Review of The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) by Maciek B — 17 Jan 2007

Okay. my new goal for 2007 is to watch at least one "worthwhile" movie per week. "worthwhile" is a vague term, which can mean either "pretentious," "interesting," "something I haven't seen before," or whatever. mostly I just don't want to count watching wayne's world on tv in the middle of the night. not that wayne's world isn't fantastical, but it's different. and I do want to count re-visiting some old godard films or whatever, so those count as well.

So the next few entries will be catching up, and then i'll hopefully update this whenever I see a "worthwhile" movie.

1-16-07.

The Love of Jeanne Nay.

I haven't watched a silent film in a long time. I haven't watched a non-comedy silent film in even longer. I don't know where this one came from, I must have written down the title in a film class years ago, so it ended up on my netflix queue.

So needless to say, I wasn't in silent film mode. The last movie I watched before this one was Dreamgirls, which is a very loud, colorful, musical film. So from THAT perspective, the movie was very slow moving. I had trouble paying attention to it.

The camera shots were awesome. The lighting was very stylistic, but not over-the-top stylistic. Every cut seemed necessary. These days people cut just to keep the pace up or whatever, but back in the heyday of silent cinema, when the art had been truly mastered (before sound came along and ruined it for a good 10 years), everything seemed necessary, nothing seemed excessive, but it was beautiful. This was a beautifully shot story.

The story itself was very Hitchcock-esque. It sped up at the end, so even though at the beginning I had trouble following along, by the end I was at the edge of the couch, wanting to see exactly how it all would go down.

This film was just masterful. That's all I can say. A golden piece of art from a golden age of that art. I'm glad to have seen it. Fans of silent cinema should enjoy it. I feel like this review sucks. I have been out of film school for almost 2 years now and I have forgotten how to write. Hopefully that comes back soon.