Man With A Movie List

Director: James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber Year: 1928 Run-time: 13 min Source: Youtube In one of those strange cinematic coincidences, there were actually two adaptations of Poe's wonderful melancholic work, the short story The Fall of the House of Usher .  In France, Jean Epstein (featured on our list for Coeur Fidele ) partnered with a new-to-the-industry Luis Bunuel, putting out a critical success - Ebert, for example, ranks it among his favorite films. This is the other one.  Contrary to national stereotypes, the American director James Watson took a much more impressionistic and avant-garde approach to the source material.  Although the three characters are present, and a few of the key scenes are recognizable, anyone who hasn't read the (very short) tale will have a hard time following along.  The key takeaway from this highly experimental work is the overbearing sense of anxiety and fear that it imparts.  As with the last film, I watched it ...

Director: Dziga Vertov Year: 1928 Run-time: 52 min Source: Youtube "In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people" - Dziga Vertov In 1928, Stalin's Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization began.  The plan ended in chaos four years later with massive famine - an estimated 3.3 to 7.5 million dead.  This makes The Eleventh Year , a stark and strange propaganda film presumably commissioned to sell the program to Ukraine by showcasing innovations in machinery, one of the eeriest and most haunting films on this list, even without the industrial techno soundtrack added in a version that I found on Youtube. Vertov is well-known among cinephiles, and his film Man With a Movie Camera  made it into the top ten of the most recent Sight and Sound poll, but information on this particul...