Masters of Cinema

Reuniting the star and director of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, The Hands of Orlac [Orlac’s Hände] is a deliciously twisted thriller that blends grand guignol thrills with the visual and performance styles of German Expressionism.
Based on a novel by medical-horror novelist Maurice Renard, it charts the mental disintegration of a concert pianist (Conrad Veidt) whose hands are amputated after a train crash, and replaced with the hands of an executed murderer. When Orlac’s father is murdered by the dead man’s hands, Orlac begins a steady descent towards madness.

Reuniting the star and director of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, The Hands of Orlac [Orlac’s Hände] is a deliciously twisted thriller that blends grand guignol thrills with the visual and performance styles of German Expressionism.
Based on a novel by medical-horror novelist Maurice Renard, it charts the mental disintegration of a concert pianist (Conrad Veidt) whose hands are amputated after a train crash, and replaced with the hands of an executed murderer. When Orlac’s father is murdered by the dead man’s hands, Orlac begins a steady descent towards madness.

Reuniting the star and director of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, The Hands of Orlac [Orlac’s Hände] is a deliciously twisted thriller that blends grand guignol thrills with the visual and performance styles of German Expressionism.
Based on a novel by medical-horror novelist Maurice Renard, it charts the mental disintegration of a concert pianist (Conrad Veidt) whose hands are amputated after a train crash, and replaced with the hands of an executed murderer. When Orlac’s father is murdered by the dead man’s hands, Orlac begins a steady descent towards madness.

In 1917 a 21 year old Buster Keaton walked on to a film set for the very first time and without a single retake made his screen debut in a comedy sketch in Arbuckle's 'The Butcher Boy'. This collection includes 13 of the 14 films that Arbuckle and Keaton made together (one remains lost) and all of the 19 independent shorts Buster made after getting his own studio in 1920. It charts Buster's early development as one of the greatest performers and directors in the history of film comedy.

In 1917 a 21 year old Buster Keaton walked on to a film set for the very first time and without a single retake made his screen debut in a comedy sketch in Arbuckle's 'The Butcher Boy'. This collection includes 13 of the 14 films that Arbuckle and Keaton made together (one remains lost) and all of the 19 independent shorts Buster made after getting his own studio in 1920. It charts Buster's early development as one of the greatest performers and directors in the history of film comedy.

Mikio Naruse was a contemporary of the great post-war Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi and indeed his works lie somewhere in between Ozu’s natural rhythms of everyday family life and Mizoguchi’s outlook on female issues and social injustices. In some respects Naruse even surpasses these two great directors in their own areas, his films being more naturalistic and not as formally rigid as Ozu, tackling a wider range of subjects and issues, those concerns often being adapted from the works of female authors, giving them a truer perspective on female issues than Mizoguchi, whose films can often seem like a man’s guilt-ridden perspective on the treatment of women in society.

Of all Masaki Kobayashi’s attacks on the cruelty and inhumanity perpetrated by authoritarian power (including The Human Condition and Samurai Rebellion), perhaps none are more brilliant than his visceral, mesmerising Harakiri [aka Seppuku].
In a magnificent performance, Tatsuya Nakadai (Yojimbo, The Face of Another, Ran) stars as Hanshiro Tsugumo, a masterless down-and-out samurai who enters the manor of Lord Iyi, requesting to commit ritual suicide on his property. Suspected of simply fishing for charity, Hanshiro is told the gruesome tale of the last samurai who made the same request – but Hanshiro will not be moved…

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is perhaps the most famous German film of all time, and certainly one of the most influential of all silent films. In its lifetime it has been: drastically re-edited (shortly after release); unseen for decades; revisioned with a modern music score in the 1980s; and thanks to the work of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and