Please note this little one that won the prize for best short in Cannes 2006:
Kristall (dir. Matthias Müller & Christoph Girardet / Germany 2006 / 15 mins)
Also, in "treasures from the archives":
Hearts of the World (dir. DW Griffith / USA 1918 / 146 mins)
The Museum of Modern Art's eagerly-awaited revival of DW Griffith's third epic feature does not disappoint, and offers an overdue opportunity to re-assess a film inevitably judged against its monumental and innovative predecessors, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Restored - with original colour tints and intertitles - from Griffith's own re-cut 1920s version, Hearts of the World was made at the invitation of the British government and intended as a Great War propaganda film, partly to encourage America's entry into the conflict. Photographed, by the great Billy Bitzer, in England (Noël Coward appears, famously, as an extra), California and - very fleetingly - France, the resulting film turned out to be more lurid melodrama than propaganda, and, by Griffith's standards, quite conservative in style, centring on two lovers divided by war but re-united in the heat of battle. But it is still a Griffith film: beautifully shot, with impressive battle scenes; sensitively acted; and infused with the director's innate humanity and integrity.
The Tower of Silence (dir. Johannes Guter / Germany 1924 / 100 mins)
The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Institute in Wiesbaden continues its admirable project to re-discover and restore the lesser-known silent features produced by the great German UFA studios in the 1920s, this one in conjunction with Berlin's Bundesarchiv and the UK's PresTech laboratories. A complex melodrama about generational guilt and revenge, set in contrasting cities and stark Baltic locations, The Tower of Silence is a bold mix of medieval myth, modernism and science-fiction, similar in its emotional intensity and brooding atmosphere to Ufa's The Chronicles of the Grey House, revived in last year's Festival. Shot by Metropolis special-effects cinematographer Günther Rittau, it is also gloriously typical of UFA's 'house style' with its ambitious and beautifully-crafted architectural sets created by the brilliant Rudi Feld, who virtually embodied the UFA 'look'. Feld even temporarily re-designed cinemas to evoke the theme of the films playing in them. Johannes Guter, once productive but now largely forgotten, proves to be yet another UFA director whose range and skill warrant greater recognition. This screening will be the world premiere of the film in its restored version (from an original camera negative), to be presented, we hope, by the Murnau Institute's Friedemann Beyer.
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