*smalldrumroll*

[glinda]

Hello! I'm glinda and I'll be your host this week. I'm planning on posting about silent cinema tomorrow so I thought I'd garner your thoughts on the subject.

How do you feel about cinemas doing live musical accompaniments to silent film showings? An essential part of the proceedings? Take it or leave it? Utterly pretentious and off-putting?

Also restoration of silent films, which films are you longing to see restored to their former glory and which should have been left to moulder? Should they try to restore the original colour choices (tinting and toning etc) or is early colour experimentation best forgotten in favour for a crisp black and white?

Comments

[laughingrat]

I came into the genre via an obsession with early sound cinema and german expressionism in cinema

Yes, me too! It's really what I lean towards the most. Even if Conrad Veidt, at that age, really looked like he needed to be gently sat down and given a pie, the poor creetur. But seriously, there is something about that stuff that really speaks to me.

[glinda]

there is something about that stuff that really speaks to me.

There's something so very compelling about that whole area of film. The aesthetics, the storytelling, the historical and mythical influences and subtext, the political subtext - which really I can't think about too hard or I want to cry. I have a notebook somewhere full of notes from when I was rather obsessed with that whole area. Hours of research on stuff I'm never going to write articles about because most people just look at me strangely when I talk about it.

Also I suspect that I must look like a fan of the genre, because people come up to me randomly at parties and talk to me about the genius of Murnau and I in turn ramble about Lang's use of sound in M right back at them. It's all a bit odd.

[laughingrat]

Are you no longer a fan, really? Or are you differentiating Fannish from general enthusiasm? I'm a total geek for early German films, even though, like you say, there was some troubling stuff. 'Course there is just about everywhere, in art. *sigh*