SCFZ

Choose your favourite films from 1925 (according to IMDB).

Each person can vote for up to 20 films. Do not feel compelled to fill the maximum allowable number.

Twenty-film ballots can be formatted as follows:
- Five tiers of four films each, 4/4/4/4/4; scored 5-4-3-2-1 pts/film/tier
- Four tiers of five films each, 5/5/5/5; scored 4.5-3.5-2.5-1.5 pts/film/tier
- Two tiers of ten films each, 10/10; scored 4-2 pts/film/tier
- No tiers, unranked; scored 3 pts/film
- A 20-film three-tier ballot is not possible

A tiered ballot can include less than 20 films, but in that case the total number of films must still be able to be factored by the number of tiers, so:
- A five tier ballot can include only 20, 15, 10, or 5 films
- A four tier ballot can include only 20, 16, 12, 8, or 4 films
- A three tier ballot (scored 5-3-1) can include only 18, 15, 12, 9, 6, or 3 films
- A two tier ballot can include only 20, 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, or 2 films
- Ballots that are 19, 17, 13, 11, 7 or 1 films must be no tiers

Users are urged to post their provisional lists as soon as possible, so that others can use them for recommendations. You may revise your lists at any point prior to the deadline.

Deadline for 1925 ballots will be Wednesday, May 31st at roughly midnight EDT.

My top 20:

Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein)
The Salvation Hunters (1925, Josef von Sternberg)
The Merry Widow (1925, Erich von Stroheim)
Stachka / Strike (1925, Sergei Eisenstein)

The Unholy Three (1925, Tod Browning)
Le double amour / Double Love (1925, Jean Epstein)
Du skal ære din hustru / Master of the House (1925, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Lady of the Night (1925, Monta Bell)

Feu Mathias Pascal (1925, Marcel L'Herbier)
Poil de carotte (1925, Julien Duvivier)
The Freshman (1925, Fred C. Newmeyer)
Le diable dans la ville / The Devil in the City (1925, Germaine Dulac)

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925, Fred Niblo)
La fille de l'eau / Whirlpool of Fate (1925, Jean Renoir)
Visages d'enfants / Faces of Children (1925, Jacques Feyder)
Varieté / Jealousy (1925, Ewald André Dupont)

Go West (1925, Buster Keaton)
Lady Windermere's Fan (1925, Ernst Lubitsch)
Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925, Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)
Seven Chances (1925, Buster Keaton)

yesssssssssssssssssssssss i only have 150 bookmarks to get through (inc a 6 hour les mis) so hoping this list is gonna change considerably

the bear's wedding - konstantin eggert, vladimir gardin
namus - amo bek-nazaryan
lady windermere's fan - ernst lubitsch
sunshine valley - emanuel gregers
le double amour - jean epstein
the vocation of andré carel - jean choux
the salvation hunters - josef von sternberg
her sister from paris - sidney franklin
the tower of silence - johannes guter
faces of children - jacques feyder
dick turpin - john g. blystone
tartuffe - f w murnau
chess fever - vsevolod pudovkin, mykola shpykovskyi
the chronicles of the gray house - arthur von gerlach
feu mathias pascal - marcel l’herbier
maciste in hell - guido brignone
the merry widow - erich von stroheim
the big parade - king vidor
go west - buster keaton
seven chances - buster keaton

(revised below)

dunno how much i'll get to watch but i've already got the bear's wedding xD

I am so excited about all the Fleischer studios cartoons for the year that I haven't seen yet. I'lll bet there's some other good stuff lurking as well. I'll start with these:

Battleship Potemkin - Eisenstein
The Big Parade - Vidor
Go West - Keaton
The Lost World
The Pleasure Garden - Hitchcock
Sally Of The sawdust - Griffith
Salvation Hunters - von Setrnberg
Seven Chances - Keaton
Strike - Eisenstein
Variety - Dupont

Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse 1925 Directed by Henri Chomette
Lady Windermere’s Fan 1925 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
From Italy to Australia 1925 ‘Dall'Italia all'Australia’ Directed by Angelo Drovetti
Opus IV 1925 Directed by Walter Ruttmann
Double Love 1925 ‘Le Double Amour’ Directed by Jean Epstein
A Woman of the World 1925 Directed by Malcolm St. Clair
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ 1925 Directed by Fred Niblo
Faces of Children 1925 ‘Visages d'enfants’ Directed by Jacques Feyder
Whirlpool of Fate 1925 ‘La Fille de l'eau’ Directed by Jean Renoir
Our Heavenly Bodies 1925 ‘Wunder der Schöpfung’ Directed by Hanns Walter Kornblum
Body and Soul 1925 Directed by Oscar Micheaux
Maciste in Hell 1925 ‘Maciste all'inferno’ Directed by Guido Brignone
Sunrise Over the Immortal City of Rome 1925 ‘Zonsopgang over de onsterfelijke stad Rome’
The Rediscovered Paradise 1925 ‘Das wiedergefundene Paradies’ Directed by Walter Ruttmann, Lotte Lendesdorff
In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea 1925
The Big Parade 1925 Directed by King Vidor
The Merry Widow 1925 Directed by Erich von Stroheim
The Gold Rush 1925 Directed by Charlie Chaplin

There's french speakers on here, right? How would you translate "Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse"? Games of Reflection and Speed? Some places have translated it as "games of", "games on" and even "play on".

Just learned that Henri Chomette and Rene Clair were brothers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Z_cnIuhL8&t

greennui wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 9:09 am There's french speakers on here, right? How would you translate "Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse"? Games of Reflection and Speed? Some places have translated it as "games of", "games on" and even "play on".

literally, it's "Games of Reflections and Speed" ("reflections" and "games" are both plural). i can't see any justification for changing "of" to "on", and asked a better french speaker than me and they agreed. changing it to "Play on Reflections and Speed" sounds better to me at first, but then it becomes an allusion to the phrase "play on words", which is not something the title of the film probably means to suggest. to use "Play" in the title, i think you'd need to use the preposition "with": "Play with Reflections and Speed", say, but that doesn't seem an improvement on the "Games..." version

regardless, it sounds a lot better in french to me

i have not seen all that much from this year, usually my early/mid 1920s ballots are full of buster keaton but this was not his best year imo

Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse (Henri Chomette)
The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian)

Paris qui Dort (Rene Clair)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein)

The Circle (Frank Borzage)
The Freshman (Fred Newmeyer/Sam Taylor)

Lady Windermere's Fan (Ernst Lubitsch)
La Voix du Rossignol (Wladyslaw Starewicz)

Chess Fever (Vsevolod Pudovkin/Nikolai Shpikovsky)
Lichtspiel: Opus IV (Walter Ruttmann)

flip wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 2:41 pm
regardless, it sounds a lot better in french to me

That's probably why no ones bothered to translate the title on letterboxd and other sites! Paris qui dort is "The Crazy Ray" on there.

Even spotted a Games of Reflections and of Speed, lol

"The play of light on water" is a stock phrase in English, and that justifies rendering "jeux" as "play," afaic

pohjalaisia - jalmari lahdensuo

one of those scandi-rural silents, and it almost works... the scenery is gorgeous and is filmed to comment on the action (best use of swinging well-bucket), the plot hints at an interesting examination of even good-hearted conflicting inflexible attitudes, and best of all the hero dies at the end...but the examination doesn't really go that far, the interior scenes you can almost see the bit where the audience sat before the stage, and the hero is the worst actor ever, i think it's the finnish response to maciste-frenzy, too much a broad-shouldered carrot-man who favours his chest over his face for acting...

anyway streaming here with eng subs: https://elonet.finna.fi/Record/kavi.elo ... uva_117362

save me! i gambled away all the charity money i stole from you



don't worry, i'll take care of everything while you go hide

(years of addict's gaslighting may have given me a jaundiced view on this kinda stuff lol)





immediately run over by a train. what a beautiful dissolve

Capital Punishment - James P. Hogan, USA

Not especially good, and the print quality sucked...but the movie is straight-up Beyond A Reasonable Doubt. Hard to imagine Lang never saw it.

kentucky pride has the weird gimmick of horse pov



not bad if you like horses. but then

did a borzage double (he has 5 credits for 1925!), the circle was pretty funny, esp the old people



norma talmadge in restored 'the lady' tho part still looks like this. she's a showgirl



'the lady' has a good bit in common with 'stella dallas' (king 1925) and both are written by frances marion (the most renowned female screenwriter of the 20th century - imdb) so these are films about which i have a lot of feelings as an adoptee etc





norma talmadge as an old woman (probably age 40) this is a very sentimental melodrama full of sexist and classist garbage so not for me etc ymmv

was gonna watch a borzage but the lady looks like talmadge misery-porn and everyone is saying the circle is great apart from the code before code ending....so....maybe i'll just watch a tod browning instead...

anyway watched something more batshit....



ways to strength & beauty - nicholas kaufmann, wilhelm prager

you want ass? there is ass, and ass, and ass, and ass, and boobs and ass (and nascent ideology, but there's enough craziness to distract from that)

HAHA and it's on youtube

and yes the circle's 'surprise' ending will likely keep it out of my list

rischka wrote: ↑Sun May 07, 2023 4:27 pm HAHA and it's on youtube

youtube version is 20 mins shorter than the one i watched, am guessing it has all the ass censored out, still worth watching as the apogee of all the physical health nonsense in the 20s, even features more methods of the weirdo-guru i watched in netherlands como: https://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/viewtopic. ... 729#p39729

stella dallas - henry king

beautiful restoration by moma, streaming here for only one more day: https://delphiquest.com/film-foundation ... lla-dallas

yes it's gorgeous, but absolutely fuck that paternalistic saintly sacrificing mother shit. also ronnie isn't given remotely enough to do

The more I see of (Dorothy Davenport) Mrs Wallace Reid's output, the more interesting I find her. "Sources" say she directed The Red Kimona, but in the credits she's listed as producer,with the direction ascribed to some dude. Dorothy Arzner's up in there as a scenarist, though, so the whole thing fits very comfortably into the feminist-adjacent conceptual space of Davenport's version of womanpicture melodrama (and she slips in one unmistakable moment of L representation...)

Oh yeah -- I could be wrong, but I think the eye-catching tinting of certain objects is a thing that's been done to the movie in prepping it for home-video availability. It's a neat effect, but boo hiss if it wasn't part of the original text.

the stationmaster - yuri zhelyabuzhsky, ivan moskvin

nothing is gonna be better than the ucicky version, although this one will easily make my final ballot, but i still find it amazing that they could make films like this one and the bear's wedding at all in russia in 1925, i just assumed it was all aggressive propaganda...anyway, sternberg levels of humiliation all present and correct....











https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JawoK-OCzyo

greennui wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 6:56 pm The Ingmar Heritance (Gustaf Molander, 1925) - Soft 1925 poll start. Don't have much to say about it except that I was surprised to see Conrad Veidt pop up in it.

yay! another cheerful swedish film! (and another one where i wonder what chloe sevigny (aka jenny hasselquist) is doing in a silent movie from 1925)

Du skal ære din hustru (Master of the House)
Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lazybones
Orochi (Serpent)
Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray)
Seven Chances
The Big Parade
The Merry Widow
Zur Chronik von Grieshuus (The Chronicles of the Gray House)

Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin)
Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe)
La vocation d'André Carel (The Vocation of André Carel)
Les misérables
The Eagle
The Gold Rush
The Lost World
The Road to Yesterday
Varieté (Variety)
Visages d'enfants (Faces of Children)

A pity I have no time to watch anything other than DtC nominees.

the were-bear!

the bear's wedding
stachka!
lady windemere's fan
the merry widow
chess fever

variete
the big parade
maciste in hell
go west
lazybones

the unholy three
feu mathias pascal
grass: a nation's battle for life
seven chances
salvation hunters

chronicle of the gray house
faces of children
paris qui dort
the gold rush
double love

THE COCAINE RUSH (Carl Alstrup, 1925)

An eccentric gentleman strolls through Copenhagen. Psychedelic dreams and grotesque coincidences propel him from one insane situation to the next. Via a personal ad he never submitted, he meets a mysterious woman with giant teeth and cannot get rid of her again. She chases him through the city while he tries to ingratiate himself with a beautiful woman who keeps crossing his path. At a café, he overhears a conversation about a cocaine temple and promptly sets out to find it.

The beginning and end are missing. The film contains Danish intertitles. No programme survives, so we cannot map out the full plot of the film or identify the names of the characters. However, an interview with the director and main character, Carl Alstrup, survives; he takes the film’s poor reception in his stride and is clearly able to laugh at himself.

streaming without Eng subs → https://www.stumfilm.dk/stumfilm/stream ... kain-rusen
with Eng subs on KG

Head Winds

Whoa, Herbert Blache was still doing it in 1925. And he's gone all reflexive and autobio. Polanski style. So and so never proposed to so and so because she was a strong-willed woman and he didn't fancy spending the rest of his life butting heads with her. Instead, he kidnaps her, planning to Stockholm her into proper womanly subservience. She gets sick sick sick sick sick sick sick and when she comes out of her coma, she's all imprinted on him like she was a baby duck. Mission accomplished! Best little sub a Dom could want.

Lol I wish I hadn't logged back to discover 1925 was this month's year for the poll so late ;__; I'll try to watch only films from 1925 if I can in these last few days of the month so I can participate. I already know I love Zur Chronik von Grieshuus, Le Double Amour and Wedding of the Bear (the latter film...HUGE new favorite) so those will be on my ballot.