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Take a trip into the depths of German silent film in a documentary that links expressionist cinema with dark political undercurrents. Director Rüdiger Suchsland’s essay adapts a famous & worthy but slightly outdated book, yet is an excellent overview of movies in the Weimar period.

From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses

DVD

Kino Lorber

2014 / Color & B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 118 min. / Von Caligari zu Hitler: Das deutsche Kino im Zeitalter der Massen / Street Date January 9, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber Video Store / 29.95

Starring: Rüdiger Suchsland (voice), Hans Henrik Wöhler (voice), Fritz Lang (voice), Volker Schlöndorff, Fatih Akin, Thomas Elsaesser, Eric D. Weitz, Elisabeth Bronfen.

Cinematography: Frank Reimann, Harald Schmuck

Film Editor: Katja Dringenberg

Original Music: Henrik Albrecht, Michael Hartmann

Written by Rüdiger Suchsland, from the book by Siegfried Kracauer

Produced by Martina Haubrich

Directed by Rüdiger Suchsland

I’ve always sought out good documentaries about films...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This April will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Monday, April 3 The Chaos of Cool: A Tribute to Seijun Suzuki

In February, cinema lost an icon of excess, Seijun Suzuki, the Japanese master who took the art of the B movie to sublime new heights with his deliriously inventive approach to narrative and visual style. This series showcases seven of the New Wave renegade’s works from his career breakthrough in the sixties: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), an off-kilter whodunit; Youth of the Beast (1963), an explosive yakuza thriller; Gate of Flesh (1964), a pulpy social critique; Story of a Prostitute (1965), a tragic romance; Tokyo Drifter...

Cinematographer on the first Star Wars film who worked with the Boulting Brothers, Hitchcock and Polanski

The British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, who has died aged 99, was best known for his camerawork on the first Star Wars movie (1977). Though its special effects and set designs somewhat stole his thunder, it was Taylor who set the visual tone of George Lucas's six-part space opera.

"I wanted to give it a unique visual style that would distinguish it from other films in the science-fiction genre," Taylor declared. "I wanted Star Wars to have clarity because I don't think space is out of focus … I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean … But George [Lucas] saw it differently … For example, he asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm camera lens and the sand and sky of the Tunisian desert just meshed together. I told him it wouldn't work,...

So you probably saw the headline and thought to yourself, “Oh Dave came up with a cute tie-in to all the pomp and ceremony that went on over in London last week, how clever of him to find an Eclipse title that connects so well with the marriage of Prince William and his girlfriend Catherine Middleton.” Yeah, I’m sure that’s what you were thinking and I can’t fault you for drawing such an obvious conclusion, even though it’s wrong. I actually chose this film for my next installment in this series simply because May 2 happens to be the birthday of Catherine the Great, the most powerful woman on earth during her lifetime and one of the most influential of all monarchs in Russia’s long and turbulent history.

Despite the fact that The Rise of Catherine the Great depicts a young woman’s entry into the...