Fantasmagorie

1908 · Directed by Émile Cohl

The first fully animated film, and one of the most joyfully anarchic things ever drawn. Émile Cohl's stick figure materializes on screen and immediately starts causing mayhem — morphing into shapes, swallowing objects, collapsing and reassembling in a stream-of-consciousness delirium that anticipates everything from Tex Avery to Adult Swim. Each of its roughly 700 drawings was photographed individually, and the result is a minute and a half of pure, unrestrained imagination. Cohl couldn't have known he was inventing an art form, but that's exactly what happened on this animator's desk in Paris.

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From · Japanese Early Cinema

Osaka Elegy

1936 · Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Kenji Mizoguchi's breakthrough — the film where he found his voice and began his lifelong commitment to telling stories of women crushed by patriarchal society. Ayako, a telephone operator in modern Osaka, becomes the mistress of her boss to pay off her father's debts, only to be discarded by her family once the money runs out. Mizoguchi's camera work reaches a new level of sophistication here: long takes, fluid tracking shots, and a refusal to cut away during moments of humiliation that forces the viewer to sit with Ayako's pain. The final shot — Ayako turning to look directly into the camera with an expression that mingles defiance, despair, and accusation — is one of the most powerful endings in Japanese cinema. The template for everything Mizoguchi would achieve in his masterpiece period, and a film of piercing emotional honesty.

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Film of the Day

Released 95 years ago today

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas

1931 · F. W. Murnau

On the South Pacific island of Bora Bora, a young couple's love is threatened when the tribal chief declares the girl a sacred virgin.

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Curated Collections

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20 films

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.

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17 films

The Silent West

The Western was the first genre American cinema invented for itself, and for thirty years before John Wayne ever rode into Monument Valley, it did most of its serious work in silence. The frontier had only just closed when the cameras arrived to film it, and the men and women who built the silent Western were doing something stranger than nostalgia: they were inventing the visual grammar — the long approach, the gunfighter's walk, the empty street at noon — that the rest of cinema would still be quoting a century later. This collection follows the form from its first narrative experiment in 1903, through the Eastern stage Westerns and the rise of William S. Hart's flinty moralism, to the wagon-train epics that mythologized the migration even as the last witnesses were still alive, to the doomed romanticism of the late-silent canon, to the first sound Westerns that had to figure out, all over again, what wind and hoofbeats were supposed to mean. What the silent Western lacked in dialogue it more than made up for in landscape: there has never been a stretch of cinema in which the American land itself was photographed with so much attention.

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11 films

The Arrival of Sound

Between 1927 and the early 1930s, cinema broke in half. The arrival of synchronized sound didn't just add a new dimension to movies. It threatened to destroy everything the medium had learned to do. Twenty-five years of visual storytelling, of cameras that could go anywhere and edits that could mean anything, suddenly collapsed into actors standing stiff in front of hidden microphones, reciting dialogue in stage-bound rooms. The earliest talkies were, for the most part, terrible: stilted, immobile, theatrical in the worst sense. But from that wreckage, a generation of filmmakers who had mastered the silent art began asking a question that would reshape cinema entirely: what should sound actually do? The films in this collection represent the most radical answers. Some directors refused sound outright. Others wielded it as a psychological weapon, a musical instrument, an industrial symphony, or a tool for building dread. What unites them is the understanding that sound's power lay not in faithfully reproducing reality, but in finding new ways to transform it. The relationship between what you see and what you hear could be as expressive, as carefully composed, and as deliberately wrong as anything the silent cinema had achieved with light and shadow alone.

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