Cold War film illustrating the defense capacity of America's telephone network, highlighting AT&T's role in the design and construction of the nation's integrated defense structure, including the Distant Early Warning Line and the North American Air Defense Command. In the dramatic ending, rockets and missiles are fired at hostile forces in a readiness exercise and score a direct hit.
Self - Narrator (voice)
17 Dec 2023
Lurking under the sea is a global web of fibre optic telecommunication cables, the plumbing of the internet. It's how we talk, text and stream, connecting billions of people. These cables are also the frontline of a tech war.
14 Apr 2016
For 50 years, Berlin was the symbol of the Cold War. The city at the heart of the intelligence war between the US and the Soviet bloc. Thousands of KGB or CIA, agents observed each other, cogs in the biggest information war in history.
08 Nov 1962
Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.
13 Mar 2007
On March 9, 1953, Joseph Stalin was buried in Moscow in front of a million people. His funeral is that of a demi-God. Ultimate paradox for one of the greatest criminals in History who brought misfortune to his people while arousing collective admiration.
13 Nov 1938
The lecturer shows a microcinematographic sequence of spirochaetes and drawings of the gonoccus (the bacteria responsible for syphilis and gonorrhea). He then turns to an easel and begins to draw 'the road of health'; the cartoon takes this up in magic drawing, in a style that is highly reminiscent of the 'Giro the Germ' series made for the Health and Cleanliness Council a few years before.
08 Nov 1964
The film twice states that it doesn't intend a moral injunction, but it clearly does with comments such as "our society... regards sexual intercourse outside marriage as irresponsible and possibly disastrous" and "you can use your knowledge with responsibility and real love or you can use it wantonly and with mere animal appetite". This is clearly marriage education not sex education.
26 Oct 2018
The story of the 1978 World Chess Championship between the Soviet Communist Party's protege, Anatoly Karpov and the traitor and Soviet defector, Viktor Korchnoi. One of those instances in life where truth is stranger than fiction.
04 Sep 2018
Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at how we have created machines that can simulate, augment, and even outperform the human mind - and why we shouldn't let this spook us. He reveals the story of the pursuit of AI, the emergence of machine learning and the recent breakthroughs brought about by artificial neural networks. He shows how AI is not only changing our world but also challenging our very ideas of intelligence and consciousness. Along the way, we'll investigate spam filters, meet a cutting-edge chatbot, look at why a few altered pixels makes a computer think it's looking at a trombone rather than a dog and talk to Demis Hassabis, who heads DeepMind and whose stated mission is to 'solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else'. Stephen Hawking remarked 'AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. Or the worst'. Jim argues that AI is a potent new tool that should enhance our lives, not replace us.
21 Jul 2020
No overview found
01 Jan 1995
Host Grant Jeffrey discusses how technology and government activities are changing the way our information is handled. How is this shaping our lives?
24 May 2013
In a culture immersed in technology, Instagram is reviving adventure, face to face community and real relationships. Through sharing the stories of friends old and new, "Instagram Is" sets out to discover the answer to the question "How can something so digital get people out from behind their devices and into the analog world?"
11 Jun 2016
A.I. guru Ben Goertzel grew up in a hippie community in Oregon during the Vietnam War. Inspired by science fiction, he imagined a perfect rational world that would transcend 1970s’ America. Ben has dedicated his life to developing OpenCog, a software that models the human mind. If Ben’s design works, OpenCog will become a human-like general intelligence. But for OpenCog to work, it needs a body.
06 May 2017
Over the past few years, technology has improved our lives in so many ways. Now, some people, called trans-humanists, are taking the next logical step - they are fusing their bodies with digital implants to increase their abilities and expand their senses - they are becoming, in effect, real life cyborgs. How is life going to change for us all if some people have supernatural powers?
Case history of an Iranian patient bitten by a rabid wolf.
22 May 2020
No overview found
08 Aug 2016
A film about fireworks, the people who make them and the cultures behind them across the globe.
21 Mar 2019
The filmmaker Jeppe Rønde has invited 10 of the world's foremost researchers - and a robot! - to rethink our relationship with technology and its dilemmas from the outside. Philosophers, anthropologists, archaeologists and programmers show us through their thought experiments that our relationship with technology is just as much about our relationship with ourselves.
06 Sep 2009
In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called the Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world. Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, the Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how the Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life. (Storyville)
26 Nov 1974
The Vietnam War during the JFK years and beyond. Made in 1972 in the filmmaker's apartment, without documentary footage of the war, metaphors are created through the animation of images and objects, and through guerrilla skits. By rejecting the authority of traditional documentary footage, the anarchist spirit of individual responsibility is established. This is history from one person's point of view, rather than a definitive proclamation.
10 May 1974
This documentary looks at developments in the Canadian forestry industry from the 1970s. Turning a Newfoundland bog into woodland, fostering British Columbia seedlings that withstand mechanical planting, inoculating Ontario elms against the bark beetle, devising ways of controlling fire... these are some of the experiments shown being carried out in laboratories and in the field to protect and conserve the country's vast forests.