New York, 7 January: Paramount has released Moana, shot by Robert J. Flaherty in the South Seas, using panchromatic film. Paris, 9 January: The writer Pierre Mac Orlan gave a lecture on humor and the fantastic in the cinema at the Vieux-Colombier Theatre. Moscow, 18 January: The official premiere of The Battleship Potemkin, the film commissioned to celebrate the 20th anniversay of the uprising of 1905, finally took place at the Bolshoi Theatre on 21 December last. The direction was entrusted to the 26-year-old Sergei Eisenstein, and it was written, shot and edited in four months. Taking a single obscure episode of that memorable year for its subject -- the mutiny on a ship in the North Sea -- Eisenstein has created a memorable film moment of recent history. The crew on board the battleship Prince Potemkin refuse to eat rotten meat, and the leaders of the mutiny are shot. When the civilian population of Odessa demonstrate their support for the sailors, they are mowed down by the Czar's troops. The massacre on the Odessa Steps is an extremely exciting sequence: down a seemingly endless flight of steps march soldiers advancing on the fleeing citizens. A nurse is shot, and the baby and its carriage bounce down the steps to destruction, a child lies dead in its mother's arms, and a pince-nez is caught in the tangle of ropes when the doctor's body is thrown into the water. The effects were achieved by using a trolley and a camera strapped to the waist of an acrobat. In this masterpiece, Eisenstein's theories of "the montage of attractions," which he expounded in 1923 and applied in Strike last year, have blossomed. For example, three statues of lions express the awakening of the people by roaring with rage. At the end, a red flag is unfurled as the people cry, "Brothers." (Use this link to view a segment of the "Odessa Steps" sequence -- 4.4 MB, MPEG format -- from Potemkin.) Berlin, 25 January: A film version of Molière's Tartuffe, made by F. W. Murnau, was screened for the opening of the Gloria Palast cinema. Hollywood, 6 February: Distributors and movie exhibitors have signed a contract to establish a new standard of business practices that will provide a framework in case of lawsuits. Tokyo, 28 February: Kinji Mizoguchi has finished work on his latest film, A Paper Doll's Whisper of Spring. London, 1 March: A new director, Alfred Hitchcock, has been hailed by the press as "a young man with the vision of a master" after the release of his first film The Pleasure Garden. Paris, 2 March: A newsreel of Citroën's expedition in Central Africa, called The Black Crossing and filmed by Léon Poirier, was screened at the Opera in the presence of the President of the Republic, Gaston Doumergue. New York, 8 March: Douglas Fairbanks' latest film, The Black Pirate, is the first full-length motion picture in two-tone Technicolor to be widely distributed. However, the pleasing color is only one of this boisterous pirate picture's many attractions. Outstanding is a spectacular stunt sequence when, in order to capture a ship, Doug climbs up a mast and descends to the deck by piercing the wide sail with his sword, ripping the canvas as he goes. Other stunts include 50 pirates swimming under water, and the hero leaping onto the side of the ship. The director, Albert Parker, an old friend of Fairbanks, keeps all the elements satisfactorily afloat. As for the color, the producer-star managed to obtain and use four of the 11 Technicolor cameras currently in existence to considerable effect. Invented by Herbert T. Kalmus and Daniel F. Comstock, Technicolor is a two-color system that has already been used for sequences in such films as Ben-Hur and The Phantom of the Opera. The studio United Artists hope to use the system again in the future. Rome, 9 March: Carmine Gallone has finished making The Last Days of Pompeii for UCI, a film started but then abandoned by Amleto Palermi. Hollywood, 28 March: Josef von Sternberg has disowned his work The Exquisite Sinner in rebellion against the methods employed by the studios. But despite his decision, the film has been re-made by Philip Rosen under Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's orders. California, March: Josef von Sternberg is making The Sea Gull, a film from a scenario written by himself and starring Edna Purviance. Charlie Chaplin commissioned the film from Sternberg. Rome, 3 April: Henceforth, by decree, all movie theaters have to screen Luce newsreels. Washington, 20 April: President Coolidge has pronounced himself opposed to the idea of a federal institution for film censorship. He considers that "the producers themselves have undertaken to reform their industry," by the creation of the MMPDA. Berlin, 26 April: Sergei Eisenstein's study trip is over. He worked on the musical score for The Battleship Potemkin and met directors F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, the actor Emil Jannings, and cameraman Karl Freund while he was here. New York, April: Warner Bros., in equal partnership with Electrical Research Products, Inc. (ERPI), have set up the Vitaphone Corporation. The aim of the company is to continue research in the field of sound in close relationship with Western Electric. Cairo, 17 May: Youssef Wahby has caused a storm of protest by revealing his plans to make a film on the life of Mohammed. Paris, 8 June: Release in France of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, a feature-length comedy directed by Harry Edwards, starring Harry Langdon who is also the film's producer, with screen newcomer Joan Crawford. Frank Capra is one of seven uncredited story writers on the film. Paris, 19 June: Release of Mare Nostrum, with Alice Terry and Antonio Moreno. It is the first film to be directed by Rex Ingram at the Victorine studios in Nice since they were taken over by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer last year. Hollywood, 4 July: The Hungarian film director Mihaly Kertesz has arrived from Europe to take up his new contract with the Warner Bros. studio. He is to be known as Michael Curtiz. Moscow, 21 July: Sergei Eisenstein has received a visit from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who have promised to invite him to Hollywood to direct a film for United Artists. New York, 21 July: Louise Brooks has married Edward Sutherland, the director of It's the Old Army Game, in which she stars with W. C. Fields. New York, 31 July: Ernst Lubitsch's last film for Warner Bros., So This Is Paris, has been hailed as a success by the critics. Hollywood, 5 August: Will H. Hays' three-year contract with the MPPDA has been extended to five years with an increase in his salary and powers. New York, 6 August: Warner Bros. has had a tremendous reception for its Vitaphone sound film presentation at the Warner Theater here. This two-and-a-half hour program consisted of a number of musical shorts, followed by the feature-length Don Juan, starring John Barrymore and Mary Astor. The film has a backing track including sound effects and a full-length score composed by William Axt and recorded by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, but with no spoken dialogue. However, the feature project, directed by Alan Crosland, was overshadowed by the Vitaphone concert attractions that include singer Giovanni Martinelli and Marion Tally, Mischa Elman on the violin, and a short introductory speech, recorded by Will H. Hays, the president of MPPDA. According to Mordaunt Hall, writing in the New York Times, the Vitaphone presentation "stirred a distinguished audience to unusual enthusiasm... The natural reproduction of voices, the tonal quality of musical instruments and the timing of the sound to the lips of singers and actions of musicians was almost uncanny." In fact during the past year, Warners has invested almost $3 million in its experiments with sound, and is only now beginning to reap the benefits. But, if all goes well, this relatively small studio may soon become one of the major players. Paris, 14 August: Jean Renoir's film Nana, from Zola's novel, has begun its eighth week at the Aubert Palace, which has the exclusive screening rights. The film has already beaten this year's record for box-office receipts. Hollywood, 16 August: Young New York-born star Clara Bow has signed a five-year contract with Paramount. But she is refusing to accept the traditionaly morality clause that enables the studio to cancel an employee's contract is they become involved in a scandal. New York, 23 August: Rudolph Valentino, adored by millions of women around the world, and derisively referred to as "The Pink Powder Puff" by some less than enthusiastic male moviegoers, has died of peritonitis at the age of 31. In an dinner with journalist H. L. Mencken shortly before his death, Valentino expressed his deep concern with what he considered to be a doubt in his manhood by these disgruntled men, which was only amplified by the press. Mencken later wrote: "...suddenly it dawned on me that what we were talking about was not what we were talking about. I began to observe him more closely - there was some obvious fineness in him. He began talking of his home, his people, his early youth. His language was simple but eloquent. I could still see the mime before me but now and then there was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly called a gentleman. In brief, his agony was the agony of a man relatively civilised, thrown into a situation of intolerable vulgarity. It was not the trifling effeminacy charges that were riding him, it was the whole grotesque futility of his life. He had achieved out of nothing a vast and dizzy success, a success that was hollow as well as vast. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside. The thing at the start must have only bewildered but it was now revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid. Here was a young man who was living daily the dreams of millions of other young men. Here was one who was catnip to women, here was one who had wealth and fame and here was one who was very unhappy." Death has come at a time when Valentino was $200,000 in debt and still struggling to recover from the baleful influence of his ex-wife, Natacha Rambova. When he died, a rumor spread that he had been poisoned by a discarded mistress, a fitting if fanciful end for the romantic Latin Lover. New York, 30 August: The death of Rudolph Valentino has resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of emotion. Forty thousand people -- most of them women -- turned out for his spectacular funeral in New York. Since the announcement of his death just a week ago, there have been numerous demonstrations of private despair across the United States and around the world. The American police have reported at least a dozen suicides by distraught female fans, while, thoughout the week, thousands filed past Valentino's coffin as he lay in state. All of America has been plunged into a veritable orgy of mourning. Even at the funeral, carried aloft by his Hollywood peers -- including Douglas Fairbanks, Marcus Loew, Paramount chief Adolph Zukor and the chairman of United Artists Joseph M. Schenck -- Rudy's coffin was followed by a huge crowd that surrendered itself to collective hysteria. The funeral service almost turned into a riot, and dozens were injured in the crush. At the graveside, amid all of the flowers, one deranged female admirer attempted to slit her wrists. Only recently, Valentino declared that, "Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams." The untimely death of the object of their obsession will not stop the fair sex from dreaming. Paris, 3 September: The Gaumont Palace has reopened after being renovated under the direction of Tommy Dowd from the Capitol Theater in New York. The orchestra pit is tiered and the organ rises up mechanically. Tokyo, 24 September: The Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa has just presented a film in the German Expressionist style, though, surprisingly, without ever having seen any examples of the genre. Kurutta ippegi (A Page of Madness) is a remarkable work of concentrated emotional power, attempting to understand the nature of insanity while offering a straight narrative in flashback. This story, told with every available camera device, surrounds an elderly man who works voluntarily in a lunatic asylum where his wife is confined (having attempted to drown her baby son in a fit of madness many years earlier), and harbors hopes of setting her free. The 30-year-old Kinugasa had been a child actor and leading oyama (female impersonator), who turned to direction when actresses were employed in films in 1922. On the evidence of A Page of Madness, it can only be the cinema's gain. Moscow, 4 October: The Mother, by Vsevolod Pudovkin, adapted from the work by Maxim Gorki, is being hailed as a masterpiece of the silent cinema. Los Angeles, 14 October: Gary Cooper stars in Henry King's The Winning of Barbara Worth. Paris, 19 October: Release of Mauprat, based on the work by George Sand, produced and directed by Jean Epstein. The young Spanish journalist Luis Buñuel was Epstein's assistant during filming. Moscow, 26 October: Projection of Miss Mend, by Fedor Ozep and Boris Barnet, who studied cinema at Lev Kulachev's experimental laboratory. Berlin, 30 October: Fritz Lang has finished shooting his futuristic allegory Metropolis. A new special effect process combining life-size actions with models was used during filming. With its 30,000 extras and 750 actors, the film is said to have cost 5 million marks. Paris, 31 October: Gaumont-Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer have just bought the French, Belgian and Swiss rights to Abel Gance's epic historical work Napoleon. New York, 7 December: The actor Ivan Mosjoukine has arrived from France on his way to Hollywood to take up his five-year contract with Universal. New York, 14 November: MGM releases Sam Taylor's superb backstage comedy, Exit Smiling, starring Beatrice Lillie. This hilarious film stars one of the funniest women who ever lived, as a theatre slavey who plays both male and female roles in the play to help the love of her life -- whom she does NOT ride off with to live Happily Ever After. Perhaps the 'no happy ending' of this particular Cinderella story will doom it to failure, but it is nevertheless a delight to behold. Lillie is lovely and extremely funny. It's hard to forget the sight of her tossing a long fur boa over her shoulder as she 'vamps' the villain... and getting it caught in an electric fan. Los Angeles, 22 December: Buster Keaton's latest feature, The General, combines comedy with the true story of a train stolen during the American Civil War. The train is the film's real star, reflecting Keaton's inquisitive interest in machinery, and the gags flow with an almost mechanical precision. Filmed on location in Oregon, the budget gobbled up nearly half-a-million dollars, a large part of which was spent on staging a spectacular crash using a real locomotive. Many of the stunts Buster performs in the film's climactic chase are both hilarious and hazardous. Perhaps the most memorable, and equally dangerous, moment in the movie comes in a period of repose when the lovelorn Buster, failing to notice the growing motion of the drive shaft on top of which he is perched, describes a series of melancholy parabolas. Los Angeles, 25 December: The opening of Flesh and the Devil was a premiere in more than one sense: it is the first film directed by Clarence Brown for MGM, it is the first time he has directed Greta Garbo, and it is the first pairing of John Gilbert with the Swedish star. But, however important the others are, the film belongs, without doubt, to Garbo. She exudes sensuality and passion in her scenes with Gilbert. Since arriving in Hollywood with her mentor, Mauritz Stiller, a year and a half ago, she has become a markedly better actress, and she is now consecrated as a truly American star in her third picture. Stiller, on the other hand, has had nothing but failures since his arrival. On Greta Garbo's first film, The Torrent, he functioned merely as assistant director and interpreter, and he was taken off The Temptress after only a week of shooting, to be replaced by Fred Niblo. Hollywood, 31 December: Josef von Sternberg's The Sea Gull will not be distributed, despite two successive versions and a new title, A Woman of the Sea.