The Wind

Victor Sjöström’s psycho-erotic tour de force features Lillian Gish in her final—and greatest—silent performance. She is the delicate Letty, who travels from Virginia to the West to start a new life—but soon finds herself going mad in a desert wasteland of leering men, hostile women, and a ferocious wind that never stops howling… Shot on location in the Mojave Desert, this torrid masterwork is a harrowing, almost mythic dramatization of the ways in which both man and nature destroy. The climactic sandstorm ranks among the most astonishing sequences in all of silent cinema, an expressionistic rampage that spirals into full-on horror. The screening will be accompanied by a live piano performance by Donald Sosin.

Preceded by:
Night Hunter
Stacey Steers, USA, 2011, 16m
In this handmade film composed of more than 4,000 collages, actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role.