In 2018, Pere Portabella transformed a remarkable historical documentary from 1974, in which five former political prisoners of the Franco regime meet to share their experiences over a meal, into a meditation on his great themes: time, language, the complexity of memory, and the weight of history.

An astonishing achievement in montage, General Report on Some Issues of Interest for a Public Screening offers a prismatic portrait of the Spanish Transition to constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy during the period just after the death of General Franco in 1975. Portabella incorporates perspectives from all sides (from republicans to monarchists to representatives of labor unions), encouraging the viewer to consider the nature and significance of politics as well as the role of cinematic representation in shaping the understanding of people trying to envision a new future after forty years of dictatorship.

Action Santos is one of the most structurally rigorous collaborations of director Pere Portabella and composer Carles Santos. After an opening montage of preparatory gestures - which evokes Portabella's earlier Nocturno 29 (1968) as well as silent cinema - the film dialectically contrasts a performance by Santos of a piano piece by Frédéric Chopin with an equally long shot of Santos silently listening to his recording.

Pere Portabella's interest in cinematic texture - reflected in choices of angle, lens, rhythm, and even film stock - is perfectly complemented by his rigorous and adventurous treatment of sound and music. The connection between artistic performance, quotidian spaces, and myth is particularly evident in his final fictional feature The Silence Before Bach. Portabella's montage relates several layered elements: Germany's great rivers, "phantom rides" on moving trains, legendary anecdotes about the discovery of lost Bach manuscripts at a meat market, elegant camera movements, and a subway performance of the Prelude to Bach's First Cello Suite (1717). The Silence Before Bach is a perfect encapsulation of the grand ambition and associative richness of Portabella's work.

From 1936 on, Joan Miró's work entered a self-described "savage" period, obsessed, like Pablo Picasso's works in the same period, with modernist versions of the monsters that inhabited Francisco Goya's imagination. Through its dense montage, Pere Portabella's film Aidez l'Espagne situates some of Miró's work in this context, juxtaposing footage from the Spanish Civil War with prints from the "Barcelona" series and his iconic illustration Aidez l'Espagne. A commission from the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC), Portabella's film was made to accompany the major Joan Miró retrospective in Barcelona in 1969.

In an effort to promote Spain's image abroad, the first official exhibition of Joan Miró's was held in Barcelona in 1968 and supported by Francoist officials. The Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC) organized a counter-exhibition in 1969. Miró had the idea of creating a long mural on the windows of the COAC building (in Cathedral Square), which already featured a mural by Pablo Picasso. Portabella asked to film not only the creation of the mural, but also its live deconstruction at the moment the exhibition closed. Miró was enthusiastic, and the result was this singular collaborative portrait.

Commissioned to accompany the May-June 1969 exhibition of Joan Miró's work organized by the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC), the film goes into the basement of the National Library in Madrid to show some of the paintings that won the National Award between 1941 and 1969. The mirror image of Miró, the Other, the film provides a human perspective on artistic institutions while vividly demonstrating Falangist ideals.

Commissioned by the Galeria Maeght for a 1974 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, Miró, the Forge shows all phases of creation for the artist's bronze sculptures Puertas Mallorquinas. Portabella's sharp cutting around the kiln evokes montage films like Coal Face (1935), but he also finds opportunities for the elegant camera movements that distinguish his fictional features. The longest of Portabella's collaborations with Miró, the film also offers the greatest insight into his production process.

A counterpart to Miró, the Forge, Miró Tapestry was a commission by the Galeria Maeght for a 1974 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris. It documents the creation of the massive World Trade Center Tapestry that was destroyed on September 11, 2001. Portabella characteristically finds striking montage connections not only between the different phases of the production process, but also between the artist's studio, his country house in Mont-roig del Camp, and the landscapes around Tarragona.

The first of Pere Portabella's fictional films to be shot entirely in color, Warsaw Bridge (1989) is also one of his greatest. From the dream-like opening montage of urban workspaces, icons of turn-of-the-century Modernisme, and enveloping Romanesque arcades to the surreal final sequence, the film explores the layers of art and memory embedded in Barcelona. Portabella collaborated closely with composer Carles Santos (who also served as co-writer), and the film's most ambitious and astonishing sequence connects television footage of trucks driving at night, shots of Barcelona's famous fish market, and an elaborately staged operatic performance. For Portabella, it is cinema alone that offers the possibility of bridging different locations, art forms, and ideas of past and future.

The first major film that Portabella produced, Carlos Saura's The Delinquents (Los Golfos, 1960), makes use of mirroring camera movements to link exterior and interior spaces. These strategies are elaborated in Portabella's first directed feature, Nocturno 29 (1968), where the length of the shots is clearly designed to move beyond strict narrative exigency and to open up other dimensions of engagement. It is with this film that Portabella begins using point-of-view and cinematic textures to open up a different "look" on the world.

Umbracle (1972) is an exploration of the iconography, fantasies, and surreal encounters of Francoist Spain. Portabella conceived of the film as having a spiraling structure in which the repeated visits to the museum would echo each other, much as the flaneur-like observations of the character played by Christopher Lee are mirrored in the looks and movements of the figure surveilling him. Lee's recitation of Edgar Allen Poe's Romantic poem "The Raven" (1845) is the indelible center of this mysterious and haunting film.

Far more than a behind-the-scenes documentary, Vampir-Cuadecuc is a complete reinvention of Jess Franco's commercial horror film Count Dracula (1970). By working in 16mm, stripping narrative scenes of sound, combining original music from composer Carles Santos with extracts from Wagner's Ring Cycle, and establishing a new audiovisual montage, director Pere Portabella distills the Dracula myth to its essence. Vampir-Cuadecuc is as primal and elemental an adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel as F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. The film's originality, sense of texture, and photogenic power makes it one of Portabella's signature achievements and one of the defining works of Spanish independent cinema.

Pere Portabella played a key role in Spanish cinema's transition out of dictatorship, produced landmark films including Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961), and introduced an experimental, poetic sensibility that continues to fascinate and inspire.

Los Golfos (The Delinquents) launched the careers of two key figures of New Spanish Cinema: director Carlos Saura and producer Pere Portabella. Saura's film offers one of cinema's most distinctive portraits of Madrid, shot with a distinctive fusion of semi-documentary authenticity and lustrous stylization by Juan Julio Baena. Saura claimed that this was one of his most difficult shoots due to censorship at every stage of production. Premiered at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the film underwent several changes before this version was publicly released two years later. An ambiguous hybrid that pointed a way out of Falangist conventions, Los Golfos looks back to the city films of the silent era and evokes both the anecdotal neorealism of early Federico Fellini and the unsentimental brutality of Luis Buñuel's Mexican films (Portabella and Saura would coax Buñuel back to Spain to make Viridiana in 1961). With its interlocked narrative episodes and use of mirroring camera movements to link exterior and interior spaces, it also anticipates the formally adventurous films both Saura and Portabella would make at the end of the decade.

Borzage's personal favorite of his films, A Farewell to Arms is the most disarmingly direct expression of his stark moral vision. The brutal realism and stoic resignation of Ernest Hemingway's famous First World War novel is transformed into a pilgrim's progress in which total emotional conviction triumphs over world-weary cynicism (Hemingway, a much more reserved romantic, felt betrayed). Borzage makes poetic use of ellipses throughout and distills the peripatetic journey across the Italian front into a dense war montage accompanied by Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. This is counterbalanced at the end by a sustained exploration of doubt, renewal, and transfiguration accompanied, ineluctably, by the culminating Liebestod of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.

Street Angel is the most photographically lush and overtly Expressionist of Borzage's films. Appropriately, it is also the most concerned with the permutations and metaphoric effects of light, from the sun-drenched evocations of Naples' Santa-Lucia Pier to the mist-filled environments that begin and end the film. This overwhelming sense of atmosphere is perfectly matched by the emphasis on earthy physical presence, especially the recurring shots of feet. The dominant motif is the circle, and Borzage and his team constructed a special set in which the camera could move 360 degrees, to more fully connect the characters and their fates to their environments and to maximize the emotional impact of repetition and variation (the opening ascent is mirrored in the final romantic descent). The vertiginous use of a portrait painting to encapsulate the movement from subterfuge and misrecognition to genuine insight is a perfect distillation of Borzage's romantic vision (and anticipates the work of Alfred Hitchcock). Like Seventh Heaven, Street Angel was made with the Movietone synchronized score and sound system, and it incorporates several dynamic effects as well as a rendition of the popular Neapolitan song "O sole mio."

The film that secured Frank Borzage's reputation as a major stylist (it earned him the very first Academy Award for Direction), Seventh Heaven is one of cinema's most audacious melodramas. Borzage traveled to Paris and researched local details in pre-World War One Montmartre for two months before recreating everything in the studio. Ably assisted by set designer Harry Oliver and cinematographer Ernest Palmer, Borzage transformed a Dickensian social drama into a mystical exploration of the spirit and the flesh. The influence of the variegated chiaroscuro and mysterious spaces of F. W. Murnau, newly arrived in America, is evident throughout. However, the camera movements and the recurring use of stairs - as spatially eloquent as they are metaphorically rich - are uniquely Borzage's. Seventh Heaven was one of the first films made using the Movietone synchronized score and sound system, and it culminates in an operatic fusion of song, gesture, and visionary sentiment.

Energetic, comic, and attentive to the possibilities of cinema and of life, Arnaud Desplechin's films demonstrate the enduring relevance of François Truffaut's dictum, "Every shot, four ideas."

In between the creation of the pioneering epics The Fall of Troy (1911) and Cabiria (1914), Giovanni Pastrone directed this reflexive comedy for Turin-based Itala Film. The burlesque performance of lead Enrico Vaser is typical of pre-World War I Italian cinema, but the emphasis on viewing positions and the cuts across the axis marked by the movie screen are characteristic of Pastrone's increasingly adventurous style. Presented in a new Desmetcolor restoration by the Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) of a print from the Museuo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin).

Clara Kimball Young plays a starstruck teenager whose delirious obsession with fictional idol Howard Hanson diminishes only she meets him for dinner. Young's performance demonstrates the distinctively American fusion of naturalistic movement, pantomime-like arm gestures, and bold facial expression that made her one of the leading stars at the Vitagraph studios. Presented in a new restoration by the Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam).

Jerry Schatzberg's last film is as restless, curious, and independent-minded as the early 1970s works that made his reputation. Schatzberg experiments with new video technologies and unusual shifts in point-of-view to capture the outsider perspective of the French visitor played by Guillaume Canet, enabling him to imbue both less familiar areas and iconic landmarks of New York with a fresh sense of discovery.

Hungarian émigré László Moholy-Nagy's richest film is also one of his most constrained. With only 300 meters of film at his disposal, Moholy-Nagy concentrated his energies on a single section of the ancient city of Marseille, an impoverished and architecturally distinctive area known as the Vieux Port. Made shortly after Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus, the film encapsulates the interplay of Painting-Photography-Film celebrated in his much-discussed 1925 book. It also inaugurates a new independent style based on a purely cinematic synthesis of formal and social observation.

Born in Kiev, Eugène Deslaw (Ievhen Slavchenko) settled in Paris after World War I and worked in all areas of the city's burgeoning film culture (as a projectionist, critic, and foreign correspondent as well as a cameraman and director). Electric Nights, the most visually expressive of his independent films, stands at the crossroads of the major modernist artistic movements of the 1920s. The celebration of artificial lights, amusement parks, and street signs in Paris, Berlin, London, and Prague looks back to the early "cinema of attractions," while the shifts in camera perspective and lyrical editing anticipate later American avant-gardists like Stan Brakhage.

The different strands of Jerry Schatzberg's filmmaking are beautifully combined in this short film he was invited to make in 1995 for a centenary tribute to the Lumière Brothers and their extraordinary invention. Using an original cinématographe camera, Schatzberg reworks the forms of 1895 (one, unbroken shot of 52 seconds from a fixed camera position) to stage an encounter that is both familiar and unexpected.

Manhatta fuses modernist painter Charles Sheeler's Precisionist emphasis on hard lines and sharp geometric forms with the immediacy and conviction of Paul Strand's "straight" photography. Throughout the 1910s, Strand had attempted to reinvigorate the American Romantic traditions of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (the film's intertitles are taken from the "Mannahatta" section of his 1855 poem Leaves of Grass) in a new technological age. Strand saw the camera as a vehicle for a unique synthesis of empirical knowledge and intuitive understanding that would enable a fuller appreciation of reality. He restaged some of his own photographs - including his iconic 1915 image of Wall Street - for the film, but the juxtapositions possess a distinctive cinematic rhythm that anticipates the musical documentaries of Walter Ruttmann, the montage of Sergei Eisenstein, and the poetic transitions of Yasujirō Ozu.

Reunion is a moving distillation of Jerry Schatzberg's thematic and stylistic concerns, and his most haunting exploration of the ambiguities of memory. Schatzberg's subtle orchestration of movement and gesture is perfectly complemented by Alexander Trauner's elegant production design and the concision of the dialogue. Harold Pinter's adaptation captures the shifting cadences of painter Fred Uhlman's novella about the deep friendship between a young German aristocrat and the son of a Jewish doctor in early 1930s Stuttgart. The most underrated of Schatzberg's films, Reunion is also his personal favorite.

Jerry Schatzberg's sensitivity to the complexity and mystery of human motivation has made him an eminent portrait photographer, a key figure in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, and one of the most singular voices in American independent cinema.

Director Carmine Gallone is best known for period epics, but, like his American counterpart Cecil B. DeMille, he was first celebrated for artistically ambitious melodramas. With Flower of Evil, Gallone, scriptwriter Nino Oxilia, and star Lyda Borelli (muse of Gabriele D’Annunzio) created one of the great masterworks of early Italian cinema. Haunting and enigmatic, Flower of Evil distills complex emotions into a purely cinematic language of gesture, movement, light, and space. Presented in a high definition restoration of a tinted 35mm nitrate print held by the EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) that was originally part of the collection of Dutch film exhibitor Jean Desmet. Original score by Cellophon. Subtitles available.

This sly short develops traditional marital misunderstandings into a comic commentary on both the luxurious new movie theaters emerging in the 1910s and the people who frequented them. With the posters for Quo Vadis (1912) featuring prominently in the background, director Enrico Guazzoni pokes fun at the pioneering epic that secured his own reputation in the budding Italian film industry. Presented in a new restoration by the Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) of a print from the Museuo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin), which makes it possible to fully appreciate the nuances of Desmetcolor. Subtitles available.

The most influential of all montage films, Battleship Potemkin remains as audacious and inspiring as ever. Conceived as a work of unabashed Soviet propaganda, it also offers a richly nuanced portrait of life in turn-of-the-century Odessa and an astonishingly complex demonstration of the psychological effects of shifts in camera position, light, and rhythm. The climactic sequence demonstrates that montage provides both a powerful tool of persuasion and a uniquely cinematic way of seeing the invisible. This restoration allows viewers to experience the fiery beauty of cinematographer Eduard Tisse's imagery and Sergei Eisenstein's explosive juxtapositions alongside the propulsive score Edmund Meisel prepared for the film's 1926 European premiere.

In this slyly reflexive satire, Julius Pinschewer, progenitor of the sponsored film and a close collaborator of Walter Ruttmann, uses stop-motion puppet animation to demonstrate the process of preparing a filmed advertisement for Aspirin tablets. Presented in a restoration from the Deutsche Kinemathek. Subtitles available.

As the opening scene demonstrates, with the progressive shift from reflections on water to graphic patterns to filmed train tracks, Walter Ruttmann conceived of Berlin, Symphony of a City as a fusion of abstract visual music and carefully choreographed observation. The definitive early "city film" opened up new possibilities for montage and the nascent documentary form. This restoration is presented courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek, the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Berlin), and ZDF/ARTE. It includes a new recording of the original score by Edmund Meisel.

By painting directly on a glass plate and shooting frame-by-frame with an animation camera, Walter Ruttmann was able to complete the first of his abstract Opuses, establishing the terms for the "absolute film." The score was meticulously synchronized in collaboration with Berlin-based composer Max Butting.

In this advertising film for AEG Radio Equipment, Ruttmann uses his established vocabulary of abstract forms to visualize the movement of radio waves and the new forms of global communication introduced in the 1920s. Restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek.

Ruttmann's first important advertising film, for Excelsior tires, prominently features the triangular and circular forms used a year earlier in his first "absolute film." Similar visual patterns would recur in the dream sequences of Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen, Part I - Siegfried (1924). Restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek.

In this advertising film for Kantorowicicz liqueur, the pure geometric forms visible in "absolute films" like Opus 1 and the beginning of Berlin, Symphony of a City are transformed into arguing heads and bottles. Restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek, with a score by Joachim Bärenz.