Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.
Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.
During World War II, the photographer Francisco Boix and other Spanish Republican prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where 120,000 people died, managed not only to survive their indescribable experience, but also, after the war, to reveal to the world what really happened in that hell, saving from destruction thousands of official photographs taken by the SS.
The Maginot Line: thousands of subway bunkers and concrete defenses lining the French border from Belgium to the Mediterranean Sea, a monumental engineering feat that was celebrated as a technical masterpiece when it was created. When the impregnable wall was demolished by the unbeatable Nazi war machine in 1940, the conquered fortress became the shattered symbol of French defeat.
A dog trains for the battlefield and becomes a crucial part of the United States military. This 1945 short documentary film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short, One-Reel.
This short film, produced at the end of WWII, warns that although Adolf Hitler is dead, his ideas live on.
Oscar winning postwar propaganda film in support of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Strident but poignant, focusing on children. The film surveys the Nazi/Japanese atrocities, post-war devastation and the early relief efforts. This film was responsible for raising over $200,000,000, making it a top moneymaking film. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.
Six young women programmed the world's first all-electronic programmable computer, ENIAC, as part of a secret US WWII project. They changed the world, but were never introduced and never received credit. These pioneers deserve to be known and celebrated: Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Barik, Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas Spence.
War and Peace of Mind explores what war does to the human mind and how both, the individuals and the nation as a whole, survive it psychologically. Finland and WWII, locally known as continuation war, is the backdrop of this documentary.
Documentary film version of the stage show in which actress Cynthia Gates Fujikawa explores the story of her father, actor Jerry Fujikawa, who had a long career in films and television, most often as a stereotyped Asian. The daughter, in the course of searching out her late father's history, discovers many things that she had not known, among them that her father had spent time in Manzanar, the internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, that he had had a family prior to hers, and that somewhere out there was a sister she had never known existed.
Cinecitta is today known as the center of the Italian film industry. But there is a dark past. The film city was solemnly inaugurated in 1937 by Mussolini. Here, propaganda films would be produced to strengthen the dictator's position.
This short film in support of the war effort focuses on the training and missions of Army Air Corps Captain Hewitt T. Wheless just after the U.S. entry into World War II.
Henry Browne, an African American farmer, and his family are profiled in this film. The important job of a farmer during times of war is highlighted, specifically his efforts growing peanuts and cotton. This role is made even more poingnant when they visit the eldest son who is a cadet in the 99th Pursuit Squadron.
Thirty years after the release of his film JFK (1991), filmmaker Oliver Stone reviews recently declassified evidence related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
The most implacable opponents of the British and Canadians fighting in Normandy were the largely teenage soldiers of the Hitlerjugend. From D+1 through to attacking back into the Falaise Pocket, this unique division constantly thwarted Montgomery's plans and exacted a terrible price on the Allies for every mile gained. Formed from 'volunteers' from the Hitler Youth Movement in the aftermath of Stalingrad, this division of boys, aged 17 on recruitment into the SS, came of age and were declared fully operational just before D Day. Coming from a fully militarized society they made exceptional and highly committed soldiers but with officers and non-commissioned officers from the Leibstandarte commanding them, they were to become a ruthless and brutal arm of the Nazi fighting machine that battled towards the Eastern Front. Both Hitlerjugend's alleged atrocities and their remarkable doggedness in battle made them a loathed but grudgingly respected opponent to all who fought them.
This programme follows the deployment of the main body of the SAS, the Recces on targets, the raids carried out both by the SAS and the bombing attacks they called in. As the SAS created havoc to the railway system the Germans were hunting them down. Eventually by the use of torture and information by collaborators the Germans tracked them down to their camp near Verrieres. The majority of the SAS were killed or captured. Those captured were later murdered by the Germans.. Their actions tied up large numbers of Germans in guarding the railways and imposed a severe delay on the movements of the 2nd SS Pz Div to Normandy. A few brave men had an impact on the liberation of France out of all proportion to their numbers
John Milius narrates this featurette on the Clint Eastwood classic.
The first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz consisted of 999 Slovak girls and young women. This documentary features several survivors from that transport.
Just off the southern coast of mainland Greece lies the oldest submerged city in the world. It thrived for 2,000 years during the time that saw the birth of western civilisation. An international team of experts is using cutting-edge technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface of the ocean. State-of-the-art CGI helps to raise the city from the seabed, revealing for the first time in 3,500 years how Pavlopetri would once have looked and operated.
For the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer looks back through the eyes of those who were imprisoned there.