Little Odessa (1994) is James Gray's first and most austere film. An intimate family drama that powerfully reworks motifs from Exodus, it begins in total darkness and boldly uses contemporary music by John Tavener and Arvo Pärt. Its use of movement, aria-like repetition, and extended gestures announced the emergence of one of contemporary cinema's most distinctive voices.

Both austere and expressionistic, The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of cinema’s great anomalies. Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer employed a historical advisor and based his script on the transcripts of Joan’s trial, but he challenged the aesthetic conventions of the period. Totally eschewing conventional forms of cutting, Dreyer creates his own internal system of communication, held together by glances. Broad pans across the judges are intercut with close-ups of Joan to create the impression that she is the unmoved center of a circle, the axis around which everyone else orbits. This audacious structure forces the viewer to confront the most fundamental questions of belief. Dreyer's original cut is presented, as intended, silently and at 20 frames per second. English subtitles available.

Writer-producer Thomas H. Ince was - along with D. W. Griffith, Maurice Tourneur, and Cecil B. DeMille - one of the key figures of the American cinema during the years before Hollywood was fully established. For this moving saga of the immigrant experience of the 1910s, Ince hired the Winnipeg-born, Scotland-raised director Reginald Barker. The fluidity and psychological acuity of the framing, camera movement, and editing are eloquently complemented by the expressive close-ups of lead actor George Beban. Restored by the Library of Congress. Score by Ben Model.

Widely considered the first successful British talkie, Blackmail began as a silent film. Director Alfred Hitchcock used the mobility of silent film shooting for the elaborate set pieces (culminating in the British Museum) and cast native Czech speaker Anny Ondra as the prototype of his female leads. Her dialogue was later dubbed, and Hitchcock made judicious use of expressionistic sound to draw the viewer into her subjective space and deepen the moral and psychological dynamics of what may be his first masterpiece.

One of the most authentic voices in contemporary cinema, James Gray extends the legacies of both European art cinema and the American independent cinema of the 1970s. His intimate epics reaffirm the cinematic power of myth, music, and gesture.

Caroline Champetier's extraordinary documentary is structured around an encounter with one of the pre-eminent cinematographers of the previous generation. Bruno Nuytten was widely celebrated for his work with directors such as Marguerite Duras, Andrzej Żuławski, André Téchiné, and Jean-Luc Godard, directed four films of his own, and then disappeared from cinema. Nuytten/Film explores the reasons why and provides unique insights into the cinematographic process and the nature of image-making.

Director Nobuhiro Suwa's most celebrated film grapples with the unrepresentable, the dropping of the atomic bomb on his native Hiroshima. Both before and behind the camera, Suwa attempts to respond to both the extant documentary material and to Alain Resnais's iconic memory film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Cinematographer Caroline Champetier created some of the deepest, most voluptuous blacks of her career in the film, and they are movingly connected to both the act of filming and the challenges of visual perception.

An "appendix" to the then-ongoing Histoire(s) du cinéma project (1988-1998), The Children Play Russian is a video essay made just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By juxtaposing and superimposing fragments from Russian and Soviet films with contemporary footage shot by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, Godard constructs a contrapuntal meditation on lost utopias, the relationship between montage and icons, and the nature of the cinematic image.

Cinematic pioneer Léonce Perret worked in many genres and was most famous in the early 1910s for his comedies, but The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador demonstrates his keen grasp of crime and melodrama. The central gambit is that the cinematograph can be a vehicle for psychotherapy and the awakening of repressed memories, and this is reinforced through subtle repetitions of gesture, composition, and lighting. Perret and cinematographer Georges Specht shot as much of the film as possible on location in Finistère, and they transform the rocky Breton seascape into an integral part of the psychological drama.

Cinematographer Caroline Champetier's rigor, precision, and mastery of light and composition have made her a creative partner to four generations of eminent filmmakers, including Leos Carax, Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Nobuhiro Suwa, Arnaud Desplechin, Xavier Beauvois, Claude Lanzmann, Philippe Garrel, and above all Jean-Luc Godard.

Syberberg's first film in three decades, Demmin Cantos is one of his most surprising. Characteristically dense and ambitious, it is also centripetal in structure and unusually specific geographically. The Western Pomeranian town of Demmin was the site of shocking events during the final week of the Second World War, and the film includes the personal accounts of the town's residents. Both an act of mourning and revival, Demmin Cantos is a prismatic reflection upon the paradoxes of history.

The most underseen of Syberberg's features, A Dream, What Else? is a meditation on the dissolution of historical Prussia after the Second World War. Syberberg combines texts by Heinrich von Kleist, Goethe, and Euripides with extracts from the history of German music and new forms of projected photography. As in The Night (1985), the speech and expressions of actress Edith Clever give the film unique gravitas. Presented with new English subtitles.

A monumental reinterpretation of texts by writers such as Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin, The Night shares with Hitler, a Film from Germany (1977) and Parsifal (1982) a deep interest in time, scale, and ritual. The film marks a decisive turn in Syberberg's work, a clearing away of studio technology and a renewed concentration on gesture and light. Presented in five parts with newly updated English subtitles.

Hitler, a Film from Germany is the most ambitious film of the postwar German cinema. Part Dantean pilgrimage and part Freudian mourning work, it is a seven-hour examination of the impact of Adolf Hitler. Through a unique montage combination of speech, projected imagery, and music, it explores the interrelationship between cinema and the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. This version has the narration in German with optional English subtitles. Premiere in America, a 1980 documentary from the time of the film's New York premiere, is available as a supplement.

Hitler, a Film from Germany is the most ambitious film of the postwar German cinema. Part Dantean pilgrimage and part Freudian mourning work, it is a seven-hour examination of the impact of Adolf Hitler. Through a unique montage combination of speech, projected imagery, and music, it explores the interrelationship between cinema and the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. The film was a West German-French-British coproduction, and this version has the narration in English. Subtitles are optional for German-language sections. Premiere in America, a 1980 documentary from the time of the film's New York premiere, is available as a supplement.

Karl May, the second part of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's "German trilogy," explores the travel and adventure fantasies of the most popular German writer of the 19th century. As always in Syberberg's work, the music of Richard Wagner and the unreconciled ghosts of the 1930s and 1940s loom large. Appropriately, May is played by the prolific director Helmut Käutner, who made some of the most iconic German romances of the 1940s.

The first part of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's "German Trilogy," Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972) reinvents the imaginative universe of the eponymous king of Bavaria, creator of extravagant castles and patron of Richard Wagner. Beginning with this film, Syberberg introduced a special system of front and rear projection. Syberberg's juxtapositions developed both montage and Surrealist collage in new directions, and the treatment of images opens new perspectives on German history and dreams.

The Confessions of Winifred Wagner is the greatest and most monumental of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's early documentaries. As in Romy, Portrait of a Face (1965), Syberberg explores the complex relationship between the construction of cinematic star images, mythologizing narratives, and the revelation of human personality. Epic and bracingly direct, it provides unique insights into the arc of German music and German history. In German with English Subtitles.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg first established his reputation as a creator of innovative documentaries. Disarmingly intimate, this hour-long portrait of the iconic German star Romy Schneider exemplifies Syberberg's fascination with the expressive possibilities of cinematic portraiture, especially the use of the camera to capture gestures and faces in flux. Subtitles available.

Parsifal (1882), Richard Wagner's enigmatic final opera, was intended for performance only at the specially designed Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany. Made to commemorate its centenary, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Parsifal (1982) is a paradoxical film. A triumph of stereo sound recording that uses all the resources of studio shooting and technology, it is a grand attempt at spiritual reunification with the fractured past. Syberberg attempts to fuse the approaches of Wagner and Bertolt Brecht, while reinventing the staging and lighting strategies made famous by German Expressionism. Acknowledging the historical fissure separating the 1980s from the silent era, Syberberg's Parsifal is a Grail quest linked to the structure of cinema itself.