Moment de gloire

An alien falls down from the sky in front of a wolf cub. His big ear allows him to listen to everything that happens in the universe. Yet somehow he fails to hear forest creatures calling for help.

About the funny adventures of a snake, a muskrat, a fox and a badger.

Ripples uses images cut together to visualize the mind's eye of an architect as he considers his next project.

Hutton's most impressive work ... the filmmaker's style takes on an assertive edge that marks his maturity. The landscape has a majesty that serves to reflect the meditative interiority of the artist independent of any human presence. ... New York is framed in the dark nights of a lonely winter. The pulse of street life finds no role in NEW YORK PORTRAIT; the dense metropolitan population and imposing urban locale disappear before Hutton's concern for the primal force of a universal presence. With an eye for the ordinary, Hutton can point his camera toward the clouds finding flocks of birds, or turn back to the simple objects around his apartment struggling to elicit a personal intuition from their presence. ... Hutton finds a harmonious, if at times melancholy, rapport with the natural elements that retain their grace in spite of the city's artificial environment. The city becomes a ghost town that the filmmaker transforms into a vehicle reflecting his personal mood.

Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.

A high-speed drive through the streets of Paris.

A 1936 documentary film about the London to Portsmouth railway. A lesser known contemporary of Night Mail, also featuring the music of Benjamin Britten and poetry of W.H. Auden.

Erkki Kurenniemi was arguably one of the first artists to propose or fantasise about a complete cultural surrender to cyber existence, and his entire career, covering such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, music, engineering, film, dance or rhetorics, testifies to this desire to escape the limits of the human body and transgress into a different dimension, bordering on techno-fetishism. In his 1964 short Electronics in the World of Tomorrow, Kurenniemi presents a slideshow of the most aseptic signs of technological imagination: diagrams, chips, machines, cold surfaces. But footage of human warmth also comes up - mostly in black and white, as if to give humans the status of a memory. Originally silent, the film was in this version endowed with a electronic music piece by Kurenneimi himself: a cold, aggressive soundtrack that could be said to present technology as a potentially menacing affair, although this is a reading that the director would certainly refute.

Suspected of theft, the Indian was discharged on the ranch-hand's accusation, but the foreman's suspicions against the hand were confirmed in time to reinstate the Indian. In gratitude the Indian captured the thief with the ranchero's money and saved the girl as well.

The unwilling dupe of her step-father, she became the decoy of the wealthy young man, but at the crucial moment she saved both herself and the young man and thus ended the game of the badgers.

Disabled in a thunderstorm, Betty Boop and Grampy's plane lands on a tropic island where Grampy soon re-invents the comforts of home... until hostile, racially-stereotyped natives intrude.

Likely in June 1897, a group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Claire Blanchet directs this visually stunning stereoscopic animation, adapted from Heather O’Neills eponymous slice of Montreal noir.

Commissioned by Philips, Europa Radio celebrates the company’s experimental PCJJ shortwave radio station in Eindhoven that went on air in 1927 and broadcasted to Europe as well as the rest of the world in various languages. Hans Richter’s film covers one day from morning to night, showing the range and scope of the daily radio programs – from stock market news and sports events to live concerts and a speech by Albert Einstein. (via: impakt.nl)

A retiring man in rioting Athens faces ghosts and memories from the past to make choices about the present.

Filmed before his feature-length Arrebato, Zulueta’s Frank Stein is a personal reading of horror cult classic Frankenstein (1931), filmed directly from its television broadcast and reducing Whale’s original to only three packed and dizzying minutes, during which the film's sensitive monster evolves at an unusual rate.

"At age six, Jan was miraculously revived after her body was retrieved from the frozen river that consumed her parents. Now, after a lifetime experiencing visions of people in peril, thirteen year old Jan intends to use her latest premonition to intervene on fate and prevent a murder."

In this meditation on contemporary race relations, two black men discuss in voiceover certain “casual” events in life and cinema that are unnoticed or discounted by whites—gestures, hesitations, stares, off-the-cuff remarks, jokes—details of an ideology of repressed racism.

Mathematics teacher Bernd comes to the conclusion that the youth's morals, values and thoughts (sexuality) are quite different than he thought they were.

Sombras de Thule