News

'The Doll' with Ossi Oswalda and Hermann Thimig: Early Ernst Lubitsch satirical fantasy starring 'the German Mary Pickford' has similar premise to that of the 1925 Buster Keaton comedy 'Seven Chances.' 'The Doll': San Francisco Silent Film Festival presented fast-paced Ernst Lubitsch comedy starring the German Mary Pickford – Ossi Oswalda Directed by Ernst Lubitsch (So This Is Paris, The Wedding March), the 2017 San Francisco Silent Film Festival presentation The Doll / Die Puppe (1919) has one of the most amusing mise-en-scènes ever recorded. The set is created by cut-out figures that gradually come to life; then even more cleverly, they commence the fast-paced action. It all begins when a shy, confirmed bachelor, Lancelot (Hermann Thimig), is ordered by his rich uncle (Max Kronert), the Baron von Chanterelle, to marry for a large sum of money. As to be expected, mayhem ensues. Lancelot is forced to flee from the hordes of eligible maidens, eventually...

The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Coppélia will be released in 500 cinemas worldwide.

Event cinema distributor CinemaLive has partnered with The Australian Ballet to deliver three productions into cinemas worldwide over the coming 12 months.

The trilogy of ballets, dubbed The Fairy Tale Series, will commence with David McAllister’s The Sleeping Beauty, which the Australian company performed in 2015. In October 2016, the production will be screened in 500 cinemas across North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Central and South America.

The second ballet is Cinderella, which will be performed in a limited exclusive London run at the Coliseum from July, before entering cinemas later this year. Alexei Ratmansky choreographed the production, which Jerome Kaplan designed.

The final production of the initial partnership will be Coppélia, which was revived by the company’s founding artistic director Peggy Van Praagh and theatre director George Ogilvie, with costumes by Kristian Fredikson. It will premiere in cinemas in 2017.

Based in Sydney with a...

In the wake of the terrible attacks in Paris, I found myself listening to a lot of French music and thinking about the Leonard Bernstein quote going around on Facebook: "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." This list came to seem like my natural response. A very small response, I know. This list is chronological and leaves off people I should probably include. The forty [note: now forty-one] composers listed below are merely a start.

Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...