The Decade that Roared
L'Hirondelle et la mésange (1920)
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L'Homme du large (1920)
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Eldorado (1921)
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Fièvre (1921)
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L'Atlantide (1921)
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Les Trois mousquetaires (1921)
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Quatre-vingt-treize (1921)
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Crainquebille (1922)
Jacques Feyder's reputation as one of France's leading filmmakers of his day was established early in the 1920s with such films as this masterful adaptation of a popular short novel by Anatole France. Crainquebille is a fairly modest piece, combining social drama and punchy satire, but one that is extraordinarily direct and engaging. The film's subject matter fits perfectly with Feyder's rigorously naturalistic style of filmmaking.Read full review...
Coeur fidèle (1923)
On paper, Coeur fidèle is nothing more than a trite melodrama, of the kind that was prevalent in cinema in the early 1920s. What the avant-garde director Jean Epstein does with this film is far more important than its characters and the story it tells. His intention was to show that by employing his well-developed theories of cinema it was possible to elevate the vulgar art of melodrama to something of far greater merit, achieving a nearer approximation to real life than any other form of art.Read full review...
La Roue (1923)
'A tragedy for modern times' is how the great cinema pioneer Abel Gance promoted his epic masterpiece La Roue, although he could equally have described it as an intimate, realist melodrama painted on a canvas of gigantic proportions. No one who watches the film can fail to be taken aback by the sheer scale of Gance's insane ambition. More importantly, the film introduces innovative techniques that would have a wide-ranging and lasting impact on the medium of film.Read full review...
L'Auberge rouge (1923)
L'Auberge rouge is a comparatively minor work in Jean Epstein's oeuvre, a low-key crime-drama that gave the 25-year-old director the opportunity to experiment with the impressionistic techniques that were being deployed, with some success, by his contemporaries. With its overt 'greed is bad' moral it is tempting to read an anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois subtext into L'Auberge rouge, and this would certainly chime with the director's own leftwing sympathies. Not Epstein's greatest film, but one of his most experimental.Read full review...
Le Miracle des loups (1924)
Le Miracle des loups has been described as the French equivalent to America's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the influence of D.W. Griffith is apparent in the film's elaborate and astonishingly convincing battle sequences. After its premiere at the Paris Opéra in 1924, the film went on to become a major critical and commercial success. One reviewer who didn't think much of it was Abel Gance, who dismissed it as a bad film lacking in both art and drama. Gance was wrong on both counts.Read full review...
L'Inhumaine (1924)
The first impression that L'Inhumaine makes is the boldly geometric nature of every aspect of its design. Cubism and Art Deco are the strongest influences, employed with great artistry in the construction of the interior and exterior sets. The film looks like a mad explosion of art purely for art's sake, but it also tells a gripping story. In his attempt to forge a new kind of cinema director Marcel L'Herbier is at his most inventive, unwittingly laying the foundation for a new genre of film, the science-fiction fantasy.Read full review...
Le Double amour (1925)
A recurring motif of Jean Epstein's, the untamed ageless sea, punctuates the prosaic narrative of Le Double amour in a way that eerily prefigures the lyrical Breton phase at the end of the director's remarkable career. Cosmic repetition is the film's other central theme, the idea that people are condemned to repeat the same patterns of behaviour, again and again, like marionettes in the hands of some celestial influence. The story may be that of a fairly routine melodrama, but Epstein makes it a far more profound work.Read full review...
Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925)
Les Aventures de Robert Macaire shows little of the wild flair for invention and stylistic bravado that define so much of Jean Epstein's other work but it is an accomplished piece of commercial filmmaking that impresses as much with its meticulous shot composition as with the quality of the acting. Some flashback sequences allow the director to depart from the linear narrative and toy mischievously with the idea of the unreliable witness.Read full review...
Paris qui dort (1925)
Although it looks modest compared with many well-regarded silent films of its period, Paris qui dort is nonetheless a film of considerable importance. It is the first film of the celebrated French film director, René Clair, and also - although it was not seen as such at the time - the first fully fledged science-fiction movie. The film is best remembered for its stunning sequences filmed on the Eiffel Tower.Read full review...
Poil de carotte (1925)
The 1925 version of Poil de carotte was director Julien Duvivier's first notable success. It may be less well-known and less well-regarded than his subsequent sound films, but it stands apart from Duvivier's other silent films both in its artistry and its humanity. The director was so fond of this film that he later remade it as a sound film. The darker aspects that we see in Duvivier's later films are more than evident in this emotionally engaging early work.Read full review...
Feu Mathias Pascal (1926)
Feu Mathias Pascal is by far the most conventional and accessible of Marcel L'Herbier's silent films, an enjoyable mélange of farce and melodrama that shows a much lighter side to the director than is seen in his better known works. The streak of exuberant comedy that runs through the film evokes something of Ernst Lubitsch's early silent offerings, and many of the gags would not be out of place in a Buster Keaton or Marx Brothers film.Read full review...
Gribiche (1926)
No other filmmaker directed children better than Jacques Feyder, and the truth of this is at once apparent in his touching realist melodrama Gribiche. Jean Forest was just nine years old when Feyder found him by chance playing in the streets of Paris. The enchanting little boy was a gift to celluloid. Based on a novel of the same title by Frédéric Boutet, Gribiche was the first and best of the three films that Feyder made for the prestigious Albatros film company.Read full review...
Le Voyage imaginaire (1926)
Le Voyage imaginaire completes a trilogy of highly imaginative silent fantasies which director René Clair made at the very start of his illustrious filmmaking career. Whilst it borrows some elements from Clair's previous two films - Le Fantôme du Moulin-Rouge (1925) and Paris qui dort (1925) - it is a more ambitious and exuberant piece, with boisterous doses of slapstick accompanying the director's most eccentric flight of fancy.Read full review...
Ménilmontant (1926)
Ménilmontant is a masterpiece of film impressionism, one of the most captivating cinematic gems created by the avant-garde pioneer Dimitri Kirsanoff. Whereas many of the films of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1920s now appear pretentious, florid or lacking in artistic coherence, this exquisite film has a reality and solidity that make it an intensely absorbing human drama as well as an incredibly daring piece of film art.Read full review...
Michel Strogoff (1926)
Of the many screen adaptations of the works of Jules Verne few are as visually spectacular and memorable as Victor Tourjansky's stunning silent epic Michel Strogoff. Running to almost three hours in length, Tourjansky's film was a bold testament to the ambition and confidence of French cinema at the height of its Golden Age in the 1920s, a lavish production that has all the drama, excitement and compulsion of Verne's classic novel.Read full review...
Nana (1926)
The second feature to be directed by the great innovator Jean Renoir was this lavish adaptation of Emile Zola's classic novel, Nana. The film can hard fail to impress with its insane extravagances, which include vast overly decorated sets and two magnificent set-pieces - a horse race and an open air ball (complete with a lively cancan sequence). So much money was spent on this film that it could never have returned a profit, and it was the commercial failure of this film which robbed Renoir of the opportunity to make such an ambitious film again for many years.Read full review...
La Glace à trois faces (1927)
Of the films that director Jean Epstein made, La Glace à trois faces is the one that was most enthusiastically received on its original release. In both narrative and visual terms, it is the most innovative and daring of the director's films, breaking many of the rules of cinema at the time and creating some new ones for future directors. This priceless masterwork had a huge impact on the filmmakers of the French New Wave era, including Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.Read full review...
La Proie du vent (1927)
In later years René Clair would be dismissive of La Proie du vent. He may have resented making the film - the plot is pure melodrama with few narrative surprises - but Clair had ample opportunity to foist on it his avant-garde credentials and, in doing so, he crafts one of his more intimate and humane works. With a captivating central performance from Charles Vanel, this is one of the director's most emotionally involving films.Read full review...
Le Joueur d'échecs (1927)
Le Joueur d'échecs is one of the great cinematic achievements of the silent era, a sumptuous blend of historical wartime epic, romantic fantasy and farce. The film was directed by Raymond Bernard, an immensely inventive filmmaker who enjoyed considerable commercial success, and is based on a novel by Henri Dupuy-Mazuel, inspired by the true story of a chess-playing automaton named 'The Turk', the baffling creation of the Hungarian baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.Read full review...
L'Invitation au voyage (1927)
L'Invitation au voyage is the work of Germaine Dulac, the most prominent feminist writer, artist and filmmaker of her time. One of the avant-garde experimentalists of the 1920s, Duluc saw film as a new art form for expressing ideas and conveying images in a way which would be impossible or inappropriate in other artistic media. Her films are both fascinating expressions of female desire and stunningly inventive pieces of film art.Read full review...
Napoléon (1927)
Ever since the film was first seen, Abel Gance's epic Napoléon has been hailed as one of the true landmarks in cinema history, a film of breathtaking vision and extraordinary cinematographic bravura. The impressionistic techniques that Gance had employed so brilliantly on earlier films are used to their fullest effect to create a cinema experience that was unrivalled in its day and still packs an almighty punch today. According to some, this is the greatest film ever made..Read full review...
La Chute de la maison Usher (1928)
As a journey into the realm of unbridled fantasy, La Chute de la maison is pretty well unsurpassed by any other film of the silent era. The repeated tracking shots and bold use of superimposition, the desolate mist-laden exteriors and the fact that not everything we see makes sense logically all have the same effect - to persuade the spectator that he is experiencing a dream rather than watching a film. The pinnacle of Jean Epstein's cinematic achievement, this film was to be massively influential in the gestation of the American horror film.Read full review...
La Coquille et le clergyman (1928)
A good candidate for the weirdest film ever made, La Coquille et le clergyman was the product of two mutually incompatible creative talents of the 1920s - the writer Antonin Artaud and the feminist filmmaker Germaine Dulac. Steeped in Freudian imagery, it is about one man's inner battle against his lustful thoughts. The images range from the explicit (a wide-eyed priest ripping off a woman's bra) to the obvious visual metaphors - such as a man unlocking an endless series of doors. A genuinely unsettling work.Read full review...
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)
Acknowledged as one of the essential masterpieces of silent French cinema, Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc still has the power move and beguile. It is a sublime example of transcendent cinema that offers the spectator a unique visual and emotional experience. There is an astonishing humanity to this film that is harrowing in its intensity and yet also spiritually cleansing. With its masterful use of large close-ups to convey the unbearable agony of Joan of Arc as she is tried and condemned, Dreyer's unique film hits us more powerfully than any other work of film art.Read full review...
L'Argent (1928)
At a cost of nearly five million francs, L'Argent was Marcel L'Herbier's most lavish and greatest film. Based on a novel of the same title by Emile Zola, but updated to contemporary France, the fillm makes a flagrant and fierce condemnation on the world of high finance, particularly the unpardonable sin of speculation. Thanks to its modern setting and simple story of greed and corruption, this remarkable film is just as relevant today as it was in the late 1920s.Read full review...
Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (1928)
René Clair's skilful transposition of Eugène Labiche's popular play Un chapeau de paille d'Italie from the 1850s to the 1890s provides an irresistibly hilarious satire on bourgeois attitudes and is as entertaining today as it was when it was first seen in the 1920s. With its humorous characters and engaging morality play this is the most accessible and enjoyable of Clair's great films.Read full review...
Finis terrae (1929)
Finis Terrae is not a straightforward documentary but rather a drama filmed in a documentary style. Prefiguring the startlingly naturalistic films he would later make in Brittany, this film marked a dramatic change for the avant-garde cineaste Jean Epstein, away from the studios of Paris to a location renowned for its raw and unprepossessing landscape. An intensely involving piece of cinema it is replete with stark yet inexpressibly beautiful images that show the dual character of Man and Nature at its worst and most benign.Read full review...
Monte Cristo (1929)
The last of the monstrously ambitious superproductions of the silent era, Henri Fescourt's Monte Cristo is easily one of cinema's best adaptations of A lexandre Dumas's celebrated novel. The artistic quality and scale ofthe film are simply breathtaking. This is silent cinema at its most ambitious, most perfect, a last great parting shot before the arrival of sound would consign silent films to history for ever.Read full review...
Un chien andalou (1929)
A collaboration between two masters of surrealist art - Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí - Un chien andalou is a full-on assault against bourgeois conformity and contains some of the weirdest - and most shocking - images that cinema has given us, including the notorious eyeball-slitting sequence. If you can make any sense of this cinematic oddity you almost certainly haven't been watching it closely enough.Read full review...