2016

“I am a woman of the world, not the world’s woman,” states “Elnora Natatorini,” as played by Pola Negri in the 1925 A Woman of the World. She has just found the man she adores holding another woman in his arms. Despite her diamond earrings, her stylish bobbed hair, her lengthy fur train, her … [Read more...] about A Woman of the World

You can read the program essay for our 2001 screening of Within Our Gates here Wiithin Our Gates is the earliest surviving feature film by an African American, a distinction that can make it seem merely some historic curiosity. Instead, the film remains dramatically gripping and socially … [Read more...] about Within Our Gates

You can read the program essay for our 2004 screening of When the Clouds Roll By here When the Clouds Roll By is a dazzling comic spree of action and fantasia. The second film Douglas Fairbanks released through his own distribution company, United Artists, it was one of the last of his “Coat and … [Read more...] about When the Clouds Roll By

One of the outstanding examples of the mid-twenties golden age of German cinema, Ewald André Dupont’s Varieté has a plot that would work nicely for a late-forties film noir, complete with an alluring femme fatale, betrayal, and death. It begins in a bleak prison where Boss Huller (Emil Jannings) is … [Read more...] about Varieté

Few directors have a stronger trademark than Yasujiro Ozu, who developed one of the most original and distinctive filmmaking styles in cinema history. But viewers who know Ozu through his delicately heartbreaking Tokyo Story (1953) and his contemplative portraits of ordinary families may be … [Read more...] about That Night’s Wife

For a brief period between the late 1910s and early 1920s, Swedish cinema challenged the supremacy of Hollywood in the production of sophisticated, mature, and visually majestic films. Filmmakers Victor Sjöstrom, Mauritz Stiller, and the lesser known outside Sweden Gustaf Molander led the way, … [Read more...] about The Strongest