Ferryman Maria (1936) - part1 - Frank Wisbar

As i don't want this blog to focus mainly on Silent Movies, let's take few moments of your browsing time to look at a very rare german movie from the 30's. Directed by Frank Wisbar, who is better known as a B-movie director in the 50's, Ferryman Maria aka Death and the Maiden aka Fährmann Maria is a very symbolic and poetic movie. I personally rate it as one of the best german movie of all-time.



Yes, it is "Moody and atmospheric and shot in the style of early silent films with very little dialogue and ponderous pacing". i won't tell you about the plot now, i prefer to let you imagine one based on those frames.

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Sybille Schmitz also played the role of Elizabeth in Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) by Georg Wilhelm Pabst with Louise Brooks.

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Broke and forgotten, she killed herself out of despair at 44 in 1955.

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Sybille Schmitz is astonishing in that sequence.

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Frank Wisbar did a remake of Ferryman Maria in 1946 in the acclaimed Strangler Of The Swamp. It is supposed to be "a must for anybody interested in good early horror" if you believe The Psychotronic Video Guide. But i never saw it. Maybe someday.

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This was the first 12 frames i'll post of this movie.
Next time you'll see the last 12.
In the meantime, any comments will be appreciated.

Paris Qui Dort (1925) - part2 - René Clair -

This is the last 12 frames of my tribute to Paris Qui Dort by Rene Clair.
I chose to focus on the story happenning on the Eiffel Tower because you 've never seen her filmed like that. The characters seem to ignore the gravity and play with it as it wasn't that important. This is poetry at its best.
Wish we were there, don't you ?

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Madeleine Rodrigue is Hesta. She disappeared in the realms of the Cinematograph with the Talkies. Who knows what happened to her ?

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Henri Rollan fights with Albert Préjean, who was the leading act in Marcel Carne's first movie Jenny.

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"is there anybody out there ? " ...
"someone will listen at least for a short while"

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Have we dreamed this story ?
Have you read Calderon's Life Is A Dream ?

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yes, another happy-ending !!
but that's mainly the difference between movies & life, isn't it ?
You may need the Plot to know what's going on in this movie because i took great liberty with the story :
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PLOT
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The watchman at the top of the Eiffel Tower wakes up one morning to find everyone and everything in Paris completely frozen. He walks along deserted streets, occasionally encountering men and women who are alive but quite unconscious. Just as he is beginning to engage in the type of laughter denoting approaching madness, he runs into a group of people who just flew in to town during the night and are very much up and about. The little group settle in and begin to take advantage of their peculiar situation, indulging in good food and the like during the day and sleeping high up in the Eiffel Tower at night in order to avoid a repeat performance of whatever seemed to freeze the rest of the population down below. Midway through the film, the guys suddenly realize that there is only one woman in the group and, for all they know, in the world, so they start fighting among themselves. Eventually, they find out what happened to the world around them. A mad scientist fellow named Dr. Crase activated his "Crase ray" (or crazy ray) and basically stopped Paris and presumably the whole world in its tracks. Convincing the professor to reverse the effects of the ray turns out to be only the first step at restoring normalcy to their lives.
- Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" - Amazon.com -
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NOTES
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These frames are taken from a rare broadcast on french tv Arte a couple of years ago.