In this documentary essay, Harun Farocki shows that the famous Lumière brothers’ sequence of the same title already carries within itself the germ of a foreseeable social development: the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial labour.
A poetic amalgam of Yuri Norstein’s memories, hopes, and fears for the future. Tale of Tales depicts his post-war childhood, remnants of the personal tragedies of war, and the little wolf character in the lullaby his mother used to sing.
Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds, leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape.
Ousmane Sembène’s first film uses a mixture of documentary and fiction techniques to tell the story of a young cart-driver in Dakar. The Wagoner illustrates the continent’s poverty, showing that independence has not solved the problems of its people.
This postmodern retelling of Karen Carpenter’s affliction by anorexia enraged her family and initially got the film banned. Blending archival material, artificial talking heads, and Barbie-doll reenactments, Todd Haynes criticises the objectification of female celebrities.
Mati Diop’s experimental documentary Atlantiques is a precursor but also a narrative sidestep to what would become her feature debut, Atlantics, ten years later. A group of young Senegalese men discusses a possible attempt to cross the ocean to Spain.
Spacy elaborates the concept of ‘infinite regress’ through a zoom-in to a grandstand on which animated photos show a zoom of the same stand, ad infinitum, with reverses and variations. All its components—location, illusion, and time—are strictly combined in an endless cycle, like a Möbius strip or an Escher film, in a Japanese tempo, from slow to fast.
Norman McLaren applies the principles used to animate drawings or puppets to animate live actors. Neighbours is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower. The political context shifts depending on the viewers’ personal positions.
A polemical, avowedly personal video documentary on the American Black gay experience. Marlon Riggs celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act.
Marguerite Duras takes us on a nighttime car ride through an unpopulated Paris in mid-August, in a single, uninterrupted shot from inside the car. From the end of night till dawn, a depopulated Paris soothes itself with Duras’ affecting voice-over, accompanied by cello accords.
A girl from a shantytown travels to the city to become an itinerant newspaper vendor. Mambety’s richly textured view of urban life fuses fiction and documentary, displaying the rampant poverty and endemic misogyny in the modernising capital of Dakar.
What is Senegal exactly? Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen is a film about its people and, at the same time, a reflection on the conventions of ethnographic cinema. It shows the mechanisms of manipulation in the seventh art form.
As a heavy fog shrouds the wild woods, a helpless hedgehog starts wandering in the powdery mist. Will the young visitor find his way home? Hedgehog in the Fog has generated its own lore, and there is even a monument to the hedgehog in Kyiv.
On a lonely planet, a musical is enacted in a modern marketplace. The employees of various commercial venues, portrayed as anthropomorphic animals, cope with boredom and existential anxiety by performing cheerful showtunes.
In the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers, the kind-hearted, cheese-loving bachelor and inventor Wallace rents out his loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic dog’s bedroom to a penguin.
In the dream-like narrative of At Land, a woman, played by filmmaker Maya Deren herself, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, encountering other versions of herself. Deren described the film as about the struggle to maintain one’s personal identity.
In Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia, Hollis Frampton presents 12 pictures and reminisces about them. After about a minute, the photos catch fire and burn to ashes. Memory and anticipation merge.
At the outskirts of a city, a group of people stands around a lorry. Naked men, women, and children are herded in through the rear door of the vehicle. Once the door is locked, a gentleman takes a hose and connects it from the exhaust pipe to the lorry’s interior.
In 1967, Agnès Varda was living in California when one of the Black Panthers founders, Huey P. Newton, was arrested during a traffic stop for killing a police officer—a clear case of racial injustice, according to the Panthers. The following summer, Varda took her 16mm camera to a “Free Huey” demonstration in Oakland.
A man opens the large gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France, in 1895. Through the gate and a smaller door next to it, workers stream out for lunch. Once all the workers have left the factory, the gatekeeper closes the gate again.
Isle of Flowers shows the cycles of modern life. Very soon, it becomes evident that something is rotten in the capitalist system as a whole. Since its release, the film has lost none of its visual significance or topicality.
The Vampires of Poverty is an action film masquerading as a documentary about filmmakers who exploit poverty for profit, with a touch of black humour, but most of all a scathing critique against ‘misery porn’ and the opportunism of those filmmakers who make ‘socio-political’ films in the Third World to make money and win prizes in Europe.
A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris. This beguiling allegory of innocence and transcendence is the only short film ever to win an Oscar for best original screenplay.
Made early in the prolific artist's nearly fifty-year career, The Inextinguishable Fire is a critique of the Vietnam War and the role of industry in the production of chemical weapons. In analysing the production, dissemination, and consumption of images, Harun Farocki reveals the inextricable links between media culture, politics, technology, and violence.
Dimensions of Dialogue doesn’t present us with models of meaningful human understanding; on the contrary, we are given three examples which clearly demonstrate that communication can and will break down. During this 12-minute magnum opus, Jan Švankmajer demonstrates his virtuosity and limitless invention by shifting his artistic style and animation techniques three times.
Zbigniew Rybczynski worked eight hours a day for ten months on the Oscar-winning Tango. He brings together a jumble of cut-out photos featuring countless figures of all kinds and ages in a flawlessly synchronised animation. The work was formally highly innovative at the time.
Wasp follows a single mother too young to have four children, and too poor to feed them. This Oscar-winning short film was shot in Dartford, a south-east London working-class suburb, where filmmaker Andrea Arnold grew up.
The black-and-white science fiction film from 1902 has since become a canonical work. A Trip to the Moon was hugely popular upon its original release and used animation and visual effects that were very innovative at the time.
In Outer Space, a woman no longer fights an unknown entity, but that portion of the filmstrip that is normally unseen when film is projected—the “outer space” of the film’s image, consisting of the optical soundtrack and its perforations.
An authoritative voice-over pre-empts the events in the image, seeming to order not only the people, cars, and moving objects on the screen but also the actual camera movements on the street in view. John Smith draws attention to how controlling and directional the practice of voice-over actually is.
Wavelength consists of almost no action. The film’s spine is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph, until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.
Alain Resnais combines poignant black-and-white archive footage of the Holocaust, such as mass graves and systematic destruction, with colour footage of the empty camp grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in 1955. Night and Fog raises critical questions about collective memory and the tendency to forget.
Two young men in a pickup truck, from different parts of the world, discover each other through the use of a camera. As the camera lenses change, a landscape of rice fields and a cinema crew get into the frame. The camera then reshoots the road and the men, as if we were witnessing a film rehearsal.
In 2014, artist and forensic audio analyst Lawrence Abu Hamdan examined audio files of the shots that killed Nadeem Nawara and Mohamed Abu Daher in the West Bank of Palestine. Rubber Coated Steel does not preside over the voices of the victims but seeks to amplify their silence.
Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman was arguably the first surrealist film ever made. The film tells the story of a clergyman who falls madly in love with a beautiful woman, but must defeat an equally eager rival.
Zuza Banasińska reinvents the famous Slavic witch Baba Yaga through a clever montage of films from the Polish Educational Film Studio archive, containing sexist content. Questioning their own non-binary identity, they unleash the queer dimension of found footage tasked with conveying a normative conception of identity.
Today, the flicker film Arnulf Rainer is still a landmark in the history of cinema. In this radical work, Peter Kubelka reduced cinema to its simplest form of expression: each frame is composed of light or darkness, silence or sound.
While in San Francisco to promote her latest film, Agnès Varda gets a tip from an acquaintance. In Sausalito, a town in the San Francisco Bay Area, there lives a Greek painter named Jean Varda. Could they be related?
A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs marching and picketing with the word ‘solidarity’ superimposed on the screen. Like Wieland’s earlier films, Solidarity uniquely combines political awareness with an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour.
Manuel Muñoz Rivas turns the daily passage of a ferry on a Spanish river into a ritual crossing of sacred beauty, as the passengers’ souls wander through suspended narrations of everyday life.
All My Life is a 3-minute pan movement that opens on an old picket fence framed by the blue sky above and a stretch of summer-brown grass below. On the soundtrack, you can hear the crackle and hiss of an old record. Soon, Ella Fitzgerald starts singing “All My Life” in a 1936 session with the pianist Teddy Wilson.
Filmed over a single unbroken take, this work brings together slice-of-life vignettes. On a busy street corner, three young men have a conversation over food. Suddenly, a motorcycle crash occurs nearby. As the crowd clears, a young boy performs street tricks and a beer girl plies her trade.
Each Saturday, historian and activist Alicia Vega transforms the chapel of Lo Hermida into a screening room for about a hundred children. They have never seen an actual movie, and in her workshop, they learn more about cinema. Through watching films, the children discover a larger reality and a different world.
A pristine white bathroom soon becomes a site of crimson-stained shaving carnage in Martin Scorsese’s daring student film, a potent and disturbing allegory for the horrors of the Vietnam War. What starts out as a pleasant morning soon goes horribly wrong, turning into a bloody spectacle of self-mutilation.
During the Cold War, the Thai village of Nabua was accused of harbouring communists. Its inhabitants were subject to violent reprisals. Phantoms of Nabua evokes these atrocities, but does so under a luminous guise.
The War Game presents a fictional scenario concerning the consequences of an explosion in Kent following the escalation of an East-West conflict. The BBC withdrew its support, stating that “the effect of the film is considered too horrific for television broadcast”. The film had a significant impact on the growing campaign for nuclear disarmament.
Between 2020 and 2021, the Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason filmed his three children building a tree house in their backyard. Using a fixed frame, his lockdown project yielded a fascinating study of the seasons grounded in the leisurely rhythms of kids at play.
In 1976, the announcement of the imminent eruption of La Soufrière, Guadeloupe’s main volcano, left Basse-Terre completely depopulated. Werner Herzog travels there with his team and two cameramen as the danger reaches its peak.
A rich boy is playing alone with his enormous collection of expensive toys. When he looks out the window, he sees a poor boy on the street, also playing alone. They duel, each showing off their toys in a bid to outdo the other. Satyajit Ray called Two a ‘film fable’.
A man is sitting on a picnic blanket in a Chicago park on Lake Michigan. He is filmed from above. Every 10 seconds, the camera zooms out by a factor of 10. Finally, we see the entire universe, with constellations floating around like clouds of cream in ink-black coffee.
After the revolution in 1979, Iran prohibited the depiction on the silver screen of men and women touching. Since then, directors have relied on every cinematic trick in the book to mirror ecstatic tension—but often the game of glances is enough to set a scene ablaze. Nazarbazi collages these intense cinematic moments into a poem about love and desire in Iranian film, which also echoes our own pandemic time of physical distancing.
Letters from a Palestinian woman living in war-torn Lebanon to her daughter, whom she has not seen for years, and a series of photographs convey the effects of war and exile on their personal and cultural life, with a nuanced look at family relationships.
In Ever is Over All, Pipilotti Rist juxtaposes the field and its flowers with her magically powerful wand, and transposes acts of aggression and annihilation into benevolent and creative ones. An anarchic young woman gleefully breaks windows.
In this short animated film by Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park, various zoo animals are interviewed about their living conditions. The film points to issues regarding the living conditions of wild animals, but succeeds in doing so with a lot of humour.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first major film introduced their grippingly sparse, elliptical style to international audiences. Not Reconciled brought an intense sense of the present to this narrative of three architects reckoning with their family’s traumatic wartime history.
Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay that questions the alleged innocence of handbags in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In doing so, Maryam Tafakory provides a robust political analysis of censorship and intimacy.
During her vacation in Cuba in 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Agnès Varda made a photo report about Cuban society and culture after the revolution. This delightful black-and-white composition makes the edit resemble a choreography and intermingles the photos with catchy Cuban rhythms.
A woman lies awake at night. Nearby, a set of theatre backdrops unspools itself, unveiling two alternate landscapes. Upon the woman’s blue sheet, a flicker of light reflects and illuminates her realm of insomnia.
Begone Dull Care brings a wild piece of music to life with abstract expressionist animation. Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip, impossible to simulate with digital tools.
