Actualités

Shoes (1916) screens along with the short film Suspense (10 minutes – 1910) Sunday December 11th beginning at 7:30pm at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood).

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of two of Lois Weber’s most important films, Milestone Films has released restored versions of Shoes and The Dumb Girl Of Portici. Working with the Netherland’s Eye Filmmuseum, the Library of Congress, archivist Lori Raskin and composers Donald Sosin and John Sweeney, these films will both be screening at Webster University. The small but magnificent ensemble Shoes, with Weber’s star discovery Mary MacLaren was released the same year as her epic blockbuster The Dumb Girl Of Portici featuring the legendary dancer, Anna Pavlova. The two films show brilliantly the tremendous range Weber had as a film director.

“Lois Weber was the most successful of all the women directors in the first quarter of the 20th century and, at the time,...

Last week Kino Lorber launched a new Kickstarter aimed to fund their latest project “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers,” a collection of important American films directed by women, including Alice Guy Blaché, Lois Weber, Nell Shipman, Dorothy Davenport­, and many more, between 1910 and 1929.

The ambitious project will be presented in association with the Library of Congress and be the largest commercially-released video collection of films by female helmers. It will include HD restorations of both the most important films of the era, as well as lesser-known works, including short films, fragments and isolated chapters of incomplete serials.

“By showcasing the ambitious, inventive films from the golden age of women directors, we can get a sense of what was lost by the marginalization of women to ‘support roles’ within the film industry,” reads the Kickstarter page.

Read More: ‘The Eyeslicer,’ A New Variety Series By and For Indie Filmmakers, Launches Kickstarter Campaign...

New York’s Anthology Film Archives has announced the lineup for its ambitious Woman With a Movie Camera: Female Film Directors Before 1950,” which runs September 15 — 28. Among the spotlighted filmmakers are Gene Gauntier, Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché, though many more will be featured during the two-week series as well. Full lineup below.

“The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)

“Further Adventures of the Girl Spy” (Sidney Olcott)

“The Colleen Bawn” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)

“Broadway Love” (Ida May Park)

“The Adventures of Prince Achmed” (Lotte Reiniger)

Read More: The Rock Named World’s Highest-Paid Actor, Earning Nearly $20 Million More Than Highest-Paid Actress, Jennifer Lawrence

“The Rosary” and “Suspense” (Lois Weber & Phillips Smalley)

“Shoes” (Lois Weber)

“The Holy Night” (Elvira Notari)

“Humankind” (Elvira Giallanella)

“The Drunken Mattress” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The Strike” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The New Love and the Old” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The Roads That Lead Home” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The...

The annual Bird’s Eye View Film Festival was held in London from 8th March to 17th. This year saw a major theme exploring women’s role in gothic and horror cinema with live accompaniments to silent classics, a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and a specially commissioned score and live performance by Grammy award-winner Imogen Heap to Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928).

Bloody Women: From Gothic To Horror wasn’t the only thing going down with screenings, workshops, seminars and talks on the role women play in the medium we all know and love. In an art form still ruled largely by men it’s nice to see a film festival celebrate the female perspective, and not only that, deliver some downright brilliant films.

Below is a report on a collection of films and events we attended this great year.

Victor Sjostrom’s 1928 melodrama,...

Given the recent furore over certain Sky Sports presenters being a bunch of sexist bastards, it seems a relevant time to celebrate the female contribution to cinema – which is still largely unappreciated with women directors still making up a small percentage of directors and other creatives. But they’re awesome and they’ve now got their own festival to show off their work.

We’ve been sent over the press release and festival line up. The Bird’s Eye View Film Festival takes place in London from March 8th – 17th. The programme includes new films, documentaries, retrospectives and panel discussions.

From the press release:

The hotly anticipated Birds Eye View Film Festival 2011 (Bev) programme has been announced by Rosamund Pike at a private launch event on 25 January. The Festival returns for its seventh annual celebration of women filmmakers from 8-17 March at BFI Southbank, the Ica the Southbank Centre, with...

Sept. 8

7:30 p.m.

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way

Berkeley, CA 94720

Hosted by: Pacific Film Archive

To mark the 10th anniversary of the release of the massive underground and obscure film DVD collection Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893-1941, curator Bruce Posner presents a night of obscure and rarely publicly screened films, including several classics of the avant-garde.

Included in the program is what is considered the first underground film produced in the U.S.: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta. Completed in 1921, Manhatta is a visual poem celebrating the architecture of NYC.

During that same time period, the early avant-garde was in full swing in Europe and tonight’s program will also include several of that era’s most famous works, such as Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason), Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic cinéma, and Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique. (To...

Wolfman star Emily Blunt talks about her date with a blockbuster beast, and why she feels movies are a lot of silliness

Emily Blunt is curled up on a sofa in a West End hotel suite, wearing a cream dress peppered with black dots. It is a few weeks before her 27th birthday; she has long brown hair and blue Cleopatra eyes laced with a knowing wit. (Those eyes once prompted an ex to nickname her "Garfield".) On screen Blunt has some­times cultivated a certain haughtiness, which she has described in the past as her "head girl demeanour", but in person she's fizzy and easily amused, without a hint of the withering cruelty displayed in The Devil Wears Prada or My Summer of Love.

Hers may be the sole face on the poster for The Wolfman, the remake of the whiskery 1941 horror favourite, but she would surely be the...