“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.”
A core group of architects embraced the West Coast from Vancouver to LA with its particular geography and values and left behind a legacy of inspired dwellings. Today, architects celebrate the influence established by their predecessors.
The Bokelberg photographic collection brings to life the Paris of the Belle Époque (1871-1914), an exhibition of workshops and stores with extremely beautiful shop windows before which the owners and their employees proudly pose, hiding behind their eyes the secret history of a great era.
Hitler's Holocaust Railways
The artistry and architecture of Bruce Goff reflects his innate ability to transform simple shapes and materials into imaginative, embellished artworks that convey texture, color and depth. His architectural style is free from predetermined form and begins with a feeling that grows out of function, much like a painting develops from inspirations. This artistic video, presented by Joe D. Price, is the winner of the 1962 Cannes Film Festival President's Award, Non-Theatrical Division.
Jaime Lerner - Uma História de Sonhos
During its nine-month-long season, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express makes over 60 journeys, covering 150,000 kilometres, with the majority of trips between London and Venice. The train is comprised of 17 unique 1920s carriages that have transported a host of elite individuals across Italy, Switzerland, and Turkey for more than a century. This documentary follows the stories of the staff and passengers as the train makes its way across Europe, with some customers having paid more than £2,000 for the privilege.
A history of the bridges of Paris, through modern views and historical engravings.
What started as a simple tomb became over a 2,000 years history the universal seat of Christendom and is today one of the most visited museum in the world with invaluable collections of Arts, Manuscripts, Maps. Using spectacular 3D modelisation and CGI to give viewers as never before a true understanding of the history of this architectural masterpiece and its extensions, the film will also use animation to tell relevant historical events. This heritage site reveals new untold secrets with the help of historians deciphering the Vatican’s rich archives and manuscripts collection and following the restorations at work (newly discovered frescoes by Raphael) and recent excavations. A story where Religion, Politics, Arts and Science meet to assert religious authority and serve as a spiritual benchmark.
In France’s last presidential election, Marine Le Pen, a right-wing candidate, won over 30 per cent of the vote after an attempt to rebrand a party long associated with her controversial father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. See how three of her supporters faced similar obstacles in changing the narrative.
Brasília
The Ashtabula train disaster and bridge collapse was the worst train disaster of the 19th century, claiming the lives of 97 people. The engineering and structural failures that caused the collapse of a bridge that stood for over a decade, also took down the most luxurious train of the day, “The Pacific Express #5.” The accident happened in Ashtabula, Ohio on December 29, 1876 during a raging blizzard, sending the luxury train crashing 70-feet into a river gorge and costing the lives of 97 people. The disaster shocked the nation, yet it’s a story that’s been lost in the pages of history. In a strange twist of fate and intrigue, the bridge disaster also became the backdrop to the still unsolved murder of Charles Collins, the railroad’s chief engineer. It also contributed to the eventual suicide of millionaire Amasa Stone, the president of the railroad and the designer and builder of the bridge.
Rare archive footage reveals what Singapore was like dating back to 1900, showing coolies sharing lunch, rickshaw pullers, a grand Peranakan funeral, and more.
25 BIS is an intimate portrait of a masterpiece from the beginning of Auguste Perret’s career: the building located on 25 Bis, Rue Franklin in Paris. The film looks for the intangible and subjective element of the building’s history: the depth of its human print. The building appears as a sedimentation of life stories where each layer has left the trace of a passage. From the intimate nature of these stories, the film draws this fragile and undefined essence that could be called “the soul of the place”.
This Western is a pilot for the series "The Iron Horse," in which a dapper frontier gambler wins a railroad line in a poker game and has his hands full holding it from the clutches of various conniving bad guys.
Tadao Ando (b.1941) is a world-renowned architect, and a recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His calm, minimalist architecture with elegant concrete designs reflects the Zen principle of simplicity. In the film he reveals the experience a building should evoke, as he discusses a number of iconic designs, such as The Row House and The Church of Light.
Beginning just after the bloody Sioux victory over General Custer at Little Big Horn, the story is told through two unique perspectives: Charles Eastman, a young, white-educated Sioux doctor held up as living proof of the alleged success of assimilation, and Sitting Bull the proud Lakota chief whose tribe won the American Indians’ last major victory at Little Big Horn.
The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.
A walk through the career of French filmmaker André Téchiné, from his own point of view and that of those who worked with him: Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, Juliette Binoche and Sandrine Kiberlain, among others.
For most of America's history, sacred buildings represented our greatest feats of innovative engineering and artistic design. Unlock the elements of design that make these structures so fascinating and unveil the meaning in religious architecture, ranging from grand cathedrals and simple country churches to synagogues and mosques.