Kino-polis, a screening room for early cinema

20 films

Silent 101

Twenty films, 1902 to 1929, laid out as a map rather than a trophy case.

17 films

First Steps

These are the years when nobody had agreed what a movie was for.

19 films

German Expressionism

These films came out of a Germany that had just lost a war and then lost the value of money.

9 films

Pioneers: Oscar Micheaux

Micheaux wrote, directed, and sold his own pictures because the studios would not.

20 films

Soviet Montage

After 1917 a group of Soviet directors treated the cut as the argument, not the glue.

19 films

Scandinavian Realism

Sweden and Denmark spent the 1910s and early 1920s shooting outside, in real weather, with a moral seriousness borrowed from Ibsen and Lagerlöf.

18 films

American Comedy

American screen comedy in these years is a set of methods, not a mood.

13 films

Spotlight: Anna May Wong

Wong Liu Tsong was born in Los Angeles in 1905 and was on screen by fourteen.

21 films

American Spectacle

These are the pictures that spent the money where you can see it.

18 films

French Avant-Garde

French filmmakers in the 1920s treated the camera as a way to think, not just to tell.

20 films

The Supernatural and the Occult

Cinema reached for ghosts early because the machine could do substitutions.

12 films

Japanese Early Cinema

Japanese silent cinema kept the benshi, a live narrator who spoke every role beside the screen.