Essay

Before Dracula, before Frankenstein, before the Universal Pictures Corporation understood there was money to be made scaring the bejesus out of its audience, there was the Phantom. He is the unholy spawn of three mismatched parents: a French writer who claimed his fiction was fact-based, a brilliant … [Read more...] about The Phantom of the Opera

Ernst Lubitsch’s marriage movies are sophisticated, witty, and timeless, and one of the best is his 1924 film, The Marriage Circle. It takes place in Vienna, “the city of laughter and light romance,” and it begins with an unexpected focus: a man has a hole in the toe of his sock. It’s a very … [Read more...] about The Marriage Circle

When she died in 1968 at ninety-five years old, Alice Guy Blaché believed that all but a handful of her titles were lost. In a career that began at the beginning of movies, Guy had written, produced, and/or directed about a thousand, including one hundred sound films long before talkies. After a … [Read more...] about Woman with a Movie Camera: The Films of Alice Guy Blaché

One of Paramount’s last silent films, released in February 1929, is this spectacularly photographed tale of a Navajo caught between two cultures. By the late 1920s, debate about the relationship of Native Americans to the dominant society was reaching a turning point, as reflected in a … [Read more...] about Redskin

Good Night, Nurse (1918), The Cook (1918), and The Garage (1919) Three shorts directed by and starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle with featured player Buster Keaton One of the most consequential chance meetings in cinema history occurred on a rainy day in March 1917 in New York City. Or so goes … [Read more...] about Fatty + Buster: The Comique World of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton

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

You can read the program essay for our 2006 screening of Seventh Heaven here Our own age usually prefers its film romances to play out between people who are rich, or at least comfortably well off. Silent film, on the other hand, loved its poor people; and the ethereal, peerlessly … [Read more...] about Seventh Heaven