1920

German expressionist silent film by the director of Nosferatu.

At the Opera of Paris, a mysterious phantom threatens a famous lyric singer, Carlotta and thus forces her to give up her role (Marguerite in Faust) for unknown Christine Daae. Christine meets this phantom (a masked man) in the catacombs, where he lives. Most prints of this movie are from the 1929 reissue version. This version is from 1925.

The End of St Petersburg was to be Pudovkin’s most famous film and secured his place as one of the foremost Soviet montage film directors.
The film forms part of Pudovkin’s ‘revolutionary trilogy’, alongside Mother (1926) and Storm Over Asia (1928).

Features a jazz music score compiled by Euterpe Jones.

The film depicts a strike in 1903 by the workers of a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia, and their subsequent suppression. The film is most famous for a sequence near the end in which the violent putting down of the strike is cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered, although there are several other points in the movie where animals are used as metaphors for the conditions of various individuals. Another theme in the film is collectivism in opposition to individualism which was viewed as a convention of western film. Collective efforts and collectivization of characters were central to both Strike and Battleship Potemkin.

Mother is a 1926 Soviet film directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin depicting one woman’s struggle against Tsarist rule during the Russian Revolution of 1905. The film is based on a novel of the same title by Maxim Gorky.

Arsenal is a 1928 Soviet film by Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko. It is the second film in his “Ukraine Trilogy”, the first being Zvenigora (1928) and the third being Earth (1930).

The film concerns an episode in the Russian Civil War in 1918 in which the Kiev Arsenal January Uprising of workers aided the besieging Bolshevik army against the Ukrainian nationalist Central Rada who held power within Kiev at the time

The Circus is a 1928 silent film which finds Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character being chased by a police officer, having been mistaken for a pickpocket. Running into the circus main tent in an attempt to escape the law, the patrons there mistake his fleeing for part of the act – and the best part! Recognising potential profit, the ringmaster hires him, but discovers that The Tramp can only be funny unintentionally, not on purpose.

Buster builds a boat, The Damfino, in the basement of his house. The boat is too big to fit through the door, resulting in the collapse of the house when he drives off. Will the boat float or sink on its maiden voyage…

Convict – Buster Keaton

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Convict 13 is a 1920 short comedy film starring comedian Buster Keaton. It was written and directed by Keaton and Edward F. Cline.