Ellie is trying to juggle rhythmic gymnastics and troubles with her best friend, while Jack is struggling to live up to his brother's hockey legacy and his dad's high expectations. When a text argument about who has it easier gets out of hand, Ellie and Jack trigger a real-life swap and switch bodies! With a rhythmic championship and a spot on the hockey team at risk, they must find a way to get back in their own bodies before the swap becomes permanent....

In this drama about a man’s gambling addiction and the woman who loves him, Guy Blaché is a master of cinematic space and skillfully stages the action in the foreground and background of the frame. This film is also notable for the nightmare sequence, which, via superimposition, depicts playing cards circling the man and pulls us into his dizzying burden. Music by Frederick Hodges.

Taking 18 months to complete, this dizzyingly surreal pinscreen animation interprets music by Mussorgsky as interplay between shadow/light, permanence/impermanence, motion/stillness, human/animal, and night/day. Parker and Alexeieff slowly created the imagery for this dream-like world by constantly adjusting the pins on the board and then filming what their shadows generated.

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.

Dulac’s earliest extant title, LA CIGARETTE concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband who believes she is having an affair—speaking to a real postwar crisis of masculinity in France. With its understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realistic tendencies with impressionistic visual association, building tension between modernity/antiquity, life/death, and masculinity/femininity through cinematic-specific techniques, editing,...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Based on a fable by Ernst Keienburg, this short drama exhibits an entrancing sense of space. As a story about a monstrous man who steals a town’s musical instruments, scholars argue that this is an anti-Nazi allegory. When the musical instruments come to life, Reiniger’s playful silhouette animation celebrates the power of music as joy overcomes evil.