The Dangers of the Fly is an educational film made by Ernesto Gunche and Eduardo Martínez de la Pera, also responsible for Gaucho Nobility (1915), the biggest blockbuster of Argentinean silent cinema. De la Pera was a talented photographer, always willing to try new gadgets and techniques. This film experiments with microphotography in the style of Jean Comandon's films for Pathé and it is part of a series which included a film about mosquitoes and paludism and another one about cancer, which are considered lost. Flies were a popular subject of silent films and there are more than a dozen titles featuring them in the teens and early twenties.
Short documentary about social and economic situation in Galicia (Spain) in 1936
After the publication of a CD book with the poems of Leopoldo María Panero, musicians Carlos Ann and Enrique Bunbury travel to the Canary Islands to meet the "cursed poet", who is hospitalized in the psychiatric hospital of Las Palmas.
A method soldier boys have for amusing themselves in their leisure moments. New comrades are frequently initiated by the old-fashioned sport of tossing in a blanket. The newly arrived recruit, who is the victim of their sport, enjoys himself, perhaps, less than the other participants.
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
Two unique perspectives on the city of Liverpool come from interviews with the director's parents.
Presos del silencio
Life on the breadline in the 1930s was hard enough, but times were desperate when you fell beneath it. Hunger marches organised by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement drew attention to the cause, but this left-wing collective picked up a cine-camera. The fictional story at the heart of the film is somewhat melodramatic, but the authentic surroundings give its message realism and weight.
The documentary tells the story of Uschi, a farmer living free and recluded in the bavarian alps. Shot in epic black and white pictures, Still follows Uschi's life over a ten year period. From an untroubled summer of making cheese through pregnancy and the uncertain future of the parental farm, Matti Bauer portrays Uschi's struggle to keep alive the dream of a way of life that has become rather untypical in this day and age.
In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind has a name: Tramuntana. Tramuntana takes what it wants—clothes, trees, boats, and the people of the landscape who live with the endless threat of being carried away by its force. This film is a lyrical portrait of this furious wind, woven from the stories passed down by local villagers.
French Resistance's documentary during the liberation of Paris in August 1944.
Take a breathtaking train a ride through Nothern Quebec and Labrador on Canada’s first First Nations-owned railway. Come for the celebration of the power of independence, the crucial importance of aboriginal owned businesses and stay for the beauty of the northern landscape.
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.
Final Line
Fritz Lang, le cercle du destin - Les films allemands
Three basketball players step onto the court, each with a rhythm of their own. As their movements are studied and reimagined, their game is then recontextualized into jazz, revealing the artistry within sport and the music hidden in motion.
The first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera and possibly the first woman to appear in a motion picture within the United States. In the film, Carmencita is recorded going through a routine she had been performing at Koster & Bial's in New York since February 1890.
The earliest surviving motion-picture film, and believed to be one of the very first moving images ever created, was shot by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince using the LPCCP Type-1 MkII single-lens camera. It was taken on paper-based photographic film in the garden of Oakwood Grange, the Whitley family house in Roundhay, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire (UK), on 14 October 1888. The film shows Adolphe Le Prince (Le Prince’s son), Mrs. Sarah Whitley (Le Prince’s mother-in-law), Joseph Whitley, and Miss Harriet Hartley walking around in circles, laughing to themselves, and staying within the area framed by the camera. Roundhay Garden Scene is often associated with a recording speed of around 12 frames per second and runs for about 2 to 3 seconds.
Taken in 1896 on the Boulevard (upper Broadway) on the occasion of a bicycle parade in the heyday of the wheeling craze. Old-fashioned horse cars lend interest to the scene.
Rare black and white footage of Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones auditioning for the 60s hit NBC television program The Monkees.