Lillian Gish in The Wind (1928, dir. Victor Sjöström) (via)

Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978, dir. Werner Herzog)

“Kinski loved the work and for pretty much the whole time on set he was happy, even though he would throw a tantrum maybe every other day. He was at ease with himself and the world at the time and loved to sit with his Japanese make-up artist Reiko Kruk for hours and hours. He would listen to Japanese music as she sculpted him every morning, putting his ears and fingernails on. We had to do the teeth and ears and shave his head every morning and just seeing him with this enormous patience was a fine sight. I would walk in and sit with him for fifteen minutes. We did not talk, we just looked at each other in the mirror and nodded at each other. He was good with the project, and he was good with himself.

Though the film is close to two hours and Klaus is on screen for maybe seventeen minutes, his vampire dominates absolutely every single scene. That is the finest compliment I can give him for his performance. Everything in the film works towards these seventeen minutes. His character is constantly present because of the story and the images which intensify this sense of doom and terror and anxiety. It took fifty years to find a vampire to rival the one [F.W.] Murnau created, and I say that no one in the next fifty years will be able to play Nosferatu like Kinski has done. This is not a prophecy, rather an absolute certitude. I could give you fifty years and a million dollars to find someone better than Kinski and you would fail.”

-Werner Herzog, quoted in Herzog on Herzog

Diver competing at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Olympia (1938, dir. Leni Riefenstahl) Scene online here.

(via)

Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo’s nightmare sequence (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Catherine Hessling in Whirlpool of Fate (1925, dir. Jean Renoir) (via)

Laboratory set for L’Inhumaine (1924, dir. Marcel L’Herbier) Set designer: Fernand Léger.

Alla Nazimova & Arthur Jasmine in Salome (1923, dir. Charles Bryant)

Production designer Natacha Rambova based much of Salome’s decor and costumes on the decadent illustrations Aubrey Beardsley produced for the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.

The above still is a recreation of Beardsley’s The Peacock Skirt

Lana Turner & John Garfield in publicity still for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, dir. Tay Garnett) 

“What did she have that makes me feel that way about her? I don’t know. She wanted something, and she tried to get it. She tried all the wrong ways, but she tried. I don’t know what made her feel that way about me, because she knew me. She called it on me plenty of times, that I wasn’t any good. I never really wanted anything, but her. But that’s a lot. I guess it’s not often that a woman even has that.”

-James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

Jean Painlevé with his underwater camera (1935, via)

“Without free thinking, no progress is possible. Governments may be able to fabricate statistics about agricultural or industrial production, but they cannot invent art, literature, or science.”

The Seahorse (1934), one of Jean Painlevé’s “scientific-poetic” sea documentaries 

“In the early 1930s, when Painlevé set out to make one of the first films ever to use footage shot underwater, he chose as its subject the seahorse—a species with unusual, and to Painlevé, commendable sex roles: whereas it is the female seahorse who produces the eggs, it is the male who gives birth to them. ‘The seahorse,’ he would later write, ‘was for me a splendid way of promoting the kindness and virtue of the father while at the same time underlining the necessity of the mother. In other words, I wanted to re-establish the balance between male and female.”

-excerpted from Maverick Filmmaker Jean Painlevé (via)

Sylvia Sidney in You Only Live Once (1937, dir. Fritz Lang) (via Still Moving: The Film and Media Collections of the Museum of Modern Art)

Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther (1963, dir. Blake Edwards)

“When I was making The Pink Panther and playing the accident-prone Inspector Clouseau for the first time, I remembered the loss of my virginity and the embarrassment I’d suffered struggling out of my nightwear so that I could get on with satisfying my barely containable passion.

It made a good gag and consolidated the conviction I had about Clouseau that, in all circumstances, whatever boob he’d made, the man must keep his dignity - which gave him a certain pathetic charm that the girls found seductive. It all went back to the frustrations I suffered as a result of a lack of priorities in love-making.”

-Sellers, quoted in Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers