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As far as exciting climaxes go, you can't get much better than the ending to Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds." Although the movie wasn't aiming for accuracy and realism, not many audience members expected him to fully break from the history books in the final act. As the movie barreled forward, both Shosanna's (Mélanie Laurent) and the titular Basterds' converging plots to assassinate Hitler faced more and more obstacles, and it seemed like everything was falling apart.

Luckily, Tarantino wasn't interested in dramatizing history: He was interested in vengeance. Shosanna gets to posthumously deliver her triumphant message to the Nazis in her theater, telling them they're all about to be killed by a Jew. The room goes up in flames, and then the remaining two Basterds swoop in to kill Hitler and the rest with machine guns. Then a bomb goes off and the whole theater is destroyed. It was...

On Nov. 27, 1929, three years after Greta Garbo’s American film debut, Variety described her as “the most mysterious of Hollywood stars.” More than 50 years later, in 1981, a Variety story began “Given that Greta Garbo still remains the most elusive, mysterious and speculated about film personality on the planet…”

It’s rare for any star to maintain public interest for so long. And it’s especially notable that she maintained interest, even decades after her final film, by trying to avoid attention.

In a career of only 15 years, Garbo gave fans her acting talent but nothing of herself — no details of her life, never addressing rumors or speculation. In a brief 1929 item, Variety said “Practically nothing has ever been known personally about Miss Garbo, she being a publicity-shunner and the toughest of all stars to interview.” In her heyday, she had as much impact on fashion and daydreams as Lady Gaga and Beyonce,...

Sf’s logo is one every Scandinavian is familiar with. A film production company, distributor and the owner of a movie theater chain across the Nordic and Baltic countries until recently, it is a cultural landmark not only in its native Sweden, but also across the Nordic countries.

Founded as Svensk Filmindustri in 1919, Sf played an instrumental role in what is known as the golden age of Swedish cinema. Ambitious productions by directors including Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, based on famous Nordic literary works, attracted international attention.

After a lull in the 1930s, Swedish cinema enjoyed a revival in the 1940s, partly thanks to the appointment of Sjöström, who had returned to Sweden after working in Hollywood, as artistic director of Sf. As the producer of most Ingmar Bergman films as well as the Astrid Lindgren adaptations, which remain hugely popular across Scandinavia to this day, Sf was firmly...

I would like to accompany 2011's Nana with a printed text at the door of a public screening, a text written precisely before the word “contextualize” (b. 1934) existed as the verb form of “context” (b. 1840).It would be Jean Epstein, 1921—"Now the tragedy is anatomical. The décor of the fifth act is this corner of a cheek torn by a smile. Waiting for the moment when 1,000 meters of intrigue converge in a muscular denouement satisfies me more than the rest of the film. Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin."(…)"The film is nothing but a relay between the source of nervous energy and the auditorium which breathes its radiance…" (from “Magnification”)Or Antonin Artaud writing in 1927—"The human skin of things, the epidermis of...

Ninotchka

Written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

USA, 1939

It’s easy to see why Ninotchka works as well as it does, and why it’s one of the best films from Hollywood’s golden age and of arguably Hollywood’s greatest year. Just look at the talent involved. Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch were all seasoned writers, though with their best work admittedly still to come. Ernst Lubitsch had directed a number of excellent silent films in Germany, had hit the ground running once in Hollywood, making his first American film with no less a star than Mary Pickford (Rosita [1923]), and after a series of charming musical comedies, many with Maurice Chevalier, directed the more sublime and sophisticated comedies for which he now best known, films like Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933). While this was happening, Greta Garbo was working...

Everybody's favorite movie decade: Which ones are the best movies released in the 20th century's second decade? Best Film (Pictured above) Broken Blossoms: Barthelmess and Gish star as ill-fated lovers in D.W. Griffith’s romantic melodrama featuring interethnic love. Check These Out (Pictured below) Cabiria: is considered one of the major landmarks in motion picture history, having inspired the scope and visual grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Also of note, Pastrone's epic of ancient Rome introduced Maciste, a bulky hero who would be featured in countless movies in the ensuing decades. Best Actor (Pictured below) In the tragic The Italian, George Beban plays an Italian immigrant recently arrived in the United States (Click below for film review). Unfortunately, his American dream quickly becomes a horrendous nightmare of poverty and despair. Best Actress (Pictured below) The movies' super-vamp Theda Bara in A Fool There Was: A little...

Louis Feuillade's great serials of the nineteen-teens (Fantomas, Les Vampires etc) inspired numerous imitations, sequels and parodies: they still lurk behind the makeshift digital scenery of the modern action film, making threatening shadows and cackling mutely.

I've long been fascinated by the followers of Fantomas—and how I long to see Zigomar (a.k.a. Zigomar the Eelskin, 1911), directed by somebody rejoicing in the name of Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, which actually predates the screen adaptation of Allain & Souvestre's master-criminal. The slippery Zigomar even manages a spectacular escape from the electric chair itself, reverse-rappeling into the ceiling at the crucial moment.

Above: "It's a severed hand, isn't it?"

What I have managed to see is La secta de los mysteriosos (The Mysterious Sect, 1914), or those parts of it which survive. Spain's answer to Feuillade, Alberto Marro, serves up an elaborate adventure in Barcelona, with a trio of black-masked desperadoes, known as...

There’s Mauritz Stiller’s Erotikon (1920), whose indirect narrative approach influenced Lubitsch, and then there’s Gustav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929), about which I thought I knew nothing. It turns out I’d read, in Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, which when I was a kid was just about the only film book I knew of, in the section labelled Sex, that Machatý films the lovers embracing and then cuts to two raindrops intermingling on a window pane.

Machatý, of course, is Mr. Erotic: a few years later he would bring to the screen Hedy Lamar’s famous nude scene in Ecstasy (1933), which also featured what’s been described as the first sex scene, Machatý focusing on Lamar’s face as she register’s the title emotion–an effect achieved in fact by the director pricking the soles of his star’s feet with a pin. One wonders what his sexual technique was like,...

Gunnar Hedes Saga / The Blizzard (1923) Direction: Mauritz Stiller Cast: Einar Hanson, Mary Johnson, Stina Berg, Hugo Björne, Pauline Brunius Screenplay: Mauritz Stiller; from Selma Lagerlöf's novel Mary Johnson, Einar Hanson, The Blizzard Directed by Mauritz Stiller, the Swedish drama Gunnar Hedes saga / The Blizzard tells the confusing story about how a reindeer stampede affected the life of a violin player. I found the continuity hard to follow, perhaps because, as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival program explained, "Great chunks of The Blizzard have been missing for years." The Blizzard stars Einar Hanson as Gunnar Hedes, the son of an aristocratic family. When a troupe of traveling performers comes to his village, Gunnar falls in love with the waif-like violinist Ingrid (Mary Johnson), who looks a bit like Greta Garbo in Stiller's Gösta Berlings Saga, released the following year. After the reindeer disaster, Gunnar goes mad and imagines that...

Cinematographer who brought a sensuous style to 12 of Ingmar Bergman's films

The Swedish cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who has died aged 100, could be said to have created the "look" of Ingmar Bergman's films, crystallised in three of the director's masterpieces: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both 1957). From Port of Call (1948) to The Devil's Eye (1960), 12 films in all, Fischer was able to make visible Bergman's visions.

He was born in Ljungby, in southern Sweden. After spending three years in the Swedish navy as a chef, he attended the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, where he studied with the celebrated decorative artist Otte Sköld. He had an apprenticeship in cinematography at Svensk Filmindustri (Sf), the country's leading production company. His mentor there was the cinematographer Julius Jaenzon, who worked with the two great masters of Swedish silent cinema, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. This...

The full line up for the 54th BFI London Film Festival was announced in the Odeon, Leicester Square this morning, with a number of highly anticipated films set to light up the capital this October.

The festival runs from the 13th to the 28th of October and will begin with Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s haunting masterpiece Never Let Me Go, and will close with Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours which stars James Franco.

Announcing the roster were Artistic Director Sandra Hebron and the Director of the British Film Institute, Amanda Nevill.

HeyUGuys will be all over the festival this year, it looks like it will be one to remember.

Click here to view the full calendar

The 54Th BFI London Film Festival Programme Launch

London, Wednesday 8 September: The programme for the 54th BFI London Film Festival, launched today by Artistic Director Sandra Hebron, showcases an array of...

Mauritz Stiller's silent movie masterpiece Erotikon – one of David Thomson's "10 lost works of genius" (The films that time forgot, Film & Music, 20 August) – has been beautifully restored by the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm as part of a handsome box set of recently restored films from Sweden's "golden years" of cinema (1917-24). These include two more Stiller masterworks, Gösta Berlings Saga and Herr Arnes Pengar, and two directed by Ingmar Bergman's mentor, Victor Sjöström – Terje Vigen and The Phantom Carriage – who, like Stiller (says Thomson), "needs to be recovered". In fact, Sjöström enjoyed a two-month retrospective of his work at the National Film Theatre (BFI Southbank) in 2004. Another "lost" Stiller film, the Gunnar Hedes Saga, will play at the BFI London Film Festival in October. The recovery of these two geniuses of cinema is well under way – indeed, they never really vanished.

Clyde Jeavons

Archive consultant, London Film Festival

World cinemaSweden

guardian.

The new wave 40 years early. The soft side of Jean-Pierre Melville. Nicole Kidman makes the unmakeable. Somewhere out there is an alternative history of film – David Thomson unearths 10 lost works of genius

Erotikon (1920)

Forget 1920, this is an absolutely modern comedy about romance and sex, directed in Sweden by Mauritz Stiller. We should remember that when MGM brought Greta Garbo from Sweden in the mid-20s, she was almost baggage in the deal that hired Stiller, one of the sharpest and most sophisticated of silent directors, but a man who would be crushed by Hollywood. Stiller needs to be recovered (like his contemporary, Victor Sjöström), and Erotikon has an instinct for attraction and infidelity that simply couldn't be permitted in American films of the same period. It's also marvellous to see that, nearly 100 years ago, Swedish cinema was in love with its country's cool light and with actresses as warm but ambiguous as Tora Teje,...