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.

Vigorous, mysterious, and always on the move, the films of Lynne Ramsay have introduced bold new possibilities for sound, color, and the exploration of memory.

"A film without actors," People on Sunday is a unique experiment in observational discovery shot in the areas around Berlin in summer 1929. A pioneering work of location shooting and improvisational performance, the film provides a multifaceted portrait of Weimar society at its most relaxed. Many of the filmmakers who collaborated on the film - including directors Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, screenwriter Billy Wilder, and cinematography assistant Fred Zinnemann - would go into exile in Hollywood a few years later. Presented in a new restoration from the Deutsche Kinemathek. Subtitles available.

Hiroshi Innami's first film is a startling hybrid that combines a detective plot transposed from a British novel with American-style cross-cutting, sets influenced by German Expressionism, and location footage from the Foreign Settlements and surrounding mountains of Kobe, Japan. The film was restored and rediscovered by the Kobe Planet Film Archive and is presented here with English subtitles and an original soundtrack. A version of the film with an accompanying narration by benshi Kumiko Omori is also available.

Hiroshi Innami's first film is a startling hybrid that combines a detective plot transposed from a British novel with American-style cross-cutting, sets influenced by German Expressionism, and location footage from the Foreign Settlements and surrounding mountains of Kobe, Japan. The film was restored and rediscovered by the Kobe Planet Film Archive and is presented here with English subtitles, piano music, and an accompanying narration by legendary benshi Kumiko Omori.

Like his contemporary Yasujirō Ozu, Hiroshi Shimizu spent most of his career working at Shochiku's Kamata Studio in Tokyo and specialized in melodramas and comedies. The Edo period setting is atypical, but Shimizu's mastery of space and skill at drawing out psychologically complex performances is fully evident in this fragment from his earliest surviving film, made when he was only 22 years old. This section of Love's Catch Rope, long considered lost, was recently rediscovered by the Kobe Planet Film Archive and is presented worldwide for the first time. Subtitles available.

Made with chiyogami washi paper, Slow Old Man is the very first film of Noburō Ōfuji, and it demonstrates the artisanal craft and narrative wit that would make him the most important and influential of Japan's animation pioneers. The film was considered lost for nearly a century, but a slightly shrunken print was recently discovered by the Kobe Planet Film Archive. Meticulously restored, it is presented worldwide for the very first time here. Subtitles available.

Boldly experimental and rigorously precise, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s growing body of work demonstrates the continuing vitality of classical Japanese and international auteur cinema.

Originally titled Der müde Tod (The Weary Death), Destiny interweaves several different periods and approaches to storytelling into one of the most astonishing and moving works of the silent cinema. It established Fritz Lang's reputation as a director uniquely capable of translating ultimate concerns into expressive visual forms, and has inspired directors ranging from Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel to Ingmar Bergman. Presented in a tinted and toned restoration with an orchestral score from the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung (Weisbaden, Germany). Subtitles available.

The most enduring and haunting of Weimar films, Nosferatu is a singular fusion of Romanticism and Expressionism that made the reputation of director F. W. Murnau. Adapted, without permission, from Bram Stoker's Dracula, it became the template for all subsequent vampire films. Murnau's "Symphony of Horror" is made all the more unsettling by spatial echoes, the reworking of basic cinematic devices, and the atypical use of actual locations along Germany's Baltic coast. Presented in a tinted and toned restoration with an orchestral score from the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung (Weisbaden, Germany). Subtitles available.

The most well-known and widely distributed of the experimental documentaries produced by the General Post Office Film Unit in the 1930s, Night Mail is, like Coal Face, a collaboration with composer Benjamin Britten and the poet W. H. Auden. Like many montage films of the period, the emphasis is on process, here the different phases of mail delivery. Recurring visual and auditory motifs link the different strata, environments, and regions of Britain in striking and sometimes surprising ways.

The most underrated of the wartime films of Humphrey Jennings, Words for Battle is a montage documentary largely shot at the height of the Blitz in 1940. By linking sensitively observed and masterfully edited fragments of contemporaneous life with poems by John Milton, William Blake, Robert Browning, and Rudyard Kipling as well as iconic speeches by Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, Jennings mobilizes the rhetoric of the past to address the urgent crises of the present, and suggests new creative possibilities for cinema itself. Restoration courtesy British Film Institute.

The original Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari integrates all elements of spatial design with highly stylized performances and an innovative flashback structure to create a psychologically complex portrait of a world plunged into chaos. Long an established benchmark of world cinema, it remains as fascinating and unnerving as ever. Presented in a tinted and toned restoration with an orchestral score from the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung (Weisbaden, Germany). Subtitles available.

Diva Dolorosa (The Sorrowful Diva) is a lyrical and evocative found footage montage film made up of fragments of films from the Desmet collection at the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Director Peter Delpeut (former deputy director of the Filmmuseum) is a writer of great rhetorical subtlety and complexity, but here he develops relationships almost entirely through juxtapositions of visual fragments and an original score composed by Loek Dikker. Each fragment takes on new layers of meaning in this context, and each section builds upon the last. Delpeut's film is a testament to the haunting power of silent film and to cinema's capacity for renewal and reinvention. Subtitles available.

Discover some of the many ways adventurous film directors have adapted, used, been inspired by, and responded to seminal musical pieces from composers ranging from Beethoven and Wagner to Prokofiev and Penderecki.

Rainbow Dance was New Zealand-born animator Len Lye's second released film and one of the best examples of the experimental Gasparcolor process (an alternative to Technicolor developed by Hungarian Béla Gáspár that was also used in the 1930s by animators such as Oskar Fischinger). Commissioned as an advertising film for Britain's General Post Office, the film is also a playful exploration of the nature of cinema and a celebration of movement and color. The score was composed by the Australian concrete sound and experimental music pioneer Jack Ellitt.

One of the most sensitive and rigorously edited of British documentaries, Coal Face was a landmark collaboration of the peripatetic Brazilian-born director Alberto Cavalcanti, composer Benjamin Britten, and the poet W. H. Auden (who wrote the narration). The film is a precise delineation of the many facets of what was once, as the narrator tells us, "the basic industry of Britain" and a paean to the human figures who made that possible.

The greatest of British wartime films, Listen to Britain is a masterpiece of both precise observation and of the use of sound-image montage to generate associations that are both specific and evocative. Director Humphrey Jennings, working closely with editor Stewart McAllister, captures all facets of British life in 1942, from the habitual nature of descents into underground tunnels to the singular experience of people from all backgrounds watching pianist Myra Hess perform a free concert in London's National Gallery. The composite portrait makes it very clear what Britain was fighting for while also poetically suggesting creative possibilities for the future. Jennings was a profound influence on later directors such as John Boorman and Terence Davies.

Following the success of his other Weimar epics, director Fritz Lang became increasingly convinced that the grandeur and universal impact of the silent film image would enable film to "make an honest contribution to repairing the chaos that has prevented nations from seeing each other as they really are ever since the tower of Babel." Nowhere is Lang's utopian conception of the possibilities of cinema more evident than in the first part of his adaptation of the 13th century epic poem Die Nibelungen. Set design and movement, rhythm and dream, are all fully integrated in this truly monumental film. The film is presented in a meticulous restoration with tinting, toning, and the original orchestral score of Gottfried Huppertz by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung (Weisbaden, Germany). Subtitles available.

The second part of Fritz Lang's silent epic was restored with tinting, toning, and the original orchestral score of Gottfried Huppertz by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung (Weisbaden, Germany). Brunhild is the key character here, and her abstract, ritualized performance perfectly matches the ornate sets and the film's obsessive focus on myth and mortality. The apocalyptic conclusion warrants comparison with Götterdämmerung, the conclusion of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. Subtitles available.

Darius Khondji is one of the most acclaimed and influential cinematographers working today. This exhibition explores Khondji’s work – especially his approach to light, color, space, and framing – and the larger question of the role of the cinematographer as a shaping agent in the overall style of a film.

Heir to the visionary tradition of British Romanticism, John Boorman is one of the great masters of cinematic form. His sense of color, movement, and space perfectly matches his interest in poetry and myth.

Isabelle Huppert has developed a style of acting that makes meticulous precision seem spontaneous, and she has worked more closely with major cinematic personalities than anyone else of her generation.

I Dreamt I Woke Up is John Boorman's poetic reflection on the Irish landscapes in County Wicklow that have shaped his imaginative universe since 1969. Presented from a new scan of the filmmaker's personal 35mm print.

M is a pioneering early sound film, a thriller and police procedural that offers a meticulous and precise exploration of the different levels of society (from the police to the underworld). The greatest of Fritz Lang's films, it is a crystalline masterpiece of editing, with a haunting performance by Peter Lorre as a childlike serial killer and the most morally complex manhunt in cinema. This extraordinary restoration is presented courtesy the Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin) and Praesans Films (Zürich). Subtitles available.

Silent Italian diva Francesca Bertini was one of the key proponents of a more restrained, gesturally modulated, and psychologically expressive style of "realist" film acting. As her career progressed, she became involved in the scripting and even directing of her work. Here she collaborates with director Nino Oxilia, a bold pictorialist and master of choreography and pacing who died during the First World War. The film is presented is 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. The subtle and moving score is presented courtesy Daniele Furlati (Bologna). Subtitles available.

A concise depiction of a struggling agrarian family, A Corner in Wheat is also one of the most forceful demonstrations in early cinema of the power of parallel editing to connect events spatially and morally. Director D. W. Griffith's eloquent depiction of the rural landscape owes much to the nineteenth century Realism of Jean-François Millet as well as the conventions of Romantic landscape painting. The cross-cutting Griffith introduced in his Biograph films of 1909 shaped the development of cinema worldwide.

D. W. Griffith argued that the artistic significance of the cinema was rooted above all in its capacity to capture the contingent flow of the natural world in time. Nowhere is this more evident than in this beautifully concise Biograph melodrama from 1909, which elegantly connects characters and environments. This is particularly evident in the linked panning movements that bracket the film, situating the human drama in a broader context and demonstrating the spontaneously captured "wind in the trees" that Griffith later described as early cinema's signature achievement.