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The Man with a Movie Camera

Year: 1929
Director: Dziga Vertov
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Technically speaking, The Man with a Movie Camera, which chronicles a dawn to dusk day-in-the-life of Moscow circa 1929, is a documentary. But Vertov takes the basic raw material of a straightforward “city symphonies” travelogue documentary and through a variety of cinematographic techniques/effects transforms it into something […]

Posted on July 22nd, 2009 by Mat Viola
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-47-
His Girl Friday

Year: 1940
Director: Howard Hawks
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His Girl Friday makes one major change to the play (The Front Page) on which it’s based: Hildy Johnson, the ace reporter who quits the newspaper business to the chagrin of Morning Post managing editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant), is turned into a woman (Rosalind Russell). Not surprisingly, this gender […]

Posted on July 17th, 2009 by Mat Viola
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-48-
Smiles of a Summer Night

Year: 1955
Director: Ingmar Bergman
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Man to his wife: “I can tolerate my wife’s infidelity, but if anyone touches my mistress, I become a tiger.”
Same man to his mistress: “I can tolerate someone dallying with my mistress, but if anyone touches my wife, I become a tiger.”
 
Before acquiring his reputation as a director […]

Posted on July 11th, 2009 by Mat Viola
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-49-
The Skeleton Dance

Year: 1929
Director: Walt Disney
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Featuring a quartet of bony hoofers showing off their terpsichorean talents during a midnight graveyard soiree, The Skeleton Dance is five minutes of lively animated hilarity which holds up beautifully after 80 years thanks to Ub Iwerks’s imaginative animation and Carl W. Stalling’s playful music and […]

Posted on July 9th, 2009 by Mat Viola
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