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4 briefs · 52 min
Set in 1923 Berlin, Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg follows Abel Rosenberg, a broken trapeze artist drawn into a world of medical experimentation, prostitution, and state surveillance. Shot in Munich with Sven Nykvist, it is a deliberately oppressive drama about the moral erosion preceding fascism — technically assured but narratively opaque, admired by some for its austerity, dismissed by others as shapeless and detached.
Tribute to the Teachers (1977) is a Persian-language drama written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami for Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. No plot details, cast list, or production credits beyond director and writer are publicly verifiable. It belongs to Kiarostami’s early institutional period, preceding his international breakthroughs. Without access to the film itself—or even a reliable synopsis—it remains a factual placeholder: a title attached to a date, a name, and a genre. Its significance lies in chronology and context, not in circulation or reception.
D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent epic pioneered cinematic grammar while propagating a violently racist revision of Reconstruction history. Adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman, it glorifies the Ku Klux Klan as saviours of white womanhood and Southern order. Though lauded for its editing, scale, and orchestral score, its depictions of Black Americans—many performed in blackface—are dehumanising fabrications that incited protest on release and continue to shape debates about film preservation, pedagogy, and responsibility.
The Golem (1915) is a partially lost German silent film co-directed by Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen, adapting Jewish folklore into a proto-horror narrative about a clay creature reawakened in modern times. With only fragments surviving — held by Deutsche Kinemathek — its story, performances, and themes remain partly speculative. It establishes the golem as autonomous yet unstable, but lacks the psychological or visual cohesion of later Weimar horror. Its value lies in lineage, not completeness.