Past Events › Up Coming Gigs

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 remain of the performances of Clara Bow, Gary Cooper and Louise Brooks, respectively, in the preservation elements housed at UCLA Film & Television Archive of…

This pioneering aviation picture put William A. Wellman's career in high gear after directing silents for various studios.  It drew heavily on his own World War I experience as an American flyer for the Lafayette Escadrille.  The technically demanding shoot was based in San Antonio, Texas, where Wellman and hundreds of army personnel and extras waited for good weather (sun with clouds, to give the correct sense of space).  Though the film won the first Best Picture Academy Award, Wellman…

Presented by the American Cinematheque and Retro Format Films on 8mm Mary Pickford enchants in a fascinating evening of short films by pioneers D.W. Griffith and Thomas H. Ince, including her first starring role in “The Violin Maker of Cremona” (1909), “Sweet and Twenty” (1909), “Artful Kate” (1911), “Lena and the Geese” (1912), “A Beast at Bay” (1912), “Friends” (1912) and more, with Lionel Barrymore, Henry Walthall, Owen Moore, Billy Quirk and many more. With live musical accompaniment by Cliff…

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 (who bears his child out of wedlock), and “The Lily of the Tenements,” which features Bernard as a Lower East Side seamstress sexually exploited by…

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 take over. The plot: Famed playwright Donald Anthony returns home to Magnolia Gap, Virginia, and proposes to Betty Fairfax (Coleen). She accepts and he offers…

UCLA Film and Television Archive Presents "7th Heaven: The Films of Frank Borzage" Don't miss this double feature with live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick. Lazybones  (1925) A shiftless young farmer (Charles Buck Jones) takes a fatherless infant girl under his wing after he rescues her and her mother from the river, until, years later, his experience of war transforms his feelings for his now adult ward.  Abounding with Biblical allusions and echoes of D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), Lazybones finds director Frank Borzage…

The UCLA Film and Television Archives Presents: "7th Heaven: The Films of Frank Borzage" Lucky Star  (1929)  A pastoral melodrama that director Frank Borzage whips into soaring romantic rapture, Lucky Star reteams Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell as a simple farm girl and wounded WWI vet whose love for each other overcomes all odds.  Borzage’s bathes the film’s deeply evocative stage sets with his trademark chiaroscuro lighting and soft-focus to surpass even 7th Heaven’s sense of otherworldly grace. Production: Fox…

A young, beautiful prostitute named Sadie Thompson (Gloria Swanson) arrives on the South Pacific island of Pago Pago looking for honest work, and falls for Timothy O'Hara (Raoul Walsh), an American sailor who is unfazed by her unsavory past. However, Mr. Davidson (Lionel Barrymore), a missionary who arrived on the island at the same time, aims to "save" Sadie from her sinful life and petitions to have her separated from her beau and deported back to San Francisco. STARRING GLORIA…