In the late twenties and early thirties, Yasujiro Ozu was working steadily for Shochiku studios, honing his craft on dozens of silent films in various genres, from romantic melodramas to college comedies to gangster pictures -- and, of course, movies about families. In these three droll domestic films -- Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But, and Passing Fancy, presented here with all-new scores by renowned silent-film composer Donald Sosin -- Ozu movingly...

Presents a documentary on the life of an Eskimo family pitting their strength against a vast and inhospitable Arctic. Juxtaposes their struggle for survival against the elements with the warmth of the little family as they go about their daily affairs.

"American silent film comedies were dominated by sight gags, stunts and comic violence. With the advent of sound, comedies in the 1930s were a riot of runaway heiresses and fast-talking screwballs. It was more than a technological pivot -- the first feature-length sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927), changed Hollywood"--

The director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari adapted Fyodor Dostoyevsky's literary masterwork Crime and Punishment for the screen with this feature made at the height of the Expressionist movement in German cinema. The story concerns a poor, imperious former law student who believes that he is a special kind of person exempt from any moral law. He murders a woman and her sister and is sent to prison for years.

The quintessential silent vampire film, crafted by legendary German director F. W. Murnau. Rather than depicting Dracula as a shape-shifting monster or debonair gentleman, Murnau's Graf Orlok is a nightmarish, spidery creature of bulbous head and taloned claws, perhaps the most genuinely disturbing incarnation of vampirism yet envisioned.

An anthology of films from American film archives. In addition to rare silent-era features, includes landmark independent and avant-garde works, documentaries and newsreels, earliest American movies, pioneering special effects, one-reel adventures and comedies, cartoons and experimental animation, home movies, travel films from the 1910s, working training films from the 1920s, political ads from the 1930's, and other film types invented during the...

In a dramatization of the Norse myth, Siegfried fights dragons and ogres while traveling through the mystical Woden Wood, but his greatest challenge is the battle for the love of Kriemhild, King Gunther's sister ; Kriemhild is obsessed with avenging the death of Siegfried, and enlists the assistance of Attila the Hun to destroy her brother's kingdom in this dramatization of the thirteenth-century Norse legend.

The Tramp and his ragamuffin sidekick, a young boy rescued from the streets, triumph over life's hard knocks in the landmark film that changed the notion of what a screen comedy could be.