Quixote (1965)

A documentary overview of silent cinema pioneer Edwin S. Porter.

In this CBS News production broadcast on Thanksgiving 1960, Edward R. Murrow points out the plight of migrant farm workers in America. Topics range from the harsh living conditions, endless travel, low wages, and poor opportunities for their children.

Featuring the stories and music of seminal Cajun musicians "Bois Sec" Ardoin and Canray Fontenot, Dry Wood is a short, vibrant documentary portrait of life, food, music and festivity in the Louisiana Delta from the singular Les Blank. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 1999.

A short documentary that explores a blue-collar community’s growing unease with the Vietnam War. It was produced in response to President Nixon’s famous November, 1969 speech when he contrasted the unlawful and vocal anti-war protesters to the respectful “silent majority” who were in favor of remaining in Vietnam to fight communism. This film explores the thoughts and opinions of the “silent majority” represented by the folks living in the Garfield Ridge neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago.

A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst complex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resignation of the patients. Existentialist rather than optimist, the approach is one of humanistic atheism, accepting death as part of life. Interviews with doctors and nurses explore their outlook; all speak of death as a fact, without either sentimentality or religiosity. The studied objectivity of the film only imperfectly hides an intense emotionality.

Taken from Boccaccio's Decameron, this lovely puppet film tells the bawdy story of the beautiful young Venetian lady who confesses her sinful passion for the Archangel Gabriel to a lustful monk, who promptly impersonates him in her bedroom with predictable results. Amidst the film's ribaldry, the hypocrisy and false piety of the monk are mercilessly mocked.

Sociological study of the real values of young people in socialism.

Shot in high-definition video using rear-screen process plates from classic Warner Bros. films noirs. A young man (in color) searches for his past through black-and-white scenes from "The Big Sleep," "Mildred Pierce," and "Strangers on a Train."

Shooting in 1966 without script, story, or any narrative preconception, Nelson and Wiley created a masterwork of ‘60s independent cinema. The Great Blondino follows an anachronistically attired young fellow as he navigates a beguiling, sometimes troubling world with a curiosity that opens us wide to the filmmakers’ inspired, freeform vision. In many ways, the wonder of Blondino may echo the excitement of invention and exploration that Nelson and Wiley experienced in the making of the film. Utterly exuberant and freed from rote cinematic restriction, it embodies an artistic rigor and direction that also prevents it from ever seeming too unhinged. An incredible feat of tightrope walking. —Mark Toscano

This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.

"TESTAMENT is James Broughton's exquisite self-portrait. A major figure in avant-garde filmmaking and poetry since the 1940s, Broughton views his life and life's work with irony, charm, humor, and a combination of joyous self-love and gentle self-depreciation. Scenes from his earlier films mix the elements of humor, magic, slapstick, melodrama, and romance which mark his aesthetic. A plethora of rich personal symbols is woven throughout the film, tied together by verbal games, Zen poems, anecdotes, songs, a child's prayer, dreams, and visions." - Karen Cooper "James Broughton's TESTAMENT is one of the most remarkable films ever produced within the American independent cinema. It is the most moving and most sublimely detached of the recent trend of filmic autobiographies - by Jerome Hill, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage, to name only the masters, and Broughton's peers." - P. Adams Sitney "A beautiful, important, mysterious work." - Amos Vogel

A film about three of our leading visual artists, Bhupen Khakar, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram. It takes, as its point of departure, a glass mural on which all three were working, then zeros into each of them. It links them to their physical and mental worlds through cinematic devices like associative sounds, variable light and montage. Compositionally, the visuals aim to link with the styles of each artist, as well as the larger narrative traditions of India.

An investigative (but frequently humorous) documentary on the surveillance activities of the New York City Police Department's Bureau of Special Services, known as the Red Squad. "An extraordinary political film, in which the spies - Red Squad and undercover police assigned to infiltrate the American Left - are in turn spied upon. The result: a photographic exposé of faces and agents in action, fully identified by name and title." - Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

Consolation Service follows a young Finnish couple, Anni and J-P, as they make public their decision to divorce. It is set in early spring in Helsinki, with its frozen landscape on the cusp of thawing.

Another short documentary of "Real Food, Roots Music, and People Full of Passion for what they do!", Spend It All is Les Blank's spirited look at the French-speaking Cajun community of southwest Louisiana.

The story of a poor girl who leaves her starving family and sheep for a more prosperous village. Her grandfather finds her and tries to convince her to return to her home.

Universal Citizen is a multifaceted personal travelogue that brings us to a real Universal Hotel, in Guatemala, and to the same public square in Siena that appears at the beginning of Universal Hotel; at the center of the film are Thompson's off screen meetings with a Libyan Jew and former Dachau inmate who works as a smuggler in Guatemala and refuses to be photographed. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

An ultra-realistic depiction of life in a Marine Corps brig (or jail) at a camp in Japan in 1957. Marine prisoners are awakened and put through work details for the course of a single day, submitting in the course of it to extremely harsh and shocking physical and mental degradation and abuse.

A surreal journey of a displaced spirit as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness.