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In La Dixieme symphonie, written and directed by Abel Gance in 1917 but not released until November 1918, music is central. The film is about the composing of a symphony that is performed in the movie theater, and at its high point the music takes precedence over the image.

Examining Gance's work in the context of avant-garde, Henri Langlois saw La dixieme symphonie as his first masterpiece. It is basically, though, a conventional melodrama. Enric Damor, a gifted composer, suspects his wife of having an affair with the man her step-daughter wants to marry (she is in fact being blackmailed by him). But this breakdown of family relationships provides a new source of inspiration - art produced through suffering - his tenth symphony, which he performs on the piano for an invited audience of friends and admirers.

A working note dated August 1917 suggests that Gance initially planned to use recorded sound but instead La dixieme symphonie became one of the first feature films to have a specially commissioned symphonic score, composed by Michel-Maurice Levy. The orchestra in the cinema thus reproduces what is supposedly being played within the film. The evident disparity here, between the piano in the image and the orchestral sound in the cinema, is aggravated by the fact that many cinema orchestras could not cope with a symphonic score. The disparity is quickly effaced, however, because what we actually see on the screen is less the performance of the symphony than a series of images that illustrate it. There are locating shots of Damor playing and of the entranced listeners, but the sequence consists principally of tinted images of a ballet dancer superimposed on an idyllic garden setting with a frieze of dancers, flowers, and bunches of grapes sat the top and bottom of the frame. The visual is thus an interpretation of the musical, breaking out from the narrative in which it is held. More precisely, music ceases to be simply the subject-matter of the film; it generates images that are presented as the visual equivalent of the musical.

The importance of La dixieme symphonie is that it achieved within mainstream cinema what was to become one of the great preoccupations of the avant-garde, the liberation of the image from the narrative and the theatrical. It was a move toward non-narrative form, toward the expressive and the rhythmical. The title itself is significant here. Damor is assimilated to Beethoven by superimposition's, but his composition is also subsumed into the film as extension of the Ninth. After the Choral, the Visual. The supreme orchestrator is not the composer but the director: the first image is of Damor with the death mask of Beethoven in superimposition, but the final one is of Abel Gance taking a bow, thanking the audience for their appreciation.

La dixieme symphonie illustrates, then, the extent to which cinema in its aspiration to be recognised as a popular art form was looking toward music as model and guarantee. They seemed to have a similar project, using rhythm, harmony, and tonal contrast as the basis of an appeal to feeling. Lyric poetry could also provide a parallel since it, too, played on the intuitive, but music seemed more appropriate and was more distanced from the literary. For Gance and many of his contemporaries in France, it opened out the possibility of a radically new theory of what cinema might become.

Menilmontant (1926) was, in the modest context of the alternative cinema circuit, a smash hit. It's great success allowed filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanov to go on making films, and also helped Jean Tedesco to stay in business as an exhibitor.

Like Kirsanov's first film, Menilmontant (again starring Kirsanoff's first wife, the beautiful Nadia Sibirskaia) tells a story without the use of inter-titles. It is often said that the filmmakers cinema is poetic, but one must add that in his second film he explored the poetics of violence and degradation.

The story begins and ends with two unrelated, but similarly filmed and edited murders. In each case, the grisly event does not grow organically out of the plot, but seems to surge out of a world welling with violent impulses.

Menilmontant uses practically all of the typical stylistic devices of cinematic impressionism, but it is hard to consider it as in any way representative of the movement. It's overwhelming, virtually unrelieved violence and despair seem to infect its own storytelling agency, upsetting what in other filmmakers' works would be clearly delineated relations of parts to the whole.

The film contains several bursts of rapid editing, for example, but they are not rhythmic in any simple, narratively justified way (in the manner of Abel Gance, for example); their meter is complicated and unsettling, worthy of an Igor Stravinsky. The film offers several notable examples of subjective camera work, but typically these become slightly unhinged, with no absolute certainty as to which character's experience in being rendered.

Menilmontant is, quite deliberately, a film in which the formal center cannot hold, because it is about a world in which this is also true. Although certainly not a Surrealist work, it shares with Surrealism no only a fascination with violence and sexuality, but also a display of forces and transcend, and question the boundaries of, individual human consciousness.

Kirsanov concluded his Menilmontant with a shot of impoverished and exploited young women fashioning artificial flowers in the poorest district of Paris, he provided us the most comprehensive image, aesthetic and social, of this form of cinema. Through a panoply of stylistic experiments and through glorious close-ups of the incomparably fragile face of Sibirskaia, Kirsanov thought he had shaped a harsh milieu into an exquisite flower. But a flower for whom? Menilmontant would become a major film on the cine-club and specialized cinema circuit, but never played to the people of the working class quatier that gave it its title. This was not Kirsanov's public anyway, for he came from the Russian aristocracy. In 1919, having fled the Revolution, he was reduced to playing his beloved cello in movie houses just to be able to eat. He must have been tempted to imagine himself and his music as an unappreciated flower in the crude milieu of mass art.

Seen this way, Menilmontant becomes a personal triumph of art over industry, of the icon of Sibirskaia over the brutal world of plot and spectacle that constitutes ordinary cinema. That triumph is signaled in the miracle of the film's narration, the first French film without titles, a tale told completely through the eloquence of its images. The dark alleys of the nineteenth arrondissment, the streetlights listening on the Seine, and the pathetic decor of shabby apartments are all redeemed by art. No silent film more clearly bewails the fate of art in our century, more obviously appeals to connoisseurs of the emotions roused by artificial flowers.

Jaromil Jires's decidedly dreamlike Czechoslovakian film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, takes place in the countryside, as Valerie visits her relatives at their turn-of-the-century estate, only to find that they are vampires, engaging in a sort of ecstatic summer orgy into which Valerie will be initiated. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a deeply eccentric text, infusing a coming-of-age story with Edenic concepts of purity and lust, inclusion and banishment, into a sensuous tapestry in which nothing is as it seems.

Written by Jires, Ester Krumbachova, and Vitezslav Nezval, the films brevity and its seductive mise-en-scene sumptuously photographed by Jan Curik, make the film seem almost an outlaw project, or an act of social criticism designed to "enforce atheism by embracing an anti-Catholic stance, particularly in relation to sexual morality. Yet the films embrace of sexual excess, and the almost fetishistic depiction of bodily fluids, color, light , flesh tones, and gauzy fabrics, bespeaks an atmosphere of absolute sexual license, rather than creating a fantasy world of repression. In many ways, Valerie is very much like Alice in Alice in Wonderland, reacting to the bizarre circumstances that unfold before her.

The film begins with an image of Adam and Eve, and Valerie is often seen eating apples in close-up, her overripe lips lingering over the succulent fruit with undisguised satisfaction. Thus Valerie provides us with an image of feminine desire before and after the fall of Eden but without the attached blame that Eve shoulders in Western Christian mythology. Instead, Valerie is seen by the film as a giver of life, a force of purity too intense to be corrupted, while her grandmother becomes a vessel of corruption. This is a film that is deeply tied to nature at its most gloriously ripe season, summer, and Valerie herself partakes of this lushness with direct and unabashed delight.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders presents a world in which all is allegory, ones relatives may be vampires, and all authority figures are suspect; in the opening minutes of the film, a priest enters Valerie's dazzlingly white bedroom and almost immediately tries to rape her. Valerie extricates herself from the priest's attack but remains justly suspicious of authority for the rest of the film. What protects Valerie, above all other things, is her connection to nature, which preserves her position within the film as a force of hope within a crumbling family structure.

In many ways Valerie and Her Week of Wonders can be read as a more sexually explicit vision of the coming-of-age narrative, centering on the freedom of youth, than its numerous American and British counterparts. Valerie emerges triumphant at the end of the film, despite all adult attempts to corrupt her, and the purity and innocence of her metaphoric quest is valorized by the film's ambiguous conclusion, in which all the films events are called into question; it may all have been a dream.

Near the end of the silent cinema period, at opposite ends of Europe, two films were being planned on the subject of money or capital: Sergei M. Eisenstein's project for a film based on Karl Marx's Capital, and Marcel L'Herbier's film adaptation of Emile Zola's L'Argent. Eisenstein's project, unfortunately, never got beyond the preliminary stage of diary notes, recorded discussions with G.V. Alexandrov, and the rough outline of a scenario. L'Herbier's project, of course, was completed and released as L'Argent, in the midst of controversy, critical condemnation as well as acclaim, and uncertain commercial success, at least in France.

Undoubtedly influenced by Abel Gance's experiments with camera mobility, L'Herbier turned this very free, modern-day version of Zola's celebrated novel into a series of pretexts for outbursts of striking cinematic excess, creating a strikingly modern work marked by its opulent, over-sized sets and a complex, multi-camera shooting style. The result is a film resolutely split between narrative and spectacle, between straightforward storytelling scenes typically dominated by shot-reverse shot cutting and chaotic, exciting impressionist sequences, as when, at the Paris stock market (shot on location) a camera hanging from a pulley apparatus high above the trading floor sweeps down on the traders. The effect, presumable, means to evoke the irrational frenzy of capitalist from a decidedly right-wing perspective.

If Gance's Napoleon and Carl Th. Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc constitute the apex of big-budget historical reconstruction films in the French silent cinema, then L'Argent certainly can be taken as the culmination of the modern studio spectacular. With a five-million franc budget, L'Herbier was given privileged access to the Paris Bourse for three days of shooting (with 1,500 actors and over a dozen cameramen) and was permitted to electrify the Place de l'Opera in order to shoot a night scene of the huge crowd awaiting news of Hamelin's solo transatlantic flight. At the newly opened Studios Francoeur, Lazare Meerson and Andre Barsacq constructed immense set decors, including an enormous bank interior, several large offices and vast apartments, a dance stage for Saccard's celebration party, and an unusual circular room next to Gundermann's office whose entire wall length was covered with a giant world map.

Many of these studio spaces have smooth, polished surfaces and are stylized to the point of exhibiting little more than walls, ceilings, and floors. This stark simplicity, especially in such monumental designs, undermines any appeal to verisimilitude and tends to dissolve the boundaries differentiating one space from another. The indeterminacy of these decors, although exemplary of the modern studio spectacular, thus specifically functions to further abstract the film's capitalist intrigue. Together withe crowds of extras that often traverse the frame and chief cameraman Jules Kruger's selection of slightly wide-angle lenses and high- and low camera positions, especially for the frequent long shots or extreme long shots they produce a consistently deep-space mise-en-scene and larger than life capitalists. Furthermore, the highly stylized or generalized milieu of the film actually serves to foreground the nationalistic and class-based terms of the intrigue, articulated through the casting, and allows them to read all that more clearly.

The Modernizing strategy that shapes L'Argent's set decors and deep-space mise-en-scene was also governed, finally, by a loosely systematic discursive which many French filmmakers shared in the late 1920s. Generally, the French tended to privilege the specifically 'cinematic' elements of framing and editing - close ups (especially of objects), unusually high and low camera position, extensive camera movement, superimposition's and dissolves, various forms of rhythmic montage, associative editing. But L'Herbier's L'Argent offers another, perhaps even more interesting model for the way its reflexive style ultimately helps to articulate the film's critique of capital.

At least two particular features of this film practice loom large in L'Argent. The first feature as an absolutely unprecedented mobile camera strategy, whose high visibility and extreme dynamism render its effect peculiarly ambiguous. The range and extent of the film's camera movement is unmatched except perhaps by that in Gance's Napoleon (for which Kruger was also chief cameraman). Largely because of such unusual camera movements, in L'Argents space oscillates uncannily between the fixed and the fluid. A second feature of the film's discursive practice is its rather unconventional editing patterns, which sometimes work in tandem with camera movement. There is the uniquely persistent pattern of cutting a stable shot as a sudden camera movement becomes perceptible, which creates a slightly jarring effect in the film's rhythm that ruptures its sense of spatio-temporal continuity and foregrounds the very construction of filmic space-time.

The reflexivity of this discursive practice marks L'Argent as a Modernist text, of course, at least to the extent that the materials of the film medium and their deployment as a disruptice system become an ancillary subject of the film. L'Argents framing and editing techniques, in conjunction with set design and acting style or casting, more closely resemble those of Jean Renoir's Nana or Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, both of which serve to subvert the conventions of another genre, the historical reconstruction. Yet reflexivity here bears a subversive significance that exceeds the genre of the modern studio spectacular precisely because of L'Argent is a story of capital.

L'Argent's achievement, in the end, rests on the correlation it makes between discourse, narrative, and the subject of capital. Capital is both everywhere and nowhere, echoing Marx; it motivates nearly every character in the film and is talked about incessantly, but it is never seen or - as the dung on which life thrives - even scented.

Nevertheless, L'Argent is a beacon of modernity, an over-sized hymn to music of light, where everything is rhythm, movement, and a fantastic spiral of financial manipulations. Even today, the subject is astonishingly relevant.

In 1923 Jean Epstein had his greatest success with Coeur fidele, a cinematic expression of his theories. Shot on the Marseille waterfront, Coeur fidele features a "cast" of down-and-out characters, colorful cafés, and quays. The story is of a romantic triangle, however, utilized such innovative devices as non-sequential timelines and flashback sequences. Epstein strapped the camera to a merry-go-round at one point to provide images of increasing twirling and dizziness.

Coeur fidele is a contemporary romance whose poetry of the waterfront combines a sordid realism with a stunning visual lyricism- the film is early evidence of Jean Epstein's concern with exploring the expressive possibilities of the cinema. Instead of developing the story conventionally through dramatic confrontations... Epstein emphasizes simple patterns of rhetorical figuring and several ambiguous sequences of privileged subjectivity. In addition, Coeur fidele makes use of an astounding and memorable close-up of it's protagonists staring hauntingly through a window. Gina Manes face (as she looks out of the dirty bistro window)- in a stunning and beautiful image that seems to hover over the narrative itself- that floats over the water of the squalid, dismal harbor.

As previously mentioned, Coeur fidele is a love story in which Marie Epstein plays a minor but significant role as the crippled neighbor of the heroine. As the lovers are reunited (enabled by Marie's shooting of the villainous and drunken husband), the heroine's sick child remains in the dingy apartment as Mademoiselle Marice, dazed by her violently provoked action, cradles the infant on the wooden stairs. There are the last images of Marie, inter-cut with shots on the happy couple on the carnival ride that had been the scene of their separation.

The merry-go-round sequence in Coeur fidele has become an accepted "classic" of cinematic impressionism, as many viewers were (and are) greatly impressed by the striking sequence set on the merry-go-round, on which the heroine rides while in a state of extreme mental agitation. Epstein, inspired by Abel Gance's La Roue, experimented in this scene with the editing of very short bits of film in regular, rhythmic patterns. This section of rapid montage and camera movement has been called by Rene Clair "visual intoxication."

With Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine, whose sets were designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, Alberto Cavalcanti, Fernand Leger, and Claude Autant-Lara, architecture became a supreme screen of sets. Concerned with modern ornament, L'Inhumaine would synthesize the design aesthetic of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, for all who worked on this film (including Paul Poiret, who did the fashions) came to define avant-garde design at the Exposition in the following year. The architect Mallet-Stevens, who designed the pavilion of tourism at the Exposition, was the theoretician of the film set. In his writing on decor, he conceived the set of a film as a work of draftsmanship and a working drawing. He was particularly concerned with rendering hap-tic volumetric(s) and depth and emphasized aesthetic techniques of relief in the design of filmic decor.

L'Inhumaine, a film that turned the architect Adolf Loos into an enthusiastic film critic, opens with an industrial vista of Paris as displayed from the "moderne" villa of Mallet-Stevens. This house is inhabited by "the inhuman one" – a woman. Georgette Leblanc, who conceived the idea for the film, plays Claire Lescot. She is a soprano who presides over an international salon of men, hosting dinner parties served by masked waiters in an inner patio that resembles a refashioned impluvium. This particular set was designed by Cavalcanti, who, in his own Rien que les beures, would constantly return to the theme of food, conceiving the urban rhythm as its own metabolic matter.

Claire's salon is frequented by two suitors who battle of her affection. The engineer, Einat, ends up winning he love by showing her the workings of his very modern "cabinet of curiosity." Claire delights in the marvels of this laboratory (deigned by Leger), in which she can futuristic-ally watch her audiences on a screen just as they are able to hear her sing. As the inter-titles suggest, "she voyages in space without moving," reaching visions of artists in their studios, partaking of the bustling life on the street, and following people driving cars and riding trains. In this way, she lives "through the joy and the pain of human beings." No wonder her other suitor becomes jealous and poisons her.

But Einar's laboratory contains residual traces of its genealogy: it can perform alchemy. What is more, it is outfitted with an extra chamber, equipped with a mechanism for reviving the dead. This lab of transformation becomes activated in a sequence that resonates with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. With superimposition's and rapid montage, the laboratory offers what the inter-titles call "a symphony of labor," which brings our voyage-use back to life and to the liveliness of her urban salon.

The film was made by L'Herbier's own production company, who deliberately chose an awkward science fiction plot in which L'Inhumaine serves as the pretext for some virtuoso displays of cinematographic virtuosity, and as the narrative justification for some remarkable decors. The sets are a microcosm of the whole film: they are in very different styles, and going from one to the next produces an almost physical shock. The film was very poorly received, both by critics and by the public, and one can see why. It is arguably the first great example in the narrative cinema of the so-called post modernist aesthetic. For the coherence of a stable fictional world with suitably "round" characters who undergo various experiences, L'Inhumaine substitutes a fundamentally incoherent world of pastiche, parody, and quotation. Its flat characters provide no stability; they are but puppets in the hands of an unpredictable, perhaps even mad storyteller. The film uses many devices from the stylistic repertoire of cinematic impressionism, but rather than amplifying and explicating the narrative, they serve instead to call it into question.

Just Another Blonde directed by Alfred Santell is a love story and drama, with aerial scenes, about two small-time gamblers and the two Coney Island girls they romance. The film was also released and reviewed (especially in and around New York City) under the title, The Girl from Coney Island. The film stars Dorothy Mackaill as the title character. She plays Jeanne Cavanaugh, one of the more popular hostesses at a Luna Park dance emporium. Unfortunately this film exists in fragmentary form, and reportedly, all of the scenes which include Louise Brooks (in a thankless roll) still exist.

THE PLOT SYNOPSIS:

"Jimmy O'Connor, employed in a gambling establishment, is so honest that he is offered a banking job at any time; and for his sake, Scotty, his protégé and pal, decides to go straight. The boys go fifty-fifty in everything until SCotty falls in love with Diana, who operates a shooting booth at Coney Island. Jimmy declares that he disapproves of all women- except his mother - and Scotty despairs until he schemes to have Jimmy meet Jeanne, Diana's girl friend. It is only when they expect to be killed in an airplane crash that Jimmy tells Jeanne he loves her, but later he feigns indifference. Jeanne is heartbroken; Scotty explains that he can't marry Diana until Jimmy is safely engaged; and with that both boys are reconciled to their respective sweethearts."

Miniature expressionist sets are the real star of Life & Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1927), & render this partially a work of animation. It's on the National Registry as a work of cultural significance.

The thirteen-minute story symbolically criticized the maltreatment of Hollywood extras.

Our naive hero, John Jones (Jules Raucourt), arrives in Art Deco Hollywood all smiles & dreams.

He has a letter of introduction that gets him hired by a casting agent (Robert Florey being quite antic in the film he wrote & co-directed).

As an extra he's known thereafter as 9413, the number being printed right on his forehead. Now begins the endless wait for his number to come up.

Other numbers become automatons with fading dreams, but 9413 struggles to remain an individual.

Earning no money, falling deeper in debt for his rent, he is slowly starving to death, while imagining he is surrounded by scorpions.

At last he dies, but continues dreaming even in his coffin. He dreams he is ascending to heaven, or perhaps he really is ascending in the form of a heroic paper cut-out silhouette. In the firmament he becomes a shining star, with wings.

Reportedly filmed for $97.00, one reason it looks so incredible is thanks to cinematographer Gregg Toland, who went on to such amazing camera work on films like Citizen Kane.

A fifteen-minute Impressionist film somewhat in the manner of Expressionism, The Love of Zero (1928) tells the tale of Zero (pantomime artist Joseph Marievski) who falls in love with Beatrix (Tamar Shavrova).

They live a blissful life upon a stage of abstract furniture & trapazoid windows & doors, with Zero periodically serenading Beatrix with a trumbone while perched on his highchair.

Gloomily parted by fate when Beatrix is recalled to the castle, Zero falls into a forlorn pose.

After long loneliness he finally falls for another woman (Anielka Elter), but she mistreats him with laughter & disdain, leaving him for two other men.

News arrives of the death of Beatrix. Thus there is no chance of Zero ever recovering his lost happiness. The world has become dark, ugly, irksome. Demons surround him, & he is finally destroyed, like a doll snatched away from a toy stage by the hand of a child.

This little film was famously made for only $200, pretty cheap even for 1928. The filmmakers got plenty for their money, too, as this is visually a masterwork, thanks in the main to the gorgeous set design by William Cameron Menzies.

King Baggot began making films for Carl Laemmle in 1909 and was a major star from 1910 to 1916. Baggot then gained renowed as a director in the 1920s and developed a reputation for making Universal's young female stars "look good". He had performed this service for Carmel Myers, although she was not considered a "starlet," but a very good actress. He had done the same for Marie Prevost, and was later assigned to direct Gladys Walton in both The Lavender Bath Lady and A Dangerous Game, The Lavender Bath Lady was certainly no "jewel," but a lightweight romantic comedy. At this time, Walton was working very hard for the studio. She made eight films in 1921 -- but with titles like All Dolled Up, High Heels and Short Skirts, there was some indication that she was more object than actress. It was apparent that the studio considered her window dressing -- and her role in All Dolled Up was, indeed, that of a window dresser. However it was a good story and the reviewers said so.

In a trifling but amusing story, a charming flapper, Gladys Walton, plays a humble salesgirl, she comes to the rescue of wealthy Florence Turner when the latter is victimized by pickpockets and blackmailers. Literally pummelling the crooks into insensibility, Walton earns a million dollar reward. Though she rises to the top of the social ladder, she remains as likable and down-to-earth as ever. All Dolled Up was the sort of fare that was eagerly lapped up by all the shopgirls and clerks in the audience, who believed that "There but for the grace of the screenwiter..."

Germany, with the release of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens in 1922 has long claimed this honor. However a film book has recently been found in the Budapest National Library that strongly suggests that the Hungarians got there first.

The Hungarian film Drakula halala (1921), aka The Death of Dracula, was the first adaptation of Irish writer Bram Stoker's 1897 vampire novel Dracula. However, recent research has carried out in Hungary that indicates this movie was not based on Stoker's novel.

The narrative from Drakula halala models itself not from any historical event, but from the fictional stories circulating in the early part of this century. Svengali-like stories of powerful dynamic men hypnotizing pure innocent girls were one of the staples of popular melodrama. Indeed, since Mary is kidnapped by her former music teacher, one could argue that the story is closer to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, than to anything Stoker visualized.

Newspaper accounts confirm that Drakula halala opened in Vienna in February 1921. Nosferatu premiered thirteen months later, in Berlin in March 1922. On these grounds alone, The Death of Drakula is clearly the first film adaptation relating to Stoker's novel. Perhaps the Austrians should get some of bragging rights as to which country produced the first screen Dracula. The film was both partly shot and premiered in Vienna, and Paul Askonas (who played Drakula) is Austrian. Depending on your politics, either the film was an Austro-Hungarian collaboration, or this Hungarian Count had more than a little Germanic blood.

A trade journal reporting on the 1921 opening in Vienna mentions that the lead actress was played by a Serbian actress named Lene Myl. The film next resurfaces in Budapest in 1923 with the lead actress named as Margit Lux. Although this might be simply the result of a marketing decision designed to highlight different actresses, the possibility exists that Lajthay re-cut or re-shot the film to star Margit Lux, making the 1923 film an alternative version.

Those who insist that their Counts live in coffins and suck blood can rest assured that the German Nosferatu still qualifies as the first attempt to film Stoker's novel. The rest of us who like life with its complications and ambiguities can point instead to Hungary. It is only fitting for the country of the birthplace of Bela Lugosi to also have made the first filmed Dracula.

Following some stage acting experience and other unrelated employment, Albert Capellani began directing films for Pathe in 1905. He advanced from turning out short comedies to spectacles, often based on literary classics. His 1912 version of Les Miserables ran 12 hours. Some critics disregarded the static and stagy qualities of the film and instead believed Capellani was contributing to a relatively new art form. He was invited to direct in the U.S., where he turned out several films between 1915 and 1922.

Capellani directed several American films, the most popular being the romantic drama, Camille (1915), Daybreak (1918), and The Virtuous Model (1919). However, the most daring and inventive of his American output was the 1922 melodrama, The Young Diana, in which Capellani co-directed with Robert C. Vignola. It was written by Luther Reed from a story by Marie Corelli and stared Marion Davies, Macklyn Arbuckle, Forrest Stanley, and Gypsy O'Brien.

Davies plays Diana May, who is in love with a sailor named Cleeve. Her Father wants her married into British nobility and a scientist looking for the fountain of youth falls in love with her. The scientist tricks her into thinking Cleeve has married, so she abandons her plans to wed him, only to discover 20 years later that it was a lie. She finds the scientist and he restores her youth but spurns the now married Cleeve. Diana wakes up; the proceeding has been a dream! She and Cleeve are married.

The greatest aspect of The Young Diana is the sets by Joseph Urban. They are not only lush and beautiful, but pioneering as well, especially the scenes in Doctor Demetrius' laboratory, which show striking similarities to when Rotwang makes his robot creation into a duplicate Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and the wild and wooly creation sequence of The Bride in James Whales Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

The film was made in the wake of the success of A Blind Bargain and the interest in the Voronoff theories of prolonging life by transplanting animal glands into humans. Unfortunately, The Young Diana would mark the end of Capellani's career who would return to France in 1923 and retire from film after suffering from paralysis.

The male flyer initially appears in cinema as a flawed hero. The prototypes are characters found in Variety (1925), directed by Ewald Dupont and based on Felix Hollaender's novel, The Oath of Stephen Huller.

This is a semi-expressionist film about a heavy-bodied catcher-husband, Boss Huller (Emil Jannings), whose wife, Bertha-Marie (Lya de Putti), is seduced from domestic bliss by the trio's lighter-bodied star flyer, Artinelli (Warwick Ward). The cather-husband imagines dropping his rival, the flyer, but murders him instead in a fight, and goes to prison. The seducing male flyer is the provocateur of extreme passion, a position subsumed by female aerialist characters in later films. But the male aerialist as a criminal, even murderer, intermittently reappears in representation because he epitomizes a capacity for extreme risk-taking, which is translated into socially risky immoral behavior. But it is the male flyer who becomes especially vulnerable to depiction as a fallen hero, literally and for losing emotional control.

Although little-known today, Variety is one of the major works of German Expressionism. It's an immorality of emotion drama with a fine performance by (the always great) Jannings and the wonderful visual film-making that is the hallmark of the Expressionist movement (extraordinary cinematography by Karl Freund). Variety was heavily censored for its American release; how it was changed makes it almost as interesting as a case study in film censorship as it is enjoyable as a movie.

In its original version, the film begins with a drawn-out portion showing how Emil Jannings falls in love with Lya De Putti, left his wife for her, and created a trapeze act with his lover. This part of the story was excised completely by the American censors, and title cards added to redefine Jannings and De Putti as the married couple of the U.S. release version. The censors' intent was to erase the plot point of casting adulterous lovers as the established couple in a love triangle. The effect was to far more radically transform the story. The unfaithful husband who is in his turn betrayed by his unfaithful lover is transformed into a sympathetic cuckold. The opportunistic temptress who catches two men only to end up with none is transformed into a young wife who succumbs to temptation. From unsparing morality play to conventional melodrama, courtesy of censorship.

The Garden of Eden is a charming but obscure silent comedy from 1928 and was an important film for both its talented director Lewis Milestone, a two-time Academy Award Best Director winner, and its beguiling star Corinne Griffith, a once-popular and now nearly-forgotten star of silent cinema.

It's adapted to the screen by Avery Hopwood and Hans Kraly from the play by Rudolph Bernauer and Rudolf Österreicher. It features marvelous art-direction courtesy of William Cameron Menzies, who later became a director of films. It also stars Charles Ray as the sophisticate who falls in love with Griffith who he thinks has a title. Ray's specialty was playing country bumpkins, and this Cinderella tale offered him a chance to go against type and perhaps revive his sagging career. However, comeback attempts were hampered by the advent of the sound picture.

Griffith as always shines and gives a capable and graceful performance. Her beauty has not been missed by Mr. Milestone in his direction of the scenes. Louise Dresser and Lowell Sherman do well by their parts and Edward Martindel is sympathetic as a love-sick uncle. Ray escapes his normal hick role even if the naive innocent aura still hangs over him.

Structurally the film is divided into three sub-movies which could almost be played independently. The first portion is Toni LeBrun's experience at the "Palais de Paris," a cabaret that she naively thinks is an opera hall. The next movie segment concerns the wooing of Toni by rival uncle and nephew. The last section of the film is also set in the Hotel Eden, however, the plot of this section deals with Toni's wedding.

On occasion, there are some visually dazzling shots, such as Toni and Richard seated at a grand piano, perfectly reflected in the raised lid, while the room slowly rotates around them. But overall The Garden of Eden is fun and moves briskly enough. The pacing is aided by a slight under cranking that provides a slightly sped-up feeling that boosts the comic effect. However, it's not overdone to the point of ridiculousness. Sadly a Technicolor dream sequence of Toni as a great opera star, prefiguring her later assumed wealth, remains unfortunately lost.

Based on the stage play by William Hurlburt, Lilies of the Field, staring Corinne Griffith is a wildly passionate backstage melodrama with terrific performances. Griffith plays a chorus girl has been robbed of her child by framed divorce court evidence.

Here Griffith is young and vulnerable, yet with an inner strength that enables her to survive intact. Griffith was already a star before Lilies of the Field and she has top billing, but this is the film that made her into an even bigger star. And it is easy to see why.

The film is greatly distinguished by a bizarre, yet lavishing Art Deco movie sets, huge staircases, mad parties, hot musical numbers in which Griffith is dressed (just barely) as an Art Deco automobile hood ornament.

Hip flasks of hooch, jazz, speakeasies, bobbed hair, 'the lost generation.' It's no doubt the Twenties are endlessly fascinating. It was the first truly modern decade and, for better or worse, it created the model for society that the entire world follows today. Lilies of the Field, like Our Dancing Daughters (1928) is a great time capsule of the Twenties. Don't expect to see the gentle Gibson girl of the earlier generation, because this film is all about bobbed hair and a short skirt, with turned-down hose and powdered knees! Griffith also starred in the talkie version of this picture in 1930.

After staring in the disappointing Pink Tights, Gladys Walton returned to the circus background, where she tamed both a lion and an undisciplined young man, in Harry B. Harris's romantic drama, The Man Tamer (1922).

When Kitty's (Walton) father, a lion tamer played by Rex de Roselli, becomes incapacitated, his daughter, Kitty, decides to take over his act. Hayden Delmar (William Welsh), the circus owner, is romantically attracted to his new star, as if Bradley Caldwell (Roscoe Karns), the rich and spoiled son of a millionaire. She chooses neither one, but when Caldwell father pleads with her to tame his son the way she handles her lions, shoe accepts the challenge. During her assignment, she begins to realize she is falling in love with her subject. Meanwhile, Delmar, the owner, begins to make unsavory advances toward her, although she has earlier rejected him. This leads Caldwell to forcefully rescue her from the lecherous owner.

The Man Tamer is somewhat of a morbidly bizarre film. Though not quite as "arty" as say The Devil's Circus or He Who Gets Slapped and not even bordered on tragedy. However, one interested in such classics will find this little gem quite entertaining to say the least.

From its elaborate and stylish opening scenes, Asphalt immediately establishes itself as a startling achievement. This unforgettable film is in many ways the perfect summation of German film-making in the silent era: a dazzling visual style, a psychological approach to its characters, and the ability to take a simple and essentially melodramatic story and turn it into something more complex and inherently cinematic. Although influenced by such classics as The Last Laugh and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Asphalt is a unique look at urban life and a classic in its own right.

The plot in Asphalt is very simple: a woman caught trying to shoplift a diamond seduces the cop entrusted with bringing her to justice and the cop pays an very high cost for his lapse in judgment, but great films don't require elaborate plots to achieve their greatness. Betty Amann, the female lead who looks like a mash-up of Louise Brooks and Betty Boop, is sensuous and sultry but not cartoonishly so. In other words, she's no Theda Bara and thank goodness for that. Perhaps if she was a cult goddess like Brooks, Asphalt would be no different than the G.W. Pabst classic Pandora's Box. It is completely baffling why Amann never became a star. Amann is paired greatly with Gustav Fröhlich, who is remembered for his performance in Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis, you will be surprised at his range here. Emotionally naked, Fröhlich goes from anger to tenderness, and then to craven denial when faced with the consequences of a violent act.

Asphalt is directed by Joe May, a leading German filmmaker of the 1910s and 1920s who is also known for the two-part epic The Indian Tomb. In addition, he helped to launch the career of Fritz Lang. Like Lang, May later relocated to Hollywood, where he directed several classic B-films, most notably The Invisible Man Returns. But Asphalt remains perhaps his most famous, and his greatest, work. However, May's handling of individual scenes is impressive. Reality is put in its place when location shots of the city are followed by a breathtaking Expressionist caricature of what we've just been shown, with the camera craning and tracking through throngs of extras and fleets of vehicles on UFA's enormous street set.

As Dave Kehr from the New York Times said, "Asphalt reveals a filmmaker of astonishing technical skills and a distinctive visual style, based on a use of raked sets to create a sense of precariousness and claustrophobia." Brilliant!!!

Marjorie Rambeau's husband divorces her takes custody of her child in Albert Capellani's drama, The Fortune Teller (1920), based on the 1919 play by Leighton Osmun. After he accuses her of having an affair with a circus manager, she takes a job as circus fortuneteller. She begins to deteriorate morally as the result of her heavy drinking. Two decades later, Raymond McKee, her son, now down on his luck, comes to her to have his fortune read. Without revealing her identity, she inspires him to carry on. The young man leaves and becomes a successful political candidate. In addition, his fiancée is the governor's daughter. Motivated by her son's good fortune, his mother reforms and straightens out her life. In the end the mother and son are then reunited.

The Fortune Teller is a solid fascination of circus drama. It touches a nostalgic nerve and makes you feel youthful. Unfortunately, Capellani would soon after begin to suffer from paralysis in 1923. It's entertaining, and this in a must for fans of the circus films of the twenties.

This routine circus drama was a typical rags-to-riches vehicle for minor Universal Studios star Gladys Walton. She, in her third circus film, portrays a circus performer who grows tired of circus life and agrees to pose as the long-lost daughter of a wealthy couple, in Jack Conway's drama, Sawdust (1923).

The elderly couple believe that their daughter has been kidnapped by show people. The corrupt ticket seller of the circus dreams up the scheme of having Nita Moore (Walton) pose as their lost child. Meanwhile, Moore who has been substituting for a drunken clown, meets Phillip Lessoway (Niles Welch), a local lawyer. She temporarily brings joy to the lonely couple, who accept her as their lost daughter. The ring master, Pop Gifford (Frank Brownlee), who is Moore's brutal foster father since her parents died in an earlier circus accident, searches for her. Rather than return with him to the circus, she confesses to the couple the truth and then, suffering from the pangs of guilt, tries to commit suicide. But Lessoway, the lawyer, rescues her. Gifford is forced to leave without her, and the young couple plan their future together.

Walton appeared in two earlier circus dramas, Pink Tights (1920) and The Man Tamer (1922).

Mazie Darton (Gladys Walton), a high-wire performer with a traveling circus, longs for a peaceful country life, in Reeves Eason's critically panned drama, Pink Tights (1920). Forced to stay in a small town while laid up with an injury, Darton is spurned by the conservative townspeople. Rev. Jonathon Meek (Jack Perrin), the local parson, befriends the circus troupe, especially Darton. But he, too, opens himself to criticism from his flock, who protest his closeness with the show people. Eventually, Darton's boyfriend arrives and the pair become closer. The parson fades from the scene as a possible mate for Darton, who ends up winning the hearts of the townspeople.

Pink Tights was made while Irving Thalberg was there; originally he wanted to cast an unknown actress named Norma Shearer in the role of Mazie. She didn't get the part, but years later she became a star under Thalberg when they were both working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She also became his wife. Walton would remain a minor Universal star for her short lived career and star in several circus dramas.

The traveling circus in the United States reached its peak between 1880 and 1920. But Hollywood in the twenties showed no signs of any loss of public interest in the popularity of circuses or circus films.

In 1920 Her Elephant Man was released. It is an extremely visual film, with acts that are thrilling and exciting, and it's sometimes dangerous; it presents a wide array of characters; which expands the film from the typical stage-bound set to the outdoors. In addition, the Her Elephant Man has a furnished plot.

The story is about Joan (Shirley Mason), the daughter of a missionary who died in Africa, is assigned to be taken to a particular bishop in Scott Dunlap's drama, Her Elephant Man (1920). However, the circus troupe who finds her makes more of an impression on her than the prospective bishop, and she elects to stay with its members. She becomes a horseback rider and grows fond of Colonel Philip Dorset (Albert Roscoe), the caretaker of elephants. The man has a mysterious past that still troubles him; he had been married years earlier when he discovered his bride only chose him for his money. To avoid any entanglement with Joan, he leaves the circus. He then discovers that his wife has divorced him. Relieved of his past problems, he rushes back to the circus and Joan. Meanwhile, a villain with the troupe tries to seduce her, but she resists. A story finally brings Dorset and Joan together.

Highly recommended to fans of silent films or any interest in the circus.

This Ernest Lubitsch classic has often been billed as one of the best-sophisticated comedies of the silent era. However, Kiss Me Again is now presumed lost. No copies are known to exist except for a trailer featured in the library of moving images, inc.

Like all "high comedies," Kiss Me Again was reportedly a comedy of manner and a refined example of satire, with witty title cards and ironic situational gags rather than physical humor. The film stars Marie Prevost as LouLou, a married woman who develops an infatuation with a handsome musician. When LouLou asks her husband Gaston (Monte Blue) for a divorce, he shrewdly agrees without an argument; of course, LouLou imagines that something must be amiss if Gaston is so eager to give her up, so she then moves heaven and earth to win him back.

The film also features Clara Bow, who was boosted into stardom as a "kid-girl" in Down to the Sea in Ships. She got, consequently, another lovely part in this Lubitsch film, where she is billed as a French typist living in Paris. What effort did she make to be French? Perhaps none. Apparently she was just her own dear self. Now Marie Prevost was a great actress. She was a charming and a cleaver and an amusing soubrette. However, she was another "star" doomed by fate to play only one role, and that is the role of a successful but not virtuous woman-about-town. She plays that better than anyone from the silent era.

Marie Prevost and Kenneth Harlan star in this inspired comedy, which was ironically based on a novel written by twenty famous authors, each of whom contributed a chapter. The point of each chapter was to put the characters in such a tight predicament that the next writer would have to be exceptionally clever to get them out of it. As can be imagined, the film that resulted from the book was fast-paced and had almost constant action.

Connemara Moore (Marie Prevost) has two suitors, one who likes bobbed hair and the other who doesn't. Both have proposed and she promises to reveal which one she has accepted by either bobbing her hair or not bobbing. In reality, she can't decide between them, so she accepts a ride with a stranger, David Lacy (Kenneth Harlan, at the time Prevost's real-life husband). The ride leads her to all sorts of adventures involving bootleggers, a fight on a private yacht, an attack by hijackers, and other tense situations. Connemara is rescued by Lacy, who turns out to be a government agent, and when she shows up with only half her hair bobbed, it's an indication that she has chosen him as her husband-to-be.

With the exception of the Ernest Lubitsch classic, The Marriage Circle, Bobbed Hair may very well be Prevost's best silent vehicle. However, Prevost is just another pretty Hollywood starlet that deserves to be a cult goddess! Lubitsch once said "she was one of the few actresses in Hollywood who knew how to underplay comedy to achieve the maximum effect." Beyond the films romantic trappings, it's full of wonderful slapstick moments. Much credit should be given to director Alan Crosland, who delivers a funny, fast-paced, and offbeat story, enlivened by animated performances from the two leads, in what was a popular sophisticated comedy that has now become just another forgotten silent film.

Albert Capellani produced the first multiple reel feature, "Les Miserables," a production which marked a distinct forward step and still holds favor with the picture public. However, it is here, in his five hour 1913 adaptation of Les Misérables where Capellani made his crowning achievement, earning international respect for himself and Pathé. The film is typically distinguished by his masterful use of long shots, open spaces and crowd scenes. Perhaps a little stilted at times, but overall holds it's own with just about any pre-20s silent film. Today, Capellani is rightly considered to be one of the most important figures in the history of cinema.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's second feature film is an ambitious study of evil through the ages, but the great Danish filmmaker is years away from his masterpieces of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet and Gertrud. The inexperienced filmmaker was influenced by D.W. Griffith's 1916 Intolerance and aimed to map out the path of the Devil using Griffith's innovative filming style as a guide. He added on his realistic approach to the subject matter, as he believed realism to be the most essential part of any film.

Like its inspiration, Intolerance, Leaves from Satan's Book contains stories from four historical periods linked thematically. Unlike Griffith's film though, Dreyer chose not to cross cut between stories, which makes for a less confusing film.

Satan is the character who links the four stories. The film starts with his fall from grace, as told through inter-titles, and God's proclamation that he walk the Earth tempting humanity. For each soul that turns from God, 100 years will be added to Satan's sentence, but for every person who resists his temptations, 1000 years will be removed. Hoping to fail in his duties so that he may be admitted back into heaven, Satan tries to get men to betray what they hold most dear in four eras of history.

The first section of the film is the biblical story of Jesus' betrayal by Judas. The next story takes place during the Spanish Inquisition. The third section of the film takes place during the French Revolution. The final segment is set in the Finland during the Russo-Finnish war of 1918. As a film, this wasn't Dreyer's best, but it was fairly entertaining. This early Dreyer film shows his almost innate ability to compose attractive images within the limits of the frame.

Though this film isn't the grand spectacle he was hoping for, Dreyer did a wonderful job with it. His use of the film frame and style of story telling make this a movie interesting and attractive to watch.