Silent Film Tonight: The Docks of New York

This masterpiece by Josef von Sternberg belongs to the last years of silent cinema (1928), the period in which the form, facing extinction, achieved perfection. There's no waste, no excess, in Sternberg's production: the melodramatic plot (a ship's stoker rescues a girl from suicide, marries her, and takes the rap for a minor crime she is accused of) is so familiar and so desultorily presented that it's barely perceptible, and the acting is minimal, confined to ritual gestures endlessly repeated. Sternberg suppresses direct emotional appeal to concentrate on something infinitely fine: a series of minute, discrete moral discoveries and philosophical realignments among his characters. --Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader, 2013

THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK
April 4 (Friday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Directed by Josef von Sternberg
(United States, 1928, 76 minutes, b/w, silent with live musical accompaniment by Mike Schiffer)
Starring George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova

In this 1928 silent masterpiece directed by Josef von Sternberg, a steamboat stoker working on the New York City waterfront saves a suicidal woman who has jumped off a pier into the briny water below. The selfless act changes his life forever.

Read More......

Silent film set in Coney Island at Page Hall tonight

Film researcher Jason Altman shares some interesting details on the Criterion film website about the making of Lonesome (tonight, Page Hall, 7:30 pm, free with live musical accompaniment).

"Universal’s press book admits that (with the exception of some introductory stock footage of the actual Coney Island, where the film is set) Lonesome was actually shot at 'Venice [California], the Coney Island of the Pacific Coast.'”

"The Venice midway did not have a roller coaster with parallel tracks, which Fejos needed in order to shoot the key scene in the film where Jim and Mary are separated. So one minute the pair are in the arcade in Venice, and the next they get on the Jack Rabbit Racer, which was actually located at a Long Beach amusement park."

"Because cameraman Gilbert Warrenton had to photograph the roller coaster scenes at night, he used the first car of the ride to carry not only a camera but also lights, along with the heavy batteries that powered them. That amount of weight at the front end of the train, as Warrenton told film historian Kevin Brownlow, caused the wheels to repeatedly leave the tracks and come crashing back down."

Read More......