It’s the last day of the Springtime Silent Movie Challenge and I am sharing what I watched! I indulged myself utterly by filling my viewing list with pictures from France and Britain but there are some other lovely tidbits to be found as well.
If you took part in the challenge, please be sure to share your results! The challenge has two parts.
British filmmaker R.W. Paul is not well-remembered today but he sold Georges Melies his first camera. This trippy little film shows the lengths that people will go to to avoid a traffic ticket. It’s a valuable work because it showcases that trick films were not a French exclusive.
Actual footage from Roald Amundsen’s successful attempt to be the first human being to set foot on the South Pole. Also, penguins. The historical value is obvious but the homespun quality (Amundsen himself did some of the filming) is an added charm.
This was just delightful! A torn-from-the-headlines French comedy about the real theft of the Mona Lisa made just weeks after the event. Silent cinema moved at breakneck speed!
This is the earliest German feature film I have seen to date, so I am pretty pleased. It’s not perfect, of course, but viewers may be surprised by some of the sophisticated techniques employed. It’s a biopic and a bit stiff but still very illuminating.
This is actuality footage of the Russian royal family and was apparently viewed by author Franz Kafka, who wrote a sarcastic blurb about it. As a Jewish man, his focus was not on the glamor and ceremony so much as the cruel anti-Semitic policies in force at the time. (For example, approximately 400 Jews were killed in the 1905 Odessa Pogroms.)
The earliest R.W. Paul film I have seen and it’s exactly what it says on the tin: the Epsom Derby is caught on film. What it lacks in story it more than makes up for with the chance to see living, breathing Victorians.
Alice Guy’s macabre little medical comedy uses special effects to show a patient having his limbs amputated and reattached. That may sound like the start of a horror film but Guy keeps things light and the patient is dancing by the end.
R.W. Paul also takes on modern medicine with even zanier results. Baby incubators were saving lives all over the world but what if you leave the kid inside too long? GIANT BEARDED BABY!
A real tearjerker based on the Hans Christian Andersen story about a small street vendor who burns her wares and experiences visions as she slowly freezes to death. The special effects used by director James Williamson make this version particularly tasteful.
Another Alice Guy film, this one captures a serpentine dance. You know, those wonderful dances where the performer whisks around specially designed skirts in a pattern. Dance films were particularly popular because the moving performers and their costumes were particularly well-suited to hand-color.
The exercise was fun and I was once again struck by the sheer variety and quality in motion pictures from the very beginning. I hope you also had fun on your journey. Even if you didn’t complete all ten viewings, I would love to hear your feedback and see your viewing list.
An ultra feminine environment brought up an aspect of women sexuality and relating to men that I had not thought about before. I encountered it on a beach on Koh Phangan in Thailand.
Friends of mine that were too shy to comment on this post asked me to elaborate some more. When I read the post again, it sounded coded indeed 🙂 . I need to be more clear.
More on this idea to come. I’ll write a more elaborate post at some point. It’s too good to let it go just like that.
“I’m on this paradise island, at a fantastic yoga/meditation/spa/vegetarian retreat that’s got a little… problem. There was an open mic evening tonight, and a woman recited a poem of hers named “Overdue for a woo” – very sweet, good sense of humor, where the punch line was “we [women] want respect and equal pay, but we still want to be seduced”. She said she wrote the poem for herself, and had no idea how many women feel the “pain”.
This poem overlaps a perpetual lack of raw testosterone for the quantity of hot hot hot women here by the retreat. Too much breathing on chakras, eye gazing and elevating energy, while a shortage of hair-pulling, bend-me-over kind of stuff. Or so they complain. Surprise, what do women want?!
Obviously I got scared . Two options: I change my orientation, or get the hell out of here. In the meantime, I’m deep into nostalgia, and try to remember that there are hot guys out there.
This entry was posted on 16.02.2012, 19:18 and is filed under Customs & Tradition, Sanskrit, Индия, Интернет-инфо-техно, История, Наука. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.