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2 items from 2012

14 March 2012 8:35 PM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

The second in a short series celebrating the films of the Pathé-Natan company, 1926-1934. 

La petite Lise (1930) seems like a film from Mars. It's so dazzling and unique that it should be a textbook classic, and then it wouldn't be so startling. I suppose its failure to perform at the box office is all the explanation we need for why it didn't join the canon, although other commercially unsuccessful movies have managed it. It's finally emerging into the light, I think, and taking its place as a truly innovative early sound film: dialogue occupies such a distant third place in the film's scheme that calling it a talkie seems quite wrong.

One anecdote stands out: when producer Bernard Natan first saw the film Jean Grémillon had made for his company, he told the director that he'd never again be employed by Pathè-Natan, in such forceful terms that Grémillon »

19 January 2012 5:59 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Ménilmontant (1926) was written, directed, produced, edited and co-photographed in Paris by Dimitri Kirsanoff. And it is, on any terms, a remarkable piece of writing, direction, production, editing and cinematography.

I'm not sure why Marcel L'Herbier and Jean Epstein seem to be regarded as almost marginal figures in cinema, important, but somehow off the beaten path. I think they're as major as you can get. But Kirsanoff is even more neglected: he barely has a toehold in film history at all. And he seems to me to be in their league, though as yet I've seen only a little of his work. I'd even say that for Ménilmontant alone he should be in the highest ranks of French silent filmmakers. His career includes short, experimental films, as well as low-life melodramas and a German mountain film with Dita Parlo. His last film dates from 1957, the year of his death.

Ménilmontant falls »

2 items from 2012