A lyrical portrait of Amsterdam and its changing appearance during a rain-shower.

Robert J. Flaherty’s follow-up to Nanook of the North shifts from the Arctic to the South Seas, portraying Samoan village life with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a…

Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love…

Commissioned by the Moscow Soviet as a documentary and information film for the citizens of Moscow prior to municipal elections, film is a tableau of Soviet life and achievements in…

A documentary on the life of the people of the Aran Islands, who were believed to contain the essence of the ancient Irish life, represented by a pure uncorrupted peasant…

The armed forces of the Third Reich, particularly the German army, are presented as an efficient system of bodies and machines at the seventh Nazi Party Rally that occurred in…

A prescient documentary about city planning, which presents idyllic suburbs and nuclear families as a solution to the chaos, poverty and social decay of industrialized inner cities.

This WW2 documentary centers on the crew of the American B-17 Flying Fortress Memphis Belle as it prepares to execute a strategic bombing raid on Nazi submarine pens in Wilhelmshaven,…

A dramatized re-enactment and documentary of the Battle of Verdun as seen by both French and German soldiers, shot on site of the actual battle.

Joris Ivens’s wartime documentary of China’s resistance to the Japanese invasion, cross-cutting civilian exodus and bombing with the Nationalist state’s mobilization—schools, industry, dispersed war production, foreign relief—and guerrilla fighting. Framing…

This short documentary, presented and directed by MGM sound engineer Douglas Shearer, goes behind the scenes to look at how the sound portion of a talking picture is created.

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.