Summary: Explores the making and meaning of Film, a 1965 short film starring Buster Keaton, that was written by Samuel Beckett, directed by Alan Schneider, and produced by Barney Rosset. Topics covered include the circumstances leading to the film's production, the production process itself, and the film's critical reception. Includes outtakes, never-before-heard audio recordings of production meetings,...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: By the mid-1980s, the fabled animation studios of Walt Disney had fallen on hard times. The artists were polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old timers not yet ready to relinquish control. The following is no fairy tale. It's the true story of how Disney regained its magic with a staggering output of hits such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King,...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Buena Vista Home Entertainment 2010

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Examines Trotsky, the revolutionary, venerated and reviled, loved, hated, feared. Archive material compiled from all over the world, citations and new shoots create an electrifying proximity to the historical person and to the man Leon Trotsky.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2000

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Ricky Jay is a world-renowned magician, author, historian and actor, as well as a performer who regularly provokes astonishment from even the most jaded audiences. Trace Jay's achievements and influences, from his apprenticeship at age four with his grandfather, to such now-forgotten legends as Al Flosso, Slydini, Cardini and his primary mentors, Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller. Featuring rare...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "Told by the activists and leaders who live and breathe this movement for justice, Whose Streets? is an unflinching look at the Ferguson uprising. When unarmed teenager Michael Brown is killed by police and left lying in the street for hours, it marks a breaking point for the residents of St. Louis, Missouri. Grief, long-standing racial tensions and renewed anger bring residents together to...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: It is a timely tale of what can happen when engaged citizens fight the power for the sake of a better world. Arguably, no one did more to shape our understanding of the modern American city than Jane Jacobs, the visionary activist and writer who fought to preserve urban communities in the face of destructive development projects. The film vividly brings to life Jacobs' 1960s showdown with...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: MPI Media Group 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: This remarkable story from the past is especially timely today. Filmed in Cordoba, Granada, Seville, and Toledo, this film retraces the 800 years in medieval Spain when Muslims, Christians, and Jews forged a common cultural identity that frequently transcended their religious differences, revealing what made this rare and fruitful collaboration possible, and what ultimately tore it apart.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Stephen Fry goes in search of the story behind the first media entrepreneur Johann Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press, to find out why he did it and how.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama, and continued to farm the land until the late 1920s when he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, devising his visual language to depict his memories of slavery and scenes of a...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Explore the long, fascinating life and complicated career of architect and designer Eileen Gray, whose uncompromising vision defined and defied the practice of modernism in decoration, design, and architecture. Making a reputation with her traditional lacquer work in the first decade of the twentieth century, she became a critically acclaimed and sought-after designer and decorator before...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: First Run Features 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "Emmy Award-winner John Scagliotti, producer of the landmark films "Before Stonewall" and "After Stonewall", guides us in a wondrous tour of erotic history, poetry and visual art in this point-of-view documentary on same-sex desire from ancient times to Victorian crimes. He explores how the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the growth of LGBT political power in the 1990s cleared the path for...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: World War II saw the first full-scale aerial battles, as well as an unprecedented degree of air attacks against civilians. This program looks at both the Royal Air Force's attacks on Berlin, and the Luftwaffe's retaliatory bombing of London. Along with footage of dogfights, the program also looks at Germany's formidable anti-aircraft guns. At the behest of the Nazi party, the German military...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Pen & Sword 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Armstrong, Dorsey

Summary: For more than 1,000 years, stories of King Arthur and his knights have fascinated people from all different walks of life. What is it about this story that has given it such enduring popularity? What are the themes and ideals of Arthurian legend that have appealed to so many people across time and space? In this 24-lecture course, you will learn about the origins and development of Arthur's...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2015

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Documentary filmmaker, Christine Choy, tracks down three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre in order to find closure on an abandoned project she began shooting in 1989.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, leading to three nights of rioting by the city's LGBT community. With this outpouring of courage and unity the gay liberation movement had begun. Newly restored for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, this documentary pries open the closet door, setting free the dramatic story of survival,...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Recounts the triumph and travails of the eighteen African American athletes representing the United States in the 1936 Olympics, who endured racism in Hitler's Berlin as well as back home in the United States.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2016

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Presents interviews with living witnesses to Hitler's Third Reich, raising questions about national identity and complicity among Germany's civilian population.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Working for change: Explores the birth of the social documentary in the U.S. and U.K. during the years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, featuring interviews with several of the people who helped define and shape the form.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Project Recover, a small team of accomplished scientists, historians, and military veterans, scour the depths of the ocean and the farthest corners of the earth, to search for and recover the remains of the more than 80,000 Americans who have been missing in action since World War II. They aim to deliver closure, solace, and kinship to MIA families who have gone generations without answers.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: pt.1. After being commissioned by the 1936 Olympic Committee to create a feature film of the Berlin Olympics, Riefenstahl shot a documentary that celebrates the human body by combining the poetry of bodies in motion with close-ups of athletes in the heat of competition. Includes the marathon, men's diving, and American track star Jesse Owen's sprint races at the 1936 Olympic games. The...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Pathfinder Home Entertainment 2006

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: It is not widely known that a handful of prisoners in the Nazi death camps managed somehow to take clandestine photographs of the hell that was being hidden from the world. Director Christophe Cognet retraces the footsteps of these courageous men and women in a quest to unearth the circumstances and the stories behind their photographs.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: It is a vivid and engaged docu-celebration of the LGBT rights movement from the partial victory of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act to Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front, the AIDS crisis, Legal Marriage, and finally the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. The film gives an extensive history of the course of LGBTQIA+ rights campaigning, but, more importantly, also shows how much more work there is to be...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere