1920s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists project Vol. 3)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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Gropius
Joined: Thu Jun 29, 2006 5:47 pm

Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#351 Post by Gropius » Fri Jan 21, 2011 7:04 pm

lubitsch wrote:Salome
I didn't submit a list - still too many gaps in my 20s viewing - but if I had, Salome would have been on it. As would Alexandre Volkoff's Geheimnisse des Orients.

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Dr Amicus
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#352 Post by Dr Amicus » Fri Jan 21, 2011 8:49 pm

I didn't submit a list either - I started off with good intentions and managed some decent viewing, but work and family pressures snuck in. So no vote from me for the immortal Gus Visser and his Duck...

If I had though, Langdon's The Strong Man almost certainly would have made it, as would Orphans of the Storm.

Oh well, maybe next time...

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lubitsch
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#353 Post by lubitsch » Sat Jan 22, 2011 7:42 pm

Well gentlemen here are the orphans of this project, films only you liked and nobody else in the world. Use this thread and let the rage flow freely about the bloody fools who aren't worthy to compile lists with you or lament calmly and extol the virtues of your forgotten pearls.
As I have already said there are some real biggies here, I've marked them in bold

S.V.D. - Soyuz velikogo dela (Kozintsev/Trauberg, 1927) 48
Le joueur d'échecs (Bernard, 1927) 47
Melodie des Herzens (Schwarz, 1929) 45
Fräulein Else (Czinner, 1929) 42
Brumes d'automne (Kirsanoff, 1929) 42
Am Rande der Welt (Grune, 1927) 41
Schatten (Robison, 1923) 39
The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (Florey, 1928) 39
Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt (Bernhardt, 1929) 39
Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Jutzi, 1929) 38
The Ring (Hitchcock, 1927) 38
Orochi (Futagawa, 1925) 37
Une vie sans joie (Dieudonne/Renoir, 1924) 37
Erotikon (Stiller, 1920) 37
The Dance of Life (Cromwell/Sutherland, 1929) 37
A Woman of Paris (Chaplin, 1923) 36
Kinoglaz (Vertov, 1924) 36
Orlacs Hände (Wiene, 1924) 36
West of Zanzibar (Browning, 1928) 35
Just Pals (Ford, 1920) 34
Nogent, El Dorado du dimanche (Carné, 1929) 33
Aelita (Protazanov, 1924) 32
The Phantom of the Opera (Julian, 1925) 32
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Worsley, 1923) 32
Manolescu (Tourjansky, 1929) 31
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Ingram, 1921) 31
Hot Water (Lloyd, 1924) 30
The Mark of Zorro (Niblo, 1920) 30
Oueufs d'epinoche (Painlevé, 1929) 30
Feu Mathias Pascal (L'Herbier, 1926) 30
Oblomok imperii (Ermler, 1929) 27
Die Bergkatze (Lubitsch, 1921) 27
The Toll of the Sea (Franklin, 1922) 27
The Scarlet Letter (Sjöström,1926) 27
Liberty (Laurel & Hardy) 1929
For Heaven's Sake (Lloyd, 1926) 26
Melodie der Welt (Ruttmann, 1929) 25
Rotaie (Camerini, 1929) 25
The Freshman (Lloyd, 1925) 23
Underground (Asquith, 1928) 23
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (Wegener, 1920) 22
Way Down East (Griffith, 1920) 21
Sunnyside Up (Butler, 1929) 21
Benya Krik (Vilner, 1926) 20
Shestaya chast mira (Vertov, 1926) 20
Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (Clair, 1928) 20
The Hoose-Gow (Laurel & Hardy, 1929) 19
Der heilige Berg (Fanck, 1926) 19
The Iron Mask (Dwan, 1929) 18
Crainquebille (Feyder, 1923) 18
Beyond the Rocks (Wood, 1922) 18
Bulldog Drummond (Jones, 1929) 17
Chiny i lyudi (Protazanov, 1929) 16
The Telltale Heart (Shamroy/Klein, 1928) 15
Nana (Renoir, 1926) 15
It (Badger, 1927) 15
L'homme du large (L'Herbier, 1920) 15
Gunnar Hedes saga (Stller, 1923) 15
Sylvester (Pick, 1924) 14
The Black Pirate (Parker, 1926) 14
Son of the Sheik (Fitzmaurice, 1926) 14
Ein Walzertraum (Berger, 1925) 14
Hangman's House (Ford, 1928) 14
Manhatta (Sheeler/Strand, 1921) 14
A Woman of Affairs (Brown, 1928) 13
White Shadows in the South Seas (Van Dyke, 1928) 13
Histoire d'un Detective (Dekeukeleire, 1929) 13
Die Gezeichneten (Dreyer, 1922) 13
L'horloge magique (Starewicz, 1928) 12
Les nouveaux messieurs (Feyder, 1929) 12
L'étoile de mer (Man Ray, 1928) 12
Hands Up! (Badger, 1926) 10
Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (Tourneur, 1929) 10
Ballet mécanique (Leger/Murphy, 1924) 10
Opus 1 (Ruttmann, 1921) 9
3 Bad Men (Ford, 1926) 9
Le Diable au coeur (L'Herbier, 1928) 9
Daydreams (Keaton, 1922) 9
Berth Marks (Laurel & Hardy, 1929) 8
Zemlya v plenu (Otsep, 1928) 8
Polizeibericht Überfall (Metzner, 1928) 8
Shakhmatnaya goryachka (Pudovkin, 1925) 8
Nju (Czinner, 1924) 7
Isn't Life Wonderful (Griffith, 1924) 7
Grass (Schoedsack & Cooper, 1925) 7
Was ist los im Zirkus Beely? (Piel, 1927) 7
El Dorado (L'Herbier, 1921) 7
The Paleface (Keaton, 1922) 7
Robin Hood (Dwan, 1922) 6
Everyday (Richter, 1926) 6
The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch, 1924) 6
Tess of the Storm Country (Robertson, 1922) 6
Anna Boleyn (Lubitsch, 1920) 5
Der große Sprung (Fanck, 1927) 5
The Trail of '98 (Brown, 1928) 5
Unaccustomed as we are (Laurel & Hardy, 1929) 4
Dynamite (DeMille, 1929) 4
Sumurun (Lubitsch, 1920) 4
Rien que les heures (Cavalcanti, 1926) 4
Why worry? (Lloyd, 1923) 4
A Girl in every Port (Hawks, 1928) 4
Ben Hur (Niblo, 1925) 3
El Sexto sentido (Ardavin/Sobrevila, 1929) 3
Lady of the Night (Bell, 1925) 3
The Virginian (Fleming, 1929) 3
Three Ages (Keaton, 1923) 3
Hamlet (Gade, 1921) 2
Glomdalsbruden (Dreyer, 1926) 2
Tell it to the Marines (Hill, 1926) 2
La Vocation d'Andre Carel (Choux, 1925) 2
Hyas et stenorinques (Painlevé, 1929) 2
Chyortovo koleso (Kozintsev/Trauberg, 1926) 1
Le rat de ville et le rat des champs (Starewicz, 1927) 1
Symphonie diagonale (Eggeling, 1924) 1

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Tommaso
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#354 Post by Tommaso » Sat Jan 22, 2011 9:03 pm

Well, this list of orphans should be seriously taken into consideration as an appendix to the main list, because it indeed only contains films that should be seen by any silent fan in my view. I don't agree with your choices of the 'biggies' in all cases (there should be many more), but I'm indeed surprised about some films like Der Golem or Schatten only getting one vote. But then, these votes did not come from me, so who am I to complain.

And I have to admit that I totally forgot about The Toll of the Sea. Not sure whether it would have made my list, but it's a great and very beautiful film in any case. Good to see Fräulein Else, Manolescu and Melodie des Herzens got at least one vote (not from me, sadly, these and many others are personal orphans), though I am pretty certain about who that was. I wish these films would have convinced at least somebody else who wasn't already a die-hard Weimar fan....

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lubitsch
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#355 Post by lubitsch » Sun Jan 23, 2011 6:57 am

Finally gentlemen you receive a standardized mail from me where I ask you which of the named films you've seen. Obviously these are the top placed films you haven't voted for (except for any mistakes I may have made), alphabetically sorted by director. If you have seen a film and don't remember it well enough not having it revisited for this project, then there are two different options
a) you remembered that the film wasn't anything special and didn't think it necessary to revisit it because it wouldn't have made the list anyway, then it counts as seen
b) the film has dissolved completely in your mind that you couldn't say whether it's any good or not, then it does count as not seen.

The faster I get your PMs the faster the final list appears here, it's just that I want to see to which degree lesser known and more difficult to access films suffered from this handicap. In the previous list we had far less film and a few voters less, so it didn't play a major role though e.g. Melies or Griffith profited from their wider exposure. This time it may be different, the replies are strictly confidential, no need to be embarassed.

Please sacrifice the 5 minutes of your time for an answer with an exact list of films, so that the hours I've sacrificed are not in vain.

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swo17
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#356 Post by swo17 » Sun Jan 23, 2011 11:25 am

Re: lubitsch's PM, just to make people's lives easier:

Prästankan = The Parson's Widow
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen = Diary of a Lost Girl

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lubitsch
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#357 Post by lubitsch » Sun Jan 23, 2011 1:51 pm

swo17 wrote:Re: lubitsch's PM, just to make people's lives easier:
Prästankan = The Parson's Widow
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen = Diary of a Lost Girl
Hey, I even used translations for the Russian titles and still complaints? And knowing a bit of German doesn't hurt if you deal with silents ...

Anyway while I get your PMs here are the films which didn't crack the TOP 100. Plenty of Soviet classics here and a quite a few favorites of mine where I provided the second vote. Also quite hilarious is Gösta Berlings saga which got votes from 5 poll participants adding only up to a measly 17 points.

102. Cops (Keaton) 66 points, 3 votes
103. Tol'able David (King) 65 points, 3 votes
104. La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc (de Gastyne) 63 points, 3 votes
105. Arsenal (Dovzhenko) 62 points, 3 votes
106. The Godless Girl (DeMille) 61 points, 2 votes
106. Blade af Satans bog (Dreyer) 61 points, 2 votes
108. The High Sign (Keaton) 59 points, 2 votes
108. The River (Borzage) 59 points, 3 votes
110. Brudeferden i hardanger (Breistein) 58 points, 2 votes
110. La Coquille et le Clergyman (Dulac) 58 points, 3 votes
112. Tusalava (Lye) 57 points, 2 votes
113. Du skal ære din hustru (Dreyer) 56 points, 2 votes
114. Flesh and the Devil (Brown) 55 points, 2 votes
114. La Glace a trois faces (Epstein) 55 points, 4 votes
116. Miss Lulu Bett (de Mille) 54 points, 2 votes
117. Der müde Tod (Lang) 53 points, 3 votes
118. Neighbors (Keaton) 51 points, 2 votes
119. L'Inhumaine (L'Herbier) 49 points, 2 votes
120. Nanook (Flaherty) 49 points, 2 votes
120. Lazybones (Borzage) 49 points, 2 votes
122. Staroye i novoye (Eisenstein) 47 points, 2 votes
122. October (Eisenstein) 47 points, 3 votes
122. The Man who laughs (Leni) 47 points, 2 votes
125. Der lebende Leichnam (Otsep) 45 points, 2 votes
126. L'Atlantide (Feyder) 43 points, 2 votes
126. Chang (Schoedsack & Cooper) 43 points, 3 votes
126. Jenseits der Straße (Mittler) 43 points, 2 votes
129. My Wife's Relations (Keaton) 41 points, 3 votes
130. The Cat and the Canary (Leni) 40 points, 4 votes
130. Johan (Stiller) 40 points, 2 votes
132. Der Student von Prag (Galeen) 39 points, 2 votes
132. Entr'acte (Clair) 39 points, 3 votes
134. Shinel (Kozintsev & Trauberg) 38 points, 3 votes
135. Mother (Pudovkin) 37 points, 3 votes
136. Heimkehr (May) 36 points, 2 votes
136. Die Frau im Mond (Lang) 36 points, 2 votes
136. The Last of the Mohicans (Tourneur) 36 points, 3 votes
139. The Manxman (Hitchcock) 34 points, 2 votes
140. Jujiro (Kinugasa) 33 points, 2 votes
140. The Fall of the House of Usher (Watson & Webber) 33 points, 4 votes
142. Vormittagsspuk (Richter) 32 points, 2 votes
143. The Chehahcos (Moomaw) 29 points, 2 votes
143. Der var engang (Dreyer) 29 points, 2 votes
145. The Boat (Keaton) 28 points, 2 votes
145. The End of St. Petersburg (Pudovkin) 28 points, 2 votes
147. The Great Gabbo (Cruze) 27 points, 2 votes
148. Phantom (Murnau) 25 points, 2 votes
149. La petite marchande des alumettes (Renoir) 24 points, 2 votes
149. The Navigator (Keaton) 24 points, 2 votes
151. Moulin Rouge (Dupont) 21 points, 2 votes
151. Tartüff (Murnau) 21 points, 4 votes
151. The Penalty (Worsley) 21 points, 2 votes
154. Strike (Eisenstein) 19 points, 2 votes
154. Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (Fanck & Pabst) 19 points, 2 votes
154. The Skeleton Dance (Disney) 19 points, 2 votes
157. Within our Gates (Micheaux) 18 points, 2 votes
158. The Kid Brother (Lloyd) 17 points, 2 votes
158. Gösta berlings saga (Stiller) 17 points, 5 votes
158. Battling Butler (Keaton) 17 points, 2 votes
161. Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Leni) 13 points, 2 votes
162. Casanova (Volkoff) 7 points, 2 votes

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Zazou dans le Metro
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#358 Post by Zazou dans le Metro » Sun Jan 23, 2011 1:58 pm

Seeing these also-rans I'm reminded of the toppling statue in October. How Eisenstein's stock has fallen..used to be the mainstay of many a film school curriculum back in the day.
Criterion's lack of the delayed/cancelled box set a major factor or has he really fallen so far from grace?

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Tommaso
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#359 Post by Tommaso » Sun Jan 23, 2011 2:02 pm

lubitsch wrote:
swo17 wrote:Re: lubitsch's PM, just to make people's lives easier:
Prästankan = The Parson's Widow
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen = Diary of a Lost Girl
Hey, I even used translations for the Russian titles and still complaints? And knowing a bit of German doesn't hurt if you deal with silents ...
"Prästankan" is not German, but Danish, and I had to look it up, too....

Meanwhile I slowly begin to ask myself which GREAT films actually made the Top 100: no "Der müde Tod", "Student von Prag", not even "Nanook" and "October"?!

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swo17
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#360 Post by swo17 » Sun Jan 23, 2011 2:09 pm

Yeah, I wasn't complaining, just that at first glance I didn't realize those were films I had seen, since their US releases only refer to the titles in English.

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lubitsch
Joined: Fri Oct 07, 2005 4:20 pm

Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#361 Post by lubitsch » Sun Jan 23, 2011 2:20 pm

Zazou dans le Metro wrote:Seeing these also-rans I'm reminded of the toppling statue in October. How Eisenstein's stock has fallen..used to be the mainstay of many a film school curriculum back in the day.
Criterion's lack of the delayed/cancelled box set a major factor or has he really fallen so far from grace?
I think the lack of good DVDs for most of Soviet silents is one point (the botched Academia Ruscicos for Eisenstein are typical), but essentially film history was written by left wing historians in the early times and again in the 60s and 70s. The only longer German film history dating from then by Gregor & Patalas devotes for the 20s 6 pages to Sweden, 15 pages to France, 17 pages to Germany, 18 pages to USA and 24 for the Soviet Union. With the ideologues losing power, their idols go down, too.

What I find a bit sad is the decline of Flaherty whose Nanook took an awful beating here, I hope Man of Aran fares a bit better in the next decade. Also the low score for The Skeleton Dance and Tusalava was surprising (I provided the second vote) and the result for Last of the Mohicans very disappointing, Bordwell's warm words had no effect it seems. Johan and especially Jenseits der Straße and Der lebende Leichnam lack wider exposure, the last one is supposed to come from Edition Filmmuseum though generally their films didn't fare too well, English subs on a German DVD apparently can't substitute a US or British release.

As for the titles, I abuse my power for educational measures. If you like films enough to include them in a TOP 50 decade list, you might just as well learn their original titles ... especially when the US titles are such unimaginative crap like Destiny or tell you the ending like The Last Laugh.

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Gregory
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#362 Post by Gregory » Sun Jan 23, 2011 3:10 pm

Even if one doesn't personally care much about his films, it's a little far-fetched in my opinion to credit Eisenstein's critical standing over many decades to the work of ideologues. He was plainly a major innovator. In addition, I thought there was some kind of prevailing view (not that such a thing should carry any particular importance, but there simply was) that he consistently made films that were captivating throughout, aside from the scenes that many critics dwell on, such as the Odessa Steps sequence.

To my thinking, a more plausible explanation is that Eisenstein's influence has become so incorporated into the language of film that one has to work hard to avoid taking them for granted. Worse than that, the montage techniques he and other Soviet filmmakers developed have been so overused and badly used, especially with the advent of digital editing, that I suppose the original achievements have been tainted, or at least the waters have been muddied.

I also worry that as the stories and events Eisenstein captured recede in historical memory, the films lose their immediate relevance for many contemporary viewers, and have a hard time relating to them because of a lack of conventional characters within these stories. I'm thinking about much broader audiences here than those who submitted lists for the project.

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Tommaso
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#363 Post by Tommaso » Sun Jan 23, 2011 3:35 pm

Gregory wrote:To my thinking, a more plausible explanation is that Eisenstein's influence has become so incorporated into the language of film that one has to work hard to avoid taking them for granted. Worse than that, the montage techniques he and other Soviet filmmakers developed have been so overused and badly used, especially with the advent of digital editing, that I suppose the original achievements have been tainted, or at least the waters have been muddied.

I agree, but would say that this goes for most other silent filmmaking, too. Almost everything we take now for granted has been first developed in the silent era, be it the typical 'invisible' Hollywood editing, the use of light and shade by the expressionist cinema, or the 'Kammerspiel' without which later Bergman would be unthinkable, and so on.

And let's face it: this is a forum with people that love film immensely, and even of those only an absolute minority of 18 people cared or felt informed enough to take part in this project. And I would also assume that some people deliberately left out some well-known films due to lack of space on the list, in the belief that enough others would vote for these films anyway. At least this was my reason not to include "October" or "St.Petersburg" in the lower ranks of my Top 50. As I already said before, I almost felt 'ashamed' that my Top 15 almost exclusively contained 'canonical' films; I may be mistaken, but I suppose some of us - including myself for the spots 35-50 - wanted to show some 'originality' (I don't mean that negatively), deciding to feature great but unknown films that deserve to be discovered. Perhaps this has backlashed a little with regard to the final list. I would suppose that if you asked a well-versed film fan not particularly into silents for a very important director of the time, Eisenstein would be a name that came up pretty quickly.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#364 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jan 23, 2011 3:43 pm

Tommaso wrote:And let's face it: this is a forum with people that love film immensely, and even of those only an absolute minority of 18 people cared or felt informed enough to take part in this project.
There are definitely other factors in play here keeping potential participants from contributing. I'm sure Fearless Leader can educate you on at least one

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RobertB
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#365 Post by RobertB » Sun Jan 23, 2011 4:18 pm

Tommaso wrote:"Prästankan" is not German, but Danish, and I had to look it up, too
Prästänkan isn't Danish, it's Swedish. It was made for Svensk Filmindustri. And please don't call it "Prästankan". That means "The Parson's Duck"! :shock: The dots over "ä" are very important.
Last edited by RobertB on Sun Jan 23, 2011 5:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Zazou dans le Metro
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#366 Post by Zazou dans le Metro » Sun Jan 23, 2011 4:35 pm

Tommaso wrote: And I would also assume that some people deliberately left out some well-known films due to lack of space on the list, in the belief that enough others would vote for these films anyway. At least this was my reason not to include "October" or "St.Petersburg" in the lower ranks of my Top 50. As I already said before, I almost felt 'ashamed' that my Top 15 almost exclusively contained 'canonical' films; I may be mistaken, but I suppose some of us - including myself for the spots 35-50 - wanted to show some 'originality' (I don't mean that negatively), deciding to feature great but unknown films that deserve to be discovered.
As I outlined to lubitsch in response to my interrogatory PM whether I had now or ever been party to such a such a film I agree with Tom here that to a large degree the whole purpose of this project is an exchange of ideas and information for better or worse. In this way flagging up some overlooked films is indeed more valuable than having a hermetically sealed canon of films that we can all be self congratulatory about. I left out some that I'm kicking myself about and others deliberately to allow some upstarts in. No I don't think The Crowd or The Gold Rush and other mighty oaks are lesser films than some of the seedlings from L'Herbier I offered up (which ended on stony ground) but I left them off. Call it being a smart alec if you like but I had just finished a L'herbier binge and they were fresher in my mind than the screenings from nearly 20 years ago plus at film school of the Eisensteins etc.
Then there's the issue of how the films are viewed. My top ranking numbers feature the unassailable Sunrise seen twice on a massive screen with a 90 piece orchestra and Jeanne watched in a 13th century torchlit courtyard at St John's Cambridge with live accompaniment. No number of Samizdat dvdrs of vhs dubs and jumpy re-videoing off of projections on bedroom walls is ever going to come close.
I would have loved to see Nogent and particularly Sylvester, which judging from the BFI stills I have of it, must exist in a magnificent copy somewhere. Maybe also we should be a bit more transparent where copies can be sourced from or up the swapsie stakes?
Personally I would have preferred that the decade have been split in half to allow for more concentrated assessment and a less unwieldy batch to deal with. I mean, realistically how many 'homework' films can you cope with alongside other pressing viewing and that quaint thing called a life? I would lobby for this even more for the 30's decade which is potentially even richer.

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lubitsch
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#367 Post by lubitsch » Sun Jan 23, 2011 6:09 pm

RobertB wrote:
Tommaso wrote:"Prästankan" is not German, but Danish, and I had to look it up, too
Prästänkan isn't Danish, it's Swedish. It was made for Svensk Filmindustri. And please don't call it "Prästankan". That means "The Parson's Duck"! :shock: The dots over "ä" are very important.
:oops: :oops: :oops: (at least one is in advance for Tommaso) Ok, the missing dots are my mistake, but this just shows beautifully how necessary it is to exercise a bit if even the arrogant jerk who's running this list can't spell properly. It's just my experience from reading on the internet or in books that especially the German language is mangled in English texts beyond belief and politeness.
Gregory wrote: In addition, I thought there was some kind of prevailing view (not that such a thing should carry any particular importance, but there simply was) that he consistently made films that were captivating throughout, aside from the scenes that many critics dwell on, such as the Odessa Steps sequence.

I also worry that as the stories and events Eisenstein captured recede in historical memory, the films lose their immediate relevance for many contemporary viewers, and have a hard time relating to them because of a lack of conventional characters within these stories. I'm thinking about much broader audiences here than those who submitted lists for the project.
There seems to be a bit of a contradiction here and I'd doubt the first part since Soviet montage films weren't popular even in the Soviet Union itself, it was an intellectual elite who enjoyed them worldwide and much of film reception in these years was plain ideology. Read something like Kracauer and you realize it isn't really about the films, it's always about the big social issues.
Tommaso correctly pointed out that this decade is full of innovative ideas (Moody photogenie from France, stylized sets and acting from Germany, fluent storytelling from the USA) which all were similarily overexposed, so why should the Soviet film suffer alone from that? I think it's less the fact the history recedes from our view, it's more the snug and schematic way it is filmed which becomes boring. Finally we shouldn't forget that Eisenstein is a typical case where a film dominates the other output (at least the 20s) and Potemkin didn't do too bad. I doubt however that "daring" voting has much influence in these matters, if each film had earned a few votes in the lesser third, the film would still end up pretty low, Gösta Berling is a good example.
Zazou dans le Metro wrote:Then there's the issue of how the films are viewed. My top ranking numbers feature the unassailable Sunrise seen twice on a massive screen with a 90 piece orchestra and Jeanne watched in a 13th century torchlit courtyard at St John's Cambridge with live accompaniment. No number of Samizdat dvdrs of vhs dubs and jumpy re-videoing off of projections on bedroom walls is ever going to come close.
I would have loved to see Nogent and particularly Sylvester, which judging from the BFI stills I have of it, must exist in a magnificent copy somewhere. Maybe also we should be a bit more transparent where copies can be sourced from or up the swapsie stakes?
Personally I would have preferred that the decade have been split in half to allow for more concentrated assessment and a less unwieldy batch to deal with. I mean, realistically how many 'homework' films can you cope with alongside other pressing viewing and that quaint thing called a life? I would lobby for this even more for the 30's decade which is potentially even richer.
I disagree on the viewing conditions though I admit that a really bad copy can turn you off, but essentially I try to compare the films not the projection and to switch off the advantage a fully restored film gets. Lonesome still awaits a really good release or copy in the collector's channels as does the notorious Kurutta ippeji and both films scored very high.
As for the availability there's indeed the question how those of us with better connections enable other participants to view more films, so that unreleased films get better exposure in the lists though googling the film titles on the net through forums yields rich results. There are zillions of unreleased films out there for free downloading if you search around.
Finally I agree that it's very difficult to check a whole decade in 7-8 months, but this list project can't go on forever with the 2000s list being due again in 2024. With each decade the number of available films rises and from the 60s on it spirals pretty much out of control, so I see no way how to do it better except maybe for introducing a kind of fluent eternal list which runs forever where members can always insert films they just have seen.

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Tommaso
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#368 Post by Tommaso » Sun Jan 23, 2011 7:18 pm

I think the idea of keeping on with discussing the films that we newly discover is a very good one; in former times some of us hijacked the now somewhat dormant 'Silent Films on DVD' thread for this. And it's probably more important to continue this discussion with the silents than with later periods, simply because it can be pretty hard to find information on the more obscure ones, at least in the English language.

And I must admit that the viewing conditions do have an influence on my perception of a film, even though I try not to make them influence me too much. But I left "Sylvester" off my list simply because I couldn't be sure how great the film really is, as I simply only could guess at what is shown in many scenes with the atrocious copy I had. The fact that the film nevertheless left quite an impression of course speaks for it. And with silents, a big factor of course is the music. In this respect I'm still thankful that Swo uploaded "A page of madness" with the ITN soundtrack here, because it simply furthers the impact of the images, and the whole perception of the pacing so much more than that strange 70s soundtrack that was on my former copy.

And sorry for my further misidentification of the title of that Dreyer film. But the problems with telling apart German, Danish and Swedish only seem to indicate that we perhaps shouldn't try to use languages we don't speak at least a little. I already see us trying to remember the correct English translation of that Kobayashi film popularly known as "Samurai Rebellion" when it comes to the 60s list, not to speak of the Japanese title....

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scotty2
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#369 Post by scotty2 » Mon Jan 24, 2011 2:19 am

There are definitely other factors in play here keeping potential participants from contributing. I'm sure Fearless Leader can educate you on at least one
I suspect that the goal here is to reduce the number of participants to somewhere in the vicinity of one.

Is it just me, or did this whole process get really, really complicated? I did participate a day late (but it doesn't count; shame on me), but then again, that was a week ago. I hope someone is enjoying this.

The 1920s project has begun to resemble Kafka's The Castle. I believe that the castle exists, and that something is going on beyond the gates, but it is hard to say just what it is. I participated in years' worth of lists, but the high-hurdling required these days is pretty daunting.

Maybe next round we could introduce secret passwords/virtual handshakes for submission, a private list of unacceptable canonical films that will be silently dropped, and rejected submissions for mere bilingualism.

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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#370 Post by knives » Mon Jan 24, 2011 3:07 am

scotty2 wrote:
There are definitely other factors in play here keeping potential participants from contributing. I'm sure Fearless Leader can educate you on at least one
I suspect that the goal here is to reduce the number of participants to somewhere in the vicinity of one.

Is it just me, or did this whole process get really, really complicated? I did participate a day late (but it doesn't count; shame on me), but then again, that was a week ago. I hope someone is enjoying this.

The 1920s project has begun to resemble Kafka's The Castle. I believe that the castle exists, and that something is going on beyond the gates, but it is hard to say just what it is. I participated in years' worth of lists, but the high-hurdling required these days is pretty daunting.

Maybe next round we could introduce secret passwords/virtual handshakes for submission, a private list of unacceptable canonical films that will be silently dropped, and rejected submissions for mere bilingualism.
I wouldn't go that far, but Lubitsch's general attitude and more specifically the PMs at the end serve no purpose except to accidentally hinder what is otherwise intended to be a fun game of learning. The end results don't matter and never have. This, at least for me, has primarily been an excuse to attack films I haven't seen yet and probably wouldn't normally. Lubitsch seems to be taking the fallacy that the destination is as important as the journey.


That said I'd like to throw in my hat on a theory of why the Soviets didn't make the splash they probably should have. Among many other things when you get down to it the stories being told are very samey. Hell by the time I reached Arsenal I nearly threw the VHS out the window I'd become so tired of this. There's just no variation and you have to choose between which pea you find the sturdiest. It's can not be a simple coincidence, for example, that all of my Soviet choices were the ones I watched early on or had no similarities to the soviet story.

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Zazou dans le Metro
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#371 Post by Zazou dans le Metro » Mon Jan 24, 2011 3:30 am

lubitsch wrote: Finally I agree that it's very difficult to check a whole decade in 7-8 months, but this list project can't go on forever with the 2000s list being due again in 2024. With each decade the number of available films rises and from the 60s on it spirals pretty much out of control, so I see no way how to do it better except maybe for introducing a kind of fluent eternal list which runs forever where members can always insert films they just have seen.
This assumes that everyone in the forum is just queuing up exclusively for one particular list. There are three lists being juggled at present and people will go for whatever they feel comfortable with /want to explore / ventilate their existing knowledge.
Only 18 people voted and some have expressed dissatisfaction with their own 'performance' in what became an almost academic chore. What's that as a percentage of forum membership? Minimal. By reducing the extent of the films to be watched would certainly stimulate participation and discussion. No? And what's wrong with running the 2000's or 2000-2005 or whatever concurrently for those or are not interested in a particular decade. A decade is after all an arbitrary choice. There is a world of difference between films of 1920 and those of 1929/30 as well as between1930 and 1939 . (Indeed Barry Salt has concocted a career out of just this). These topics of technical characteristics (over) determining genre/style/taste/ production values etc etc. let alone socio-economic factors are rarely discussed alongside these decade overviews but perhaps given the possibility of discussing less in greater detail rather than racing to the end of a list might make for a healthier debate.
Is less more? Discuss in no less than 250 words and don't forget to credit your sources with copious footnotes .And no smilies or green ink please.

If you do prefer to wait until 2024 to pontificate on the 2000's can we have a longer period for appraisal as I fear will be having to go to the toilet more often during screenings although I could perhaps continue to watch via my I-phone neck jack input. After all what does size,quality and the viewing experience count for eh Loob?

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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#372 Post by lubitsch » Mon Jan 24, 2011 7:10 am

That's a regular night assault though I'm not sure what exactly is the target. If there's any dissatisfaction with my work, I'd have to ask what exactly new I've done. I copied the rules from the previous list projects and shifted the list submission date according to the wishes of the members. I added a viewing guide which some may find helpful in order not to overlook/forget about certain countries, stars and directors during the project as well as when it's time to submit the ballot. However you can feel free to ignore it, I'm not forcing anybody with a gun behind your head.
I calculated the scores, left the door open for Scharphedin a few days and ran into a delay due to unforeseen work commitments and then comes the absolutely only innovative thing I introducedwhich however was no problem in the last round, that's a small PM asking if you have seen the top films you didn't vote for. It may be a peculiarity of mine, but I'd like to know if two films with the same score were seen by the same number of people or if one was seen by all participants and another by half of the voters. This serves as strong encouragement to those who haven't seen the latter films for this list or will participate in the next one that these films might be potential winners. In fact at the moment (awaiting a few PMs) there's only one film which got voted for by all who have seen it and that's the 32nd placed film which 7 have seen and 8 have not. But even if you think it futile it costs five minutes to quote my PM, delete the films you've seen and write back.
To call this little added step "really, really complicated" and going on to Kafka as scotty2 does is quite absurd to put it mildly and doesn't merit any further comment. In fact I did count his list and if he would check his PMs he'd know.
Knives definition that this is a "fun game of learning" and that " The end results don't matter and never have." is pretty daring and most certainly goes too far in telling all of us how we have to see this list project especially since it is by name and definition a list project. Why even do the list with all its rules then if it's just about watching and talking a bit about the films? Why not just have a thread with amiable chatter about silents?
Zazou's posting leaves me even more baffled with the bizarre ending especially since he doesn't address the point I've made even though he quotes it. Naturally the decade lists are arbitrary, but so is every alternative. Tommaso is the only one who addressed the suggestion that we open a new list system opening at the same day lists for each decade (or whatever you prefer) with a moderator who keeps track of the lists of individual members and notes any changes, so we'd have a steadily mutating list. This however has also its own pitfalls because users would drop out or submit a list only once and the cohesive viewing experience of this project would be lost. This would eventually lead to a list similar to the one on silentera where all the older lists made when less films were available skew the ranking towards established classics, that's why e.g. Phantom of the Opera features there so highly.
I also don't think 18 participants a low number. After all this is an era where few film fans can easily supply a list of enough masterpieces they have seen because of the limited number of available and well known films. The films aren't easily available and rather costly and/or require a search on the net and finally you have to be willing to devote your time to a certain degree more or less exclusively in regard to other films to this project. From my experience with equally large net communities it's sometimes surprising how few people are really willing to make an effort.

Last but not least, some of these posts seem to hint that I influence this whole project negatively. This would however be pretty difficult because I've virtually no executive power whatsoever. I haven't created the rules for the entry post, I most certainly have no influence on the discussion (or lack of thereof) during the months the project runs and at the end it's just laborious typing and calculating.
I don't mind critique but there's no room for me to develop a "general attitude" in this project.

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Zazou dans le Metro
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#373 Post by Zazou dans le Metro » Mon Jan 24, 2011 8:05 am

Firstly let me say that my posts are in no way a personal attack beyond a mild jibe here and there. I realise running these shows is a pretty thankless task but someone has to do the mediating,moderating,manipulating and math and collect the flak. I don't see what's baffling in my post but basically I suppose my point is that Decade lists are becoming ( for me) rather redundant exercises. If we look at a list for example with Breathless and The Robe sharing points what does that tell us? Also do you really think 18 voters constitutes a successful project?

This might go down like a shit sandwich but I personally would prefer another entrance point. Something along the lines of the Genre projects but maybe even more specific like Classic Westerns/Revisionist Westerns/Non US westerns instead of getting bogged down in genre definition. Perhaps also a thematic heading which might open up new paths to meander along . The western project for example after a few false starts is riding high and has spurred on initiatives like (zedz to name but one) suggesting a Boetticher/Scott tributary thread to run off the main one. This is easy to follow and moderate without creating a gordian knot of intertwined and frayed edged threads. Thinking off the top of my head we could have Czech New Wave, French Poetic Realism, British Kitchen Sink and other ready made concepts but perhaps even more arcane ones dealing with such themes as occupation. Not being restricted by decade of origin COULD bring up interesting comparisons and DISCUSSION. I am relatively well versed in the films of occupied France but know diddly squat about Sino-Japanese films on the subject for example. It could be argued that this facility already exists but list projects for all their faults do create a focus and effort and reshuffling the pack might be more stimulating and attract some of the more informed forum members back to participate. People love lists: they are not so keen and intimidated by 'homework' to be handed in for marking.
The "bizarre" point of my last post was that we don't really have to wait 13 years for the 2000 list because 1. I will be potentially old and incontinent but more importantly 2. there will be no need for Decades only listings on a rota basis.
This a very much 'thinking onto paper' post so don't put it down too readily to what Brecht (I think) called plumpes Denken.

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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#374 Post by Tommaso » Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:06 am

Indeed a hell of a lot of things thrown into the discussion this night. I'll go through them post after post...
knives wrote: The end results don't matter and never have. This, at least for me, has primarily been an excuse to attack films I haven't seen yet and probably wouldn't normally. Lubitsch seems to be taking the fallacy that the destination is as important as the journey.
Yes and no. The question is whom those lists might serve. For the participants in the listmaking it's probably indeed a way to discover and watch films you haven't seen or even heard about before. But what about the 'newcomers'? When I started to frequent this forum four or five years ago I knew far less about film history than today, and I used the then existing lists to more or less systematically go through the decades, trying to see things that the good people here thought to be especially important or worthwhile. This was extremely helpful for me, even though I haven't made it beyond the 1960s yet. I would certainly not have seen many American and French films without them, instead probably sticking with my old pet directors from Japan, Italy, Scandinavia or Germany.

knives wrote: That said I'd like to throw in my hat on a theory of why the Soviets didn't make the splash they probably should have. Among many other things when you get down to it the stories being told are very samey. Hell by the time I reached Arsenal I nearly threw the VHS out the window I'd become so tired of this. There's just no variation and you have to choose between which pea you find the sturdiest. It's can not be a simple coincidence, for example, that all of my Soviet choices were the ones I watched early on or had no similarities to the soviet story.
That is true to a certain extent, but it is true for basically any other 'genre' I can think of, be it melodrama or the classical Hollywood musical. Or only think about Ozu films.... I think that here as with the Soviets the interest lies in the variations of the 'theme', and of course how much you're interested in or even only just like the 'theme'. I'll probably never muster a lot of interest in crime thrillers, so I'll certainly won't sit through ten of them in a row, even if they're all good. But I do like those Soviet films in general, and in my view there's a hell of a difference between "Arsenal", "Storm over Asia" or "The eleventh year". To each his own pleasure, then.
Zazou dans le Metro wrote:And what's wrong with running the 2000's or 2000-2005 or whatever concurrently for those or are not interested in a particular decade. A decade is after all an arbitrary choice. There is a world of difference between films of 1920 and those of 1929/30 as well as between1930 and 1939.
Yes, but to understand the origin of those differences I find it very helpful to follow the history of cinema more or less chronologically. I want to take part both in the forthcoming 30s list as well as, in two or three years, in the 2000s list, but I have too many gaps in both decades to do both at the same time. Not being interested (to varying degrees) in a particular decade is basically a result of lack of knowledge of that particular decade. I'm really not very much interested in much that came after 1970 at the moment (with a few exceptions, i.e. individual filmmakers), but that has to do with my comparative lack of a thorough view of the more modern decades. As I said above, my going through the 60s list(s) helped me a lot to come to terms with that decade and find a lot of films that I initially never thought would interest me very much. Visconti and Antonioni are prime examples for me in this respect.
lubitsch wrote:Tommaso is the only one who addressed the suggestion that we open a new list system opening at the same day lists for each decade (or whatever you prefer) with a moderator who keeps track of the lists of individual members and notes any changes, so we'd have a steadily mutating list.

Don't know whether there's a misunderstanding here. I certainly addressed this suggestion, but I wouldn't suggest to do it as described. What I suggested was to leave this thread 'open' or use another thread (the existing 'Silent Film on DVD thread) or better, open a new one like 'Silent Films you've never seen', or something like that, to notify about and discuss anything we have just discovered, be it on dvd, TV or the backchannels; simply sharing information about interesting films.

As to the general points about Lubitsch's role as a 'listmaster': well, he has already 'defended' himself, and personally I have no problem with a more 'serious' attitude. This includes also the initial posts of films he thinks are important from each country. I don't always agree, but they have proven to be a helpful starting point. I simply tend to forget about some films even if I've seen them already. I don't even have a problem if he calls my taste in films awful, because I know better :wink: . Occasionally the use of an emoticon like the one I just used may be helpful, though.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#375 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:47 am

As an additional alternative to decade by decade list making, how about an ongoing series of simply _discussing_ the films of particular years? No list -- just presentations on films one finds particularly worthy (and/or enjoyable).

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