Dulac's earliest extant title, LA CIGARETTE concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband who believes she is having an affair-speaking to a real postwar crisis of masculinity in France. With its understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realistic tendencies with impressionistic visual association, building tension between modernity/antiquity, life/death, and masculinity/femininity through cinematic-specific techniques, editing, and more. Music by Judith Rosenberg.

One of Hollywood's earliest -- and most peculiar -- musicals, The Great Gabbo stars von Stroheim as an egotistical ventriloquist who casts a Svengali-like spell upon an ingenue (Betty Compson), against a backdrop of singularly strange numbers (including "Icky" and the spider-and-fly-themed "Caught in a Web"). Director James Cruze (The Covered Wagon) allowed von Stroheim to endow the character with his signature flourishes, resulting in a wicked cocktail of garish stage shows and Austro-Hungarian villainy that is a diabolical delight.

Sessue Hayakawa (The Bridge on the River Kwai) plays Tatsu, a painter-turned-hermit living in the wilds of Japan. Thought mad by local villagers, he truly believes that his princess fiancée has been captured by a dragon, an obsession that leads him daily to artistic inspiration. When a surveyor comes across Tatsu while trekking across the mountains, he informs famed artist Kano Indara about his discovery. Kano is desperate to find an heir to teach his art, but when Tatsu meets Kano's daughter (Tsuru Aoki) and sees only his lost princess, a clash of wills brings the household to the brink of disaster. Long considered lost, THE DRAGON PAINTER survives today as a tribute to Hayakawa's talents and a shining example of Asian-American cinema, complete with a score by Japanese-American composer Mark Izu.

Blind husbands made Erich von Stroheim an immediate sensation, exposing the complex layers of repression, jealousy, and lust that lie beneath the surface of an American couple's marriage.

SOMETHING NEW is a thrilling and hilarious Western where the hero comes to the rescue of the kidnapped girl in a 1920 Maxwell sedan! Chased by bandits on horseback across rocky terrain, Shipman, boyfriend/co-star Van Tuyle and "Laddie" (her pet collie) survive some of the most amazing (and real) stunts ever attempted in a roadster. SOMETHING NEW is an offbeat and wonderful addition to film history.

J'Accuse, Gance's extraordinary breakthrough work, is a World War I drama considered to be one of the most technically advanced films of the era and the first major pacifist film. It was referred to by Gance as "A human cry against the bellicose din of armies." This seminal cinematic achievement stars Marise Dauvray as Edith, a young woman who is unhappily married to an older man, François (Séverin-Mars), but is actually in love with a young poet, Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé). Both Jean and François end up on the front lines of World War I while Edith is captured by German forces and suffers atrocities at the hands of the soldiers. Gance contrasts individual human suffering with the larger horrors of war, depicted with stark realism. J'Accuse introduced such technical advances as rapid-cut editing and highly expressive camerawork and lighting. Gance, who had served briefly in the military, returned to active service in order to film real battle scenes to include in the project. The film became a huge international hit, prompting one journalist to write that if the film had been shown in every town in the world in 1913, war might have been averted. In the early 1920s, Gance revised the plot, titles, and editing for "peacetime" presentation. That had been the only version of the film available until now. Directed by Abel Gance.

In BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY, Nell Shipman is a beautiful young wife trapped on an ice-bound ship. The captain, a murderous fugitive, will stop at nothing to have his way with Nell. With only the help of a ferocious dog named Wapi, she must stave off his advances and escape with her severely wounded husband to safety.

In 1918 and 1919, DW Griffith turned from spectacles such as The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance and Hearts of the World to smaller films, which he called his short story series. Among these is True Heart Susie (June 1919). There are those of us who consider True Heart Susie to be the Griffith's masterpiece, writes Tom Gunning in his notes for a 2006 screening at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. He goes on to praise the narrative structure and point of view, as well as the fine details of performance, framing and even the use of inter titles, which make a seemingly modest film such as this appear nearly incandescent in its confessional and emotional power. In an almost mythical American arcadia, Lillian Gish portrays a pure, prim girl who so loves her childhood sweetheart (Griffith's most charming boyish hero, Robert Harron) that she sells the family cow to anonymously finance his higher education, only to lose him to a more modern woman (Clarine Seymour) when he comes home. Miss Gish's performance is among her best, her face is what Gunning calls a battleground of emotions, staging complete and progressive dramas of realization, recognition and despair. As a bonus feature, we offer Hoodoo Ann (February 1916). This light comedy is Griffith-supervised and scripted (using the pseudonym Granville Warwick), although the actual direction is by Lloyd Ingraham. Although the plot is a tangle of unlikely coincidence, the performers make it work, and it is filled with those little touches for which Fine Arts Pictures are famous, in the words of an original review. Rodney Sauer compiled the music for both films; the score for True Heart Susie is performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. True Heart Susie was prepared in cooperation with the British Film Institute. James White of BFI Films supervised the digital mastering from BFI's 35mm duplicate negative, recreating the original tinting according to BFI's unique original print. Image quality and condition of the film is generally excellent. Hoodoo Ann is digitally mastered from a 35mm fine-grain master positive made from the camera negative. Both films are speed-corrected to appropriate frame rates. A minister marries an unfaithful flirt. When his wife dies, he turns to the girl who has always loved him. DW Griffith is in top form and Lillian Gish's performance is one of her best.