Essay

The city of Shanghai in the 1930s was a center of great social and political upheaval. The Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, was busy trying to rout the then-underground Chinese Communist Party, while one thousand miles to the north, Japanese Imperial forces had occupied Manchuria. Chiang … [Read more...] about Wild Rose

Camera-wielding insects, taunting red devils, monstrously large pets — since its inception, cinema has been aligned with the fantastic. Early pioneers of special effects developed cinematic “tricks”— cross-dissolves, stop-motion animation, matte shots, even the close-up — that became the building … [Read more...] about Wild and Weird, 1906-1928

As bright a star as Hollywood ever produced, receiving up to ten thousand letters a week from adoring fans at the peak of her stardom in the mid-1920s, Colleen Moore trusted the wrong people with her life’s work. In 1944, she gave her collection of fifteen nitrate films to the Museum of Modern Art … [Read more...] about Why Be Good?

Thomas Edison, world famous for his light bulb and phonograph, created a new sensation in 1894 with his Kinetoscope, a 35mm movie viewing device enclosed in an oak cabinet. Although his team developed a working system, Edison failed to appreciate the value of a projector that would enable large … [Read more...] about When the Earth Trembled

You can read the program essay for our 2016 screening of When the Clouds Roll By here The image of Douglas Fairbanks is that of the swashbuckling hero from The Mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922), and The Thief of Baghdad (1924). But the cornerstone of Fairbanks’s fame was as a popular … [Read more...] about When the Clouds Roll By

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

Reginald Denny created such a vivid image of the all-American man in his silent film portrayals that when the coming of sound revealed his very British accent, it nearly meant an end to his career. Instead, he was relegated to a series of bland supporting roles as upper-class Brits. But in the … [Read more...] about What Happened to Jones