Nordic National Cinemas

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The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. Please verify that you are not a robot. Add to Wish List. Toggle navigation Additional Book Information. The authors examine each country's domestic film production, social and political context and domestic audiences from the beginning of this century to the twentieth century. Request an e-inspection copy. The Bookshelf application offers access: Offline Computer — Download Bookshelf software to your desktop so you can view your eBooks with or without Internet access. The country you have selected will result in the following: An adaptation of the ancient German myth, it mostly proceeds at a stately pace until the final battle scene.

Some may find it slow, especially when compared with the lively, suspenseful Dr. Mabuse der Spieler and Spione Yet its leisurely presentation is appropriate to the subject matter. Equally important, lingering over images allows us to notice the details of the extraordinary settings and costumes, with their busy decorated surfaces and their startling arrangements within the shot.

Nordic National Cinemas

Take the image at the top of this entry. Brunhilde, having been forced to marry King Gunther against her will, envies her sister-in-law Kriemhild, who has married Siegfried, the man Brunhilde loves. In this shot, Brunhilde mounts the steps of Worms Cathedral to confront Kriemhild and assert her right to enter the cathedral first. We see her from behind and then at the upper left as her ladies follow her, wrapped in their patterned hoods and black cloaks, creating an almost abstract composition.

Lang build the enormous stairway outside the cathedral in two stages and then used the set imaginatively to stage several ceremonies and dramatic conflicts. What makes this film Expressionist, I would argue, is the way the actors and settings interact, as in this moment when Brunhilde pauses by her window and then comes forward through the slightly parted curtain, exiting left.

She pauses in the opening, her dress seemingly becoming part of the curtains for a moment. Insistent symmetry and acting also contribute to the style. Upon her move to the land of the Huns, the style becomes a more familiar sort of Expressionism, with distorted trees and buildings that looks like they were built of mud that settled oddly before drying:. The elements of the German tales are all here: Yet the resemblance is far from exact. Clearly Lang used elements from these illustrations and took them off in his own direction.

The film has recently been restored and looks great on Blu-ray. Kino in the US and Eureka! Both have DVD editions as well. During the first half of the s, the Swedish cinema was a victim of its own success. In he released his first two films in It was a huge success, no doubt in large part due to the growing stardom of Lon Chaney, and it put the studio on the map and allowed Seastrom to stay in Hollywood, notably for The Scarlet Letter and The Wind Mauritz Stiller also a previous top choice was about to head for Hollywood as well, but his final Swedish film is one of his finest.

Many people will know it as the debut film of Greta Garbo. Fans should be forewarned that she is an important character and appears in the early and late scenes but disappears for a long stretch in the middle. As our friend Antti Alanen points out, Garbo had already acted in a comedy, Luffar-Petter Peter the Tramp , and in some short advertisements.

The film begins with Berling, a drunken pastor in a small town, being relieved of his duties. Berling has a number of chances to redeem himself but ends up harming the people around him and sinking lower into despair. He is finally redeemed by the love of the Garbo character, Elizabeth, the new bride of a wealthy neighbor, to whom, it turns out through a technicality—and happy coincidence—she is not actually married.

Hansen and Garbo make a gorgeous couple below left , but they are upstaged by the great Swedish stage actress Gerde Lundequist as Samzelius:. As usual, the film contains lovely scenes in the Swedish landscapes. There are some impressive night sleigh rides, including a famous scene in which Berling and Elizabeth are chased across a frozen lake by wolves. Unfortunately the film was cut down into a single feature for its release outside Scandinavia. The Story of Gosta Berling was the main version that circulated for many years.

The Swedish Film Institute restored it in stages as more footage was found, but the current print, at minutes, is still missing some footage. Beware picking up an older video release with the truncated film. The same DVD comes in a box set of six Swedish silent classics , which is widely available from the usual online sources.

Carl Dreyer has popped up on this blog several times, usually in passing. Not surprising, since David wrote a book about him way back Here he makes his second appearance on our ten-best lists the first having been for his first feature, The President, in with Michael. The film centers around a wealthy, aging artist, Claude Zoret. The main room of his house is decorated with several eye-catching pieces of sculpture, notably a mysterious battered head that looms in the background of many shots.

Is it part of a collection of ancient statues? Much of the action takes place here, which has led some historians to place Michael in the tradition of the Kammerspiel. David calls it a borderline case.

Nordic National Cinemas

The film has been hailed as an early treatment of homosexuality. Although there is nothing overtly expressed, it is hard not to read such a subtext into the action. Zoret, wonderfully played by Danish director Benjamin Christensen, has many guests and admirers visit him, creating a little all-male coterie. Zoret refers figuratively to Michael as his son, but there seems to be another tie between the two.

Moreover, there may be a hint that Charles Switt, a journalist apparently writing a biography of Zoret at the center of the frame above , feels some jealousy toward the young man. Trouble begins when a princess comes to commission a portrait from Zoret. During her visits to the studio to pose, she meet Michael, who is immediately smitten. The affair continues as Michael becomes increasingly inconsiderate to Zoret,borrowing money to continue the affair and missing an important showing of his work.

In contrast, Zoret shows unwavering generosity to Michael, despite being devastated by his desertion. Ultimately Zoret paints his last work, showing an elderly, lonely man against a barren seascape. It is hailed as a masterpiece at a party which Michael does not attend. As much as any of his silent films, it looks forward in tone to his later sound ones. A very nice print of Michael is available in the UK from Eureka!

Every now and then I want to put a film on the list which is impossible to see unless you happen to live near one of the archives that has a print and they happen to program it. Still, in the hope of inspiring someone to restore it and make it available, I proceed. Its situation is highly conventional, and its plot depends on a massive coincidence.

The heroine is introduced as Marie, one of several women making artificial flowers. On her lunch break she thinks back to a romantic day she spent in the country. There she meets a young man, Richard. The couple go to an expensive restaurant, and Richard seduces Marie, and then abandons her, driving away alone the next morning. Three years pass, and Marie has a small child, also named Richard. She enters him in a contest for the most beautiful child, with a cash prize, offered by an insurance company that wants to put the winner on their advertising posters.

The child dies, however, and Marie visits his grave. As she leaves, she sees a huge poster with his image. The campaign has begun. Everywhere in Paris she goes, she sees the poster and finally begs the insurance company to end the campaign. The boss, however, refuses. Marie begins tearing down the posters, and she is soon arrested. Epstein handles the arrest scene without an establishing shot but builds it up through close-ups. A third shot shows her turning to the officer and staring in a way that suggests she is becoming mentally unbalanced. Finally a long shot establishes the scene as a second policemen enters to help arrest her.

The boss of the insurance company is informed of this and sends his son to file a complaint against her. New copies of the poster are being put up all over town. The son is none other than the Richard who seduced Marie years before. Hearing her tale, he asks her forgiveness and takes her home to his parents. The father forbids their marriage, they marry anyway, and eventually after his own younger child dies! I should make mention of one other Impressionist film that came out in Most of his films seem cold and by-the-numbers to me, not to mention a bit pretentious.

At one time the film was available on DVD, but it seems to be out of print. His next would be what many would consider his funniest feature, The Gold Rush. By they had fully made the transition: Keaton went further with a complex story of a romance blooming between members of feuding families, using multiple locations, a developing causal line, and clever motifs. We analyze it in Chapter 4 of Film Art: In , Lloyd achieved a similar complexity with Girl Shy , one of his greatest films.

Yet in secret he writes a guide for seducers, taking on the narrational persona of a jaded man of the world. Clearly he has taken his inspiration from movies of the day. The imaginary scenes from his book dramatize his success in gaining the love of a vamp see bottom and a flapper.

The publishers decide that the book is so over the top that they will publish it as a comic story. During all this Harold develops a relationship with Mary, a quiet young woman from a wealthy family.

When her father tries to buy Harold off, he pretends to spurn Mary. She is about to marry a rich man, but Harold determines to stop the wedding. Even Keaton never outdid that one. But from to , these two each created a string of innovative, carefully crafted, hilarious films. Now the individual releases of each DVD seem to be slipping out of print as well. Volume 1, which contains Girl Shy , is definitely out of print. I chose the former mainly because of its perpetually astonishing transition from the frame story of a small-town projectionist unlucky in love to his dream of himself as a sophisticated detective.

His dream takes the form of a movie, and the sleeping projectionist walks through the theater and into the onscreen action. With extraordinary precision, Keaton maintains a long-take framing of the pianist and audience in the auditorium while the hero onscreen undergoes a series of unexpected shot changes.

In each he is in the same pose and position within the screen, but the backgrounds change arbitrarily, as when he begins to dive from a rock into the ocean and finds himself landing in a snowdrift:. The result is a marvelously convincing technical feat, giving the illusion of being a single shot as far as the theater is concerned and on the movie screen a character wandering through an appropriately dream-like series of edited shots. In general, Keaton was the most adept of the three great comics at using cinema technology to create gags, and this is his most elaborate attempt.

Though see also his short, The Playhouse , in which multiple exposures, flawlessly managed in-camera, create Keaton clones that play all the roles.

The plot of the dream emerges after this virtuoso transition, and it remains hilarious throughout. The chase, while not quite as dazzling as the one in Girl Shy , has considerable variety of vehicles one wonders if the two comics were consciously trying to best each other , including a passage where the hero rides the handlebars of a speeding motorcycle, unaware that the driver has fallen off. Kino has packaged Sherlock Jr. The third funny man was Ernst Lubitsch. The Marriage Circle was his second Hollywood film, and one of his best.

The Marriage Circle is a light romantic comedy, following a chain of flirtations and misunderstandings. Stock has realized that his pretty young wife Mizzi has begun to neglect and nag him. She is soon attracted a newlywed, Dr. Mueller, though she laughs off his attempts to woo her. It has often been pointed out that Lubitsch is a director of doorways. The five characters visit each other in various combinations, and the string of attempted seductions and jealousies builds. Charlotte naively pushes Braun into visiting Mizzi at home when she plays sick. The sets and especially the doorways play a big role.

Characters pause in doorways to take in a compromising situation they have interrupted. Eager to alienate Charlotte from her husband, he opens the office door to reveal Charlotte in the waiting room:. Here the innuendos are aimed at the characters. We know more than any of them does, and the humor arises from watching them misinterpret what they see and hear.

The Marriage Circle is available to rent or buy in digital form on Amazon. I know nothing about the source or the quality. The print is distinctly soft as the frame above suggests but acceptable until a better one becomes available. Greed is often spoken of as the film that historians and buffs would most like to see rediscovered. Part of it survives, of course—about two hours out of the original eight or so. Its producer, MGM, had it was edited down into a reasonably coherent feature, mainly by cutting out a number of characters and their subplots.

Their luck fluctuates, as Trina wins a lottery and McTeague is thrown out of work for not having a license. Trina becomes an obsessive miser, and McTeague, by now an alcoholic, murders her and flees to Death Valley with her money. I find a lot of Greed heavy-handed and obvious. It has an interesting style, however, with a lot of proto-Wellesian deep focus and low angles, complete with, in the case of the frame above, a hint of a ceiling. The final sequence in Death Valley is also very effective. See Indiewire for comments on this. In Turner Classic Movies edited a four-hour version, inserting production stills to suggest the missing scenes.

This was reasonably effective, but it seems impossible to find a print of it that is not washed out and fuzzy. They all verge on unwatchable. I hope that the situation is not left where it is and that a true restoration is eventually done. My frame above comes from an archival 35mm print, so clearly better material exists.

Comparing experimental shorts to fiction features, though, seems unfair. If you want to sample just Opus 3 , which is about four minutes long, it has been posted multiple times on YouTube. Sunday December 28, Actors: Germany , National cinemas: We alternate days of rain and days of sunshine, but crowds still keep turning up.

His latest, La Sapienza , is more user-friendly, somewhat closer to American art-house accessibility. A married couple in a politely disintegrating relationship takes a trip to Italy, and then their paths diverge. Alexandre, a famous architect who conducts research on the side, takes along on a field trip the young Goffredo, who wants to be an architect as well.

Each character comes, by a quiet path, to a degree of peace and reconciliation. Alexandre even renews his creative energy, thanks partly to Goffredo, who insists that architecture is not only about space but what fills it: As ever with Green, everybody is gorgeous; the clothes are casually splendid; the backgrounds are magnificent.

The climax, a muted one, takes place in the Chapel of San Carlo, filmed in appropriately radiant majesty. In a way, the movie is a fine art-history class. Le Malade imaginaire , no less. Green is one of the few filmmakers today who makes movies in homage to the pleasures of aesthetic experience. No wonder that one of his films has the title Le Pont des Arts. One scene makes fun of pretentious contemporary artists, chiefly to throw the purity of classic art into greater relief. Given these familiar patterns, we quickly get used to the artifice of to-camera address, sometimes in extreme close-up.

But La Sapienza has freshness because of its new subject matter. We get not a romance among young people but a fading love among their elders. The film harks back to a great tradition of disenchanted couples visiting alien places, from Voyage to Italy to Certified Copy. And the actors, particularly Christelle Prot as the wife, have an intelligent vivacity. Tomas and Ebba seem to have a fine upper-middle-class family, with beautiful kids Vera and Harry.

Seeking quality time, they arrive at a high-tone ski resort in the French alps. They have a pleasant visit at first, punctuated by the cannons that trigger controlled avalanches, until one such snow slide seems to threaten them on a patio. Tomas comes to see the family crisis as the collapse of his male identity. As with the Green film, people talk a lot. The central scene, in which Ebba presses Tomas to explain himself in front of another couple, runs by my count over twelve minutes.

Unlike the Green film, Force Majeure is the opposite of austere. Even without the breathtaking scenery, the ski lodge is given a sort of ersatz grandeur itself. According to reports, John Ford once remarked that a running horse is the most beautiful thing in the world. The locals let much of their stock roam across the valley until they herd them into a corral for the winter.

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