Ivan Mosjoukine, who left a starring career in Russia for even greater glory in France, wrote and directed The burning crucible (Le Brasier ardent, 1923) in which he also plays eleven parts. Of this film Jean Renoir said I was ecstatic I decided to abandon my trade, ceramics, to try to make films.

Ivan Mosjoukine collaborated on the script and plays the title role in Alexandre Volkoff's lavish Kean (1924), dramatizing the later life of Edmund Kean, the greatest Shakespearian of the early 19th century.

An important piece of German-Jewish cinematic history, contrasting the closed world of an Eastern European shtetl with the liberal mores of 1860's Vienna. With its historically authentic set design and ensemble of prominent actors, THE ANCIENT LAW is an outstanding example of the creativity of Jewish filmmakers in 1920s Germany. In the film, Baruch (Ernst Deutsch), the son of a rabbi, becomes fascinated by the theater. Against his father's wishes, Baruch leaves home and finds his way to Vienna, where an archduchess at the imperial court (Henny Porten) falls in love with him. She becomes his patroness, facilitating his successful career as a classical actor. But Baruch continues to long for home, and must find a way to reconcile his religious heritage with his love of secular literature. The movie paints a complex portrait of the tension between tradition and modernity.

A hapless amusement park attendant finds his run away balloon ride has left him in a strange predicament.

In an attempt to forget his lost sweetheart, Buster takes a long trip at sea where he boards a whaling ship with a strict captain.

A boy leaves his small country town and heads to the big city to get a job. As soon as he makes it big his sweetheart will join him and marry him.

A brilliant historical satire teeming with inventive flourishes, Buster Keaton's THREE AGES is a silent comedy of truly epic proportions. This clever parody of D. W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE follows Buster's hard-luck romantic adventures throughout world history: form the dawn of man in the Stone Age, through the gladiatorial arenas of Ancient Rome, to the city streets of the American Jazz Era. *"Superb three-part silent comedy." - Daniel Eagan, **Film Journal International***

After hearing the story of Moses, the sons of a devout Christian mother go their own ways, while the atheist brother's breaking of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS leads to tragedy. This is the first film in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical trilogy.

As new generations discover the magic of silent cinema, Buster Keaton has emerged as one of the era's most admired and respected artists. Behind the deadpan expression and trademark porkpie hat was a filmmaking genius who conceived and engineered some of the most breathtaking stunts and feats of visual trickery, while never losing sight of slapstick cinema's primary objective: laughter. *"The greatest of the silent clowns is Buster Keaton, not only because of what he did, but because of how he did it." - Roger Ebert*

Taken to its bare bones, the story deals with Sisif, a locomotive engineer who saves Norma, an infant girl, from a train wreck and raises her as his adopted daughter. Norma thinks Sisif's son Elie is her brother, and when the two fall in love, she leaves to marry a virtual stranger. Sisif is also obsessed with her and the plot elaborates this triangular relationship...German director G. W. Pabst, an ardent admirer of La Roue, was encouraged by Gance's example to undertake his own remarkable explorations of human psychology in such silent films as Secrets of a Soul, Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Yet La Roue is even more remarkable for its cinematic accomplishment than for its story. The film was shot almost entirely on location. Sets were built along the railroad tracks in the yard at St. Roch, near Nice, and at an elevation of 13,000 feet on Mount Blanc. Gance pioneered a dazzlingly innovative style of rapid montage that revolutionized filmmaking around the world, especially in the works of Eisenstein and his contemporaries in the Soviet Union. Almost every sequence was experimental: as his cinematographer, L-H Burel recalled, "I'd never come to the end of it if I were to list all the tests we did, all the special effects I invented, and all the innovations we launched."..Like Intolerance and Citizen Kane, La Roue became a source book of cinematic invention that reverberated in countless other classic films over the decades. It was hailed by artists and intellectuals, who recognized it as a stunning advance in modern art. Said Akira Kurosawa, "The first film that really impressed me was La Roue."This new restoration with a running time of nearly four and a half hours, accompanied by Robert Israel's symphonic score, is the fullest presentation of La Roue to reach the public since 1923. It at last allows audiences today to experience the amazing, poetic vision that Abel Gance brought to the world.