What good is a canon? It's a question that hovers in endless debate near cinephile culture. The idea of distilling cinema down to its "best" or "most essential" films is like a game or a thought experiment, and whether it be the AFI or Sight & Sound or a group of Young Turks looking to rattle conventional wisdom, canon-making demonstrates nothing so much as a desire to assemble an expansive, fragmented, and still-evolving sense of film history into some sort of definitive order. Canons, each with its own biases, are useful chiefly as a starting point or a basecamp. The best answer is to always be looking, always curious. And cinema has barely more than a century to keep up with. I wonder how bibliophiles cope.One of the virtues of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which begins on May 28th, is how it mixes classics and arcana on a level plane.
- 6/3/2015
- by Duncan Gray
- MUBI
Above: Spectacular full-scale derailment from the 1931 version of The Ghost Train (and also the 1941 version).
Arnold Ridley is fondly remembered in the UK as one of the stars of seventies sitcom Dad’s Army, about an incompetent and mainly superannuated group of volunteer soldiers in the WWII home guard, a show which made Ridley a national star at age 72 (it continued until he was 81). His sweetly doddering persona made a brilliant foil to the petulant Arthur Lowe, the dithering John Le Mesurier and gloomy Scot John Laurie.
One day, shooting on location in a graveyard, one of Ridley’s younger co-stars mused, “Hardly worth your leaving, is it, Arnold?” A rather harsh bit of humor: if you find it too mean, take comfort in the fact that the young thesp predeceased Ridley by some years, owing to liver failure. What larks!
But looong before Dad’s Army, Arnold Ridley found...
Arnold Ridley is fondly remembered in the UK as one of the stars of seventies sitcom Dad’s Army, about an incompetent and mainly superannuated group of volunteer soldiers in the WWII home guard, a show which made Ridley a national star at age 72 (it continued until he was 81). His sweetly doddering persona made a brilliant foil to the petulant Arthur Lowe, the dithering John Le Mesurier and gloomy Scot John Laurie.
One day, shooting on location in a graveyard, one of Ridley’s younger co-stars mused, “Hardly worth your leaving, is it, Arnold?” A rather harsh bit of humor: if you find it too mean, take comfort in the fact that the young thesp predeceased Ridley by some years, owing to liver failure. What larks!
But looong before Dad’s Army, Arnold Ridley found...
- 9/9/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
Above: Gustav Mezey three-sheet poster for Le Rosier de Madame Husson (Bernard Deschamps, France, 1932).
This stunning Austrian deco poster, which I came across on a Berlin antiquarian site, stands a magnificent 9 foot tall (110" x 49" to be precise) and comes in three sections. The poster is for a 1932 French film, whose German title, Der Tugendkönig, translates as “The Virtue King.” In the Us the film was titled He (or He - the Virgin Man), but the original title is Le Rosier de Madame Husson. Based on an 1887 Maupassant novella of the same name, the story concerns the titular Mme. Husson who seeks to promote chastity in her village by crowning a rosière, or a Rose Queen: a girl of unimpeachable virtue. But when none of the young women in town are equal to the title she selects the village idiot (played in the film by Fernandel) as her rosier.
Above: Roger...
This stunning Austrian deco poster, which I came across on a Berlin antiquarian site, stands a magnificent 9 foot tall (110" x 49" to be precise) and comes in three sections. The poster is for a 1932 French film, whose German title, Der Tugendkönig, translates as “The Virtue King.” In the Us the film was titled He (or He - the Virgin Man), but the original title is Le Rosier de Madame Husson. Based on an 1887 Maupassant novella of the same name, the story concerns the titular Mme. Husson who seeks to promote chastity in her village by crowning a rosière, or a Rose Queen: a girl of unimpeachable virtue. But when none of the young women in town are equal to the title she selects the village idiot (played in the film by Fernandel) as her rosier.
Above: Roger...
- 4/12/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
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