70 mins |
Rated
TBC
Carmen (1918)
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Join us for a presentation by Durham Cinematheque's very own Tom Whiteside on Ernst Lubitsch's 1918 silent film, CARMEN, in celebration of INTERNATIONAL SILENT MOVIE DAY.
November 8, 1918: While the November Revolution rages in the streets of Berlin, journalists and UFA executives watch an advance screening of the movie “Carmen” in the UFA studio screening room in Tempelhof. The leading actress, Pola Negri, later recounts that the distant sound of gunfire continually punctuated the silent film. The next day, on November 9, 1918, the Weimar Republic was proclaimed. Despite or perhaps because of the troubled times, “Carmen” became a great success. Contemporaries and film critics agree that the first “major motion picture” by the exceptional Berlin director Ernst Lubitsch, who was only 26 at the time, is one of the most important works of early German cinema.
Immediately following the public premiere on December 20, 1918, “Der Film” magazine wrote that with “Carmen,” the Union film studios had created a “masterpiece and at the same time the best German film.” Another publication, “Die Lichtbild-Bühne” hailed it as a “tremendous success” that impressively demonstrated the capabilities of the German film industry. With its wildness, opulence, and sensuality, the film, which was based on motifs from Georges Bizet’s opera of the same name, clearly struck a chord with a nascent new age.
As Luciano Palumbo, film restorer at the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, reports, eight different versions of “Carmen”– which, lined up one behind another on the ground, would have stretched for about nine kilometers (five and a half miles) – were viewed, measured, and compared for the restoration. For each version of the film, the length of every single one of the approximately 660 shots was measured to determine how many frames were missing from which material.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, RTL Group
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Carmen (1918)
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Join us for a presentation by Durham Cinematheque's very own Tom Whiteside on Ernst Lubitsch's 1918 silent film, CARMEN, in celebration of INTERNATIONAL SILENT MOVIE DAY.
November 8, 1918: While the November Revolution rages in the streets of Berlin, journalists and UFA executives watch an advance screening of the movie “Carmen” in the UFA studio screening room in Tempelhof. The leading actress, Pola Negri, later recounts that the distant sound of gunfire continually punctuated the silent film. The next day, on November 9, 1918, the Weimar Republic was proclaimed. Despite or perhaps because of the troubled times, “Carmen” became a great success. Contemporaries and film critics agree that the first “major motion picture” by the exceptional Berlin director Ernst Lubitsch, who was only 26 at the time, is one of the most important works of early German cinema.
Immediately following the public premiere on December 20, 1918, “Der Film” magazine wrote that with “Carmen,” the Union film studios had created a “masterpiece and at the same time the best German film.” Another publication, “Die Lichtbild-Bühne” hailed it as a “tremendous success” that impressively demonstrated the capabilities of the German film industry. With its wildness, opulence, and sensuality, the film, which was based on motifs from Georges Bizet’s opera of the same name, clearly struck a chord with a nascent new age.
As Luciano Palumbo, film restorer at the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, reports, eight different versions of “Carmen”– which, lined up one behind another on the ground, would have stretched for about nine kilometers (five and a half miles) – were viewed, measured, and compared for the restoration. For each version of the film, the length of every single one of the approximately 660 shots was measured to determine how many frames were missing from which material.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, RTL Group
