Hardly one of French filmmaker Abel Gance's masterpieces, The Torture of Silence nevertheless has more dramatic and psychological value than your average romantic-triangle tale. Simply put, the film concerns a doctor, his wife, and his brother. The doctor, a specialist in pediatrics, has no time for his wife Marthe. She seeks solace in the arms of his brother. Unable to keep up the charade, Marthe attempts to shoot herself, but it is her lover who is mortally wounded.
A sci-fi/espionage film in which world powers vie for control of a death ray during World War I as an undercover countess infiltrates enemy ranks to prevent them from getting their hands on the weapon.
Italian drama from the Società Anonima Ambrosio company.
Based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas.
A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre. The film had an incredible impact on the development of cinema and is a masterful example of montage editing.
This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.
In a futuristic city sharply divided between the rich and the poor, the son of the city's mastermind meets a prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.
L'étoile du génie
"Damaged Goods" pictures the terrible consequences of vice and the physical ruin that follows the abuse of moral law. It is a stirring plea for a pure life before marriage, in order to make impossible the transmission of hereditary traits to future generations. This film is presumed lost.
A quack doctor 'cures' a victim of venereal disease, whose baby is later born infected.
Audrey Munson (a real-life 'perfect' model for numerous Beaux-Arts sculptors) first appeared artistically nude as a sculptor's model, recreating classic artistic (nude) paintings in George Foster Platt's controversial film from the Mutual Film Corporation. In fact, the film told the story of her own life. This film has generally been regarded as the first non-pornographic American film to feature nudity. This was the first known film in which a leading actress stripped down to be naked, making her the first nude film star. (filmsite.org)
Purity, a simple country girl, comes to the city and is hired as an artist's model. A young poet becomes obsessed with her, and is distraught when he learns she has been posing nude. But his distress is diminished when he finds that she intends to use her income from modelling to publish his poetry. (IMDb)
In this lost film, Theda Bara took the role of spoiled, deceiving nymphomaniac "vixen" Elsie Drummond. She wooed Wall Street businessman Martin Stevens (A. H. Van Buren) away from his interest in her sweet sister Helen (Mary G. Martin). She continued to seek after rich men, eventually marrying young statesman Knowles Murray (Herbert Heyes) (again stolen from Helen) - but still willing to be unfaithful with Stevens who had since regained his fortune. (filmsite.org)
Jimmy and May, young lovers, run away from their dreary farm lives to live in the city, though they don't marry. Soon Jimmy finds things aren't working out and has little ambition to work or affection for May left. In desperation he sells May into the hands of a pimp and a madam in a brothel. They don't meet again until, wounded while running from the police, he runs into a hospital ward where she's being treated for the ravages of social diseases she's accrued in the course of her degradation.
The film was created as a compilation of footage that was, in some cases, nearly fifteen years old, and included stock footage such as medical reels containing footage of venereal diseases and films depicting white slavery. The basic plot was a cautionary tale about a young woman's journey into prostitution and white slavery, but, like the other films of the era, the plot was secondary to the sexual content. Many of the presentations were introduced at the front door, with live nude women in glass booths at the entrances. Inside, the films were usually accompanied by a medical slideshow about venereal disease and a lecture from an alleged sexual education specialist. This was a typical presentation template for the time, and set an example for later exploiters. (Wikipedia)
The life of Moses as told through the Book of Exodus, the imagination of a dying boy, and the ballads of his father.
It is a world without language. A world where one is raised to respect the rules. Only one Boy questions the verity of what he has been taught, and he must decide whether to continue living in a society of fear or choose his own destiny.
Two soldiers lost behind enemy lines reminisce about their lives before war stole their identities.
In 1921, we follow two women - Marie and Grete - from the same poor Viennese neighborhood, as they try to better the lives of themselves and their families during the period of Austrian postwar hyperinflation.