Exhausting day

[altivo]

In which I actually seem to have done relatively little.

Notable: invited to make a list of silent film classics to be added to the library's DVD collection. This I will do, though it's not anything I would have expected. Came out of a conversation with the director, who discovered some extra funds and was going to order a Charlie Chaplin collection with it. I suggested that silent films would need some promotion in order to get anyone to pay attention to them, which turned to the question of what others I'd consider to be classics that we could use for promoting the idea.

I suggested several:

Nosferatu
Wings
Son of the Sheik
The General
Ben Hur
Orphans of the Storm
The Ten Commandments
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Thief of Bagdad
The Phantom of the Opera
The Gold Rush

I'd prefer pipe organ or orchestral accompaniments, but those may be hard to get. Piano will do if it's in the appropriate style.


She's willing to consider working up a film festival in which we'd show and discuss several of them, one a week this coming summer. Now the trick is to find DVD copies with appropriate music soundtracks...

Comments

[moonhare]

My new favorite silent films are the Oswald The Lucky Rabbit cartoons :o) Disney could have done a much better job with this collection, no matter how much they said they did do to restore them. The musical score is nice, Schubertesque to a degree, and there are other old silent cartoons included on the linked DVD.

edit- oops, spelling spelling

[altivo]

Hmm. I hadn't considered silent cartoons, but of course there are classics in that area too. They come a bit later than the big name live action films. I suppose Winsor McKay's Gertie the Dinosaur must be available. That was 1914, one of the very earliest if not the first.

[frith]

I suggest Metropolis. I've never seen it, but it's supposed to be stupendous. I've seen several of the Chaplin movies, albeit many years ago.

[altivo]

Oops, yes. Metropolis belongs on the list, and I have seen it, though it's rather more difficult to understand than most of the others. I should also have a Harold Lloyd film, have to think about that.