You can read the program essay for our 2019 screening of Our Hospitality here In a 1949 Life magazine article, James Agee described Buster Keaton’s deadpan face to an audience about to rediscover his talent. “[His expression was] an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to … [Read more...] about Our Hospitality
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 1927–1928
FILMS Trolley Troubles; Oh, Teacher; Great Guns; Mechanical Cow; All Wet; The Ocean Hop; Bright Lights; Oh What a Knight Created and Produced by Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, 1927–1928 Donald, Goofy, Pluto, and… Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. That’s how the list of major Disney animated characters might … [Read more...] about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 1927–1928
Lady of the Pavements
Lady of the Pavements opened in 1929 to rave reviews. Although directed by the distinguished D.W. Griffith, recognized as a master even then, it was Lupe Vélez’s performance both on and off screen that got all the attention. While Griffith was reinventing his style with the emergence of sound, Vélez … [Read more...] about Lady of the Pavements
A Kiss From Mary Pickford
When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks visited Moscow on a vacation trip in 1926, they were the most famous couple in the world. Among the first Hollywood celebrities, they were idolized everywhere, even in the Soviet Union, where audiences preferred American and German films to groundbreaking … [Read more...] about A Kiss From Mary Pickford
J’Accuse
Five months after the armistice was signed that ended World War I, Abel Gance premiered his epic J’Accuse in Paris. Called the Great War, WWI was also dubbed “the war to end all wars,” and Gance’s film was aimed at making that statement a reality. Many of his own friends had been killed in the … [Read more...] about J’Accuse
The Gaucho
In 1926 Douglas Fairbanks was beginning to sense his own mortality. His elder half-brother John had suffered a paralytic stroke and would be dead within the year. His storybook union to Mary Pickford was strained, her excessive drinking an affront to her husband’s lifelong abstinence. Yet “Doug”, as … [Read more...] about The Gaucho
The Fall of the House of Usher
One evening in the mid-1930s Henri Langlois took Georges Franju to Montmartre’s Studio 28, where a few years earlier the first Surrealist films had played to riotous crowds. The program included screenings of Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) and Buñuel and … [Read more...] about The Fall of the House of Usher
Erotikon
Czech cinema is nearly as old as cinema itself. Yet with one dramatic exception, it did not gain international attention until the Czech New Wave dazzled the world in the 1960s. The exception, 1933’s Ecstase (Ecstasy), was part of an earlier modernist movement encompassing art, literature, and film … [Read more...] about Erotikon