Monday, July 14, 2008

Films on 7/13/08, Part 1

Pamela Wong's Birthday for Grandma (1977) Lifestyle Production/ Encyclopedia Britannica
Depicts a special event in the life of a Chinese-American family while showing various aspects of life in Chicago's Chinatown. Shown in honor of Miles' birthday, its one of my favorite films in my collection.


Lonedale Operator (1911) D.W. Griffith
A drama in which a telegraph operator wards off payroll thieves with a wrench resembling a gun while her engineer-sweetheart races a train to her rescue. Below is a music video on YouTube made up of clips from the film (why the hell this film isn't on YouTube or elsewhere on the Internet in a complete form is beyond me)

Symphonie Diagonale (1924) Viking Eggeling
Features hieroglyphic forms moving along an invisible diagonal in a work by Viking Eggeling. Nifty animation that reminded me of early neon signs on Times Square.



Hammy Learns To Fish (1965)
Uses live animals to tell the story of a hamster and a rat who go fishing. This was another episode from the Tales of the Riverbank series that used to be shown on Canadian TV. The hamster and the rat decide to take the rat's motorboat down the river to go fishing. Lots of Heart of Darkness jokes here.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

checking for two weeks! you gotta get back to blogging, skip!

stephy said...

Pamela Wong's ordeal continues to haunt me. Maybe not as much as the image of the cerebral palsy people banging, though. Thank you for availing these things to me, it brings the surreal into my boring desk-job existence! And thanks also for letting me crash the other night.