
28 Jun 1912

Japanese Expedition to Antarctica
Footage shot during Japanese Army Lieutenant Nobu Shirase’s second Antarctica expedition.

Several little boys run along a pier, then jump into the ocean.

28 Jun 1912

Footage shot during Japanese Army Lieutenant Nobu Shirase’s second Antarctica expedition.
01 Jan 1916
To popularize the idea of automobile travel, Ford Motor Company produced Ford Educational Weekly, a film magazine distributed free to theaters. One 1916 series featured "Visits to American Cities." In this episode, Los Angeles is featured at the very beginning of the boom created by oil, movies and aircraft. On the occasion of its centennial in 1953, Ford donated its film to the National Archives and Records Service; this copy derives from a fine grain master printed from the Archive's preservation negative. Music by Frederick Hodges.

23 Sep 1927

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.

31 Dec 1950

Madrid, Spain, 1949. The Circo Americano arrives in the city. While the big top is pitched in a vacant lot, the troupe parades through the grand avenues: the band, a witty impersonator, the Balodys, acrobats, jugglers, acrobatic skaters, clowns and… Buffallo Bill.

01 Jan 1980

Warsaw's Central Railway Station. 'Someone has fallen asleep, someone's waiting for somebody else. Maybe they'll come, maybe they won't. The film is about people looking for something.

30 Jun 1896

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

24 May 1912

Roald Amundsen's South Pole Journey is a Norwegian documentary film that features Roald Amundsen's original footage from his South Pole expedition from 1910 to 1912.

03 Nov 2023

Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.

31 Dec 1950

An educational short film about correct speaking methods.

01 Nov 2013

Mysteries of the Unseen World transports audiences to places on this planet that they have never been before, to see things that are beyond their normal vision, yet literally right in front of their eyes. Mysteries of the Unseen World reveals phenomena that can't be seen with the naked eye, taking audiences into earthly worlds secreted away in different dimensions of time and scale. Viewers experience events that unfold too slowly for human perception
28 Nov 1927
Finland’s first nature documentary. The filmmakers’ expedition leads them all the way to the Åland Islands and the Karelian Isthmus.

06 Apr 1898

A method soldier boys have for amusing themselves in their leisure moments. New comrades are frequently initiated by the old-fashioned sport of tossing in a blanket. The newly arrived recruit, who is the victim of their sport, enjoys himself, perhaps, less than the other participants.
03 Oct 1926
Surfing at Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. Most surfers are human, one is a dog. The educational documentary is part of the Bruce Scenic Novelties series.
01 Jan 1922
A troupe of gypsies takes a traveler along with them on their day trip.
01 Oct 1909
On a market day in Kernascleden, two Breton women exchange their hair for a few coins. The hair becomes hairpieces. Last scene, an elegant Parisian removes her hat and exposes her generous wig skillfully coiffed.
01 Jan 1907
Lucien Bull was a pioneer in chronophotography. Chronophotography is defined as "a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion."

01 Jan 1928

A documentary on the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Made by Istituto Luce, there is an understandable focus on Italian athletes, but it is the first Olympic documentary that describes the techniques of certain events.

01 Jan 1955

Gilles Groulx's first film shot in 1955 with a camera borrowed from his brother and edited during his spare time when he worked as an editor at the Radio-Canada news service a few years before he joined the NFB. Silent film, presented as its author left it, where the soil and the dialectic of Groulx's work are already there: documentary realism, the social space to be explored, daily life, the relationship between individual and society, social disparities, the consumer society, seduction and happiness.

21 Mar 1961

An appreciative, uncritical look at silent film comedies and thrillers from early in the century through the 1920s.
01 Jan 1936
Short film about the manufacture of bricks.