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Cinema at Taliesin was both cultural exploration and community ritual. Each week, films were promoted in the At Taliesin column, a series of weekly writings published from 1934 to 1937 in local newspapers. Written mostly by apprentices, with occasional input from Frank Lloyd Wright, the columns offered glimpses into Taliesin Fellowship life while highlighting an upcoming Sunday film screening.
Taliesin Playhouse before 1953 Fire
Recognizing the power of cinema to foster cultural understanding, Wright once wrote that audiences should “see for oneself as deeply and richly, the life of other parts of the world.” In that spirit, the theater became more than a venue. it provided a portal to global perspectives.
By 1939, the theater had screened films from a variety of countries, including France, the former Soviet Union, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, China and Sweden.
Personal Photo from Taliesin Fellow Kelly Oliver
Programming during the early years of the Fellowship reflected an ambitious spirit that placed cinema at the heart of artistic and intellectual inquiry. A significant number of films shown in the 1930s focused on political and socially-conscious stories, particularly from European filmmakers. Other films explored revolution, history, and power. Hillside also welcomed artistic experimentation: films that explored dream logic, poetic imagery, and surrealist techniques. Animation and musical storytelling emerged as innovative platforms for pushing artistic boundaries.
The Fellowship gravitated toward socially-conscious cinema, especially films that used the medium as a tool for revolution, transformation, and spectacle. Sergei Eisenstein’s Old and New (1929, screened 1933, Fellowship rating: “Good”) the first recorded film at Hillside, dramatizes the shift from traditional farming to collective agriculture in the Soviet Union. In one striking sequence, images of machinery are edited with almost musical rhythm, turning ideology into a kind of cinematic poetry. The Road to Life (1931, screened 1933, “Good”) offered a semi-documentary portrait of juvenile rehabilitation in post-revolutionary Moscow. Part fiction, part documentary, and one of the earliest Soviet sound films, it follows young boys from the streets of Moscow as they’re reformed in a labor camp. In Storm Over Asia (1928, screened 1934, “Very Good”), a Mongolian herdsman becomes an unlikely revolutionary symbol of resistance after colonial forces try to exploit him in one of cinema’s earliest anti-imperialist epics. Director Vsevolod Pudovkin turns this simple story into a sweeping critique of imperial power, using powerful imagery and editing to tell a larger story about freedom.
Elsewhere in the archives, revolution gives way to human complexity, as the focus shifts to the individuals caught in revolution’s path. Chapayev (1934, screened 1935, Fellowship rating:“Excellent”) depicts a Red Army hero as a flawed, magnetic leader. Ten Days That Shook the World (1928, screened 1934, “Very Good”) takes a more epic approach, turning the 1917 Russian Revolution into a fast-paced, chaotic storm of images, emphasizing motion and momentum.
Fritz Lang’s M (1931, screened 1935) turned its lens on modern anxiety, presenting a darker take on society. Following the hunt for a child murderer, it asks hard questions about justice, fear, and who really holds power. In contrast, The Czar Wants to Sleep (1935, screened 1937 and 1940, “Excellent”) uses comedy to critique bureaucracy—light in tone, but sharp in message.
Hillside audiences were also exposed to avant-garde expression. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, screened 1934, Fellowship rating:“Excellent”) takes Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic tale and reimagines it with surreal visuals. Slow motion, double exposures, and eerie camera angles that create a dreamlike world of dread and decay. Jean Cocteau’s L’Étoile de Mer (1928, screened 1934, “Fair”) is more abstract, using soft-focus shots and non-linear editing to tell a poetic, almost subconscious love story. These weren’t just stories, they were visual experiments, using film to explore emotion, memory, and the unknown.
Even Disney shorts played a defining role in Hillside’s cinematic landscape. Silly Symphonies like Skeleton Dance (1929, screened 1938) and Orphan’s Benefit (1934, screened 1934 and 1935, Fellowship rating:“Wonderful”) became musical compositions in animated form. Their precise timing, visual rhythm, and playful tone contributed a sense of joy, artistic innovation, and musicality to early cinema.
Theater logs reflect a clear preference for lyrical, romantic storytelling, particularly in the films of French director René Clair. His works, À Nous la Liberté (1931, screened 1933, 1934, 1938, Fellowship rating: “Excellent Plus”), Le Million (1931, screened 1934, 1935, 1938, “Good” / “Excellent”), and Sous les Toits de Paris (1930, screened 1933 and 1938, “Good” / “Very Good”), were screened repeatedly throughout the 1930s and consistently praised for their inventive use of music, gentle humor, and poetic depictions of everyday life. Blending romance, satire, and innovative sound design, Clair’s films offered audiences a charming and imaginative escape.
Viennese operettas like Congress Dances (1931, screened 1933, Fellowship rating:“Very Good”) and Two Hearts in Waltz Time (1930, screened 1934, “Good”) added romance, spectacle, and lavish production to the program. Congress Dances mixed comedy, politics, and a royal love story, set in grand ballrooms filled with waltzing crowds. Two Hearts in Waltz Time followed a composer who finds new inspiration through love, with songs that became hits far beyond the film.
Hollywood was present, too. Taliesin audiences saw dramatic and emotional American films like The Constant Nymph (1933, screened 1934, Fellowship rating:“Good”), Broken Lullaby (1932, screened 1933), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), and Stagecoach (1939), featuring big names like Leslie Howard and John Wayne. With familiar faces and polished storytelling, these films offered a contrast to the political and experimental works that made up much of the Fellowship’s viewing.
Together, these choices reflect a community that saw film as more than mere diversion—whether through Soviet montage, Viennese operettas, or Disney’s dancing skeletons, every selection was a chance to engage the mind, stir the emotions, and spark conversation. Wright’s reflections reveal what he hoped artists (whether filmmakers or from the Fellowship) would take from these works. He urged Disney’s team not to “extra-illustrate pictorial music” but to seek a “perfect correlation between music and design… instinctive design, which is perfect design.” He warned against getting “mixed up with these sentimentalities” and cautioned that “the public doesn’t know what it wants… Show them that thing which they miss.” His message was the same for his Fellowship: resist the pull of convention and commercialization, and stand firm in your artistic vision.
For Frank Lloyd Wright, cinema, like architecture, was part of a larger project: the pursuit of art with the power to shape not just physical spaces, but the ways people see, think, and the spirit itself.
