You can read the program essay for our 2008 screening of The Adventures of Prince Achmed here At ninety-one years of age, Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed still has all the ebullience and self-evident pride of a prototype unveiling itself. In retrospect it’s no wonder that … [Read more...] about The Adventures of Prince Achmed
1917: The Year That Changed the Movies
Golden Ages Come and Go Among the casualties of the First World War were many of the national cinemas of Europe, taking Italy’s silent divas and nearly everything French down with them. Denmark, neutral for the duration, lost its markets to war and, by 1917, its once flourishing Nordisk … [Read more...] about 1917: The Year That Changed the Movies
Two Days
Soviet silent-era cinema usually conjures images of the perspective-bending stylistics of its most famous maker, Sergei Eisenstein, whose startling camera angles, extreme close-ups, and breakneck rhythms have come to define the entire epoch. But among the Soviet films that survive today several were … [Read more...] about Two Days
A Tribute to David Shepard
In Memoriam: Film Preservationist David Shepard (1940–2017) In January 2017, we lost one of our own, David Shepard, beloved champion of silent and classic film. Shepard began at the wee age of twelve renting Kodascope prints to run at home in his newly acquired Bell and Howell projector. When … [Read more...] about A Tribute to David Shepard
Tol’able David
Tol’able David was released on the last day of 1921, on the eve of the year marking modernism’s breakthrough, the year of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Despite being a product of that most modern art, cinema, Tol’able David seems like an unspoiled fragment of pre-industrialized … [Read more...] about Tol’able David
The Three Musketeers
Fresh off the career-defining success playing the swashbuckling man-for-the-people in The Mark of Zorro (1920), Douglas Fairbanks set to work to bring his hero of heroes, d’Artagnan of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, to the screen. More than any other character he portrayed, Fairbanks … [Read more...] about The Three Musketeers
A Strong Man
One of the few surviving silent films made in Poland, A Strong Man (Mocny Człowiek) is also one of the most stylistically advanced. It opens with a stately pan along the riverfront of Warsaw—capital of the nation’s film production—blending into a montage of majestic old buildings. But something … [Read more...] about A Strong Man
The State of Preservation
Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress Silent films, TV shows, screwball comedies, instructional films—they’re all welcome at the Library of Congress, the de facto national library of the United States. Mike Mashon, head of the library’s Moving Image Section, is the person who oversees the … [Read more...] about The State of Preservation