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A bold contemporary adaptation of Anton Chekhov's legendary short story, Ward No. 6 chronicles one man's descent into madness. Dr. Ragin is the head doctor at a provincial insane asylum, where he interacts daily with the abandoned, the unloved and the forgotten. Lonely and isolated in his personal life, he finds solace in the long philosophical dialogues with his brilliant patient Gromov, which lead him to question the nature of his own existence. Updating the 1892 tale to the present day, the film is shot in a real mental institution on the outskirts of Moscow, and features interviews with actual patients. A powerful film, Ward No. 6 illuminates the writer's immortal genius for a new generation.
Reviews
"... filmmakers Karen Shakhnazarov and Aleksandr Gornovsky's Ward No. 6 updates the narrative to contemporary Russia, but retains the original's philosophical foundation and trenchant tone." - Video Librarian
"The filmmakers successfully capture the essence of Chekhov's depiction of a man already depressed over society's imperfections who develops an ever darker view of the futility of human life as a result of his conversations with a brilliant but troubled patient." - Video Librarian
Mabou Mines critically acclaimed interpretation of Ibsen's A Doll's House rejuvenates a nineteenth century classic with bold staging and conceptual originality. Ibsen's Doll's House has been described as a feminist clarion, Freudian drama and bourgeois soap opera. In Mabou Mines' re-imagining, the production shocks and enlightens audiences as never before. Includes the companion documentary, Looking for a Miracle, which features extensive interviews with director Lee Breuer and the original cast.
Review
"...highly original production to offer a refreshing approach to this classic." - Educational Media Reviews Online
Director: John W. Walter
Starring: Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Tony Kushner
Filmmaker John Walter artfully captures Meryl Streep groping for - and then seizing - the character in her unforgettable portrayal of Mother Courage in Tony Kushner's adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht masterpiece Mother Courage and Her Children, which was presented by The Public Theater/NY Shakespeare Festival in Central Park in the summer of 2006. As Manohla Dargis in the Times observed, "filmmaker John Walter jumps from art to history and politics and back again, from the theater of the streets to the theater of the stage, without pause. That makes the movie... tough to summarize, which is part of its appeal."
Though this film could easily have been crafted into a star vehicle for Streep and Kevin Kline, Walter instead digs deeply into Brecht's motives and politics, unearthing the playwright's famed and famously clever testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee - the day after which he fled from the United States.
THEATER OF WAR is about theater and war, capitalism and Marxism, the postwar anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, and one literary genius's ability to make art from them all.
Review
"An interesting meditation on theater as social protest, as well as the necessity and (often) futility of art, this is recommended." - Video Librarian
Since its overwhelming success on Broadway forty years ago, HAIR: Let the Sun Shine In has inspired generations with its messages of love, non-violence and liberation. This definitive and entertaining documentary highlights the continuing relevance of the show and its still radical, transformative power.
In preparation for its fortieth anniversary, the show's author and co-creator Jim Rado rehearses a troupe of young performers for a new production whose vibrant energy brings HAIR's fantastic score to life once again. A wealth of archival footage covers US and international productions as well as conveys a portrait of an era, a generation and its politics. Original interviews and new segments feature Milos Forman, Keith Carradine, Ben Vereen, Melba Moore, author James Rado, composer Galt MacDermot, director Tom O'Horgan and others.
With the US today again mired in a prolonged and unpopular war, HAIR inspires a new generation with its cry for peace, love and change.
Review
"While Hair: Let the Sun Shine In is a celebration of this countercultural classic, the film doesn't shy away from the dark side of the production's history, such as the lives lost to drug addiction and AIDS, and a suspicious hotel fire (Hair received threats from a variety of organizations, from the Weathermen to the John Birch Society)." - Recommended Video Librarian
Director: Bob Komar
Starring: Daniel Roberts, Dawn Murphy, Simon Phillips
Sex and power drive the action of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Set in today's British army this is a modern realization of a classic problem play where every character must justify their own private morality in a world bereft of discipline and authority. Critics rave that this contemporary dramatization is the perfect introduction to Shakespeare.
Director: Paul Willis
Starring: Heidi Schreck, Matt Ford, Tricia Rodley
Set in an anonymous corner of suburbia, this contemporary adaptation of Ibsen's play is a shattering exploration of ambition, domestic power and gender roles. Just married, Hedda Gabler and her husband arrive at their new home where Hedda's romantic rival from the past appears. Hedda must confront her desire for a life lived beautifully and without compromise - whatever the cost. This bracing dramatization brings new dimensions to Hedda Gabler's character.
Director: Michael Cacoyannis
Starring: Alan Bates, Charlotte Rampling, Katrin Cartlidge, Michael Gough
In pre-Revolution Russia, Madame Ranevskaya (Charlotte Rampling) returns to her decaying estate after an exile in Paris. Ranevskaya's dissolute brother Gaev (Alan Bates), her insecure adopted daughter Varya (the late Katrin Cartlidge in one of her final film roles) and dotty butler Feers (Michael Gough) are as ill-prepared for the grim financial realities that threaten their existence as Ranevskaya is. At stake are the estate and its beloved cherry orchard, the pride of the extended family of aristocrats and freed serfs. As spring gives way to summer and memory threatens reason, the family must either find their footing in a Russia turned upside down or flounder in a sea of longing and doubt, a bittersweet luxury that they can literally no longer afford.
Rampling (The Night Porter, Under The Sand), who the London Times declared "has rarely delivered a more exquisite performance," imbues Ranevskaya, mistress of an aristocratic dream world without predators now facing wolves at the door, with a grace and dignity rarely seen in this classic role of Russian drama. For The Cherry Orchard, Cacoyannis has liberated Bates (Gosford Park), Gough (Out of Africa), Cartlidge (Breaking the Waves), and the talented supporting cast from stage conventions, deftly shepherding them through the single most satisfying film adaptation of Chekhov's work ever made.
Director: Michael Haneke
Starring: Andre Eisemann, Felix Eitner, Frank Giering, Nikolaus Parvia, Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Muhe
Michael Haneke's film of Franz Kafka's The Castle pairs one of the most influential voices in 20th century literature with one of the most visionary filmmakers of the new millennium. A film as complex, vivid, and "intriguing" (New York Times) as Orson Welles' The Trial, The Castle is both an ingenious, perversely faithful interpretation of the master of alienation's novel, and a worthy companion to The Piano Teacher, Cache and other films from the darkest leading light of contemporary cinema.
A land surveyor identified simply as K is summoned to a remote mountain village by the local government, known as (and housed in) "the castle." Unable to convince underlings of the legitimacy of his position, he tries to take his case to castle officials. But the more K struggles to gain entrance, the more obstructive the village's provincial bureaucracy becomes. As the absurdity of K's circumstances and the depth and intricacy of the castle's hold on the villagers grows, Haneke masterfully evokes Kafka's vision of a dystopian society hobbled by paperwork and bled dry by conformism and convolution. Using an expert cast headed by Haneke regulars Ulrich Muhe (The Lives of Others, Funny Games) and Susanne Lothar (The Piano Teacher), and beautifully austere, Rembrandt-like visuals, Haneke transforms Kafka's unfinished novel into a potent, enigmatic, and complete film experience that is truly Kafkaesque.
Director: Nikita Mikhalkov
Starring: Elena Solovei, Oleg Tabakov
Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt by the Sun) has a reputation as an actor's director, adroitly guiding his players through complex material and obtaining some of the finest performances in Soviet cinema. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Oblomov, his moving and authentic distillation of Ivan Goncharov's great 19th century tragi-comic novel.
Oleg Tabakov brings to the title role a delicate dignity as the gentle aristocrat who would rather sleep than compete in a modern world of expanding industrialization -- a character lovable and ludicrous. And Elena Solovei invests with giddy charm her role of the delightful country belle, Olga, with whom Oblomov has a brief springtime of passion.
Set in glittery St. Petersburg during the heyday of the czars, Oblomov is also full of enchanting scenes of lush interiors and ravishing landscapes. The delicate story about friendship, family, and daydreams becomes a warmly nostalgic portrait of Russia before the turn of the century.
The brilliant Julie Harris repeats her Tony Award winning role as the eccentric nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson.
Against a handsome set depicting Dickinsons Amherst, Massachusetts home, Harris is in constant motion recollecting the poets past from her work, her diaries and letters and encountering the significant people in her life - friends, relatives and acquaintances.
Director: Lindsay Anderson
Starring: Alan Bates, Bill Owen, Brian Cox, Constance Chapman, James Bolam
Utilizing the same brilliant cast as In Celebration's original highly acclaimed Royal Court Theater run, director Lindsay Anderson (O Lucky Man, If) re-imagines his stage triumph into a riveting cinematic experience. Anderson grounds David Storey's ferocious and poignant drama in a setting that as realistic as the playwright's caustic portrait of generational hypocrisy is universal.
In their tiny house in a Yorkshire mining town, God-fearing and hardworking Mr. and Mrs. Shaw (Bill Owen and Constance Chapman) welcome their sons home to celebrate the couple's fortieth wedding anniversary. But with each son's arrival, more and more of the Shaw's model blue collar family facade begins to chip away. Middle son Colin's (James Bolam) engagement has placed him on the path to a loveless marriage. Barely shouldering the burdens of his shattered artisitic aspirations and his own family, Steven, the baby, brilliantly played by Brian Cox (Manhunter, 25th Hour), is on the threshold of a nervous breakdown. But the toaster tossed into this already scalding theatrical bath is Alan Bates (Georgy Girl, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters) as eldest son Andrew. As father, mother, and brothers futiley try to hide the truth from themselves and each other, Bates' Andrew tears into the Shaw family's carefully maintained fictions with animal fury and all-too-human bitterness.
Anderson's spare and elegant direction grants his ensemble the space to collide and retreat even within the cramped confines of the Shaw's collier's cottage. In Anderson's sensitive hands, In Celebration becomes the visionary antithesis of John Ford's How Green Was My Valley and a cautionary yet inspiring tableau of a modern family living at a medieval level of disharmony.
Director: Christopher Miles
Starring: Glenda Jackson, Susannah York, Vivien Merchant
Jean Genet, one of the most celebrated creative minds of the 20th century, receives an unbridled, expertly cinematic rendering in this long unseen film based on his perverse play. The Maids' volatile mixture of class confrontation, Freudian passion and criminal mischief frames an acid-etched portrait of two sisters whose hatred and desire twist their tortured lives together into a relentless downward spiral of guilt, degradation, and freedom at any cost.
Glenda Jackson (A Touch of Class) and Susannah York (A Man For All Seasons) play Solange and Claire, Paris maids who tend to cruel socialite Madame's (Vivien Merchant) unending domestic needs. Whenever Madame is away, the sisters obsessively act out a complex role-playing psychodrama of domination and control that feeds their powerful lust for revenge upon the haughty, disdainful mistress they serve. But after falsely denouncing Madame's lover to the police, Solange and Claire's shared terror of arrest and the unchecked aggression with which they increasingly infuse their "ceremony" threaten to destroy them even as they perch on the threshold of ecstatic release.
Director: Arthur Hiller
Starring: Lawrence Pressman, Lois Nettleton, Luther Adler, Maximillian Schell
Millionaire Jewish entrepreneur Arthur Goldman (Maximilian Schell) benvolently rules his financial empire from a penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan. Seemingly at the edge of sanity, Goldman holds forth on everyting from Papal edicts to ex-wives, from baseball to his family's massacre in a Nazi concentration camp. When Goldman remarks on a blue Mercedes continuously parked outside his building, Goldman's captive audience of assistant (Lawrence Pressman) and chauffeur (Henry Brown) dismiss their boss' anxiety as encroaching paranoia. But each of Goldman's passionate, seemingly capricious ravings are transformed into a shocking, inadvertent deposition when Israeli agents capture Goldman and put him on trial as Adolph Dorf, the commandant of the concentration camp where Goldman's family was supposedly exterminated. In a trial scene of unrelenting intensity, Academy Awardc winner Schell (Judgement at Nuremberg) crafts what the Detroit Free Press called "a white-hot lead performance," mutating from eccentric Goldman to sociopath Dorf and beyond. The riddle of Dorf's true identity becomes wrapped in an enigma of cunning self-treachery and single-minded obsession.
Veteran cinematographer Sam Leavitt enables Hiller to coax a vividly personal and electrifying intelligent dual portrait out of Schell. The Man in the Glass Booth is a timeless drama of surprising intimacy and indefatigable courage, "possessing," declared the Los Angeles Times, "a remarkably resilient sense of lightness for all the profound questions it ponders."
Director: Harold Pinter
Starring: Alan Bates, Jessica Tandy
On any given day Ben Butley, a self-made train wreck of an English Literature professor at a London university, can shrug off everyone and everything with equal ease. But today, the disaster of Butley's proudly misspent life threatens to dwarf even his cynically fatalistic non-expectations. Arriving at his cramped cave of an office, Butley is informed that his adored prot Joey is moving in with another man, his estranged wife is re-marrying, and his seemingly untalented colleague has been published ahead of him.
As embodied by Alan Bates, Butley falls back on the surgically precise wit and savage eloquence that helped put him in his current circumstances in the first place. The blitzkrieg of vitriolic commentary with which Butley engages lovers, students, rivals, and allies, all with equal ferocity, becomes a glass bottom boat illuminating the churning depths of his bankrupted soul. Acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter, in what Time Magazine hailed as "a quite superior directorial debut," turns author Simon Gray's single-set, dialogue driven stage play into an irresistible dynamic visual experience that tracks Bates' hilarious and fearless performance with cunning precision.
Bates and an expert supporting cast, including OscarAR winner Jessica Tandy (Driving Miss Daisy), joust with a sly, self-referencing wit and an unselfconscious exuberance that is breathtaking. With every verbal parry and valedictory flourish of wordplay, Butley's life becomes more of an inescapable bear trap of thwarted ambition, clandestine affection, and squandered brilliance.
Director: Joseph Losey
Starring: John Gielgud, Tom Conti, Topal
Fiddler on the Roof's Topol and a wish-list cast of British theatrical aristocracy, including Sir John Gielgud (Arthur, Becket), Patrick Magee (A Clockwork Orange), Edward Fox (The Day of the Jackal), and Tom Conti (Reuben, Reuben), ground Bertolt Brecht's famous theatrical imagination in a precise, character-rich interpretation of the troubled life and anxious times of 17th century physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Under director Joseph Losey (who originated the American stage version of Galileo in 1947), The American Film Theatre's Galileo focuses on Brecht's characteristic mosaic of theatricality and immediacy into a personalized and keenly cinematic drama that pits public responsibility against private doubt.
Challenged by a new student, tutor and theorist Galileo co-opts emerging telescope technology and discovers irrefutable proof of the heretical notion that the earth is not the center of the universe. But in a rigid society ruled by an uneasy alliance of aristocracy and clergy already undermined by the Plague and the Reformation, science is a threat and enlightenment is a luxury. Faced with either death at the hands of the Inquisition or recantation to a hypocritical but all-powerful Papacy, Galileo must choose between his own life and the restless scientific curiosity that he has spurned family, friends, and wealth to pursue.
In Galileo, director Losey (Eva, The Go-Between, The Servant), an exile of the Hollywood blacklist himself, creates a uniquely affecting portrait of discovery, heresy, compromise, and exile. Neither coward nor hero, Brecht's Galileo reveals the troubling human side of the struggle between science, government, and religion.
Director: Daniel Mann
Starring: Brock Peters, Clifton Davis, Melba Moore, Raymond St. Jacques
The American Film Theatre's Lost in the Stars transforms Alan Paton's world famous novel of racial oppression, Cry the Beloved Country, into a tragic and beautiful film musical unlike any you've ever seen. Gilded by Maxwell Anderson's lucid lyrics and Kurt Weill's (The Three Penny Opera) powerful music, and guided by Daniel Mann's (Playing for Time) sensitive direction, this one-of-a-kind film is both a heartbreaking indictment of a cruel society and a poetic testament to the millions of forgotten lives ground beneath the heel of apartheid.
Brock Peters (To Kill a Mockingbird) is Stephen Kumalo, a black South African minister searching the unfamiliar back alleys and shantytowns of Johannesburg for his son, Absalom. But Kumalo's unwavering faith is put to the test when he finds Absalom in jail facing a capital murder charge. Courage, dignity, and sacrifice fall prey to the whirlwind of racist hypocrisy and hollow justice in Absalom's trial. Absalom's reunion and reconciliation with her father, his jailhouse marriage to his pregnant sweetheart Irina (Melba Moore), and his heroic determination to tell the truth no matter the cost set the stage for a tragic climax of both epic proportion and documentary immediacy.
Peters, whom Weill declared, "one of the great voices of American theatre," delivers a flawlessly moving performance. Singing the title song, "Lost in the Stars," in an empty church to which he will never return, Kumalo's agony offers spiritual richness in place of poverty and human grace in place of prejudice, even as his heart becomes another casualty of vicious ethnic hatred.
Director: Tony Richardson
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Katharine Hepburn, Lee Remick, Paul Scofield
Agnes (Hepburn), as domineering and sarcastic as her husband Tobias (Scofield) is equivocating and guarded, finds her empty Connecticut nest invaded. First, Claire, Agnes' alcoholic sister (the scene-stealingly brilliant Kate Reid), arrives to bitterly spar with her more stable sibling. Then, Agnes and Tobias' luckless in love daughter Julia (Remick) returns home on the heels of yet another failed marriage. But the fuse on this upper-middle class powder keg comes in the form of friends Harry (Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair), who appear on the doorstep seeking shelter from an ephemeral emotional cave-in that has left them terrified, for reasons they can't name, of being alone.
Harry and Edna's solace becomes Agnes and Tobias' undoing as two generations raised to need love, not to give it, and who use language to dissect truth and feeling, not to share it, turn first to each other -- then against each other. Albee's musically attuned dialogue is showcased with a sensitivity and savagery that Richardson's intimately filmed visualization focuses on with unflinching clarity. As each self-blinded character ignores the achingly bared soul of the others, Albee's living room demolition derby leaves no one intact.
Director: Peter Hall
Starring: Cyril Cusack, Ian Holm, Terence Rigby, Vivien Merchant
In North London, an all-male beehive of inactivity is ruled with a foul mouth and an iron hand by the abusive Max (Paul Rogers) and his brother, the priggish palace eunuch Sam (Cyril Cusack). Rounding out the precision vulgarity of The Homecoming's "situation tragedy" are the sons, punch-drunk demolition man Joey (Terence Rigby) and the magnificient Ian Holm (Lord of the Rings, The Sweet Hereafter) as pimp-smart Lenny. When, under cover of darkness, the prodigal son Teddy (Michael Jayston) brings his wife Ruth (Vivien Merchant) home to meet his family for the first time, he gets far more and less than he bargained for. To Teddy's rueful discomfort, Ruth's Mona Lisa smile forms the gateway to a labyrinth of Freudian dread, venal family values, and naked neediness that could only come from the mind of Harold Pinter.
Director: John Frankenheimer
Starring: Bradford Dillman, Fredric March, Jeff Bridges, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan
One of the few still undiscovered treasures of American 70s cinema, John Frankenheimer's masterful interpretation of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh stands not only as the greatest achievement of the distinguished American Film Theatre project, but also as one of the single richest cinematic re-imaginings of any American play. Near the end of his brilliant and varied career, director Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, The Train) singled out the little known Iceman as "the best creative experience I ever had."
In the faded light of Harry Hope's 1912 skid row bar, a rag tag group of fallen men, each like a ghost haunting the wreckage of his own life, await the annual arrival of Hickey (Lee Marvin). This year, however, the charismatic Hickey brings not the usual rounds of drinks and pats on the back, but the unwelcome news that he's off the sauce for good and has come to persuade Hope's drunks to do the same. One by one, the regulars' booze-basted pipe dreams come under Hickey's leering microscope until finally the most shocking self-deception turns out to be Hickey's own.
Director: Tom O'Horgan
Starring: Gene Wilder, Karen Black, Zero Mostel
In the face of a modern urban life devoid of anything but an uninterrupted parade of dehumanizing compromise and disappointment, Stanley (Wilder) tenuously guards his fragile individuality in between gulps of booze. The only solace he enjoys is commiseration with his self-consciously sophisticated neighbor John (Mostel), and his unspoken adoration of a warmly sympathetic co-worker Daisy (70s cult object Karen Black). But as a surreal comic apocalypse begins to transform, one by one, everyone into a rhinoceros, the non-conformism that seemed like Stanley's downfall may be his only salvation.
Re-creating the role he originated on stage, Mostel delivers the most jaw-droppingly bravura performance of his career, playing off both Wilder's and his own incredulous terror as the fussy, prissy John metamorphoses (entirely without make-up or camera tricks) into a bellowing rhinoceros. Mostel, Wilder, and Black's generous characterizations and pitch-perfect comic timing streamline Rhinoceros's convulsive outrageousness into an ardent valentine to both knockabout screen comedy and Ionesco's experimental and timely satire.
Director: Laurence Olivier
Starring: Alan Bates, Joan Plowright
Nearly a thousand miles away from their beloved Moscow, Chekhov's Three Sisters live in virtual exile. Olga (Jeanne Watts), a schoolmistress, attempts to support her siblings and the home that is the sole legacy of their late army officer father. Masha (Joan Plowright) finds relief from her empty marriage in an affair with a passionate young colonel, played by Alan Bates (Gosford Park, The Cherry Orchard, In Celebration). Irina (Louise Pernell), the youngest, wills herself to return the affections of an ardent suitor in the hopes that he will whisk her off to the city before it is too late. Intoxicated by yesterday's triumphs and heedless of tomorrow's disasters, the Three Sisters are left to sift through the debris of their shattered dreams on the eve of the social and political upheaval that will transform Russia forever.
Sophocles' immortal tragedy ANTIGONE receives a definitive cinematic interpretation in this 1961 film. Irene Papas (Z, THE TROJAN WOMEN, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE) heads a cast of over 500 actors of the Greek stage and screen, joined by soldiers and horsemen of the Greek Royal Guard. Performing in the original Greek, Papas and, in particular, Manos Katrakis as the tyrannical Theban King Creon, embody Sophocles' timeless themes with earthy conviction and irresistible passion.
In the aftermath of a bloody civil war that fatally pitted both her brothers against each other, Antigone (Papas), daughter of Oedipus, picks through the carnage outside the gates of Thebes in search of her fallen siblings' bodies. Vowing to bury both men, Antigone defies a direct edict from Thebes' King Creon that Antigone's rebel brother remain unsanctified for having led the insurrection. Antigone's defiance of Creon and devotion to her shattered family divides the city of Thebes, threatens her sister's betrothal to Creon's son and invokes the wrath of a king willing to defy the gods themselves to satisfy his selfish vengeance. But by condemning Antigone, Creon unwittingly dooms himself to a sentence far crueler than any punishment he could inflict on his enemies.
While remaining faithful to the original text, director Georges Tzavellas interprets ANTIGONE as an intimate black and white epic that recalls Orson Welles' MACBETH and Laurence Olivier's filmed HAMLET. As relevant now as it was in the Fourth Century BC, ANTIGONE's rich tapestry of complex characters pushed to the limits of loyalty, savagery, love and fate comes vividly to life in this superior film adaptation.
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PF11990179
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DVD (Greek, Black & White, With English Subtitles)
Director: Harry Pollard
Starring: George Siegmann, James Lowe, Margarita Fisher, Virginia Grey
Conceived as a super production on the scale of Foolish Wives and The Phantom of the Opera, this 1927 adaptation of Stowe's famous book cost $1.8 million and took two years to film. Seen today, the sincerity of director Harry Pollard's handsomely produced drama outweigh the conventions of its story. All told, this "lost" production remains a fascinating cinematic bridge between the 19th century barnstorming theatrical tradition and the new freedom of the feature film... as well as a cultural bridge between African-American and white popular entertainments.
Director: F. W. Murnau
Starring: Camilla Horn, Emil Jannings, Gosta Ekman, William Dieterle
Mobilizing the full resources of the Ufa Studios, F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise) orchestrated a colossal adaptation of Goethe's FAUST that ranks alongside Fritz Lang's Metropolis as the greatest achievement of the German silent cinema.
Gosta Ekman stars as the titular alchemist who, struggling with his faith amidst a devastating plague, is offered the power to cure and the gift of youth...in exchange for his soul. As the diabolical Mephisto, Emil Jannings (The Last Laugh) delivers a performance of operatic scale and intensity, by turns charming, comical, and horrific.
Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Gertrud Arnold, Hanna Ralph, Margarete Schoen, Paul Richter, Theodor Loos
One of the greatest artistic and technical achievements of the German silent cinema, Fritz Lang's monumental Die Nibelungen is a passionate retelling of Nordic legend, invested with all the resources of the colossal UFA Studios.
Scripted by Lang's wife at the time, Thea von Harbou (Metropolis), Siegfried establishes larger-than-life heroic characters who are defined by tests of valor and rigid codes of honor. In order to win the hand of Kriemhild (Margarete Schoen), Siegfried (Paul Richter) must win a bride for her brother, King Gunther (Theodor Loos). Kriemhild's Revenge begins after the death of Siegfried, and weaves the treacherous tale of his widow's ungodly vengeance upon his murderers. The noble qualities of the first film become liabilities in the second, as the blood oaths and vows of loyalty bring about a maelstrom of violence that results in the slaughter of entire armies (Lang would continue to explore this theme of bloodlust and revenge in such films as Fury, The Big Heat, and Rancho Notorious, but never with such ferocity).
Director: Mauritz Stiller
Starring: Ellen Hartman-Cederstrom, Gerda Lundequist, Greta Garbo, Jenny Hasselqvist, Lars Hanson
Lars Hanson, one of Sweden's biggest stars, plays Gosta Berling, a defrocked priest who encounters a series of adventures and loves in his tumultuous journey to redemption. Along the way, he encounters the beautiful Elisabeth, played by Greta Garbo in her first major screen role, but who already looks very much the movie star. The epic production is punctuated by stunning set pieces, including the burning of the massive Ekeby estate, and a magnificent chase across a frozen lake, with the lovers pursued by a ravenous pack of wolves.
"At once a summary and a swan song of the Swedish film" (Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art), The Saga of Gosta Berling was the last major film produced during Sweden's first golden age. Soon after, many of Sweden's leading stars and directors, including Stiller, Garbo and Hanson, were coaxed to Hollywood, and Sweden would enter a decades-long drought during which few of its films would receive international attention. Now, after more than 80 years, The Saga of Gosta Berling can be revisited and appreciated as one of the pinnacles of early Swedish cinema.
Review
"... includes some spectacular set-pieces (the burning of a manor house) and evocative outdoor scenes (a chase across an ice-covered lake), all captured with impressive cinematography" - Recommended Video Librarian
Director: Maurice Tourneur
Starring: Charles Hatton, Frank Keenan, John Bowers, Madge Bellamy, Mae Giraci
Lorna Doone was filmed three times before in the silent era, and six times more in the sound era, but the 1922 production directed by Maurice Tourneur is arguably one of the finest, and without a doubt the most beautiful. Like most of the feature adaptations of Lorna Doone, the 1922 version allows the romance and action of the novel to exist largely untouched by the tumult of the English Civil War. A young girl of noble birth is kidnapped by the Doones, a feared band of theives and cutthroats. Their leader, fallen nobleman Sir Ensor Doone, raises the girl, Lorna, as one of his own kin. Lorna secretly falls in love with yeoman John Ridd, but must contend with the brutish Carver Doone, who wants Lorna for his own.
In Lorna Doone, Tourneur uses natural lighting and the landscape to frame his actors with painterly effect, showcasing a very different set of aesthetic values than those of The Blue Bird, with its elaborate stylized sets and costumes. Both are representative gems of his silent work, much of which remains lost.
This edition of Lorna Doone was transferred from an original print at 18 fps and features a new score for piano and strings by Japanese singer/songwriter and composer Mari Iijima.
Director: Albert Parker
Starring: Carol Dempster, John Barrymore, Louis Wolheim, Roland Young
When a young prince is accused of a crime that could embroil him in international scandal, debonair supersleuth Sherlock Holmes comes to his aid, and quickly discovers that behind the incident lurks a criminal mastermind eager to reduce Western civilization to anarchy. Adapted from the hugely popular stage version of Arthur Conan Doyle1s stories (by William Gillette), SHERLOCK HOLMES not only provided Barrymore with one of his most prestigious early roles, but also presented the screen debuts of two notable actors: William Powell (The Thin Man) and Roland Young (Topper). SHERLOCK HOLMES was mastered from a 35mm restoration by the George Eastman House Motion Picture Department, and is accompanied by a score by Ben Model, performed on the Miditzer Virtual Theatre Organ.
Director: Carl Boese, Paul Wegener
Starring: Albert Steinruck, Greta Schroeder, Lyda Salmonova, Paul Wegener
Widely recognized as the source of the Frankenstein myth, the ancient Hebrew legend of the Golem provided actor/director Paul Wegener with the substance for one of the most adventurous films of the German silent cinema.
Suffering under the tyrannical rule of Rudolf II in 16th-century Prague, a Talmudic rabbi (Albert Seinruck) creates a giant warrior (Paul Wegener) to protect the safety of his people. Sculpted of clay and animated by the mysterious secrets of the Kabbalah, the Golem is a seemingly indestructible juggernaut, performing acts of great heroism, yet equally capable of dreadful violence. When the rabbi's assistant (Ernst Deutsch) takes control of the Golem and attempts to use him for selfish gain, the lumbering monster runs rampant, abducting the rabbi's daughter (Lyda Salmonova) and setting fire to the ghetto.
With its remarkable creation sequence (a dazzling blend of religion, sorcery and special effects) and the grand-scale destruction of its climax, The Golem was one of the greatest achievements of the legendary UFA Studios, and remains an undeniable landmark in the evolution of the horror film.
Director: D. W. Griffith
Starring: Lillian Gish, Lowell Sherman, Richard Barthelmess
D.W. Griffith's penchant for Victorian melodrama reached its height of expression in WAY DOWN EAST. First performed in 1898, Lottie Blair Parker's play was one of the most successful stageworks ever written, a theatrical chestnut, heavy with sentiment, that cried out for the touch of the master. Griffith captured the appeal of Parker's original, while embossing it with devices borrowed from other popular melodramas, such as the climactic chase across an ice floe (inspired by stage adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin).
Lillian Gish stars as a small-town girl who is seduced, impregnated, and cast aside by Lennox Sanderson, a wealthy playboy (Lowell Sherman). To escape the shame of having a fatherless child, Anna changes her name and starts a new life in a small farming community, where she meets David, an icon of male virtue and decency (Richard Barthelmess). Their delicate happiness is threatened when Lennox arrives in town, and word of Anna's unsavory past begins to spread.
Director: D. W. Griffith
Starring: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess
D. W. Griffith reached a pinnacle of expressiveness in this tender yet tragic tale of love and suffering in the seedy Limehouse district of London.
Richard Barthelmess gives a sensitive portrayal of a Chinese man who travels to England to spread the pacifist teachings of the Orient, but it is Lillian Gish who illuminates the screen. In this, the most heart-rending performance of her career, she plays a fifteen-year-old street urchin who longs to escape her miserable existence. Emotionally scarred by the torment and neglect of her abusive father (Donald Crisp), she collapses in the shop of the lonely and disillusioned "yellow man." As he tenderly nurses her back to health, an unspoken romance flowers between them, awakening in each of them feelings of love they thought themselves forever denied.
In some ways, Broken Blossoms was Griffith's response to critics of The Birth Of A Nation, an effort to clear himself of lingering charges of racism. However, cinematic convention forbade physical intimacy between the two races. With this in mind, Griffith took what might have been a bold interracial romance and turned it into something more ethereal: a form of cinematic poetry that engages the viewer through subtle gestures and changes of expression, meticulously choreographed and gracefully assembled.
Director: D. W. Griffith
Starring: Gibson Gowland, Henry B. Walthall, Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Ralph Lewis
More than 75 years after its initial release, The Birth of a Nation remains one of the most controversial films ever made and a landmark achievement in film history that continues to fascinate and enrage audiences. It is the epic story of two families, one northern and one southern, during and after the Civil War. D. W. Griffith's masterful direction combines brilliant battle scenes and tender romance with a vicious portrayal of African-Americans. It was the greatest feature-length blockbuster yet to be produced in the United States and the first to be shown in the White House. After seeing it, President Woodrow Wilson remarked it was "like writing history with lightning!"
There was a time when critics sought to de-emphasize the film's content and celebrate the picture as an artistic masterpiece, but from today's perspective, such an approach seems less tenable. However flawed The Birth of a Nation now seems as an historical epic, it is undeniable that the film itself made history. In cities and states across the country, it energized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which tried to have the film banned, or at least the most gruesome scenes censored. The film also inspired African-Americans to move into filmmaking as a way to offer alternative images and stories.
Director: Louis Feuillade
Starring: Edmund Breon, Georges Melchior, Rene Navarre
Based on the phenomenally popular French pulp novellas, Louis Feuillade's outrageous, ambitious FANTA"MAS series became the gold standard of espionage serials in pre-WWI Europe, and laid the foundation for such immortal works as Feuillade's own Les Vampires and Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films.
Rene Navarre stars as the criminal lord of Paris, the master of disguise, the creeping assassin in black: Fantomas. Over the course of five feature films (which combined to form a 5 1/2-hour epic), Fantomas, along with his accomplices and mistresses, are pursued by the equally resourceful Inspector Juve (Edmund Breon) and his friend, journalist Jerome Fandor (Georges Melchior).
Review
"Definitely recommended for cinema history collections" - Video Librarian