Discover some of the bold ways adventurous editing has been used to transform space, change perceptions, and introduce new creative possibilities.

In the wake of their public encounter in 2009, Marcel Ophuls and Jean-Luc Godard planned a collaborative essay film about the histories and future of the Middle East. Godard abandoned the project before shooting began, and Ophuls continued by adapting the style he had developed from The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) to The Troubles We've Seen (1993). The initial funding soon ran out, but Ophuls kept attempting to give shape to the edited fragments until shortly before his death in 2025. Presented here is the final form of the unfinished film. With English subtitles.

In 2009, Jean-Luc Godard and Marcel Ophuls had a public dialogue in Geneva. The two filmmakers had known each other for five decades and they had become increasingly preoccupied with the relationship between film history and the cataclysmic events of the 20th century. Their exchanges are both insightful and deeply revealing. They also set the stage for the planned collaboration that eventually became Disagreeable Truths. With English subtitles.

Josef von Sternberg's debut feature already demonstrates the meticulous composition, gestural rhymes, graphic tension, and plastic force that would soon make him one of cinema's preeminent stylists. Made independently for $5,000 and shot on location throughout the Los Angeles area, the film received the backing of United Artists after Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were cajoled into a private screening (lead actress Georgia Hale would co-star in The Gold Rush the next year). The Salvation Hunters was celebrated at the time for unadulterated realism, but it now seems like a unique synthesis of pictorialist atmosphere, Symbolist psychology, and Expressionist space. Its mood and sensibility anticipate the postwar filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. Restoration courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Austrian Film Museum. Original Score by Dreamscope Trio.

His Girl Friday is the paradigmatic screwball comedy and a quintessential example of the Depression-era "comedy of remarriage." Rarely have rapid-fire dialogue, gesturally precise performance, nuanced mise-en-scène, Classical Hollywood lighting, and invisible editing been so seamlessly integrated. The most quietly acerbic of all newspaper films, it provides insights into the vagaries of politics and journalism that are as incisive now as they were when the film was released.

"Cinematic Legacies of Flemish Art," a conversation with Arnaud Desplechin, is the first in a continuing series.

The last epic of Marcel Ophuls is one of his most structurally complex. Shot during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, it includes startlingly frank discussions with French, American, and British journalists as well as participants from all sides. By interweaving a contemporary train journey through the Balkans and extracts from films such as His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), Ophuls transforms The Troubles We've Seen into an ambitious reflection on documentary, shifting media environments, and the relationship between cinema and history. With English subtitles.

The least seen, most surprising, and most joyous of Marcel Ophuls's major films is a shapeshifting investigation into the 1781 Battle of Yorktown, where a combined American and French force decided the American Revolution. By playfully combining footage of the bicentennial commemorations with various forms of restaging, Ophuls explores the different interpretations of the Revolution, the relationship between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and the complexity of one of the world's most enduring alliances. With English subtitles.

Made in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and full German reunification, November Days is a reckoning with a country where time was still out of joint. Through adventurous montage, Ophuls relates the perspectives of very different individuals, from advocates for transition and reform to petty bureaucrats and legendary Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf. What results is a complex portrait of East German society on the eve of its vanishing. With English subtitles.

Hotel Terminus is one of Marcel Ophuls's signature achievements. Through nuances of mise-en-scène and editing, the examination of the life, times, and trial of Lyon Gestapo head Klaus Barbie becomes a multifaceted exploration of human motivation and mendacity. The film includes startling passages of Lumière-like discovery, but also incorporates multiple levels of staging and performance. A clear rebuttal of cinema vérité ideals of invisible observation, it makes clear why Ophuls has exerted such a profound influence on the interventionist strain of contemporary documentary. With English subtitles.

With war imminent, American filmmaker Frank Capra watched Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) for the first time and came away shaken and despondent. Struggling to find a way to communicate the urgency and meaning of the Second World War to a skeptical American public, Capra decided to produce counter-propaganda by taking found footage from existing newsreels and documentaries, re-editing the footage to produce new montage effects, and adding explanatory, sometimes humorous, narration in an "everyman" idiom (provided here by Walter Huston). The Battle of Britain, fourth of the seven Why We Fight films, is exemplary. Restored by the United States National Archives.

Despite their reputation for optimism, many of Capra's major films, especially the ones he made in the years surrounding the Second World War, are equally preoccupied with existential crises and ultimate concerns. Like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the protagonist of Meet John Doe is brought to the edge of self-destruction before rediscovering purpose. Capra's rich visual imagination and vigorous approach to montage is evident throughout. His abiding interest in the mechanisms and rhetoric of political persuasion is paradoxically ambiguous and trenchant.

Max Ophüls's only film in the Netherlands was the most elaborate and expensive Dutch production of the period. The episodic exploration of the shifting value of currency anticipates the circular systems of exchange central to the later French Ophüls films La Ronde (1950) and The Earrings of Madame De... (1953), but it is infused with the Brechtian musical didacticism of The Threepenny Opera (1928). Ophüls's carefully calibrated mise-en-scène is perfectly complemented by the masterful lighting of Expressionist cinematographer (and fellow German exile) Eugen Schüfftan. Restored by EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam). With English subtitles.

A landmark in the development of documentary form, The Sorrow and the Pity is a prismatic exploration of life under occupation. Using a series of interlinked filmmaking strategies - including the judicious arrangement of speakers, montage associations with existing film footage, inventive framing, and evocative mise-en-scène - the perspectives of political luminaries are juxtaposed with those of shopkeepers. The results are often surprising and belie easy judgment, which is what makes this holistic portrait of French society between 1939 and 1945 so uniquely compelling. English subtitles available.

The expansive and absorbing documentary films of Marcel Ophuls (1927-2025) open up new perspectives on the complexities of history and the perennial challenges of justice and memory.

Like its partner film The Bridge (1928), this "cine-poem" exemplifies the ambiguous tension in early City Symphonies between quotidian observation and abstract formalism. The familiar spaces of rainy Amsterdam are made to appear startlingly new through Ivens's adventurous editing. Rain was originally shown without music at Amsterdam's Filmliga and international film societies, and is presented that way here.

The greatest of the Dutch film pioneers, Joris Ivens (1898-1989) led a peripatetic life and made important documentaries in countries ranging from Spain and the United States to Indonesia, China, and Vietnam. For this early city film, however, he focused on a subject much closer to home: the Koningshaven Bridge in Rotterdam. Ivens’s Constructivist inclinations and deep knowledge of Dutch painting are complemented by a uniquely lyrical approach to montage.

Luis Buñuel's pseudo-documentary was shot in the area around the town of La Alberca in Spain's impoverished Las Hurdes region. Part ethnography, part anthropological travelogue, and part Surrealist fiction, this landmark hybrid pushes the boundaries of the nascent documentary form and demonstrates the director's penchant for paradox. Originally silent, Buñuel later added a French narration and extracts from the final symphony of Johannes Brahms (No. 4, Op. 98, 1884). English subtitles available.

The quintessential Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou was the incendiary cinematic debut of co-directors Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Buñuel's witty and perpetually surprising montage disrupts ordinary patterns of logic, simultaneously parodying and celebrating l'amour fou. According to legend, for the first 1929 screenings, Buñuel manually juxtaposed recordings of the Prelude to Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (1859) and an Argentinian tango. This has since become the established score for the film. With English subtitles.