War and Peace: 1918

The Lone Eagle

A nobleman seeks to rescue his bride, who has been kidnapped by his former lover and a bandit.

A love triangle set against the turn-of-the-century gold rush.

A husband orders his wife to keep their marriage a secret, in order to better continue his affair with a married woman.

An inventor, David Hammond is the son of a ship's captain. He leaves his sweetheart, Lisbeth Bixler, and goes to the city to promote his invention. Lisbeth's father, an unsuccessful artist, deserts his family, secretly intending to commit suicide.

A young woman, a prisoner who was dressed to steal by her lover, is in jail. She would like to see her sweetheart. One night she succeeds in persuading the doctor of the prison who also is a woman, to be released. She finds the man, a waiter in an elegant hotel, behaving as a cynical Don Juan, he was preparing to rob the safe of the hotel and go away with his new lover, a dancer. This dancer suffers a fatal accident.

On a holiday, the family Gram meets a young, mysterious man who turns out to be a Mormon. In spite of her fiancèe's presence, the daughter Nina is drawn to the stranger. Hypnotized, she soon follows his every step. When she finally awakes from her trance, she finds herself on a ship to Utah, in the clutches of a dangerous man. (Stumfilm.dk)

Ukrainian silent courtroom drama about the trial on charges of Menachem Mendel Beilis in the ritual murder of 12-year-old Andrey Yushchinsky. Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Ukrainian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kyiv, in the then Russian Empire, in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the Beilis trial or Beilis affair.

The Highest Law

A lottery win of $5,000 forever changes the lives of a miner turned dentist and his wife.

The story of a poor young woman, separated by prejudice from her husband and baby, is interwoven with tales of intolerance from throughout history.

A movie star helps a young singer-actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.

Ida May Park started in the film business as a scriptwriter, but in 1917 Universal announced that Park would direct films with actress and producer Dorothy Phillips for the company’s Bluebird brand. Park’s films often had a strong female perspective and The Risky Road is no exception. The story of a country girl who comes to the city to work, but falls for a rich man and undeservedly gets a bad reputation, the film was marketed as “the drama every woman should see”. The surviving fragment, showing the despair of Phillips’s character, is a real cinematic gem that leaves one yearning for more material of the film to be discovered. In 2008, a tinted nitrate fragment, with Swedish intertitles at the opening of the second reel, was deposited at the Archival Film Collections of the Svenska Filminstitutet. From the fragment, a 35mm B&W duplicate negative was made, from which this print was struck using the tinting of the nitrate as color reference.

Just as Galeen and Wegener's Der Golem (1915) can be seen as a testament to early German film artistry, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) symbolizes both the birth of the Australian film industry and the emergence of an Australian cinema identity. Even more significantly, it heralds the emergence of the feature film format. However, only fragments of the original production of more than one hour are known to exist, preserved at the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra; Efforts at reconstruction have made the film available to modern audiences.

La Ferme du choquart

Paris, France, 1784. After living many tribulations, Joseph Balsamo, known as Count Cagliostro, an infamous adventurer, enigmatic magician and necromancer, experienced physician and ruthless swordsman, triumphs among the members of the decadent French aristocracy. But a bold foretelling about a very prominent noblewoman causes his fall in disgrace… (Partially lost film.)

The story of the military unit organized by future U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt and its adventures in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Devdas, the son of a zamindar, and Parvati, his neighbour's daughter, are childhood sweethearts. However, class and caste differences prevent their marriage. Devdas is sent off to Calcutta, while Paro is married off to an aged rich widower. In Calcutta, as remorse drives him to alcohol, Devdas meets Chandramukhi, a prostitute. All Indian prints of this Bengali version were destroyed in a fire that ravaged New Theatre’s studios. Today, only one copy of the film survives which belongs to the Bangladesh Film Archives. Of that copy almost forty percent is destroyed.

A story of a woman who committed a murder. In a French court room her life is retold by long flashbacks of her testimony and life.

A Hollywood biographical film about a survivor's experience of the Armenian Genocide. Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian plays herself in the film which is based on her published memoirs. It is thought to be the first film about made about genocide. All known complete copies of the film have been lost. A restored and edited 24-minute segment of the historic motion picture was released in 2009 by the Armenian Genocide Resource Center of Northern California. It is based on a rare surviving reel of film edited in Soviet Armenia.