I never imagined that early silent cinema could be so imaginative and have such astonishing visual effects (maybe they're not quite amazing comparing them to today's cinema, but considering that they are the first movies, they're just great).
Georges Melies's movie enchanted me. 'The Haunted Castle' is impressive and actually really funny and enjoyable to watch -that naughty Devil was delightful-. 'Voyage dans la lune' is for me a masterpiece: it is entertaining, funny, and sometimes ridiculous story that hypnotized me with his beautiful and pretty much unrealistic background sets.
When we saw impressionism in painting and literature I asked my dad if impressionism showed out in cinema too. Now that I saw that compilation of scenes of impressionist silent movies, I must say that I'm delighted by the delicacy of the photography and the creativity that was put into the screen with those movies; it is simply amazing and quite artistic.
Abel Gance's movies seem to be quite interesting for his innovative use of a lot of eye tricks, visual effects, and his genius photographic compositions. I would love to watch 'Napoleon' some of these days.
A lot of people persist in thinking that silent film is somehow "primitive," and it's just not true. Right from the start, with Melies and the Lumieres, it was sophisticated.
ReplyDelete"Napoleon" is mind-blowing, partly because it combines a melodramatic thunder-and-lightning narrative aesthetic with the most advanced aesthetic techniques. The time I saw it in a theater with a live orchestra, the audience frequently went wild.