The Mark of Zorro
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
Preserved in our collections
Harmless dandy by day, Diego becomes a masked avenger by night, taking revenge on behalf of those oppressed by a cruel tyrant.
Rouben Mamoulian
Rouben Mamoulian was an Armenian-American film and theater director. His oeuvre includes sixteen films, four of which are musicals, and seventeen Broadway productions. He was responsible for the acclaimed original stagings of Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945), as well as the first production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935). His output in the early film sound era demonstrated his talent for deploying cinematic innovations that were startling in their day. He restored mobility to the camera, and developed his own signature use of montage, close-ups, split-screens and dissolves. His films garnered more in the way of critical acclaim than box office receipts, but many were popular in their time : City Streets (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Love Me Tonight (1932), Queen Christina (1934), The Mark of Zorro (1940), and Blood and Sand (1941).
