The Cabinet of Dr Shhh! (silent movies thread)

[sally]

ok i couldn't help watch another georgian one, this time a farce, which would have been delightful apart from some unwatchable horse abuse

samanishvili’s stepmother - kote mardjanishvili, zakaria berishvili (1926)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttuq3xwXPi0

[sally]

celebrating the return of stumfilm with an elegant quickie

a lonely woman - august blom (1917)

[sally]

cœur ardent - jean durand (1912)

it is astonishing to me how idiotic durand's comedies are compared to how beautiful his camargue westerns can be. he really loved that landscape

[sally]

betuwse kersen (1925)

charming little doc about dutch cherry growing
















https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkwzBH7 ... u&index=51

[sally]

yep....epic danish production filmed in authentic italy (partly)






(contemporary appian way)


mists of the past - a w sandberg (1925)

eng intertitles here: https://www.stumfilm.dk/en/stumfilm/str ... del-popolo

seems to be a story that cinema relishes, about art, doubles, reappearances (genetically, artistically, monkly) but begins with a dangerously increasing crick in the neck....










nevertheless, the hero has a remedy.....









however this is too much, drives them delirious. her, a crown of thorns till she turns blue...






whereas he collapses completely, goes full romantic goth and starts talking to turkeys...

[greennui]

Watched a bunch of restored, fragmented Italian films

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4FiTEFltJc&t

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8upNtt0XbI

[sally]

sunrise over the immortal city of rome (1925)

this is insanely gorgeous, although it's not all rome and is bafflingly ended by a cowboy and acrobats, but still, deeeeeeelicious














https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm6LjAZSb64

[sally]

aitaré da praia - gentil roiz, ary severo (1925)

one of those rough and ready brazilian silents where either huge chunks are missing or the filmmakers got totally bored at the end and tied up all the plots strands in under a minute. either way the film looks AMAZING, as if the sun and salty air had materially embedded themselves in the movie for atmosphere and ended up constituting the entire story

[greennui]

'37 but feels earlier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO0EvY-cI_Y

[sally]

lovely denmark (1925)

https://www.danmarkpaafilm.dk/film/dejlige-danmark-0

totally random loveliness






korsør (1925)

https://www.danmarkpaafilm.dk/film/korsoer-1925

lovely travelogue around seaside destination (with brief cameo from john smith's black tower)

[sally]

the devil in the city - germaine dulac (1925)

with that, i think i've now exhausted all the female directed films of 1925 (this and red kimona) unless anyone knows any others?

[sally]

watching some bfi 1925s

uti - herbert uzielli

unabashed pure colonialist gaze (dead tiger and tuba) https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/wat ... 925-online






the dolgarrog disaster - frank h kenyon

welsh dam burst: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/wat ... 925-online




stratford-on-avon - cecil m hepworth

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/wat ... 925-online






the scilly isles

daffodil industry: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/wat ... 925-online






dorset coast - stoll bailey

camping holiday footage: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/wat ... 925-online

[Lencho of the Apes]

Hepworth in '25? Wow, I should look into that.

[sally]

Hepworth in '25? Wow, I should look into that.

it's a 12 min travelogue of shakespeare's birthplace, not sure how interesting that is. the bfi have a digital scan of his 1923 comin' thro' the rye, and 1921 tansy, which were available at certain uk specific sites until covid and now there are 'currently no plans to make available outside london, sorry', when it's cheaper for me to get to paris right now than london. am currently very pissed off with the bfi, should call it london film institute, seeing how little it serves the majority of the country. rant over.

[sally]

the eagle - clarence brown (1925)

just don't get the adulation of valentino, don't find him attractive at all, not when john gilbert and ronald colman were around instead, madness.

and fuck this movie that makes an empress a bitch just cuz hollywood can't handle powerful older women. creepy film.

[Lencho of the Apes]

the adulation of valentino

Maybe it was really successful merchandising? I just saw Cobra, and there were title cards devoted to selling the idea of how desirable and "magnificent" he was. (Well, maybe only one title card...

[sally]

cool, passing on cobra then! one less 1925 bookmark to mull over...



un mariage au revolver - jean durand (1912)

one of durand's less inspired westerns but still nice to see joë hamman here again after last watching him much older in the 1931 erl-king

[sally]

this is very cute, a 1925 homemade advertisement for a novel his wife had written, from emile gaudu, a cine-mad amateur (he has lots more films) based in that most cinematic of 1920s locales, bretagne

https://www.cinematheque-bretagne.bzh/b ... -0-12.html?

[sally]

even minor epstein is still ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

the adventures of robert macaire (1925)

[sally]

sons of the sea - h bruce woolfe (1925)

if you like watching navy recruitment propaganda about working class kids sacrificing themselves for the upper classes, then this is for you!










even a nod to greek como (the pom-pom shoes), the dirty robbers...

[sally]

aha, uk redeems itself from the ghastly above

the pleasure garden - alfred hitchcock (1925)

sooooooo hitchcock, right from the start, not sure he even added much else in later movies. but anyway, i don't like the word 'stan' but i'll use it for miles mander, the sleazy delicious shit....

[ole dole doff]

The transition to the new technology, however, did not take place without resistance. One of the most prominent public intellectuals of the period Pavlos Nirvanas, who wrote the script for Gaziadis’ The Storm and Astero and who had a persistent interest in cinema, declared in frustration:

The characters in [silent] films not only talk but they talk in a special way. First, they don’t say nonsense, as do for example characters in the theater. Further, they never babble on about useless issues, they don’t exhibit stupid wit, don’t make gross jokes, and don’t shout out stupidities under the pretense of philosophizing. And yet, they communicate with each other perfectly . . . Watch two lovers on the screen: you think that they speak the language of angels never heard before by human ears. When the screen takes on the responsibility of informing us in writing about what they say to each other, the viewer is taken over by disgust. For this reason, the worse a movie is the more written text it presents us with. The best movie is the one which contains the fewest possible written expressions and lets us communicate without mediation with its heroes.

[Zynab]

Wow everyone has been watching so many good silents while I've been gone! I myself recently watched Kult Ciala (1930) which made for a hazily evocative midnight viewing experience, though the rip was quite pixelated and generally of low quality. The love triangle story was very Lubitsch (without the humor) and the execution was very Gustav Machaty (in a diluted way). The film is worth a look but only if you're running out of erotic melodrama silents to watch, imo (if that's even possible).

I also watched these lovely fragments of Bertini and Menichelli films last night. I especially liked Mariute! La Bertini's face...always a sight to behold.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/11995566 ... a3</iframe>

https://player.vimeo.com/video/12876943 ... cc</iframe>

Also I'm kind of sad you guys don't like Rudolph Valentino / his films ;__; He's close to my heart as one of the first movie stars I loved when I was getting into silents and classic Hollywood as a young teenager. One of my most precious cinema-related memories is being given a little flipbook of frames from The Eagle, showing him dancing, when I was 13, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Cobra is literally my favorite movie of his! I think he and Nita Naldi are absolutely smoldering in it...so beautiful. I plan to rewatch soon. I also find Valentino fascinating as the embodiment of 1920s orientalist fantasy. There's a lot to unpack there.

[sally]

Wow everyone has been watching so many good silents while I've been gone! I myself recently watched Kult Ciala (1930) which made for a hazily evocative midnight viewing experience, though the rip was quite pixelated and generally of low quality. The love triangle story was very Lubitsch (without the humor) and the execution was very Gustav Machaty (in a diluted way). The film is worth a look but only if you're running out of erotic melodrama silents to watch, imo (if that's even possible).

I also watched these lovely fragments of Bertini and Menichelli films last night. I especially liked Mariute! La Bertini's face...always a sight to behold.

Also I'm kind of sad you guys don't like Rudolph Valentino / his films ;__; He's close to my heart as one of the first movie stars I loved when I was getting into silents and classic Hollywood as a young teenager. One of my most precious cinema-related memories is being given a little flipbook of frames from The Eagle, showing him dancing, when I was 13, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Cobra is literally my favorite movie of his! I think he and Nita Naldi are absolutely smoldering in it...so beautiful. I plan to rewatch soon. I also find Valentino fascinating as the embodiment of 1920s orientalist fantasy. There's a lot to unpack there.

you can never have enough erotic silent melodramas! thanks for the rec, will definitely get to. and perhaps if i had been inculcated from an early age maybe i could like valentino too, but at 13 i didn't even know any cinema existed (my youth was very farm-based) and nowadays i like em rougher and gnarled

and dammit i wish all the italian archives would coalesce in a meaningful way....i have a mariute bookmarked to watch, it's 28 mins compared to above (looks like the above is the last 10 mins of this one) and is much crappier quality and not coloured. maybe i'll watch the crappy version up to the beginning of the nice one and then switch over

link to mariute - 28 min

[Zynab]

and dammit i wish all the italian archives would coalesce in a meaningful way....i have a mariute bookmarked to watch, it's 28 mins compared to above (looks like the above is the last 10 mins of this one) and is much crappier quality and not coloured. maybe i'll watch the crappy version up to the beginning of the nice one and then switch over

Sally thanks so much for the longer version / extra material from Mariute! Had no idea that existed; will definitely be watching soon + looking at the higher quality tinted fragment again. Anything to get a better idea of a film of La Bertini's.

[Zynab]

Roland West said fuck cinematographic innovation!! Honestly crazy to see a film from as late as 1925 with almost zero visual flourishes. All the excitement comes from ‘tricky’ set-pieces and gadgets, but I couldn’t even enjoy that because I was embarrassed for the film for being more primitive in style than stuff from as much as 10 years earlier. This is the most visually stationary film I've seen from this year that's not an utterly forgotten bourgeois 'women's picture'. It's maybe the least compelling film in Chaney's filmography. His 'mad doctor' is given very little to do and has maybe 15 min total of screentime? It's all about the fake Sherlock Jr. character (the treatment of the mail order detective diploma thing was giving me some thoughts about the Pinkertons, Napoleon Hill and today's multi-level marketing stuff, though). The thing I liked the most about this movie was the titular monster because he looks just like a trve kvlt black metal dude in corpse paint & a long black cloak + displays extreme black metal behavior by spending all his time hiding in the forest and snaring normies with his homemade tree trap.

THE MONSTER is definitely not making my top 20 for 1925 and I would rank it very low in terms of films I've seen from this year at all. I do not recommend it.

[ole dole doff]

[sally]

cheka commissar miroschtschenko - paul sehnert (1925)




my first estonian silent i think, and from this i gather that estonians must be optimists, since they're constantly amazed at the horror they find themselves in. a distinctly anti-soviet movie?

[nrh]

THE MONSTER is definitely not making my top 20 for 1925 and I would rank it very low in terms of films I've seen from this year at all. I do not recommend it.

i really like this movie even though i think everything you are saying about it completely correct. there is something i find deeply fun about roland west, a combination of naive enthusiasm and pretty decent budgets (the sets are always great) and...eccentric ideas about narrative emphasis and pace that feels pretty singular.

you're definitely right when you say that this feels like it belongs to a different era than 1925, and it gets even weirder when he remakes his mid '20s the bat movie for early sound in 1930 as the bat whispers.

[sally]

manasse - jean mihail (1925)

here's another film that is incredible to see in 1925! the only thing that made it bearable (lol) was the panda eye