The future, filed early
1927
Featured film
Metropolis
Directed by Fritz Lang
A city of towers and underground workers, set in the year 2026 and imagined in 1927. The future looked at us first, and it has been looking ever since.
Every era leaves a print
Classic
Movies
The canon · Silent era to New Hollywood · Twelve films
Early cinema.Still arriving.
The past, projected at 24 frames per second.
A classic is a time capsule that still runs. Each of these films carries the fears, tools, and hopes of its year, sealed in light. Watch them in order and you watch the twentieth century think about itself, one era handing its questions to the next.
Man vs. the clock
1936
Silent & Early
Modern Times
Directed by Charles Chaplin
The Tramp against the factory clock. The machine age timed to the second, and one man who cannot keep its beat.
The door between worlds
1939
Golden Age
The Wizard of Oz
Directed by Victor Fleming
A Kansas farm girl steps through a storm into a world in Technicolor. The door between worlds, filmed.
A life in reverse
1941
Golden Age
Citizen Kane
Directed by Orson Welles
A life told backward from its final word. Memory as the first unreliable narrator.
Waiting for exit visas
1942
Golden Age
Casablanca
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Everyone in Rick's café is waiting for a way out of a timeline that has stopped. Most of them never get one.
The world without him
1946
Golden Age
It's a Wonderful Life
Directed by Frank Capra
One man is shown the world running without him. The alternate timeline used as a moral instrument.
An industry changes eras
1952
Postwar
Singin' in the Rain
Directed by Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
Hollywood films its own timeline break: the silent era ending, the talkies arriving, and nobody ready.
The past, restaged
1958
Postwar
Vertigo
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
A man tries to rebuild a woman out of memory and dress her in the past. Obsession as time travel that fails.
Before and after
1960
Postwar
Psycho
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
One shower scene cut the timeline of cinema in two. There is a before it and an after it.
One cut, four million years
1968
New Hollywood
2001: A Space Odyssey
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
From a thrown bone to an orbiting station in a single cut. The longest time jump in film, taken in one edit.
Power, inherited
1972
New Hollywood
The Godfather
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
A family treats time as inheritance. Every scene is power passing from one era to the next.
Myth filed as history
1977
New Hollywood
Star Wars
Directed by George Lucas
It opens in a past that never happened: a long time ago, in a galaxy far away. Myth filed as history.