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
Fatty + Buster: The Comique World of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton
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
The Adventures of Prince Achmed
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
The Wedding March
You can read the program essay for our 2000 screening of The Wedding March here Few people in the history of Hollywood have been as revered and reviled as Erich von Stroheim. Among studio magnates like Irving Thalberg, Stroheim’s inability or unwillingness to deliver a film at a usable length … [Read more...] about The Wedding March
Seventh Heaven
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
You Never Know Women
You Never Know Women brings multiple gifts to lovers of silent film: the serene beauty of Florence Vidor (“the orchid lady of the screen”); two leading men, the handsome Clive Brook and the wryly sophisticated Lowell Sherman; character actors El Brendel and Eugene Pallette; performances from key … [Read more...] about You Never Know Women
The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna
A clock strikes 12. Whether noon or midnight is not yet known. Meanwhile in another room, a large bathtub filling with hot water nears to overflowing. As a servant girl closes the faucets in the nick of time, the camera begins to track backward, out of the steamy bathroom to the side of an unmade … [Read more...] about The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna
A Woman of the World
“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