Under Full Sail – Silent Cinema on the High Seas

Flicker Alley in association with the Blackhawk Film Collection has announced the release of "Under Full Sail – Silent Cinema on the High Seas," a new DVD release featuring, as per its press release, "five breathtaking films that preserve the romance, grandeur and allure of windjammers sailing open waters, exquisitely photographed in the style of the time."
The following information is from the Flicker Alley release:
The Yankee Clipper (1927), produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Rupert Julian, restored to the most complete version available since the film’s release, is a feature-length melodrama recreating the real-life race from Foo Chow to Boston for the China tea trade. The gorgeous production filmed at sea for six weeks aboard the 1856 [...]

by Andre Soares | April 11, 2009   
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Abel Gance’s LA ROUE on DVD

"There is cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso."
That’s none other than Jean Cocteau, referring to the mammoth 1923 drama (original running time: nearly 8 hours) directed and written by Abel Gance — he of Napoleon.
Gance worked for three years on La Roue / The Wheel, which revolves around a locomotive engineer (Séverin-Mars, who died in 1921, two years before the film’s official release), his obsession with his adopted daughter (Ivy Close, mother of director Ronald Neame), and her (romantic) love for the engineer’s son (Gabriel de Gravone), who also happens to have fallen in love with her.
The director and his cinematographers (Gaston Brun, Marc Bujard, Léonce-Henri Burel, and Maurice Duverger) worked [...]

by Andre Soares | April 17, 2008   
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