After several farmyard analogies featuring chicks and calves, the well-spoken narrator and director of the film, Winifred Holmes, considers the subject of girls and how they reach adulthood and readiness for the 'important job of motherhood.
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.
Ténérife
A boy from the desert tries to sell a sand rose in the big city.
Documentary about a slaughterhouse in Quito, where hundreds of people and entire families work everyday. The smell of the place is warm and penetrating, the noise is intense, everything is red. Would that much effort and death have an ulterior purpose?
A journey into time, landscape and consciousness: The Southwestern United States in the black-and-white moving images and unsettling instrumental music. Entropy of the American dream.
The film offers three excerpts from the life of a working blind person. It shows in particular the extent to which the guide dog can replace the blind person's lack of sight and how this results in a relationship of loyalty between man and animal of rare intimacy.
The film evokes all the aspects of bullfighting - its history, the bulls, the toreros, the arena, the audience - and involves numerous matadors from the era.
It has been over one hundred years since M. K. Čiurlionis left his lasting imprint on Lithuanian culture. He was a composer, painter, genius, and madman who created an entirely new space, new context, and new universe.
Hilversum in Black and White portrays Hilversum in the period 1924-1974. Using amateur footage and excerpts from Polygoon newsreels from that period, the film shows how the town grew from its five hundredth anniversary in 1924 to a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. 'Hilversum in Black and White' is a production of the Hilversum Historical Circle Albertus Perk for the occasion of Hilversum's six-hundredth anniversary. They previously produced "Hilversum Occupied and Liberated, 1940-1945."
The Police Tapes is a 1977 documentary about a New York City police precinct in the South Bronx. The original ran ninety minutes and was produced for public television; a one-hour version later aired on ABC. Filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent three months in 1976 riding along with patrol officers in the 44th Precinct of the South Bronx, which had the highest crime rate in New York City at that time. They produced about 40 hours of videotape that they edited into a 90-minute documentary.
"[Hutton’s] latest urban film, New York Portrait, Chapter III, takes on a unique tone in relation to Hutton’s ongoing exploration of rural landscape. The very fact that Hutton is dealing with older footage, with archives of memory more than immediacy, gives it a different texture than his earlier New York films. Hutton always found the presence of nature in the city, not only in his many shots of sky and vegetation, but also in the geometry and texture of the city itself, which seemed to project an independence from the human." (Tom Gunning)
Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)
Short subject on how fashion is created-- not by the great couturiers, but on the street.
A far-out trip through two hours of psychedelic clips from 1960's hippie flicks.
Rare documentary footage from around 1900 depicts the mood of life in Berlin at the turn of the century.
A contemplative, seemingly timeless record of the years Hutton spent in Southeast Asia while working as a merchant seaman. Jon Jost writes, "The film is rich with truly wonderful visions: a thick, white porcelain cup perched on a ship's rail, the tea within swaying gently in sync with the ship while the sea rushes by beyond the faces of crewmen posing awkwardly but also movingly for the camera; a cockfight on ship; scenes from a bucolic pre–Pol Pot Phnom Penh. Images has the haunting elegiac resonance of Eugène Atget's Paris, the echo of a time and place that was." - MoMA
Documentary about filmmaker Jean Grémillon.
Nazi propaganda short about paratroopers
A beautifully wrought superimposition in black-and-white, MANSFIELD PRODUCT COMPANY layers a crane demolishing a car with two young men installing a stove. The fact that this haiku on the industrial lifecycle was shot in Kevin Jerome Everson's hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, lends a personal dimension to the visual mingling of old and new. - Max Goldberg