watchlist_extended

Black and Tan (1929) is a short film directed and written by Dudley Murphy, and featuring Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, originally released by RKO on 8 December 1929.
The film includes Ellington and his orchestra playing his Black and Tan Fantasy, Black Beauty, and The Duke Steps Out.
On 13 February 2001, Black and Tan was reissued by Kino Video in the DVD collection Hollywood Rhythm Vol. 1.

Wealthy Cynthia is in love with not-so-wealthy Roger, who is married to Marcia. The threesome is terribly modern about the situation, and Marcia will gladly divorce Roger if Cynthia agrees to a financial settlement. But Cynthia's wealth is in jeopardy because her trust fund will expire if she is not married by a certain date. To satisfy that condition, Cynthia arranges to marry Hagon Derk, who is condemned to die for a crime he didn't commit. She pays him so he can provide for his little sister. But at the last minute, Derk is freed when the true criminal is discovered. Expecting to be a rich widow, Cynthia finds herself married to a man she doesn't know and doesn't want to.

Due to some common interests between German and Russian aristocracy ( the Russians even had aristocrats in their past not to mention they had an Empress called Catherine the Great, as great as this German count's heiresses… ), it is not strange that this Teutonic count has understood and even enjoyed Herr S. M. Eisenstein's "Staroye I Novoye".
It is not very usual that for the aristocracy to enjoy Bolshevist films full of proletarian demands that put private property at risk or as it happens in this case, a film about the Communist Party's policy on the subject of the collectivization of the Soviet agriculture. Normally this would be perfect gibberish for this German count, but thanks to Herr Eisenstein 's greatness and directorial talent, the hardships of the heroine of the film, Dame Marfa ( Dame Marfa Lapkina ) breached even the thick aristocratic Schloss walls.
And that's one of the first remarkable aspects of this oeuvre; in spite of the political subject of the film, the powerful images and lyricism ( astonishing and beautiful shot compositions ), especially during the first part of the movie, preserve the artistic merits entirely while serving a propaganda purpose. The second remarkable aspect of the film is the dichotomy between the old and new, the fight to improve the lot of Dame Marfa and her countrymen. There are many discussions because it is not easy even in Russia to change ancient and conservative customs. There are superb metaphors and social criticism ( illiteracy, bureaucracy, religiosity ) which perfectly fit the film, and last but not least, "Staroye I Novoye", is a kind of archaic documentary about ancient customs established deeply in old Russia, those ones that our heroine must fight against. And there is also a lot about agriculture ( very enlightening for this German count), especially about harvesting and how to fatten Russian cows or pigs ( literally, no pun here… ).
Herr Eisenstein had to bear during the last era of his film career, unbelievable censorship and mutilation of his work, as happens with "Staroye I Novoye". The film was reedited and Eisenstein accused of sympathizing with Trostky's policies but fortunately the film was restored and showed by the German-frenchified t.v. channel "ARTE", natürlich!, including an evocative music score by Herr Taras Bujewski, that fits superbly Herr Eisenstein primal artistic interests.
And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must buy a tractor for one of his Teutonic heiress.

In a juke joint, sharecropper Zeke falls for a beautiful dancer, Chick, but she's only setting him up for a rigged craps game. He loses $100, the money he got for the sale of his family's entire cotton crop. His brother Spunk is mortally wounded in the shoot-out which follows. Zeke goes away but returns as Brother Zekiel the preacher. His forceful preaching draws the faithful in large numbers. Even Chick wants to be saved. Zekiel has asked the pretty Missy Rose to marry him, but Chick can still cast a spell over the preacher...
- Written by David Steele

The queen of mythical Sylvania marries a courtier, who finds his new life unsatisfying.

The New Babylon is a metaphorical clash of glittering surfaces and deep social cynicism that marked the climax of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's experimentations with the conventions of the Soviet silent cinema. Taking their thematic inspiration from the story of the Paris Commune of 1871, the two directors fashioned a highly conceptualized allegory of social strata under pressure that transcends its historical roots to form a sardonic comment on the human condition.
The music, by Dimitry Shostakovitch, is also integral to the film's narrative structure. Normally in film, the music serves to compliment or amplify the visual image. The relationship is one of conjunction. In The New Babylon, however, Shostakovitch creates a relationship through the opposition of sound and image. In the music hall scene, for example, the composer interfaces components of the "can-can" and the "Marseillaise" with the vulgar spectacle of the pageant to form a musical comment on the French middle class.
Although the avant-garde aspects of The New Babylon caused it to fall somewhat in disfavor during the regime of Josef Stalin, it is precisely those elements that cause it to remain of interest today. Although ranking somewhat below the pioneering efforts of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin whose theories greatly influenced its creation, The New Babylon still represents an innovative use of the cinema and one of the highpoints of the Soviet silent cinema.

A criminal known as Thunderbolt is imprisoned and facing execution. Into the next cell is placed Bob Morgan, an innocent man who has been framed and who is in love with Thunderbolt's girl, without knowing of their relationship. Thunderbolt hopes to stave off the execution long enough to kill young Morgan for romancing his girl.

A prostitute sees a friendly sailor as a way out of Havana's grimy underworld.

Peggy is a Follies dancer who forsakes her life of carefree attachments in order to meet her goal of marrying a millionaire. Alas, her elderly husband, broker C. Morton Gibson, is a well-meaning bore, and soon Peggy begins seeking entertainment elsewhere.
A year after their marriage, three significant events occur almost simultaneously. Peggy's former boyfriend, Paul Lockridge, a composer and pianist who is in love with her and seems to have a funny quip for every occasion, returns from Paris. She reunites with him as he offers her his companionship as a diversion from her stuffy life. Also, Ralph Le Saint, a young devil-may-care sculptor who is still in love with Peggy, plans his suicide in a mood of bitterness, and Gibson's daughter, Marjorie, returns from schooling abroad. Marjorie is soon paired with Ralph, and the romance that develops between them is paralleled by the adult affair between Peggy and Paul.

1930 film by Ernst Lubitsch

In Depression-era Japan, a man commits a robbery to save his critically ill daughter and escapes with the funds, but complications arise.

The adventures of a cocky con man and his beautiful accomplice.

A broken-down alcoholic prizefighter struggles to keep custody of his adoring son.

Dziga Vertov's Entuziazm is considered a masterpiece of early sound film and of Soviet avant-garde cinema. Dealing with the Five Year Plan of the late 1920s, it was praised by artists like Charlie Chaplin, was subsequently forgotten, and rediscovered by the avant-garde movement of the 1960s.
This edition presents the film, for the first time on DVD, in two versions: the print preserved in the former Soviet Union's Gosfilmofond as well as Peter Kubelka's fascinating restoration which - by re-syncing the image and sound - allows the viewer to experience what Vertov considered the new language of sound cinema. In Restoring Entuziazm, Peter Kubelka - filmmaker and co-founder of the Austrian Film Museum - demonstrates the principles of his restoration work und discusses Vertov's concepts of cinema. The Extras section presents two more rare documents from the Austrian Film Museum's Vertov collection.
Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas, Vertov's paean to the Soviet first Five-Year Plan for economic development (1928-32), clearly has a "three-movement" form. Beginning with an overture on the elimination of all the old detritus impeding full socialist construction (particularly religion and alcoholism), the film moves into a middle section that passes through many of the stages of heavy industrial production to culminate in a final movement, where the products of industrialization flow back to the USSR (most notably to the countryside) and are celebrated.
The film is classicly Vertovian in its reflection upon its own constructed nature. Like Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm seems to begin twice: the music we hear (and watch) being heard in the film's first shot is later repeated, with the woman auditor replaced by a male conductor in a radio studio. The production, transmission, organization and audition of sound enter our own conscious reception of the film. Thus Enthisiasm is a three-levelled film, with the audience's auditory experience, the film as a sound-image construct, and the documentary character of the film's basic materials all co-present and woven together as part of a reflexive texture remarkable at this early date in the history of sound film, and inspirational for many later experimenters, including Peter Kubelka and Richard Serra.

Haunted by the memory of Walter Holderlin, a soldier he killed during World War I, French musician Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes) confesses to a priest (Frank Sheridan), who grants him absolution. Using the address on a letter he found on the dead man's body, Paul then travels to Germany to find his family.
As anti-French sentiment continues to permeate Germany, Dr. Holderlin (Lionel Barrymore) initially refuses to welcome Paul into his home, but changes his mind when his son's fiancée Elsa identifies him as the man who has been leaving flowers on Walter's grave. Rather than reveal the real connection between them, Paul tells the Holderlin family he was a friend of their son, who attended the same musical conservatory he did.
Although the hostile townspeople and local gossips disapprove, the Holderlins befriend Paul, who finds himself falling in love with Elsa (Nancy Carroll). When she shows Paul her former fiancé's bedroom, he becomes distraught and tells her the truth. She convinces him not to confess to Walter's parents, who have embraced him as their second son, and Paul agrees to forego easing his conscience and stays with his adopted family. Dr. Holderlin presents Walter's violin to Paul, who plays it while Elsa accompanies him on the piano.
The film's original title, The Man I Killed, was changed to The Fifth Commandment to avoid giving "wrong impressions in the minds of the public about the character of the story." It ultimately was released as Broken Lullaby.

1931年，应苏联导演普多夫金的邀请赴苏联访问了3个月，伊文思在那里做了几十次演讲，并放映了自己的影片，也观看了杜甫仁科等苏联电影工作者的作品。回荷兰后，应“菲利浦电器公司”之请，拍摄了宣传片《工业交响曲》（又名《菲利浦收音机》）。他不顾厂方严格的限制，在影片中揭示了高度机械化劳动对工人的身体和精神造成的损害。
one of the most important ivens' works. Philips Radio is considered the third important Dutch avant-garde film of Joris Ivens, after The Bridge and Rain. The film was commissioned by Philips in order to show the modern production process of radio's in the factories and offices in Eindhoven. Only in a later stage of the shootings it was decided to use the latest film sound technologies in studios in France and make the first Dutch sound film.

A young couple's marriage is jeopardized by the husband's descent into alcoholism.

Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the new president of Huxley U, hires bumblers Baravelli and Pinky to help his school win the big football game against rival Darwin U.

Alexander Dovzhenko’s first sound film, revolving around the construction of a giant dam on the Dnieper River, is one of his greatest, though it was poorly received in the Soviet Union when it came out in 1932. It’s only one of the eccentricities of this lyrical and monumental feature that the title refers to three different characters, and it’s telling that the father of one of them, an illiterate peasant who proudly spends his time fishing and loafing while everyone else works, is treated with considerable warmth. (A sequence in which he’s frightened when addressed by an outdoor loudspeaker evokes Chaplin as well as Tati.) As in all of Dovzhenko’s best work, the style veers closer to lyrical poetry (its opening sequence about the river) and portraiture (a later segment introducing us to various workers) than to narrative, though it’s innovative in other respects as well: the final sequence includes some striking jump cuts almost 30 years before Jean-Luc Godard purportedly invented them in Breathless.

Like Fejos' LONESOME, this film shows a creative imagination combined with an undeveloped story sense and a finite talent. The events in the simple plot are telegraphed, repeated, and told very slowly. Poor Marie, hanging out clothes on the line in the front yard at midnight, is offered candy by the fiance of the lady of the house and, presto, comes the dawn. (Presumably the seduction or rape occurred right in the barren front yard, next to the road.) Marie is cast out, and can find little work. Finally, she finds herself at the door of a tavern frequented by prostitutes, facing the ferocious woman who runs the place. She is given a menial job and finds a family in the girls and a mother-figure in the manager. The character of this woman--strong, hard, inexpressive, but compassionate and just--and the actress who plays her, is by far the most complex and interesting aspect of the film. Marie suffers further at the hands of a group of do-gooders, cardboard figures as Fejos' villains tend to be. Finally she goes to a ridiculous, saccharine, kitschy heaven, where she again finds herself washing the floors. It's hard to know just how much Fejos has his tongue in his cheek with this final sequence. In fact, it's hard to pin Fejos down in general. Much of the time he seems simple-minded, even dull, but then he'll come up with an original visual idea or an unexpectedly well-observed moment or character that makes you think he has something after all.
17 November 2001 | by bensonj (New York, NY)