Joe May's sensual drama of life in the Berlin underworld is in many ways the perfect summation of German filmmaking in the silent era: a dazzling visual style, a psychological approach to its characters, and the ability to take a ...
Regen is an experimental documentary film directed by Joris Ivens in 1929. It can be defined as a cinematic-poem. In 2021 Breve Storia Del Cinema restored the film with a new score composed by Nikolas Labrinakos.
100.000.000 peasants - illiterate, poor, hungry. There comes a day when one woman decides that she can live old life no longer. Using ways of new Soviet state and industrial progress she changes life and labor of her village.
The clock strikes midnight, the bats fly from the belfry, a dog howls at the full moon, and two black cats fight in the cemetery: a perfect time for four skeletons to come out and dance a bit.
In the beginning of the industrial revolution, the Paris Commune was established in 1871 against the rich and the powerful, and violently repressed by the army that remained faithful to a tamer form of Republicanism. How could the...
On an island off the coast of Brittany four isolated men collect seaweed. Two young best friends have a quarrel and when one's thumb becomes infected his friend must risk his life on the ocean to bring him to the doctor.
A story of a man who loses his memory during the First World War, regains it 10 years after the Russian Revolution and returns home to a new and alien St. Petersburg.
A young woman is seduced and abandoned by a man who was invited to stay at his home by her father in a stormy night. Noticing that she is pregnant, the girl decides to leave home and start a new life.
Resisting the character-driven narrative adhered to by the rest of the world's filmmakers, Victor Turin formulated a grand, elemental drama centered around the struggle for survival in Asia, from the arid plains of Turkestan to th...
The protagonist, a lazy pen-pusher, gets the sack for his bureaucratic idleness, and learns that the way back into the job market depends on getting a letter of recommendation from a "grandmother".
Two masked men playing dice in a bar leave, get in a car, and drive to the ruins of a castle on a hill. There. they find a modern chateau filled with contemporary furniture and abstract art. Time to roll the dice.
An unimpressive but well intending man is given the chance to marry a popular actress, of whom he has been a hopeless fan. But what he doesn't realize is that he is being used to make the actress' old flame jealous.
With the police hot on their trail, Stan and Ollie attempt to change clothes in their getaway car, only to find themselves struggling to balance atop the girders of an unfinished skyscraper. Will they return to ground level in one...
Alexandra Schmitt, Holmes Zimmermann, Ilse Trautschold
Plot
Mutter Krause and her children live in the poorer section of Berlin's Wedding district. The film depicts the cruelty of poverty and communism as a rescuing force that reaches Mutter Krause and the child too late.
A young Chinese woman working in the kitchen at a London dance club is given the chance to become the club's main act, which leads to a plot of betrayal, forbidden love, and murder.
The boys and their wives are preparing for a drive to a Sunday picnic but infighting is ruining their plans and a sudden feud with a next-door neighbor completes the disaster.
A close-up look at sand urchins and rock urchins. At the seashore, a man digs up a sand urchin. We look closely. He sets it back in the sand, and it burrows out of sight. Its intestines take nutrients out of sand. Using magnificat...
A classic melodramatic love tragedy addressing social inequality in feudal Japan, depicted in Kenji Mizoguchi's typical style. The nostalgic scenes of 1920s Tokyo provides a valuable visual experience set against the background of...
In Spring is a masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema avant-garde, a non-fiction film made by Mikhail Kaufman, Dziga Vertov's brother and co-author, along the lines of the avant-gardist theory of «cine-eye». The film shows Kyiv in 1929, ...
Douglas Fairbanks, Belle Bennett, Marguerite De La Motte
Plot
King Louis XIII of France is thrilled when his son is born--an heir to the throne. But his Queen has actually delivered twin boys. Cardinal Richelieu sees the second son as a potential for revolution, and has him sent off to Spain...
On his honeymoon with a bride he has wed for business reasons, a man falls for a woman who is in the clutches of a sinister character.After this woman begs him to help her escape, he plots to do so using the opportunity of a maske...
Two lighthouse keepers (the father and the son) are to spend one entire month in the middle of the sea near the coasts of Brittany; the young man is ill.
Jerzy Braun, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Andrzej Strug
Cast
Gregori Chmara, Agnes Kuck, Julian Krzewinski
Plot
Journalist Henryk Bielecki is not very talented but he desperately wants to become a famous writer. Nothing will stop him from making his dreams come true.
On shore leave from the Navy, seamen Stanley and Oliver want to treat two attractive single girls to a glass of soda in the park but only have enough change for three sodas.
A simple story of two friends who live together in a poor tenement and who share about everything in life, until they gallantly rescue a woman injured in a road accident.
Stanley's attempts to treat Oliver's cold include dropping a swab down his friend's throat, applying a mustard plaster to his rump, and inflating the air mattress from the gas jet until it has Oliver pressed against the ceiling.
Ivan Koval-Samborsky, Renee Stobrawa, Grace Chiang
Plot
An impression of the state of the world in 1929, contrasting similarities and differences in religion, customs, art and entertainment from all over the world. The film is constructed like a symphony.
When Mrs. Hardy refuses to cook supper, Mr. Hardy decides to cook it for himself and Mr. Laurel, but things go wrong during a jealous mix-up with the next-door married couple.
Swept up in a police raid, Stan and Ollie are sentenced to jail and land in a jail labor camp. The governor visits, accompanied by two flappers, where the duo accidentally create rice pudding for a food fight.
Stanley and Oliver, in their new jobs as footman and doorman at a ritzy hotel, wreak their usual havoc on the guests, including partially undressing a swanky blonde guest and repeatedly escorting a haughty Prussian nobleman into a...
Visual structure composed of variations on the arabesque: arcs of light, water spouts, spider webs, burgeoning trees, flowers and foliage, a woman's smile, arms stretching, an arm giving rhythm to a rocking chair.
Three bank robbers on the run happen across a woman about to give birth in an abandoned covered wagon. Before she dies, she names the three bandits as her newborn son's godfathers.
The quest for a sparkling pearl necklace stolen by a beggar under the gaze of a prostitute, who persuades her unemployed friend to steal it back, with tragic consequences.
Capt. Fracasse, a down-on-his-luck nobleman, gives shelter at his estate one night to a troupe of traveling actors. He falls in love with Isabelle, an actress with the group. The next day, as they prepare to leave, he decides to j...
