Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

Two men in love with the same woman, but with very different backgrounds, become friends when they fly during WWI. Apart from this getting the first Oscar, there were some surprisingly well done stunts - which I think might easily hold up today. However, I read on another website that many fighter pilots were out of luck after WWI and had to make a living performing very dangerous flight acrobatics on cheap machines that they bought for a few hundred bucks from the government. In that sense, those daredevils were in abundance when the film was made. I thought it might prove interesting to look at the structure of a long silent film - Jack, the protagonist of the film, is in most scenes of the film. His two interests are David - friend and colleague pilot - and Mary - a girl that loves him, but he is in love with Sylvie, who loves David (but is only in the beginning and the end of the film). The "friendship" story and the "love" story seem to run quite in paral...

A beautiful young woman lives an careless life while her surroundings enthralled by her charms descend into madness. I would have wished for a better soundtrack than I was given here. Unfortunately, the heavy classical orchestra score didn't reflect the many subtleties that are hinted at through the story line. On the other hand I preferred not to be emotionally guided. I assume that it was Pabst's intention to lure the viewer into judging the protagonist Lulu ambiguously. When one scene prompts for contempt another might just as strongly pity the naive view of the world that the woman has. The character seems on one hand to have a very strong sense of moral, when she tries to give herself up to the law, but it is hindered by one of her many potential lovers. On the other hand, she ruthlessly abuses a woman who has obviously fallen in love with her to give her money. She has a spirit-like quality in terms of that we never really learn about her past, except that she w...

 The sinister Fantomas robs a train, tricks a lady, but Inspector Juve is onto him. The tableau like cinematography is quite interesting, although not always very helpful to the story, since many of the shots are re-used which can be a bit confusing. Possibly there were budget restrictions. The Fantomas actor, René Navarre, makes a very impressing figure on screen. The train accident are fabulous and many of the details in the story and the picture still hold up pretty well. This might not be the godfather of all crime movies, but there is a certain quality in pacing that I felt similarly in watching the first episode of "Breaking bad".

An innocent country girl is in love with her neighbor that marries an infidel girl. A comparatively linear story, compared to the other DWGriffiths films I have seen so far. The pacing is extremely slow, and it might be interesting to know what had moved Griffith to take on this movie. An amusing side note are the intertitles. The English is obfuscated at least, perhaps meant to be in the tone of a romantic poem, but pretty confusing for me. There is already quite a lot of use of geometry inside the image frame, which sometimes work really nicely. The scene ends are clearly marked by fades to black or title cards.