Lecture by Marilyn Fabe
Bruce Loeb on Piano

This program illustrates the diversity of early cinema and traces the beginnings of filmic narrative. It includes delightful trick films and special effects by Georges Méliès, Cecil Hepworth, James Williamson, and others; a work by Edwin S. Porter that illustrates the relationship between early film and its spectators; and the climax from D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (1921), a key moment in the development of cinematic storytelling.