a silent movie by Robert Wiene
An early version of the classic, based more on the 1902 stage musical than on the original novel.
L. Frank Baum would appear in a white suit and present his live actors, slide shows and films as a live travelogue presentation of his popular fantasies. Highlights include Dorothy being swept to Oz in various ways, such as with back-projection tornadoes and storms in a chicken coop. Lack of financial backing forced the show to fold after appearing in only two cities, despite being a critical and commercial success. This film is lost.
Jiraiya is some sort of super-ninja with superpowers. He can fly, he can avoid detection by turning himself into a toad, and he has some sort of ability to vanish.
Abraham Cadabra, an unconfident young man buys a magic book and top hat in the hope of using magic to impress the girl of his dreams, Penelope Predicament. However, when he meets her for a date, he discovers that his rival, Jock Strong has beaten him to it. Abraham tries to use magic to win Penelope over, but magic may not be the solution.
A farm girl learns she is a princess and is swept away by a tornado to the land of Oz.
The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman and an elderly gentleman. The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura. Considered an unfinished film.
The background of this picture represents a scene along the beautiful river Seine in Paris. A gentleman enters, and taking a blackboard from the side of the picture, he draws on it a sketch of a novelist. Then, standing in the centre, he causes the living features of his sketch to appear in the place of his own, which is utterly devoid of whiskers. The change is made so mysteriously that the eye cannot notice it until one sees quite another person in the place of the first. Again another sketch is shown on the board, this one being that of a miser; then an English cockney; a comic character; a French policeman, and last of all, the grinning visage of Mephistopheles. It is almost impossible to give this film a more definite description; suffice it to say that it is something entirely new in motion pictures and is sure to please. (Méliès Catalog)
No overview available.
A two-reel adaptation of Dante Alighieri's Inferno from the Divine Comedy by Helios Film. It is less well-known than the five-reel feature produced the same year by Milano Films, but it was released earlier in 1911.
A reel of the Noh drama Momiji-gari, in which Danjuro Ichikawa played opposite Onoe Kikugoro V as an ogress who has disguised herself as the Princess Sarashina. Filmed by Shibata Tsunekichi in the open air on a windy day in November 1899, Danjuro would allow only the one take, so that when his fan blew away in mid-performance the scene had to stay. The film re-emerged at the Kikikan theatre in 1907 where it was a great success and inspired a wave of fiction filmmaking based on traditional Japanese narratives.
A struggling drug addict is plunged into a tortured netherworld, where he must defend his spirit from a ravenous horde of soul-addicted junkies.
A young woman, Margaret Dauncey, is caught between the forces of a charlatan magician, Oliver Haddo, whom she is unable to resist, and the love of a handsome surgeon, Arthur Burdon, who has saved her from being a helpless cripple by performing a delicate operation on her spine.
One of the earliest cinematic adaptation of Chinese classic novel Journey to the West. When seeking for food alone, Tang Xuanzang was kept prisoner by seven spider monsters who took the form of seven beautiful women. The Monkey King and the other two of Xuanzang's disciples managed to rescue him with the help of Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva/Guanyin. They renounced the desire for lust and continued the quest for Buddhist Scriptures.
A recalcitrant thief vies with a duplicitous Mongol ruler for the hand of a beautiful princess.
Prague, Bohemia, 1820. Balduin, a penniless student, falls in love with Countess Margit, a wealthy noblewoman whom he has saved from drowning.
A demon, a reaper, and the ghost of a prostitute read gothic short stories and act them out.
As a young couple stops and rests in a small village inn, the man is abducted by Death and is sequestered behind a huge doorless, windowless wall. The woman finds a mystic entrance and is met by Death, who tells her three separate stories set in exotic locales, all involving circumstances similar to hers.
At the royal court, a prince is presenting the princess whom he is pledged to marry when a witch suddenly appears. Though driven off, the witch soon returns, summons some of her servants, and carries off the princess. A rescue party is quickly organized, but the unfortunate captive has been taken to a strange, forbidding realm, from where it will be impossible to rescue her without some special help.
This is the first movie version of the famous story. Alice dozes in a garden, awakened by a dithering white rabbit in waistcoat with pocket watch. She follows him down a hole and finds herself in a hall of many doors.
A nervous and unsettling young boy takes a mysterious old suitcase across London... to a twisted and surreal conclusion.
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