One of the most sensitive and rigorously edited of British documentaries, Coal Face was a landmark collaboration of the peripatetic Brazilian-born director Alberto Cavalcanti, composer Benjamin Britten, and the poet W. H. Auden (who wrote the narration). The film is a precise delineation of the many facets of what was once, as the narrator tells us, "the basic industry of Britain" and a paean to the human figures who made that possible.

The most well-known and widely distributed of the experimental documentaries produced by the General Post Office Film Unit in the 1930s, Night Mail is, like Coal Face, a collaboration with composer Benjamin Britten and the poet W. H. Auden. Like many montage films of the period, the emphasis is on process, here the different phases of mail delivery. Recurring visual and auditory motifs link the different strata, environments, and regions of Britain in striking and sometimes surprising ways.

One of two espionage thrillers Alfred Hitchcock made in 1936, Secret Agent derives from the stories of W. Somerset Maugham. The byzantine operations of intelligence services during the First World War provides a framework for a characteristically witty exploration of point-of-view, duplicitous encounters, and the narrative power of objects. An extraordinary sequence in a Swiss church demonstrates the force of Hitchcock's British Catholic imagination and eerily anticipates the early films of Terence Davies.

Terence Davies's first sojourn in America is full of surprises. The episodic structure mirrors that of John Kennedy Toole's titular novel, but the visual design and treatment of the gaps between figures and environments derive from the paintings of Edward Hopper. Looping transitions through time and memory are anchored by subtly echoing transitional spaces, winding camera movements, and a characteristically luminous performance by Gena Rowlands.

Freely combining tropes from Homer and Virgil, Giovanni Pastrone and Luigi Romano Borgnetto's epic is as remarkable for its creative ingenuity as its scale. Pastrone and Borgnetto use recurring camera movements, background figures, phantasmagorical superimpositions, and adventurous editing to develop a complex but coherent narrative form. Unusually intended for presentation as a single work (without intermission), it was an enormous international success, establishing a model of ambitious filmmaking that endures to the present. Restored by the Fondazione Cineteca Italiano. With English subtitles.

The most enduring of British wartime films, Listen to Britain is a masterpiece of precise observation and of the use of sound-image montage to generate associations that are both specific and evocative. Director Humphrey Jennings, working closely with editor Stewart McAllister, captures all facets of British life in 1942, from the habitual nature of descents into underground tunnels to the singular experience of people from all backgrounds watching pianist Dame Myra Hess perform a free concert in London's National Gallery. The composite portrait makes it very clear what Britain was fighting for while also poetically suggesting creative possibilities for the future. Jennings was a profound influence on later directors such as John Boorman and Terence Davies. New restoration by the British Film Institute.

A Cottage on Dartmoor is a celebration of the mobility and compositional integrity of silent cinema that was originally conceived as a part-talkie. Director Anthony Asquith would become famous for his conventional adaptations of plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, but A Cottage on Dartmoor is a forcefully visual film, with location footage that is as striking as the carefully framed interiors. Strongly influenced by both German Expressionism and Soviet montage, the complex flashback structure interweaves multiple points-of-view as it converges towards the present.

Through shifting points-of-view and a unique approach to movement and space, the lyrical films of Terence Davies (1945-2023) open up new perspectives on perception, memory, and time.

Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V (1599) is Britain's greatest wartime epic. It is also a celebration of the possibilities of cinema, shot in Technicolor with a score by composer William Walton and a visual design inspired by illuminated manuscripts and Renaissance paintings. Released several months after the Normandy landings, the film's patriotic purpose was clear, but Olivier remains attentive to the nuances of Shakespeare's meditation on leadership. Like his protagonist, Olivier understands the power of rhetorical prowess, drawing together all the resources of his art - vocal register, physical gesture, and the movement of actors and camera - in the climactic sequence.

Mario Caserini's extraordinary film of Parsifal was made to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Richard Wagner's final "music drama" (1882). Remarkably faithful to Wolfram von Eschenbach's 13th century manuscript, the ambitious production by Turin-based Ambrosio Films was characteristic of the Italian epics of the period in its use of hundreds of extras and costumes from La Scala in Milan. Caserini combines diagonal movement through winding paths with bold superimpositions to evoke the epic movements and interior visions beloved by the Symbolists. Restored by EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), with a new score composed of extracts from historical recordings of Wagner's Parsifal. English subtitles available.

Created to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Syberberg's Parsifal, Prologue is both a fitting end and a new beginning to his body of work. Fragments from past and present intermingle, suspended and reanimated in a field of video distortion. The different layers - from Heinrich von Kleist's "Last Poem" (1809) to Edith Clever's monologues - connect apocalyptic transformation with images of childhood. With English subtitles.

The Seattle is a bridging film in Syberberg's ouevre, a color prologue to The Night (1985) that recapitulates themes and approaches from earlier works. A montage of interlinked gestures and movements are given continuity by Edith Clever's recitation of a famous speech by Chief Seattle, the leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples of the Pacific Northwest. As in Karl May (1972), Syberberg uses the mythology and the iconography of the Western to reckon with a divided Germany. With English subtitles.

Designed as a vehicle for co-star Maureen O'Hara, this tale of revenge and moral regeneration had a troubled production history. Debut director Sam Peckinpah was nevertheless able to establish his own stylistic universe of stark verticals, shifting background movements, night-time encounters, and emphatically precise sounds. The psychological treatment of Southwestern American landscapes anticipates the work of Cormac McCarthy.

Beautifully shot in Ansco Color (an American variant of German Agfacolor), Stranger on Horseback is a distillation of the fundamental dynamics of the Western. Director Jacques Tourneur's spare and elegant treatment of action is perfectly aligned with the laconic precision of Joel McCrea's traveling judge. The film opens and closes with sinuous arabesques that establish the parameters of the underlying moral vision.

With its byzantine plot twists, stylistic panache, and sense of voluptuous doom, The Big Combo is a seminal film noir. Director Joseph H. Lewis's stark and precise mise-en-scène draws out the archetypal elements of a pared-down narrative. The effect is reinforced by David Raskin's spare, jazz-inflected score and the iconic low-key lighting of cinematographer John Alton.

Often cited as the first feature-length gangster film, Alias Jiimmy Valentine is a close adaptation of a 1910 play by Paul Armstrong that provided ample opportunities for director Maurice Tourneur to apply his unique, pictorially rich style. Trained as a painter, sculptor, and set designer, Tourneur's architectonic mise-en-scène emphasizes geometric patterns, silhouettes, and the balletic orchestration of movement. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

This 14-scene film is a landmark in the development of parallel editing, narrative cinema, the crime film, and the Western. Cinematographer-producer-director Edwin S. Porter combined location shooting with footage shot inside the Edison studios, employing many of the new filmmaking techniques that would define cinema's second decade. Porter combines multiple forms of in-frame movement with both subtle and dramatic turns of the camera, structuring everything around a famous close-up of the criminal leader firing directly at the audience. Preserved by the Library of Congress.