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.
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.
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.
Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.
An early British Kinemacolor short, in which delicate tones and shades of color are beautifully reproduced in examples of highly cultivated sweet pea flowers.
Almost 200 women file by a device on the wall from which they take their time checks. A man runs half-way across the screen at the end of the film.
A camera on an overhead crane travels down a large, long aisle where men are shown working on large machinery on either side. Carts carrying equipment are shown traveling on rails down the aisles. There are also men walking in the aisles. From Bitzer's Westinghouse Works series.
On the left of the screen, a small group of men lift the top off of what appears to be a turbine with a crane and continue to check the machine, tightening various parts with wrenches. On the right side, a few men appear to be testing the workings of what may be a turbine.
This scene is a part of the very first film shot produced by the Manaki Brothers. Despina, the Janaki and Milton Manaki's grandmother, was recorded weaving in one high-angle shot. For no apparent reason, the first shot made in Macedonia, in the Balkans in fact, made by these two cinematography pioneers, contains peculiar symbolics: at the moment when the grandmother Despina spins the weaving wheel, film starts rolling in our country.
An exploration of Rodez Cathedral and its stained glass windows: praying figures and scientific imagery. A study on color, repetition and flickering consisting of 292 photographs.
The film Terre Magellaniche represents the fruit of multiple and risky trips that the explorer Alberto M. De Agostini made in the Patagonian mountain range and in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. Executed with rare mastery and exquisite artistic sense, the film shows the explorer in the labyrinth of Patagonian channels, penetrating the deep fjords between large masses of floating ice of curious shapes, coming from the immense glaciers that descend from the Cordillera and bathe its frontal walls on the waters of the sea. Transported to regions of extraordinary beauty, situated in front of gigantic mountains, from which majestic waterfalls rush, the viewer experiences the illusion of finding themselves in a mysterious kingdom of dream and enchantment.
A chronicle of the Russian Revolution of 1917, from the bourgeois democratic February Revolution to the great socialist October Revolution and the final triumph.
A shy teen wants to ask out a girl on a date - but how can he know what she'd like to do, or what kind of activity would be best suited for getting to know her?
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.
Andy directs Lou Reed drinking a Coke.
The Heart of 'The Natural'
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.
This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
The official record of Mallory and Irvine's 1924 expedition. When George Mallory and Sandy Irvine attempted to reach the summit of Everest in 1924 they came closer than any previous attempt. Inspired by the work of Herbert Ponting (The Great White Silence) Captain Noel filmed in the harshest of conditions, with specially adapted equipment, to capture the drama of the fateful expedition.
Women getting onto a rickshaw.