sjj's - Rented List

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This collection is the result of a bold decision: to rescue forgotten early films made on inflammable nitrate stock, and to bring these amazing treasures to your screens, many for the very first time. This is your passport to a world of magic and delights!

Art Home Swallows His Clarinet (1912)
France 1912. A comic short with crazy special effects.
The Cook (1918)
USA 1918. Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle are zany waiters in this slapstick comedy, seen here in its original uncut form.
All This and Rabbit Stew (1941)
USA 1941. Tex Avery cartoon, rarely seen today because of censorship.
Love and Advertising (1932)
France 1932. In this comedy short, real people live their lives in a shop window, anticipating today's 'Reality TV'.
An Excursion to the Moon (1908)
France 1908. The colour remake of Georges Melies' famous 'A Trip to the Moon'.
La Samaritaine (1930)
France 1930. Behind the scenes in the Mail Order department of the famous Paris store, 40 years before the invention of the computer!
Publi-Cine
France 1935-1950. Six racy commercials for brillantine, razors and furniture, with surprise guests Jacques Tati and Laurel and Hardy.
By Indian Post (1919)
USA 1919. A rare John Ford Western, from the very beginning of his career.
Cyrano de Bergerac (1900)
France 1900. The 'ballad of the Duel' performed by Coquelin Aine for the Paris Universal Exhibition.
Ain't She Sweet (1933)
USA 1933. 'Karaoke', decades before its time, presented by the inimitable Lilian Roth.The Flight Around the World (1924)
Germany 1924. The fifth episode of our action adventure serial, full of thrills and spills.

In Disney's 'Mulan', a fearless young woman risks everything out of love for her family and her country to become one of the greatest warriors China has ever known.

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"Laurel Canyon" is a two-part doc series that pulls back the curtain on a mythical world and provides an up-close look at the lives of the musicians who inhabited it.

Through a wealth of rare and newly unearthed footage and audio recordings, the series features an intimate portrait of the artists who created a musical revolution that changed popular culture. Uniquely immersive and experiential, this event takes us back in time to a place where a rustic canyon in the heart of Los Angeles became a musical petri dish. Featuring the music of Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Doors, Linda Ronstadt, Eagles, and many more.

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In 1929, F. W.

Mufnau, one of the greatest of all film directors, invited leading documentarist Robert Flaherty to collaborate on a film to be shot on location in Tahiti, a Polynesian idyll in which Murnau imagined a cast of island actors would provide a new form of authentic drama and offer rare insight into their "primitive" culture. The result of their collaboration was Tabu, a film that depicts the details of indigenous island life to tell a mythical tale that is rich in the universal themes of desire and loss. Subtitled "A Story of the South Seas", Tabu concerns a Tahitian fisherman and his love for a young woman whose body has been consecrated to the gods, rendering her tabu as far as mortal men are concerned. The lovers flee their island and its restrictive traditions, but will their love prevail in the "civilised" world?

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"Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band" is a confessional, cautionary, and occasionally humorous tale of Robertson's young life and the creation of one of the most enduring groups in the history of popular music, The Band.

The film is a moving story of Robertson's personal journey, overcoming adversity and finding camaraderie alongside the four other men who would become his brothers in music, together making their mark on music history. Once Were Brothers blends rare archival footage, photography, iconic songs and interviews with Robertson's friends and collaborators including Martin Scorsese, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and more.

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"Summerland" follows the story of fiercely independent folklore investigator, Alice (Gemma Arterton) who secludes herself in her clifftop study, debunking myths using science to disprove the existence of magic.

Consumed by her work, but also profoundly lonely, she is haunted by a love affair from her past. When spirited young Frank (Lucas Bond), an evacuee from the London Blitz, is dumped into her irritable care, his innocence and curiosity awaken Alice's deeply buried emotions. Bravely embracing life's miraculous unpredictability, Alice learns that wounds may be healed, second chances do occur, and that, just perhaps - magic really does exist.

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Grace (Annette Bening) and Edward (Bill Nighy) have been married for 29 years and live in a small seaside town called Hope Gap. During a visit from their son Jamie (Josh O'Connor) Edward informs them both that he plans to leave Grace and walks out the door that very same day.

With the whole family knocked into disarray, Grace has to find a way through this new life which she least expected and, with the help of her son, achieve hope once again. 'Hope Gap' tracks the emotional unravelling of a tight knit family going through divorce and walking the thin line between love and hate.

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Based on Herman Bang's 1902 novel of the same name, Carl Th. Dreyer's 'Michael' is a fascinating fin-de-siecle study of a "decadent" elderly artist (Benjamin Christensen) driven to despair by his relationship with his young protege and former model, Michael (Walter Slezak).

With suffocatingly sumptuous production design by renowned architect Hugo Haring (his only film work), this Kammerspiel, or "intimate theatre", foreshadows Dreyer's magnificent final film Gertrud, by forty years with its "Now I may die content, for I have seen great love" epigraph.

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Since the failure of his small business, Victor has become a household tyrant, constantly complaining and criticising his long-suffering family. The saintly forbearance of his wife Ida seems only to drive Victor to ever more vindictive acts of tyranny.

Finally Victor's old nanny, watching his behaviour with increasing fury, takes drastic action. With an enchanting performance from Astrid Holm at its centre, this is a carefully observed comedy of manners, tackling issues of domestic inequality which are still relevant today. Meanwhile the wonderful Mathilde Nielsen as Nanny Mads ensures a rich vein of humour runs through this emotional and deeply affecting film.

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Based on a best-selling novel and negrophobic play called 'The Clansman', he produced a three-hour epic that, in 1915, set a new standard for film production and absorbing melodrama. It follows the lives of two white families divided by.

and enduring, the American Civil War, and includes elaborate cameos of historical events such as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Costing the then unprecedented sum of $100,000 to make, it opened in Los Angeles on 8 February 1915 and quickly became the most successful silent film ever made. It grossed over $10 million on its first release. Many denounced its overt racism and wars with the censors were used for publicity with brilliant effect. Social reformers constantly denounced the film's racism and historians protested about its claims to historical accuracy. Wherever it was shown, protests, and sometimes riots, ensued and authorities frequently enforced cuts of the more offensive parts of the film.

In this vivid snapshot of Weimar life, a group of young Berliners enjoy a typical lazy Sunday, including a trip to the city's suburban lakes. Flirtations, rivalries and petty jealousies ensure as they all try to wring the last from their weekend even while Monday and the weekly routine loom.

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A key work of German silent cinema and an international smash on its release, E.A. Dupont's Variete (Variety) is an audacious revenge melodrama set under the canvas of the big top.

When Boss Huller (the iconic Emil Jannings) meets the young emigre Berta-Marie (Lya De Putti), it kindles his desire to relaunch his career as a trapeze artist, stalled due to an injury and the pressures of domestic life. But with passion comes obsession, and with the involvement of the famed Artinelli into their act, tensions rise to a fever pitch. Visually astonishing, with some of the most inventive camerawork of the 1920s, and a typically intense and vivid central performance from Jannings.

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A masterwork of the German Silent Cinema whose reputation has only increased over time, 'Diary of a Lost Girl' traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtuoso flair by the great G.W.

Pabst, 'Diary of a Lost Girl' represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks, mere months after their first collaboration in the now-legendary Pandora's Box. Brooks plays Thymian Henning, an unprepossessing young woman seduced by an unscrupulous and mercenary character employed at her father's pharmacy (played with gusto by Fritz Rasp, the degenerate villain of such Fritz Lang classics as Metropolis, Spione, and Frau im Mond). After Thymian gives birth to the child and subsequently rejects her family's expectations for marriage, the baby is stripped from her care, and Thymian is relegated to a purgatorial reform school that functions less as an educational institution and more like a conduit for fulfilling the headmistress's sadistic sexual fantasies.

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During a brief stay in Chicago, innocent farmer's son Lem falls for and weds Kate, a hard-bitten but lonely waitress.

Upon bringing her home at the start of harvest time, the honeymoon soon turns into a claustrophobic struggle as they contend with the bitter scorn of his father and the invasive, leering jealousy of the farm's labouring community.

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One of the most popular films from the silent era, director George Fitzmaurice's 'The Son of the Sheik' stars Rudolph Valentino who gives perhaps the finest performance of his career. Unfortunately it would be his last, he died suddenly at the age of 31, just days before the film's release.

In this visually intoxicating sequel to Valentino's career-defining film 'The Sheik', the silent screen's greatest lover portrays a cultured yet untamed young man who is lured into a thieves trap by a beautiful dancer, Yasmin (Vilma Banky). After escaping, he kidnaps the damsel and holds her captive in his desert lair, dressing her in Arabian finery and threatening to unleash his violent passion upon her. Exotic romance saturates every frame of this Orientalist epic; its sadomasochistic fantasies are acted out against the lavish set design of William Cameron Menzies (The Thief of Bagdad) and lushly photographed by George Barnes (Sadie Thompson).