Five collections

A Programme in Five Reels · 1920–1927

The Haunted Screen

German Expressionism — shadow printed to the stone.

Caligari’s crooked town, Nosferatu’s stair, the Golem’s clay, the machine-woman in gold. When German cinema learned to paint with darkness, its posters learned it too — angular, dread-struck, unmistakable. The house’s crown hangs here: the Schulz-Neudamm one-sheet for Metropolis.

The New Vision · 1924–1930

The Constructivists

Soviet montage — the poster as engine.

In the wake of the Stenberg brothers and Rodchenko, a whole school built posters the way the films were cut — from fragments, on the diagonal, in red and black. The sheets here are that movement’s lithographs: motion itself, translated to the stone. (The Stenbergs’ own originals sit almost entirely in museum vaults; we hang the public-domain work of the hands who drew alongside them.)

The Feature Presentation · 1923–1928

Silent Hollywood

One-sheets, window cards, and lobby cards from the American silent.

The tramp, the stone face, the man on the clock, the phantom’s unmasking. American silent cinema at its height — sold on paper that was rented, returned, and destroyed. What survives, survives by accident.

Le Grand Écran · 1924–1930

The French Screen

Deco-era French cinema — the poster as couture.

Paris took the new cinema and dressed it in Art Deco. Boris Bilinsky’s Paris one-sheet for Metropolis leads a screen of lacquered geometry and lettering that behaves like architecture.

Everywhere Else At Once · 1913–1930

The World Screen

The silent era did not happen in four countries.

Rome had its divas and its thousand-extra epics; Stockholm and Copenhagen had landscapes that acted; Tokyo, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest had houses of their own. Cinema arrived nearly everywhere at once, and everywhere the local printers answered it in their own hand. This is the rest of the world’s paper.

In the Lobby, As They Hung · 1920s

Lobby Card Sets

The eight-card sets, sold as they hung.

A lobby card set was a film in eight frames — a title card and seven scenes, pinned in the lobby to sell the show. We reproduce the sets whole, as sets, the way the palace hung them.