Past Events

A rare comedy from the typically austere D.W. Griffith, Sally of the Sawdust is a delightful gem and the veritable kick off of W.C. Fields’s unmatched career. Based on the 1923 stage musical Poppy, Sally is rife with what we now know as trademark Fields — bumbling idiocy, juggling, dog-kicking — all in the midst of circus antics galore. Fields plays Prof. Eustace, a lovably notorious juggler who becomes the unlikely guardian of Sally after her mother (rejected by her affluent parents for marrying…

With Surprise Shorts! In possibly his best pre-swashbuckling comedy, Douglas Fairbanks stars as a young New Yorker who longs for the excitement of the Old West. Energetically directed by John Emerson, with a witty script and wryly ironic intertitles by husband and wife Emerson and Anita Loos, and cinematography by Victor Fleming.

Co-presented by the Art Directors Guild Film Society William Cameron Menzies was likely the most celebrated art director in silent motion pictures for his work on such extraordinary films as THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924). He won the first Oscar for Art Direction for THE DOVE (1927), and in 1936 directed the landmark sci-fi epic THINGS TO COME. In 1939 he took a step forward in filmic visualization so profound that an entirely new term had to be coined: production…

35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress Featuring live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick! A glittering social satire staged safely abroad, So This Is Paris passes off the routine infidelities of Jazz Age blue-bloods as “the French way.” Teasing the audience with urbane good humor—and featuring a nigh-surrealist montage of an “artist’s ball” (read: nightclub) that superimposes throngs of dancing legs and arms into a proto-psychedelic rendering of a really good champagne high—this silent doesn’t shy away from wanton hedonism.…

Different From The Others (German: Anders als die Andern) is a German film produced during the Weimar Republic. It was first released in 1919 and stars Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel. The story for Anders als die Andern was co-written by Richard Oswald and Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who also had a small part in the film and partially funded the production through his Institute for Sexual Science, with the aim of presenting the story as a polemic against the then-current laws under Germany's Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense. The cinematography was by Max Fassbender, who two years previously…

Celebrate the career of Felix the Cat, the No. 1 cartoon star of the 1920s, with a program including Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer’s “Felix in Hollywood” (1923) and other shorts featuring the fabulous feline. Plus such animated gems as Winsor McCay’s “The Sinking of the Lusitania” (1918) and “The Pet” (1921), Max Fleischer’s “The Tantalizing Fly” (1919) and “Koko’s Auto Ride” (1921) and more. With live musical accompaniment by Cliff Retallick. Screening format: 8mm | 100 min.

A chic European countess visits her small-town American cousin and wreaks mayhem with her liberated continental habits, like smoking cigarettes and seducing men of high ranking public office. Pola Negri is very good at imbuing small gestures with explicit suggestions, and, with eyelids perpetually at half-mast, exudes an attractive combination of contempt and boredom. As a reflection of and probably a comment on Negri’s experience with the American public as an exoticized object of controversy, A Woman of the World…