Produced and directed by Kidlat Tahimik, this brilliant semi-autobiographical fable tells the story of a young Filipino born in 1942 (during the Occupation), his awakening to, and reaction against, American cultural colonialism. In his small village, Kidlat dreams of Cape Canaveral and listens to the Voice of America; he's even the president of his village's Werner Von Braun fan club. Winner of the Berlin Film Festival International Critics Award...

The Immigrant, which contains elements of satire, irony, and romance as well as cinematic poetry, endures in the twenty-first century as a comic masterpiece. The film, Chaplin's eleventh in the Mutual series, is the best-constructed of his two-reelers and was Chaplin's favorite among all his two-reel comedies

The most popular of the Mutuals, The Adventurer begins and ends with a chase. It is the fastest-paced film of the series, and although it has more slapstick than Easy Street and The Immigrant, it is redeemed by its construction, characterization, and Chaplin's balletic grace.

One A.M., Chaplin's fourth Mutual, is an impressive piece of virtuosity, a solo performance except for a brief appearance by Albert Austin as a taxi driver. The film is a tour de force of Chaplin's superb pantomime and comic creativity performed in a restricted space, a brilliant experiment that he never repeated. Chaplin reportedly remarked, "One more film like that and it will be goodbye Charlie."The film's simple situation revolves around a drunken...

Easy Street, his ninth film for Mutual and the most famous of the twelve, Chaplin ordered the first of the T-shaped street sets to be built that he would consistently utilize to provide a perfect backdrop to his comedy. The look and feel of Easy Street evoke the South London of his childhood (the name "Easy Street"suggests "East Street,"the street of Chaplin's birthplace).

The Floorwalker, Chaplin's first film under his landmark contract with Lone Star-Mutual, has embezzlement as its subject. Chaplin's inspiration for the film came while he and his brother Sydney were in New York City negotiating his contract with Mutual. While walking up Sixth Avenue at Thirty-third Street, Chaplin saw a man fall down an escalator serving the adjacent elevated train station and at once realized the comic possibilities of a moving staircase....

Discovering Cinema is a 2 part collection comprised of Learning to Talk and Movies Dream in Color. Film historians Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg compiled materials from their own Lobster Films collection and material from archives throughout Europe and the USA to create these two historic documentaries illustrating the birth of sound and color cinema, perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of the twentieth century...Told from a European perspective,...

In the early 1980s, documentary filmmaker Stephen Schaller was instrumental in the rediscovery and restoration of The Lumberjack (1914), the oldest surviving film made in Wisconsin, and produced by a group of itinerant filmmakers who traveled from town to town making "local talent" pictures. Schaller's lovely and sometimes deeply emotional, 63-minute journal/essay film offers a look at the making of the Wausau, Wisconsin classic, including interviews...

In the sixth Mutual film, Charlie is a pawnbroker's assistant in a pawnshop that evokes the London of Chaplin's childhood. The film is rich in comic transposition, a key element to Chaplin's genius. The apex of such work in the Mutuals is the celebrated scene in The Pawnshop in which Charlie examines an alarm clock brought in by a customer.

A refinement of his earlier comedies set in a film studio, Behind the Screen, Chaplin's seventh film for Mutual, lampoons the unmotivated slapstick of the kind Chaplin disliked when he worked for Mack Sennett. Chaplin made the film as a sort of parody of the knockabout, pie-throwing comedy of the Keystone films.