silver nitrate notes

welcome

22 jul 2026

Eighteen years in. One hundred and thirteen posts. The newest is on Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève (1939) and the four-walled room Alexandre Trauner built so the camera could not get out, a set that does the work most films hand to the script. Just below it, the recent run is still near the top: Rossellini's Stromboli (1950), Mizoguchi's The Crucified Lovers (1954), and Visconti's Ossessione (1943). More poetic realism to come.

If you are new here, the site's focus is the classic cinema of the monochrome era, silent films through the late 1950s, with occasional forays into the early New Wave. There is more about the project on the about page. The full archive is there, and so is the rolling watch log for anyone curious about what I am actually putting on the projector.

recent posts

• Alexandre Trauner Built the Room That Kills Jean Gabin
  22 jul 2026
  Trauner built all four walls of the room so the camera had nowhere to stand outside it, and the set became the argument of the film.
• Rossellini's Stromboli and the Tuna Hunt That Stops the Film
  12 jun 2026
  Rossellini stops an Ingrid Bergman melodrama to film a real tuna hunt at length, and the interruption turns out to be the whole point of the picture.
• Mizoguchi's The Crucified Lovers and the Smile on the Boat
  03 jun 2026
  A society condemns two people for an adultery they have not committed, and the sentence drives them into the very love it punishes.
• Visconti's Ossessione and the American Novel He Stole
  02 jun 2026
  A count with communist sympathies took an American crime novel he had no right to use and shot it on the banks of the Po.
• Victor Sjöström, The Phantom Carriage, and the Ghost Shot Four Times
  31 may 2026
  The last sinner to die before midnight must drive Death's cart. Bergman watched the film once a year for the rest of his life.
• Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise and the Door That Stays Closed
  08 may 2026
  Comedy is for the door that stays closed. Comedy is for the audience trusted to imagine what is on the other side.
• John Alton, T-Men, and the Black That Was Not a Mistake
  03 may 2026
  The look of postwar American film noir was figured out by a poverty-row cameraman trying to expose negative film with three quarters of the lights he was promised.

» full archive (112 posts since 2008)

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