a year of speed, revolution and fantasy in cinema

As we have done in previous years with the best films of 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1925, we begin 2026 by reviewing the best of cinema from a hundred years ago.

‘FASTO’S, S FW Murin’

Maybe only a handful of movies are living up to the ideal of cinema as an autonomous art which, in turn, is a union of all the others. There is no doubt that this is one. Murnau reinterprets the myth of Faust from the literature of Marlowe y Goethe, the expressionist theater of Max Reinhardt, the devilish metamorphosis of Emil Jannings, the most amazing mockups and visual effects.

“Light shapes form,” said Rohmer of this Gothic cathedral of baroque expressiveness that It seems built with black magic, but it is the farewell to Germany, at the peak of its art, to one of the few total filmmakers who have ever existed.

‘Ménilmontant’, by Dimitri Kirsanoff

He most aggressive beginning of silent cinema: a violent murder, without context, that leaves two girls orphaned. The most moving close-ups ever: Nadia Sibirskaïa, director’s partner. Cold steam rises between his lips in the Parisian neighborhood of the title; He puts his fingers in his mouth, a gesture of nervousness elevated to the heavens of fragility during 37 minutes of harsh human drama and zero intertitles.

‘A Page of Madness’, de Teinosuke Kinugasa

This was not recovered until the 1970s. unidentified film object that was lost half a century. Terrifying filigree, mental sanatorium subsection, without intertitles and with powerful imagery full of visual resources that draw on the Western avant-garde. It responds to the creed of the Shinkankakuha artistic school, which promulgated the eradication of naturalism, and it does so through strokes of madness.

‘The General Engineer’, by Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman

Summit of action cinema and physical comedy only at the level of its greatest daredevil star, capable of risk your neck to distill the perfect gag sitting on the crank of a running locomotive or filming, in the most expensive plane in history, how he falls into the river from a collapsed bridge. Despite the number of incredible stunts he pulls off in his train chase, a sublime treatise on the construction of humor in general terms, Its lack of success condemned Keaton’s creative freedom.

‘The sixth part of the world’, by Dziga Vertov

travel film, ethnographic film, visual poem and call to universal workers union that speaks from you to you while jumping back and forth, with exultant frenzy, through the immense empire of the Soviet Union. He filmmaker-eye par excellence (and the scissors of Elizaveta Svilova) understands the image as a matter of pure expression.

‘The Charleston Madness’, by Ernst Lubitsch

A bare-chested neighbor in front of the window shakes a cocktail shaker. extramarital desires and misunderstandings where the characters’ points of view, what they keep silent about and what they intuit, collide with each other. Lubitsch touch at its finest that urgently needs to be included among his other masterpieces of sexy flirtation such as The dangers of flirting (1924), A thief in the bedroom (1932) o Ángel (1937). And recipe book against bitterness that turns seduction games into a vital elixir to (re)find ourselves.

‘The Mother’, by Vsevolod Pudovkin

The novel of Gorky about the stifled revolution of 1905 acquires eternal individualization in the close-ups of Pudovkin. The Vitaphone was taking its first steps in Hollywood, but no sound film will ever be able to transmit sounds like the images of the faucet dripping during the father’s wake while the mother waits for the arrival of the child.

‘Desert Flower’, by Henry King

Although this same year John Ford premiered a western that was as easy to enjoy over and over again as Three bad men, this blockbuster with all the deployment of media Samuel Goldwyn, who built a town with its own railway detour for the film crew, is guided by the very essence of the genre: the conquest of the landscape through a film camera. It is difficult to match the level of fullness of the images of Henry King when it comes to a epic romance.

‘The Devil and the Flesh’, by Clarence Brown

High risk explosive activity: lighting a cigarette for Greta Garbo. This is certified in the melodrama that changed the image of the Swedish star forever (from here on, cinematographer William Daniels became his personal illuminator; the scene with shadows of raindrops forming tears on his face is reason enough). While your love with John Gilbert It went beyond fiction, this love triangle as scorching as snow did not hide notes of bisexuality.

‘The Bride of Glomdal’, by Carl Theodor Dreyer

He Dreyer more bucolic it simply tells a story of forbidden love; but only a little, since the conflict lasts and matters less than the nature around, the cozy homes and the horses that cross the river. Thus, the unforgettable nests in small gestures like a brief furtive kiss behind the woodshed or the frustration of a jilted suitor who bursts a bottle against the stones.

‘The Woman Signed’, by Victor Sjöström

Lillian Gish He wanted to leave behind the innocent roles that had shaped his career with Griffith and designed this one to suit him. adaptation of The scarlet letter de Nathaniel Hawthorne. Convinced that there was no one better than the Swedes to talk about Puritanism, He demanded Lars Hanson at his side and Sjöström behind the camera. The courtship scene that ends with hands clasped as they emerge from the bushes demonstrates its success.

‘El capote’, de Grigori M. Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg

In a great year of literary adaptations in Soviet cinema (The mother, Kuleshov con Jack London in By law), this movie fuses two Gogol stories with high doses of expressionist asphyxiation and creates a nightmare that flirts with the Kafkaesque. Most amazing special effect? The actor Andrei Kostrichkin made up like a decrepit old man after a devastating ellipsis.

‘Oh My Mother!’ by Sam Taylor

Something in the movies Harold Lloyd you end up winning. His stunts are not as sophisticated as those of Keaton and the feeling becomes cheesy to him more easily than to Chaplin, but it may be that, precisely for that reason, the man with glasses conquered the heights from his least favored position; There is nothing more enjoyable in a comedy than the triumph of the supposed loser.

Even if he is an unfriendly billionaire who, by getting close to the girl he likes (Jobyna Ralston, at her zenith of sweetness), He becomes involved in a charitable organization and ends up fraternizing with those excluded from the neighborhood. Its high point is two sequences that would be unthinkable for someone who would not take it seriously. adapt reality to cartoon logic: the progressively massive chase and the bumpy transfer to the wedding of the drunken groomsmen. How is it not going to disarm us?

‘Nana’, by Jean Renoir

The decorations of Claude Autant-Lara They come to life and refer to an off-screen that Renoir’s staging expands even further. He spent a fortune (including selling his father’s paintings) and He pruned a large part of Zola’s novel to create a vehicle for the greater glory of his wife, Catherine Hessling, who turned the role of tragic courtesan into a festival of grimaces more garish than the cancan.

‘Michel Strogoff’, de Viktor Tourjansky

The novel of Jules Verne has had a multitude of adaptations, but all of them are far in scale and ambition from this almost three-hour long French blockbuster with the charismatic Ivan Mosjoukin like the tsar’s mail. Shot in Latvia, The Baltic country gave 4,000 soldiers from its army to stage the impressive battles between Russians and Tatars in a recreated Siberia on the outskirts of Riga.

Animation and experimental cinema

While the German Hans Richter continued with his avant-garde montages of geometric shapes –that in Film study They also alternate with seagulls and eyeballs–, Marcel Duchamp He left his Dadaist signature in cinema with the short Anemic Cinema, a collaboration between friends with Man Ray y Marc Allégret that used what the French artist called rotor reliefs: circular cards with spiral designs that were placed on a record player and rotated, giving an impression of three-dimensionality.

But the great specialist in the art of cardboard is Lotte Cleaner, clear. The German culminated three years of meticulous dedication adapting Arabian Nights through his technique of silhouettes with cardboard cutouts and lead sheets, animated frame by frame. A craftsmanship in which her husband lent a hand Carl Koch, Walter Ruttmann o Berthold Bartosch, and that crystallized in The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest animated feature film we have.