Notes
The following material is from Wikipedia.
1918-1928: The Triumph of American Film…
- Citizen Kane (1941) dir. Orson Welles
- evidence of Hollywood’s new ability to manipulate lighting
- The Thief of Bagdad (1924) dir. Raoul Walsh
- mainstream movie
- Desire (1936) dir. Frank Borzage
- Gone with the Wind (1939) dir. Victor Fleming
- Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) dir. Mervyn LeRoy
- Singin’ in the Rain (1952) dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
- MGM style: “had an opulence and optimism”
- The Maltese Falcon (1941) dir. John Huston
- Warners Bros style: nighttime settings, murder, melodrama, movie journalism
- The Scarlet Empress (1934) dir. Josef von Sternberg
- Paramount style: sparkly, romantic, champagney
- The Cameraman (1928) dir. Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton
- Keaton’s films had a deeper sense of comedy
- One Week (1920) dir. Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton
- Sherlock Jr. (1924) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Buster Keaton
- Three Ages (1923) dir. Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline
- Buster Keaton Rides Again (1965) dir. John Spotton
- The General (1926) dir. Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton
- climax of movie was “most stunning visual event ever arranged for a comedy”
- Divine Intervention (2002) dir. Elia Suleiman
- “finds grumpiness funny”, uses the deadpan
- Limelight (1952) dir. Charlie Chaplin
- Chaplin was strong in his ability to use body movement to create comedy
- City Lights (1931) dir. Charlie Chaplin
- The Kid (1921) dir. Charlie Chaplin
- “humanized comic cinema”
- “Chaplin was cinema’s Charles Dickens”
- Bad Timing (1980) dir. Nicolas Roeg
- The Great Dictator (1940) dir. Charlie Chaplin
- shot with Adolf Hitler kicking balloon is representative of Hitler making the world his toy, very creative choice
- Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) dir. Jacques Tati
- modeled after Chaplin
- Toto in Color (1953) dir. Steno
- Awaara (1951) dir. Raj Kapoor
- Sunset Boulevard (1950) dir. Billy Wilder
- Some Like It Hot (1959) dir. Billy Wilder
- Luke’s Movie Muddle (1916) dir. Hal Roach
- Haunted Spooks (1920) dir. Alfred J. Goulding and Hal Roach
- Never Weaken (1921) dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
- Safety Last! (1923) dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
- ends with one of most famous sequences of 20s cinema
- I Flunked, But… (1930) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
- influenced by Harold Lloyd
…And the First of its Rebels
- Nanook of the North (1922) dir. Robert Flaherty
- made extremely long nonfiction film for its time
- “made the audience look more ethically”
- documentary as an art form was born
- The House Is Black (1963) dir. Forough Farrokhzad
- Sans Soleil (1983) dir. Chris Marker
- The Not Dead (2007) dir. Brian Hill
- The Perfect Human (1967) (shown as part of The Five Obstructions) dir. Jørgen Leth
- The Five Obstructions (2003) dir. Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth
- Blind Husbands (1919) dir. Erich von Stroheim
- used realism to undermine the Hollywood fantasy
- The Lost Squadron (1932) dir. George Archainbaud and Paul Sloane
- Greed (1924) dir. Erich von Stroheim
- use of color yellow shows greed, color of money shown earlier, very innovative technique
- movie ran 7 hours
- Stroheim in Vienna (1948)
- Queen Kelly (1929) (shown as part of Sunset Boulevard) dir. Erich von Stroheim
- The Crowd (1928) dir. King Vidor
- portrayed 20s America with far more realism than romantic cinema
- first movie to use New York extensively as a location
- shows mass society and kinetic energy of cities
- The Apartment (1960) dir. Billy Wilder
- uses same idea of desks in the crowd
- The Trial (1962) dir. Orson Welles
- uses same idea of desks in the crowd
- Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) dir. Yakov Protazanov
- Posle Smerti (1915) dir. Yevgeni Bauer
- “bravely natural”
- early Russian films like these were lamense and pessimistic in a way, showed grief, loss, and longing
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
- very realistic, especially with actress who played Joan, very natural look and very emotional
- The President (1919) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Dreyer looks to simplify and purify his images
- Vampyr (1932) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
- gives shadows a life of their own, uses whiteness to go against the Hollywood norm of how a film should look
- his films were considered “unfashionable”
- Gertrud (1964) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
- again uses whiteness, blankness, to create spiritual purity in the imagery
- Dogville (2003) dir. Lars von Trier
- Vivre sa vie (1962) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Jean-Luc Godard