New features on Criteria, the Criterion Channel companion site #filmsky

New on KINOPOLIS: 🐴 The Silent West 🌵 Before John Wayne ever rode into Monument Valley, the Western had already spent thirty years inventing its own visual grammar. 17 films by Hart, Ford, Keaton, Sjöström, even Kuleshov, tracing how cinema first saw the frontier www.kino-polis.com/collections/...

Today o KINOPOLIS - Abel Gance’s J’ACCUSE (1919) ends with the dead rising from the battlefield to ask the living whether their sacrifice was worth it. The 2,000 soldiers Gance cast in the sequence were on leave from Verdun. Most were killed within weeks of filming. #filmsky

Today on KINOPOLIS: Souls for Sale (1923). A preacher’s daughter accidentally wanders onto a movie set and becomes a star. Von Stroheim and Chaplin have cameos. A circus tent catches fire and the director yells keep shooting. Hollywood starting to write its own myth. #filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Always more films to add to the collection . . .

Links to over 900 essays, reviews, and articles have been added to the KINOPOLIS Reading Room from sources like the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the BFI, Movies Silently, and MoMA I'm still indexing them, and will be adding video essays soon! www.kino-polis.com/reading-room

New on KINOPOLIS - 📚 The Reading Room 🎬 Now all of our linked articles are searchable by Title, Author, Film, and Topic! The best writing on early cinema from around the web, more added daily. Happy watching and reading! www.kino-polis.com/reading-room

A quick plug for another film site I maintain. I love The Criterion Channel, but have been frustrated by its search feature, so I built my own. Search by composer? Gotcha. Like Czech films of the 1960s? No problem. Custom lists, star ratings, favorites, and box sets! www.search-criteria.com

Today on KINOPOLIS: La Vie du Christ (1906) by Alice Guy-Blaché. 25 tableaux, 300 extras, sets modeled on Tissot’s illustrated Bible. Released 120 years ago, It was the biggest Gaumont production of its era, directed two years before Griffith ever stepped behind a camera. #filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Now on KINOPOLIS: the Fleischer brothers' Out of the Inkwell (1918-1929). Max draws a clown, who promptly escapes the page, and this a decade-long series begins, built on the rotoscope, slapstick metaphysics, and the war between creator and creation. #filmsky

Now on KINOPOLIS: Mabel at the Wheel (1914). Mabel Normand directs, drives a Stutz Bearcat, and bites Charlie Chaplin’s hand. Their on-set clashes led Sennett to let Chaplin direct his own films. A turning point disguised as a two-reel farce. #filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

🎬 Film of the Day: SECRETS OF A SOUL (Pabst, 1926) An experiment in making a Freudian film, to the point that the producers invited the man himself to participate - he declined, but two of his associates served as advisors. Check out the dream sequence at minute 15. #Filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Tod Browning was the Yorgos of the 1920s

🎬 Film of the Day: REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM (1917) Happy birthday Marshall Neilan, born this day 1891. Pickford’s favorite director. He was 26, she was 25 playing a child, and Frances Marion wrote the script. The formula shouldn’t work. It absolutely does. #Filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

🎬 Film of the Day: PAVEMENT BUTTERFLY (1929) Anna May Wong had to leave Hollywood for Europe to get roles worthy of her talent. Here she plays a Parisian fan dancer framed for murder. Alexander Granach (Knock from Nosferatu!) plays the spurned clown who set her up #Filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

🎬 Film of the Day: TERROR ISLAND (1920) Harry Houdini made two films for Paramount and this is the better one. Pure pulp: submarines, sacred pearls, an iron safe tossed into the sea. He couldn’t act (but did it matter?). www.kino-polis.com/films/5c568d... #Filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

For those who love early cinema, Danish Silent Film is an incredible treasure trove. Much of their catalog of over 200 films can't be found elsewhere (including KINOPOLIS) and are remarkably high quality. Definitely worth a bookmark. #filmsky www.kino-polis.com www.stumfilm.dk/en/stumfilm

🎬 Film of the Day: Murnau’s THE HAUNTED CASTLE, released April 7, 1922 This murder mystery is early, minor Murnau, but has its moments, like a nightmare scene at 47:00 that reads as a warm up to Nosferatu, released a year later www.kino-polis.com #Filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

🎬 Film of the Day: HALF SHOT AT SUNRISE (1930) Happy birthday Bert Wheeler, born today 1895. With Robert Woolsey, the first comedy team to become stars of the talkies, now almost forgotten. Two AWOL doughboys loose in WWI Paris. Pre-Code, free to watch. www.kino-polis.com/films/bbeb2f... #Filmsky

Born on this day in 1900: Spencer Tracy. Today’s film of the day on KINOPOLIS is Up the River (1930), his feature debut, directed by John Ford. Tracy is already completely himself here. Bogart co-stars in their only film together. #filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.kino-polis.com/films/45967e...

Just added three essential early sound-era films to KINOPOLIS: King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929), Kenneth Macpherson’s Borderline (1930), and Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926). Race, religion, avant-garde experiment, and the invention of documentary itself. Links in the replies. #filmsky​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Film of the day on KINOPOLIS: The Stolen Jools, a ridiculously celebrity-packed caper to raise money for the National Variety Artists Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Released April 4, 1931 (19 min.) Is it good? Pfft, no of course not. Is it fun? Yep, sure is! www.kino-polis.com/films/85d9f7... #filmsky

New collection: - The Arrival of Sound! Featuring films by Hitchcock, Chaplin, Vertov, Lang, and others It's one of the key pivot points in the development of cinema, and resulted in some of the greatest films of all time. Watch them on KINO-POLIS www.kino-polis.com/collections/... #filmsky

If you only know Pola Negri from silent-era gossip columns, you’re missing one of the great screen performers. We just added Carmen (1918) and Forbidden Paradise (1924) to Kinopolis — eight of her films now, the full arc from Berlin to Hollywood. #filmsky www.kino-polis.com/people/6428a...

Just added on Kinopolis: three surviving films from Theda Bara, cinema’s original Vamp. Of the 40+ films she made, most were destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault fire. 🎬 A Fool There Was (1915) 🎬 East Lynne (1916) 🎬 The Unchastened Woman (1925) www.kino-polis.com/people/16e4e... #filmsky #silentfilm

Just added to KINOPOLIS, three films by Franz Osten starring Seeta Devi, one of the first stars of Indian cinema The Light of Asia (Prem Sanyas, 1925), produced by Himanshu Rai, is a retelling of Siddhartha Gautama’s journey to becoming the Buddha #filmsky www.kino-polis.com/films/ede1d9...

“Human experience conveyed purely from the visualisation of the human face: no one else has composed and realised human beings quite like Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc.” — Michael Mann, the BFI/Sight & Sound directors poll www.kino-polis.com/films/9b22c0...

New feature alert! Now on KINOPOLIS, films that are available on The Criterion Channel are linked directly, with other available streaming services listed too. Our goal is to help you discover great films AND give you as many options on how to watch them as possible. Enjoy! #filmsky #criterion

Just added to KINOPOLIS, a collection of work from director Oscar Micheaux, one of the most remarkable self-inventors in film history, showing the full complexity of Black American life at a time when movies offered only caricature and contempt #filmsky www.kino-polis.com/collections/...

Born on this day in 1911: Jean Harlow. She started with uncredited bit parts, got cast in Hell’s Angels at 19 (directed by Howard Hughes), and within a few years was outselling Garbo and Crawford at the box office. #filmsky www.kino-polis.com/films/feaab8...

Today is the birthday of George Terwilliger (1882-1970) 🎂 director of at least 76 productions between 1912 and 1936, including the 1926 film The Big Show starring John Lowell and Evangeline Russell about a traveling circus show It's available now on KINO-POLIS www.kino-polis.com/films/707a9c...

Just added! Abel Gance's 7-hour masterpiece La Roue (1923). Three years in the making, it tells the story of railwayman who saves a young girl orphaned by a train crash In case you're planning on staying in this weekend . . . (source: Wikimedia) www.kino-polis.com/films/4910fe...

New to silent films? Check out our Silent 101 collection - 20 essential films that are the foundations of early cinema. From American comedy and adventure to the European avant-garde, this is your starter pack www.kino-polis.com/collections/...

Introducing KINO-POLIS 🎞️ — a personal screening room for early cinema. Films from 1896 to the 1930s, free to watch, organized into collections like German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, and Early Hitchcock Come get lost in the movies that invented movies. www.kino-polis.com #filmsky