A Cottage on Dartmoor is a celebration of the mobility and compositional integrity of silent cinema that was originally conceived as a part-talkie. Director Anthony Asquith would become famous for his conventional adaptations of plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, but A Cottage on Dartmoor is a forcefully visual film, with location footage that is as striking as the carefully framed interiors. Strongly influenced by both German Expressionism and Soviet montage, the complex flashback structure interweaves multiple points-of-view as it converges towards the present.

Through shifting points-of-view and a unique approach to movement and space, the lyrical films of Terence Davies (1945-2023) open up new perspectives on perception, memory, and time.

Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V (1599) is Britain's greatest wartime epic. It is also a celebration of the possibilities of cinema, shot in Technicolor with a score by composer William Walton and a visual design inspired by illuminated manuscripts and Renaissance paintings. Released several months after the Normandy landings, the film's patriotic purpose was clear, but Olivier remains attentive to the nuances of Shakespeare's meditation on leadership. Like his protagonist, Olivier understands the power of rhetorical prowess, drawing together all the resources of his art - vocal register, physical gesture, and the movement of actors and camera - in the climactic sequence.

Mario Caserini's extraordinary film of Parsifal was made to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Richard Wagner's final "music drama" (1882). Remarkably faithful to Wolfram von Eschenbach's 13th century manuscript, the ambitious production by Turin-based Ambrosio Films was characteristic of the Italian epics of the period in its use of hundreds of extras and costumes from La Scala in Milan. Caserini combines diagonal movement through winding paths with bold superimpositions to evoke the epic movements and interior visions beloved by the Symbolists. Restored by EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), with a new score composed of extracts from historical recordings of Wagner's Parsifal. English subtitles available.

Created to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Syberberg's Parsifal, Prologue is both a fitting end and a new beginning to his body of work. Fragments from past and present intermingle, suspended and reanimated in a field of video distortion. The different layers - from Heinrich von Kleist's "Last Poem" (1809) to Edith Clever's monologues - connect apocalyptic transformation with images of childhood. With English subtitles.

The Seattle is a bridging film in Syberberg's ouevre, a color prologue to The Night (1985) that recapitulates themes and approaches from earlier works. A montage of interlinked gestures and movements are given continuity by Edith Clever's recitation of a famous speech by Chief Seattle, the leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples of the Pacific Northwest. As in Karl May (1972), Syberberg uses the mythology and the iconography of the Western to reckon with a divided Germany. With English subtitles.

Designed as a vehicle for co-star Maureen O'Hara, this tale of revenge and moral regeneration had a troubled production history. Debut director Sam Peckinpah was nevertheless able to establish his own stylistic universe of stark verticals, shifting background movements, night-time encounters, and emphatically precise sounds. The psychological treatment of Southwestern American landscapes anticipates the work of Cormac McCarthy.

Beautifully shot in Ansco Color (an American variant of German Agfacolor), Stranger on Horseback is a distillation of the fundamental dynamics of the Western. Director Jacques Tourneur's spare and elegant treatment of action is perfectly aligned with the laconic precision of Joel McCrea's traveling judge. The film opens and closes with sinuous arabesques that establish the parameters of the underlying moral vision.

With its byzantine plot twists, stylistic panache, and sense of voluptuous doom, The Big Combo is a seminal film noir. Director Joseph H. Lewis's stark and precise mise-en-scène draws out the archetypal elements of a pared-down narrative. The effect is reinforced by David Raskin's spare, jazz-inflected score and the iconic low-key lighting of cinematographer John Alton.

Often cited as the first feature-length gangster film, Alias Jiimmy Valentine is a close adaptation of a 1910 play by Paul Armstrong that provided ample opportunities for director Maurice Tourneur to apply his unique, pictorially rich style. Trained as a painter, sculptor, and set designer, Tourneur's architectonic mise-en-scène emphasizes geometric patterns, silhouettes, and the balletic orchestration of movement. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

This 14-scene film is a landmark in the development of parallel editing, narrative cinema, the crime film, and the Western. Cinematographer-producer-director Edwin S. Porter combined location shooting with footage shot inside the Edison studios, employing many of the new filmmaking techniques that would define cinema's second decade. Porter combines multiple forms of in-frame movement with both subtle and dramatic turns of the camera, structuring everything around a famous close-up of the criminal leader firing directly at the audience. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

With The Iron Horse, an ambitious epic about the creation of the transcontinental Central Pacific Railroad, John Ford reinvented the iconography of the railway journey. Adopting vantage points above and below the moving trains, Ford developed a treatment of scale and motion that builds upon the visual strategies of nineteenth century precursors like painter/sculptor Frederic Remington and photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, imbuing them with distinctly cinematic rhythms.

"Phantom ride" films were among the most popular forms of early cinema. The Kiss in the Tunnel, a three-shot film by the British pioneer G. A. Smith, provides the most structurally elegant “phantom ride” of the nineteenth century. It exemplifies the tantalizing possibilities created by the interrelation of staged fiction and documentary discovery.

Among the most ambitious films of the 19th century, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was a complete recording of the 14-round 1897 heavyweight championship fight between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada. It was shot with a specially-designed "Veriscope" camera using 63mm widescreen film, a unique shooting and exhibition process controlled entirely by the intrepid pioneer Enoch Rector. Original presentations lasted for more than 100 minutes and included introductions and presentations of each 3-minute round, all accompanied by a live narrator. This extract, preserved by the Library of Congress, is all that remains.

They Made Me a Criminal is one of the seminal boxing films of the 1930s and one of the last great social-issue films of the Depression. It was an atypical assignment for director Busby Berkeley, who was eager to make a dramatic work and adapted the complex choreography of his spectacular musicals for the film's rhythmically vigorous boxing sequences. The low-key lighting of influential cinematographer James Wong Howe anticipates the flourishing of film noir in the 1940s and lends heightened gravitas to the persona-defining performance of John Garfield.

The Big Trail is the seminal depiction of the migration journey along the Oregon Trail and the most important Western of the early 1930s. It was also the last of a small handful of films shot with Movietone sound and Fox's short-lived 70mm Grandeur film, a pioneering widescreen process that created notorious focal challenges at close range. Director Raoul Walsh and his cinematographers developed a new compositional strategy: using increased distance and breadth to orchestrate astonishingly elaborate, interlocking movements.

Vigorous and incomparably kinetic, Walter Hill’s films have revitalized the defining genres of American cinema.

The Hitch-Hiker is the most distinctive of the independent, social-issue films produced by Ida Lupino’s company The Filmakers Inc. Lupino was a favorite actress of directors ranging from Raoul Walsh to Sam Peckinpah, and extensive studio experience helped her transform a low-budget thriller about a dangerous road trip into an innovative exploration of fractured subjectivity. The abundant noir elements are enriched by legendary cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca’s supple location shooting. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

A source of great controversy at the time of its original release, Pandora's Box is now recognized as one of the seminal achievements of Weimar cinema. Austrian director G. W. Pabst reworked elements from two of Franz Wedekind's fin-de-siècle Lulu plays and the result is an amalgam of late nineteenth century social concerns (from the Salvation Army to Jack the Ripper). Pabst's choreography of action and Günther Krampf's lustrous cinematography fuse naturalist and expressionist elements, perfectly complementing the incandescent performance of American actress Louise Brooks. English subtitles available.