In today's installment of our retrospective survey of Alfred Hitchcock's singular career, we revisit his first major statements. Thrillingly, all of Hitchcock's trademark themes and signature moves are visible in these early masterpieces -- an uncanny talent, Hitch arrived, it would seem, fully formed.
Hitchcock's motif of treacherous toying with filmgoers is intriguing to spot in his early silent-to-talkie thrillers, Blackmail and Murder!
Masterpieces of the silent era, L'Argent and Fragment of an Empire (Oblomok imperii), revel in the delirium of creativity.
Flicker Alley's The Extraordinary World of Charley Bowers gathers and restores what remains of an elusive and very clever film pioneer, and Kino Lorber shares the silently charming magic of Herbert Brenon's Peter Pan.
Paul Leni loved to move the camera to unsettle viewers -- under curtains, through doors, down trapdoors, swinging on ropes -- as seen in The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning.
Filmmaking was only one element of a much wider feminist movement that was manifesting itself in various forms, from the flapper to the suffragette to the birth control advocate to the bohemian female writer and political activist.
While Anthony Asquith's Shooting Stars and Underground look excellent on Kino Lorber's digital restoration, Arthur Robison's The Informer, looks most spectacular, thanks to working from the original negative and a tinted nitrate print.
Over 90 years later, silent film The Kid Brother works well as entertainment for modern audiences, for whom its calculated old-fashioned corn and apparent simplicity aren't a problem but par for the course.
Silent film actor Alice Howell conveyed the persona of a working-class clodhopper with a huge pile of frizzy hair plopped on top of her head, and she threw herself into physical comedy as much as Lucille Ball.
A boon for Sherlockians and silent film fans, Flicker Alley presents Der Hund von Baskerville, a DVD/Blu-ray combo containing the 1914 and 1929 silent German versions.
Flicker Alley, Milestone Films and Kino Classics offer the works of silent film directors Georges Méliès, Lotte Reiniger, Abel Gance, and F. W. Murnau on Blu-ray.
Pioneers is an essential gathering of early film treasures that help redefine an era of glorious creativity by women filmmakers and often surprising access to means of production.
Kino Lorber's release of Old Ironsides offers derring-do with cannons firing and masts breaking off and hundreds of extras swarming all over each other's ships.
Well into her 30s, silent film star Mary Pickford was the waif-iest waif in film history, and the number of convincing variations she wrung on this theme is remarkable.
William Welllman has made elegant use of shadows to convey serious issues before, and uses them in silent film You Never Know Women with a flourish.
Sponsored by the Library of Congress, Mostly Lost is an annual film workshop in which unidentified or mis-titled silent films are screened to an audience of scholars and fans who try to figure out what they are. Sometimes they succeed.
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