A Fabulous Year! While an impressive number of long and well structured documentaries were being produced by Pathé or Urban, technically open-minded clergymen were filming extensively in Egypt, Turkey and Palestine. Early industrial films show spectacular images of the Westinghouse Company in Pittsburgh/USA and the coal mines in Shirebrook/England; elsewhere, on the big screen, crude humour and frivolous eroticism remind us that in 1904 cinema was an integral part of popular culture. The Latest News! Current events such as theatres destroyed by fires, bomb attacks and the Russo-Japanese war, were being re-enacted. At that same time, cinema allowed audiences all over the world to enjoy the captivating performances of stars performing on the Parisian or Berlin stages, such as Mistinguett, Henry Bender and Les Omers. The ‘director of the year’ is Gaston Velle, a former magician who evolved into a most sophisticated filmmaker.
Curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko

Looking back at the cinema of 100 years past with a selection of canonical classics and lesser-known rarities from 1924 culled from the archives, including seminal films from France’s burgeoning avant-garde scene, Swedish master Victor Sjöström’s majestic Hollywood feature, He Who Gets Slapped, Karl Freund’s “unchained camera” at work in F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Gabriellino d’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby’s lavish adaptation of Quo vadis? that almost single-handedly bankrupted Italy’s film industry, plus a brand new digitization of Aleksandr Ivanovskij’s Dvorec i krepost’ (The Palace and the Fortress) offering a rare example of colour tinting in Soviet cinema, and a spotlight on the talented female filmmakers Nell Shipman and Lydia Hayward. As ever, the feature films are supplemented by weird and wonderful fiction and non-fiction short subjects as well as newsreel items that highlight some of the major events and key political and cultural figures of the year. And, of course, no One Hundred Years Ago programme would be complete without another thrilling multi-part serial.
Curated by Oliver Hanley