Ways to Strength and Beauty

Screen Test: Jackie

January 1967 •English

Andy Warhol directs The Factory regular Louisa "Jackie" Foster for a screen test.

Around China with a Movie Camera

July 2016 •English

A new film compiled from the BFI National Archive's unparalleled holdings of early films of China, features films from 1900-48 filmed across China. The cinematic journey of Around China with a Movie Camera contains many films which may never have been seen in China, or at the very least not for over 70 years. These travelogues, newsreels and home movies were made by a diverse group of British and French filmmakers, some professionals, but mainly enthusiastic amateurs, including intrepid tourists, colonial-era expatriates and Christian missionaries.

Ténérife

September 1932 •French

Silent Shakespeare

June 2000 •English

A BFI collection of 7 short films from the USA, England and Italy scored for Piano, Guitar and String Quartet.

Growing Girls

November 1949 •English

After several farmyard analogies featuring chicks and calves, the well-spoken narrator and director of the film, Winifred Holmes, considers the subject of girls and how they reach adulthood and readiness for the 'important job of motherhood.

Slaughterhouse

July 2001 •English

Documentary about a slaughterhouse in Quito, where hundreds of people and entire families work everyday. The smell of the place is warm and penetrating, the noise is intense, everything is red. Would that much effort and death have an ulterior purpose?

Opening of the Kiel Canal

June 1895 •English

The opening of the Kiel Canal in Germany by Kaiser Wilhelm II on 20 June 1895.

One Second in Montreal

September 1969 •English

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.

The Celebration of Saint George

September 1905 •Macedonian

Early Balkan footage.

The Defilee of Army Orchestra, Carriages and Horsemen

September 1908 •Macedonian

Early Balkan footage.

Florence

January 1975 •English

Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)

Swole

January 2017 •Finnish

In Swole I continue to document my commitment to an intensive and transformative gym and diet regimen, as well as the communities that form around such activities, sustaining themselves through texting and sharing videos and photos on social media. I learn the vocabulary of my new community.

Limbs of Sun

July 2016 •

A journey into time, landscape and consciousness: The Southwestern United States in the black-and-white moving images and unsettling instrumental music. Entropy of the American dream.

Lumiere's First Picture Shows

September 2013 •English

An overview of the works of French film pioneers Louis and Auguste Lumière from 1895 to 1897.

The Police Tapes

January 1977 •English

The Police Tapes is a 1977 documentary about a New York City police precinct in the South Bronx. The original ran ninety minutes and was produced for public television; a one-hour version later aired on ABC. Filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent three months in 1976 riding along with patrol officers in the 44th Precinct of the South Bronx, which had the highest crime rate in New York City at that time. They produced about 40 hours of videotape that they edited into a 90-minute documentary.

Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74)

January 1974 •English

A contemplative, seemingly timeless record of the years Hutton spent in Southeast Asia while working as a merchant seaman. Jon Jost writes, "The film is rich with truly wonderful visions: a thick, white porcelain cup perched on a ship's rail, the tea within swaying gently in sync with the ship while the sea rushes by beyond…the faces of crewmen posing awkwardly but also movingly for the camera; a cockfight on ship; scenes from a bucolic pre–Pol Pot Phnom Penh. Images has the haunting elegiac resonance of Eugène Atget's Paris, the echo of a time and place that was." - MoMA

El mar se mueve en una espiral

January 2018 •Spanish

Photographic and sound story, through the encounter of characters with their stories of a time without end.

Der neue Expressdampfer Saint Louis

May 1899 •German

Short film about an express steamer

Laurel & Hardy: Their Lives and Magic

December 2011 •German

The lives of Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892-1957), on the screen and behind the curtain. The joy and the sadness, the success and the failure. The story of one of the best comic duos of all time: a lesson on how to make people laugh.

How Animated Cartoons Are Made

September 1919 •English

Wallace Carlson walks viewers through the production of an animated short at Bray Studios.