Tag Archives: Silent Film

“The Mountain Cat”

Posted on June 13, 2017 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: Released in 1921, Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Mountain Cat” (sometimes called “The Wildcat”) has little of the urbaneness of the director’s later work. It’s one of his Bavarian films, made (at least in part) on sojourns from … Continue reading →

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Like a Holy Candle

Posted on July 11, 2015 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: There are four sorts of scenes alternated: (1) the particular history of Judith; (2) the gentle courtship of Nathan and Naomi, types of the inhabitants of Bethulia; (3) pictures of the streets, with the population flowing … Continue reading →

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Robert and Nanook

Posted on December 15, 2014 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” is usually discussed as a documentary, but I wonder if the movie isn’t ill-served by that conversation, which is simply too limiting to address the subtleties of Flaherty’s art. In focusing on … Continue reading →

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The Treasure of Treasures

Posted on December 9, 2014 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: Lately I’ve been enjoying, bit by bit, the Cohen Film Collection’s restoration of D.W. Griffith’s  “Intolerance,” which is available to stream via Hulu Plus. (It’s also available on Blu-Ray.) I’ve seen the movie many times, but … Continue reading →

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Capitulation

Posted on August 27, 2014 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: A Russian who immigrated to Paris in the early 1920s, Dimitri Kirsanoff was above all an avant-gardist. However, he wasn’t above employing Griffith-style melodrama when it suited his purposes. In his “Menilmontant,” a brief, richly volatile work about a … Continue reading →

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Notes on “Every-Night Dreams”

Posted on August 18, 2014 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: There’s an almost cubist visual sensibility at work in this 1933 silent from director Mikio Naruse. Scenes are fractured into barrages of angles, the camera sometimes moving in on its subjects in kamikaze fashion. Many of the … Continue reading →

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Movie Poster Du Jour: “The Passion of Joan of Arc”

Posted on April 26, 2014 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: This poster for Dreyer’s “Joan” must be one of the earliest products of Boris Konstantinovitch Bilinsky’s cinema advertising company, Alboris, founded just a few months prior to the film’s Parisian opening in October 1928. A Russian expat … Continue reading →

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“The Hands of Orlac”

Posted on June 30, 2013 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: Directed by Robert Wiene, the 1924 “The Hands of Orlac” takes the psychological emphasis of Wiene’s “Caligari” and gives it an undertow of pained Germanic romanticism (among other things, it’s a fever dream of emasculation). Conrad … Continue reading →

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“Thomas Graal’s Best Film”

Posted on December 22, 2012 by

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes: Swedish film pioneer Mauritz Stiller is known mainly for his connection to Greta Garbo; it was he who brought her to MGM. But in the 1910s and early ’20s he was a major force in movies, perhaps … Continue reading →

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