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TM2YC's 1001 Movies (Chronological up to page 25/post 481)

Zamros

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TM2YC said:
Have you been watching 'The Deconstruction of Falling Stars' while partaking of some 'erb...? :D


I did have the crazy thought the other day, that since they are essentially a finite quantity (and most have gone missing), it would be just about feasible to set oneself the goal of watching all silent movies ever made, with a realistic chance of achieving that goal.

In a few century's time, we'll* be looking back on the films of the 20th century with the same reverence as we look back on the works of Shakespeare.

I'm not sure who I'd point to and call the Shakespeare of Film, but my finger would probably rest on the Coen Brothers for the longest.

*The royal we, man...
 

TM2YC

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Zamros said:
I'm not sure who I'd point to and call the Shakespeare of Film, but my finger would probably rest on the Coen Brothers for the longest.

Interesting point but I'd probably go Scorsese. To be in his 70s and still making his best films is astounding. Then you factor in his tireless work saving/restoring hundreds of classic films. I can't even imagine cinema today without the impact of Scorsese. Where as I can imagine a world without the Coens (even though I love them, their filmography and their last film a lot).
 

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87 years ago...

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An Andalusian Dog (1929)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Country: France
Length: 21 minutes
Type: Silent, Surrealist, Art

'An Andalusian Dog' ('Un Chien Andalou') is the famous surrealist short by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. I'm sure everybody knows at least some of it by shear cultural osmosis. Radiohead's 1995 video for 'Just' takes a lot of inspiration from Buñuel's style...


...and of course the lyrics to Pixies' kickass song 'Debaser' are about the film (Black Francis even screaming out the film's title)...


There is also an Ash in 'The Evil Dead' feel in there, when the male character is staring in horror as ants crawl out of stigmata in the palm of his hand. There are all kinds of oddities here; dragging the ten-commandments lashed to priests and pianos draped in dead cows, deaths-head moths, fondling of naked buttocks/breasts, sewn-up human mouths (like Neo in The Matrix), body-hair fetishism and a mysterious severed hand. If you watched it enough, I dare say you could draw meaning from it's images (which do stay with you) and it's ideas but I was happy to enjoy it on a surface level of bizarre fun.


Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc biopic next.
 

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87 years ago...

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The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Country: France
Length: 96 minutes
Type: Silent, Courtroom-Drama, Religous?

'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) feels like a film out of time, much more a New Wave 60s piece, than a 1928 silent. The majority takes place in a stark minimalist courtroom, most of the footage is just the faces of people and most of those shots are extreme close ups of Jeanne's tear drenched face. Actress Renée Falconetti must have cried out her entire body weight in tears. The film is prefaced by a crawl telling us that the dialogue is taken straight from the transcripts of Jeanne's trial and we are shown the actual manuscript. It adds a documentary layer to the film that follows.

I was reminded of later films such as Ken Russell's 'The Devils' in the theme and in the minimal set designs. Mostly, it seemed heavily influential on George Lucas' 'THX 1138'. That film's female character LUH-3417, with her shaved head and haunted performance is a close duplicate of the look of Jeanne here. It's no doubt a powerful religious film (for those of that persuasion) but is also powerful on the level of one lone innocent person against the full corrupted power of the state and church. On those two themes, it could be watched in a triple-bill with 2005's 'Sophie Scholl: The Final Days' and Scorsese's 2016 masterpiece 'Silence'.

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The ending was far more shocking than I expected from a 90 year old movie. We are almost spared nothing of the horror of being burned alive. But perhaps more troubling are the haunted looks on the priests who have enthusiastically condemned Jeanne. We see from their expressions that they realise far too late that they have convicted not a servant of Satan but a Saint and cannot stop it.


In a behind-the-scenes story that echoes the film's subject... the first version of the film was censored by the church/government and then burned in a fire, so Dreyer made a second version using the many outtakes from the first cut... and that too was burned in a fire. Many cuts then circulated trying to approximate the first lost version. Then unexpectedly a perfectly preserved copy of the first cut, fully uncensored, was discovered in a mental hospital. Reading up on the differences, the censored bits sound like some of the film's most memorable moments.

More Buster Keaton next.
 

Zamros

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I've been watching Fantomas, Louis Feuillade's 1913 predecessor to The Vampyres. And it is doing the thing I hate silent films doing most: putting too much screen time into reading letters and dialogue cards. It's awkward especially because it was hard to find versions of it, and the one I have is all in French, so I'm having to translate it line by line myself.

I'm starting to agree with you on pre-1920s silent films xD
 

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Zamros said:
I'm starting to agree with you on pre-1920s silent films xD

Just going by what is in this book and the other silent movies I've so far watched... pre-1923/1924 is sometimes hard work. After that, all the filmmakers seem to have learned the basic rules of how to tell a story with moving pictures. Then you've got a small window of 5-6 years of pure magic before sound comes in and ruins the party ;) . So far, the only films before 1923 that I'd say were unmissable would be...

D.W. Griffith - Broken Blossoms (1919)
Victor Sjöström - The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Fritz Lang - Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler: Parts 1 and 2 (1922)





87 years ago...

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Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)
Director: Charles Reisner & Buster Keaton
Country: United States
Length: 70 minutes
Type: Silent, Comedy

In my opinion, 'Steamboat Bill, Jr.' is the best Buster Keaton feature (of the ones I've seen so far). The plot/story is really simple and focused (It's 'Romeo and Juliet' on a riverboat) and the location and characters are limited and contained. It all takes place along the same pier, the riverboats, the shopping arcade, the houses. This allows the comedy to be inventive and small (rather than big set-pieces) and the story to be engaging.

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(Silent comedy is made for animated gifs :D )


The best scenes include Buster's cheeky attempts to spring his dad from jail, Buster trying on various silly hats and of course the hurricane finale. We see a whole town destroyed by a storm, no models, no CGI and Buster caught up in the heart of it. This sequence contains two of his most famous gags, leaning into the wind and the house falling on top of him.


Next up, another Soviet propaganda film *sigh*
 

Zamros

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TM2YC said:
Zamros said:
I'm starting to agree with you on pre-1920s silent films xD

Just going by what is in this book and the other silent movies I've so far watched... pre-1923/1924 is sometimes hard work. After that, all the filmmakers seem to have learned the basic rules of how to tell a story with moving pictures. Then you've got a small window of 5-6 years of pure magic before sound comes in and ruins the party ;) . So far, the only films before 1923 that I'd say were unmissable would be...

D.W. Griffith - Broken Blossoms (1919)
Victor Sjöström - The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Fritz Lang - Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler: Parts 1 and 2 (1922)

There are several Melies pictures I'd say were unmissable; A trip to the moon, Journey into the Impossible.

There's also a 1911 version of Dante's Inferno that is pretty great. It had an impressive budget and special effects for the time. I'm still stuck in 1913...

EDIT: If you like German Expressionism, this is the film that really got the movement kicked off:


Also: Cabiria, the first epic film. Emphasis on the word epic. This inspired D.W. Griffith to make Intolerance.

 

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88 years ago...

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The Heir to Genghis Khan (1928)
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Country: Russia
Length: 125 minutes
Type: Silent, Drama, Propaganda

'The Heir to Genghis Khan' (aka 'Storm over Asia') is historically speaking, utter b*llocks (as far as I understand). It's about the native Mongol people joining with Soviet forces to expel the evil capitalist British occupation of Mongolia. Except the British never occupied Mongolia and in fact the Soviet Union forcibly established a communist regime in Mongolia, via a campaign of political and religious extermination.

That nonsense aside, is it a good movie? Nope. It's absolute torture for the first hour, with a tolerable second half. The plot is quite thin but still hard to follow, making me feel like I'd missed half the intertiles. A poor Mongolian herdsman is cheated by an evil sneering capitalist b*stard, joins the brave and noble Soviet Partisans, is captured by the British, shot, survives and is then (because he randomly has this talisman thing) installed as the puppet-ruler of Mongolia. Most of the way through, Valéry Inkijinoff's performance in the lead, is blank and emotionless. But suddenly he gets insanely angry and leads an armed insurrection to free Mongolia in the last 15 minutes. There are some interesting uses of editing in there. Drums edited in time with the drum beats and the rapid montage battle scenes at the end but it's not enough to make this a worthwhile watch.


Next up is the first of many films by Alfred Hitchcock in the book.
 

Rogue-theX

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Cutout heads aside, that poster is pretty striking ^
 

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Rogue-theX said:
Cutout heads aside, that poster is pretty striking ^

Yeah, Soviet posters are beautiful things.

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87 years ago...

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Blackmail (1929)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 84 minutes
Type: Silent, Courtroom-Drama, Religous?

'Blackmail' is the first Alfred Hitchcock movie in the book, the first "proper" sound film listed (It was maybe the 3rd or 4th ever full talkie) and the first British film entry. Although the earliest moving pictures were developed in Britain, the decades between those and this are not represented in the book. I plan on watching a few other 1929 British silents but I'd be interested to see what came before.

'Blackmail' began as a silent movie before Hitchcock switched mid-production to sound, re-filming many scenes. As the star Anny Ondra was Czech, this meant that her lines were live "dubbed" by an English actress (Joan Barry). I'm not sure why, because she could speak English well enough, with a light accent and the mis-matched lip movement caused by the dubbing is very distracting. A short clip of Ondra doing a sound test survives, featuring Hitchcock's usual risque humour...


The first 8-minutes are silent, when suddenly a window shatters, beginning the sound and it continues for the rest of the film. I think it was Hitchcock's little joke and perhaps an early "jump scare". Unlike with 'The Jazz Singer', there are no intertitles and sound isn't used as a gimmick but as a story telling device. Like in this scene...


I was surprised that this early entry in Hitchcock's filmography already had his formula set. Murder, secrets, sex, mystery and a chase across a famous landmark (In this case, The British Museum). It's all shot with his familiar brand of macabre humour and his trademark camera moves. A painting appears to laugh at death and the character's misfortunes and a lady speculates aloud about the best ways to commit murder (see clip above). He was probably pushing what were the boundaries of sex and violence on screen at the time. Something that he would continue pushing for the rest of his career.


Back to the world of silence with the next entry, another Soviet film. Fingers crossed! :D




88 years ago...

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Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Director: Dziga Vertov
Country: Russia
Length: 67 minutes
Type: Silent, Montage, Experimental, Documentary

I was sort of familiar with 'Man with a Movie Camera' because I watched a live performance of Michael Nyman's incredible dreamlike and romantic orchestral score 7-years ago at London's Barbican Theatre. However, for the visuals we were treated to what was called 'NYman with a Movie Camera'. His shot-for-shot remake using footage from his own film archive. So I knew what the experience entailed but had never actually watched the 1929 original. Naturally I choose to watch it now, with the beautiful Nyman score.


'Man with a Movie Camera' has no set story, or conventional characters and is instead an experimental piece of art about the nature of film itself. A dizzying montage of shots, inviting the viewer to see the connections, or draw their own. Blinking eyes, window shutters, a camera iris, an eyeball, a camera lens. Trams pass back and forth across the screen, until we start to see the windows as film cells/strips. Film speeds up, stops, and goes super slowmo, making us aware of it's illusion of movement. A childbirth is intercut with a funeral. The cameraman of the title hops all over the city with his massive tripod camera like a Freerunner with a GoPro. Balanced on moving cars, atop bridges, hanging from wires, clutching to the side of a moving train. We see him filming us, as an audience watches him, as we watch them.

You can't take it all in on one viewing but at least I've finally found a Soviet silent movie I can love.


The first entry in the book by G.W. Pabst is next.
 

Zamros

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A young-looking Hitchcock will never not be weird to me. I always assumed he was born an old, fat man.
 

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88 years ago...

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Pandora's Box (1929)
Director: G. W. Pabst
Country: Germany
Length: 108 minutes
Type: Silent, Drama

Louise Brooks in 'Pandora's Box' (Die Büchse der Pandora) is as entrancing as the Lulu character she plays. Pabst invited Brooks over from America especially to play the role. Lulu is a muse, a dancer, a lover, a prostitute and a flame around which moths will happily burn. She is carefree but also careless and drags all around her to ruin but she is not evil, she just doesn't consider consequences to herself, or others.

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The rest of the cast are uniformly brilliant too. Carl Goetz plays Lulu's father? pimp? ex-lover? (or all three?), a bum just happy to come along for the ride and to revel in other's misfortunes. Alice Roberts plays the Lesbian Countess Geschwitz, who along with all the men, has a fatalistic obsession with Lulu. The characters start at the top of Berlin society but by the last act are reduced to eating mouldy bread and drinking booze out of broken teacups on a cold London Christmas Eve. 'Pandora's Box' is a haunting tale of murder, rape, cheating, lying and misfortune... but also beauty and romance too. It's another film that goes straight onto my 'All-time classics list".


Afterwards, I watched this old Arena documentary on Brooks, which I'd highly recommend. Boy can she tell an anecdote!


An early Marlene Dietrich movie next.
 

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87 years ago...

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The Blue Angel (1930)
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Country: Germany
Length: 99 minutes
Type: Drama

The blu-ray for 'The Blue Angel' ('Der Blaue Engel') has both the German and English sound versions of the film (They shot everything twice) but I went for the German release (with English subtitles). I believe a silent version was also released but I can't find any copies. It's another step forward for sound film, but notably lacking a score (I assume this was for technical reasons). I found myself really missing the kind of lush orchestral scores that were used in earlier German silent films. However there are musical sequences, including Marlene Dietrich's now famous "theme song"...


Emil Jannings plays the uptight Professor Rath, who finds his students sharing "indecent" photos of a local Cabaret star Lola (Played by Dietrich). He storms down to the cabaret (the titular 'Blue Angel') to confront her and his students but ends up falling for young Lola. He recklessly throws away his career and standing in society to be with her ("There's no fool like an old fool"). By the end Rath's humiliation and degradation take him to the very limit of despair and he emits these truly horrible wails of anguish. These sounds demonstrate something new that silent films could never have done. It's very much a companion piece to Jannings' earlier 'The Last Man', this time winning him the first Oscar for Best Actor.


Another surrealist film next.
 

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86 years ago...

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The Golden Age (1930)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Country: France
Length: 63 minutes
Type: Silent, Surrealist, Comedy

'The Golden Age' ('L'Age d'Or') is the surrealist follow up from Luis Buñuel, to his short film 'An Andalusian Dog'. Some limited soundFX and a few snatches of dialogue are here but it's essentially another silent movie. The same sort of thing that delighted at 16 minutes, when stretched to an hour, gets a bit tedious around the middle.

Thankfully, enjoyment recovers in the second half when the focus shifts to a high-society party featuring "The Man" committing spectacular social indiscretions. Such as... kicking a puppy out of frame, knocking over a blind man, shooting a child in the back for taking his cigarette, mud wrestling a woman during a religious ceremony, then slapping her mother full-force in the face for spilling his sherry, and later a throwing a burning Christmas tree out of a window, followed by a bishop and a giraffe. I had some real laugh-out-loud moments with this unfeasibly awful character. The best bits edited down to something like 30 minutes would be a riot, instead of a bit of a chore.


Another Soviet film next. The Berlin wall can't fall fast enough.
 

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86 years ago...

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Earth (1930)
Director: Alexander Dovzhenko
Country: Ukraine (Then part of the Soviet Union)
Length: 76 minutes
Type: Silent, Propaganda, Drama

'Earth' ('Zemlya') is another Soviet propaganda film which is considerably more enjoyable and more conventional than the others I've watched so far. That said, the underlying propaganda message is more insidious and malevolent. It's aim is to portray peasants who still owned their own small scrap of land (and a couple of cows) as being enemies of the people, in not giving what little they had, over to the new Soviet collectivist farm system. Stalin had already begun killing and imprisoning these peasants (Kulaks) in their millions as the film was being made.

The questionable political context aside, it's an emotional story about triumph over adversity. Beautiful shots of farms and countryside. Strong characters. The joy of a hard days work, when you've accomplished something. In this case, the process of turning a field of wheat, into loaves of bread.


The first true American Gangster movie next!
 

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86 years ago...

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Little Caesar (1931)
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Country: United States
Length: 79 minutes
Type: Drama, Crime, Gangster

'Little Caesar' is considered the first US Gangster film, the twisted version of the American dream. The template is here, the violent arrogant rise and the hubristic fall. Edward G. Robinson's lead performance is very good, even if his Gangster accent is a corny (He seemed to end every sentence with "...see"). He is deliberately the spit of Al Capone, the infamous "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" having occurred less than a year before the 'Little Caesar' was released.

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Supporting actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Glenda Farrell aren't particularly good but they don't ruin the picture. The direction is sometimes flat (No doubt due to sound recording issues) but LeRoy also uses some memorable Scorsese-like gliding camera moves. On that note, there are more than a few shots that are directly referenced in later Gangster films like 'The Godfather'.


'All Quiet on the Western Front' next.
 

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87 years ago...

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All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Director: Lewis Milestone
Country: United States
Length: 153 minutes (2.5 hours)
Type: (Anti-)War, Drama

'All Quiet on the Western Front' is probably the most purely anti-war, war-movie that I've seen so far. There is nothing heroic about anything here, nothing noble, it's all a senseless and pointless waste of life. Even Kubrick's powerful 1957 'Paths of Glory' (One of my favourite films) has a couple of heroic/moral characters and a sense of good and evil. At the time, Variety magazine wrote "The League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language, to be shown in all the nations until the word "war" is taken out of the dictionaries". Needless to say they didn't and by the end of the decade, the world would be back to killing each other on mass.

It opens with a school teacher essentially recruiting the young boys in his class for war, telling them how glorious it is and quoting what WWI poet Wilfred Owen called "The old lie". We then follow the class as they are slaughtered, or maimed, one by one across the length of the film. The last survivor makes a return to the school room just before the end, disgusted as he finds the same teacher recruiting another class of young boys. Another key scene has the soldiers sitting around trying to figure out if any of them even know why they are at war?


The camera work and editing (especially during the battle scenes) is little different to how you'd shoot a large scale war movie now. The incredibly sharp transfer on the blu-ray adds to the feeling of it being ageless. Only the primitive sound keeps this from feeling thoroughly modern. The mono track has a constant background crackle and while the shell impacts during the battle are suitably loud, it doesn't have the kind of multilayered soundscape we expect from a war film nowadays. Perhaps when the 100th Anniversary rolls round in 2030, Universal could use all the digital tricks to create a new alternate 5.1 mix (just for variety). I've had this blu-ray on my shelf for a couple of years but hadn't got round to watching it... exactly why I challenged myself with this list! :D


Two Rene Clair musical comedies next.
 

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Got round to watching The Birth of A Nation, fir the first time since film class. It was easier to sit through this time as my Film Teacher wasn't there to enforce a no music or score rule. (He was obsessed with showing silent films in complete silence. So I wasn't completely disinterested this time.

The Battle Scenes toward the end of the first act were freaking phenomenal. The part where two chums from opposite sides meet on the battlefield and die in each other's arms was heartbraking. It really showcased just how ugly the civil war was. "Brother will kill brother" as Dave Mustaine once whailed.

I couldn't help but be reminded of The Patriot. Another big budget psuedo-propaganda film that plays fast and loose with history in order to satisfy fetishised national  propaganda. Also the parallel between The Little Colonel blocking the canon with a confederate flag, and Mel Gibson impaling Lucius Malfoy with a union flag, was too hard to ignore.
Like all propaganda, it is infectious. You must be on your guard when watching this, reminding yourself "This is wrong" The second you remotely sympathise with Griffith's intentions, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself. The last thing people should be saying when watching these historical white-washes is "Oh, so that's what it was like, back then..."

I was actually impressed with Griffith's portrayal of Lincoln, as a good and humble man, desperately trying to hold his country together.

Theeeeeen Part 2 begins. And once again, it was a chore to sit through. I'd like to point out that throughout this entire 3 hour long opus, Griffith addresses the issue of slavery briefly at the very beginning of the film.

This gave Griffith a chance to do what all racists try to do, make their insane ravings sound reasonable. These blacks now have more rights than whites. They're uneducated and don't even want the freedoms we have imposed upon them. When blacks get freedom, they won't bring their best. They'll bring drugs, they'll bring crime, they're rapists, and some, Griffith assumes, are good people. Slavery? What slavery?

Also, Woodrow Wilson's words of appreciation in the interlude might be the most sickeningly abhorent thing a U.S. President has said... But that wouldn't nearly be true.


The horse chase scenes in the third act would be breathtaking if it wasnt portrayed as the most heroic lynching of all time.

This is a movie ripe for fanediting. Cut off in the middle, briefly montage through the important info for a satisfying conclusion. Cut all the white-washing and most the black-facing.

Fuck Griffith and fuck this dreck. How people didn't see this coming after he made "His Trust" is beyond me.

I propose we replace this film with Cabiria as the "First epic to watch". It might have portrayed the Carthaginians one dimensionally evil, but the consequences of that are much less severe. It's ancient history. Tunisians of today share little in common with their Carthaginian ancestors. Also, the main instance of black face in the film isn't completely horrible, as the character has layers, and became an Italian National Hero soon after. It'd like Welles in Othello, I can let it slide if it's at least tries to be tasteful.

Whereas THIS is most certainly dangerous, as we have seen with its revival of the KKK, who proudly marched through D.C. under Wilson's smiling gaze.
 

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Zamros said:
my Film Teacher wasn't there to enforce a no music or score rule. (He was obsessed with showing silent films in complete silence.

Why would you do that?!? The music is an integral part of the film. Conveying emotion, tone, proxy sound effects and well everything. Here is a nice little video about silent music...

 
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