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Maria Caserini
A short film depicting the execution of Mary, Queen of the Scots. Mary is brought to the execution block and made to kneel down with her neck over it. The executioner lifts his axe ready to bring it down. After that frame Mary has been replaced by a dummy. The axe comes down and severs the head of the dummy from the body. The executioner picks up the head and shows it around for everyone else to see. One of the first camera tricks to be used in a movie.
A re-enactment of the Jules Durand case. In 1910, Jean Jaurès [leader of the French socialist movement] took the lead in defending a working-class coal miner, Jules Durand, accused of complicity in and condemned to death for the murder of a labor leader. As in the Dreyfus Affair, a false dossier had been used to convict Durand. Jaurès argued that the memory of the Dreyfus Affair saved Durand, calling the case the working class’s Dreyfus Affair.
A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.
Filmed in IMAX, a young Mayan boy who lives close to the ruins becomes acquainted with an archaeologist (Guerra) and asks her to tell him about his ancestors. The crew travelled to over 15 locations in Mexico and Guatemala, including Tulum and Chichén Itzá.
Take a technological thrill ride The Magic of Flight takes you on a technological thrill ride faster, higher and wider than modern science or even your imagination! Relive the first flight of the Wright Brothers, then soar with the Blue Angels as they defy the laws of gravity. Narrated by Tom Selleck.
Filmed in IMAX, a young girl questions her grandfather about the alleged curse of King Tutankhamen. His response takes us up to the source of the nourishing river Nile, to the Great Pyramids of Giza, to the Valley of the Kings.
A twelve-year-old boy's fate is determined by his father's departure and the impending Dust Bowl as he is forced to care for his family and their farm.
Co-produced by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Institute, this Academy Award-winning documentary relates the harrowing story of Gerda Weissmann Klein and her journey of survival and remembering both before and after the war.
'Project Censored: The Movie' explores media censorship in our society by exposing important stories that corporate media fails to report/under report. Using the media watchdog group, Project Censored, as their road map, two fathers from California decided to make a documentary film that will help to end the reign of Junk Food News that Corporate Media continues to feed the American people.
A humorously semi-factual account of the history of cinema.
The tyrant Emperor Heliogabalus lives a life of debauchery and set lions loose among his guests.
Northern France, 1917. Australian Private Joseph Richmond and his fellow soldiers from the 18th Battalion A.I.F. have retreated into a supply trench during an artillery barrage. After being left by himself to act as a listening post, Joe discovers the all-important trench periscope has been damaged, meaning he has to poke his head above the parapet to determine enemy movements after he can overhear them close by. After exchanging shots with an unseen enemy, he retreats, but is confronted by a mysterious soldier. The soldier tells Joe go with him, even though he is not Joe’s relief. Joe refuses to leave his post without proper orders. The soldier reveals himself to be Joe as well, that Joe’s shooting exchange was fatal, and he has been dead ever since. The mysterious soldier represents everything Joe had to leave behind to become a soldier, but now he is dead, the two must reunite so Joe’s soul can meet its destiny.
A divinely inspired peasant woman becomes an army captain for France and then is martyred after she is captured.
James Powell, a college senior, falls for Bess Gunther, a sophomore. However, the attractive Bess is deeply in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, or "Scotty", as she likes to call him. The obsession leads Bess down a road James prefers not to follow. Years later, he wonders whether she's the one that got away.
The city of Edo, the 18th century. Owaka, the daughter of a merchant family, and her childhood friend Matsukichi. The two were drawn to each other, but Matsukichi has been disowned by his family, and is working for the city fire brigade. Meanwhile, negotiations begin for the arrangement of Owaka's marriage. Unable to let go of her thoughts of Matsukichi, her mad emotions make her bring about a massive inferno which razes Edo. By chance encounter, the two meet again amidst the fires.It is an epic spectacle set against the stage of the massive metropolis of Edo.
During the Paris Commune, a boy runs across trouble at the barricade. The film is now attributed to Alice Guy-Blaché by the Gaumont company, although there is some debate about whether it was directed by Étienne Arnaud.
The watching of an old film in 8 mm format produces memories and doubts for two persons who faced the question of armed political fight in '70 in Italy.
The film recreates the final events leading to Italian unification in September 1870.
Between 1795 and 1801, 306 drowned people were recovered from the Seine river, near Paris. Peter Greenaway propouns a historical approach were 25 significant cases of drownings are catalogued, dissected and elaborated, with multilayered visuals and 'documentary' asides.
At the tense 1938 Munich Conference, former friends who now work for opposing governments become reluctant spies racing to expose a Nazi secret.
Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria clashes with his father, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, over implementing progressive policies for their country. Rudolf soon feels he is a man born at the wrong time in a country that doesn't realize the need for social reform. The Prince of Wales, later to become Britain's King Edward VII, provides comic relief. Rudolf finds refuge from a loveless marriage with Princess Stéphanie by taking a mistress, Baroness Maria Vetsera. Their untimely demise at Mayerling, the imperial family's hunting lodge, is cloaked in mystery.
Electricity titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse compete to create a sustainable system and market it to the American people.
In this sprawling, fictionalized history of the Black Panthers, 1960s Oakland becomes a war zone as the Panthers battle for the right to exist.
A WWII veteran escapes his care home in Northern Ireland and embarks on an arduous but inspirational journey to France to attend the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, finding the courage to face the ghosts of his past.
The history of cinematic sound, told by legendary sound designers and visionary filmmakers.
A chronicle of the Cristeros War (1926-1929), which was touched off by a rebellion against the Mexican government's attempt to secularize the country.
Young women toiling in a factory are exposed to hazardous material which takes a disastrous toll on their health.
The story of fifteenth century Czech icon and warlord, Jan Zizka, who defeated armies of the Teutonic Order and the Holy Roman Empire.
In post-World War II America, a woman, rebuilding her life in the suburbs with her husband, kidnaps her neighbor and seeks vengeance for the heinous war crimes she believes he committed against her.
In the years between WWI and the rise of Fascism, legendary thespian Eleonora Duse shocks everyone by getting back onstage at over 60 years of age. Struggling with the brutality of historical events unfolding and clinging to the possibility of utopia, she makes her art a revolutionary act, even at the cost of sacrificing health and affection—facing her final journey aware she could give up life itself, but not her own true nature.
An American spy behind the lines during WWII serves as a Nazi propagandist, a role he cannot escape in his future life as he can never reveal his real role in the war.
Fr. Hugh O'Flaherty is a Vatican official in 1943-45 who has been hiding downed pilots, escaped prisoners of war, and Italian resistance families. His activities become so large that the Nazis decide to assassinate him the next time he leaves the Vatican.
Buck Weaver and Hap Felsch are young idealistic players on the Chicago White Sox, a pennant-winning team owned by Charles Comiskey - a penny-pinching, hands-on manager who underpays his players and treats them with disdain. And when gamblers and hustlers discover that Comiskey's demoralized players are ripe for a money-making scheme, one by one the team members agree to throw the World Series. But when the White Sox are defeated, a couple of sports writers smell a fix and a national scandal explodes, ripping the cover off America's favorite pastime.
Germany 1945, Max, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, meets a radical group of Jewish resistance fighters, who, like him, lost all hope for their future after they were robbed of their existence and their entire families were killed by the Nazis. They dream of retaliation on an epic scale for the Jewish people. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Max starts identifying with the group's monstrous plans...
Rome. The 1980s. After the magnum opus The Art of Joy she has been working on for a decade is rejected by the Italian publishing world, writer Goliarda Sapienza commits a desperate theft that costs her her reputation and social position. Incarcerated in Italy’s largest female prison, she finds herself living alongside thieves, junkies, sex workers and revolutionaries. After her release, she continues to meet with these women and over the course of a sweltering summer, a life-changing relationship flowers – a relationship that will reawaken her the desire to live and to write.
Eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner lives his last 25 years with gusto and secretly becomes involved with a seaside landlady, while his faithful housekeeper bears an unrequited love for him.
Stephen Glass is a staff writer for the respected current events and policy magazine The New Republic and a freelance feature writer for publications such as Rolling Stone, Harper's and George. By the mid-90s, Glass' articles had turned him into one of the most sought-after young journalists in Washington, but a bizarre chain of events - chronicled in Buzz Bissinger's September 1998 Vanity Fair article - suddenly stopped his career in its tracks.
A look at the history of the American comedy publication and production company, National Lampoon, from its beginning in the 1970s to 2010, featuring rare and never before seen footage, this is the mind boggling story of The National Lampoon from its subversive and electrifying beginnings, to rebirth as an unlikely Hollywood heavyweight, and beyond. A humour empire like no other, the impact of the magazines irreverent, often shocking, sensibility was nothing short of seismic: this is an institution whose (drunk stoned brilliant) alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture. Both insanely great and breathtakingly innovative, The National Lampoon created the foundation of modern comic sensibility by setting the bar in comedy impossibly high.
In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
