#French silent movies

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Les Vampires (1915)

[picturessnatcher]

Le voyage à travers l'impossible (Georges Méliés, 1904)

[soft-homestyle]

Josephine Baker

-

Stay cozy.

@soft-homestyle

[weirdlookindog]

Marguerite Gance in La chute de la maison Usher (1928)

l'Avant-Scène Cinéma Magazine #313/314, France, October 1983.

[fibula-rasa]

Study of Light / Étude de la lumière (1923)  

[letterboxd | imdb | HENRI]

Director: Maurice Audibert

Study of Light is a short showcase for Maurice Audibert’s method of natural color photography—a process of tri-color additive synthesis—which he developed and refined with Rodolphe Berton starting around 1909. The process involved using multiple lenses and prisms to capture three photograms per frame of film, arranged in a triangle printed within each frame on 65mm film. [see what that looks like at Timeline of Historical Film Colors] Then, using color filters during projection, the three photograms would be synthesized into a single color image. 

This, of course, required specialized projection equipment, which Audibert would address in further refinements in his technique. (If you’ve ever looked into the development of color and sound film technologies before they became habitually adopted, you know that extra work/expense for exhibitors was a typical hurdle for inventors.) Audibert himself recognised some of the issues with his process, including colors shifting due to imperfect superimposition and a stereoscopic look to the projected images due to variation in the depths of field for the superimposed images. As a 2020s viewer, I find the dreamy, gossamery look visually interesting, though I recognise that that wasn’t what Audibert was aiming for!

All that said, Audibert transitioned to experimenting with a subtractive rather than an additive process in the year following the production of this film.

[666candies]

Marguerite Gance as Madeline Usher in Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

[thefugitivesaint]

Georgi Stenberg (1900-1933) & Vladimir Augustovich Stenberg (1899-1982), 'Miracle of the Wolves', 1927 Source For some reason this poster (which seems to have little relation to the content of the French historical drama it's meant to advertise) gives me strong 'Take On Me' vibes (the video aesthetics rather than the song itself).

[empirearchives]

Napoléon (1927), dir. Abel Gance

[mabusecaligari]

L'Inhumaine (1924) - Marcel L'Herbier

[dark-longings]

La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d'Arc, 1929. Marco de Gastyne.

[friendlessghoul]

Ma Vache...Et Moi... (Go West) 1925 Buster Keaton, Kathleen Myers, Ray Thompson, and Howard Truesdale

[diana-andraste]

La joie de vivre, 1934

10 minute short film at the link

[makeitquietly]

[soft-homestyle]

Josephine Baker

-

Stay cozy.

@soft-homestyle

[picturessnatcher]

La légende des ondines (Georges Denola, 1911)

[fibula-rasa]

Danse des saisons : L'hiver, danse de la neige / Dance of the Seasons: Winter, Snow Dance (1900)   

[letterboxd | imdb]

Director: Alice Guy-Blaché