Simultaneously tactile and elusive, the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul paradoxically combine the rhythm of dreams with the weight of lived experience. His unique imaginative worlds gracefully communicate the power and mystery of cinema.

Alternately gentle and tumultuous, Orphans of the Storm is an adaptation of Les Deux Orphelines, a French historical melodrama from 1874 about two sisters in Revolutionary France seeking a cure for blindness. Les Deux Orphelines became the most popular production in turn-of-the-century American theater and Griffith conceived of the film as a template for an ambitious eight-to-ten film "pictorial history of the world." His utopian conception of cinema as a universal language is evident in the abstract personification of complex forces, which are made vivid and comprehensible by gestural echoes, variations in movement, Dickensian cross-cutting, and the carefully balanced performances of Lillian and Dorothy Gish. The political analogies are often strained, but the operatic scope and total variations make this the last of Griffith's great silent epics.

James Ivory's final feature, and his only major film completed after the passing of producer Ismail Merchant, is an elegant swan song. Set largely in Uruguay, the film reworks tropes and motifs familiar from films Ivory made in America, India, the UK, and Italy. Ivory's great themes - the pressures of time, regret, the power of music, the relationship between movement and vision - are explored in a different register, but articulated through a characteristically understated treatment of shifting points-of-view.

Surprising and moving, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries is a personal favorite of James Ivory. It is also one of his most interesting experiments with narrative and point-of-view. Each of the novelistic sections is structured around the perspective of a member of an American family (modeled on that of World War II veteran James Jones) struggling to acclimate both to Paris and New England. The accumulation of the interrelated vignettes eloquently conveys the many nuances of the generational shifts of the 1960s and of expatriate life.

A TV adaptation of a 12-page John Cheever short story made outside the auspices of Merchant-Ivory Productions, The 5:48 is atypical in almost every respect while still demonstrating all the hallmarks of James Ivory's directorial style. Screenwriter Terrence McNally makes judicious use of Cheever's crisp and layered dialogue, but the incisive depiction of a dissipated advertising executive is most powerfully communicated through camera movements and shifts in point-of-view. Ivory took on the project just after completing his first film version of a major Henry James novel (The Europeans, 1979), and he appears to have welcomed the opportunity to shift scale and tone.

Days and Nights in the Forest (1970) is one of Satyajit Ray's most subtle films. Adapted from an autobiographical novel by prolific Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, the film depicts the misadventures of four friends from Calcutta with both gentle humor and bitter irony. It is among Ray's most insightful explorations of the residual legacies of the British Raj, and the closest he came to the spirit of Jean Renoir in the use of interwoven camera movements and tensions between speech and image to draw out the contradictory motivations of self-deceiving characters.

Best known for the films he made during his four-decade collaboration with producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, James Ivory is an elegant stylist with a unique perspective on expatriate life. His graceful camera movements and treatment of point-of-view perfectly complement his moving explorations of the passage of time.

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.