Cinema in Russia

Pioneer filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton was intrigued by the idea of a film about the history of the movies as early as 1915. He finally released a 52-minute feature called The Film Parade that was shown in New York and favorably reviewed by "Variety" in 1933. He continued tinkering with the film for the rest of the decade, and later filmmakers and distributors used Blackton's footage for stock or to produce their own variously titled and truncated versions. -UCLA Film & Television Archive

Díky, pane Kříženecký

The history of Frankenstein's journey from novel to stage to screen to icon.

Hosted by Christopher Lee, this documentary examines the different actors who have portrayed Dracula over the years.

In 1982, Wim Wenders asked 16 of his fellow directors to speak on the future of cinema, resulting in the film Room 666. Now, 40 years later, in Cannes, director Lubna Playoust asks Wim Wenders himself and a new generation of filmmakers (James Gray, Rebecca Zlotowski, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Nadav Lapid, Asghar Farhadi, Alice Rohrwacher and more) the same question: “is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”

Long treated with indifference by critics and historians, British silent cinema has only recently undergone the reevaluation it has long deserved, revealing it to be far richer than previously acknowledged. This documentary, featuring clips from a remarkable range of films, celebrates the early years of British filmmaking and spans from such pioneers as George Albert Smith and Cecil Hepworth to such later figures as Anthony Asquith, Maurice Elvey and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock.

The epic life story of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), a French screenwriter, director and producer, true pioneer of cinema, the first person who made a narrative fiction film; author of hundreds of movies, but banished from history books. Ignored and forgotten. At last remembered.

Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.

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.

A look at the life and work of Spanish filmmaker and film critic Fernando Méndez-Leite, as he writes his memoirs and a novel with autobiographical resonances.

A portrait of the famous French actress Fanny Ardant, who has worked with great figures of cinema such as Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Sydney Pollack and, above all, François Truffaut (1932-84), with whom she had a sentimental relationship and whose death marked the rest of her life.

The life and work of the brilliant German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, a cross-border artist who, by leaving Germany and making the whole world his place of work, acquired the objective perspective necessary to portray his country's society better than anyone else while providing a unique and original point of view on the troubled history of the European continent.

An inventive remembrance of the impact of the Hollywood blacklist on two American classics, rendered as a visually mesmerizing dialogue between Carl Foreman and Elia Kazan.

A short documentary about the rapidly disappearing era of heritage movie palaces and the film going experience once offered within those hallowed walls.

The pianist Miguel Ángel Lozano embarks on a personal and artistic journey with the purpose of reconstructing the life of his grandmother, Maria Forteza (1910-60), singer and pioneer of Spanish sound films.

This is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy. It is about a humane and groundbreaking masterpiece and the flawed but gifted people who made it. It is about a troubled era of cultural ferment, social and political change, about broken dreams and strivers, then and now. It is about an era that made a movie and a movie that made an era.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is one of the world’s oldest and most respected. Film Spa was made to celebrate its belated 50th edition in 2015 in its 69th year – belated because from 1959 to 1993 it was forced to alternate with the festival in Moscow.

The Captains' Summit documents the first time in Star Trek history that four stars who at some point have played Captains in Star Trek (William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Leonard Nimoy, Jonathan Frakes) have been brought together for a 70-minute rare and unprecedented round table event. Whoopi Goldberg, star of Star Trek: The Next Generation, hosts the event.

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

A fragmented collection of independent closed cinemas, in London during lockdown, captured on Super 8mm film.