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A personal screening room for early cinema

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From: Spotlight: Charlie Chaplin

Pay Day

1922 · Directed by Charlie Chaplin

A bricklayer and his wife clash over his end-of-the-week partying.

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From: French Avant-Garde

The Smiling Madame Beudet

1923 · Directed by Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac's quietly devastating portrait of a bourgeois marriage suffocating under its own propriety — and one of the earliest films directed by a woman that survives in good condition. Madame Beudet is intelligent, sensitive, and desperately unhappy, trapped with a boorish, insensitive husband whose one theatrical gesture — pretending to shoot himself with an unloaded revolver — she decides to turn real by loading the gun. Dulac uses Impressionist techniques — slow motion, superimposition, distorted lenses — to externalize Beudet's inner life, her fantasies of escape and her simmering rage, creating a visual language for female subjectivity that was decades ahead of its time. At just forty minutes, it's a concentrated, brilliant study of the quiet violence of domestic confinement. A landmark of feminist cinema.

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From: Early Hitchcock

The Farmer's Wife

1928 · Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock's warmest and funniest film — a gentle rural comedy that reveals a side of the Master of Suspense that audiences rarely got to see. After his wife's death, a prosperous middle-aged farmer decides to remarry, drawing up a list of eligible women in the district and proposing to each in turn, only to be rejected with escalating comedy and diminishing dignity. Hitchcock mines the humor from English rural manners with affectionate precision, and the performances — particularly Gordon Harker as the dry, long-suffering handyman — are delightful. The film moves at a leisurely, countrified pace that couldn't be further from the thrillers that made Hitchcock famous, and that's precisely its charm. A reminder that the man who gave us Psycho and The Birds could also observe ordinary English life with warmth, humor, and genuine tenderness.

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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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Collections

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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

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

German Expressionism

German Expressionism was never just an art style — it was a scream. Born in the wreckage of World War I, in a Germany reeling from defeat, revolution, hyperinflation, and the collapse of every certainty the old empire had promised, it took the internal states that realism couldn't touch — dread, madness, desire, despair — and made them visible. Sets buckled and leaned. Shadows moved with intentions of their own. The camera itself became untrustworthy. The movement proper runs from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920 to roughly the mid-1920s, but its influence bled forward through the entire Weimar period and ultimately into Hollywood, carried there by the very filmmakers who'd invented it when they fled the Nazis in the 1930s. Film noir, horror cinema, science fiction — all descend from what these directors built in Berlin studios out of painted canvas, angled light, and a nation's collective anxiety. This collection traces the full arc: from Caligari's painted nightmares through the movement's peak in the mid-twenties to its late transformation into New Objectivity, ending with Fritz Lang's M — the film where Expressionism shed its stylized sets but kept its soul.

19 films

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Golem: How He Came Into the World
From Morning to Midnight
Destiny

Spotlight: Anna May Wong

Anna May Wong was Hollywood's first Chinese American film star and one of the most consequential, and most wronged, figures in the history of cinema. Born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles in 1905, she broke into films as a teenager and quickly demonstrated a screen presence that critics consistently singled out even when the films around her were mediocre. Her career is a study in paradox: she was internationally celebrated as a fashion icon and a major star in Europe, while American studios kept her trapped in stereotypical Dragon Lady and exotic villain roles, systematically denied her the leading parts she deserved. Anti-miscegenation laws literally prevented her from kissing a white co-star on screen, which effectively barred her from most romantic leads. She responded with remarkable resourcefulness, founding her own production company, traveling to Europe where she was treated as the star she was, mastering French and German to act in multiple language versions of films, and performing Shakespeare on stage opposite Laurence Olivier. She died in 1961 at fifty-six, just before the tide of history might finally have turned in her favor, but her legacy as a pathbreaker for Asian American representation in Hollywood is now rightly celebrated. The films collected here trace her career from a teenage extra to an international star, and they document both the brilliance of her talent and the constraints that prevented it from being fully realized.

13 films

The Red Lantern
Outside the Law
The Toll of the Sea
Drifting

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