It's hard to put the Progressive Era more succinctly than the 1912 film The Land Beyond the Sunset, about a boy who has a terrible home life and who gets a ticket to one of those Progressive picnics that took kids out of the city...
silent film
The reason D.W. Griffith was a great filmmaker isn't that he had a great moral message, though he most certainly thought of himself as a liberal. Being a pro-Confederate liberal.
We haven't touched on Georges Méliès for awhile, so let's consider his 1905 film, The Legend of Rip Van Winkle, or sometimes just called Rip's Dream. One of the most.
This remarkable Alice Guy Blaché film from 1912, Making an American Citizen, is a story in four parts. It shows an eastern European peasant and his wife becoming Americans. In each of the four parts, the husband beats his wife. But as an American, that...
An old favorite of mine for tonight, with an emphasis on old. This brilliantly creative 1909 film is a lot of fun. https://www.youtube.com/embed/_UvG5ItVzxc Hard out there for the smoker.
Last night, I got back in touch with an old friend, Tod Browning's 1927 film The Unknown. I love this film so much. Joan Crawford, in one of her first.
Friends, I present you perhaps the creepiest document in the entire history of film, the 1907 film The Dancing Pig. https://www.youtube.com/embed/IcCKPAnArsw I have been known to show this students just to give them a taste of the time period's entertainment choices.
Since we published the westerns podcast earlier today, let's close out the day with one of the films I discussed in it. This is the astounding 1916 western Hell's Hinges.
Long before Laurel & Hardy were a famous comedy duo, Stan Laurel had quite the silent film career. He's not at the Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd level, but his films can be quite.
I may have linked to this before, back in the days before I created Film Club, but since we started the day with Samuel Slater, I figured we'd end it with the wages of textile production. 1912's The Crime of Carelessness is the loathsome, morally...
We started our day with women's suffrage so let's end it there too, with this 1912 anti-suffrage film, A Lively Affair. The messaging on this is horrible, basically saying that.
This 1928 travelogue by Isaac Upham doesn't feel like a journey into 92 years ago. It feels like 200 years ago. Obviously the 20th century has reached China--the European style.