Man of Marble (1977) is the most important cinematic deconstruction of the socialist realist orthodoxy mandated for all artists working in any medium in the Soviet sphere from 1934 until the Thaw after Joseph Stalin's death (1953-1964). Director Andrzej Wajda’s film moves back and forth between the 1950s and the transformative 1970s as the brash and ambitious female protagonist mounts an investigation into the recent past. Generational shifts are emphasized through angular compositions, observational montage, costuming, and performance, and Wajda suggests that authentic glimpses of reality are accessible only through the process of searching.

The Birch Wood is an intimate adaptation of a 1932 short story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Iwaszkiewicz's stories are best known for their Chekhovian realism, but director Andrzej Wajda took the opportunity to rework a series of motifs from the paintings of the preeminent Polish Symbolist Jacek Malczewski. By combining elegant camera movements with surprising uses of the zoom lens, Wajda seamlessly oscillates between these two modes, and transforms this depiction of early twentieth century country life into a moving exploration of human transience.

The most ambitious of the widescreen historical epics produced in Poland in the mid-1960s, Ashes is one of director Andrzej Wajda's signature achievements. A faithful adaptation of Stefan Żeromski's 1904 novel about the Napoleonic wars, it was understood at the time of its release to be about much more recent betrayals and defeats. Six decades later, it stands out above all for its dynamic battle sequences, potent depiction of the vagaries of history, and elegiac poetry.

Trained as a painter and always attentive to the poetry of words and images, Andrzej Wajda was a constantly developing stylist and the great chronicler of Poland's twentieth-century history.

Stanisław Wyspiański's The Wedding (1901) is the most important twentieth-century play in Polish and an iconic work of turn-of-the-century modernism. The ghosts of the area surrounding the old capital city of Kraków mingle with characters representing all strata of society as a wedding reception is transformed into a phantasmagoric dreamscape. Andrzej Wajda's film is the most moving and adventurous of his several adaptations of Wyspiański's work, and it introduces a new stylistic phase marked by a constantly moving camera and richly symbolic explosions of color.

Stan Brakhage worked tirelessly to develop a type of cinema that could adequately portray the subjective complexities of human vision. Chartres Series was his response to a visit to the greatest of French Gothic cathedrals in the early 1990s, and it epitomizes what he called moving visual thinking by combining hand painting and optical printing with a singular approach to color and rhythm. Henry Adams described Chartres as the supreme example of a "structure which should be final," and Brakhage tries to reconcile the immediacy of perception with intimations of eternity.

The Toll of the Sea (1922) was the first feature produced by the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation to receive wide release. A moving adaptation of Madame Butterfly transposed from Japan to China by screenwriter Frances Marion, it was inspired by David Belasco's popular theatrical production (1900) and Giacomo Puccini's celebrated opera (1904). Anna May Wong's career-making performance combines naturalistic gestures with the pictorial distillation of nineteenth century melodrama. Both figures and objects were carefully arranged by director Chester M. Franklin to maximize the impact of 2-strip Technicolor, a subtractive process that isolated parts of the light spectrum to produce a pair of red and green strips. The absence of blue gives rose bushes, cliffs, and skies both graphic force and a unique beauty.

An Adventurous Automobile Trip was one of the most ambitious productions of Georges Méliès. Originally intended for presentation as part of a hybrid theater-film performance at the Folies Bergère in Paris in 1904, the film was released in both black-and-white and color versions the next year. Méliès used all of the technical resources at his disposal - including superimpositions, trick explosions, surprise cuts, and selective red stenciling - to make this parody of the high-speed road journeys of King Leopold II of Belgium spectacular. The idea, espoused by Méliès in subsequent decades, of cinema as the art of metamorphosis in both space and time is manifest throughout.

Despite the widespread belief that silent cinema was entirely in black-and-white, the desire for color was present from the very beginning. Filmmakers like Georges Méliès, Gason Velle, and R. W. Paul incorporated frame-by-frame color stencil work, sometimes assisted by a cutting machine but often done by hand. This Pathé Frères print demonstrates the uniquely expressive effects that could be achieved through this laborious artisanal process.

Explore the histories of cinematic color and discover some of the distinctive ways it has been expressively used from the silent era to the twenty-first century.

Originally intended as a pre-program accompaniment for a popular literary adaptation, The Ghoul is an exceptionally concentrated example of the ghost story, the most important and deeply rooted genre in Thai cinema. It is striking both for its disarming blurring of comedy and horror and for the sudden appearance and movement of figures in all areas of the frame. One of the earliest surviving Thai films, The Ghoul acts as a bridge between the early silent cinema of Georges Méliès and 21st century art films such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Presented in a high-definition transfer of a nitrate negative, courtesy of the Thai Film Archive.

Sunrise is the consummate Hollywood art film, a perfect synthesis of German Expressionist style and the resources of the American studio system. Director F. W. Murnau relished the opportunity to further develop his sensuous mise-en-scène through the harmonization of gesture, lighting, and set design; the juxtaposition of sharp lines and curved portals; and supple camera movements that suggest both seduction and discovery. Romance as shared mental space has never been more beautifully visualized. Sunrise immediately became a reference point for artistically ambitious directors around the world and is presented here with the original Movietone synchronized sound and score track.

A concise distillation of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's work, The Anthem consists of an opening shot in which conversations and entrances are filmed from a fixed position, followed by an elegant circular track around an indoor tennis court. Thematic and formal connections between the two shots abound, and the film is architectonic and clearly bifurcated but never strictly symmetrical. With characteristic elegance, Apichatpong fuses structural precision with an openness to spontaneous discovery.

All My Life is the simplest and most richly colored of Bruce Baillie's lyrical epiphanies. Ella Fitzgerald sings the eponymous song as the camera slowly pans right to left across roses and fencing before finally pivoting upwards, linking heaven and earth in one continuous movement.

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.