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The year in review
Being now in the final days of 2014, it’s time to take stock of this year. Here is the official Silents, Please! year in review. I’m not into ordered lists, so it’s simply a series of notes and a...
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Farewell to 2014
L’Argent (FR 1928) Have a fun New Year’s Eve, everyone! Tonight I’ll be drinking Tanqueray, like a 90s rapper. This blog will be on hiatus for two or three weeks while I move house and generally get...
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Pasionaria | Passionflower (ES 1915)
My posting hiatus was longer than expected due to RL busy-ness, but welcome back to Silents, Please in 2015! From the Spain of a century ago comes the extraordinary film Pasionaria. The film is a...
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Double trouble: Die falsche Asta Nielsen | The False Asta Nielsen (DE 1915)
This post is my contribution to the Fourth Annual Dueling Divas Blogathon. Many thanks to Lara at Backlots for organizing and hosting this event. Poster from the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu...
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Torture de Luxe (US c.1926)
Over the last couple of years, the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) have put up a quite considerable number of films in the Screening Room section of their website. One of my recent finds...
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Anarchic architecture … Buster Keaton’s One Week (US 1920)
This post is my contribution to the First Annual Buster Keaton blogathon, hosted by Lea at Silent-ology. Read all the entries here! Advertisement from the Motion Picture News, 18 Sep 1920. One Week of...
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Love and rockets: Matrimonio interplanetario | A Marriage in the Moon (IT 1910)
We all have problems in our lives, and in our relationships. But what if the one you love literally lives on a different planet? This is the problem facing the couple in Matrimonio Interplanetario, a...
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Alma Torturada | Tortured Soul (ES 1916)
Poster courtesy of the Centre de Documentació Museu de les Arts Escèniques Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain I first became interested in Margarita Xirgu a year or two ago, when I saw...
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Douro, Faina Fluvial | Labour on the River Douro (PT 1931)
In 1931, a young Portuguese filmmaker named Manoel de Oliveira made his first completed film: a cinematic portrait of the River Douro, lifeblood of his hometown of Porto. De Oliveira was working in...
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Book roundup! Film histories: Italy, Japan, pre-Revolutionary Russia; mid...
I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on silent film histories more often. Here, have a roundup of what I’ve been reading over the last two or three months! The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia,...
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Karalli & Bauer: Счастье вечной ночи | The Happiness of Eternal Night (RU 1915)
This is my contribution to the Russia in Classic Film blogathon, organized by Fritzi at Movies Silently. Read the other posts here! This week, a return to the Yevgeni Bauer hour of power! The Happiness...
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10 lost silent films that I’d love to see
As an art form, silent film lasted for a mere 40 years, c.1895-1935. It’s well known that the great majority of films from the silent era are now lost, whether due to destruction (either deliberate, as...
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Feminine threat! Menichelli in La moglie di Claudio | The Wife of Claudius...
In 1918, Itala-Film released a film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Femme de Claude (1873), a play which updated the Messalina myth to 19th century France. The wife of Claudius, the legendary...
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A mailout of film postcards
For posterity/self-archiving purposes, here are the postcards I made and mailed out to friends for Valentine’s Day. A gaggle of Garbos, a multi-Moz, Barrymore times four, etc. May the film gods not be...
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An interview with Bin Li, nitrate film specialist
Since July 2014, Bin Li has been working for Haghefilm Digitaal in Amsterdam, one of the most esteemed film preservation/restoration laboratories in the world. A graduate of the MA Preservation and...
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Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory: The Adventurous Years of Film (1907-1916)
The Desmet collection is a key jewel in the crown of EYE Filmmuseum: a huge and relatively intact corpus of films, posters, promotional materials, and company records deriving from the business...
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Diana, l’affascinatrice | Diana the Seductress (IT 1915)
This month I’m blogging on the theme ‘Adventure 1915′ – adventurous films at their 100th birthday. To Francesca Bertini for the first entry! It’s a treasured spy cliché – the agent who falls in love...
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Retracing the history of an action blockbuster at 100: Il jockey della morte...
A stolen child, a skeleton mascot, a circus act, and a stunt-filled chase as a man in a skeleton suit and a female acrobat go on the run: continuing this month’s theme of ‘Adventure 1915′ is Il jockey...
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Mistress of disguise, pirate of the skies: Filibus (IT 1915)
Have you ever wanted to watch a film about a masked female criminal mastermind who flies around in a zeppelin, perpetrating audacious schemes for the thrill of it as much as for the spoils of victory?...
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Oxilia, Menichelli, 1915: two short films
Via the excellent Sempre in Penombra blog; via FilmoTeca de Catalunya’s digitized collections Until his career was cut short by World War I, Nino Oxilia was one of the most promising Italian...
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