The Silent Clowns Film Series is New York’s longest-running regularly scheduled silent film showcase. Our programming reaches the serious film buff by including rarely-screened titles and rare prints, yet it also introduces kids and new audiences to the classics of the silent screen. Screenings feature live piano accompaniment by MoMA’s Ben Model, with an introduction […]

Live musical accompaniment by MIYUMI Project Japanese Experimental Ensemble Sessue Hayakawa was an unlikely star in early Hollywood, a Japanese actor who became a beloved matinee idol in an era of intense anti-Asian prejudice. Frequently typecast in roles that trafficked in exotic stereotypes (and not always Asian ones), Hayakawa eventually set up his own production company, Haworth […]

In 1914, an unknown French director arrived in New York. Four years later, Maurice Tourneur was one of the most celebrated American filmmakers with D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. From his beginnings as a painter, this presentation will endeavour to recapture the essence of an artist who helped to shape the feature film […]

Get swept away by the haunting beauty of “The Dragon Painter.” Starring the incredible Sessue Hayakawa, this film tells the tale of Tatsu, a passionate artist who loses himself in his art—literally! Believing his beloved princess has been captured by a dragon, Tatsu’s obsession blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. This is more than […]

Presumed lost (as are many of director Allan Dwan’s silent films), Padlocked was restored in 2023 by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Národní filmový archiv (Prague), where the only surviving print had lain unnoticed for decades. But what does such a restoration involve in the digital era? In this presentation, Maria Fuentes will […]

On drum set and vibraphone, Shun Ishiwaka shows off his mastery in this film-screening “concert,” enlivening the silent movie The Dragon Painter, a quirky story of a brilliant, reclusive painter obsessed with the myth of a dragon princess. Starring Japanese matinée idol Sessue Hayakawa, the first actor of Asian descent to become a leading man in […]