The DU Lounge
Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsAnybody ever watched a silent movie?
I'm watching "Orphans in the Storm," from 1922. It stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish as two sisters, Henriette and Louise, from the French countryside caught up in the French Revolution. When their parents die in an epidemic and Louise is blinded, they go to Paris in hopes of finding a cure for Louise. They get separated (it's a long story), and now Henriette, while looking for Louise, has fallen in love with the son of a count. Meanwhile, Louise has fallen into the hands of an evil con man who is forcing her to use her blindness to beg on the streets. All the while, of course, the French Revolution is getting ready to explode. I love old movies!
onehandle
(51,122 posts)Denninmi
(6,581 posts)This guy was brilliant. Physical comedy with a lot of stunts that were all real without any safety equipment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lloyd
valerief
(53,235 posts)morning (but I had to leave for work).
HopeHoops
(47,675 posts)femmocrat
(28,394 posts)ohiosmith
(24,262 posts)hifiguy
(33,688 posts)theater organ accompaniment in my youth. Mostly Laurel & Hardy at their peak. I've seen Nosferatu and Birth of a Nation as well. Great stuff.
Even better with a good theater organist.
Lydia Leftcoast
(48,217 posts)The director was a stickler for historical accuracy, so his actors performed without make-up. This gives the movie a timeless quality, and Maria Falconetti, who plays Joan, does an amazing job of letting you know what is going through Joan's mind during her trial. (Amazingly, this was Falconetti's only movie, although she was a highly regarded stage actress in France, and she died in obscurity in the 1940s.) You get the distinct impression that Joan is on trial for being an uppity woman as much as for claiming to have received messages from saints and angels (which actually wasn't an unusual thing to claim in those days).
This film was thought to be lost until the 1990s, when a complete print was found in, of all places, a storage closet in a Norwegian mental hospital. TCM showed it shortly after that.
There are no battle scenes here. Joan has already been captured and is being interrogated when the film opens.
You wouldn't think that a silent movie based on the transcripts of an actual trial would be riveting, but it is.
Brigid
(17,621 posts)I wonder how a print of it ended up in a storage closet in a mental hospital in Norway. I will look and see if TCM has it available on their website. Coincidentally, I go to St. Joan of Arc Church.
RebelOne
(30,947 posts)The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino. He was the heartthrob of the silents. But he died young.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Valentino
hunter
(38,327 posts)MiddleFingerMom
(25,163 posts).
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There and here: http://otr.net/
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I go to sleep listening to those old shows more often than to music now... though lately
I've been putting on nature sounds -- espec. the combination of lake loons, distant train
whistles, thunder and crackling fires.
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surrealAmerican
(11,364 posts)I'm particularly fond of Buster Keaton.
FSogol
(45,526 posts)Check out these silent ones:
"The Lodger" by Alfred Hitchcock.
"Wings" won best picture in 1928(?)
Anything with Buster Keaton
Paladin
(28,272 posts)derby378
(30,252 posts)Turns out a 16mm print was found somewhere in the archives of Buenos Aires. It was in bad shape - some segments simply disintegrated - but a German-led consortium of Metropolis fans managed to save the rest and work it into an almost-complete run of the original 1927 release.
I can't believe humanity was so close to losing this gem.
graywarrior
(59,440 posts)Ava
(16,197 posts)Since I'm a film major I've had to take cinema studies courses where we watch and analyze films. I've taken several, and I don't regret it, but I've had to watch Sunrise waaaay too many times. It isn't one of the best silent films in my opinion anyways, and having to watch the full movie that many times is frustrating.
A silent film that I really like is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It's an underwatched one in my opinion and has some really really stunning images. My absolute favorite, though, is Man with a Movie Camera. It's absolutely mind-bogglingly before it's time and visually extremely captivating and powerful. Dziga Vertov is amaze-balls. One of Hitchcock's earliest films is a good one too - The Lodger.
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)To be fair I was drunk and I think I passed out before the good parts.
El Supremo
(20,365 posts)I love The General, Ben Hur a Tale of the Christ and any Chaplin. Broken Blossoms and The Wind (both with Lilian Gish) are very good too.