We’ve gotten a lot of new movies already in 2018, but one of my favorites so far is a set of three silent films by Josef Von Sternberg. While these films are campus use only (DVD 14852 – 14854), they are truly worth watching and can be viewed by students in our screening room. One […]
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Silent Cinema Showcase 2017
AFI in Silver Spring is having their Silent Cinema Showcase, and it’s a great lineup! You can see the listing by film here: https://silver.afi.com/Browsing/EventsAndExperiences/EventDetails/0000000011 And on the calendar here: http://afi.com/silver/films/Calendar.aspx This calendar below was accurate as of 11/2, but be sure to check the live one because they update things sometimes. Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday […]
Continue readingIt’s Buster Keaton’s Birthday!
Celebrate by checking out one of our quietly awesome streaming databases, Silent Film Online! via GIPHY
Continue readingFor the silent film treasure hunter…
Imogen Sara Smith highlights Mostly Lost on Criterion. Definitely worth a read. On eventbrite, the description of the Mostly Lost workshop is: The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus presents “Mostly Lost 6: A Film Identification Workshop” on June 15-17, 2017 in Culpeper, Virginia. “Mostly Lost” will feature the screenings of unidentified, […]
Continue readingCheck out this silent version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on Viki: https://www.viki.com/videos/1037941v-20000-leagues-under-the-sea This was the first motion picture filmed underwater! As Wikipedia states: Actual underwater cameras were not used, but a system of watertight tubes and mirrors allowed the camera to shoot reflected images of underwater scenes staged in shallow sunlit waters. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20,000_Leagues_Under_the_Sea_(1916_film)) Here […]
Continue readingSilent Movie GIFs shows the sausage-making behind old special effects
Special effects aren’t usually exciting anymore. Filmmakers can create worlds and human beings from whole cloth now, so digital trickery doesn’t wow like it used to. 100 years ago, though, every difficult shot took a herculean effort. The Twitter account Silent Movie GIFs recently shared a few explanations for how silent films pulled off their […]
Continue readingNo, a silent film of a train probably didn’t cause mass hysteria
You’ve probably heard this one before: back during the dawn of motion pictures, a short movie showing a train heading for the camera caused audiences to freak out and try to run from the theater. It’s a funny anecdote about how much of an impact film made – and it makes those audiences look pretty […]
Continue readingA new lost Méliès was discovered… after it was mislabeled
A Trip to the Moon, not Match de Prestidigitation First there was the lost Hitchcock film. Then, the lost Laurel and Hardy sequence. Now, film conservationists have found a long-list film by Georges Méliès, one of the pioneers of cinema. Méliès was one of the pioneers of film as an art form, especially in the […]
Continue readingAtlas Obscura thinks Fritz Lang may have invented rocket countdowns
Life imitates art, but rarely does art have the chance to define the hallmark of a totally unrelated field. For an example of when a film managed to capture the public imagination that strongly, read Cara Giaimo’s article for Atlas Obscura about how German director Fritz Lang essentially popularized the basic ideas of space travel. […]
Continue readingThis shot is the most expensive shot in silent film history
The General (1926) – HU DVD 34This shot is the most expensive shot in silent film history. It was filmed in a single take, that had to be perfect, with a real train and a ‘dummy’ engineer (notice the white arm hanging out the conductors window). Some of the locals who came to watch the […]
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