The Cinematheque

“The zenith of Hollywood gothic … Hal Mohr’s sinuous travelling camera snakes through the crypt-like mansion hand in hand with Daniele Amfitheatrof’s unearthly musical score.”

Scott MacQueen, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Robert Cummings, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead star in this gloriously gothic noir psychological thriller, the only film directed by actor Martin Gabel. Hoping to obtain the love letters of a long-dead 19th-century poet, an unscrupulous American publisher insinuates himself into the spooky Venetian household of a 105-year-old woman (the poet’s former muse) and her lovesick, mentally-unbalanced niece. Gabel’s eerie, atmospheric film freely adapts Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers, itself modeled on a real-life case involving letters of Percy Shelley.

“A remarkably effective adaptation … The ghostly web of shifting identities and sexual tensions is superbly spun.” Paul Taylor, Time Out

Preservation funded by The Packard Humanities Institute.

Moods of the Sea
USA 1941
Slavko Vorkapich, John Hoffman
10 min. 35mm

Striking images of nature are rhythmically edited to the music of Mendelssohn (“Fingal’s Cave”) in this poetic ​“pictorial fantasy,” an early masterwork of American avant-garde cinema.

Preservation funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation.