Story of the adventures of the resourceful Scheherazade. Newly married to Shahryar, a deranged monarch who murders his brides after the wedding night, Scheherazade manages to keep her head by entertaining her husband with exciting stories.
Viktor Tourjansky’s The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights arrives like a caravan of firelit silhouettes trundling out of a half-remembered dream, its 1924 celluloid already crackling with the perfume of nitrate danger. Viewed today, the film is a palimpsest: Persian miniatures super-imposed on German-expressionist ca...
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Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.
Viktor Tourjansky
Maurice Elvey
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" Viktor Tourjansky’s The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights arrives like a caravan of firelit silhouettes trundling out of a half-remembered dream, its 1924 celluloid already crackling with the perfume of nitrate danger. Viewed today, the film is a palimpsest: Persian miniatures super-imposed on German-expressionist cardboard, Orientalist exotica wrestling with proto-feminist cunning. Yet within this cultural chimera pulses something uncannily modern—the notion that narrative itself is a technol..."
Viktor Tourjansky
France
