Dark dramas played out on damp streets were familiar staples in midcentury Britain. From the late 1930s with Brian Desmond Hurst's On the Night of the Fire, through the 1940s and 1950s with Carol Reed's The Third Man and Jules Dassin's Night and the City, "Brit noir" was a mix of true films noirs and noirish, low-budget B-movies with location shooting, shadowy sets, and (sometimes) femmes fatales. This series was organized in association with Bruce Goldstein and Film Forum, with special thanks to the British Film Institute, Park Circus, and Tamasa.

Born in Wisconsin 100 years ago, Joseph Losey (1909–1984) made his mark in American cinema as the insightful outsider who distilled his style in exile, in England. In the early 1950s, when his promising Hollywood career was threatened by blacklisting, Losey resettled in London. Within a decade he had launched a new life as a European auteur. A native aesthetic brilliance and committed social conscience led to associations with many artists—most notably with English playwright Harold Pinter. A selection of Losey's rarely screened early work from the late 1940s through the 1960s, along with his three Pinter partnerships, is included in this series. Presented in association with the British Film Institute with special thanks to Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress.

Note: "The Prowler" and "The Criminal" by Losey are presented in other series.

UCLA Film & Television Archive's annual Festival of Preservation, now in its 15th year, is a brilliantly diverse showcase of the rare and the recognized, the engaging and the challenging, culled from the archive's extensive holdings. This selection of new preservation from the 2009 festival ranges from the first Sri Lankan independent film, to jazz-infused Vitaphone shorts of the early sound era, to rare melodramas by Frank Borzage. "What could be better than to sample the eclectic collection of rarities, oddities, and one-offs that this festival manages to rescue"—Kenneth Turan. With special thanks to Mimi Brody, the National Gallery presents ten programs from the 14th festival.

With modest means and great enthusiasm, collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel began buying contemporary art together in the 1960s, eventually amassing in their small New York apartment one of the finest collections in the country. Their astonishing story is documented in this award-winning work. (Megumi Sasaki, 2008, HD-Cam, 89 minutes)

Dennis James on theater organ

King Vidor's late silent masterpiece, The Crowd, may deny its ambitious average-guy hero (James Murray) a chance to rise above the masses and achieve the American dream of success, but the film remains a treasured cinematic milestone. Filled with style and wit, The Crowd is an "early domestic attempt at the European art film"—David Thomson. (King Vidor, 1928, 35 mm, silent with live music by Dennis James, 100 minutes)

Distinguished film historian, theorist, and professor of visual arts at Princeton University, P. Adams Sitney discusses American avant-garde cinema as fulfillment of the promise of an American aesthetic, an idea first defined by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Four films follow his lecture: Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (Marie Menken); Visions in Meditation #2—Mesa Verde (Stan Brakhage); Gloria (Hollis Frampton); and Gently Down the Stream (Su Friedrich). (Approximate total running time, 120 minutes) This program is made possible by funds given in memory of Rajiv Vaidya.

50th Anniversary Screening

Fifty years after its initial release, this retelling of the Orpheus myth in the streets of a Rio de Janeiro ghetto during Carnaval retains all of its endearing enchantments. Foretelling the arrival of a new wave in Brazilian film, Black Orpheus combines poetry, naturalism, fantasy, and even voodoo. (Marcel Camus, 1958, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 105 minutes)

A chamber piece that Carl Theodor Dreyer nearly renounced when he was unable to get the two actors he most wanted, this unusual one-act takes place during the course of a day. A wife, in spite of her deepest affection, ruins her husband's career. The husband, on the face of things, is involved in a murder. As for its place in Dreyer's oeuvre, Two People "opens a path to Ordet"—David Bordwell. (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1944–1945, 35 mm, Danish with subtitles, 78 minutes)

Hans Christian Andersen's timeless tale of the poor little match seller who finds happy fantasies of holiday feasts when she strikes her own matches was filmed by Renoir and TĂ©desco as they generated raw electricity from an automobile motor and improvised their lighting. (Jean Renoir and Jean TĂ©desco, 1928, 35 mm, silent with live music by Andrew Simpson, 40 minutes)