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Fridriech Willhem Murnau was a German director who flourished in the late 1920s, mostly for his post-expressionistic mise-en-scene, and his complete reliance on visual storytelling, a concept that a later visual director, Alfred Hitchcock, labeled "pure cinema". This film, the "Last Laugh", was made in '24, just before his next success and the film which still keeps him alive, "Sunrise". The "Last Laugh" tells the story of a hotel clerk who is demoted to lavatory attendant, because of his infirmity. As brilliantly portrayed by silent actor Emil Jannings, this hotel clerk takes pride in wearing his military uniform and going to work everyday, and has reached a clichéd level of glory and respect amongst his neighbors. When he loses this position, he sees his whole word being destroyed. The noirish photography implies not only the influence of German expressionism, but also of such great filmmakers as Lang, Griffith and Dryer, all of them directors who had an impact on later European art-house filmmakers such as Bergman, Rosselini and Reed. The overrated value we attach to appearances and the way people are judged by what they are wearing is the center of this movie. Emancipating from the mainstream American way of movie-making at the time, Murnau does more than simply telling the story in a way that involves the audience's emotions; his mise-en-scene is always subjective, as if the camera was in the mind of his protagonist. In that sense, not only is he able to include the hero's dreams and fantasies in the story, but also portray the realistic scenery as perceived by Janning's view: bright and shining at the first part of the story, while our hero is still enjoying his position as hotel clerk, dark and threatening in the second part, as the hero's situational development leads him to a more pessimistic view of life. Perhaps Murnau was not aware of it at the time, but the manner in which he balanced his direction, constantly alternating between fantasy and reality, formed a landmark of a film, possibly the greatest of the whole silent era, equal to such silent films as "Metropolis", "The Passion of Joan of Arc"and "The Lodger". This conscious disregard for realistic mainstream movie-making and the emphasis on subjective experience also originated and inspired yet another European filmmaker, who, even though lived much later and based his visual techniques on surrealism and neo-realism, founded his art completely on the intrinsic emotional impression of reality, just as Murnau did in this film. His name has Federico Fellini.

Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid" is, quite simply, a masterpiece of silent cinema, one of the most emotional visual journeys every viewer must undertake. Simple, subtle and straightforward, Chaplin succeeds both as an actor and a director. As an actor, he plays his usual role of Charlot, a goofy flat-feet-ed short man with a hat and a mustache, who, in this case, finds a baby on the street and decides to raise him. As a director, Chaplin manages to employ a quite "cinematic" style, quite contrary to many of his former movies. Because cinematic art, generally speaking, is composed of two major elements: the narrator's ability to choose his focus and the film's reliance on visual rather than verbal information. This film excels in both. Not only is it purely visual, but the manner in which Chaplin places his camera highlights the characters and helps narrate this unornamented tale of parental love. It is highly emotional yet it never crosses the line to melodramatic. It is capable of producing a great deal of through to the viewer yet its subdued themes and messages are never overstated, they never become clear and evident, they sort of come out through the laughter and the tears. His mise-en-scene is powerful, yet exceedingly candid and forthright.

Pasolini's first film "Accatone" is exactly as one would expect a typical Pasolini film to be: wreathed in raw violence, and shot with a brilliant sense of poetic slash brutal realism, reminiscent of the neo-realism era, and perhaps, if not for sure, a semi-autobiographical portrait of life in the streets of Rome's peripheries. "Accatone" is, at its best, a chunk of life, which Pasolini managed to extract not as it initially was, but dramatically filtered through his own personal lyrical gaze. Gangs, prostitutes, lies and deceit lie in this film's core. A sense of irresponsible opportunism is seen in this film, almost no regrets for the past and no fears for the future. In fact, the movie's tragic hero, Vittorio Accatone, is a dark alter-ego of yet another favored Italian movie character, embodied only a year before by Marcello Mastroianni in "La Dolce Vita". Perhaps, in this case, Accatone was not a party animal journalist who sought ephemeral pleasure in social middle-class gatherings and women, but the spirit is, by itself, maintained astonishingly faithfully: Accatone is no longer a protagonist in Pasolini's movie, doomed to descend lower and lower in social class, losing both his dignity, his social acceptability and his profound "style", but a symbol, a metaphor for Pasolini's own political beliefs. Under this figure of a brute, behind the otherwise repelling image of a short dirty man with a sly smile and a peculiar walk, lies the failure of post war Italian government, a government which, according to this movie's subtext, strove so hopelessly to attain social and economical success for Rome's population, and somehow neglected or marginalized Rome's peripheries, causing people like Accatone and his girlfriends to result in prostitution and theft. A kind of pretension and make-belief well being which was also visible, at the time, in America. Yes, Accatone is the result of this American Dream's pastische.