Man With A Movie List

Director: Yevgeni Bauer Year: 1914 Runtime: 0:37 Source:  Youtube The two Yevgeni Bauer films on the list seem to me attempts to distill the essence of deep, psychological Russian romantic novels into short films. Technically, they're very accomplished, particularly in the lighting and mise-en-scene. Each shot seems carefully composed. The story here inverts that of the previous film: instead of a wealthy heiress "corrupted" by her encounters with the working class (although it seems to me she ends in a fair position), here it is a poor laundress who is brought into high society by a prince who is in love with her supposed innocence. She almost immediately becomes entranced by the superficial frivolities of class, spends all of the prince's money and leaves him destitute for another suitor. In both Bauer films, the men act well, but their arcs are so dull and melodramatic that it's hard to stay interested in them.  The women, on the other hand, are fascin...

Director: Yevgeni Bauer Year: 1913 Runtime: 0:48 Source:  Youtube Our first Russian film is a compact tragedy with a lot for us to unpack.  It comes from Yevgeni Bauer, an interesting film pioneer who died a few short months before the October Revolution.  And indeed, this is a rare glimpse into late Tsarist society.  It follows a young, depressed heiress Vera who feels without purpose.  The early scenes showing her internal isolation are the best; Bauer uses lighting expertly to highlight her feelings of loneliness.  Inspired by her mother, she gets excited by philanthropy, but is deceived by a crudely stereotypical drunkard and wastrel Maksim, who steals from and incompetently kidnaps her.  Not letting herself be taken advantage of, she murders him in his stupor. Later, she is pursued by a courteous, doting prince.  She falls for him quickly, but realizes she can't connect with him emotionally, because she can't help but see Maksim when s...

Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1913 Runtime: 0:09 Source:  Youtube This one's a trifle, but it has charm.  A tiny short with no dialogue, it follows the young boy Bout-de-Zan as he steals a small elephant from the circus, and then gets into a few harmless, slapstick-filled mishaps with it.  It's too short for any coherent plot or resolution, and I suppose that's not the point anyway.  The elephant's cute, and it's a charming and harmless bit of children's entertainment, but on a personal note, it's hard to overcome the melancholy I feel when looking at circus animals. There's not much else to report here, but a tiny bit of research uncovers that this was a part of a series of Feuillade shorts starring the young urchin Bout-de-Zan.  (Although his means are unclear: he looks like Chaplin's Tramp, but it does appear that he lives in a nice home with patient, well-to-do parents.)  The Bout-de-Zan series succeeds an earlier series starring a simil...

Director: Lois Weber (with Phillips Smalley) Year: 1913 Runtime: 0:10 Source: Youtube Lois Weber is a fascinating, largely forgotten figure in the history of cinema.  Not only is she an early female filmmaker, with an unusual auteur-level control over her works, but for a short few years she held a surprising amount of sway in the burgeoning industry.  In 1916, she was Universal Studio's highest paid director, period.  During her heyday she made 10 movies a year, but the vast majority of her films are lost.  Unfortunately, this brief short is likely her only appearance on the list, but it highlights her technical innovations. Weber probably didn't invent the split screen, but she used it extremely effectively in this tight little domestic thriller.  The real highlight is a triangular three-way split, in which we see a distressed wife, played by Weber herself, calling her husband at work, while a burglar is about to cut the phone line with a knife.  A...

Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1913 Runtime: 5 films with a total of 5:37:00 Source:  Bluray Contemporary film critics frequently strive to overturn the perceived dominance of "high art" in our cultural discourse.  This has led to the championing of directors as different as Takashi Miike and Paul Verhoeven, whose work may have been previously dismissed as genre fiction.  Perhaps there is no better time for a critical re-appraisal of the great crime serials of the French director Louis Feuillade.  Feuillade has always had a certain reputation among cinephiles, but rarely is he placed on the same level as his contemporaries Griffith, Lang, and Murnau.  Feuillade was an extremely prolific director who attempted on multiple occasions to promote various high art philosophies in his work, but today he is best known for his more populist works, such as Fantômas and Les Vampires (although the first of these was a critical success). The titular villain of Fa...

Director: Harold M. Shaw Year: 1912 Runtime: 0:14 Source: Youtube This is a great short film to watch if you're spending a hot summer in the city.  It was made by a little-known director as something of a PSA about the Fresh Air Fund, a non-profit which let inner-city children vacation in the countryside. (It's still going strong today!) A poor young newsie with an endearingly tattered cap gets to take a break from child labor and parental abuse, and join a group of kids for one day in the great outdoors. In many ways this would be the prototype of the heartwarming Pixar short, if the ending wasn't so poignant and bittersweet.  It's such a simple little film, but one that's absolutely worth 14 minutes of your life.

Director: Urban Gad Year: 1910 Runtime: 0:38 Source: Youtube The list begins with this short Danish work, the first film starring Asta Nielsen, who (according to Wikipedia) would become one of the first international movie stars, well known for playing troubled yet sympathetic women.  (It was directed by her first husband.) The scene that kick-started that fame, and also the sole reason this movie is still remembered, occurs late in the movie, when her character Magda is at the bottom of the titular abyss.  Dancing on stage for money with her bohemian lover, she gives an arresting performance that was extremely risque at the time.  Watching it today, it's still extremely mesmerizing in its understatedness; she carries the whole thing with ever-so-slight movements of her hips, refusing to look at the man she's pretended to tie up with a rope.  It's a powerful cinematic moment, and absolutely worth seeing. However, the film has other moments that stick out to ...