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3 items from 2012

20 April 2012 7:23 PM, PDT | Alt Film Guide | See recent Alt Film Guide news »

Clara Bow, Mantrap What do Andrei Tarkovsky, Edward G. Robinson, Clara Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Audrey Hepburn have in common? Easy. They'll all be featured in some form or other at the Library of Congress' Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, in May. [Packard Campus screening schedule.] Andrei Tarkovsky will be represented by the classic sci-fier Solaris (1971), billed as the Soviet Union's answer to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and by the classic period drama Andrei Rublev (1969), a meditation on art, religion, spirituality, and human brutality and stupidity. A technicality: Solaris will actually be screened on April 27. Edward G. Robinson stars in The Little Giant (1933), a pre-Code crime comedy featuring Mary Astor. The (at the time) energetic Roy Del Ruth (The Maltese Falcon, Taxi!, Employees' Entrance) directed. Clara Bow is the star of Mantrap (1926), a fluffy romantic comedy of interest chiefly because of Bow and because neither of her two leading »

- Andre Soares

4 April 2012 9:46 AM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

"Here's a recently discovered experimental film from 1929, A Theatrical Hotel on 46th St, New York also known as Pensive Crackle," wrote David Cairns at his Shadowplay the other day. "It uses the particular quality of the early soundtrack, that 'warm bath of audio hiss' Guy Maddin has spoken of, with its accompanying soft crackle and bump, as an atmospheric effect, and lets it gradually seep into the onscreen characters, poisoning them as surely as a diet of gunpowder and wasp venom. It starts quite funny, and slowly turns bleaker and bleaker."

The date of that post: April 1. Today at the Chiseler, David notes that "a lot of people said nice things about the film, and I couldn't tell if they knew it was me and were playing along, or were genuinely taken in. There was no way to ask without seeming like the gullible one — I was hoisted by my own April Fool's petard. »

16 January 2012 3:46 AM, PST | Den of Geek | See recent Den of Geek news »

Our look back over the history of MGM continues, as the silent era gives way to the talkies and musicals of the 20s and 30s...

It’s 1928, and the success of Warner Bros’ musical, The Jazz Singer, has ushered in a new age of talking pictures. Audiences adored it, and it was sink or swim time for MGM. Suddenly, the silent cinema rule book was thrown out of the window and numerous opportunities opened up in Hollywood.

Composers were in demand, and song and script writers, along with voice coaches, were needed more than ever. White Shadows In The South Seas was the first MGM sound picture, although not a talkie. Originally filmed as a silent picture, MGM realised that sound wasn’t just a passing fad and, like most studios at the time, swiftly added sound effects to its music. But they did make one character speak – and that was Leo the lion, »

3 items from 2012