Directed by Madeline Brandeis • 1918 • United States
Starring Zoe Rae, Dorphia Brown, John Dorland

Madeline Brandeis was just twenty-one years old when she wrote and directed this fairy-tale fantasy about a boy who falls to earth on a star and his ensuing adventures. With a cast comprised entire...

Directed by Germaine Dulac • 1919 • France
Starring Andrée Brabant, Gabriel Signoret, Jules Raucourt

Germaine Dulac’s earliest extant film, LA CIGARETTE concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband, who believes she is having an affair—speaking to a real postwar crisis of masculinity i...

Directed by Lois Weber • 1921 • United States
Starring Claire Windsor, Louis Calhern, Philip Hubbard

The last film made under the banner of Lois Weber Productions, this moral drama, also written by Weber, is a biting commentary on economic inequality. Through her portrait of the Griggs family—an...

Directed by Germaine Dulac • 1923 • France
Starring Germaine Dermoz, Madeleine Guitty, Jean d'Yd

Considered one of Germaine Dulac’s most feminist films, THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET is also a crucial step in her continuing de-emphasis of traditional narrative structures in favor of visual associati...

Directed by Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov • 1927 • Soviet Union
Starring Kuzma Yastrebitsky, Olga Narbekova, Yelena Maksimova

Returning to a pre–Russian Revolution mode of narrative storytelling, this melodrama focuses on two peasant women—one the victim to an abusive father-in-law and t...

Directed by Marie-Louise Iribe • 1931 • France
Starring Mary Costes, Joë Hamman, Otto Gebühr

This early sound drama was Iribe’s second directorial effort and uses cinematic techniques to visualize Goethe’s 1782 ballad “Erlkönig” and Schubert’s later musical adaptation. Produced by Iribe’s Les Ar...

Directed by Dorothy Davenport • 1934 • United States
Starring Claudia Dell, Lola Lane, Richard Hemingway

When a radio star (Lola Lane) is murdered, a mysterious young woman (Claudia Dell) is accused of the crime. Can a wisecracking reporter (Richard Hemingway), who finds himself captivated by th...

Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1902 • France

Typical of Gaumont’s output at the time and an example of cinema’s early presentational style, this humorous “demonstration” film showcases a vaudeville act featuring a Miss Dundee and her trained performing dogs.

Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1906 • France

In this pun-titled Gaumont comedy, a man rests in a barrel that gets pushed down a hill. The ensuing short is an advanced study on cinematic space and captures the continuity of motion as the rolling barrel moves from location to location, violently h...

Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1907 • France

This historical drama, which depicts a young boy caught by accident in revolutionary conflict, is notable for its unceremonious depiction of a firing squad in action. Remarkable for its confident use of the full frame, it anticipates director Alice Gu...

Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1912 • United States
Starring Magda Foy, Marian Swayne, Mace Greenleaf

This family melodrama echoes aspects of O. Henry’s 1907 short story “The Last Leaf” and depicts the clever attempts of a concerned young girl trying to save her older sister, who is dying of con...

Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1912 • United States
Starring Lee Beggs, Blanche Cornwall

Alice Guy Blaché depicts the pressures to assimilate faced by immigrants in this tale of an Eastern European couple who come to the United States, where the husband learns four lessons in “Americanism.”

Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1912 • United States
Starring Blanche Cornwall, Mace Greenleaf

This drama about a gambling addict and the woman who loves him reveals Alice Guy Blaché to be a master of cinematic space as she skillfully stages action in the foreground and background of the frame an...

Directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley • 1913 • United States
Starring Lois Weber, Val Paul, Douglas Gerrard

Lois Weber stars as a young mother who is home alone when a tramp enters the house in this visually captivating and stylistically inventive thriller, featuring a striking chase scene...

Directed by Mabel Normand • 1914 • United States
Starring Mabel Normand, Charles Chaplin, Chester Conklin

This short farce is often only discussed as the screen debut of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp (here more lecherous and inebriated than in later incarnations). However, director Mabel Normand, who ...

Directed by Lois Weber and Allen G. Siegler • 1916 • United States
Starring J. Edwin Brown, Charles Hammond, Katherine Griffith

Director Lois Weber also provided the script for this short family drama, which follows a discontented Civil War veteran who leaves the home for aging soldiers where he...

Directed by Lotte Reiniger • 1931 • Germany

Lotte Reiniger had already completed her full-length masterpiece THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED when she made this animated tale of romance. A love story set to a baroque score, HARLEQUIN is a delicate black-and-white ballet rendered through exquisite...

Directed by Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff • 1933 • France

Taking eighteen months to make, this dizzyingly surreal pinscreen animation interprets music by Mussorgsky as interplay between shadow/light, permanence/impermanence, motion/stillness, human/animal, and night/day. Claire Parker an...

Directed by Lotte Reiniger • 1934 • Germany

Based on a fable by Ernst Keienburg, this short drama exhibits an entrancing sense of space. Its story about a monstrous man who steals a town’s musical instruments has led scholars to make the case that THE STOLEN HEART is an anti-Nazi allegory. When ...

Directed by Lotte Reiniger • 1935 • Germany

An example of Lotte Reiniger’s animated music films based on opera, PAPAGENO is filled with impeccable attention to detail. Papageno, a bird catcher from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” idles away the time with his avian companions, fights an undulating sn...

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1935 • Germany

Taking its title from the Nuremberg Rally of 1935, this short documentary presents the armed forces of the Third Reich as an efficient system of bodies and machines in motion. The film is a dangerous celebration—through dynamic visuals and careful ed...

Directed by Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth • 1937 • United States

Produced by Mary Ellen Bute’s company, Expanding Cinema, and made in collaboration with Ted Nemeth and sculptor Rutherford Boyd, PARABOLA is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creatin...

Directed by Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren, Ted Nemeth • 1940 • United States

SPOOK SPORT announces itself as a new kind of film ballet comprised of “color, music, and movement” and is a lively interpretation of a night at a graveyard, where colored shapes representing bats, ghosts, and spooks ...

Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid • 1943 • United States
Starring Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

Cinematic trance-maker Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid launched an underground revolution with this avant-garde landmark—shot in their Hollywood home, but a world away from the co...