As we have done in previous years with the best films of 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1925, we begin 2026 by reviewing the best of cinema from a hundred years ago.
“Faust”, by FW Murnau
Maybe only a handful of films are living up to the ideal of cinema as an autonomous art which, in turn, is a union of all others. There is no doubt that this is one. Murnau reinterprets the myth of Faust based on the literature of Marlowe And Goethe, the expressionist theater of Max Reinhardt, the diabolical metamorphosis of Emil Jannings the most amazing models and visual effects.
“Light shapes are forming” said Rohmer of this Gothic cathedral with baroque expressiveness which It seems constructed with dark magic, but it is a farewell to Germany, at the height of his art, to one of the few complete filmmakers who ever existed.
“Ménilmontant”, by Dimitri Kirsanoff
He the most aggressive beginning of silent cinema: a violent murder, without context, which leaves two girls orphaned. THE the most moving close-ups of all time: Nadia Sibirskaïa, partner of the director. A cold vapor rises between his lips in the Parisian district of the title; He puts his fingers in his mouth, a gesture of nervousness elevated to the paradise of fragility during 37 minutes of harsh human drama and no intertitles.
“A page of madness”, by Teinosuke Kinugasa
This was not recovered until the 1970s. unidentified cinematographic object it was lost for half a century. Terrifying watermark, mental sanatorium subsection, without intertitles and with powerful imagery full of visual resources that draw from the Western avant-garde. It responds to the credo of the Shinkankakuha artistic school, which promulgated the eradication of naturalism, and this through strokes of madness.
“The General Engineer”, by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
Summit of action cinema and physical comedy only at the level of its biggest daredevil star, capable of risk your neck to distill the perfect gag sitting on the connecting rod of a moving locomotive or filming, in the most expensive shot in history, how he falls into the river from a collapsed bridge. Despite the number of incredible stunts he performs during his train chase, a sublime treatise on the construction of humor in general terms, His lack of success condemns Keaton’s creative freedom.
“The Sixth Part of the World”, by Dziga Vertov
travel film, ethnographic film, visual poem and call for a universal workers’ union which speaks to you as it jumps back and forth, with exultant frenzy, across the immense empire of the Soviet Union. He filmmaker’s eye par excellence (and the scissors of Elisabeth Svilova) understands the image as a matter of pure expression.
“The Madness of Charleston”, by Ernst Lubitsch
A shirtless neighbor in front of the window shakes a shaker of extramarital desires and misunderstandings where the characters’ points of view, what they keep silent and what they intuit, collide. The Lubitsch touch at its best which is urgently needed to be included among her other sexy flirting masterpieces such as The dangers of flirting (1924), A thief in the room (1932) or Angel (1937). A recipe book against bitterness which transforms games of seduction into a vital elixir for (re)finding yourself.
“The Mother”, by Vsevolod Pudovkin
The novel of Gorky The stifled revolution of 1905 acquired an eternal individualization in the close-ups of Pudovkin. The Vitaphone was taking its first steps in Hollywood, but no sound film could ever convey sounds like the images of the faucet dripping while the father watches while the mother waits for the child to arrive.
“Desert Flower”, by Henry King
Even if this same year John Ford has created a western as easy to enjoy again and again as Three bad men, this blockbuster with all the media deployment Samuel Goldwyn who built a city with its own railway detour for the film team, is guided by the very essence of the genre: the conquest of the landscape through a film camera. It is difficult to match the level of fullness of the images of Henry King when it comes to epic romance.
“The Devil and the Flesh”, by Clarence Brown
High risk explosive activity: light a cigarette for Greta Garbo. This is certified in the melodrama that forever changed the image of the Swedish star (as of now, cinematographer William Daniels became his personal illuminator; the scene with the shadows of the raindrops forming tears on his face is reason enough). While your love with Jean Gilbert It went beyond fiction, this hot love triangle did not hide hints of bisexuality.
“The Bride of Glomdal”, by Carl Theodor Dreyer
He Dreyer more bucolic it simply tells a story of forbidden love; but only a little, since the conflict lasts and matters less than the surrounding nature, the cozy houses and the horses crossing the river. Thus, the unforgettable nests of small gestures like a brief furtive kiss behind the pyre or the frustration of a rejected suitor who smashes a bottle against the stones.
“The Marked Woman”, by Victor Sjöström
Lillian Gish He wanted to leave behind the innocent roles that had shaped his career with Griffith and crafted this one to suit him. adaptation of The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Convinced that there was no one better than the Swedes to talk about puritanism, He asked Lars Hanson alongside him and Sjöström behind the camera. The court scene which ends with the hands clasped as they emerge from the bushes demonstrates its success.
“Cape Town”, by Grigori M. Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg
In a great year of literary adaptations in Soviet cinema (The mother, Kuleshov with Jack London In By law), this movie merges two Gogol stories with heavy doses of expressionist asphyxiation and creates a nightmare that flirts with the Kafkaesque. The most astonishing special effect? The actor Andrei Kostrichkin made up like a decrepit old man after a devastating timeskip.
“Oh my mother! » by Sam Taylor
Something in the movies Harold Lloyd you end up winning. His stunts are not as sophisticated as those of Keaton and the feeling becomes corny for him more easily than for him. Chaplin, but it may be that, precisely for this reason, the the man with glasses conquered the heights from his least advantaged position; There is nothing more enjoyable in a comedy than the triumph of the so-called loser.
Even if he is an unpleasant billionaire who, by getting closer to the girl he loves (Jobyna Ralston, at her sweetest peak), He gets involved in a charitable association and ends up fraternizing with the outcasts of the neighborhood. Its climax consists of two sequences which would be unthinkable for someone who did not take it seriously. adapt reality to the logic of the cartoon: the escalating chase and bumpy transfer to the drunken groomsmen’s wedding. How will this not disarm us?
“Nana”, by Jean Renoir
The decorations of Claude Autant-Lara They come to life and refer to an off-screen space that Renoir’s staging expands even further. He spent a fortune (notably selling his father’s paintings) and He pruned a large part of Zola’s novel to make it a vehicle for the greater glory of his wife, Catherine Hessling, who made the role of tragic courtesan a festival of grimaces more garish than the cancan.
“Michel Strogoff”, by Viktor Tourjansky
The novel of Jules Verne has seen a multitude of adaptations, but all are far in scale and ambition from this charismatic French blockbuster of almost three hours Ivan Mosjoukine like the Tsar’s mail. Filmed in Latvia, The Baltic country sent 4,000 soldiers from its army to stage these impressive battles. between Russians and Tatars in a reconstituted Siberia at the gates of Riga.
Animated and experimental cinema
While the German Hans Richter continued with his avant-garde montages of geometric shapes –that in cinema study They also alternate with seagulls and eyeballs–, Marcel Duchamp He left his Dadaist signature on cinema with the short film Anemic Cinema, a collaboration between friends with Man Ray And Marc Allegret who used what the French artist called rotor reliefs: circular cards with spiral designs that were placed on a record player and rotated, giving a sense of three-dimensionality.
But the great specialist in the art of cardboard is Lotte Reiniger, clear. The German culminated three years of meticulous dedication to adapt The thousand and one nights thanks to his technique of silhouettes with cardboard cutouts and lead sheets, animated frame by frame. A know-how to which her husband lent a hand Carl Koch, Walter Ruttmann either Berthold Bartosch, and this crystallized in The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, the longest running animated feature film we have.
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