The last film made under the banner of Lois Weber Productions, this moral drama, also written by Weber, tackles issues of class and economic inequality, "exploring the 'blot' of society's disregard for its educators and clergymen," according to Weber biographer Shelley Stamp. The real focus of the story is the female protagonists and the anxieties, desires, and prejudices wrapped up in their economic positions. Music by Rodney Sauer and the Mont Alto...

Typical of Gaumont's output at the time and an example of cinema's early presentational style, this humorous "demonstration" film showcases a vaudeville act featuring a Miss Dundee and her trained dogs. While the dogs perform tricks like jumping over platforms and sticks, a male aide briefly assists Miss Dundee, who herself is part of the attraction. Music by Frederick Hodges.

Delve deep into this candid portrayal of masturbation and our cultural relationship with this activity we all take part in, but don't discuss. Interviews with sexologists, authors, religious figures, and porn stars.

This short farce is often only discussed as the vehicle for the onscreen debut of Chaplin's iconic Tramp (here more lecherous and inebriated than later incarnations). However, Normand, who also stars, captures the chaotic slapstick violence with expert clarity, staging for the camera a comedy of manners and miscommunication. Music by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Weber stars as a young mother who is home alone when a burglar enters her house in this visually captivating and stylistically advanced thriller. The chase scene, the use of split-screen, and the shots of the burglar ascending into the house are all powerful visuals that proclaim Lois Weber's skill as a film director. Music by Frederick Hodges.

Produced by Bute's company Expanding Cinema and made in collaboration with Ted Nemeth and sculptor Rutherford Boyd, PARABOLA is a celebration of film's ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creating juxtaposition between light/shadow, stasis/motion, and form/music, the black-and-white short invites us to see the parabolic curve, or "nature's poetry," as both invigorating and beguiling.

This straightforward family melodrama was filmed while Solax was still located in Flushing, New York. FALLING LEAVES echoes aspects of O'Henry's 1907 short story "The Last Leaf" and depicts the clever attempts of a concerned young girl trying to save her older sister who is dying of consumption. Music by Tamar Muskal.

SPOOK SPORT announces itself as a new kind of film ballet comprised of "color, music, and movement," and is a lively interpretation of a night at a graveyard where colored shapes representing bats, ghosts, and spooks jump, shimmy, bounce, glide, and spiral across the frame. Bute hired animator Norman McLaren to draw these forms directly onto the filmstrip. Filmed in two-color Cinecolor.

This early sound drama was Iribe's second directorial effort and uses cinematic techniques to visualize Goethe's 1782 ballad ERLKÖNIG and Schubert's later musical adaptation. Produced by Iribe's Les Artistes Réunis, this story of the evil Erl King and fairies who follow a father and his sick son speaks to film's power to externalize what literary and musical models cannot.

While this film is, according to film historian Alison McMahan, "'against' the oppression of women," it "tells us more about the social and economic pressures to 'Americanize'" and assimilate foreigners like Guy Blaché. The film follows an Eastern European couple that comes to the United States, where the husband learns four lessons in "Americanism." Music by Frederick Hodges.