Thursday, February 10, 2011

One click leads to another . . .

I said I wasn't going to do this anymore, but I must recommend two remarkable pieces of film editing, based on some outstanding movies, which I found on YouTube.

These sequences come from a documentary celebrating German film-making -- you know, the stuff that rarely gets seen in English-speaking countries because most of us can't be bothered to deal with subtitles. The film show us what we've missed over the years, if you ignore tame American remakes, such as City of Angels, which of course began life as the magisterial (and black-and-white) Wings of Desire

The documentary is called Auge in Auge - Eine deutsche Filmgeschichte. The first part of the title translates as "Eye to Eye" (and not, as one YouTube note has it, "Eve to Eve"; I think that would be a different type of movie). Fittingly, these two (brief) montages show what actors and directors can do with eyes on the screen:

Die Blicke der Frauen (Gazes of women*)



And Die Auge der Manner (Eyes of men)



Beautiful music, too. Here's a link to the official website.

*Look for the sixth clip, the woman who glances out very briefly from under a cloche hat. (She's technically the fifth actress to be shown, because Brigitte Helm appears twice.) This is Asta Nielsen, a Danish actress who made most of her films in Germany, and is regarded as the first great international movie star. Even though her films were silent, so the language barrier didn't exist, some of her performances were regarded by US importers as too erotically charged -- nor was she particularly pretty -- and she was never well known on this side of the Atlantic. An outstanding talent.

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