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.

Having already established a reputation in Hollywood, Austrian émigré director Josef von Sternberg was invited to Berlin to make a sound film with prominent star Emil Jannings. Von Sternberg made significant changes to Heinrich Mann's original story, giving the social critique a more complex psychological inflection expressed through the competing performance styles of Jannings and Marlene Dietrich, obsessive repetitions of spaces and camera movements, and total conviction in the plastic force of the cinematic image. English subtitles available.

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.

With quiet precision, Hirokazu Kore-eda has helped to reinvigorate the approaches to space, movement, family, and light that have long distinguished Japanese cinema.

Director Yasujirō Ozu's signature style is already evident in this early crime drama. Matching camera movements and recurring objects - desks, smokestacks, tea kettles, shop signs, tatami mats, and telephone wires - simultaneously ground narrative spaces in everyday reality and push them into a more abstract plane. As always in Ozu's work, formal precision and psychological acuity are carefully balanced with sly comedy. English subtitles available.

A Page of Madness is among the most inventive and surprising of all silent films. Responsive to the major currents in the art cinema of the 1920s - from German Expressionism to the propulsive montage styles of Abel Gance and Sergei Eisenstein - this intertitle-less film was an attempt to elevate Japanese cinema from theatrical constraints. Co-screenwriter (and later Nobel laureate) Yasunari Kawabata described it best: a celebration of the play, melody, and speed of light.