criterionforum.org

VOTING CLOSED. RESULTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

If you are reading this sentence, you are eligible to participate in our forum's latest decades list project exploring the films of the 1920s. If you know anyone adventurous enough--on or off the forum--that you think would also enjoy participating, feel free to invite them as well.

Please PM me your list of what you believe are the top 50 films from this decade toward the end of the project. I will send confirmation that I have received your list after I have tabulated it. If you haven't heard from me within a day, you should follow up with me to make sure that I received your list. You may feel that you could compile a list of 50 favorite films from this decade much earlier than the deadline, but it's still highly recommended that you engage in the discussions here. Don't keep your favorites a secret, and always be open to suggestions from others!


THE RULES

1) Each individual list is to comprise no more or less than 50 films, ranked in your order of preference (with no ties). If you haven't yet seen 50 films from this decade that you think are genuinely great (or even if you have), please take advantage of the resources listed below and participate in the ongoing discussions to find films that you can be proud to put on your list.

2) Anyone participating in this project should plan to submit a list by the Round 1 deadline. After this point, I will publish some preliminary results that will not reveal how each film has performed, but will at least make it apparent which films are orphans (i.e. those that have received only one vote, and so receive no points in the tabulation process). During the week that follows (Round 2) all those who are interested in participating further may seek out the orphaned films (or anything else they didn't fit in before the Round 1 deadline) and make revisions to their lists as they see fit, up until the Round 2 deadline. After this point, I will publish the results.

3) Any feature film, serial, documentary, experimental film, or short film released during the 1920s (1920-1929) is eligible.

4) The date given on IMDb is the relevant date for determining a film's year of release, even when it's clearly wrong (unless a special case is made below). If the film is not on IMDb and you say it was released during this period, I'll take your word for it.

5) In certain cases, it may be appropriate for films that are technically separate to be combined, or for films that are technically combined to be separated. In such cases, you may vote for either a part or the whole, but bear in mind that all votes will be competing against each other (e.g. a vote for Ivan the Terrible Pt. 1 will not count toward the vote for Ivan the Terrible in the final tally). Generally, if multiple films are allowed to be combined for voting purposes, you should probably vote for them that way unless you are strongly opposed to doing so. The most common cases:

• Single-director multi-part films for which each segment was released separately (e.g. Feuillade's serials, Lang's two-part epics) may be considered as a single film. Films included in trilogies may not be combined.

• Variant edits: For films that exist in multiple versions (e.g. Welles' Mr. Arkadin, Rivette's Out 1), all votes that don't specify a "secondary" version will be counted toward the "primary" version.

• Portmanteau films: Each of the individual segments and the film as a whole are all separately eligible.

We may occasionally need to make a special case related to rule 4 or 5. If you are seriously considering including a film on your list that you have a question about in this regard, bring it up in this thread and we'll iron it out. However, I will not make any further exceptions during the last week of the project.

For more details about rules and procedures, please refer here.

Finally, though it is not strictly required, it is recommended that you include titles for films that you discuss in this thread in bold, as it will help the film titles stick out amidst all of the other information that will inevitably pile up in this thread. If you particularly like a film, you might even highlight it in a shiny color. See how much that caught the eye? You're going to be thinking about that for days now.


ELIGIBILITY – REMINDERS / SPECIAL CASES

The following are examples of multi-part films that are eligible to be voted for as a single film: Die Nibelungen

In some of these cases, you may feel strongly that you only want to vote for one part of the whole. You can do this, but again, just remember that all votes will be competing against each other (e.g. for all intents and purposes, Die Nibelungen, Siegfried, and Kriemhild’s Revenge are three completely separate films).

The Spiders is ineligible now, since it was eligible for the pre-1920s list.

The following films may be cited as 1920s releases in some places, but not on IMDb, and so are not eligible for this list: Dans la nuit

The following films are cited as 1920s films on IMDb, and so are eligible for this list, regardless of what anyone else might say: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Queen Kelly


RESOURCES

A list of all films that received votes during our prior 1920s project

Past Forum Discussions
Discussion from the Forum's Prior 1920s Project
Defending of Sad Pandas from the Forum's Prior 1920s Project
Discussion from the Forum's Round 2 Silent Era Project
Defending of Sad Pandas from the Forum's Round 2 Silent Era Project
Discussion from the Forum's Genre List Projects
Discussion from the Forum's Shorts List Project

Guides Within This Thread
Do you feel you have an especially informed opinion about the work during this decade from a particular director, country, genre, etc.? Many people here would greatly appreciate your taking the time to prepare a guide for navigating through all that's available. (Though they do not necessarily need to be comprehensive.) Guides are especially welcome for extremely prolific directors/movements, or to summarize availability for films (such as shorts) that are often hidden away on releases for other films or only available on the web. Past examples: Director Guide, Country Guide, Genre Guide, DVD Availability Guide

Satori on Germaine Dulac
Satori on Mary Pickford

External Resources

AWAITING SUGGESTIONS

Recommended Reading

AWAITING SUGGESTIONS


THE MATRIX R. SCHMATRIX HONORARY SPOTLIGHT SECTION

Remember that part in the movie Spotlight where all the reporters sat around and said "Hey, you hold your nose and watch this movie that you wouldn't otherwise want to watch and I guess I'll do the same for you"? Oh wait, that's not how it happened at all. No, those reporters went out and put all their heart into their work and gave long important speeches about it. In honor of their garrulousness, this section is now reserved for links to any and all posts on a particular film that are 500 words or longer. Why 500 words? Because when I used to be in the biz, I remember my editor throwing that number around a lot. Sorry folks, but we're living in a post-Spotlight world now, and the old ways just aren't going to cut it anymore.

As a reminder, matrixschmatrix is not the only member here that is allowed to write in-depth posts.

Chicago (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927) (knives)
The Devil's Circus (Benjamin Christensen, 1926) (matrixschmatrix)
Häxan (Benjamin Christensen, 1922) (matrixschmatrix)
The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) (Drucker)
Lucky Star (Frank Borzage, 1929) (matrixschmatrix)
The Magician (Rex Ingram, 1926) (matrixschmatrix)
Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927) (matrixschmatrix)
Phantom (F.W. Murnau, 1922) (matrixschmatrix)
Piccadilly (E.A. Dupont, 1929) (knives)
The River (Frank Borzage, 1928) (matrixschmatrix)
Souls for Sale (Rupert Hughes, 1923) (Tommaso)
Stride, Soviet! (Dziga Vertov, 1926) (knives)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harry Pollard, 1927) (knives)
Varieté (E.A. Dupont, 1925) (matrixschmatrix)

***Please PM me if you have any suggestions for additions to/deletions from this first post.***

Real talk: Eight months should be plenty of time for this list. Please plan ahead so that we don't have to mess with extensions. (That being said, if you contribute to this thread as much as matrixschmatrix did to the last one, and still feel like you need more time toward the end, I will let you have pretty much whatever you want.)

I generally don't participate in lists, but a quick look at the films that received votes last time reveals I've either seen or own nearly 80 of these films! Don't know how that happened but this should motivate me to contribute a little, and perhaps finally unwrap that copy of the BFI Napoleon I have on my shelf and revisit a few other films.

We would love to have you!

There is a good amount of good stuff out on Blu-ray now. Since I did my first list for the 1960s last time around, I’ve been super excited for this one.

I'm also kinda sort sitting on that Epstein Potemkin box, unwatched.

Well that would be a good and rewarding place to start. Though I think I prefer the musical accompaniment from the Image DVD for Usher. (And the same goes for Caligari.)

Don't forget that utterly bizarre voice over either. I probably won't have the time/ money to buy much for this so I'm going to be very library dependent this time around. Still I'm going to aim at watching at least the available Oscar nommed films which while I doubt will be terribly great will be connecting to other projects I'm working on.

The Sheik

A few months ago, I got to see showing of Son of the Sheik with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra a few months ago, and really enjoyed it-the live accompaniment certainly made a difference, but it's a fun movie, with some good action scenes and a halfway believable romance (despite the lead threatening to rape the lead woman at one point- it's a weird movie) but overall it was relatively easy to paper over the ugly parts and enjoy it. It was the first Valentino I'd watched, and I was excited to watch another one.

This one... is bad. It's not very fun- the action scenes are perfunctory, and while there are occasional nice shots with an interesting depth of field or a beautiful view of the desert, it mostly relies on the set decoration to do the work of making scenes of people sitting around and looking at one another interesting, and Valentino spends pretty much the whole movie flaring his nostrils dramatically. It's really ugly, too- the commentary analyses it as basically an ur-orientalist text, and that felt true, with the Arabs being sexy brutes and savages (including a whole scene gambling for wives, which as the commentary points out, isn't exactly in line with a religion that totally bans gambling) who only gain any kind of humanity through contact with European-ness. It's also basically a story in which a dude kidnaps a woman and forces her to fall in love with him through captivity- and per the commentary, it's explicit in the book that the turn is because he is raping her, and she falls in love with the abuse. That's not explicit in the movie- early on, he uh politely declines to attack her- but the commentary notes that the movie kind of plays it both ways, and could be read as following the (very popular) book in that regard in a number of points. Adolphe Menjou shows up two thirds of the way in, and plays a noble Frenchman trying to talk his friend Valentino into not continuing to Kimmy Schmidt the lead- by appealing to his European-ness, natch- and his presence is at least a little different, but it's far from being enough. The end of the movie, after our heroine has fully succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome, has Valentino revealing that actually, he's white, so it's ok- no cross-ethnic romance after all! That beat, after all that preceded it, was actually pretty funny, out of sense of like, sure, why not.

There are movies that are morally ugly that are fun, or at least fascinating, anyway- as I described in the Lang thread, Nibelungen is both morally incoherent and occasionally outright evil, but it's very much a movie worth watching anyway, but this is not that movie. It's dull, and despite only being about 75 minutes, it drags- there's just nothing really to hold interest. I don't know if any of Valentino's other early stuff is better (Blood and Sand at least sounds like a more interesting plot) but in retrospect I think I would have skipped this one and gone straight to the sequel. Though the commentary I mentioned is good enough to justify buying this thing on its own.

Oh also- is there a TSPDT/Doubling the Canon list available? I always found those very helpful.

My thought was to replace that with the list of all films that received votes in the previous round. 1920s films on the top 1000 are easy enough to find on TSPDT's website, and the DTC list is just chosen by random people anyway (not necessarily critics) so it seems less relevant to me.

Here are IMDb lists of the results of the first three relevant rounds of this project:

Criterionforum.org's List Project: Silent Era v1.0
Criterionforum.org's List Project: Silent Era v2.0
Criterionforum.org's List Project: 1920s v3.0

Two observations from the previous results:

A) Italian cinema drops off a cliff from the early silent era to the 1920s

B) It looks like Dans la nuit (1930) was perhaps first shown in 1930 and should be ineligible this time around. I can find this, this and this suggesting so, but if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'll submit it to IMDb and get it edited. Even this site which is pretty comprehensive with the release dates of all films made during 1929 in France cannot provide a release date for this particular film.

Whoa how can I find Clair's 3:25?

TMDaines wrote:Dans la nuit[/i] (1930)[/url] was perhaps first shown in 1930 and should be ineligible this time around. I can find this, .

There are numerous french site all showing Dans la Nuit as 1929 such as Allo Ciné and this one
http://www.cinema-francais.fr/les_acteu ... harles.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

matrixschmatrix wrote:The Sheik

A few months ago, I got to see showing of Son of the Sheik with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra a few months ago, and really enjoyed it-the live accompaniment certainly made a difference, but it's a fun movie, with some good action scenes and a halfway believable romance (despite the lead threatening to rape the lead woman at one point- it's a weird movie) but overall it was relatively easy to paper over the ugly parts and enjoy it. It was the first Valentino I'd watched, and I was excited to watch another one.

This one... is bad. It's not very fun- the action scenes are perfunctory, and while there are occasional nice shots with an interesting depth of field or a beautiful view of the desert, it mostly relies on the set decoration to do the work of making scenes of people sitting around and looking at one another interesting, and Valentino spends pretty much the whole movie flaring his nostrils dramatically. It's really ugly, too- the commentary analyses it as basically an ur-orientalist text, and that felt true, with the Arabs being sexy brutes and savages (including a whole scene gambling for wives, which as the commentary points out, isn't exactly in line with a religion that totally bans gambling) who only gain any kind of humanity through contact with European-ness. It's also basically a story in which a dude kidnaps a woman and forces her to fall in love with him through captivity- and per the commentary, it's explicit in the book that the turn is because he is raping her, and she falls in love with the abuse. That's not explicit in the movie- early on, he uh politely declines to attack her- but the commentary notes that the movie kind of plays it both ways, and could be read as following the (very popular) book in that regard in a number of points. Adolphe Menjou shows up two thirds of the way in, and plays a noble Frenchman trying to talk his friend Valentino into not continuing to Kimmy Schmidt the lead- by appealing to his European-ness, natch- and his presence is at least a little different, but it's far from being enough. The end of the movie, after our heroine has fully succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome, has Valentino revealing that actually, he's white, so it's ok- no cross-ethnic romance after all! That beat, after all that preceded it, was actually pretty funny, out of sense of like, sure, why not.

There are movies that are morally ugly that are fun, or at least fascinating, anyway- as I described in the Lang thread, Nibelungen is both morally incoherent and occasionally outright evil, but it's very much a movie worth watching anyway, but this is not that movie. It's dull, and despite only being about 75 minutes, it drags- there's just nothing really to hold interest. I don't know if any of Valentino's other early stuff is better= Blood and Sand at least sounds like a more interesting plot- but in retrospect I think I would have skipped this one and gone straight to the sequel. Though the commentary I mentioned is good enough to justify buying this thing on its own.

I first saw The Sheik a few years ago but had pretty much forgotten about most of it. Upon revisiting it just a couple of months ago on the Kino Blu, I came to largely the same conclusion as you. My first thought when it ended was that this is one of the most misogynistic films I've ever seen, so color me surprised to find out that not only was the novel written by a woman, but both it and the film were incredibly popular with women. I have to say, while it's not a good film by any stretch, I did find it veering into camp occasionally, particularly with Valentino's performance. I've seen him in a few other films (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Delicious Little Devil, Beyond the Rocks), and when he's in brooding mode, he tends to be wooden. So it was quite jarring to me when he moved into leering mode, with wide-open eyes and big, cheesy grin, bearing his teeth in an aggressively ridiculous manner. It's so over the top that it becomes comical, and that's actually what made the film campy and enjoyable for me. His goofy performance is like an unintentional antidote to the extremely unappealing character he's playing. He comes alive in a way that is so blatantly predatory and indecent, but it comes off like a child's idea of those characteristics. Perhaps the film's greatest worth is as a document of what American women found sexy at that moment in time (I believe he is considered cinema's first male sex symbol).

It occurred to me as well on my recent viewing that Valentino's star has fallen greatly in the last decade or so. When I was a child, long before I truly got into film, Valentino was a name I was familiar with just like Chaplin. As late as the 80s and early 90s, he seemed an easily recognizable reference to silent film in the mainstream. The Sheik earned a spot on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest love stories of all time, and I can only assume that was by reputation alone as being representative of Hollywood's first "Latin lover." But as so few of his movies are thought of today as great art (not that they probably ever were), his celebrity no longer keeps him afloat to any but the most hardcore silent movie buffs

As far as other Valentino films go, I do recommend seeking out Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (if you're in the U.S., it's airing October 30 on TCM). I wasn't overly enthused by the film myself when I saw it several years ago, but it's generally well regarded and I plan to watch it again for reevaluation. I can vouch for Valentino's legendary tango scene, which is legitimately one of the sexiest things I've seen in a silent movie. Another film I've been meaning to see is the 1921 version of Camille, which also stars Alla Nazimova and is included as a bonus feature on the DVD for the Garbo film.

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:

TMDaines wrote:Dans la nuit[/i] (1930)[/url] was perhaps first shown in 1930 and should be ineligible this time around. I can find this, .

There are numerous french site all showing Dans la Nuit as 1929 such as Allo Ciné and this one
http://www.cinema-francais.fr/les_acteu ... harles.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Not a single one that I could find provides a release date of 1929 though. It is the premiere/release date that is of relevance and not year of production. That is how IMDb works and how we have managed it here too.

The site you linked works primarily on production years. I even linked to their page in the post you have quoted! They list this as a 1929 production, but do not know the release date. See below:

TMDaines wrote:Even this site which is pretty comprehensive with the release dates of all films made during 1929 in France cannot provide a release date for this particular film.

The most common date of release given is 31 May 1930. IMDb gives 16 May 1930, but I can find no other source listing that. I tried searching for books in both English and French, and publications from the time, but can't find a filmography that is really authoritative.

This site (Inside a Dream) lists it as appearing on the Circuit Pathé on 31st May 1930 for its premiere.

It's currently 1930 on IMDb, so unless that changes, it's ineligible until the next round. (This was already pointed out in the first post.)

Yes, sorry Swo. I did not realise that until I had already researched it for an hour, so thought I would share my findings regardless.

Feego wrote: I first saw The Sheik a few years ago but had pretty much forgotten about most of it. Upon revisiting it just a couple of months ago on the Kino Blu, I came to largely the same conclusion as you. My first thought when it ended was that this is one of the most misogynistic films I've ever seen, so color me surprised to find out that not only was the novel written by a woman, but both it and the film were incredibly popular with women. I have to say, while it's not a good film by any stretch, I did find it veering into camp occasionally, particularly with Valentino's performance. I've seen him in a few other films (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Delicious Little Devil, Beyond the Rocks), and when he's in brooding mode, he tends to be wooden. So it was quite jarring to me when he moved into leering mode, with wide-open eyes and big, cheesy grin, bearing his teeth in an aggressively ridiculous manner. It's so over the top that it becomes comical, and that's actually what made the film campy and enjoyable for me. His goofy performance is like an unintentional antidote to the extremely unappealing character he's playing. He comes alive in a way that is so blatantly predatory and indecent, but it comes off like a child's idea of those characteristics. Perhaps the film's greatest worth is as a document of what American women found sexy at that moment in time (I believe he is considered cinema's first male sex symbol).

It occurred to me as well on my recent viewing that Valentino's star has fallen greatly in the last decade or so. When I was a child, long before I truly got into film, Valentino was a name I was familiar with just like Chaplin. As late as the 80s and early 90s, he seemed an easily recognizable reference to silent film in the mainstream. The Sheik earned a spot on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest love stories of all time, and I can only assume that was by reputation alone as being representative of Hollywood's first "Latin lover." But as so few of his movies are thought of today as great art (not that they probably ever were), his celebrity no longer keeps him afloat to any but the most hardcore silent movie buffs

As far as other Valentino films go, I do recommend seeking out Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (if you're in the U.S., it's airing October 30 on TCM). I wasn't overly enthused by the film myself when I saw it several years ago, but it's generally well regarded and I plan to watch it again for reevaluation. I can vouch for Valentino's legendary tango scene, which is legitimately one of the sexiest things I've seen in a silent movie. Another film I've been meaning to see is the 1921 version of Camille, which also stars Alla Nazimova and is included as a bonus feature on the DVD for the Garbo film.

The commentary goes into some detail about the movie's appeal for women- as I recall, the appeal of the book was basically read as just 'it acknowledges that women are capable of enjoying sexuality at all' with some sort of illicit thrills of exoticism thrown in. I'm not sure why a book (and effectively, a movie) with such a specifically female audience would need to be sexual in such a nasty way, but I suspect this is one that, like A Fool There Was, has been treated unkindly by changing mores.

I wonder if the plummeting of Valentino's own star is due to those same changes (which have surely accelerated, even since the 80s) or changes in availability of things from the silent era? I would say that Chaplin, Nosferatu and Metropolis are about the only silents I can trust people to get references to, and those have both been pretty well kept in the public eye- Keaton, too, though no particular work, really. It's hard to think of any silent romance or drama that has broader cultural cache at this point.

swo17 wrote:It's currently 1930 on IMDb, so unless that changes, it's ineligible until the next round. (This was already pointed out in the first post.)

Yes you're both right; despite most french sites putting 1929 in brackets afterwards. It was premiered in May 1930. Strange though as it figured in my list and discussion during the last round so must have slipped the net.
Whilst I'm on can we make Menilmontant compulsory viewing?

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:Strange though as it figured in my list and discussion during the last round so must have slipped the net.

Most likely IMDb had it as a 1929 film at the time. Details like that are always changing.

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:Whilst I'm on can we make Menilmontant compulsory viewing?

... or, even better, all Kirsanoff! It's been a while since I've seen it, but I remember loving Brumes d'automne as well. It's a gorgeous mood piece about my favorite season, and contains even more of Nadia Sibirskaia's piercing gaze.

This was my favourite lists project last time. Looking forward to participating more, should be loads more stuff available than last time around.

thirtyframesasecond wrote:This was my favourite lists project last time. Looking forward to participating more, should be loads more stuff available than last time around.

Well since the last round there's now a chance to see my number 1. The Holy Grail of Gremillion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muxchyT2u7E" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I had the luck to see this in the 2013 Grem retrospective on a pretty nifty 35mm print but until someone gets it out here's the only option it seems.