The Silver Screen Oasis

Bummer, Man....

Finished teaching my class last week and was looking forward to going to a six week class, starting tonight, on Claire Denis. Cancelled -- insufficient enrollment.

So...is there anyone out there who can learn me some Denis?

Thanks for that post on Feyder Kingrat, "La Kermesse Heroique" is a film on the top of my list of "must-see movies". The German version of "Anna Christie" (1930) and "Daybreak" (1931) are especially recommendable.

I'm still trying to find the German-language version of "La kermesse héroïque", shot simultaneously by Jacques Feyder. Françoise Rosay plays the same role as in the French version, but the other actors (Paul Hartmann, Charlotte Daudert, Albert Lieven) are different. The title is "Die klugen Frauen".

Similarly, Feyder also made "Les gens du voyage" (1937) in French and German, with Françoise Rosay in both. The German version is called "Fahrendes Volk". André Brulé, Fabien Loris, Guillaume de Sax, Marie Glory, Sylvia Bataille are in the French version, Hans Albers, Camilla Horn, Hannes Stelzer in the German one. I'm also trying to get this one...

How interesting Sweeney.

Sweeney Todd wrote:I'm still trying to find the German-language version of "La kermesse héroïque", shot simultaneously by Jacques Feyder. Françoise Rosay plays the same role as in the French version, but the other actors (Paul Hartmann, Charlotte Daudert, Albert Lieven) are different. The title is "Die klugen Frauen".

Similarly, Feyder also made "Les gens du voyage" (1937) in French and German, with Françoise Rosay in both. The German version is called "Fahrendes Volk". André Brulé, Fabien Loris, Guillaume de Sax, Marie Glory, Sylvia Bataille are in the French version, Hans Albers, Camilla Horn, Hannes Stelzer in the German one. I'm also trying to get this one...

The Cinémathèque was planning last year a Feyder retrospective that disappeared completely. If there are still prints of the German versions of the Feyder films, they are in Germany somewhere...Nobody has seen the German versions since their original release.

Apparently a friend of mine just got "Fahrendes Volk" and is sending me a copy. It was quite unexpected and his mail arrived maybe one hour after I wrote the previous post!
You can be interested to know that in 1963, a friend of mine found at the "Flea Market" in Saint-Ouen (just where I live now...) the 9.5mm complete prints of L'OR, the French-language version of "Gold", and IF1 NE REPOND PLUS, the French-language version of "FP1 antwortet nicht". So I watched them maybe three of four times each, and by now, both are "lost" films as well.
And recently I got the German-language version of Julien Duvivier's "Les 5 gentlemen maudits", called "Die funf verfluchten Gentlemen"...

How Lucky Sweeney! I bet you speak German fluently, because I imagine that those films don't carry any subtitles.

No, I don't speak a word of German, but in most of the cases I have seen the French versions, so it's not difficult to follow the German ones. French TV also programmed some of these German-language versions, like "Marianne" (Duvivier), "Amphytrion", "Gold", "FP1 antwortet nicht", and others, and in this case they are of course subtitled in French. Similarly, several English-language versions were shown, like "Big House", "Caravan", "Koenigsmark", etc.
I even have Dutch, Romanian, Czech versions of English-language movies like "The Ghost Train", and I don't speak these languages neither. But in fact, a great percentage of my videos are in foreign languages of all kinds and without subs. Sometimes, I find the subs years later... and I just add them!

WOW

French tv sounds so much better than ours....

But of course they also have a better theatre than we have (The Cinematheque).

I first watched a grainy print of L'Atalante, I was really moved by it, you don't get any pre story, you don't know how long or where they met although it feels that they don't know each toher very well. Most of all I was absorbed in the way Vigo told his story, I was incredibly moved, especially by Dita Parlo and it seemed to convey the stark reality of the times. One watch of a grainy print convinced me to buy a better version.