At the Compound, fancy dress wardrobes, silent cinema and disco, and laundry facilities were on offer.

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It is a black-and-white silent film, and, of course, Charlie Chaplin was a pioneer of black-and-white silent cinema.

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From the beginning, the silent cinema was an art devoted to physical risk and to primitive passions, to rage, lust, ambition, and obsession (silence made emotions more extreme in many ways), and it produced obsession in its huge audience.

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Maddin pulls out all the stops in this elaborate pastiche of silent cinema, home movies, avant-gardish subjectivity, multimedia spectacle, and Grand Guignol hysteria to get at self-pitying childhood traumas that ultimately add up to a strict mother, a distracted father, the primal scene, and his first crush.

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By the mid-to-late 1920s Hollywood would take over the stage of world cinema, and the silent Italian goddesses would fade from public consciousness, says Pena.

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Maddin has discovered a new kind of cinema, the welding of silent-film techniques, avant-garde imagery, and twenty-first-century technology (there are digital effects smuggled in throughout the picture).

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