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Lost Classic Reviews

Lost Classic: Lumière and Company (1995)

LU.MIERE. read the emblazoned jackets of two moviemakers, cranking their Cinematograph outside the Giza pyramids, circa 1895. Suddenly a Mummy rushes over the dunes, grabs the tripod-mounted camera and smashes it into the sands. An intertitle reads, “Censorship Already!!” The year is actually 1995, and the Lumières are played by two actors under the direction […]

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Feature Screengem

Screengem: Telephones in Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)

Though not a silent film, Jules Dassin’s Rififi is most famous for the absence of audio, strikingly creating a relationship with sound and then removing it. Following a group of robbers attempting a daring diamond heist in the middle of Paris, this crime film delivers on generic expectation from the outset. After a piece of […]

Categories
Feature Screengem

Screengem: Keaton’s Train in The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926)

One of the most fondly remembered works of silent cinema, Keaton and Bruckman’s The General is a masterpiece in both daring comic performance and narrative simplicity – many of the greatest visual jokes ever filmed all revolve around one man and his train. That man is Johnnie Gray (Keaton), a railroad engineer whose attempt to enlist […]