Federation of Magic Pop UFOS

The Los Angeles Silent Film Festival screened The Devil’s Circus last night at the Los Feliz 3 with a live score. That title becomes considerably more interesting when you notice the director: Benjamin Christensen. The Danish filmmaker had already made the astonishing 1922 witchcraft/documentary/horror hybrid Häxan before Hollywood brought him to America. The Devil’s Circus, released by MGM in 1926 and starring Norma Shearer, was Christensen's first American feature. It is also one of only four of his seven U.S. films known to survive. � Screenline Films +1 The movie concerns a young trapeze performer, a pickpocket and a lurid circus world—exactly the kind of melodrama silent cinema could turn into nightmare architecture. Last night's presentation paired it with the 1920 short Cinderella Cinders and included live musical accompaniment. � Screenline Films +1 Documented: director, survival status, screening and festival. Interpretation: Christensen's American work...

  In 1940, Walt Disney released Fantasia , a cathedral-sized attempt to marry classical music with animation and drag cartoons into the marble halls of high culture. Thirty-six years later, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto answered with a wrecking ball. Allegro non troppo begins with a producer boasting that he has invented an immortal new form: animated stories synchronized to classical music. He is then informed that an American named “Prisney” may have already done something similar. Undeterred, he assembles an orchestra of elderly women, an authoritarian conductor and an exhausted animator kept chained in a dungeon. That opening tells us exactly what kind of film this is. It admires Fantasia , steals its structure and then attacks nearly everything surrounding it: artistic pretension, commercial exploitation, obedience, masculinity, consumerism and the assumption that technological progress represents moral progress. The live-action passages are filmed like frantic, decayin...