![]() The patron saint of sheer visual obsession, Ingram made images so primal they are a world in themselves. If we look closely, whole sequences by Ingram shine through in films by Orson Welles, Josef von Sternberg, Luchino Visconti, James Whale and Stanley Kubrick. Yet Ingram and his lush pictorial style are visible in both. In everything he did the camerawork was impeccable.” 2 Michael Powell, who began as his assistant in the late ’20s, wrote: “For me, he was an inspiration, an ideal.” 3 It is hard to imagine more radically different directors than Lean and Powell. David Lean said: “The man who really got me going was Rex Ingram. Yet Ingram, of all the silent directors, had the greatest impact on the sound era. Of his 27 films, less than half survive and only a few are available on DVD or Blu-Ray. His myth weighs little against the fact that most of his work is downright hard to see. As a romantic rebel who walked out on MGM to work in Europe and North Africa and run his own studio in Nice. As a sexually ambivalent Svengali who discovered Valentino and other stars. ![]() ![]() We may know him as the key Hollywood filmmaker of the 1920s. We are aware of him, these days, less as a director than as a fantasy of what a director might be. ![]() Rex Ingram may be the best-known enigma in film history. Issue 76 January 15, 1893, Dublin, Ireland. ![]()
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