I have been finally getting around to slowly pursuing a neglected interest of mine. I recently watched an old John Wayne "B" movie called "The Lucky Texan" (not brilliant cinema, but interesting to see a young John Wayne) and "Sherlock Jr." starring Buster Keaton (actually a good film, with good stunts).
I figure I may as well combine that interest with this blog, so I've decided once a month to watch a movie from Robert Anton Wilson's list of his favorite 100 movies. The obvious first choice would be Intolerance the long silent film which apparently influenced Illuminatus! So I will watch it in the next few days and blog about it next week. As it was issued in 1916, it has long been in the public domain, so it should be easy for anyone who wants to watch it with me and post comments to find a free copy. (For example, the Wikipedia article linked to in this paragraph has a copy). Nearly three hours long, so I may need to watch it as a serial.
6 comments:
I have Intolerance on dvd and will watch it again soon and comment if I have anything useful to say. I haven't seen it in a long time. It seems relevant now more than ever with all the divisiveness and conflicting ideologies in the world.
I love that movie list and I love "Intolerance". The mall in Hollywood next to Grauman's Chinese Theater used to have an "Intolerance" theme with elephants, etc. A character in "Intolerance" finds a quarter; that always makes me think of "Prometheus Rising".
Most of the surviving movies from the silent era are available on the Internet Archive (archive.org) for downloading, including Intolerance. It's quite a contrast to his Birth of a Nation, which is a hymn to intolerance.
Intolerance is a technical landmark for cinema that in parts still feels just as breathtaking nowadays.
I like the idea of a RAW movie club.
Note that Gary McGath, once a month, plays live music to accompany silent films, and the next broadcast is 8 p.m. tonight, e.g. Wednesday, May 1. It also will be available to stream for a few days, if you miss the live broadcast:
https://www.twitch.tv/madfilkentist/schedule
Here is Gary's Mastodon account, with details about the latest presentation in one of his posts today:
https://liberdon.com/@gmcgath
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