Man With A Movie List

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...