A fascinating pictorial document: On an old, cluttered work ship, a man is helped on with a bulky, old fashioned diving suit. It's a complicated process, many layers and sections are carefully applied. He goes over the side. Some men row out to what looks like a wrecked barge and set dynamite. Then the diver returns and now laughs and acknowledges the camera. The other men, now safely away, blow up the barge.
Raising angora rabbits for wool; new marine navigation and safety technology; kitchen gadgets; developing new rose varieties.
City of Wax is a 1934 American short documentary film produced by Horace and Stacy Woodard about the life of a bee. It won the Oscar at the 7th Academy Awards in 1935 for Best Short Subject (Novelty). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2007.
A commissioned film for Schweizerischer Werkbund (SWB), Die neue Wohnung was produced for the Basel architectural and interior design exhibition, WOBA, to demonstrate innovative aspects of modern architecture and highlight their differences from the event’s highly conservative approach. Despite its ad campaign roots, Richter's touch is not absent; The surviving version, aimed at a "bourgeois" Swiss public, presents decluttered, functional architecture and decor as superior to the traditional and luxurious "ancient" ways of living.
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.
A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.
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.
A languid, beautifully shot collection of landscapes, edited into a whimsical and touching film.
This scene is a part of the very first film shot produced by the Manaki Brothers. Despina, the Janaki and Milton Manaki's grandmother, was recorded weaving in one high-angle shot. For no apparent reason, the first shot made in Macedonia, in the Balkans in fact, made by these two cinematography pioneers, contains peculiar symbolics: at the moment when the grandmother Despina spins the weaving wheel, film starts rolling in our country.
The subject is two grotesque-looking human beings who are sitting on the deck of a ship. The two weird individuals sit cross-legged and do the bidding of a man in oriental costume. The point of the film seems to be directed at the fact that the bone structure of the two subjects makes them look like monkeys or apes, and the spectators seem to be trying to get them to behave like monkeys, that is, scratch themselves, etc.
Almost 200 women file by a device on the wall from which they take their time checks. A man runs half-way across the screen at the end of the film.
A camera on an overhead crane travels down a large, long aisle where men are shown working on large machinery on either side. Carts carrying equipment are shown traveling on rails down the aisles. There are also men walking in the aisles. From Bitzer's Westinghouse Works series.
On the left of the screen, a small group of men lift the top off of what appears to be a turbine with a crane and continue to check the machine, tightening various parts with wrenches. On the right side, a few men appear to be testing the workings of what may be a turbine.
Between 1950 and 1955, Henri Langlois tried to produce, on behalf of the Cinémathèque française, several films devoted to great artists, with their cooperation, by entrusting them with virgin film stock. Wrote Langlois on the unfinished project, epic in scope: "We had the idea of asking poets, painters, scholars, writers and even repressed filmmakers [...] to make films in 16mm, with the means at hand, without taking into account any commercial concern or censorship." What precious little came of the project was eight minutes of film from Matisse and twenty-some from Marc Chagall, released at a later date.
The film shows a parade down Fifth Avenue, New York. In the foreground many children, both black and white, can be seen following alongside the parade. The participants in the parade include cowboys, Indians, and soldiers in the uniform of the United States Cavalry on horseback and riding horse-drawn coaches. Buffalo Bill can be seen on horseback, lifting his hat to the crowd. Filmed on 1 April 1901.
In the background is a row of three-masted sailing ships, at anchor, their sales furled. In the foreground, a simple pier that's more like a yardarm juts out above the water; about 15 boys of six or seven years of age are on the jutting wood, and they jump off into the water below. The water looks to be about three feet deep. They swim back toward the pier. A small motorized boat passes. It's a stationary camera; one take.
Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.
A hunter and his native helpers set up a trap, then taunt and shoot a panther. Next we see the locals skin the animal.
On 4 September Frederick Albert Cook (1865-1940) arrived in Copenhagen on the ship 'Hans Egede'. He received a hero's welcome as the first man to set foot on the North Pole. He was greeted by the king, and given an honorary doctorate at the University of Copenhagen. Only a few days later, however, his endeavour was questioned, and in December the University rejected Cook's documentation. Carl Th. Dreyer is seen as one of the journalists taking notes. (DFI)
A group of military men uses explosives to de-root trees.