MoMA announces fourth annual Silent Movie Week featuring exclusive collection restorations
What Price Glory. 1926. USA. Directed by Raoul Walsh. The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
NEW YORK, NY.—
The Museum of Modern Art announces the fourth annual presentation of Silent Movie Week, a summer series that presents seven recent silent film restorations at MoMA over the course of seven consecutive evenings, from July 29 through August 3, 2026. This year’s series will be the first to feature restorations of films exclusively drawn from MoMA’s collection. Two of the films—The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927) and A Dog’s Life/Shoulder Arms (1918)—have been restored to their original domestic theatrical release cut for the first time since the works premiered, with MoMA’s print of The Student Prince recently discovered to be the sole remaining copy of the cut shown to audiences in 1927. All restorations are being shown in the Museum’s theaters for the first time, including five World premieres and two American premieres. This year’s series will once again feature live musical accompaniment, including a 10-piece orchestra performance of a newly reconstructed score for Way Down East (1920) by music scholar Gillian B. Anderson, and a newly recorded, MoMA commissioned orchestral score for 3 Bad Men (1926), written and conducted by Timothy Brock. Silent Movie Week 2026 is organized by Dave Kehr, Curator, and Steve Macfarlane, Department Assistant, Department of Film.
The series will open on July 29 with the premiere of a new digitization of Way Down East, alongside a new reconstruction of Louis Silvers and William Frederick Peters’s original score edited by orchestral conductor and musicologist Gillian B. Anderson. This year’s lineup also includes a restoration of Buster Keaton’s The Navigator (1924) from the only known nitrate print in MoMA’s archive; Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory (1926), restored by MoMA and the Film Foundation; the first-ever restoration of the full domestic release of The Student Prince; long-unseen original release versions of Charles Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms, restored under the aegis of the Chaplin estate, which will be screened alongside a scanned vintage print of the director’s rare World War I propaganda film, The Bond (1918), from MoMA’s archive; 3 Bad Men accompanied by Timothy Brock’s newly recorded orchestral score; and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), utilizing elements from MoMA’s film collection. All screenings will feature live musical accompaniment.
“That six of the seven films featured in this year’s Silent Movie Week are all MoMA restorations, and the seventh, Sunrise, was restored by our friends at the San Francisco Film Preserve using some elements from MoMA is a tribute to the perspicacity of Iris Barry, MoMA’s first film curator in the 1930s,” said Kehr. “At a time when no other museums were collecting films as works of art, Barry toured the world and acquired original prints of a great many silent and early sound classics. In many cases, these prints remain the best source material for these important works today.”
As a commercial medium, silent film lasted for only about 30 years, but those 30 years represented a creative explosion with few parallels in the art world. It’s estimated that only 20 percent of the films made between 1895 and 1930 survive, and yet the work of preserving and restoring the remaining films continues. MoMA is one of several archives around the world with significant silent film holdings, and this annual series invites audiences to enjoy some of the recent restoration work done by MoMA and colleagues across the globe.
