Man With A Movie List

Director: Sergei Eisenstein Year: 1925 Run-time: 75 min Source: Kanopy This film's reputation puts at on a higher level than the prior films on this list, and there's certainly not much I can add to that reputation.  I'm just going to say what strikes me about it at the moment, in the context of the other films I've been watching. Battleship Potemkin  is a Soviet propaganda film conceived as such: it documents and celebrates a very specific event in Russian history on its twentieth anniversary, the mutiny of the ship Potemkin  and its participation in the riots in the city of Odessa.  (Wisely, Eisenstein scrapped the original plan of covering the entire first Russian revolution.)  Certainly, the story fits the needs of the state, although the basic facts are accurate.  The famous Odessa Steps sequence really took place at night and not on the steps themselves, but Tsarist soldiers really did fire on the protesting crowds, and the resulting panic woul...

Director: Buster Keaton Year: 1924 Run time: 45 min Source: Kanopy When Buster Keaton started working in the film industry in 1917, he apparently had reservations about this new art form.  By 1924, he had changed his mind enough to direct film's first, and possibly its best, love letter to itself.  Sherlock, Jr. stars Keaton as a wannabe detective in the mold of Holmes, but Sherlock, Jr. is really all about life imitating cinema. The greatest scene - probably among the top ten special effects of all time - is the moment when Keaton's character, dreaming, steps onto the screen itself from the audience's position, where he finds himself madly transported between locales as the scenes change.  The genius of Keaton's stunts is that he makes it look simple, when really each shot required using surveying equipment to get his position exactly right. There are plenty of other great stunts here, but this is the first Keaton movie on the list where he has an interesting ...

Director: René Clair Year: 1924 Run-time: 20 min Source: Youtube The director René Clair of the short experimental film Entr'acte  would have a long and varied career, although I'm not sure whether he will show up again on the list.  To me, this one is interesting because of the other personalities involved.  Erik Satie, famous as a young man for his  Gymnopedies,  not only composed the eclectic music, but has a cameo.  The film premiered between the acts (thus the name) of one of his ballets, one year before he died.  Marcel Duchamp also participated, and it's fascinating to think of these two men being part of the same endeavour. Certainly the film reflects a Dadaist spirit, and remind us that the movement had plenty of humor to it which can sometimes fail to come across in the art gallery.  In a strange way, I was reminded the most of Monty Python while watching some of the more absurd scenes.  Despite the costumes and p...

Director: Jean Epstein Year: 1923 Runtime: 1 hr 27 min Source: Archive.org (English subs found elsewhere online) Part of the reason I'm using this list is the high possibility of great unknown foreign classics, and this definitely fits that bill.  Faithful Heart  is an extremely early example of what would Quentin Tarantino once characterized as the classic stereotype of European film-making: the plot is painfully simple and there are few surprises, but it hits home because of effective editing and pacing. In this case, we have an orphaned girl Marie who falls in love with a kind dockworker Jean, but is forced by her cruel adoptive parents to marry a local drunkard with the unfortunate name Petit Paul.  Jean and Petit Paul end up brawling, Jean ends up in jail while Petit Paul escapes, and by the time Jean gets out Petit Paul and Marie have an infant child.  I won't spoil the end, except to say that no one comes out of this story looking very responsible, sav...

Director: F.W. Murnau Year: 1922 Runtime: 1 hr 34 min Source: Amazon Video (Kino Restored Edition) Nosferatu  is the first film on the list that I've seen before, twice in fact, but even after a third viewing my respect for the film remains lukewarm.  I really want to love this movie, given its reputation, the great influence that it would (debatably) have, and the fact that its director Murnau would later create what might be my favorite film.  But ultimately the interest I have in Nosferatu  fails to go beyond an analytical detachment. If for nothing else, Nosferatu  is an absolute must-see film for its rarely-repeated take on the vampire mythos.  Count Orlok is never charming, debonair, and won't win over any teenage love interests.  He's a corrupt and vile abomination from the start that can barely contain his menace inside an ill-fitting nightgown, or whatever it is that he wears.  Max Schreck's performance makes for essential viewing,...

Director: Erich von Stroheim Year: 1922 Runtime: 2 hr 22 min Source: Blu-ray This movie is definitely an interesting counterpoint to the morality tales that abound in the silent film era.  It's length is rivaled among its early list-mates only by Intolerance , but in its direction it couldn't be further in spirit.  Unlike Griffith, who reveled in the ultimate control that the medium of silent film gave him to espouse his message, the director Erich von Stroheim is content to let us make our minds about the amoral "Count" Sergius Karamzin, a con man and womanizer played by von Stroheim himself, and also about why the director felt he needed to put these terrible misdeeds to film. It's especially interesting that the details of Karamzin's life are not entirely dissimilar to those of the director himself, as many have pointed out.  Von Stroheim was an Austrian emigre who arrived in this country bearing a fake name claiming to be the son of nobility.  Appar...

Directors: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand Year: 1921 Runtime: 10 min Source: Youtube The ten-minute art piece Manhatta , conceived by two photographers Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand is occasionally called cinema's first avant-garde film, and is somehow both more conventional, and more extreme, than that description denotes. To start with, Manhatta  is not about rejecting the status quo, but celebrating it, in this case the apotheosis of the industrial era that was Manhattan after the turn of the century.  We see stunning shots of a city-scape that is both familiar and strange, unmistakably New York despite missing most of the landmarks we would recognize (with the exception of the Brooklyn Bridge, which has never looked so stunning outside Woody Allen's own ode to the city).  These shots are paired with words from Walt Whitman's poem about the city - the passages chosen here center around man's mastering of the environment, and implicitly, his own destiny. ...

Director: Charlie Chaplin Year: 1921 Runtime: 53 min Source: Youtube Surely this will be a sad cliche by the time I give up on this mad quest, but while watching Charlie Chaplin's The Kid , I couldn't help but think about superhero movies.  Specifically, the way that superhero movies once could be relied on to contain predictable and largely superfluous plots, and now, due to their massive popularity, they're trying to adapt themselves to a whole host of genres, from slapstick comedies to emotional dramas. Somehow that's the best analogy for me to make sense of The Kid .  This was Charlie Chaplin's gambit, to adapt his vaudeville-rooted comedy, all based around his wildly successful Tramp character, to somehow fit into a tearjerker drama, which seems to be heavily influenced by D.W. Griffith (who Chaplin definitely admired and partnered with to create United Artists).  Chaplin adopted Griffith's penchant for nameless, archetypal characters (The Tramp is f...

Director: Buster Keaton and Malcolm St. Clair Year: 1921 Run-time: 22 min Source: Youtube I won't turn down two Buster Keaton films in a row.  While  One Week  was all physical slapstick and set-based humor, the comedy in this film is more situational, although it also dives heavily into surreal farce.  The classic persona he shows in his films feels a little more developed, with that stone face barely hiding flashes of distress. I couldn't possibly be the first to notice this, but Keaton shares a spiritual bond with Jackie Chan.  Certainly both performers were physical comedians of the highest order, and both suffered repeated injuries on set.  There are stunts in this film that boggle my mind, considering how little trickery filmmakers of the period had access to. I didn't care much for what plot there was in The Goat , but it has a manic energy and pacing to it that's kind of infectious.  One thing that impresses me about the silent age is ...

Director: Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline Year: 1920 Run-time: 22 min Source: Youtube Watching this after Tih Minh  was like a nice, glass of iced tea after a hot summer day.  I've always been a huge fan of Buster Keaton, and this list is a nice opportunity to see some of his lesser-known works as well as watch some favorites once again.  In this one, the classic Keaton persona hasn't really developed yet, but the slapstick and incredible stunts are all there. The film itself is a parody of an educational short promoting prefabricated houses, but anyone who's put together an Ikea bookshelf can understand the humor.  The bizarre misshapen house that gets produced due to some mislabelled boxes is one of the best singular props in early cinema - it alone makes the film worth it. As for the stunts themselves, they make it clear how Disney and Looney Tunes stole shamefacedly from Keaton and the vaudeville tradition.  Keaton himself is sometimes Bugs Bunny,...