
Acting
Emil Jannings
Born 1884-07-22 · Rorschach, Switzerland
Emil Jannings (1884–1950) was a German actor, the first to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Between 1926 and 1929, he worked in Hollywood. Upon returning to Germany, he sympathized with the Nazi regime and was one of the advisors to Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), the film studios controlled by Goebbels as a propaganda weapon. With the end of World War II and Germany's defeat, his career fell into disgrace.
Acting credits
7.3Prim professor Immanuel Rath finds some of his students ogling racy photos of cabaret performer Lola Lola and visits a local club, The Blue Angel, in an attempt to catch them there. Seeing Lola perform, the teacher is filled with lust, eventually resigning his position at the school to marry the young woman. However, his marriage to a coquette -- whose job is to entice men -- proves to be more difficult than Rath imagined.
The Blue Angel
1930
7.8An aging doorman, after being fired from his prestigious job at a luxurious hotel, is forced to face the scorn of his friends, neighbours and society.
The Last Laugh
1924
5.8In 18th-Century Russia, the Czar, Paul, is surrounded by murderous plots and trusts only Count Pahlen. Pahlen wishes to protect his friend, the mad king, but because of the horror of the king's acts, he feels that he must remove him from the throne.
The Patriot
1928
7.9God and Satan wager on the soul of a learned and prayerful alchemist as part of their eternal war over Earth.
Faust
1926
6.4A neglected wife disguises herself in order to lure her wastrel husband into a compromising position.
The Merry Jail
1917
6.3This 1940 presentation features highlights of earlier (1928 onward) Oscar ceremonies including Shirley Temple and Walt Disney, plus acceptance speeches for films released in 1939 with recipients and presenters including Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland, Hattie McDaniel and more, with host Bob Hope.
Cavalcade of the Academy Awards
1940
7.4A former Imperial Russian general and cousin of the Czar ends up in Hollywood as an extra in a movie directed by a former revolutionary.
The Last Command
1928
6.3"The Roman Banquet, the golden glories, the unrivaled luxuries, the wine, the dance, the song, the beautiful women, the sumptuous splendors that taxed a barbaric world for a night of feasting and revel-- Re-created for your entertainment in the most colossal drama produced", reads an ad in the Daily Argus of New York. Unione Cinematografica Italiana's lavish production of the oft-told tale stars Emil Jannings as Nero.
Quo Vadis?
1924
6.5At the height of Reign of Terror Maximilien Robespierre orchestrates the trial and execution of several of his fellow leading French revolutionaries including Georges Danton.
Danton
1921
a silent movie by Robert Wiene
Dear Eva
1914
King Pausole is known for his relaxed rule and having a different wife for every day of the year. Princess Aline, the king's favorite, leaves the kingdom with Giglio, a modern, adventurous pilot, disrupting the kingdom's orderly hedonism. The king abandons his daily duties to hunt for his daughter, bringing him into contact with a world outside his own pampered experience.
The Adventures of King Pausole
1933
No synopsis available yet.
Der Morphinist
1916
An extremely jealous artist slips into a monkey costume and kills all those men who come too close to his wife, another artist.
A Night of Horror
1917
No synopsis available yet.
Hoheit Radieschen
1917
8.0"Basher Bill," a retired prizefighter turned criminal, pretends to reform by joining a Salvation Army shelter in London run by a pious wraith named Elizabeth. Attracted to Elizabeth (although he is engaged to a street girl named Annie), Bill confesses to a bank robbery, has a spiritual revelation, and decides to go straight. His cast-off sweetheart reports him to the police; then, contrite, she warns Bill of the impending danger. Bill is captured immediately, but he escapes and sacrifices his life to save Elizabeth and the Salvation Army nursery when the rest of the gang use them as a human barricade against the police.
The Street of Sin
1928
6.5This film is a fascinating showcase for Emil Janning's theatrical play. He's a gentle school teacher who believes in his boys and is easily fooled about all things, while the other town officials want him dismissed. Curiously it's very hard to see what the film is exactly aiming for. Disaster strikes and the lax prof proves to be too far removed of the real problems of the world, on the other hand his enemies are shown in the most unsympathetic, satirical way denouncing the militaristic, bourgeois ideology of the Kaiserreich.
Traumulus
1936
6.9The story of the ill-fated second wife of the English king Henry VIII, whose marriage to the Henry led to momentous political and religious turmoil in England.
Anna Boleyn
1920
6.8Based on Shakespeare's play: The treacherous Iago plans to ruin the life of Othello by provoking him to jealousy.
Othello
1922
8.0In Corsica, Marianna Paoli's brother is killed by an Englishman whose identity is unknown to her. She swears vengeance and tracks the killer to Monte Carlo. There she falls in love with a handsome young officer, only to discover that he is the murderer she has sworn to punish.
Vendetta
1919
6.5Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)
Hitler's Hollywood
2017
9.0André Frey, a bohemian artist, woos and wins a rustic Swiss maid, promising to return to her after a visit to the city. The girl, Vroni, finds herself pregnant and is forced by her father to marry Poldi Moser, the mayor of the small Swiss town. Moser and Vroni are happy together, and two sons are born to them. André returns to the village periodically and finally asks Vroni to go away with him. She refuses, and he writes her an angry note. That evening, Vroni and André are involved in a toboggan accident; Vroni is killed outright, and André is fatally injured. Moser finds André's note and goes to him, demanding of the dying man to know which of the boys is in fact André's child. Thinking to protect his own son, André informs Moser that Moser's own son is his (André's) son. Moser swears vengeance on the child but relents when he realizes that he loves both boys equally.
Betrayal
1929
9.0Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films
2011
An adaptation of the Gerhart Hauptmann play of the same name. A young farmer's daughter is used and abused by the men in her life.
Rose Bernd
1919
4.5The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.
100 Years of the UFA
2017
Behind the camera
7.2Today is a fateful day for village judge Adam. Who broke Widow Kull’s jug fleeing head over heels after his nightly visit to her daughter? As the trial unfolds, it becomes clear to everyone that the judge himself is the culprit. Judge Adam twists and turns, invents countless explanations, and piles up the most absurd lies. But he is conducting a trial against himself—one he cannot win.
The Broken Jug
1937
6.1German chancellor Otto von Bismarck promises the dying emperor Wilhelm I. to be loyal to his grandson. But the gap between young Kaiser Wilhelm II. and old Bismarck is rapidly widening. It soon appears that an era is coming to an end.
The Dismissal
1942
7.4An anti-British propaganda film from Nazi Germany which depicts the life of the South African politician Paul Kruger and his eventual defeat by the British during the Boer War.
Uncle Krüger
1941