See the 1913 doppelgänger horror film The Student of Prague, with a live introduction and expertly improvised piano score by Dr. Philip Carli, one of the greatest modern silent film accompanists. Doppelgänger – mysterious doubles – have a long history in folklore around the world, but the word we use was coined as recently as 1796, by a German novelist. In this film Baldwin, a lively student who has run through his money, is inveigled by a sharp and diabolical-looking fellow student, a jokester named Scapinelli, to exchange for a fortune in gold – not his soul, oh no! Merely, “anything I may choose in your room.” Baldwin is astonished when Scapinelli chooses his image in the mirror, and it obediently follows the jokester out of the room. Baldwin soon learns how complicated and downright spooky life becomes when your mirror image belongs to someone else.

Les Deux Timides is a French film, René Clair’s last silent feature, which hops back and forth between drawing room farce and slapstick. A shy young lawyer accidentally helps to get a wife-beating thug what’s coming to him, and when the thug finishes his prison sentence he finds that his wife has died and the lawyer has fallen in love with a girl. So he naturally courts the girl himself – her and her shy elderly father. With two shy protectors, how will Cecile escape disaster?