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Made on location in Germany during the period of the Great Inflation, Isn't Life Wonderful is a tender ode to the resilience of the human spirit and the all-conquering power of love. Carol Dempster delivers her most moving performance as Inga, a Polish war orphan who struggles to provide for the family that has taken her in, while accumulating a meager dowry from the rubble of a depression-stricken Berlin so that she can marry Paul (Neil Hamilton). Returning to his family, weakened by the...

The last of the three great films that V.I. Pudovkin directed in the 1920s, Storm over Asia (1928) is an acknowledged classic of Soviet silent cinema. Filmed largely on location in Mongolia, the film has an authentic documentary feel, though the story is a stirring melodrama. It concerns a young fur trapper (Valeri Inkizhinov) who, after being captured and sentenced to death by British occupying forces, is mistaken as a descendant of the great warrior Genghis Khan. He then becomes a puppet...

"It might reasonably be contended that Humphrey Jennings is the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced." - Lindsay Anderson, Director These astonishing films show and explain essential news and propaganda functions of the movies during the Great War of 1914-1918. In those days before television and even before radio, fiction films in movie theaters were the most widely shared public experience, while news films were the most potent and detailed public images of armament, military...

For the five years between 1908 and 1913, D.W. Griffith directed some 450 films for the Biograph Company, delivering at a rate of two or three films per week. These films, one and two reels in length, are sometimes regarded as apprentice works, films in which Griffith borrowed, invented, and perfected the forms and techniques that he later used to such memorable effects in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), and Isn?t Life...

For the five years between 1908 and 1913, D.W. Griffith directed some 450 films for the Biograph Company, delivering at a rate of two or three films per week. These films, one and two reels in length, are sometimes regarded as apprentice works, films in which Griffith borrowed, invented, and perfected the forms and techniques that he later used to such memorable effects in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), and Isn't Life...

Described by Dziga Vertov, its director, as an "experiment in the language of pure cinema," The Man With the Movie Camera is perhaps the most dazzling and sophisticated work not only of Soviet, but of world silent cinema. In part it is a "city symphony," although its urban landscape is actually a film synthesis of shots taken in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and elsewhere. In part, it is a panorama of and a manifesto on the nature of socialist society in the late 1920s. But it is especially a...

Rudolph Valentino's first independent production, Cobra , was released less than a year prior to the actor's untimely death at age 31. It is an unusual and contradictory showcase for the actor who is remembered more than any other as the icon of irresistible sexuality in Hollywood silent film. Beleaguered by women in his native land, a promiscuous Italian Count, Rodrigo Torriani (Valentino) escapes to New York to work for an elegant antiques dealer specializing in Italian objets d'art. The...

From 1913 to 1916, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rose from the ranks of bit player to writer, director and star of comedies for Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Company. Because of Sennett's belief that actors were interchangeable, he lost Arbuckle to producer Joseph M. Schenck, who not only paid the comedian handsomely, but also permitted him complete creative control. To help in the new venture, Arbuckle recruited Buster Keaton, popular star of a knockabout vaudeville act; Keaton took a large pay cut...

Aelita, The Queen Of Mars is a Socialist science fiction spectacle and in 1924 was the first big-budget movie from Soviet Russia. A year and a half in the making, it was intended as ideologically correct mass entertainment which could compete both in Russia and abroad with the Hollywood films that dominated Soviet and world screens while also earning plaudits for artistic innovation such as had greeted The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other German expressionist films. Aelita is a fantastic...

In 1918 and 1919, D.W. Griffith turned from spectacles such as The Birth of a Nation , Intolerance and Hearts of the World to smaller films, which he called his "short story series." Among these is True Heart Susie (June 1919). "There are those of us who consider True Heart Susie to be the Griffith's masterpiece," writes Tom Gunning in his notes for a 2006 screening at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. He goes on to praise the "narrative structure and point of view, as well as the fine...

Sergei Eisenstein's Strike , with the possible exception of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane , marks the most outstanding cinematic debut in the history of film. Triggered by the suicide of a worker unjustly accused of theft, a strike is called by the laborers of a Moscow factory. The managers, owner and the Czarist government dispatch infiltrators in an attempt to break the workers' unity. Unsuccessful, they hire the police and in the film's most harrowing and powerful sequences, the unarmed...

Here is William S. Hart, brightest star of the early western screen, in the film he thought his best. As a 1920 reviewer wrote, "He represents the combined daring and cunning of the American fighting male. He not only looks the part, but he acts it with keen intelligence. There constantly shines in his eyes the combined pugnacity and caution of the true gunman of the West." Hart plays Black Deering, an outlaw who, in his own words, "ain't never been any good." He and his gang are ambushed...