STREET ANGEL directed by Frank Borzage (USA, 1928)
This week I began a 5 week MOOC in film history at Coursera run by Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University called ‘The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color’. Street Angel is the first of ten movies on the syllabus and will be a hard act to follow.
What a great film this is!
It was chosen because it was made at a time when silent movies were about to be replaced by talkies and shows how directors with visual style didn’t really need dialogue to tell a rich and emotionally powerful story.
Prof Higgins says, rightly, that “it contains all that is great and weird about silent films”. Continue reading
