Martin Scorsese is famous for his collaborations with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the first feature-length film with all three, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” has become a critical and commercial success. It’s not unusual for a director to find a “favorite” actor and form a successful relationship. In fact, this practice goes back to the beginning of the industry.
In 1912, pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith cast 18-year-old Lillian Gish in his short film “An Unseen Enemy,” and the two worked on more than 40 short and feature-length productions over the next decade. One of the most famous scenes from the silent era is in their film “Way Down East,” in which Gish floats unconscious on an ice floe; she had lifelong nerve damage in several fingers as a result of her performance in that scene.
SEEMartin Scorsese movies: All 26 films ranked worst to best
During the Golden Age of Hollywood,...
In 1912, pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith cast 18-year-old Lillian Gish in his short film “An Unseen Enemy,” and the two worked on more than 40 short and feature-length productions over the next decade. One of the most famous scenes from the silent era is in their film “Way Down East,” in which Gish floats unconscious on an ice floe; she had lifelong nerve damage in several fingers as a result of her performance in that scene.
SEEMartin Scorsese movies: All 26 films ranked worst to best
During the Golden Age of Hollywood,...
- 11/18/2023
- by Susan Pennington and Chris Beachum
- Gold Derby
Martin Scorsese is famous for his collaborations with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the first feature-length film with all three, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” has become a critical and commercial success. It’s not unusual for a director to find a “favorite” actor and form a successful relationship. In fact, this practice goes back to the beginning of the industry.
In 1912, pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith cast 18-year-old Lillian Gish in his short film “An Unseen Enemy,” and the two worked on more than 40 short and feature-length productions over the next decade. One of the most famous scenes from the silent era is in their film “Way Down East,” in which Gish floats unconscious on an ice floe; she had lifelong nerve damage in several fingers as a result of her performance in that scene.
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, there were quite a few famous collaborations,...
In 1912, pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith cast 18-year-old Lillian Gish in his short film “An Unseen Enemy,” and the two worked on more than 40 short and feature-length productions over the next decade. One of the most famous scenes from the silent era is in their film “Way Down East,” in which Gish floats unconscious on an ice floe; she had lifelong nerve damage in several fingers as a result of her performance in that scene.
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, there were quite a few famous collaborations,...
- 11/18/2023
- by Susan Pennington, Chris Beachum and Misty Holland
- Gold Derby
Despite his well-earned title as the master of suspense, many of director Alfred Hitchcock's movies left something to be desired. Though he rarely made all-out duds, his hits were so impressive that they set the bar too high for many of his lesser films. Hitchcock also had a habit of returning to the same elements: an innocent man on the run ("The 39 Steps" and "Saboteur"), a pair of murderers where one of them is horrified by the act ("Rope" and "Strangers on a Train"), etc. While this allowed Hitchcock's later movies to feel more refined for viewers who saw the movies as they came out, it can make for a frustrating experience when you're working your way through Hitchcock's filmography decades later.
Hitchcock was no stranger to the fact that some of his movies were stronger than others, even going so far as to publicly complain about what he saw as their shortcomings.
Hitchcock was no stranger to the fact that some of his movies were stronger than others, even going so far as to publicly complain about what he saw as their shortcomings.
- 9/9/2022
- by Demetra Nikolakakis
- Slash Film
8 things that happened on this day in history as it relates to showbiz...
1838 Legendary abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass escapes from slavery. Where's his biopic? Seriously.He shows up briefly as a supporting character in both the miniseries North and South and the feature film Gloryin the 1980s but since then, no films or TV about him, apart from documentaries?
1920 Way Down East starring Lillian Gish as a wronged young woman premieres...
1838 Legendary abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass escapes from slavery. Where's his biopic? Seriously.He shows up briefly as a supporting character in both the miniseries North and South and the feature film Gloryin the 1980s but since then, no films or TV about him, apart from documentaries?
1920 Way Down East starring Lillian Gish as a wronged young woman premieres...
- 9/3/2020
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***The coming of sound cost the American film industry plenty: it forced them to soundproof their stages, refit their theaters, and it rendered a fair few actors unemployable, by reason of heavy accents or lack of facility with the English language. In fact, one of the founders of 20th Century Fox was the comedy star Raymond Griffith, whose damaged vocal cords prevented him speaking above a croak, and who made the transition to writing and producing when he saw the writing on the wall. But on the other hand,...
- 3/18/2020
- MUBI
The latest installment in the filmmaker's series of journal-films combining iPhone footage and sounds and images from movies. A diary penned with cinema.Journal (6.6.16 - 1.10.17)feat. additional footage from Masha Tupitsyn and Isiah MedinaMy journal-film series (of which this is the third installment) came to be as a means of resolving the points of convergence and departure amongst the environments I occupy and those which I encounter in cinema. I like to view these films as a method of managing the images that take up my thoughts and memories into a new continuity, one in which the distinction between images seen on-screen and those personally experienced is no longer absolute. In dissolving this partition, these films provide a vector for the animation conceptual concerns through cinema - montage fulfilling that which language can only formally describe and vice versa. The following essay outlines some of the concerns this film attempts...
- 3/20/2017
- MUBI
How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...
- 1/4/2016
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Antony I. Ginnane has long been concerned about what he regards as a high level of film illiteracy among many writers, producers and directors, both established and emerging.
And the veteran producer/distributor believes that even among those filmmakers who are steeped in screen history, some have little or no knowledge of the countless classic films produced in the decades before the 1970s.
That.s part of the motivation for Ginnane.s new book, The Unusual Suspects: 104 Films That Made World Cinema, which Currency Press is launching next month.
His eclectic choices range from D.W. Griffith.s Way Down East (1920) through to Quentin Tarantino.s Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003).
Omitting any title produced after 2003, he explains, does not suggest that no great films had been made since then, but rather that the grammar of cinema had already been laid down.
He is quick to point out his list, which includes Alfred Hitchcock.s Vertigo,...
And the veteran producer/distributor believes that even among those filmmakers who are steeped in screen history, some have little or no knowledge of the countless classic films produced in the decades before the 1970s.
That.s part of the motivation for Ginnane.s new book, The Unusual Suspects: 104 Films That Made World Cinema, which Currency Press is launching next month.
His eclectic choices range from D.W. Griffith.s Way Down East (1920) through to Quentin Tarantino.s Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003).
Omitting any title produced after 2003, he explains, does not suggest that no great films had been made since then, but rather that the grammar of cinema had already been laid down.
He is quick to point out his list, which includes Alfred Hitchcock.s Vertigo,...
- 10/25/2015
- by Don Groves
- IF.com.au
This Chaplin poster, with its graphic simplicity, its bold approach to typography (two very striking typefaces each bleeding to the edges of the poster) and its brash use of color, has a distinctively contemporary look, as if it was a fan poster screenprinted in a basement in Bushwick to be sold on Etsy. It doesn’t look like the hand-painted posters we recognize from the 1930s at all. But in fact it is a 1936 poster, made to accompany the original release of Charlie Chaplin’s film.The poster is a product of Leader Press, an Oklahoma City printer that came up with a solution to a distribution problem in the early years of sound cinema. In the early 30s, after films had played the major cities, prints were bused to the hinterlands and posters were supposed to be included along with the film print. The prints wouldn’t arrive until...
- 3/13/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
In Robert Wiene’s 1920 dreamlike horror classic, veteran German actor Werner Krauss plays the mysterious Dr. Caligari, the apparent force behind a creepy somnambulist named Cesare and played by Conrad Veidt, who abducts beautiful Lil Dagover. The finale in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has inspired tons of movies and television shows, from Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir The Woman in the Window to the last episode of the TV series St. Elsewhere. In addition, the film shares some key elements in common (suppposedly as a result of a mere coincidence) with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio's 2011 thriller Shutter Island. The 1920 crime melodrama Outside the Law is not in any way related to Rachid Bouchareb's 2010 political drama. Instead, the Tod Browning-directed movie is a well-made entry in the gangster genre (long before the explosion a decade later). Browning, best known for his early '30s efforts Dracula and Freaks,...
- 4/1/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Hitting movie theaters this weekend:
Arthur Christmas - James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy
Hugo - Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Lee
The Muppets - Amy Adams, Jason Segel, Chris Cooper
Movie of the Week
Hugo
The Stars: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Lee
The Plot: Set in 1930s Paris, an orphan who lives in the walls of a train station is wrapped up in a mystery involving his late father and an automaton.
The Buzz: Director Martin Scorsese is not known for his family films. Throughout his career Scorsese has stuck to churning out gritty/grisly street films, realistic & vibrant tales about the harshness of life, about the hard-nose battle of good versus evil, of right versus wrong (of moral relativity), and of psychoses versus neuroses. His films are fairly hardcore and as thus are very often hard-r. His latest offering in Hugo, looks to be an...
Arthur Christmas - James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy
Hugo - Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Lee
The Muppets - Amy Adams, Jason Segel, Chris Cooper
Movie of the Week
Hugo
The Stars: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Lee
The Plot: Set in 1930s Paris, an orphan who lives in the walls of a train station is wrapped up in a mystery involving his late father and an automaton.
The Buzz: Director Martin Scorsese is not known for his family films. Throughout his career Scorsese has stuck to churning out gritty/grisly street films, realistic & vibrant tales about the harshness of life, about the hard-nose battle of good versus evil, of right versus wrong (of moral relativity), and of psychoses versus neuroses. His films are fairly hardcore and as thus are very often hard-r. His latest offering in Hugo, looks to be an...
- 11/23/2011
- by Aaron Ruffcorn
- The Scorecard Review
I'm not going to pretend that I have anything new to add to any scholarly discussion of the works of D.W. Griffith. Film historians have had nearly 100 years to dissect these films and all of the interesting conversations have been had. I am, however, going to offer my opinions, which may be less than scholarly, but I feel that these films still warrant talking about. Thanks to Kino, I've seen more silent films in the last few months than in the entire first thirty years of my life. Their latest releases are the Griffith films Way Down East and the notorious The Birth of a Nation. Both films share several attributes and lead us to understand something about Griffith's character and beliefs, but they...
- 11/18/2011
- Screen Anarchy
Racism in HD? Kino Video, the leader in silent films on DVD and now Blu, is bringing the “classic” D.W. Griffith epic Birth of a Nation to Blu-ray. The film has been one of the biggest stains on cinema, arguing that the Kkk helped stabilize America into the country it was back in 1915 when the film was released, featured white actors as black characters (black-facing), as well as its bitter fight with the NAACP.
But can its dark history be looked past for Griffith’s ground-breaking camerawork that changed cinema forever? That’s the immortal question. Either way, Kino will do a superb job on the film, as we can see by its extras:
- The Making of The Birth of a Nation (1992, 24 min. Produced by David Shepard)
- Filmed prologue to The Birth of a Nation (1930, 6 min. Featuring D. W. Griffith and Walter Huston)
- Civil War Shorts directed by D.
But can its dark history be looked past for Griffith’s ground-breaking camerawork that changed cinema forever? That’s the immortal question. Either way, Kino will do a superb job on the film, as we can see by its extras:
- The Making of The Birth of a Nation (1992, 24 min. Produced by David Shepard)
- Filmed prologue to The Birth of a Nation (1930, 6 min. Featuring D. W. Griffith and Walter Huston)
- Civil War Shorts directed by D.
- 8/29/2011
- by Jon Peters
- Killer Films
If Audrey Hepburn was the last virgin goddess of American films, Lillian Gish was the first. Often referred to at the time as "The First Lady of the Silent Screen," she was indeed movies' first truly great actress. From her debut at age 19 in founding father D.W. Griffith's two-reel An Unseen Enemy (1912) in what I calculate as the initial year of film's golden age (plus 25 other Griffith films in less than 24 months), to her final starring masterpiece, at age 35, in Victor Sjostrom's The Wind (1928), Lillian Gish was the central player in many of the enduring treasures of cinema's earliest flowering, that essential cornerstone of the art in its purest form. She is the key figure in most of Griffith's major work, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919) to Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922), not to mention such beautiful lesser-known gems as Hearts of the World...
- 8/17/2011
- Blogdanovich
Avant-garde director best known for Hallelujah the Hills
Adolfas Mekas, who has died aged 85, was the director of Hallelujah the Hills (1963), perhaps the most light-hearted, amusing, innovative, allusive and freewheeling film to come out of the New American Cinema Group established in 1962. One of the clauses in its manifesto reads: "We believe that cinema is indivisibly a personal expression. We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen." Mekas, his older brother Jonas, and other avant-garde members of the group, such as Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Shirley Clarke and Gregory Markopoulos, lived by this doctrine in all their film-making.
Shot in black and white in 16mm, Hallelujah the Hills, which cost only $75,000 from concept to can, was directed, written and edited by Mekas, with Jonas as assistant; a young friend, David Stone, as first-time producer; Stone's wife, Barbara,...
Adolfas Mekas, who has died aged 85, was the director of Hallelujah the Hills (1963), perhaps the most light-hearted, amusing, innovative, allusive and freewheeling film to come out of the New American Cinema Group established in 1962. One of the clauses in its manifesto reads: "We believe that cinema is indivisibly a personal expression. We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen." Mekas, his older brother Jonas, and other avant-garde members of the group, such as Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Shirley Clarke and Gregory Markopoulos, lived by this doctrine in all their film-making.
Shot in black and white in 16mm, Hallelujah the Hills, which cost only $75,000 from concept to can, was directed, written and edited by Mekas, with Jonas as assistant; a young friend, David Stone, as first-time producer; Stone's wife, Barbara,...
- 6/8/2011
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
Every year on opening day Robert Redford hosts a press kick-off to the Sundance Film Festival in the Egyptian, the old theater in town. They have followed a pretty standard pattern in the past. Redford discusses the difficulties that independent films face, the ones Sundance still tries to remedy, even as they face their own problems.
This year the festival lost one of their more popular screening venues, The Racquet Club, and they continue to deal with the “riff-raff,” as festival director John Cooper calls the ambush marketers that glut the street. But Redford chimed in that the festival had always faced problems. Money, for many years, was a huge concern, he said. There were also misfires in programming. Redford told a funny story about an early effort to present Way Down East, the great D.W. Griffith silent with Lillian Gish, as part of their curation...
This year the festival lost one of their more popular screening venues, The Racquet Club, and they continue to deal with the “riff-raff,” as festival director John Cooper calls the ambush marketers that glut the street. But Redford chimed in that the festival had always faced problems. Money, for many years, was a huge concern, he said. There were also misfires in programming. Redford told a funny story about an early effort to present Way Down East, the great D.W. Griffith silent with Lillian Gish, as part of their curation...
- 1/21/2011
- by keithsim
- IMDb Blog - All the Latest
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.