Man With A Movie List

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa Year: 1926 Run-time: 60 min Source: Amazon Video In studying the history of film, we have to always keep in mind that it's the films that survived that get to tell the story.  In this sense, Japanese silent films have the worst of it.  Due to earthquakes and World War II (Americans destroyed an entire archive), less than 1% of Japan's films from the 1920s have survived.  We've lost the first films of Ozu and Mizoguchi (we'll see plenty of both later in the list), and countless other directors or gone entirely.  This makes it all the more remarkable that we can watch A Page of Madness , which the director Kinugasa reportedly found in his own storehouse in 1971. Without the necessary context, it's difficult to know just how revolutionary this film was, but certainly it's hard to imagine it fitting well in any 1920's society.  The plot centers around a man who gets a job at a mental asylum where his wife was committed, presum...

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti Year: 1926 Run-time: 46 min Source: Youtube This French avant-garde film by a Brazilian director makes for an interesting counterpoint to the short film Manhatta .  While that film displays Manhattan from on high (showing it, probably unintentionally, to be an urban dystopia to rival Metropolis) , Rien que les heures  wants to show Paris from the ground up.  We get compelling shots of alleyways, garbage, and stray animals.  Amidst this are little mini-narratives about nameless characters, without coherent beginnings or ends. This film has been mentioned as a forerunner of Bunuel's films, but there's not much surrealism on display, apart from an excellent little vignette in which scenes from a slaughterhouse are overlaid on a man's steak, and a wonderful shot that edits eyes together, which was turned into the film's poster.  Rien  seems instead to be a mini-thesis on film's ability to rediscover the beauty of ordin...

Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin Year: 1926 Run-time: 1 hr 29 min Source: Youtube The Soviet director Pudovkin isn't as well-regarded as Eisenstein, and his films don't have the same force of impact, but he played a crucial role in the development of cinema.  Working in a similar rapid-fire editing style as Eisenstein (an approach which is known as montage , although that term has a different connotation now), Pudovkin strayed a bit from his contemporary's communalist ideal, and focused his stories on strong characterization. That's somewhat relative - Mother  doesn't name its main character, the titular "Mother".  The crux of the film is how she responds to the death of her husband (and eventually, her son) in the failed 1905 revolution (also the setting of Eisenstein's first two films) by devoting her life to the proletariat's cause.  Pudovkin never actually shows her making that decision - it's an internal story told almost entirely throug...

Director: Buster Keaton (and Clyde Bruckman) Year: 1926 Run-time: 1 hr 15 min Buster Keaton is probably my favorite silent film director, and Sherlock, Jr.  and Steamboat Bill, Jr.  are right up there in my all-time favorites, just under Sunset .  But neither of those films have quite the prestige as The General .  The last giant Sight and Sound poll in 2012 ranks that film as the 34th GOAT, with Sherlock, Jr.  20 ranks behind it.  It's probably the most renowned film from my home state of Oregon. But as much as I love Keaton, The General  has always left me a bit cold.  Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer during the Civil War.  Due to his important job, the South won't enlist him, although he thinks it's because he's too wimpy (the common thread to Keaton's characters being a feeling of masculine incompetence).  But when his girlfriend and his locomotive are kidnapped by a team of Union spies, he has to chase after them. I...

Director: Rasmus Breistein Year: 1926 Run time: 1 hr 44 min Source: Bootleg DVD This Norwegian film was inspired by a famous painting of the same name, a beautiful fjord with two traditional wedding boats carrying a bride and groom. Even if the film did nothing besides recreating this scene, it would be an evocative testament to the beauty of Norway.  But there's a great melodrama that takes place around the titular procession, one of the sweetest and saddest romances on the list so far.  These great fjords are somehow the perfect setting for telling an epic tale of romantic betrayal that spans decades.  (This is a film category that needs a Wikipedia page - the only other great fjord movie that comes to my mind is the 2015 catastrophe film, The Wave , which also uses its setting to great effect.) I don't have too much else to say about this (I did like the film a great deal), except to remark that Norway has been on my mind a lot lately, since I'm heavily inv...

Director: Sergei Eisenstein Year: 1925 Run-time: 1 hr 22 min Source: Kanopy Here we break chronological order for the first notable time: Strike  is actually the first feature-length Eisenstein film, although it was made in the same year as Battleship Potemkin .  Potemkin  is the better film, although I would say that Strike  better illustrates just how ahead of his time Eisenstein was.  This is a masterwork of editing - never has a film this early felt so meticulously constructed from its shots.  Although light-years apart in story and mood, the film on the list that feels the closest in directorial spirit was Jean Epstein's Coeur Fidele .  (I can't help but wonder what Eisenstein's films would be like if he was born in the West, in some scenario like the Superman Red Sun  comic but in reverse.) The shots are incredibly quick, with entire scenes built out of small, disparate moments, like in a comic book.  The effect is exhilarating, ...

Director: King Vidor Year: 1925 Run time: 2 hr 31 min Source: Youtube (paid) The key scene of The Big Parade , a WWI film made 7 years after the events, is when the lead character, an American soldier, wounded in no-man's-land, crawls into a crater after a wounded German, seething with rage since he just watched his best friends die.  With his bayonet in hand, he finds he can't finish the job.  Instead, he shares a cigarette with his dying foe.  It's a touching scene, but I have to imagine that The Big Parade  is the first and only war film where such a moment would not be considered cliche. Here it really works though, and that's because The Big Parade  spends the previous two hours content with the patriotic fervor of its characters.  But although this is not an anti-war film, it does try hard to be realistic about the effects of war, and that clearly resonated with its audience.  The first world war was a bloodbath on a previously unknown sca...

Director: Charlie Chaplin Year: 1925 Run time: 1 hr 35 min Source: Amazon (make sure to find the 1925 version) Charlie's Chaplin's The Gold Rush is an excellent movie in any time, but it will not strike a modern viewer as very ambitious.  That's because in our era, comedies and dramas are mostly considered equals, at least outside of award season.  This wasn't so in the silent era: while D.W. Griffith could spend extraordinary sums creating massive sets for a three-hour long "serious" film, Chaplin took a huge risk in making the longest (90 minutes) and most expensive comedy at that time.  (It doesn't really look expensive, being shot mostly in one-room cabins.  But being the perfectionist that he was, it makes sense that he spent a lot of that money on few short establishing shots and one memorable ending.) But while the movie doesn't feel as ambitious as it was, it does feel very iconic, the epitome of Charlie Chaplin.  The love story is trit...