The first full-length animated feature ever, Prince Achmed is loosely based on tales from The Arabian Nights. This enchanting film tells its story-an evil sorcerer trying to best the princely hero-entirely through cut-paper silhouettes against tinted and toned backdrops. Director Reiniger’s exquisitely expressive cutouts depict magical scenes of adventure involving flying horses, Aladdin, the Witch of Fiery Mountain, and the beautiful Princess Pari Banu, among others! A treat for all ages! Accompanied by Philip Carli

This gender-bending 1924 comedy imagines the year 1954 when an epidemic of “masculitus” has wiped out the male population, except for one sad sack, Elmer Smith (Earle Foxe). Gertie the Gangster (Grace Cunard) discovers the hermit Elmer and sells him to the government-for a hefty $10 million-where his fate will be decided in a boxing match on the floor of the US Senate! Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation. 35mm print source: Museum of Modern Art Accompanied by Philip Carli Philip Carli brings both prodigious musical talent and a committed scholarly outlook to his lifelong passion for the music and culture of the turn of the last century. He discovered silent film at the age of five and began his accompaniment career at thirteen, with a performance for Lon Chaney’s 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. While at college he programmed and accompanied an annual series of silent films, and also organized and conducte

D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms made Richard Barthelmess a star, but it was Henry King’s Tol’able David that cemented his place in the silent firmament. Barthelmess is the sensitive young David forced to confront brutal Goliaths in King’s rustic American coming-of-age tale. David’s serene Appalachian childhood comes to an end when a trio of outlaws terrorizes his town, crippling his brother and causing the death of his father. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation. 35mm print source: Museum of Modern Art Accompanied by Frederick Hodges

Set in the criminal underworld of Paris, this 1925 British box-office smash hit features the beguiling Ivor Novello as the apache Pierre Boucheron, aka The Rat. Novello would go on to star in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926) and Downhill (1927), but it was The Rat that made him a Valentino-like sensation. Novello’s knife-throwing Rat (a role he created for himself on stage) is dangerous to men, irresistible to women—especially to slumming aristocrat Zélie de Chaumet (Isabel Jeans). Director Cutts does a splendid job bringing Belle Époque Paris to life in his London studio. Accompanied by Sascha Jacobsen and the Musical Art Quintet Bassist Sascha Jacobsen draws on a variety of musical styles from classical to jazz and Argentine Tango. He has performed with Kronos Quartet, theatrical greats Rita Moreno, Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone, musicians Bonnie Raitt, Randy Newman, and Raul Jaurena, among many others. Jacobsen is in demand as a

Silent Oscar Wilde! If any filmmaker in history could convey the wit of the audaciously verbal Wilde in purely visual terms, it was the audaciously clever Ernst Lubitsch, aided here by a superb cast-May McAvoy as Lady Windermere, Ronald Colman as Lord Darlington, and Irene Rich as the notorious Mrs. Erlynne. Wilde’s biting comedy of social affectation and hypocrisy finds perfect expression under Lubitsch’s deft direction. The two masters shared an ethos, voiced here by Wilde’s Lord Darlington: “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.” 35mm print source: Library of Congress

William Dieterle, who would go on to direct Hollywood classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Portrait of Jennie, started his career as actor/director Wilhelm Dieterle in Germany. Despite its lurid English translation, Sex in Chains is actually a message film about the human cost of imprisonment—for the imprisoned and society—that argues for prison reform. Dieterle himself plays the protagonist Franz Sommer, in jail for involuntary manslaughter, who turns to his cellmate for companionship. The film’s depiction of prison homosexuality was far ahead of its time, and so bold as to acknowledge that it could even lead to love. Accompanied by Philip Carli