Thank You, Mr. Robertson
★ 7.5 · 1985 · 77m · Documentary
A glimpse of the pre-history of cinema starting with the projections of Etienne Gaspard Robert (also known as M. Robertson), who used magic lanterns and other optical illusions to develop the genre of the Gothic phantasmagoria in the late eighteenth century.
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A Great Day in Harlem
1994 · ★ 6.6
Art Kane, now deceased, coordinated a group photograph of all the top jazz musicians in NYC in the year 1958, for a piece in Esquire magazine. Just about every jazz musician at the time showed up for the photo shoot which took place in front of a brownstone near the 125th street station. The documentary compiles interviews of many of the musicians in the photograph to talk about the day of the photograph, and it shows film footage taken that day by Milt Hinton and his wife.
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The Faces We Lost
2017
A documentary about how Rwandans use personal and family photographs to remember and commemorate the loved ones they lost in the 1994 genocide.
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Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer
1975 · ★ 7.2
Thom Andersen's hour-long documentary adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge's photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds.
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The Tramp and the Dictator
2002 · ★ 7
A look at the parallel lives of Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler and how they crossed with the creation of the film “The Great Dictator,” released in 1940.
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The Rules of Film Noir
2009 · ★ 6.1
Matthew Sweet explores his rules of 1940s and 50s American film noir thrillers.
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The eloquence of blood
2005
Short film made from photographs taken by anthropologist and photojournalist Rogério Ferrari in Palestinian territories in 2002.
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The Woolworths Choir of 1979
2012 · ★ 5.5
Concerned with processes of assembly, CHOIR brings together disparate bodies of material and archival technologies into dissonant concert. It is a work of several parts. Part one constructs an auditorium in which an action will be staged. Part two assembles the chorus to narrate the action. Part three supplies the action.
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El cine libertario: cuando las películas hacen historia
2010 · ★ 7.3
Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, the anarchist union CNT socialized the film industry in Spain, so in Madrid and Barcelona film workers took over the production assets and, between 1936 and 1938, numerous films on a wide variety of topics were released, composing a varied mosaic that gives rise to one of the most unusual and original moments of Spanish cinematography.
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A letter to Nikola
2021 · ★ 10
As a letter to her son, the filmmaker testifies her experience as a photographer aboard the Aquarius, a ship that rescued 29,523 people in the Mediterranean between 2016 and 2018.
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Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust
2004 · ★ 6.6
Daniel Anker’s 90-minute documentary takes on over 60 years of a very complex subject: Hollywood’s complicated, often contradictory relationship with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The questions it raises go right the very nature of how film functions in our culture, and while hardly exhaustive, Anker’s film makes for a good, thought provoking starting point.
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Arakimentari
2004 · ★ 6.3
A look at the life and work of Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and his impact on Japanese culture.
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Hitchcock/Truffaut
2015 · ★ 7.2
Filmmakers discuss the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock and the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (“Le cinéma selon Hitchcock”), written by François Truffaut and published in 1966.
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