Presented as part of the Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing Series Live musical accompaniment for the silent portion of this program will be provided by Cliff Retallick. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive His Nibs (1921) Gregory La Cava directs this riotous, slapstick spoof of the goings-on at a rural movie theater, The Slippery Elm Picture … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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.
A famous opera singer lost her voice when her son was born, and has drowned her sorrows in drink. When a murder is committed near her house, she invents a story in order to get herself back in front of the public again. However, the story she comes up with results in her son being … [Read more…]
Our “Retroformat,” movies on 8mm series presents “Fatty and Mabel at Keystone” in our intimate, Spielberg Theatre. This two hour program is an evening of silent shorts on 8mm featuring two of the era’s most beloved stars, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. The program includes a 100th anniversary screening of the beautifully made comedy … [Read more…]
Booster dreams and noirish visions comingle in tonight’s program covering almost 60 years of Los Angeles history as seen through a selection of travelogues, industrial films and amateur movies. Between the Ford Motor Company’s silent-era portrait of a booming young metropolis and the DWP’s early 1970s promotion of an imminent, water-drenched Pacific Rim economic explosion, … [Read more…]
Maldone (France, 1928) One of director Jean Grémillon’s earliest successes, Maldone sets up an internalized class conflict in the person of Olivier Maldone, who prefers a working-class existence to the comforts of his wealthy family. Summoned home at the death of his brother to assume control of the family estate, he dutifully returns, but cannot … [Read more…]
LOS ANGELES PREMIERE!!! Recently rediscovered in Bologna, Italy, this is the first presentation of SYNTHETIC SIN in Los Angeles in more than 82 years! A partial VITAPHONE soundtrack survives for the last few minutes of the film. Cliff Retallick will provide a live score up to that point and then let the original Vitaphone splendor … [Read more…]
An Evening of D.W. Griffith Shorts Presented by the American Cinematheque and Retro Format Films on 8mm Our outstanding series resumes with films from early 1911. Mary Pickford stars in “The Three Sisters” and “When a Man Loves.” We screen two daring social dramas: “Fate’s Turning,” in which wealthy Charles West rejects waitress Dorothy Bernard … [Read more…]
It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of all silent films are lost today. Of that small percentage of titles which does survive at archives, studios and in private collections, much has yet to be preserved, while far too many of those that have been preserved exist only in fragmentary form. (For example, only portions … [Read more…]