Author Archive: Retro

A noted judge is one of the most violent patients in the sanatorium until it is discovered that music has the power to quiet him. One day he escapes and going to the house of a former nurse, now the wife of a physician, he finds her alone. In his capacity as judge, he sentences her to die in five minutes. It is then by mere accident that the terror-stricken woman learns the power of music.

A son leaves to seek his fortune in the city. Many years later he returns and checks into his parents’ inn. They don’t recognize him, but noticing his fat wallet, plan to rob him.

Bing Crosby, famous on the radio but not yet in films, bumps into a girl boarding a honeymoon train; everyone mistakes them for newlyweds. Not knowing who he is, Marian claims her fianc?e is Bing Crosby. The situation begins to appeal to Bing.

What goes in to the phrase, “Let’s go to the movies”? An off-screen narrator takes us back to the earliest days of film: clips remind us of early stars and blockbusters. He explains how sound came to motion pictures: we see Jolson singing “Mammy” and John Barrymore playing Richard III. Next is a salute to the 30,000 people working in Hollywood at 272 different crafts. A montage shows us some of those jobs. It ends with a look at the physical production of celluloid (cotton and silver) and the many aspects of movie making. The narrator promises more short films about each step in production

Comedic Short directed by Mack Sennett.

by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

“Sitting comfortably in a dark room, dazzled by the light and the movement which exert a quasi-hypnotic power… fascinated by the interest of human faces and the rapid changes of place, [a] cultivated individual placidly accepts the most appalling themes…and all this naturally sanctioned by habitual morality, government, and international censorship, religion, dominated by good taste and enlivened by white humor and other prosaic imperatives of reality.” – Luis Bunuel

Un Chien Andalou exists to shock the viewer of this stupor that Bunuel elucidates above. Freudian dream imagery, amorphous space/time, and absurdist humor combine in this drawn out mating ritual between a confused cyclist and the female he pursues. May be the most inventive fifteen minutes of film anywhere.