Shared posts

07 Sep 05:48

Sherlock Holmes Fatal Hour

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film


class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">










Mystery

Silent Film


07 Sep 05:48

Mr Wong in Chinatown

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film
07 Sep 05:48

The Moonstone

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film
03 Aug 04:23

Scott Lord Silent Film: Yesterday and Today Newsreel (1929)

03 Aug 04:23

Scott Lord Mystery: Mercury Theater: Orson Welles as The Immortal Sherlo...

03 Aug 04:23

Sherlock Holmes: Silent Film

03 Aug 04:22

The Phantom of the Opera (Jullian, 1925)

03 Aug 04:22

Scott Lord Silent Film: Yesterday and Today Newsreel (1929)

03 Aug 04:22

With Donna on my Sixty Second Birthday, Downtown Boston

Donna and I walked down Tremont Street, Boston, passed the church where she is a librarian, it bells ringing, and went to lunch at one of our usual places for my Sixty Second brithday.(She bought me a pocket hair comb for a dollar and said it was for my birthday, I took her to lunch this time, ps. I had a Western Omlette.) scott lord
03 Aug 04:18

Scott Lord Silent Film: Yesterday and Today Newsreel (1929)

03 Aug 04:18

Scott Lord Silent Film: Castle Films Yesteryear Lives Again

03 Aug 04:18

The Moonstone

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film
03 Aug 04:17

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film
03 Aug 04:17

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film
03 Aug 04:17

Universal Sherlock Holmes Trailers

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film
30 Jul 05:04

Frame By Frame: John Ford

by Scott Lord Silent Film
30 Jul 05:04

Scott Lord Swedish Silent Film: The Monastery of Sendomir (Victor Sjostr...

by Scott Lord Silent Film
30 Jul 05:03

Silent Film: Harold Lloyd in Haunted Spooks (Hal Roach, 1920)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Scott Lord on Mystery Film
30 Jul 05:03

The beautiful Marion Marsh in Svengali (Mayo)

30 Jul 05:02

From Donna's Library, The Articles of Faith from the founding of the Church

I took the time in the church library while Donna was reshelving books to look for the Articles of Faith from when the church was established. Between services, I said "hello" to Mark,the present minister, who was busy and remarked that we still use the Articles of Faith today, "I know that well." The first minister of the Park Street Church,Boston was Edward Griffin, also the first Phi Beta Kappa student at Yale, and apparently Donna was Phi Beta before I met her. His particular theme was preaching against something referred to as the New Divinity. I was surfing today and found that we are listed by the National Historical Park Service along with our adjacent Granary Burial Ground. The president at the time was James Madison. Below is a historical perspective.
30 Jul 04:58

Postscript: Embrace: Dr. Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King Statue added to Boston Freedom Trail

I usually don't update this blog and usually do update my other blog on film, but this morning the guide that welcomes people to either the Freedom Trail or to the Park Street Church began a conversation about our lack of books on William Lloyd Garrison. There was one that we had. The photo above is our library card catalog that has internet- as an assistant church librarian I could pull up the sermons that William Lloyd Garrison delivered in this room twenty years after the church was erected (in the same way that if you were at Harvard College you would have poems that Oliver Wendall Holmes had delivered there.) Our welcomer referred to the stautue from the previous entry, and you can notice that there was not yet any snow, as "The Image" and judging from her age I really think she meant "the blessed image of the late Dr. and Mrs King". She couldn't just say statue even though there is a statue of J.F.K (the blessed, but more than that the still legally elected) at the Boston State House, but that is something polite, and nice. There was a class today- Tammy (Harvard Divinity) gave me permission to "jump in" in the middle of it or be added to it next week. It is titled Lenten Discipleship Initiative. -----:-----::-----:::-----::-----:
Below is my original blog entry on "The Image" and I myself quake in many ways:
Although the Boston Freedom Trail is meant to be a tour of the Revolutionary War and the grave of Crispus Attucks, a stevadore killed in the Boston Massacre, is directly outside the Church window where I am right now, the new statue of Martin Luther King holding his wife, Coretta Scott King has been unveiled on Boston Common. Another piece of history, ourchurch ran a film on this week marking the one hundreath year of radio broadcasting of the church service, there having been a shop that sold radios across the street on Tremont Street. The service is in progreess upstairs and on WEZE while I am in my wife's library. Donna, please accept these photos as symbolic of our spending our Sundays together.
photos: Scott Lord
photo: Scott Lord Postscript:The Girl on the Flying Trapeze I spend every Sunday on the Freedom Trail, which our church is on, and I listen to the ministers conduct tours in case I'm needed when in the library or if I think I should point out the Granary Burial Ground. This morning we had a new addition, a sculpture where the usually have a Christmas Star. The other Christmas lights are still in Boston Common. As it is Freedom Trail art, I thought I would add it here, but it takes a couple of photos to conquer the height distance and perspective. It is an installation- a sculture of a girl on a swing put into an envirornment where art meets reality.
Girl on a Swing photos: Scott Lord
29 Jul 23:53

Filmnyheter 1923 (free online magazine on Swedish Silent Film)

Virtual History Film: 'via Blog this' Please allow the use of the magazine cover fairly as the is a link provided above it and enjoy the copies of Filmnyheter that have been made available online to read in both Scandinavian and the United States. silent film scott lord
29 Jul 23:53

Scott Lord Silent Film: Linda Arvidson in The Adventures of Dollie (D.W....

scottlordpoet shared this story from Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film.

Actress Linda Ardvison, writing in the periodcial Film Fun during 1916, includes the "now historic" film "The Advntures of Dollie" (one reel) directed by D.W Griffith for the Biograph Film Company in 1908. Arvidson wrote under the name Mrs. D.W. Griffith. In one installment she reminisces about travelling to film exterior scenes, claiming they hadn't automobiles yet and visited locations by train or by boat. In a later installment she dicusses her salary for the film, "How much money I made! Twenty eight dollars in two weeks, enough for a whole spring outfit." What is more enjoyable is the autobiography of Mrs. D.W. Griffith, When Movies Were Young, published in 1925. Much of the material from the Film Fun periodical is repeated, worded similarly, as she gives an account of D.W. Griffith the actor being offered a provisional chance to direct his first film, "The Adventures of Dollie", given that he could return to acting if necessary. Mrs. D.W. Griffith exlains Griffith having been accepted as a director for Biograph, "For one year now, those movies so covered with slime and so degraded would have to come first to come first in his thoughts and affections....agonizing days when he would have given his life to be able to chuck the job." She includes not only the studio on East Fourteenth Street but the theaters on Third and Ninth Avenues as places into which one would not be seen going.
Author Roger Manvell, in his sixty page introduction to the anthology "Experiment in the Film" credits "The Adventures of Dollie" as the first film in which D.W. Griffith had used the flashback.
Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, notes that it was in 1908, in the film "For Love of Gold", that D.W. Griffith had first used the close up shot in film.
Silent Film D.W. Griffith D. W. Griffith
29 Jul 23:52

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (Alice Guy, 1906) - YouTube

Silent Film

Tags: Silent silent film

29 Jul 23:52

Scott Lord Silent Film: La Vie et la passion de JeĢsus Christ (1903) - YouTube

Silent Film

Tags: Silent silent film

29 Jul 23:51

Sherlock Holmes- Sign of the Four

29 Jul 23:51

Scott Lord Silent Film: Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)


The film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's account of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde directed by F.W. Murnau during 1920 is presumed lost, with no known existing copies of the film. "The Head of Janus" (Der Janus Kopf, Love's Mockery) had starred Conrad Veidt amd Bela Lugosi and is credited with having been one of the first films to include the use of the moving-camera shot. F.W. Murnau made 21 feature films, 8 of which are presumed lost, with no surviving copies. Included among them is the 1920 horror film "The Hunchback and the Dancer" (Der Bucklige und die Tanzerin) photographed by Karl Freund.
Lotte H. Eisner, in his biography titled Murnau, looks at a scene change to the shooting script of "Nosferatu" written by Henrik Galeen made by the director, F.W. Murnau, but adds that few additons and revisions to the original script were made by Murnau. "Sometimes the film is different than the scenario though Murnau had not indicated any change in the script...But there is a suprising sequence in which nearly twelve pages (thirteen sequences) have been rewritten by Murnau."
Lotte H. Eisner analyzes the film "Nosferatu" in his companion volume to his biography of Murnau, The Haunted Screen. "Nature participates in the action. Sensitive editing makes the bounding waves foretell the approach of the vampire." Eisner later adds, "Murnau was one of the few German film-directors to have the innate love of the landscape more typical of the Swedes (Arthur von Gerlach, creator of Die Chronik von Grieshums, was another) and hes was always reluctant to resort to artifice." Murnau had visited Sweden where the cameras being used were made of metal rather than wood, which aquainted him with techniques that were in fact more modern. Author Lotte H Eisner, in his volume Murnau writes of F.W. Murnau viewing the films of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller "when he made 'Nosferatu', the idea of using negative for the phantom forest came from Sjostrom's 'Phantom Carriage', which had been made in 1920. Above all, he had a love-hatred for Mauritz Stiller, whose 'Herre Arne's Treasure' he couldn't stop admiring."
Not only can we look at Murnau's film to compare and contrast its use of landscape and location to that of Swedish Silent Films, but the Wisconsin Film Society during 1960 pointed out that its narrative was situated in a different century. "Murnau probably felt that by transferring the action to the year 1838 he would have an atmosphere more condusive to the supernatural. Because of the distance in time, an audience is perhaps more willing to employ its 'suspension of disbelief'." The Film Society mentions F.W. Murnau having filmed the Vampire's carriage in fast-motion for effect, an effect which it felt had been lost on the audiences of 1960. It conceded that shooting on location brought the film "far from the studio atmosphere", but hesitated, "Although frequently careless in technical details (camerwork, exposure, lighting, composition, and actor direction) it had variety and pace."
Lotte H. Eisner, in her volume Murnau, writes, "As always, Murnau found visual means of suggesting unreality". Professor David Thorburn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expresses aprreciation and gratitude for the author's writings pointing out that "her arguments in The Haunted Screen are still widely accepted." In regard to the expression of unreality, David Thorburn sees Expressionism as having been typified by "distortion and surreal exaggation" as well as having been "interested in finding equivalents for he inner life, dramatizing not the external world, but the world within us." If not the first horror film, Thorburn delegates "Nosferatu" to being an "origin film" and as "the film in which we can see Murnau freeing the camera.....no one had ever used the camera outdoors more effectively up to this time than Murnau". Lotte H Eisner, in The Haunted Screen writes, "The landscape and views of the little town and the castle in Nosferatu were filmed on location...Murnau, however, making Nosferatu with a minimum of resourses saw all that nature had to offer in the way of fine images...Nature participates in the action."
Close-up magazine during 1929 reviewed the film, unaware that the Wisconsin Film Society would later favor the 1931 Tod Browning version, "The film opens with beautifully composed shots typical of Murnau (one spotlight on the hair, now turn the face slightly, and another spotlight)....It is unquestionably a faithful transcription of the book.
During 1926, when Murnau was readying to come to American, the periodical Moving Picture World interviewed his assistant, Hermann Bing, "Murnau's intention is to try to make pictures which will please the American theatre patrons- commercial successes because of their artistry....Murnau's object will be not to describe but to depict the relentless march of realities not for the objective, but from a subjective viewpoint." This almost seems like a nod to Carl Th. Dreyer's later film "Vampyr", other than that Dreyer's film had been made during the advent of sound film while Murnau was in America, shortly before Murnau's death. Fox Film publicity happenned to announce F.W. Murnau's coming to America by withholding the title of his debut American fim, giving the name of the dramatist that wrote its photoplay as Dr. Karl Mayer. "Theater Audiences Everywhere Are Waiting For This Creation".
Silent Film
In regard to the extratextual discourse of movie magazines of the time period, during 1929 the periodical Motion Picture News subtitled their review of "Nosferatu" with "Morbid and Depressing". It deemed Murnau's adaptation of the novel by Bram Stoker to be "a vague yarn hard to follow with several sequences that have a tremendous part to do with the plot introduced most haphazardly."
Silent Horror Film

Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

Silent Film

Silent Film
29 Jul 23:51

Scott Lord Silent Film: Brass (Sidney Franklin, 1922)

"Brass" (nine reels), directed in 1922 by Sidney Franklin and starring actresses Marie Prevost, Rosmary Church and Lucy Baldwin was one of the several films that year photographed by cinematographer Norbert Brodine. Sidney A. Fraklin that year directed the films "East is West", "Primitive Lover" and Smilin' Through". Silent Film Silent Film Silent Film
29 Jul 23:46

Scott Lord Silent Film: Old Time Movies Castle Films 8mm

29 Jul 23:46

point of view shots of Donna's desk at Church Library

The library, built in 1809, is beautiful.
These two botttom photographs in particular were taken from behnd Donna's desk from where she checks in books with a scanner and removes the checkout cards. I discussed theology with a new minister today explaining to him that he was the eighth minster I have had a rapport with and that my questions are more precise after a decade. There have been ten or eleven I have known since attending. Scott Lord