Sterling New Silver on the Silver Screen
An Alternate Hollywood and Pop Culture Timeline
An Alternate Hollywood and Pop Culture Timeline
1922’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by the German filmmaker F.W. Murnau was long thought to have been lost for quite some time, and lost on purpose, with it having been banned not just in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, but also by conservatives all across the globe mainly due to its mature, macabre themes for their period.
Starring Milton Stills and Louise Brooks as Lisbeth Salander, the titular “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, it primarily followed Milton Stills, who played a private investigator as he is hired and partially bribed, by an old and wealthy nobleman, one whom was played by Max Schreck under heavy make-up, to solve a mystery of the disappearance of his daughter, all the while his brother, played by Emil Jannings, is a veteran of the still recent First World War plots in the background, who may know more than he is letting on...
The film is notable for featuring, not only implied sexual assault and implied child abuse, but an on screen gay kiss between Lisbeth Salander and another woman, along with scenes depicting Louise Brooks in varied states of undress, mainly in showing the titular dragon tattoo on her back, though to the modern cinema goer, the scenes are tame. But censors back then were far less than accepting of F.W. Murnau.
For a long period, it was believed that the film had been lost forever, that the reels were burned either by accident or on purpose, however, reels were found to have survived, one of which would actually be found in Dikemark Hospital of all places, a mental institution outside Oslo, Norway, along with another lost film, "The Passion of Joan of Arc".
2001: Odyssee Im Weltraum, written and directed by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou back in 1928, considered by many to have been their magnum opus, other than Metropolis and the many other films the two of them collaborated.
Following the discovery of a strange monolith on the lunar surface, a space ship called Entdeckung 1 and its crew of two, played by Gerda Maurus and Willy Fritsch, along with an advanced "Thinking Machine" named DREX are sent out unravel its mysterious origin, in a film which had polarised critical opinion, receiving both praise and derision from the critics and cinema going public of the time, with many praising the spectacle, the incredible visuals which brought to mind the films of Georges Méliès and the art of surrealist painters, especially around the climax of the film, which had made use of an early technicolour process as Gerda Maurus and Willy Fritsch's characters, Bowman and Poole are pulled into a strange, multicoloured vortex, carried across vast distances of space, while viewing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colours before being brought into this of "Garden of Eden"
"Where they bring forth a new age", creating "Das Sternenkind" who'd proceed to appear over the planet Earth in the final shot of the film, teasing the bringing of a new age.
The film would be among the first to ever be nominated at the 1st Academy Awards on February 2nd, 1929, nominated for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, Art Direction, Cinematography, and for Outstanding Picture, winning in Art Direction, and narrowly being beaten by Wings for Outstanding Picture, although there was some controversy.
Among those reported to have loved the film were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels of the Nazi Party, who saw the film as an endorsement of their ideals, both men seeing "Das Sternenkind" as the films depiction of Friedrich Nietzsche's "Übermensch", however, both seemed to have not noticed that DREX, the antagonistic super computer who attempts to kill Bowman and Poole, is named after Anton Drexler, the founder of the Nazi Party, and that the original name for this villain was to be either "HIT" or "GOEB".
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