Essay

You can read the program essay for our 2009 screening of West of Zanzibar here One of the great creative duos of the silent era was that between “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney and his most frequent director, Tod Browning. The two came from similar professional backgrounds—on the low end of … [Read more...] about West of Zanzibar

You can read the program essay for our 2019 screening of The Wedding March here Fay Wray spent the first three years of her life in Alberta, Canada, where her father ran a sawmill. The family came to America in 1911 and settled first in Arizona, then moved to Utah, following a reversal of family … [Read more...] about The Wedding March

In 1927 Weimar Germany, amid escalating social conflict, Friedrich Zelnik, known only for his genteel musicals, was the last person anyone figured to direct a film version of Gerhart Hauptmann’s classic The Weavers, a contentious and controversial play about a proletarian uprising. The story of the … [Read more...] about The Weavers

Before Mickey Mouse, before the Fairbanksian moustache, and even before the Alice comedies, came Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-grams. Disney’s first animated films began in 1920 as after-work projects when Disney was a commercial artist for an advertising company in Kansas City. He made these cartoons by … [Read more...] about Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-grams, 1921-1923

In his epic multivolume Histoire du cinéma, French film theoretician and historian Jean Mitry wrote, “If I had to choose one film of all the French productions of the 1920s, it is undoubtedly Visages d’enfants I would save … It is the only one that is still modern today.” That was written more than … [Read more...] about Visages d’enfants

One of the outstanding examples of the mid-twenties golden age of German cinema, Ewald André Dupont’s Varieté has a plot that would work nicely for a late-forties film noir, complete with an alluring femme fatale, betrayal, and death. It begins in a bleak prison where Boss Huller (Emil Jannings) is … [Read more...] about Varieté

It’s often lamented that only ten to twenty per cent of films made in the silent era still exist. So whenever a coveted film thought lost suddenly turns up, it’s just cause for celebration. But what of the many worthy films no one is looking for, their directors neglected, their stars forgotten, … [Read more...] about The Valley of the Giants