Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #8
In the early days of cinema, everything you could with a camera was revolutionary. The works of folks like Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers may seem quaint now, but at the time, they were changing how art could be made forever. Film was such a new artform at that point that the very act of filming anything was rightly considered something tantamount to an act of Biblical proportions. By the time 1929 rolled around, cinema had advanced notably since the 1890-1900 era, but there was still much to be done and experimented with when it came to the art of filmmaking. There was still plenty of artistic terrains yet to be charted in the realm of cinema.
