Expressionist Cinema: German Films and More
Expressionism was among the fundamental movements in the history of cinema. As in other arts, expressionism aimed to bring the emotions of the characters to the fore. Expressionism’s view of the world is extremely subjective, emotional and non-rational. The unconscious and its most ancestral fears come to life in the work. Expressionism was born in […]
Haxan, Avant-Garde Masterpiece
Introduction Haxan is a 1922 Swedish avant-garde film by Benjamin Christiansen, considered one of the most important and innovative masterpieces in the history of films. The film invents and mixes different genres in a truly surprising way. 50 years before Godard and the Nouvelle Vague Benjamin Christiansen invents the fake documentary and the gothic and […]
Kammerspiel And The New Objectivity
Germany is certainly among the most vital and innovative countries in the history of films of the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to being the homeland of expressionism, kammerspiel and The New Objectivity are also established, with a long series of dramas and historical movies. The kammerspiel, which means chamber acting, is a theatrical and musical […]
Murnau, Life and Movies to Watch
Friedrich Plumpe, aka Murnau, is one of the most famous directors in German. Born in 1888 on December 28 in Bielefeld. He is one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. His life was short and his filmography is not long, but it includes several must-see films and masterpieces. Most of his films […]
René Clair, from the Avant-Garde to Realism
René Clair was born in Paris in 1898. Worldwide he is considered one of the most important directors of French cinema, of which he interprets and summarizes the highest part of history, a role later assumed by François Truffaut. Who is René Clair? René Clair is well known in Anglo-Saxon countries and in Italy. In […]
Forough Farrokhzad and Persian Poetry
Forough Farrokhzad was a poet and Iranian director who in the fifties and sixties fought for women’s rights in Iran through her art and her intellectual commitment. She pioneered the avant-garde movement modernist. Forough Farrokhzad’s Persian Poem Born in Tehran on January 5, 1934, Forough Farrokhzad had a difficult life due to the Iranian regime […]
A Page of Madness
The school of new perceptions A Page of Madness is a Japanese silent film of 1926 directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa. For over 45 years the film was lost, then found by the director himself in his warehouse randomly in 1971. It is a film designed by the Japanese Artists Movement called Shinkankakuha, which means school […]
Fabio Del Greco, Life and Films
Fabio del Greco was born in 1974 in Pescara, an Abruzzo city on the Adriatic Sea. Already in elementary school he wrote short stories. The first movie he sees in the cinema is Flash Gordon, and the experience in the theater affects him deeply. At the age of 10 he discovers Steven Spielberg’s cinema. At […]
Jean Vigo: a Story of Anarchy and Cinema
In the 1930s, France was the world capital of cinema, the place where cinema was born and where the cinematographic and artistic avant-gardes that influenced the whole world were most developed. After René Clair, Antonin Artaud and Jacques Feyder. France was forced to confront war and the misery of the human condition. In cinema, a […]
Dreyer, Sjostrom and Filmmakers Outside the Avant-Gardes
Outside of this rich scenario of European French, German and Russian avant-gardes and the development of American cinema, there is a long series of individual experiences of directors operating in other countries, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer. In Italy in the 1920s everything seems to have stopped and there is a profound production and distribution […]
The Russian Avant-Garde in 1920s
The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s it was pivotal in the history of films. It was born after the revolution, in the context of the October of the arts. It is one of the most interesting and radical avant-gardes in the history of cinema. The Bolshevik Communist Party allows artists great freedom to experiment, while […]
Impressionism and the New Avant-Gardes
Impressionism and new forms of cinematographic research replaced industrial film in France in the 1920s. The production of French films in the 1920s dropped dramatically. Cinema was produced much more in the United States and Germany. Pathè and Gaumont, which had been the first industrial film production companies in history, took care themselves to the […]
Dziga Vertov and the Kine-Eye
Born in Poland in 1896, Dziga Vertov, born David Abelevič Kaufman, moved to Russia where he first studied medicine and then poetry and fiction. In Moscow he begins to take an interest in cinema thanks to surrealism from which he takes inspiration also for his nickname with which he becomes known, Dziga Vertov. After the […]
David Griffith: Life and Movies
David Wark Griffith had been a bad actor who occasionally worked in theaters in provincial towns and urban ghettos. During those years he was well acquainted with the psychology and way of thinking of the sub-urban proletarian and the people of the small towns, better than any film producer in business at the time. They […]
Surrealism: the Unconscious in Cinema
Where was surrealism born? Surrealism was also an avant-garde movement for the development of the history of films. Like the cinema of the Lumiere brothers and most of the avant-gardes of the twentieth century was born in Paris. As the New York of the new world developed like Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis spaceship chasing the economic […]
Georges Méliès: the inventor of fantastic and historical cinema
Georges Méliès was among the most important directors of all time and perhaps the most extraordinary and mythical character of the origins of cinema.It was he who invented the first tricks of the cinema such as the disappearances, the fades and the coloring of the film. From a certain point of view it could be […]
The Avant-Garde Cinema: Movies to Watch
What is the Avant-Garde The avant-garde is an extreme artistic movement, unconventional with respect to the dominant art, society or culture. The avant-garde pushes the limits of what is accepted as status, mainly in the cultural world. The avant-garde is regarded as a trademark of modernism. Numerous artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movements […]