Although Orphans of the Storm is
based on a play that had been successful in the preceding decade, Griffith wrote the script during shooting. Despite the resulting complications, the film is a masterpiece of beautiful staging and acting, with the Gish sisters turning in what are perhaps the finest performances of their careers. RBP
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1920s
LA SOURIANTE MADAME BEUDET (1922)
THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET
France (Colisée) 54m Silent BW
Director: Germaine Dulac
Screenplay: Denys Amiel, André Obey
Photography: Maurice Forster, Paul Parguel
Cast: Alexandre Arquillière, Germaine Dermoz, Jean dYd, Madeleine Guitty
Germaine Dulacs celebrated film is known as one of the earliest examples of both feminist and experimental cinema. The plot depicts the life of a bored provincial housewife trapped in a stifling bourgeois marriage. The most captivating aspect of The Smiling Madame Beudet, however, is composed of elaborate dream sequences in which the eponymous housewife (Germaine Dermoz) fantasizes a life outside the confines of her monotonous existence. Using radical special effects and editing techniques, Dulac incorporates some of the early avant-garde aesthetics of the times to offset the rich, vivid feminine power of Madame Beudets imaginary life against the dullness of the one she shares with her husband (Alexandre Arquillière). When the complex visual elaboration of her potential liberation through fantasythe only thing that can put a smile on her faceis cut short by the appearance of her husband within her daydreams, she is left with only one possible solution: kill him.
Sadly, Madame Beudets missed attempt on her husbands life at the end of the film is yet again misunderstood, as she is not even rewarded with Monsieur Beudets acknowledgment of her protest against him. Ultimately, Dulac not only explicitly addresses the oppressive alienation of women within patriarchy, but more importantly, uses the still-new medium of film to offer her viewers a radical and subjective female perspective. This led to her pictures inclusion in the first Festival of Womens Films in New York in 1972. CO
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1920s
DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER (1922)
DR. MABUSE, PARTS 1 AND 2
Germany (Uco-Film, Ullstein, Universum) 95m (part 1), 100m (part 2), Silent BW
Director: Fritz Lang
Producer: Erich Pommer
Screenplay: Norbert Jacques, Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
Photography: Carl Hoffmann
Music: Konrad Elfers
Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Alfred Abel, Aud Egede Nissen, Gertrude Welcker, Bernhard Goetzke, Robert Forster-Larrinaga, Paul Richterll, Hans Adalbert Schlettow, Georg John, Grete Berger, Julius Falkenstein, Lydia Potechina, Anita Berber, Paul Biensfeldt, Karl Platen
This two-part epic was a major commercial success in Germany in 1922, doubtless because of its everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach, scrambling thrills, horrors, politics, satire, sex (including nude scenes!), magic, psychology, art, violence, low comedy, and special effects. Whereas the escapades of Fantômas (and even Fu Manchu) belong to that netherworld between the surreal and the pulpy, Dr. Mabuse was intended from the outset not merely as flamboyant thriller but as pointed editorial, using the figure of the master-of-disguise supercriminal to embody the real evils of its era.
The subtitles of each of the films two parts, harping on about our time, underline the point made obvious in the opening act, in which Mabuses gang steals a Swiss-Dutch trade agreementnot to make use of the secret information, but to create a momentary stock market panic that allows Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), in disguise as a cartoon plutocrat with top hat and fur coat, to make a fast
fortune. He also employs a band of blind men as forgers, contributing to the feeling that German audiences at the time had that money was worthless (Mabuse sees this coming and orders his men to switch over to forging U.S. currency, since even real marks arent worth as much as counterfeit dollars).
The films eponymous villain shuffles photographs as if they were a deck of cards, selecting his identity for the day from various disguises, but it is nearly two hours before his real name is confirmedby which time, we have seen Mabuse in several other guises, from respected psychiatrist to degenerate gambler to hotel manager. In Part 2, he appears as a one-armed stage illusionist, and finally loses his grip on the fragile core of his identity to become a ranting madman, tormented by the hollow-cheeked specters of those he has killed and, in a moment that still startles, by the creaking-to-life of vast, grotesque statues and bits of machinery in his final lair. Director Fritz Lang, and others, would return to Mabuse, still embodying the ills of the agenotably in the early talkie Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933) and the 1961 high-tech surveillance melodrama The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. KN
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1920s
NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922)