This stunning adaptation of Georg Kaiser’s play pushed the Expressionist stylization of sets, costumes and gestures introduced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (made a few months earlier) to such a radical point that German movie theaters refused to show it; long thought lost, a print was found and preserved by the National Film Center of Japan in the 1980s. Bored with his provincial, humdrum middle-class life as a bank teller, “the Cashier,” (a great performance by Ernst Deutsch) embezzles a considerable sum of money and heads to the city, where in no time he’s on a downward spiral. Of special note is the bicycle race, surely one of the most amazing sequences in silent cinema. The Alloy Orchestra has created a new score for this legendary work, which it will perform live. Thanks to the National Film Center of Japan for making this screening possible.

Screening with A Trip to the Moon / La voyage dans la lune (George Melies, 1902, 14m).
More than a century after its first release—and on the 150th anniversary of its creator’s birth—a fully restored color version of cinematic pioneer George Méliès’ 1902 science-fiction classic A Trip to the Moon is once again visible on screen. Long considered lost, a heavily damaged copy of the hand-painted film was anonymously donated in the 1990s to the Barcelona Cinematheque, and in 2010 an ambitious restoration project was launched by Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage. Thanks to state-of-the-art digital technology, the fragments of the 13, 375 frames have been reassembled and restored one by one. The stunning result screens here with a new original soundtrack by the French band Air.

Why you should see From Morning Till Midnight: NYFF Spotlight.