As subtitles go, filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film, an expansive yet intimate 15-hour documentary about the history of movies, gets it right: An Odyssey. Created over the course of more than a decade, his filmic journey took him around the world, twice, as he set out to interview leading personalities and capture footage from global cinema’s vibrant past and present.

The experience of watching films, wrote critic Jules Romains in 1912, is a “group dream.” Inspired by the theme of the 2012 edition of Summer Music and Movies, In Dreams, Walker Film/Video intern Matt Levine examines the dreamlike nature of film and the notion of dreams in cinematic history, from the Lumière Brothers and Méliès through film noir to Stalker, The Matrix and Inception.

Chris Marker has always had perfect timing: Born on July 29, 1921, he passed away on July 29, 2012, exactly 91 years later. Dubbed “the prototype of the twenty-first-century man” by Alain Resnais, he seemed to be everywhere at the right time, hitting every political hot spot of the later 20th century and creating innovative films wherever he went.

The cultural value of home movies, says Dwight Swanson, is that they can share unexpected moments of intimacy and humanity or views of history that might otherwise be lost. These tales, he adds, can be so honest and bracing due to the simple fact that their intended audiences may have been only a handful of people.

Officially directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb—and unofficially by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi—This Is Not a Film follows a harsh legislative decision that effectively banned Panahi from making movies for 20 years after he was convicted of conspiring against the state. He and Mirtahmasb set out to turn the sentence inside out, obeying the letter of the law in order to implicitly denounce its spirit.

Equal parts sci-fi, noir, and formalist structure, Eve Sussman’s new multifaceted film embraces two creative touchstones: the first is the protean symbol of the Russian Cosmodrome, and the second is its namesake, Malevich’s painting White on White. Mining a surreal post-Soviet ambience, the result is a calculated, never-ending fever dream caught in a forgotten corner of the Earth.

The cinematic experience is in turmoil, caught between the push to the future—an industry-wide switch to all-digital projection—and the pull of the past. The Walker Cinema’s renovation allows us to play it both ways: advancing the art of film, while also showcasing its rich history.

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has a reputation for terse gruffness, and some may conclude, misguidedly, that his films merely exhibit misanthropy and hopelessness. Yet what becomes apparent very quickly in speaking with the director is his humanism, his deep respect for individuals both in reality and as characters in his movies.