Do Rocks Dream of Flying ?

Mission Méditerranée, le musée des Abysses

RECONQUEST OF THE USELESS, a documentary film which follows the adventures of three young men as they journey nearly 5000 miles through the Peruvian Amazon, searching for inspiration and the legacy of Werner Herzog's classic film Fitzcarraldo & Les Blank's Burden of Dreams thirty years after they were made.

The Rock Touring Around Great Britain is a performance piece by Chinese artist He Yunchang that involved a walking circumambulation of Great Britain from September 23, 2006 to June 14, 2007. Starting from the hamlet of Rock, Northumberland, the artist walked to the nearby town of Boulmer where he selected a rock which he then carried counterclockwise until he returned it to the precise location from which it was taken. As the artist commented, the work was primarily "an attempt to represent the iron will of an individual and the living conditions of his being with simple and pure methods."

Supervolcan Yellowstone : Menace sur la planète ?

In this retrospective tribute, acclaimed filmmaker Jean Walkinshaw hails the 100th anniversary of Mount Rainier National Park in Washington by talking to those who know it best: the scientists, naturalists, mountain climbers and artists whose lives have been touched by the peak's far-reaching shadow. The result is a harmonious blend of archival material and high-definition footage celebrating an icon of the Pacific Northwest.

Scientists discover a giant creature under the Earth that is wrapped around the entire planet. When the creature wakes all grumpy, it causes worldwide destruction.

Baie de Naples, la colère des volcans

Follows Don as he sees different kinds of rocks at a granite quarry, sandstone cliff and museum. Demonstrates the effects of water, heat and pressure in the formation of rocks.

Nella Valle della Luna

Rocks from a meteor which grow when in contact with water threaten a sleepy Southwestern desert community.

Through the Fondren Fellows program, the Rice Media Center Archive Project has spent the past few months sifting through material stored at the now-defunct Rice Media Center. The team has identified several films as especially notable and will be presenting them in conjunction with documentary footage the team shot of people involved with the films. From lectures featuring Roberto Rossellini and Werner Herzog to films from former Rice students and faculty, the film presentation will tell the narrative of the Rice Media Center through the films and filmmakers that passed through its corridors.

Adapted from a novel from sci-fi series by Kyr Bulychev about a little girl Alice. It's Alice's birthday and as a present she is invited by an old alien friend archaeologist Gromozeka to join him on an expedition to an alien planet Coleida which population was destroyed by a space plague a hundred years ago. Arriving at the planet they decide that Alice, using a time-traveling device, will go back in time to the day when the plague was brought in by their space expedition to try and save the planet from destruction by spraying the astronauts with a vaccine. To achieve that, she and another alien scientist professor Rrrr, who looks just like a cat, must make a long and perilous journey to the planet's spaceport.

At 7:14 am on 30 June 1908, the largest explosion recorded in human history to date reverberated throughout our planet. The force of the explosion was two thousand times that of the Hiroshima bomb. A woodland area the size of Luxembourg was eradicated in the Siberian taiga. This incident is recorded in history books as the Tunguska catastrophe. To this day, internationally renowned scientists of various disciplines argue about the causes of this disastrous explosion. The documentary discusses the latest and most controversial insights of these leading scientists. It identifies the reasons why Tunguska has evolved into a phenomenon and points out the curious results produced by this mythical event in culture and economy.

Volcanic activity frees giant scorpions from the earth who wreak havoc in the rural countryside and eventually threaten Mexico City.

A biologist signs up for a dangerous, secret expedition into a mysterious zone where the laws of nature don't apply.

The Grand Canyon is a breathtaking natural monument. It's one of the planet’s best-known landscapes, yet we often forget that it tells two billion years of the Earth's history. Geologists Karl Karlström and Laurie Crossey are the leading experts on this. Over the course of 8 days, they descend the Colorado river and tackle hundreds of rapids to unveil the mysteries held in the Grand Canyon, and the place that humans occupy within it.

Footage shot in and around North Bergen, New Jersey presented in a minimalist series of fixed camera angles and long-takes accompanied by the ambient noise of city streets.

William J. Oliver filmed the ascent of Mount Tupper in the Glacier National Park by the famous Swiss mountain guide Edward Feuz accompanied by his daughter and another man. The party of three climb roped up to a height of 7000 feet.From there, the two men continue without the woman to face the final part of the climb, 'a naked shaft of rock rising sheer and high'. The two men finally reach the summit and later, on the descent, they meet the woman, who was still waiting for them. The film was sonorized and re-released in 1934 under the title of 'The game is up'. The film was produced by the National Parks of Canada to promote tourism travel to the Canadian Rockies.

1904, cinematography by Frank Ormiston-Smith.

Short film about the profession geologist