In 1915, Charlie Chaplin struck up a deal with the Essanay Film Company, a small film company based out of Chicago, IL. Through Essanay, Chaplin directed and starred in 14 films in 1915 (there was at least one later film patched together by the studio composed of Chaplin outtakes released…
Tag: film
Charlie Chaplin’s Keystone Shorts (~1914) Review
In 1913, while on tour in the United States with Fred Karno’s comedy troupe (a British comedy group), Charlie Chaplin accepted a contract to perform in a series of short silent films for Mack Sennett’s Keystone film company which was headquartered in a little town called Los Angeles, California. Though…
Cabiria (1914) Film Review
Cabiria (1914) Director: Giovanni Pastrone ★★★★☆ Martin Scorsese once claimed that the true seed of epic film-making springs forth not from D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille as one might suspect, but rather from Giovanni Pastrone, an Italian director whose string of huge-scale silent films left an indelible mark on…
Fantasmagorie (1908) Film Review
Fantasmagorie (1908) Director: Émile Cohl ★★★☆☆ Produced by the Gaumont Company in France, Fantasmagorie is a stream-of-consciousness silent cartoon that uses innovative stop-motion cinematography (which was first pioneered in America). The title of the film is a nod to the fantasmograph, a 19th century device which predated modern movie-making. I…