For Introduction to David Bradley, please see September 9.

L'Argent (Money)
Rediscovered and restored in 1967 by the Cinematheque in Paris, this 1928 masterpiece of the French avant-garde cinema was the highlight of the 1968 New York Film Festival:
“Available for years only in a sadly mutilated version, it now turns out to be not only L'Herbier's finest film but one of the cinema's most successfully experimental films. Based on the Zola novel (but updated), it assembles a dream cast: Brigitte Helm as the evil Countess Sandorff who uses her bed the way others use Merrill Lynch; Alfred Abel (star of Metropolis) as the scheming speculator; and, in smaller roles, Yvette Guilbert and Antonin Artaud. Like Gance's Napoléon, this is one of the crowning moments of the silent film.”
Georges Sadoul, in “French Film,” describes L'Herbier's experimental use in L'Argent of the recently introduced portable camera, which facilitated the “subjective camera” of the impressionist school:
“L'Argent is a film of amorous intrigue in lavish modern interiors, and here the ‘portables' are let loose in a veritable ballet of their own - withdrawing, advancing, dropping from ceilings and rising from the floor, turning in circles like horses on a roundabout.... Subjective impressionism, sacrific(ed) everything to the search after new developments of vision and originality of camera angle....”