Man with a Movie Camera

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

La remise des décorations

Days of Thrills and Laughter

An appreciative, uncritical look at silent film comedies and thrillers from early in the century through the 1920s.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

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.

Finlandia

A documentary from Erkki Karu, one of the earliest pioneers of Finnish cinema: This government-produced propaganda film introduces the nature, sports, military, agriculture and capital of Finland.

Los 5 Faust de F. W. Murnau

Prices and Profits, the Potato

Prix et Profits is a 20-minute short film originally made for educational purposes and released in 9.5mm format. As the title suggests, the film follows the supply chain of a potato, from farmers to consumers, and examines the mechanisms of capitalism.

The Dawn of Sound: How Movies Learned to Talk

Film historians, and survivors from the nearly 30-year struggle to bring sound to motion pictures take the audience from the early failed attempts by scientists and inventors, to the triumph of the talkies.

Just Life

Shurochka, the film’s hero, spends her life walking from one village to another in order to weigh tractors. Yet, this makes just one part of her existence. She dances to Utiosov’s songs, she smiles to the pictures of old Soviet actresses and shows a wonderful taste for life amidst the lonely provincial disorderliness.

Carmencita

The first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera and possibly the first woman to appear in a motion picture within the United States. In the film, Carmencita is recorded going through a routine she had been performing at Koster & Bial's in New York since February 1890.

The Funeral of Vera Kholodnaya

This film records the vast public response to the early death of Vera Kholodnaya, the first star of Russian cinema.

Kings of Comedy: Masters of the Silent Screen

A documentary about some of the comedians of the silent era featuring clips from their films and biographical information.

Nanook of the North

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.

Window

The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience's sense of gravity. The camera's movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice

Encierro de toros

In My Lady's Boudoir

Kathryn Osterman was a legitimate actress who worked occasionally in the movies during the first decade and a half of the 20th century. This looks like a Mutoscope cut-down of an actuality released in 1900, "The Art of "Making Up"". In it, we see her from the rear, sitting in front of a dressing mirror, putting up her hair and powdering her face.

Comment se fait le fromage de Hollande

Documentary about making cheese in the Netherlands.

Budapest : cortège du sceptre royal

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.

Censored!

A documentary about the cultural effect of film censorship, focusing on the tumultuous times of the teens and early 1920s in America.

Sperduti nel buio

Documentary about the lost 1914 film "Sperduti nel buio". Film historian Denis Lotto journeys across Europe following the trail of the lost movie.