Josef von Sternberg

The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel)
Germany 1930. Director: Josef von Sternberg
Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings
Legendary screen star Marlene Dietrich and eccentric stylist Josef von Sternberg made a string of delirious, decadent masterpieces in Hollywood, including The Scarlet Empress, Blonde Venus and The Devil is a Woman, but their first collaboration came with the German-made The Blue Angel, the film that defined Dietrich as an icon. As Lola Lola, the top-hatted, black-stockinged, bare-thighed, sultry cabaret singer with the husky voice, Dietrich created a persona that endures in popular culture to this day. Celebrated silent actor Emil Jannings, in his first talkie, co-stars as the uptight, aging schoolteacher whose infatuation with Lola Lola leads to his ruin. The Blue Angel is an atmospheric, sensual, and powerful exploration of sexual domination -- and the first real classic of cinema's sound era. B&W, 16mm, in German with English subtitles. 98 mins. (Pacific Cinémathèque print)

Thursday, February 17 7:30 pm

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F.W. Murnau

The Last Laugh (Der letzte mann)
Germany 1924. Director: F.W. Murnau
Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller
Murnau's hugely influential 1924 masterpiece stands as one of the silent cinema's crowning achievements, and as a landmark in the development of film grammar. Emil Jannings, one of the era's pre-eminent screen actors, stars as the proud doorman of Berlin luxury hotel who suffers a humiliating demotion to lavatory attendant. The Last Laugh was the first film to fully exploit the narrative and psychological possibilities of camera movement and the subjective shot, and is a work so visually expressive that the era's customary intertitles were rendered completely unnecessary. Its stunning 'unchained camera' was the work of the great cinematographer Karl Freund, described by one historian as 'the Giotto of the screen,' and a major creative force behind many of the great German films of the period. 'A virtual milestone in the history of films, the beginning of a tradition of mise-en-scène that was to be further explored by such masters of the cinema as Orson Welles, Max Ophüls, and Kenji Mizoguchi" (Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia). B&W, 16mm, silent. 73 mins. (Pacific Cinémathèque print)

Thursday, February 17 9:20 pm

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Vsevolod Pudovkin

Storm Over Asia (Potomok Chingis-Khan)
USSR 1928. Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Cast: Valeri Inkizhinov, A. Dedintsev, Paulina Belinskaya
Vsevolod Pudovkin is often called the second great director of the Soviet silent cinema; like Eisenstein, he was a master of sophisticated montage, but while Eisenstein favoured the mass epic, the intellectual, the dialectical collision of shots and ideas, Pudovkin, influenced by D.W. Griffith, always placed more emphasis on personal drama, on psychology, on individuals caught up in epic events -- and his films were always more popular with Soviet audiences as a result. The magnificent Storm Over Asia -- also known as The Heir to Genghis Khan -- is Pudovkin's last great silent work. Set in Soviet Central Asia during the Russian civil war, the film concerns a nomadic Mongol trapper who is taken for a descendent of Genghis Khan, and set up as puppet ruler of Mongolia by British interventionist forces. The trapper accepts his new role, but gradually realizes that he is being used to oppress his own people, and turns against the imperialists who control him. Due to British pressure, some export versions of the film identified the bad guys as White Russians, but "it is hard to believe anyone was fooled, so biting are Pudovkin's English caricatures" (Jay Leyda). The film is a tour de force of luxuriant visuals, hyperbolic symbolism, irony, ethnographic detail, and dynamic editing, and contains a stunning, Samson-like finale. It was a great popular success at home and abroad, but was condemned by Soviet officials for its "formalist indulgence." Pudovkin continued to make films in the sound era, but never achieved such virtuoso heights again. B&W, 16mm, silent. 95 mins. (Pacific Cinémathèque print)

Thursday, February 24 7:30 pm

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The End of St. Petersburg (Konyets Sankt-Peterburga)
USSR 1927. Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Cast: Ivan Chuvelyov, Vera Baranovskaya, A.P. Chistyakov
Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg, like Eisenstein's October, was commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution; the two epic works were shot concurrently, using the same locations, and cover the same historical events. Pudovkin's film, unlike Eisenstein's, was finished on time, and proved a great success with both the public and Soviet officialdom. Demonstrating the more personal, individual, emotional approach to filmmaking that Pudovkin favoured (and that Eisenstein's more radical, more intellectual cinema eschewed), The End of St. Petersburg relates the events of the Revolution through the story of one uneducated peasant boy's conversion to socialism. The film begins in 1914, with the protagonist moving to the Tsarist capital in search of employment. The city is in the throes of a strike, and the youth finds work as a scab. He gradually gains a more correct understanding of the class struggle, and is soon swept up in the events of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Pudovkin's emphasis on the human element in no way diminishes the marvels of his montage, his visual sense, or his epic sweep; this is exhilarating, rousing filmmaking, chock-full of stunning sequences, and rightly regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the Soviet silent cinema. B&W, 16mm, silent. 100 mins. (Pacific Cinémathèque print)

Thursday, February 24 9:20

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