The Dance of the Paroxysms

Silent film from 1915 which draws on the story of Carmen

Karin, a young girl, gets an hour free from school. She spends it across the street from the school, in the apartment of an older photographer.

Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.

Victor Stowell, son of the deemster of the Isle of Man, is engaged to Fenella Stanley. He becomes involved in an intrigue with local girl Bessie Collister, becomes the deemster on his father's death, and is forced to try Bessie for killing her illegitimate child.