Schneider Steven - Steven jay schneider стр 29.

Cast: Eugene Silvain, André Berley, Maurice

Schutz, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Jean dYd, Louis Ravet, Armand Lurville, Jacques Arnna, Alexandre Mihalesco, Léon Larive

Carl Dreyers 1928 masterpiecehis last silent film, and the greatest of all Joan of Arc filmsis the work of his that brought him worldwide fame, although, like most of his later pictures, it was strictly a succès destime and fared poorly at the box office. A print of the original versionlost for half a centurywas rediscovered in a Norwegian mental asylum in the 1980s. Other prints had perished in a warehouse fire, and the two versions subsequently circulated consisted of outtakes.

All of Dreyers films were based on works of fiction or plays, with the exception of The Passion of Joan of Arc, which was essentially based on the official transcripts of the proceedings of Joans trialalbeit highly selective and radically compressed portions of that trial. It was made only eight years after Joan was canonized in France and ten years after the end of World War I, both of which were central to Dreyers interpretation. The helmets worn by the occupying British in 1431 resemble those in the recent war, and 1928 audiences saw the film as a historical documentary rather like the later films of Peter Watkins.

Joan is played by Renée Falconetti, a stage actress Dreyer discovered in a boulevard comedy, and following his instructions, she played the part without makeup. She and her interlocutors are filmed almost exclusively in close-ups. Though hers is one of the key performances in the history of movies, she never made another film. Antonin Artaud also appears in his most memorable screen role, as the sympathetic brother Jean Massieu.

Dreyers radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile camera style make this a difficult film in the sense that, like all great films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. The Passion of Joan of Arc is also painful in a way that all Dreyers tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory. JRos

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1920s

STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)

U.S. (Buster Keaton) 71m Silent BW

Director: Charles Reisner, Buster Keaton

Producer: Joseph M. Schenck

Screenplay: Carl Harbaugh

Photography: Bert Haines, Devereaux Jennings

Cast: Buster Keaton, Tom McGuire, Ernest Torrence, Tom Lewis, Marion Byron

Even more than the formally experimental Sherlock, Jr. (1924), this film, along with Our Hospitality (1923) and The General (1927), reveals just how great a director Buster Keaton was, over and above his considerable talents as a comedian. In Steamboat Bill, Jr., by means of his customarily unintrusive but always expert placing of the camera, we get a real feeling for the small Mississippi riverside town where city slicker and college graduate Willie turns up to see his beleaguered steamboat-proprietor father. Dad, a rough-and-ready type, is dismayed by his sons somewhat foppish ways and is even less happy when the boy falls for the daughter of a wealthy rival determined to blow Bill, Sr., out of the water.

Needless to say, Willie finally gets to prove his mettle during a climactic typhoon that destroys the town in an extended sequence of virtuoso stunts, meticulously staged action sequences, and superbly paced suspense, but not before much fun has been had with notions of acceptable/unacceptable masculine behavior. One scene in particular, in which father and son shop for hats (played straight to camera as if it were a mirror), is not only hilarious but a prime example of Keatons very modern and playful awareness of his comic persona. Magic. GA

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1920s

POTOMOK CHINGIS-KHANA (1928)

Photography: Anatoli Golovnya

Cast: Valéry Inkijinoff, I. Dedintsev, Aleksandr Chistyakov, Viktor Tsoppi, F. Ivanov, V. Pro, Boris Barnet, K. Gurnyak, I. Inkishanov, L. Belinskaya, Anel Sudakevich

Within a month of completing 1927: The End of St. Petersburg, Vsevolod Pudovkin was at work on this epic fable, apparently inspired both by I. Novokshonovs original story of a herdsman who will rise to become a great leader, and by the prospect of shooting in virgin territory, exotic Outer Mongolia. Pudovkins State Film School classmate Valeri Inkizhinov plays the unnamed hero, a Mongol who learns to distrust capitalists when a Western fur trader cheats him out of a rare silver fox pelt. The year is 1918, and the Mongol falls in with Socialist partisans fighting against the imperialist British occupying army. Captured, he is condemned to be shot (for recognizing the word Moscow), but his life is saved when an ancient talisman is found on his person, a document that proclaims the bearer to be a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. The British install him as a puppet king, but he escapes to lead his people to a fantastic victory.