
12 Feb 2017

Somniloquies
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.
An experimental short film by John Whitney Sr. which combines animated shapes and colors; Computer graphics as dynamic, swirling art. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.
12 Feb 2017
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.
08 Nov 1960
Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconventional way of filming created a new look for documentary films where the camera’s lens was right in the middle of what ever drama was occurring. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1998.
19 Oct 2014
A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel.
20 Feb 2002
This collection of David Lynch's short films cover the first 29 years of his career. Each film is given a special introduction by the director himself. His earliest underground films Six Figures Getting Sick (1966), The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970) and The Amputee (1974) are showcased as well as two requisitioned works well into his successful career The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988) and his addition for Lumière and Company (1995).
11 Nov 2019
A film about friendship and the occasional loneliness.
07 Nov 2003
Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.
13 May 1950
This short film takes a look at the off-screen personas of screen actors. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
10 Jun 2017
Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.
02 Jan 1963
Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter) directed this 53-minute documentary about movie tycoon Joseph E. Levine (1963). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
23 Jul 1999
In making this piece, Bourque literally distorted the personal home movie images appearing on the film plane through various manipulations in the process of doing her own low-tech contact printing. The point of contact in printing is continuously shifted so that the film plane appears warped and the images fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like resurfacing memories.
01 Apr 1971
Satyajit Ray's poetic documentary was commissioned by the Chogyal (King) of Sikkim at a time when he felt the sovereignty of Sikkim was under threat from both China and India. Ray's documentary is about the sovereignty of Sikkim. The film was banned by the government of India when Sikkim merged with India in 1975. The ban was finally lifted by the Ministry of External Affairs in September 2010. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.
12 Sep 1994
Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of its basketball program. Gates and Agee dream of NBA stardom, and with the support of their close-knit families, they battle the social and physical obstacles that stand in their way. This acclaimed documentary was shot over the course of five years.
01 Jan 1972
An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.
12 May 1929
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
03 Jan 1976
Mixing narrative and documentary, the film retells a 16 year old girl's experience of a date rape.
01 May 1982
This fascinating making-of documentary investigates the controversy and political atmosphere surrounding the production of Salt of the Earth, movingly chronicling the filmmakers' defiance of the blacklist. (BAM) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.
16 Jul 1964
Andy Warhol directs a single 35-minute shot of a man's face to capture his facial expressions as he receives the sexual act depicted in the title.
09 Nov 1971
A truly major work, I Don’t Know observes the relationship between a lesbian and a transgender person who prefers to be identified somewhere in between male and female, in an expression of personal ambiguity suggested by the film’s title. This nonfiction film – an unusual, partly staged work of semi-verité – is the first of Spheeris’s films to fully embrace what would become her characteristic documentary style: probing, intimate, uncompromising. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.
20 Dec 1974
Many times during his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson said that ultimate victory in the Vietnam War depended upon the U.S. military winning the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. Filmmaker Peter Davis uses Johnson's phrase in an ironic context in this anti-war documentary, filmed and released while the Vietnam War was still under way, juxtaposing interviews with military figures like U.S. Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland with shocking scenes of violence and brutality.
01 Oct 1982
The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.