Special 35mm Film Screening:

City Lights
(Charlie Chaplin, 1931, 81 min, USA, Silent with English intertitles, B/W, 35mm)

City Lights, the most cherished film by Charlie Chaplin, is also his ultimate Little Tramp chronicle. The writer-director-star achieved new levels of grace, in both physical comedy and dramatic poignancy, with this silent tale of a lovable vagrant falling for a young blind woman who sells flowers on the street (a magical Virginia Cherrill) and mistakes him for a millionaire. Though this Depression-era smash was made after the advent of sound, Chaplin remained steadfast in his love for the expressive beauty of the pre-talkie form. The result was the epitome of his art and the crowning achievement of silent comedy.

In 1992, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2007, the American Film Institute's "100 Years... 100 Movies" ranked City Lights as the 11th greatest American film of all time. In 1949, the critic James Agee referred to the final scene in the film as the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid".

"Only someone with slow-drying cement in their veins wouldn't be moved" - Time Out New York.

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), with support from the Mary Duke Biddle Program.