A Silent Film Speaks Loudly

Read Amy Biancolli's article about the rediscovered and restored African American silent film classic, Within Our Gates, to be screened tonight at Page Hall at 7:30:

"Within Our Gates" was made almost a century ago, but its message still trembles with urgency. All people are equal. All races are human. All children deserve a good education, and all parents deserve a hope and a chance.

None of that should classify as revolutionary, should it? None of it should need to be said. And yet it's impossible to watch Oscar Micheaux's germinal work — the earliest surviving feature by an African-American filmmaker — without finding immediate and manifest parallels with issues still facing the nation.

Read more:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Early-work-of-black-cinema-to-be-screened-at-10938670.php

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Silent Film with Live Piano Tonight!

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY [MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG]
September 27 (Friday)
 Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Robert Siodmak
(Germany, 1930, 74 minutes, b/w, silent with live piano accompaniment by Mike Schiffer)

The flirtations of a summer Sunday at the beach in Weimar Germany provide the principal content of a film that helped launch the careers of some of 20th century Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers, including Robert Siodmak (THE KILLERS), Billy Wilder (SUNSET BOULEVARD), Fred Zinnemann (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY), horror movie screenwriter Curt Siodmak (THE WOLFMAN), and B-movie king Edgar G. Ulmer (DETOUR). Blending documentary footage and fictional storytelling, the film features the camera work of Eugen Schüfftan, better known for Fritz Lang’s spectacular METROPOLIS (1927)

A review in The Believer by Jessica Winter, former senior editor of Oprah's O. magazine:

The German silent film People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1930) bills itself as “a film without actors.” But it’s not without stars—future stars, that is, of the behind-the-camera variety. Billy Wilder, who wrote the spare screenplay, would become one of the preeminent writer-directors of midcentury Hollywood: he made Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard and, in the space of just over one glorious year, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. The codirectors were Robert Siodmak—who later helmed the sharp Burt Lancaster noirs The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949)—and Edgar G. Ulmer, whose eclectic, super-low-budget résumé would eventually span melodramas, musicals, horror, and the grimy noir masterpiece Detour (1945). The assistant cinematographer was Fred Zinnemann, future director of High Noon (1952) and From Here to Eternity (1953). You can trace the DNA of a golden age in American cinema back to this quasi-documentary snapshot of a weekend in Berlin circa 1930.

More:  http://www.believermag.com/issues/201103/?read=dvd_winter

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Destiny (1921)-- silent film with live piano tomorrow

Destiny, a 1921 German silent film, will be screened on Friday night at Page Hall-- with LIVE MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT by jazz pianist Mike Schiffer.

The film had a profound affect on young filmmakers of its time, including Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock.

Luis Bunuel said, "When I saw Destiny, I suddenly knew that I wanted too make movies. It wasn’t the three stories themselves that moved me so much, but the main episode – the arrival of the man in the black hat (whom I instantly recognised as Death) in the Flemish village – and the scene in the cemetery. Something about this film spoke to something deep in me; it clarified my life and my vision of the world."

Read more:  http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/cteq/destiny/

Our film series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#destiny

 

Picture: Bernhard Goetzke as Death.

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NYT's Dave Kehr reviews Lonesome

The rediscovered silent film treasure, Lonesome, which will be screened free at Page Hall 7:30pm, 9/21, with live musical accompaniment, is reviewed by silent film enthusiast Dave Kehr in the New York Times:

“Lonesome” came along at a time of great creative ferment in the film world, when the Germans, led by F. W Murnau, were developing the possibilities of long takes and elaborate camera movements (Mordaunt Hall, the film critic for The New York Times, reviewed “Lonesome” in the same Oct. 7, 1928, column in which he covered Murnau’s now lost American film "Four Devils"; the Soviets were extending the possibilities of cutting to new expressive heights in films like Sergei Eisenstein’s "October"; and the French, led by Abel Gance and Jean Epstein, were exploring the superimposition of images, among other techniques, to create a loosely defined school of cinematic Impressionism.

 

“Lonesome” incorporates all of these techniques — Fejos was clearly a voracious and discerning filmgoer — at the same time it embraces the latest technology. Although completed as a silent and briefly released as one, “Lonesome” was recalled and refitted with three dialogue sequences, in addition to an unusually dense synchronized music and sound effects track.

 

More.

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"An incredibly fluid film...."

Shawn Stone of Metroland reviews the silent film Lonesome (1928), which kicks off our film series  on Friday, September 21st.

Lonesome was suggested to us by our upcoming visitor, film critic J. Hoberman, senior critic of the Village Voice for almost a quarter century, who appears in Albany on December 7th.

From Shawn Stone's review:

"Lonesome, which was made on location in New York City (and on the Universal lot) in 1928, is the simple story of a couple of working-class young people who find each other at Coney Island, fall in love over an afternoon and evening, and then lose each other in the great mass of New Yorkers at play. Until . . .

"It’s an incredibly fluid film: the camera is constantly (but not distractingly) moving, tracking the lives of these two as they go about their day. We meet them before they meet each other; we know that they will meet each other (why else would the camera be following them so closely), but director Paul Fejos’ storytelling is so sophisticated that we are apt to miss a rather obvious point about Mary (Barbara Kent) and Jim (Glenn Tryon) that is right in front of us—and them. And the fact that Mary and Jim and the audience miss this point binds viewers even closer to the story."

More.

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Silent Film, "Bed and Sofa," Friday April 20, 7:30, Page Hall

"Liuda, a bored housewife who could not be more unlike the prototypical Bolshevik “New Woman,” lives in a one-room basement apartment on Third Meshchanskaia Street (the literal translation of the film’s original title), a petty-bourgeois neighborhood in Moscow. She spends her days idly, mainly reading magazines, notably the popular movie fan magazine Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran). Her husband, Kolia, is a charming and good-natured but dictatorial and egocentric stonemason."

"The couple is soon joined by Kolia’s old war buddy, Volodia, a printer who cannot find an apartment in Moscow due to the severe housing shortage that was still a major social problem ten years after the revolution. Liuda is quite understandably annoyed by the addition of yet another person to their cramped apartment; of course she has not been consulted. Yet Volodia, ingratiating and helpful, quickly wins her over by proving the perfect lodger. The sexual tension between Liuda and Volodia is palpable from the beginning, so when Kolia is called to a job out of town, it is scarcely surprising that Volodia takes advantage of the opportunity to woo Liuda openly."

Read more of the article on filmreference.com by Denise J. Youngblood, Professor of Russian and Soviet History at the University of Vermont.

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Silent Movie "Faust" on Friday

From Roger Ebert's 2005 reappraisal of Faust, which will be screened Friday 4/13 at 7:30PM in Page Hall:

"The greatest master of horror in the silent era was a cheerful man, much loved by his collaborators, even though they might lose consciousness from time to time [from asphyxiation] while enveloped in clouds of steam or surrounded by tongues of flame. F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) made two of the greatest films of the supernatural, Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), both voted among the best horror films of all time on the Internet Movie Database: Faust surprisingly in fourth place, just ahead of The Shining, Jaws and Alien.

More.

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Mary Pickford: The Child-Woman

Watch a 2-minute video featuring America's first movie star "America's Sweetheart," silent actress Mary Pickford (a Canadian actually), who rose to fame portraying little girls well into her thirties.

As the YouTube poster notes, over-sized sets were built to accentuate her already petite frame in order to make her look as childlike as possible.

At the age of 26, she portrays both child and woman in the 1919 feature, Daddy-Long-Legs, to be screened this Friday, March 30, 7:30PM at Page Hall, University at Albany downtown. Free as always.

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Peter Bogdanovich on "Daddy-Long-Legs"

Major Hollywood director, critic and son of Kingston, NY, Peter Bogdanovich talks about

Daddy-Long-Legs, the 1919 silent film that will be screen this Friday, March 30th, 7:30PM at Page Hall, in a piece that appeared in IndieWire, May 11, 2011:

"Neilan’s easy, casual grace, his daring, his ability to evoke extraordinarily simple yet complex reactions, his flair for human comedy, is apparent throughout. And for those who ever wondered if Mary Pickford was just a goody-two-shoes playing one childlike note, this single film—-of the scores of good ones she starred in between 1909 and 1933-–would blow that uninformed misconception away. She was brilliantly expressive, absolutely real, equally on the money at every second in comedy, drama and all points between. You want to see good modern movie acting, check out Mary Pickford in Daddy-Long-Legs."

More on IndieWire.

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Electric Edwardians, This Friday at Page Hall

"Discovered in the basement of a photographer's shop in Blackburn, England, the Mitchell and Kenyon collection was an astounding find: more than 800 reels of camera negative from 1900 to 1913, packed in two sealed barrels that kept the films nearly perfectly preserved. Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon were itinerant showmen who traveled through the north of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, taking shots of local events and then presenting them as programs in local theaters, which the locals would attend in the reasonable hope of seeing themselves on screen, through a medium that was still astonishing and new."

Read more of Dave Kehr's review of Electric Edwardians in the New York Times.

The silent film compilation with modern soundtrack will be screened this Friday, March 2nd, in Page Hall (and take note of the fact that we are back in Page Hall).

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The Artist(s): Classic Silent Film Series

The New York State Writers Institute is pleased (possibly even smug) to announce that the next five films in the Classic Film Series will be rediscovered masterpieces of the SILENT CINEMA.

We also wish to note that (in a move that demonstrates our remarkable ability to anticipate public taste in cinema, or maybe just plain luck) the films for our silent film series were selected in October 2011, well in advance of any Oscar buzz for The Artist.

Films will include a compilation of some of the very first silent films ever made, Electric Edwardians on 3/2, Mary Pickford's Daddy-Long-Legs on 3/30, F. W. Murnau's Faust on 4/13, the pioneering Soviet satire Bed and Sofa on 4/20, and the Swedish sex comedy, Erotikon on 4/27.

Picture: Erotikon.

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Hello Chatter, My Old Friend

Our friend Maureen Dowd invokes Virginia Woolf and philosopher Max Picard in her discussion of the pleasures of silence and her review of the new silent film, The Artist, by French writer and director Michel Hazanavicius.

"As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: 'Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,' once as natural as the sky and air.

As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.

There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the 'cotton wool of daily life.'"

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