Georges Méliès’s Dancing Clocks: On Cendrillon (Cinderella), 1899
There is the take on Cinderella where we ask our heroine to wait out her terrible circumstances, a moral that encourages us to work all day according to the clock[…]
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There is the take on Cinderella where we ask our heroine to wait out her terrible circumstances, a moral that encourages us to work all day according to the clock[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays · Historical & Epic · Silents
D. W. Griffith died on July 23, 1948. To commemorate this seminal figure in cinema history, we repost BLFJ regular Gordon Thomas’s deep dive, which first appeared in 2016, into[…]
Directors · Journalism · Silents
Before Wilder considered his own career as a filmmaker as having begun, and then reached movie fame on the other side of the Atlantic, he left behind a stumbling career[…]
Exhibition · Film Technology & History · Impresarios & Moguls · Movie Theatres · Silents
While Grauman is mostly known for spectacular venues reflecting Hollywood’s film fantasies, his early San Francisco period indicates that throughout his career he showed remarkable consistency in referring to the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Commentary · Silents
Those who affect a superior attitude toward a great artist such as Lillian Gish are not only ignorant of our cultural heritage but stubbornly unaware that art usually comes from[…]
Composers · Historical & Epic · Reviews · Silents
This is an updated and revised version of Gordon Thomas’s article first posted in Bright Lights in May 2006, reposted to celebrate Easter. * * * Bigger is better this[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · Essays · Romance · Silents
Excerpted from McBride’s new critical study, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, June 2018), with the kind permission of the author. * * * To maintain the admirable[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
What we see in Brooks and Beery on the screen is a mixup of the actors’ hardwired personalities and those contrived for their roles, but this is the sort of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Film Technology & History · Silents
Ever since the ad appeared, there have been unanswered questions: who or what was behind the rumors of Florence Lawrence’s death? Did these rumors start because the fans of her[…]
While it’s always difficult to make such a claim with assurance – for decades Disney’s 1937 Goofy feature Hawaiian Holiday was confidently thought to hold that honor – Bobby Bumps[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, Griffith understood the efficacy of location shooting. Putting actors into real landscapes and streets not only went to authenticating the narrative but had[…]
The happy ending that sees the clown coupled with the girl never satisfies precisely because we know the clown’s appropriate place is one of “in-between-ness,” a position that stands in[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Silents
Robert Flaherty and Alice Nevalinga (aka Nyla, the smiling one) were romantically involved – or as McLane modestly puts it, “he had an Eskimo female companion.” * * * In[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Note: Gordon Thomas’s review of the DVD set The Olive Thomas Collection, first published on November 1, 2005, is also a provocative profile of one of Hollywood’s most fascinating early scandals/tragedies. To[…]
The House of Mystery (Volkoff, 1921-23), Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Restored Works (Vertov, 1924-1934), Joan the Woman (DeMille, 1916), and The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch,[…]
Suddenly the whole medium grew up before my eyes . . . a grown-up film, with people behaving as they do in real life . . . . Nobody had ever[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic · Pre-Code · Religion & Spirituality · Silents
This post was adapted from the new book by Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic (Running Press, 416pp, December[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · Silents · Sound & Language
“Though standard critical appraisals would deem Tomatoes a deliberately crude affront to modern technical sophistication, it is itself the sophisticated artifact, its small rebellion resonating more strongly in a media[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin – the gang’s all here. Flicker Alley, a home video company founded in 2007, is not solely dedicated[…]