The Black Ball; or, Vengeance Bequeathed (1913) Poster

(1913)

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4/10
No, Not That Sort Of Ball
boblipton9 July 2022
Mia Cordes and Manny Ziener return from their sister's funeral to find a letter from the deceased. She took her life after having been betrayed by a man. Swearing to remain single and vengeance, they don domino masks and take up a juggling act. Viscount Paul Meffert spies on them in their dressing room and decides to have fraulein Ziener. Little does anyone know he is the man who seduced and abandoned the dead sister!

This early German feature -- only 39 minutes -- is from the pen and direction of Franz Hofer, and there must be a lot of cultural assumptions in this one that I don't get, as it makes little sense as I saw it. The atonal score didn't help much.
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9/10
Creative direction by Franz Hofer
fredhedges14 December 2018
On first viewing, this film seemed to me a rather archaic mix of revenge drama and narratively illogical "attractions". But then I read Yuri Tsivian's essay in "A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades", which drew attention to the symmetrical composition of many shots, especially involving the sisters. He seems to see this as an example of the director's stylistic imaginativeness, like his use of camera masking. But it also, it seems to me, has narrative implications: the mirror-like doubling of the sisters occurs when they are "of one mind". When, on the other hand, they are not pursuing the same goal, as when Edith is attracted to the viscount, or when she follows Violetta as she goes to confront him, the doubling is absent, thus adding psychological implications and complexity to the film.
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Its foreign atmosphere will help it
deickemeyer14 March 2018
A four part offering made in Germany. Its foreign atmosphere will help it. The story is very sentimental. Two sisters swear never to marry till they discover the man who had wronged a dead elder sister. They are on the vaudeville stage and the same man pays attention to one of them much to the other's distress. Later, she finds that he is the man they are seeking and, after a series of scenes not without merit as entertainment, the man, dying from a wound given by the older sister, begs forgiveness. The chase of one sister by the man's groom over the city; and the old-world, mysterious hidden rooms and hidden secret stairs of the man's castle through which the other sister chases him are the picture's best parts. It is a fair offering as a sensational melodrama. - The Moving Picture World, January 10, 1914
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