Tag: film gifs

Cecil Milton Hepworth: Film History Series

Cecil Hepworth and Percy Snow, “Alice in Wonderland”, 1903, Silent Blcak and White Film, Cinematographer Cecil Hepworth, Hepworth Studios, Film Gifs

Born in the London borough of Lambeth in March of 1874, Cecil Milton Hepworth was a British film director and producer, screen writer, and inventor. Among the founders of the British film industry, he continually made films at his Hepworth Studios from 1897 to 1923,

Born to the magic-lantern showman and author Thomas Cradock Hepworth, Cecil Hepworth began working in the early stages of filmmaking under film pioneer Birt Acres, the inventor of the Birtac, Britain’s first 35 mm moving picture camera. He also worked during this time under film producer and distributor Charles Urban, a pioneer of documentary and educational films, many of them produced through the Kinemacolor motion picture color system. With the knowledge he acquired from this experience, Hepworth wrote in 1897 the first British book on filmmaking.

Hepworth and his cousin Monty Wicks founded the Hepworth Film Manufacturing Company, later renamed Hepworth Picture Plays. In 1899, they established Hepworth Studios, a small film studio in Walton-on-Thames in northwest Surrey. In 1901, the British director Percy Stow entered into a partnership with Hepworth until 1904 when Snow founded his Clarendon Film Company, a movie camera equipment company which made short films. Snow specialized in film effects and became co-director on the 1903 “Alice in Wonderland”, his second film with Hepworth Studios.

Cecil Hepworth was the inventor of the Hepworth Vivaphone, a 1910 early sound on disc system developed and marketed by the Hepworth Film Manufacturing Company. It was not a true synchronized sound system for film. The performers appearing in the films would typically synch their singing and speech to prerecorded phonograph records. The device and the short films produced on this system were distributed in Britain and later, beginning in 1913, to Canada and the United States.

Despite Hepworth’s increasingly outdated film style, Hepworth Studio continued making popular films into the 1920s. The studio had several successful films, including the 1905 “Rescue by Rover”, whose collie is considered the first canine film star, and the internationally successful 1919 “Alf’s Button”, the story of a British soldier whose magic button produces a wish-fulfilling genie. Despite these successes, Hepworth failed to raise the necessary capital to fund studio development. After the box office failure of the 1923 “Coming Thro the Rye”, Hepworth declared bankruptcy, which put the studio in receivership and ended his career as a director and producer. All of the original films in Hepworth’s possession were melted down by the receiver to sell the silver. Though some originals and copies have survived, many of the studio’s films are considered lost to history. 

Cecil Hepworth, proud of his place in history, toured in later life with a lecture program on the birth of cinema. Among the films he had produced were several Charles Dickens adaptions, including “Oliver Twist” and “David Copperfield”, and a version of “Hamlet” starring Sir Johnston Forbes-Robinson, an actor considered the finest Hamlet of the Victorian era. So popular were Hepworth’s films that actress Alma Taylor, who starred in fourteen films by his studio, became one of the major British stars of the 1910s and early 1920s. Cecil Hepworth died in February of 1953 in Greenford, Middlesex, England at the age of seventy-eight.

Hepworth Studio’s 1903 British silent fantasy film “Alice in Wonderland” was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Snow. Only one copy of the original twelve-minute film is known to exist. The British Film Institute partially restored the film and its original film tinting and, in 2010, released the restoration with a running time of nine minutes. Filmed mostly in Oxford’s Port Meadow, it is the first movie adaption of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Instead of a flowing narrative found in the book,  the story is seen through several vignettes taken from the novel. 

The 1903 “Alice in Wonderland” starred May Clark, already a Hepworth Studio veteran at age eighteen, as Alice; Cecil Hepworth as The Frog Footman; Cecil’s wife Margaret Hepworth as the White Rabbit and the Red Queen of Hearts; Norman Whitten as the Mad Hatter and The Fish; and the two Faithfull brothers, Geoffrey and Stanley, as Playing Cards. The Hepworth’s family cat made its appearance as the Cheshire Cat. The film is notable for the early special effects work by Percy Snow, among which are Alice’s shrinking in the Hall of Many Doors and the regrown Alice stuck inside the White Rabbit’s tiny home. 

Note: The restored 1903 “Alice in Wonderland” was released as a bonus feature on a 1996 British Broadcasting Company disc. It is now available from several sources including online venues. A full-length restoration with a piano soundtrack, which is available as a download, can be found at the Internet Archive located at:  https://archive.org/details/AliceInWonderland1903

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Cecil Milton Hepworth”, circa 1910-1920

Three Insert Images: Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, 1895, Book Cover with Two Illustrations by John Tenniel, Publisher McMillan & Company, New York

Dziga Vertov: Film History Series

Dziga Vertov, “Man with a Movie Camera”, 1929, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, Silent Film, Running Time 68 Minutes, All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration/Dovzhenko Film Studios

“Man with a Movie Camera” is a 1929 experimental film which was written and directed by the Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director Dziga Vertov. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary film-making which combined improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth or hidden subjects. This style would sometimes involve stylized set-ups and interaction, at times provocative, between the filmmaker and the subject. 

The cinematographer was Mikhail Kaufman, the younger brother of Vertov and the actor who played the man of the film. The film was edited by Vertov’s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, who became known for her documentaries on World War II and for her work as co-director of the 1945 “The Fall of Berlin”, the 1946 Stalin Prize winner. The film is famous for its cinematic techniques which included multiple exposures, fast and slow motion, split screens, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, and jump cuts, in which footage from a scene is removed to render a jump in time.

“Man with a Movie Camera” presents urban life in Moscow, Kyiv, and Odesa during the late 1920s. Ordinary Soviet citizens are shown, from dawn to dusk at work and at play, in scenes where they interact with the structure of everyday life. Divided into six separate parts, one for each film reel printed, the film is done in an avant-garde style with varying subject matter. Mixed in with scenes of laborers at work and sporting scenes are scenes of Mikhail Kaufman traveling to locations and setting up his camera, as well as Svilova cutting and editing strips of film. Several staged situations are also on the film, including a spliced scene of falling chess pieces played backwards.

Dziga Vertov was a member of a movement of filmmakers know as the kinoks whose mission was to abolish all non-documentary styles of film making. Most of his films were controversial and despised by many filmmakers. Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” was a response to critics who rejected his previous film “A Sixth Part of the World”. Produced in 1926, it depicted through a travelogue format the multitude of Soviet people in remote areas and the wealth of the nation. Although well received by Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party, prominent critics gave it bad reviews. 

“Man with a Movie Camera” was not always a highly regarded work; it was criticized for both its stark experimentation and for its staging. Vertov’s Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form rather than content. The pace of the film’s editing, four times faster than a typical film of the era, with about seventeen hundred individual shots, bothered many viewers and critics. Today it is regarded by many as one of the great films ever made; it ranked nine in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the world’s best films. Throughout the years, many notable composers have written soundtracks for the film. 

Note: Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” in its entirety can be seen on YouTube and on the DailyMotion website located at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21992b  

Teinosuke Kinugasa: Film History Series

Teinosuke Kinugasa, “Kurutta Ippeiji (Page of Madness)”, 1926/1975, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematogapher Kōhei Sugiyama, Seventy-one Minutes, Kinugasa Productions/New line Cinema

Born in January of 1896 in Kameyama located in the northern prefecture of Mie, Teinosuke Kinugasa was a Japanese film maker. He began his career as an onnagata, an actor who specialized in female roles, and performed in the silent films of the Nikkatsu Studio, Japan’s oldest major movie studio founded in 1912.

Kinugasa started directing in the early 1920s when Japanese cinema began using actresses in its films. He worked for various producers, including Shozo Makino considered one of the pioneering directors of Japanese film. Kinugasa became an independent director and producer to make what is considered his best known film “A Page of Madness”. Lost for forty five years, the film was discovered by Kinugasa in his storehouse in 1971 and re-released in 1975 with a new print and score.

Released in September of 1926, the silent film “A Page of Madness” is part of the work of the Shinkankakuha, an avant-garde group of Japanese modernist artists  known as the School of New Perceptions which sought to produce direct, intuitive sensations to its subjects through dramatic and theatrical strategies. Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, is credited on the film with the original storyline and also worked on the film’s scenario with Banko Sawada and Minoru Inuzuka, who became well known for his later scripts on the Zatoichi film series. 

The film takes place in a countryside asylum where a janitor interacts with various patients with mental illnesses. His daughter arrives to visit her mother who happens to be a inmate in the asylum, gone insane due to her husband, the janitor. Feeling guilty, her husband had taken a job at the asylum to care for her. After hearing from his daughter the plans of her marriage, the janitor becomes worried due to the belief  that his wife’s mental illness might cause the marriage to be canceled. The stress of his wife’s condition and the impending marriage of his daughter causes the janitor to lose control of the difference between dreams and reality. He experiences fantasies of taking his wife from the asylum and his daughter marrying a bearded inmate. He finally returns to a sense of realtiy after his dreams of providing happy-faced masks to the inmates.

Teinosuk Kinugasa’s “A Page of Madness” and his later 1928 silent film “Jûjiro (Crossroads)”, the first Japanese film to be commercially released in Europe, are both praised for their inventive camera work, which has been compared to Germany’s Expressionist work of the same period. In “Crossroads”, Kinugasa dispensed with chronological construction and instead used flashbacks to stimulate the mind of the main character. He also used a drab gray setting and an experimental camera technique which focused attention on one significant detail at a time, such as a hand. 

Following a period of silent films, Kinugasa directed jidaigeki, period dramas most often set in the Edo period of Japanese history, at the Shochiku Studios where he helped to establish the career of  film and stage actor Chōjirō Hayashi, known by his professional name Kazuo Hasegawa. After the war, Kinugasa produced films for Daiei Studios, including lavish costume dramas and films such as the 1946 “Aru Yo No Tonosama (Lord for a Night)”, which won the first Mainichi Film Award for Best Film, and the 1952 “Daibutsu Kaigen (Dedication of the Great Buddha)” which was entered into the 1953 Cannes Film Festival.

In 1953, Kinugasa wrote and directed the 1953 jidaigeki film “Jigokumon (Gate of Hell)”. This film, one of the most internationally famous of all Japanese films, exemplified Kinugasa’s mastery of period film in its meticulous reproduction of a historical period. Produced during the golden age of Japanese cinema, the film was the first color work released by Daiei Film and also the first Japanese color film to be released outside of Japan. The film won the grand prize award at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, a 1055 Academy Honorary Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1954, and the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Color. Kinugasa’s film also won the Golden Leipard at the Locarno International Film Festival and the 1954 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film. 

The director of fifteen films, many of them award winners, Teinosuk Kinugasa died at the age of eighty-six from cerebral thrombosis on February 26th of 1982 in Kyoto, Japan. He was the first Japanese motion-picture director to present his story from the point of view of one of the characters and thus create a subjective world in a film.  He also pioneered in the use of flashbacks and in the creation of a visual atmospheric effect. 

Note: Teinosuk Kinugasa’s “Page of Madness” is available in its entirety on YouTube located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb6JEY3M_Ag

Second Insert Image: Film Scene, Teinosuke Kinugasa, “Dai Chushingura”, 1932, Starring Jusaburo Bando and Chojiro Hayashi, First Sound Version of the Classic Story, 139 Minutes

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Teinosuke Kinugasa”, circa 1912-1920, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Film Scene, Teinosuka Kinugasa, “Jujiro (Crossroads)”, 1928, Starring Akiko Chihaya, Toshinosuke Bando and Yukiko Ogawa, 88 Minutes

Deux Couples au Déjeuner

Artist Unknown, Deux Couples au Déjeuner (Two Couples at Lunch), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs, “El Juego de las Ilaves”, 2019

“The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out of my own head, and so was I, of course, it being as much a surprise to me as it could be to anybody, for I did not know that it was in me. If any had asked me a single day before if it was in me, I should have told them frankly no, it was not.

That is the way with us; we may go on half of our life not knowing such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it.” 

—Mark Twain, Joan of Arc

Note: The film gifs are from the Mexican comedic television series “El Juego de las Ilaves ( The Game of Keys)”. The series revolves around the lives of four couples who decide to be swingers among themselves, and addresses the issues of monogamy in long relationships, self-realization and desire. Sebastián Zurita, in the role of Seergio Morales, and Horacio Pancheri, as Valentin Lombardo, are the male actors in the gifs.

Riz Ahmed, “Encounter”: Film History Series

Riz Ahmed as Malik Khan in “Encounter”, Directed by Michael Pearce, 2021

“Encounter” is a 2021 drama-thriller film directed by Michael Pearce from a screenplay written by Pearce and British screenwriter Joe Barton. It is a story of a recently paroled man, suffering from a mental disturbance, who abducts his two sons and flees on a road trip. The film stars Riz Ahmed as Malik Khan as the parolee, Janina Gavankar as  his wife Piya, and Lucian-River Chauhan and Aditya Geddada as the two sons, Jay and Bobby Khan. Misha Collins plays Dylan, the mother’s new partner, and Octavia Spencer plays Hattie Hayes, the federal law enforcer attempting to retrieve the children.

In October of 2018, Film4 Productions and Raw, both British film production companies, agreed to produce the film. The principal photography began in October of 2020; by November of that year, all the cast members had joined the production. Amazon Studios became the distributor. “Encounter had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and an international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. It was later screened at film festivals in London, Chicago, and Philadelphia. “Encounter” appeared on Amazon Prime Video on the 10th of December in 2021.

Born in December of 1982, Riz Ahmed is a British actor and rapper. He has won multiple awards for his acting, including a London Film Critics’ Circle Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two British Independent Film Awards. He was also nominated for two Golden Globes, an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Ahmed appeared in the 2016 action film “Jason Bourne”, the Star Wars anthology film “Rogue One” as the character Bodhi Rock, the 2018 film “Venom” as Carlton Drake, and Ruben Stone in the 2020 “Sound of Metal”, which earned him his second Golden Globe nomination and his first Academy Award nomination.

Akira Kurosawa, “The Hidden Fortress”: Film History Series

Akira Kurosawa, “”Kakushi Toride sn san Akunin (The Three Villians of the Hidden Fortress)”, 1968, Starrring Toshiro Mifune, Cinematographer Kazuo Yamasaki

A grand-scale adventure as only Akira Kurosawa could make one, The Hidden Fortress stars the inimitable Toshiro Mifune as a general charged with guarding his defeated clan’s princess (a fierce Misa Uehara) as the two smuggle royal treasure across hostile territory. Accompanying them are a pair of bumbling, conniving peasants who may or may not be their friends. This rip-roaring ride is among the director’s most beloved films and was a primary influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars. The Hidden Fortress delivers Kurosawa’s trademark deft blend of wry humor, breathtaking action, and compassionate humanity.

Buster Keaton, “Neighbors”: Film History Series

Buster Keaton Remix from “Neighbors”, December 22, 1920 Release Date, Length: 17 minutes

“Neighbors” was a two reel silent film produced by Joseph M. Schenk for Comique Film Corporation. Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline wrote and directed. The film was photographed by Elgin Lesley and Metro Pictures was the distributer. The story followed the romance between the boy, Buster Keaton, and the girl, Virginia Fox, who lived in neighboring tenant buildings. Keaton’s actual father played the role of the boy’s father in this film.

The silent film, without any added soundtrack, is in the public domain and can be viewed here: https://publicdomainmovie.net/movie/buster-keatons-neighbors-1920

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