Aviation and film took the world by storm in the early 20th century. Just eight years after the Lumiere brothers’ famed 1895 projected screenings, Orville and Wilbur Wright took their first flight in December 1903. By the 1910s, film had exploded into an international entertainment …
Continue ReadingAn Introduction to the Wonderful World of Pre-1920 Cinema
Outside of a few big names like George Melies or D.W. Griffith, whenever silent movies are mentioned there is a good chance that people are talking about the 1920s. From Dr. Caligari to Safety Last and Phantom of the Opera to The Passion of Joan …
Continue ReadingHypocrites (1915): Lois Weber’s Tour de Force
No era of filmmaking has the potential to shock and surprise you quite like the silent era. Numerous well-made, interesting silent films from around the world have waited over a century to be discovered by a larger audience. Some hidden silent gems are unearthed from …
Continue ReadingSix Films—Six Decades Blogathon
Anyone who has made a list before knows the labor of love required to whittle down dozens or hundreds of your favorites to select just a few. Instead of picking one single favorite film from each decade, sometimes I wished I could have made a …
Continue ReadingFaust (1926) and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
Legends become so enmeshed in the cultural consciousness that they appear in numerous forms and adaptations centuries after their initial creation. The German folktale Faust is one such tale, inspiring dozens of books, plays, operas, and films since its first iteration in 16th-century German literature. …
Continue ReadingVincent Price as Joseph Smith in Brigham Young (1940)
The Hollywood studio system was an intricate, and well-oiled machine in the 1930s and 40s, an oligarchy of a handful of studios that controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of films with an iron fist. During their height, movie studios scrupulously controlled the careers and …
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