Prof. Jim Al-Khalili tackles the biggest subject of all, the universe. Through a series of critical observations and experiments that revolutionised our understanding of our world Jim guides us through the greatest cosmic detective story of all. He takes us from the beginning of the universe to the end time and answers the question: where did the universe come from and how will it end?
Albert Einstein: l'homme et le génie
A documentary produced in 1979 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Albert Einstein. Narrated and hosted by Peter Ustinov and written by Nigel Calder.
An educational physics film utilizing a fascinating set consisting of a rotating table and furniture occupying surprisingly unpredictable spots within the viewing area, Leacock’s Frames of Reference (1960), features fine cinematography by Abraham Morochnik, and funny narration by University of Toronto professors Donald Ivey and Patterson Hume, in a wonderful example of the fun a creative team of filmmakers can have with a subject other, less imaginative types might find pedestrian.
Bending Light
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has revolutionised our understanding of gravity, space and time. Initially acclaimed, then forgotten, and now rediscovered, the adventure of this hundred-year-old theory has marked the scientific history of the 20th century. From its inception, a mathematical difficulty arose that could have nipped the theory in the bud: the Schwarzschild singularity. In the company of great international relativistic physicists, the viewer embarks on a discovery of this theory with a singular destiny. We discover a "curved" universe that proves to be even stranger than Einstein had envisioned, and harbours some objects - such as black holes - that still challenge today's scientists.
Structural study of a tree. Light, water and air coax it out of the soil in a manner foregrounding time’s relativity to different forms of life on Earth. Made the day my brother got his fork-lift license.
Four 1950s cultural icons who conceivably could have met but probably didn't, fictionally do so in this modern fable of post-WWII America. Visually intriguing, the film has a fluid progression of flashbacks and flashforwards centering on the fictional Einstein's current observations, childhood memories, and apprehensions for the future.
This honest and often blackly hilarious film shows Martyn at home in Ireland, during the lead-up to and aftermath of an operation to have one of his legs amputated below the knee. Contributors include sometime collaborator and buddy Phil Collins, the late Robert Palmer, Ralph McTell, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, fellow hellraiser bassist Danny Thompson, John's ex-wife Beverley Martyn and younger generation fan Beth Orton. We see a man incapable of compromising his creative vision, from his folk club roots in the Sixties, through a career of continuous musical experimentation. Along the way there is a surreal roll-call of accidents and incidents, including a collision with a cow
On Her Majesty’s Service follows Gary Barlow as he embarks on a mission to record a special song to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. He writes the melody with Lord Lloyd Webber, but wants performers from around the Commonwealth to play on it. Prince Charles gives Gary some suggestions before he begins an extraordinary trip, recording a vast number of musicians on their home turfs to make the unique record "Sing".
When a person’s understanding of waves is so concrete, surfing can become especially reminiscent of modern skateboarding. Mutating masses of water almost appear as still and solid as skatepark transitions as John John Florence spins through the air over them; landing back into each evolving pocket. John John demonstrates this new level of surfing in his first independent release, DONE. Directed by Blake Vincent Kueny and John John Florence, DONE takes the DIY ethos and flips it on it’s head. Shot in beautiful HD, 16mm, and Super-8 in top-notch locations that include Tahiti, Western Australia, South Africa, and Hawaii, this highly anticipated film invites the viewer to travel with John John as he searches and finds some of the most incredible waves on Earth.
Sipping Jetstreams Media presents This Time Tomorrow, a film by Taylor Steele, documenting an epic Pacific swell chase over 8 days and 18,000 miles traveled. Two surfers, Dave Rastovich and Craig Anderson, tracked waves generated from this single storm in an exhausting attempt to surf the same wave twice as they pulsed eastward through the Pacific. As these waves thundered across the legendary reef of Teahupo’o, reeled down the endless point breaks of Mexico and onwards towards a frosty Arctic conclusion the pair gathered friends Kelly Slater, Chris Del Moro, Alex Gray, and Dan Malloy for this cinematic and cosmic experience of a lifetime.
The intention of the film is to give an impression of what small exotic Denmark looks like, what the strange Danes look like and how they are. Nearly 100 Danes are presented in the film, amongst them a racing cyclist, a Minister of Finance, a popular actor and 13 unmarried women from a provincial town. "There is too much fogginess and rain and melancholy in most of the pictures of Denmark," says Jørgen Leth. "But not in my film. I would like to show you some authentic, clear and beautiful pictures from this strange country."
Poet-filmmaker Jørgen Leth taps his own earliest inspirational veins by free-floating through a camera/microscope-enhanced set of poems with love as their first and final subject. For example, how a tropical island woman prepares for a meeting with her lover. The film was shot partly in the South Pacific with more than a nod to social anthropoliogist B. Malinowski's historical work The Sexual Life of Savages.
Jørgen Leth can squeeze poetry from a stone and wit from dust, and he can find love where the milk of human kindness runs dry. In a series of tableaux of Life in Denmark, he carries absurdism to a happy extreme. To act out his minuscule non-dramas, he uses a motley crew of professional actors like Ghita Nørby and Claus Nissen, writer Dan Turéll plus a snake charmer, a bicycle racer and a circus queen.
The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn is a two-part Russian television documentary by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The documentary shot in Solzhenitsyn’s home shows his everyday life and covers his reflections on Russian history and literature.
The daily life in a shantytown in the north part of Rio de Janeiro, with 10,000 people living in bad conditions, their problems and the issue of police violence.
Chez Schwartz takes us inside a year in the life of Schwartz's Deli - the unique 75-year-old landmark on Montreal's historic Main. Filmed through changing seasons, from the quiet of early morning preparation to the frenetic bustle of packed lunch times and never ending line-ups, to the more relaxed ambiance late at night - Chez Schwartz is an evocative, cinematic portrait of a small spunky deli known worldwide equally for its atmosphere and smoked meat.
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
It is about the representation and optimization of the vulva, anatomical myths, circumcisions, censorship and intimate modifications.