There’s an image from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu that I can’t shake: a pallid, pointy-eared ghoul stares down at a camera that is positioned below the deck of a ship whose ropes and mast are shooting skyward behind him, framing his figure to evoke a kind of authoritarian menace. And then there’s his … [Read more...] about Nosferatu
Modern Times, Modern Problems
This feature was published in conjunction with Chicago at ADoS 2025 NEW FAMILY VALUES The silent era was a time of the New Woman, suffragettes, flappers, and vampires. Alice Guy-Blaché envisions a world of sexually aggressive ladies-about-town openly harassing timid house-husbands in the … [Read more...] about Modern Times, Modern Problems
American Venus: Esther Ralston
This feature was published in conjunction with Children of Divorce at ADoS 2025 Today, “American Venus” is connected with Louise Brooks, a supporting player in the 1926 comedy of the same name. But in its day the term was associated with the film’s top-billed star: Esther Ralston. A graceful, … [Read more...] about American Venus: Esther Ralston
Found in Translation: What the Subtitles Leave Out
This feature was published in conjunction with A Story of Floating Weeds at ADoS 2025 KEIAN TAIHEIKI A sign on the stage announces Keian Taiheiki, or The Keian Uprising, as Kihachi appears in the role of a ronin in revolt against the shogunate in the mid-1600s, but any Japanese audience in the … [Read more...] about Found in Translation: What the Subtitles Leave Out
Chicago
Nothing guarantees immortality for a murderer quite like getting away with it, as Lizzie Borden could have told you. And so could Beulah Annan, the woman who, in 1924, shot a lover foolish enough to announce he was leaving her. Despite, or perhaps because of sensational press coverage nationwide, … [Read more...] about Chicago
Children of Divorce
The ink had barely dried on Owen Johnson’s novel Children of Divorce when Paramount bought the rights. Its transfer to film was fraught, and the script was tinkered over by no less than five writers. The resulting plot stayed faithful to the novel while transforming it into a quintessential silent … [Read more...] about Children of Divorce
A Story of Floating Weeds
The films of Yasujiro Ozu are rooted in a particular time and place—his own. But they bring to mind core elements of the human condition. Jealousy and desire, sacrifice, the family bond: elements that persist across cultures and the march of years, through changes in technology and outlook. We … [Read more...] about A Story of Floating Weeds
The Navigator
By now, the world has come around: the decades and decades of Chaplin domination have finally receded, and we’re all newly-born Keatonians. Why exactly this has happened is harder to parse—perhaps Buster Keaton appeals to a savvier, mass-media-educated culture, less naïve than the more guileless … [Read more...] about The Navigator