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.

With The Iron Horse, an ambitious epic about the creation of the transcontinental Central Pacific Railroad, John Ford reinvented the iconography of the railway journey. Adopting vantage points above and below the moving trains, Ford developed a treatment of scale and motion that builds upon the visual strategies of nineteenth century precursors like painter/sculptor Frederic Remington and photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, imbuing them with distinctly cinematic rhythms.

"Phantom ride" films were among the most popular forms of early cinema. The Kiss in the Tunnel, a three-shot film by the British pioneer G. A. Smith, provides the most structurally elegant “phantom ride” of the nineteenth century. It exemplifies the tantalizing possibilities created by the interrelation of staged fiction and documentary discovery.

Among the most ambitious films of the 19th century, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was a complete recording of the 14-round 1897 heavyweight championship fight between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada. It was shot with a specially-designed "Veriscope" camera using 63mm widescreen film, a unique shooting and exhibition process controlled entirely by the intrepid pioneer Enoch Rector. Original presentations lasted for more than 100 minutes and included introductions and presentations of each 3-minute round, all accompanied by a live narrator. This extract, preserved by the Library of Congress, is all that remains.

They Made Me a Criminal is one of the seminal boxing films of the 1930s and one of the last great social-issue films of the Depression. It was an atypical assignment for director Busby Berkeley, who was eager to make a dramatic work and adapted the complex choreography of his spectacular musicals for the film's rhythmically vigorous boxing sequences. The low-key lighting of influential cinematographer James Wong Howe anticipates the flourishing of film noir in the 1940s and lends heightened gravitas to the persona-defining performance of John Garfield.

The Big Trail is the seminal depiction of the migration journey along the Oregon Trail and the most important Western of the early 1930s. It was also the last of a small handful of films shot with Movietone sound and Fox's short-lived 70mm Grandeur film, a pioneering widescreen process that created notorious focal challenges at close range. Director Raoul Walsh and his cinematographers developed a new compositional strategy: using increased distance and breadth to orchestrate astonishingly elaborate, interlocking movements.

Vigorous and incomparably kinetic, Walter Hill’s films have revitalized the defining genres of American cinema.

The Hitch-Hiker is the most distinctive of the independent, social-issue films produced by Ida Lupino’s company The Filmakers Inc. Lupino was a favorite actress of directors ranging from Raoul Walsh to Sam Peckinpah, and extensive studio experience helped her transform a low-budget thriller about a dangerous road trip into an innovative exploration of fractured subjectivity. The abundant noir elements are enriched by legendary cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca’s supple location shooting. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

A source of great controversy at the time of its original release, Pandora's Box is now recognized as one of the seminal achievements of Weimar cinema. Austrian director G. W. Pabst reworked elements from two of Franz Wedekind's fin-de-siècle Lulu plays and the result is an amalgam of late nineteenth century social concerns (from the Salvation Army to Jack the Ripper). Pabst's choreography of action and Günther Krampf's lustrous cinematography fuse naturalist and expressionist elements, perfectly complementing the incandescent performance of American actress Louise Brooks. English subtitles available.

Long considered a lost film, this early John Ford feature already contains the defining features of his cinema: an intuitive grasp of cinematic rhythm, the dynamic treatment of individual and group movements, and the transformation of archetypal gestures and spatial boundaries into a distilled visual iconography. Actor and co-writer Harry Carey established the template for Ford's mythic heroes.

Like many of Yasujirō Ozu's early films, this beautiful fragment addresses the twin themes of university education and employment by combining trenchant social commentary and slapstick comedy. Structurally elegant narrative parallels heighten the effects of the distinctive framing, and the many paradoxes of Ozu's cinema are epitomized by the rigorously composed image of actress Kinuyo Tanaka standing in a kimono before an English-language poster for a Harold Lloyd comedy. With English subtitles.

Director Mikio Naruse's earliest surviving film blends absurdist comedy, social commentary, and family melodrama. Characteristic of Naruse's early work, it is stylistically adventurous and exuberant, incorporating superimposition, rapid montage, and split-screen effects for psychological emphasis. These are counterbalanced by the hunched movements, repeated gestures, and diagonal blocking that would later become defining elements of Naruse's cinema. With English subtitles.

Made the year before The Blue Angel (1930), Josef von Sternberg’s first synchronized sound production was among the first films to treat sound as an integral component of the overall cinematic design. Offscreen speech, unusual dialogue rhythms, and startling sound effects perfectly complement the Expressionist imagery of this proto-noir crime drama.

A landmark in the development of Japanese documentary film, this educational short anticipates the cinéma vérité masterworks of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Director Susumu Hani went to great lengths to elicit naturalistic responses from children, and the results are as vital and spontaneous as they are structurally elegant.

An education film in the truest sense, Lessons from a Calf aspires to convey the interior development of a group of rural schoolchildren in the late 1980s. As described in our portrait film, Kore-eda immersed himself in the community, developing filmmaking strategies and ways of responding to the earnestness of children that he would later apply to narrative features like Nobody Knows (2004).

An ebullient celebration of the voluptuousness of the cinematic image and the creative possibilities of sound technology, Morocco is one of the defining films of its era. Director Josef von Sternberg's stylistic trademarks - lateral tracks through enclosed spaces, shadow-laden compositions, and circular movements around central light sources - are richly complemented by a dense soundtrack featuring voices in five languages and the incomparable singing of Marlene Dietrich. Morocco was the first film released in Japan with subtitles, and it was an avowed influence on filmmakers ranging from Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa to Hirokazu Kore-eda.