Join us for Silent Movie Day 2025. Live accompaniment by Andrew Simpson, piano.

Silent star gestures, vivid facial expressions, and vertiginous camera placement are taken to the hilt in E.A. Dupont’s dramatic romance Variety from 1925. Told almost entirely in flashback, the story centers a circus trapeze artist who falls in lust with a young new dancer. Leaving his wife and child behind, he travels with his new paramour to great fame as a trapeze duo. An unfortunate high-wire accident that kills a male competitor sends the protagonist to jail for murder, where he languishes for 10 years in disgrace and ruin. (Ewald André Dupont, 1925, silent, German intertitles with English translation, 95 minutes)

Restored in 2014-2015 by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in cooperation with Filmarchiv Austria in Vienna from an abridged nitrate copy for the US market, provided by the Library of Congress.  

Image caption: Still from E. A. Dupont’s Variety, courtesy Filmarchiv Austria and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation