (1960-1979) Part 4 (1980-1999)
Part 5 (2000-2009) Part 6 (2010-2022)
TURKISH CINEMA
SILENT ERA | [IN PROGRESS ]
SOUND (1933-1999) | SOUND (2000 - 2022)
THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED | 1920 OSCAR MICHEAUX
"In Der Golem, Wegener evokes the legend of the Wandering Jew not only in the context of the Rose Festival sequence, but also through the wording of the Emperor’s decree against the Jews for having “crucified our Lord.” While, in Scholem’s account, Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem (1915) figures the golem as “akind of Wandering Jew, Wegener’s film envisions the messianic Golem as a muscular alternative to Ahasverus. Such a configuration was aligned withthat of Otto Kreisler’s Austrian-Zionist film Teodor Herzl, der Bannerträgerdes jüdischen Volkes (1921), which explicitly presented Herzl as a replacement for the topos of the “Wandering Jew." ( Nicholas Baer Messianic Musclemen Homunculus (1916) and Der Golem (1920) as Zionist Allegories)
THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE | 1921 VICTOR SJÖSTRÖM
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE |1921 REX INGRAM
THE SHEIK | 1921 GEORGE MELFORD
TOL'ABLE DAVID | 1921 HENRY KING
CAMILLE | 1921 RAY C. SMALLWOOD
SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK | 1921 MAX LINDER
LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY | 1921 ALFRED E. GREEN, JACK PICKFORD
LULU | 1923 SEGUNDO DE CHOMÓN
De Chomón’s last directorial effort is also his finest. After all the incredible pioneering work he did throughout the 1900s, especially in the decade’s waning years, his brief resurgence in a different era of movie-making stands out amid his vast filmography. LULU is an eight-minute stop motion animation short of a cute little monkey settling in for the evening before having to confront a burglar. The models are very cute, and the animation relatively smooth. LULU’s world is miniature and restrained. The short has the power of the best stop motion films; there’s an innate sense of the artistry behind the film and an appreciation for all the work that went into it.
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN | 1925 ERNEST LUBITSCH
THE JAZZ SINGER | 1927 ALAN CROSLAND
American musical drama film, the first feature-length motion
picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous
singing and speech (in several isolated sequences). Its release heralded the
commercial ascendance of sound films and effectively marked the end of the
silent film era. It was produced by Warner Bros. with the Vitaphone
sound-on-disc system and features six songs performed by Al Jolson. Based on
the 1925 play of the same title by Samson Raphaelson, the plot was adapted from
his short story "The Day of Atonement".
The film depicts the fictional story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a young man who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. After singing popular tunes in a beer garden, he is punished by his father, a hazzan (cantor), prompting Jakie to run away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer, performing in blackface. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage.
Silent Films of the Sound Era
THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK, JOSEF VON STERNBERG, 1929
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA |1929 DZIGA VERTOV
LIMITE | 1930 MÁRIO PEIXOTO
SALT FOR SVANETIA | 1930 MIKHAIL KALATOZOV
L'AGE D'OR | 1930 LUIS BUÑUEL
THE BIG TRAIL|1930 RAOUL WALSH
À PROPOS DE NICE | 1930 JEAN VIGO
CITY GIRL |1930 F.W. MURNAU
MOROCCO |1930 JOSEF VON STERNBERG (SOUND)
ANIMAL CRACKERS | 1930 VICTOR HEERMAN (SOUND)
THE BLUE ANGEL | 1930 JOSEF VON STERNBERG (SOUND)
ANNA CHRISTIE | 1930 JACQUES FEYDER (SOUND)
THE DAWN PATROL |1930 HOWARD HAWKS (SOUND)
WHOOPIEE! | 1930 THORNTON FREELAND (SOUND)
ANNA CHRISTIE |1930 CLARENCE BROWN (SOUND)
ANOTHER FINE MESS |1930 JAMES PARROTT (SOUND)
WAY FOR A SAILOR | 1930 SAM WOOD (SOUND)
BORDERLINE | 1930 KENNETH MACPHERSON
Produced by the Pool Group in Territet, Switzerland. The
silent film, with English inter-titles, is primarily noted for its handling of the
contentious issue of inter-racial relationships, using avant-garde experimental
film-making techniques, and is today very much part of the curriculum of the
study of modern cinematography.
The film revolves around an inter-racial love
triangle and its effects on the local townsfolk, which features
Paul Robeson, Eslanda Robeson, Bryher and Helga Doorn.
Macpherson was particularly influenced by the cinematic techniques of G.W. Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein, whom he first met in 1929. In Borderline, he uses avant-garde, experimental film-making techniques, blending Eisenstein’s montage innovation and Pabst’s psycho-analytical approach, to identify the emotional and psychological states of the film’s characters. These techniques called for unconventional post-production editing, the use of light and shadow, and exaggerated movement on the part of the actors. "Macpherson’s brilliance lies in his ability to photograph small movements as nuanced, meaning-producing gestures".
Deeply upset by its hostile reception,
Macpherson archived his film and withdrew from film directing.
Originally believed to have been lost, but was discovered, by chance, in Switzerland in 1983. An original 16mm copy of this film is now held in the Donnell Media Center, New York City Public Library. In 2006, the British Film Institute sponsored the film's restoration by The George Eastman House and eventual DVD release with a soundtrack, composed by Courtney Pine.
THAT NIGHT'S WIFE |1930 YASUJIRÔ OZU
“ One of seven films Ozu made in 1930, this seems at first
to be a prime example of his 'atypical' early silent period, when he
experimented with numerous Hollywood-influenced genres and techniques before
gradually refining the minimalist style and thematic focus of his mature
career.” NB
That Night’s Wife (Sono yo no tsuma), adapted from a story
by the American writer Oscar Schisgall begins in noirish darkness, a man
commits a shocking robbery. But, as we soon learn, this seeming criminal
mastermind is actually a sensitive everyman driven to desperation by the need
to provide for his family. A detective, Kagawa (Togo Yamamoto), tracks the robber
home but agrees to let him stay through the night because his daughter is in
critical condition. It’s a suspenseful setup, but the texture of everyday life,
of mundane objects and activities, is crucial to the story’s emotional power.
Guns are important—early on, we see one in close-up pointed directly at the
camera—but so is the ice pack that soothes the feverish child, a telephone
receiver, a flower in a water glass, a child’s drawings. Unfolding over the
course of one night, Ozu’s film combines suspense with the emotional domestic
drama one associates with the filmmaker’s later masterpieces, and employs
beautifully evocative camera work.
“Few directors have a stronger trademark than Yasujiro Ozu,
who developed one of the most original and distinctive filmmaking styles in
cinema history. But viewers who know Ozu through his delicately heartbreaking
Tokyo Story (1953) and his contemplative portraits of ordinary families may be
astonished by his silent comedies and crime dramas. The man labeled the “most Japanese
of Japanese directors” was deeply influenced by the Hollywood movies he grew up
devouring, including Hal Roach slapstick and proto-noir gangster films. David
Bordwell has called Ozu “almost certainly the most cinephiliac major director
before the New Wave.” As Godard dropped allusions to Hollywood actors and
genres into his films, Ozu hung American movie posters in his sets,
acknowledging his own debt and also suggesting how his characters’ lives have
been infiltrated by Western pop culture.
Born in 1903, Ozu came of age during the Taisho period (1912–1926), a time of rapid modernization and Westernization that was akin in many ways to Germany’s Weimar era: a turbulent and unstable but creatively dynamic interlude preceding the rise of militarism and nationalism that led up to the Second World War. The conflict between traditional Japanese values and imported mores (mirrored in clashing aesthetic influences) was a driving force in early Japanese cinema, nowhere more dazzlingly on display than in Ozu’s jazzy Dragnet Girl (1933)… Ozu directed his first film in 1927 and churned out a series of short comedies for Shochiku in the late twenties, most now lost. With That Night’s Wife he was on the cusp between his emergence and his recognition for early masterpieces like I Was Born, But… (1932). Yet much of Ozu’s signature style is already recognizable, though the film’s frequent tracking shots largely vanished from his mature work. The trademark “tatami shots” are already present, as the camera kneels to be on a level with the characters, and the use of static close-ups of objects or settings for transitions became a key element of his unique approach to continuity.” from an Essayby Imogen Sara Smith
THE BIG HOUSE | 1930 GEORGE W. HILL
The Big House is a 1930 American pre-Code prison drama film
directed by George Hill, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and starring Chester
Morris, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone and Robert Montgomery. The story and
dialogue were written by Frances Marion, who won the Academy Award for Best
Writing Achievement. As one of the first prison movies, it inspired many others
of this genre.
In the early days of sound films, it was common for
Hollywood studios to produce "Foreign Language Versions" of their
films using the same sets, costumes and so on. While many of these versions no
longer exist, the French, Spanish and German-language versions of The Big House
survive, which are entitled Révolte dans la prison, El presidio and Menschen
hinter Gittern. The French and Spanish versions are available with the original
in a triple feature set from the Warner Archives
PEOPLE ON SUNDAY | 1930 ROBERT SIODMANK, CURT SIODMAK, FRED ZINNEMANN, EDGAR G. ULMER
Menschen am Sonntag is a German silent drama film from a
screenplay by Robert and Curt Siodmak. The film follows a group of residents of
Berlin on a summer's day during the interwar period. Hailed as a work of
genius, it is a pivotal film in the development of German cinema and Hollywood.
The film features the talents of Eugen Schüfftan (cinematography), Billy Wilder
(story) and Fred Zinnemann (cinematography assistant).
The film is subtitled "a film without actors" and was filmed on Sundays in the summer of 1929. The actors were amateurs whose day jobs were those that they portrayed in the film—the opening titles inform the audience that these actors have all returned to their normal jobs by the time of the film's release in February 1930. They were part of a collective of young Berliners who wrote and produced the film on a shoestring. This lightly scripted, loosely observational work of New Objectivity became a surprise hit.
People on Sunday is notable for its portrayal of daily life in Berlin before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor and as an early work by writer/director Billy Wilder before he moved to the United States to escape from Hitler's Germany.
The film is the directorial debut of the Siodmak Brothers.[1] The film was co-produced by Moriz Seeler, founder of the Filmstudio 1929 production company and Seymour Nebenzal, cousin to the Siodmaks, whose father Heinrich put up the money.[4] The film began a 30-year collaborative friendship between Nebenzal and Wilder.
In 2005, the Netherlands Film Institute released an updated DVD of the film, restoring some missing scenes and commissioning a new score from Elena Kats-Chernin. ( the version used by the British Film Institute release in 2005.) The Criterion Collection released their edition in 2011, with a score by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and the Elena Kats-Chernin soundtrack as an alternate.
Fot the curious: Prior to the production of the German television series Babylon Berlin, producer Stephan Arndt and director Achim von Borries screened "Menschen am Sontag" for the entire cast and crew to help them better understand life in Berlin under the Weimar Republic, before the Nazi era.
CITY LIGHTS |1931 CHARLES CHAPLIN
FRANKENSTEIN 1931 JAMES WHALE
M |1931 FRITZ LANG
THE PUBLIC ENEMY | 1931 WILLIAM A. WELLMAN
MONKEY BUSINESS | 1931 NORMAN Z. MCLEOD
LITTLE CAESAR | 1931 MERVYN LEROY
LIBERTY FOR US | 1931 RENÉ CLAIR •
THE MILLION | 1931 RENÉ CLAIR
LA CHIENNE | 1931 JEAN RENOIR
THE SMILING LIEUTENANT | 1931 ERNST LUBITSCH
THE FRONT PAGE | 1931 LEWIS MILESTONE
MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM | 1931 LEONTINE SAGAN, CARL FROELICH
PLATINUM BLONDE | 1931 FRANK CAPRA
THE THREEPENNY OPERA | 1931 GEORG WILHELM PABST
DISHONORED | 1931 JOSEF VON STERNBERG
TOKYO CHORUS | 1931 YASUJIRÔ OZU
WATERLOO BRIDGE | 1931 JAMES WHALE
MARIUS | 1931 ALEXANDER KORDA
MATA HARI | 1931 GEORGE FITZMAURICE
COMRADESHIP | 1931 GEORG WILHELM PABST
LIMITE | 1931 MARIO PEIXOTO
TRAFFIC TROUBLES | 1931 BURT GILLETT
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY | 1931 JOSEF VON STERNBERG
KOSHIBEN GAMBARE | 1931 MIKIO NARUSE
END OF THE WORLD | 1931 ABEL GANCE
CITY STREETS | 1931 ROUBEN MAMOULIAN
PARLOR, BEDROOM AND BATH | 1931 EDWARD SEDGWICK •
BERLIN - ALEXANDERPLATZ | 1931 PHIL JUTZI
THE LADY AND THE BEARD | 1931 YASUJIRÔ OZU
DANCE, FOOLS, DANCE | 1931 HARRY BEAUMONT
WHITE ECSTASY | 1931 ARNOLD FANCK
INDISCREET | 1931 LEO MCCAREY
SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK | 1931 ZION MYERS, JULES WHITE
THE CONGRESS DANCES | 1931 ERIK CHARELL
WORKING GIRLS |1931 DOROTHY ARZNER
A SPRAY OF PLUM BLOSSOMS | 1931 BU WANCANG
Starring Ruan Lingyu, Wang Cilong, Lim Cho Cho, and Jin Yan.
It is a loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
The film is one of several collaborations between Bu Wancang and two of the top
Chinese movie stars of the day Ruan Lingyu and the Korean-born Jin Yan and was
produced by the Lianhua Film Company.
The film is noted for its attempted "Westernized
stylings" including its surreal use of decor, as well as women-soldiers
with long hair. The film also had English subtitles, but as some scholars have
noted, since few foreigners watched these films, the subtitles were more to
give off an air of the West rather than to serve any real purpose
A woman with bobbed hair wears a form-fitting qípáo dress,
holds an evening bag, and raises her hand in greeting as she alights from an
airplane. This arresting image was used to advertise British American Tobacco
Company cigarettes and illustrates the emergence of Shanghai’s “modern woman.”
By the 1930s, the image of the Chinese woman as subservient, with bound feet
balancing elaborately styled hair, had been replaced by her 20th century
version: chic, mobile, modern—code at the time for Western.
A center of international trade and commerce since the
mid-19th century, Shanghai was divided into separate districts for English,
American, French, Russian, and Chinese communities. By the 1930s, the port city
was infiltrated by Western culture and technologies. Huge department stores
opened on Nanjing Road, Chinese men sported Western-style suits, and
automobiles and electric trams thronged the streets. Chinese advertising
promoted a Western lifestyle, with images of stylish Chinese women playing
golf, listening to gramophones, and dancing together. Nightlife in Shanghai
catered to the large international population, with nightclubs, restaurants,
and, inevitably, movie theaters.
The first public viewing of a film in China took place in a
Shanghai teahouse in 1896. Billed as “electric shadow plays from the West,” the
screening was part of a roster that included magic acts and fireworks.
Originally reliant on Western producers, the first Chinese-made production was
the 1905 filmed swordfight based on the opera The Battle of Mount Dingjun. The
national film industry slowly gained momentum, culminating in the boom years of
the 1920s and 1930s. Nearly half of all films produced in China during the boom
were created in Shanghai, where China’s first movie theater opened in 1908. By
1930, the city was home to 53 movie theaters, showing mainly Chinese-produced
films.
Hollywood had a major influence on the Chinese film
industry. Film critics of the time compared national stars Ruan Lingyu and Jin
Yan to Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino, respectively. Western-style serials
such as The Perils of Pauline attracted large audiences, and homegrown love
stories such as 1931’s The Peach Girl and fallen-women dramas such as 1934’s
Shénnǚ became as popular
as similar films were in the West.
In the years leading up to World War II, and especially
following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, filmmakers had to tailor
their subject matter to the fickle political climate. For example, if a film
advocated Nationalism and opposed the Japanese, it also needed to condemn the
ruling Kuomintang (KMT) government or risk the wrath of the rising Communist
Party (CCP). Famed director Sun Yu, whose films were overtly Nationalist, was
deemed insufficiently anti-KMT and harshly criticized by the Communists, who
finally ended his film career in 1951.
Bu Wancang (1903–1974), on the other hand, survived the
upheavals of the war and its aftermath, directing films into the 1960s. An
original member of the Shanghai cinema scene, Bu worked for several studios
before becoming a major director for Mingxing. In 1931, Bu moved to Mingxing’s
rival, Lianhua, where he directed Love and Duty (1931) and The Peach Girl
(1931), both with actress Ruan Lingyu. However, Bu also ran afoul of politics.
His 1932 film Rendao (Humanity), depicting the great drought that had
devastated Northern China the year before, was criticized by the CCP for not
blaming the natural disaster on the KMT.
As the war with Japan intensified, Bu made several films
with subtle patriotic themes, notably 1939’s Mulan Joins the Army, which became
the most popular film produced in Shanghai during this period. A costume drama,
it depicts the legend of the ancient heroine Mulan who grows up practicing
martial arts. When her country is invaded, she disguises herself as a man and
leads her father’s army to victory. Under the Japanese, Bu was forced to make
several propaganda films for the occupiers and, after the war, was ostracized
by his colleagues for collaboration. He moved to Hong Kong in 1948 and made films
there until his retirement in 1963.
The two stars of A Spray of Plum Blossoms, Ruan Lingyu and
Jin Yang, were as adored as their Western counterparts, Garbo and Valentino.
Ruan was the most popular actress of her day, although her career was cut tragically
short. She first appeared in Bu Wancang’s Husband and Wife in Name (1927) for
Mingxing and later went to work at Lianhua, where she made her best-known film
Shénnǚ (The Goddess). In
a change of pace from her usual roles as the love interest or doomed
prostitute, she plays a comedic part in A Spray of Plum Blossoms, as Jin Yan’s
sister Julia, a modern girl bent on exposing her lover’s infidelity.
In 1933, Ruan appeared on the inaugural cover of Modern
Screen, which was modeled after Western-style fan magazines. Although they
doubtless advanced her career, such publications may also have contributed to
her untimely death. Hounded by the publicity surrounding her failed
relationships, she took her own life at the age of 24. In her suicide note, she
wrote, “Gossip is a fearful thing.” Ruan’s funeral brought thousands of fans
into the streets and inspired several copycat suicides.
A Spray of Plum Blossoms was part of the craze for all
things Western that swept through Shanghai in the early 1930s. Loosely based on
Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, the film features independent female
characters and female-to-male cross-dressing, a device often used in
Shakespeare’s comedic plays. Sylvia, played by Lin Chuchu, is the daughter of a
military general yet behaves more like a heroine from a Western serial. She
spends her days galloping across a rolling, open countryside (called “Canton”
in the film), which stands in for the landscapes of the American West. With
long, unbound hair, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and accompanied by two uniformed
handmaidens, she is a world away from Ruan Lingyu’s character, a sophisticated
city girl sporting bobbed hair and qípáo dresses. Julia is the embodiment of
the Shanghai “modern woman,” arriving in Canton in a borrowed biplane. Although
a country girl, Sylvia is defiant, choosing her outlaw lover over an arranged
match.
Shakespeare was not unknown in China, but the first complete
translation of Hamlet did not appear in print until 1922, followed by Romeo and
Juliet in 1924. In addition to its Western literary source, Plum Blossom’s
intertitles were written in English, perhaps to attract Shanghai’s large
international population to the film or to give it a Western cachet, even
though few people outside Shanghai could read them. In addition, the main
actors’ names are Westernized in the credits, despite the stars’ status as
national treasures in China.
Plum Blossom’s strong, assertive female characters and its
cross-dressing theme reappear in Bu Wancang’s subsequent film Mulan Joins the
Army. Six decades later, Walt Disney Studios brought Bu’s beloved Chinese
heroine to the West when it remade his most successful film as the 1998
animated feature Mulan.
ODNA (ALONE) | 1931 GRIGORI KOZINTSEV AND LEONID TRAUBERG
It was planned as a silent film, but delays permitted the use of sound technology to add a track to it. The main element of the track is Dimitri Shostakovich’s musical accompaniment. (He had also composed the musical accompaniment for The New Babylon.) The music comments on the action, often in a mocking way. Occasionally there are sound effects, and very occasionally, brief lines of dialogue, recorded and added after the filming. The story of a newly graduated Leningrad teacher, (Yelena Kuzmina). She goes furniture shopping with her fiance, Petya, and in a fantasy sequence she imagines teaching a class of neat, obedient city schoolchildren. Instead, she is assigned to work in the Altai mountains in Russian Mongolia, to provide basic education for the youngest children of the shepherds. Upon arrival in the Siberian district, she encounters a dead horse’s skin on display this returns as a motif to emphasize how primitive and in need of education the area is. At first the villagers react with indifference or antagonism, seeing no point in having their children go to school. Oddly enough, the local Soviet official is lazy and also indifferent, leaving her alone with no aid in convincing the villagers to accept her. (This negative depiction of the Soviet official later got the film banned, despite its considerable popularity upon its initial release.) The next-to-last reel of the film, in which the landowner tries to kill Kuzmina, is missing. A restored version of the film accompanied by a reconstruction of the Shostakovich score was released on Dutch and German DVDs in 2007.
EVERY NIGHT DREAMS | 1933 MIKIO NARUSE
1934
1935
LEGONG: DANCE OF THE VIRGINS | 1935 HENRI DE LA FALAISE
One of the last feature films shot using the two-color Technicolor process, and one of the last silent films shot by a major Hollywood studio. It is a drama based on a Balinese native tale, with travelogue elements depicting Balinese culture. Legong and the follow up travelogue drama Kliou, the Killer (considered a lost film) were the last mainstream silent films to be released in the US
It was released by Paramount International and was originally shown only outside the US due to concerns about female nudity in the film and the uproar it would cause. It was fiilmed in Bali, Indonesia.
Henry de La Falaise, Marquis de La Coudraye (born James Henry Le Bailly de La Falaise, February 11, 1898 – April 10, 1972), was a French nobleman, translator, film director, film producer, sometime actor, and war hero who was best known for his high-profile marriages to two leading Hollywood actresses, Gloria Swanson and Constance Bennett. He also served as the U.S. representative for Pathé, the French film studio
1936
MODERN TIMES, CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1936
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