Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge

A film by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, shot in late October 1888, showing pedestrians and carriages crossing Leeds Bridge.

The Strength and Agility of Insects

A short, early documentary work showing insects exhibiting extreme strength and agility.

Wie ein Ziegelstein entsteht

Short film about the manufacture of bricks.

Stiff Sheets

Stiff Sheets indicts public health officials and politicians for the lack of adequate and humane care for people with AIDS in Los Angeles, this time documenting a mock fashion show staged by ACT UP activists.

Departure of Shackleton's British Antarctic Expedition from Lyttelton, NZ, 1st Jan, 1908

Footage of the expedition leaving Antarctica from New Zealand shot by government cameraman James McDonald. His excellency Admiral Sir Wilmot Hawksworth Fawkes, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy's Australian Station, visits and inspects the "Nimrod."

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.

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.

How the Telephone Talks

"All sounds travel in waves much the same as ripples in water." Educational film produced by Bray Studios New York, which was the dominant animation studio based in the United States in the years surrounding World War I.

Days of Thrills and Laughter

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

New Life

"Bagong Buhay" is a short experimental film that dispels the common belief that packing up and moving to a new place will magically improve one's quality of life. The film challenges this presumption by portraying two contrasting ways of life through objects and locations, encouraging viewers to think critically about the complexities of what makes a better life. In the Philippines, it's believed that relocating to a new area will bring about positive changes in one's existence. True satisfaction is a complex and multifaceted notion, and "Bagong Buhay" encourages us to ponder that relocating to a new place is not a surefire way to attain it.

El circo

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.

Censored!

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

The Chillouks, a Central African Tribe

Short documentary on a central african tribe called 'The Chillouks'.

The Dangers of the Fly

The Dangers of the Fly is an educational film made by Ernesto Gunche and Eduardo Martínez de la Pera, also responsible for Gaucho Nobility (1915), the biggest blockbuster of Argentinean silent cinema. De la Pera was a talented photographer, always willing to try new gadgets and techniques. This film experiments with microphotography in the style of Jean Comandon's films for Pathé and it is part of a series which included a film about mosquitoes and paludism and another one about cancer, which are considered lost. Flies were a popular subject of silent films and there are more than a dozen titles featuring them in the teens and early twenties.

Los 5 Faust de F. W. Murnau

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.

Among Wild Birds

Finland’s first nature documentary. The filmmakers’ expedition leads them all the way to the Åland Islands and the Karelian Isthmus.

How the Berlin Worker Lives

This documentary shows how the Berliner workers lived in 1930. The director Slatan Dudow shows through images: a) the workers leaving the factory; b) the raise of the rents; c) the "unpleasant" guest, meaning the justice officer that brings the eviction notice; d) the fight of classes of the houses of capitalists and working classes; e) the parks of the working class; f) the houses of the working class, origin of the tuberculosis and the victims; g) the playground of the working class; h) the swimming pool for the working class, ironically called the "Baltic Sea" of the working class; i) the effects of humidity of basement where a family lives, with one member deaf; j) one working class family having dinner while the capitalist baths his dog; k) the eviction notice received from an unemployed family and their eviction.

Men Boxing

Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.