Preservation Print!

Introduced by Anne Nesbet
Judith Rosenberg on Piano

Anne Nesbet is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media at UC Berkeley.

“Belonging to the category of city symphonies, his film was, according to Cavalcanti himself, ‘the first to give a sociological perspective to documentary. No one had had the idea of showing what happens around us.' It is the most experimental and the most avant-gardist of all his films, and one of the films from this period which has best survived the test of time, no doubt because of the humor which runs through it and also a certain modesty. This film about a particular city, Paris, is also a remarkable film about time.”

-Antonio Rodrigues, Alain Marchand, Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1997 (condensed)

• (46 mins @ 18fps, Silent, Dutch intertitles with live English translation, Tinted, 35mm, From EYE Film Institute Netherlands, permission Les Films du Jeudi)

Preceded by:
Architecture d'aujourdhui (Pierre Chenal, France, 1930). Produced by the architectural review, L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, this version of the film focuses on three villas designed by Le Corbusier and explores Corbusier's theory of form and function. (Written by Chenal, Le Corbusier, 10 mins, Silent with French titles and live English translation, B&W, 16mm, From MoMA Circulating Film)

Die Neue Wohnung (Hans Richter, Switzerland, 1930). Avant-garde filmmaker Richter cuts between the clutter of a typical Victorian home and the open, airy, clean lines of Modernist spaces in this documentary commissioned by the Swiss Werkbund for a housing exhibit in Basel.-Terence Gower, Shoot on Site: Architecture in Film, UCLA (28 mins, Silent with English and French intertitles, B&W, 35mm, From Swiss Films, permission Cinémathèque suisse)

This program is presented in conjunction with the Cinema Across Media: The 1920s plenary talk by Anthony Vidler (Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union), “The Promenade Architecturale: Space and Movement in 1930s Modernism from Eisenstein to Le Corbusier.” The talk will be presented on February 25 at BAM/PFA, following the architecture panel. See filmstudies.berkeley.edu/SilentConference/index.html for more information.