Essay

Ruan Lingyu, the ill-fated star of The Peach Girl, lived a life that could have been lifted from one of her films. Born into an impoverished family from Guangdong province, she is a native of Shanghai, a city that promised jobs to China’s rural poor and later became known as the Hollywood of the … [Read more...] about The Peach Girl

You can read the program essay for our 2013 screening of The Patsy here Ever since Orson Welles made Citizen Kane in 1941, Marion Davies has been persistently and erroneously identified with the character of Susan Alexander, Charles Foster Kane’s shrill second wife. In fact, Marion Davies and … [Read more...] about The Patsy

You can read the program essay for our 2008 screening of The Patsy here A channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen. With The Patsy, Vidor was tuned just right. It is a perfect film. There is not a scene, gesture, joke, intertitle, gag, bit of detail, or character out of place. … [Read more...] about The Patsy

Called his first “real film” by historian Tom Milne, Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s The Parson’s Widow announced the arrival of an artist. An uncompromising stickler for authenticity in settings and genuineness in performance, he spent weeks and months in libraries poring over research for his sets and … [Read more...] about The Parson’s Widow

You can read the program essay for our 2006 screening of Pandora's Box here Pandora’s Box got off to a bad start. When the film premiered in Berlin in February of 1929, critics and the moviegoing public were largely dismissive of the much anticipated work. Reviews at the time were mixed, even … [Read more...] about Pandora’s Box

You can read the program essay for our 2012 screening of Pandora's Box here By mid-October 1928, when production began on Pandora's Box in Berlin, the art of silent cinema was at its zenith. That year alone, U.S. audiences had already been treated to Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr., Frank … [Read more...] about Pandora’s Box

Norwegian feature film production in the 1920s was infrequent. It could hardly be considered a major industry at the time; there were very few full-length movies being made annually and very few trained and experienced filmmakers working in Norway. It was quite a sensation when someone suddenly had … [Read more...] about Pan

When’s the last time you were surprised by a silent film? Impressed, dazzled, yes, but genuinely surprised? You’d think by 2017, with all the silent-era history scholarship behind us, that authentic, mutant-DNA “Holy Crap” moments would be rare on the ground, and, of course, they are. But there’s no … [Read more...] about A Page of Madness