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A personal screening room for early cinema

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From: Soviet Montage

Aelita: Queen of Mars

1924 · Directed by Yakov Protazanov

The Soviet Union's first science fiction film — and one of the most visually extravagant productions of early Soviet cinema. An engineer in Moscow, consumed by jealousy over his wife and frustrated by the drudgery of post-revolutionary life, builds a rocket ship and travels to Mars, where he finds an oppressed worker class ruled by a beautiful but tyrannical queen and leads them in revolution. The Martian sequences, designed by the Constructivist artist Alexandra Exter, are stunning: geometric costumes, angular sets, and a visual language unlike anything else in 1920s cinema. The earthbound scenes offer a fascinatingly candid portrait of everyday life in the early USSR. A wild hybrid of agitprop, domestic melodrama, and interplanetary spectacle that feels genuinely ahead of its time.

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From: French Avant-Garde

Cœur fidèle

1923 · Directed by Jean Epstein

Jean Epstein's passionate early masterpiece — a melodrama about a young orphan girl trapped between a brutish guardian and the gentle dockworker who loves her, transformed by Epstein's visual innovations into something entirely new. The story is simple, almost schematic, but Epstein's camera work is revolutionary: he uses rapid editing, extreme close-ups, swirling point-of-view shots, and a virtuoso fairground sequence (spinning carousels fragmented into kaleidoscopic montage) that makes the viewer physically dizzy. Epstein believed cinema should capture the inner emotional rhythm of experience, not just photograph events, and Cœur fidèle is his most convincing demonstration. The fairground scenes alone influenced an entire generation of French filmmakers, from the Impressionists to the New Wave. A film that vibrates with raw feeling and formal daring.

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From: Scandinavian Realism

Leaves from Satan's Book

1920 · Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer's ambitious early epic, inspired by D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, weaves four stories across history to dramatize Satan's recurring attempts to corrupt humanity. The segments span the betrayal of Christ, the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, and the Finnish Civil War of 1918, with Satan appearing in each as a figure who tempts ordinary people into acts of treachery and cruelty. Dreyer's visual imagination is already remarkably assured — the Inquisition sequence in particular has an intensity that anticipates his later masterpieces — and the film's theological seriousness marks it as unmistakably the work of the man who would create The Passion of Joan of Arc. An uneven but fascinating early work that reveals Dreyer's lifelong preoccupation with faith, suffering, and the human capacity for both evil and grace.

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Film of the Day

Released 129 years ago today

The Haverstraw Tunnel

1897

A train travels along the tracks of the West Shore Railroad in Rockland County, New York. It goes through the Haverstraw Tunnel and out the other side.

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Silent 101

The silent era spans roughly three decades — from the Lumière brothers' first public screening in 1895 to the arrival of synchronized sound in the late 1920s — and contains some of the most inventive, visually stunning, and emotionally powerful filmmaking ever produced. These twenty films offer an introduction to the period's essential works and movements: the trick films that first revealed cinema's capacity for magic, the rise of narrative storytelling, the explosive creativity of German Expressionism and Soviet montage, the golden age of screen comedy, and the artistic peaks that still define what the medium can achieve. If you're new to silent film, start anywhere — every one of these will change your understanding of what early cinema was.

20 films

A Trip to the Moon
The Great Train Robbery
Broken Blossoms
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Tod Browning's Underworld

Tod Browning ran away from his Kentucky home as a teenager to join the circus, and he never really left. He worked as a contortionist, a clown, and a sideshow barker before drifting into the film industry, and the world of traveling performers, carnival grifters, and criminal outcasts became the subject of virtually everything he directed. His films are populated by people who live on the margins: thieves, con artists, sideshow acts, and men so consumed by obsession that they will mutilate themselves rather than abandon it. No other director of the period returned so consistently to the same territory, and no one else made that territory feel so authentic. Browning's greatest creative partnership was with Lon Chaney, and five of the nine films here were made together. Chaney gave physical form to the damaged, driven characters Browning imagined, enduring extraordinary discomfort to play legless crime lords, armless circus performers, and paralyzed magicians plotting revenge from the swamps of East Africa. But even without Chaney, Browning's films share a distinctive atmosphere: a fascination with deception and disguise, a sympathy for people the respectable world considers monstrous, and a willingness to push melodrama into territory so extreme it becomes something like poetry. These nine films represent Browning's silent and early sound work. His most famous productions, Dracula and Freaks, came later and are not yet in the catalog, but the creative sensibility that produced them is fully visible here. The underworld Browning built on screen was drawn from the one he had lived in, and that firsthand knowledge gives his films a texture that studio-bound directors could never replicate.

10 films

The Wicked Darling
Outside the Law
Drifting
White Tiger

Japanese Early Cinema

Japanese cinema developed along a path unlike any other national tradition. While the rest of the world embraced intertitles, Japan retained the benshi, live narrators who stood beside the screen and performed all the characters' voices, provided commentary, and shaped the audience's emotional response to the images. This practice, rooted in centuries of theatrical storytelling, meant that Japanese filmmakers thought about the relationship between image and voice differently from their Western counterparts, and it helps explain why the transition to sound happened later in Japan than almost anywhere else. The films in this collection span from 1921, when Minoru Murata made what is often cited as the first significant Japanese art film, to 1936, when Kenji Mizoguchi produced the work that announced him as one of cinema's great artists. Between those dates, Japanese filmmakers created a body of work that encompassed radical avant-garde experimentation, swashbuckling period adventure, and a tradition of quiet domestic observation that has no real equivalent in Western cinema. Yasujirō Ozu was already developing the understated family dramas that would eventually make him one of the most revered directors in film history. Teinosuke Kinugasa was pushing formal boundaries as aggressively as anything happening in Europe. And Sadao Yamanaka, killed in the war at twenty-eight, was reinventing the samurai genre with a humanist wit that anticipated decades of later filmmaking. What strikes a modern viewer about these films is how little they conform to Western assumptions about what early cinema looks like. The pacing, the compositions, the emotional register all reflect a distinct cultural sensibility. These are not imitations of European or American models; they are the products of a cinematic tradition that was, from the beginning, fully its own.

12 films

Souls on the Road
Serpent
A Page of Madness
Crossroads

Spotlight: Lillian Gish

Lillian Gish is the greatest actress of the silent era, and a serious case can be made that she is the greatest screen actress of any era. She began performing on stage as a child to support her family, entered films in 1912 at the invitation of her friend Mary Pickford, and immediately became D.W. Griffith's most important collaborator — not merely his leading lady but his creative partner in developing the grammar of cinematic storytelling. She understood instinctively what the camera required: performances of radical interiority, stripped of theatrical exaggeration, built from the smallest gestures of the face and hands. Her range was extraordinary. She could play fragile innocence in True Heart Susie and ferocious maternal protectiveness in Way Down East, where she performed the famous ice-floe sequence herself in conditions that permanently damaged her hand. She brought aristocratic composure to La Bohème and The Scarlet Letter, and in The Wind she delivered what many consider the finest performance in all of silent cinema: a woman driven to madness by isolation, wind, and the violence of men, rendered with a psychological precision that anticipates the best work of the sound era by decades. Gish outlived nearly every other figure from the silent period, working steadily into her nineties, and she never stopped advocating for the art form that she had helped create. The twelve films collected here span her entire silent career, from the early Griffith one-reelers through the late MGM productions, and they constitute an unmatched record of screen acting at its highest level.

12 films

The Musketeers of Pig Alley
The Mothering Heart
The Birth of a Nation
Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

Recently Added

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The Blood Ship

The Blood Ship

1927
George B. Seitz
Where East Is East

Where East Is East

1929
Tod Browning
The Captive

The Captive

1915
Cecil B. DeMille
The Noon Whistle

The Noon Whistle

1923
George Jeske
Return to Reason

Return to Reason

1923
Man Ray
The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice

The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice

1929
Man Ray, Jacques-André Boiffard
Limite

Limite

1931
Mário Peixoto
East Side, West Side

East Side, West Side

1927
Allan Dwan
Hell's Heroes

Hell's Heroes

1929
William Wyler
Chicago

Chicago

1927
Frank Urson
A Story of Floating Weeds

A Story of Floating Weeds

1934
Yasujirō Ozu
The Trail of '98

The Trail of '98

1928
Clarence Brown

Pioneers of Cinema

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

1889–1977

Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton

1895–1966

Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy-Blaché

1873–1968

Oscar Micheaux

Oscar Micheaux

1884–1951

Harold Lloyd

Harold Lloyd

1893–1971

Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks

1906–1985

Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang

1890–1976

Clara Bow

Clara Bow

1905–1965

F. W. Murnau

F. W. Murnau

1888–1931

Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès

1861–1938

D.W. Griffith

D.W. Griffith

1875–1948

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein

1898–1948

Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer

1889–1968

Robert Wiene

Robert Wiene

1873–1938

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock

1899–1980

Lon Chaney

Lon Chaney

1883–1930

Lillian Gish

Lillian Gish

1893–1993

Conrad Veidt

Conrad Veidt

1893–1943

Erich von Stroheim

Erich von Stroheim

1885–1957

Douglas Fairbanks

Douglas Fairbanks

1883–1939

Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford

1892–1979

Films Like “The Blood Ship”

Danger Lights

Danger Lights

1931
Juno and the Paycock

Juno and the Paycock

1930
The Late Mathias Pascal

The Late Mathias Pascal

1925
The Scar of Shame

The Scar of Shame

1929
Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box

1929
Asphalt

Asphalt

1929
Sinners in Paradise

Sinners in Paradise

1938
Male and Female

Male and Female

1919
Beggars of Life

Beggars of Life

1928
The Dawn Patrol

The Dawn Patrol

1930
Born Reckless

Born Reckless

1930
Dixiana

Dixiana

1930

Action

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The Three Must-Get-Theres

The Three Must-Get-Theres

1922
Zorro Rides Again

Zorro Rides Again

1937
Serpent

Serpent

1925
Tell It to the Marines

Tell It to the Marines

1926
By the Law

By the Law

1926
The Montana Kid

The Montana Kid

1931
The Trail of '98

The Trail of '98

1928
Life of an American Fireman

Life of an American Fireman

1903
Men Without Women

Men Without Women

1930
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

1916
The Dawn Patrol

The Dawn Patrol

1930
Easy Street

Easy Street

1917

Adventure

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Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge

1924
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

1927
Zorro Rides Again

Zorro Rides Again

1937
Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe

1913
Sumurun

Sumurun

1920
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

1925
Peter Pan

Peter Pan

1924
The Holy Mountain

The Holy Mountain

1926
The Magic Cloak of Oz

The Magic Cloak of Oz

1914
Robin Hood

Robin Hood

1922
East of Borneo

East of Borneo

1931
The Cave of the Silken Web

The Cave of the Silken Web

1927

Animation

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The New Gulliver

The New Gulliver

1935
The Enchanted Drawing

The Enchanted Drawing

1900
The Sinking of the Lusitania

The Sinking of the Lusitania

1918
Fantasmagorie

Fantasmagorie

1908
The Haunted Hotel

The Haunted Hotel

1907
Interplanetary Revolution

Interplanetary Revolution

1924
How a Mosquito Operates

How a Mosquito Operates

1912
Out of the Inkwell

Out of the Inkwell

1919
And the Villain Still Pursued Her; or, the Author's Dream

And the Villain Still Pursued Her; or, the Author's Dream

1906
Black and White

Black and White

1932
Victorious Destination

Victorious Destination

1939
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

1929

All Films

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13 Washington Square

13 Washington Square

1928
Melville W. Brown
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

1916
Stuart Paton
7th Heaven

7th Heaven

1927
Frank Borzage
A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol

1910
J. Searle Dawley, Ashley Miller, Charles Kent
A Corner in Wheat

A Corner in Wheat

1909
D.W. Griffith
A Cottage on Dartmoor

A Cottage on Dartmoor

1929
Anthony Asquith
A Daughter of Brahma

A Daughter of Brahma

1919
August Blom
A Daughter Of Destiny

A Daughter Of Destiny

1928
Henrik Galeen
A Dog's Life

A Dog's Life

1918
Charlie Chaplin
A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms

1932
Frank Borzage
A Film Johnnie

A Film Johnnie

1914
George Nichols
A Flirt's Mistake

A Flirt's Mistake

1914
George Nichols