28 Feb 1899
Seine Majestät von Bethlehem zurückkehrend
Wilhelm II. returns from his trip to Bethlehem
Morning reveals New York harbor, the wharves, the Brooklyn Bridge. A ferry boat docks, disgorging its huddled mass. People move briskly along Wall St. or stroll more languorously through a cemetery. Ranks of skyscrapers extrude columns of smoke and steam. In plain view. Or framed, as through a balustrade. A crane promotes the city's upward progress, as an ironworker balances on a high beam. A locomotive in a railway yard prepares to depart, while an arriving ocean liner jostles with attentive tugboats. Fading sunlight is reflected in the waters of the harbor. The imagery is interspersed with quotations from Walt Whitman, who is left unnamed.
28 Feb 1899
Wilhelm II. returns from his trip to Bethlehem
28 Feb 1899
Wilhelm II. visits a market place in Beirut, Lebanon.
28 Feb 1899
Wilhelm II. arrives in Haifa, Israel.
28 Feb 1899
Kaiser Wilhelm II appears before the people in Damascus.
28 Feb 1899
Kaiser Wilhelm II arrives in Constantinople.
31 Dec 1950
A compilation reel of local movie theatre trailers for upcoming events, such as a “Bug-o-Rama” festival and a “Marathon of Fright.”
22 Jan 2020
A sociological meditation on the different "exits" that young Palestinians choose, in order to cope with life in the refugee camps.
25 Jun 2011
A Tibetan woman collects water near her family's yak farm and brings it back home 80-pounds full, in a ritual that takes her an hour to complete. A selection from Peabody Award-winning documentarian Bari Pearlman’s Nangchen Shorts series.
27 Apr 1959
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
11 Jun 1922
This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
21 Apr 1938
Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.
02 Jun 1938
Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.
22 Mar 1895
Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.
02 Mar 1983
A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.
01 Jan 1953
Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.
19 Mar 1955
Documentary short about an anual football game being helf in Florence, Tuscany in Italy dating back to medieval times.
18 Feb 1939
This John Nesbitt's Passing Parade short tells the story of Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, and later established the Nobel Prize.
09 Jun 1896
These two views were taken during the celebrations given in 1896 on the occasion of the millennium of the foundation of the kingdom of Hungary. Horsemen and men on foot parade, all dressed in historic uniforms.
01 Jan 1970
On a search for a couple for a love story with sex beyond the 70 Herbert Götzinger sent me to his colleagues sculptor Ludwig Chateau. During my surprise visit with the running camera, asking if he would be willing to do his part, he attacked me: "Is not that enough what they're doing at this moment?" –LM
01 Dec 1933
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.