Memorandum (1967)

A pair of married ex-convicts trying to go straight get jobs at a department store. A gangster who knows about their past threatens to expose it unless they agree to help him rob the department store.

In Rembrandt, Haanstra shows that it is possible to make a fascinating film only with images from paintings. He had to travel though all over Europe to numerous museums and private owners in order to film the works of art. In the work of the great painter, Haanstra recognizes his particular interest in man as an individual human being, cutting straight through all the religious motives. And Haanstra also wants to see Rembrandt as an individual.

A man believes all the advertising he hears.

Short directed by Mansour Sora Wade.

This Oscar-nominated documentary short tracks the shift in the relationship of an individual to his work between the 19th century and today. Focusing on how nails are made, we first see a blacksmith laboring at his forge, shaping nails from single strands of steel rods. The scene then shifts from this peaceful setting to the roar of a 20th century nail mill, where banks of machines draw, cut, and pound the steel rods faster than the eye can follow.

In the summer of 1924 Claude Friese-Greene, a pioneer of colour cinematography, set out from Cornwall with the aim of recording life on the road between Land’s End and John O’Groats. Entitled The Open Road, his remarkable travelogue was conceived as a series of shorts, 26 episodes in all, to be shown weekly at the cinema. The result is a fascinating portrait of inter-war Britain, in which town and country, people and landscapes are captured as never before, in a truly unique and rich colour palette.

A shunter's job is to slow down, link, and unlink train wagons at a central station. The film documents - without any commentary - the working hours of few shunters at the shunting-station Dresden-Friedrichstadt, which was the largest such station in all of the former German Democratic Republic. They work day and night, amidst snow and fog at the railway tracks, speaking only as much as necessary.

The oldest Greek feature film to be saved, starring a burlesque comedian Sfakianos (or Villar), who had trained in France. Villar gets a job at a dry cleaner’s and wanders through Athens. He makes one gaffe after the other and gets involved in various adventures.

The Page family lives without electricity or running water deep in the Sussex woods. Amidst ever-growing modernity and industrialization, the family carries out chores, hunts pheasants, builds steam engines, and postulates on man's trip to the moon. They demonstrate fine lateral thinking and, through their particular delivery, display fears and concerns about pollution, intensive farming, mechanization, and self-fulfillment during a time of technological advancement.

An ailing elderly woman is paid a perfunctory visit by her family while she sits despondently in a nursing home. Nobody can get through to her except for her young grandson, who talks to her about the happy times they shared between the two of them when she was well.

A young African man must try every trick in the book in this attempts to win the heart of the most beautiful girl in his village.

This is Les Blank’s earliest music film, focusing on the renown trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, who along with Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins and others sparked the change from traditional Jazz to “Bebop” in mid-1940s America. The film includes rare images of Gillespie playing on his famous bent horn and talking about his beginnings, as well as his theories about music.

A film diary in which Perlov films the minutiae of his and his family's day-to-day life. From these small bits, he builds up a broad picture of life in Israel in the '70s and '80s.

A fascinating pictorial history of a New York City bar whose customers, from the hard-drinking working class Irish to the coiffed African American gay male, continually transform its focus during its 10-year reign.

A look at the Baath party's project to construct a system of dams.

German war documentary about Yugoslavia from 1941.

Photographed by an all-female crew and directed by the author of Sexual Politics, these are autobiographical interiews with three very different women who talk frankly about their lives, conflicts, and contrasting life styles.

In this child's game, a live-action boy and girl draw characters and compete who is better. The girl draws a flower and the boy draws a car that runs it over. Then a drawn lion chases a drawn girl, until it all becomes frightfully serious.

A film documenting the landscapes of northern Iceland, as well as a recent work about the Hudson River.

A city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks in Los Angeles.