Some comments about the past year’s DVD and Blu-ray releases.
Year End 2017
Tag: Silent Film
The transition to sound: Arthur Robison’s The Informer (1929)
The BFI Blu-ray release of Arthur Robison’s The Informer (1929) offers a fascinating glimpse of the sometimes rocky transition from silent cinema to sound, with restorations of the original silent version and the partial Talkie made simultaneously.
Year-end ruminations: 2016
2016 was an impressive year for movies on disk, with a wide variety of new and classic releases, prestige productions and exploitation, and some interesting rediscoveries … too many to pick just a handful of “bests”.
The art of silent film: Anthony Asquith’s Shooting Stars (1928)
It’s remarkable that it’s still possible to discover a previously unknown yet major film from the silent era, but the BFI’s new release of Anthony Asquith’s first feature, Shooting Stars (1928) is a revelation; a fresh, self-aware film about filmmaking and the intersection of real and imaginary lives.
Viewing notes July-August 2015
A round-up of recent disk-watching ranges from comedy to horror, mock-umentary to documentary, a poverty row classic and major discovery from the late silent period.
Year End 2014
Despite perennial predictions of the demise of movies-on-disk, 2014 offered a rich and varied selection of new and old titles in often impressive editions from many different companies, though not necessarily from major distributors. The cream came from specialty labels like Criterion, the BFI, Arrow, Eureka/Masters of Cinema, Shout! Factory, Olive Films, Kino Lorber, Flicker Alley and Twilight Time.
Guest post:
A Weimar Cinema Revelation: Harbour Drift (1929), part two
Guest blogger Howard Curle continues his investigation of the silent Weimar feature Harbour Drift (1929) through a look at the film’s producer Willi Munzenberg and the film’s critical reception.
Guest post:
A Weimar Cinema Revelation: Harbour Drift (1929), part one
Guest blogger Howard Curle discovered a fascinating, previously unknown film and filmmaker at the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival: Harbour Drift by Leo Mittler.
Criterion Blu-ray Review: Master of the House (1925)
Criterion introduces the great Carl Theodor Dreyer to Blue-ray with their release of his remarkable chamber drama Master of the House (1925).
Notes on Recent Viewing, part one
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
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