A woman wearing dragonfly wings performs a romantic dreamlike dance.
Social & External
This documentary profiles contemporary artists Wangechi Mutu, Barron Claiborne, and Sanford Biggers. Each monologue is a reflection of their life experiences, letting the viewer discover how their observations have shaped the art they create.
Experience a mystical journey through nature performed by a movement artist. Felix faces the whirling challenges of his inner turbulence with an emotionally charged dynamic, delicate strength, graceful dignity, as well as ecstatic devotion. Behold the fire dancer in the night.
Essay on the influence of arts at the end of the 20th century produced by the Museum of Modern Art.
The camera sails off, giving us a view of the port from the water.
A Lumière Brothers film showing a street scene in Budapest.
Filmed in 1896 by the Lumière brothers, this short actuality captures a dramatic cavalry charge by cuirassiers — heavily armed horsemen in traditional military uniforms. The riders gallop across open ground directly toward the camera, creating an energetic and imposing image that thrilled early audiences with its sense of motion and spectacle.
Charming animated illustration of one of nature's wonders from Britain's most inventive pioneer of wildlife filmmaking.
Sovereign Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna and their suite slowly walk down a staircase, preceded by a company of cuirassiers.
A Japanese family having tea.
The earliest surviving Japanese film showing the martial art of kendo.
BEPPIE is a moving and disarming portrait of an Amsterdam street urchin. Van der Keuken once described her as follows: 'She was ten years old and the joy of the Achtergracht, where I was living at the time. An Amsterdam child, sweet and crooked as a corkscrew.' He films her while she skims the city with some friends and knocks at strangers' doors. Her family has nine children and is not well off. In those days, a visit to the De Miranda swimming pool cost a quarter, but only ten cents if the weather was bad. At school, Beppie gets a poor mark because she is too boisterous, but when the whole class rattles off the multiplication tables, she joins in at the top of her voice. All of TV-watching Holland was wildly enthusiastic about this portrait, with which Van der Keuken even made the front page of the national newspaper De Telegraaf.
Mexican vaqueros (cattle herders) in Guadalajara guide their horses through water.
A woman feeds pigeons on the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
It's common knowledge that Scotsmen are macho enough to pull off wearing a skirt - perhaps it's all that caber-tossing. This disarmingly simple film concentrates on the tartan cloths of various clans rather than the men who wore them, and is an early filmic reminder of their huge importance to both Scottish national identity and the thriving tourist industry north of the border. The film's unique selling point was that pioneering filmmaker G. A. Smith showed off the vibrant designs in Kinemacolor, among the earliest colour film processes that didn't involve meticulous hand-painting. And no dangly bits in sight.
Coming to Light interweaves the story of Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) life with the results of his work, and through it, we see the world he sought to preserve. Curtis was a driven, charismatic, obsessive artist, a pioneer photographer who set out in 1900 to document traditional Indian life.
This movie was featured on the DVD release of Der letzte Mann in 2004 in Germany.
A funeral parade in Cairo.
This Emotional Life is a three-part series that explores improving our social relationships, learning to cope with depression and anxiety, and becoming more positive, resilient individuals.
Ten women in Canada talk about being lesbian in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: discovering the pulp fiction of the day about women in love, their own first affairs, the pain of breaking up, frequenting gay bars, facing police raids, men's responses, and the etiquette of butch and femme roles. Interspersed among the interviews and archival footage are four dramatized chapters from a pulp novel, "Forbidden Love".
Countdown follows a chronological sequence. The movie was shot in Berlin and environs over a ten-day period leading up to the unification of the currencies on July 1, 1990. The film thus ends on the date marking “the first stage of German reunification”.
Alex Owens, a young woman juggling between two odd jobs, aspires to become a successful ballet dancer. Nick, who is her boss and lover, supports and encourages her to fulfil her dream.
John Shepherd spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of miles into space. After giving up the search, he makes a different connection here on earth.
In a long, diaphanous skirt, held out by her hands with arms extended, Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore performs. Her dance emphasizes the movement of the flowing cloth. She moves to her right and left across an unadorned stage. Many of the prints were distributed in hand-tinted color.
Maya Deren’s shortest, two-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera seems like an exercise piece to capture a dancer’s movement on celluloid, which later on developed into her masterpieces such as Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence.
A social event choreographed in the manner of a dance, illuminated by concepts drawn from Greek legend; one of filmmaker Maya Deren's most intriguing works.
Two ballet dancers perform a dance enhanced with surreal after-image visuals.
A film shot during the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California around the meetings organised by the Black Panthers Party to free Huey Newton, one of their leaders, and to turn his trial into a political debate. They tried and succeeded in catching America’s attention.
An intimate portrait of the small shops and shopkeepers of the Rue Daguerre in Paris, a picturesque street that has been the filmmaker’s home for more than 50 years.
What does being a woman really mean? How do women live the status society reserves for them? A group of women, beautiful or not, young or not, gifted with motherly instinct or not, answer before Agnès Varda's camera.
While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed "Yanco". This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.
Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.
Georges Méliès makes a woman disappear, then reappear.
An unhappily married woman devises a scheme to get rid of her husband.
Polina is a young dancer from a modest family. After years of ballet academy, she is accepted by the Bolshoi; still, she decides to try and audition of a modern dance company in France. She makes it, but her journey will not end there...
A former professional dancer volunteers to teach dance in the New York public school system and, while his background first clashes with his students' tastes, together they create a completely new style of dance. Based on the story of ballroom dancer, Pierre Dulane.
A Japanese fairy tale meets commedia dell'Arte. All in white, the naïf Pierrot lies in a wood. Doo-wop music plays as he rises, stares about, and reaches for the moon. Although music abounds and the children of the wood are there at play, Pierrot is melancholy and alone. Harlequin appears, brimming with confidence and energy. He conjures the lovely Colombina. Pierrot is dazzled. But can the course of true love run smooth?
Angelic and demonic serpentine dance from dawn of cinema. Hand-colored frame by frame. Lumière no. 765 or 765.1 (colorized, different dancer?).
An artist wishes to marry her childhood sweetheart and settle into family life. However, her boyfriend, who is a genius mathematician is afraid of commitment and breaks up with her just ahead of their wedding. What will the future hold in store for them?
Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.
A subtitle warns, "beware of dark sunglasses." Anna and her lover, whose looks in bowler and bow tie are reminiscent of a young Buster Keaton, kiss chastely on a bridge overlooking the Seine. He dons sunglasses and waves as she runs down a stairway to the river's edge, then watches in horror as she's knocked flat and loaded into the back of a hearse. In vain, he gives chase. Disconsolate, he buys a large funeral wreath and a handkerchief from sympathetic vendors. He removes the glasses to wipe his eyes and realizes they are the cause of all his woe. He replays the farewell without the glasses.
