Series Site
The Museum of Modern Art presents the third annual Silent Movie Week, featuring seven recent silent film restorations screened over seven consecutive evenings. The series opens with MoMA’s digital restoration of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927), presented with live musical accompaniment in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden (weather permitting) and co-organized with Neue Galerie New York.
As a commercial medium, silent film lasted for only about 30 years, but those 30 years represented a creative explosion with few parallels in the art world. It’s estimated that only 20 percent of the films made between 1895 and 1930 survive, and yet the work of preserving and restoring the remaining films continues. MoMA is one of several archives around the world with significant silent film holdings, and this annual series invites audiences to enjoy some of the recent restoration work done by MoMA and colleagues across the globe.
This year’s lineup also features recent restorations of Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Karel Lamač’s Miss Saxophone (Saxophon-Susi) (1928), Karl Grune’s The Street (1923), Herbert Brenon’s Beau Geste (1926), John M. Stahl’s Memory Lane (1926), and Frank Borzage’s Street Angel (1928).