Watch Documentary Films
Genres / Short / Documentary
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Debra Paget, For Example
Debra Paget was a contract player for 20th-Century Fox, whom they groomed and coached for stardom. But she never quite caught on. Maybe the movies weren't interesting enough. Or maybe she didn’t stand out from the rest of the pack. Or the studio didn’t take enough care in...Watch Movie
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Becoming Anita Ekberg
BECOMING ANITA EKBERG is an exploration of how the construct of "Anita Ekberg" became an internationally famous sex goddess as a result of the careful cultivation of her image in various movies, both in Hollywood, by Frank Tashlin, and in Europe, by Federico Fellini. It's an...Watch Movie
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Jerry's Deli
JERRY'S DELI is a testament to a bygone era when shrieking lunatics could run successful (even popular) businesses. Shot on film-stock leftover from television cameramen, Tom Palazzolo's portrait of Jerry Meyer offsets sequences of the tyrannical deli owner (seen berating his employees and...Watch Movie
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The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk
A video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of that particular prop in a wide variety of Sirk movies. Is it a device that traps and keeps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past and the future, and a distorted but...Watch Movie
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The Double Life of Paul Henreid
Paul Henreid, perhaps most famous for his roles in CASABLANCA and NOW, VOYAGER became a star at Warner Brothers during World War II, as the exotic lead with the European accent. After the war, his contract was cancelled and he was left to his own devices. He continued acting...Watch Movie
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John Garfield
Mark Rappaport completed his concise portrait of the legendary John Garfield in 2002, comprised (like much of his filmed essays) from existing film footage of the actor. Exceptionally engaging, Rappaport's extraordinary short contains more insightful observations of its subject than many...Watch Movie
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Human Remains
HUMAN REMAINS is a haunting documentary which illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate portraits of five of the 20th century's most reviled dictators. The film unveils the personal lives of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse Tung. We learn the...Watch Movie
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Réponse de femmes
1975: the "Year of the Woman." A television station gives seven female filmmakers seven minutes to answer the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" Agnès Varda answers with the cine-tract, ("Our Body: Our Sex"). Women talking about sex, desire, commercials and children...Watch Movie
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Our Stars
Stars of the 1940s and 1950s, were they cast for their mutual affinities or for their commercial appeal? If and when they were re-starred years later, did the magic still work? Did sparks still fly? The movie business, a machine that manufactured romance and desire at the same time that it...Watch Movie
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The Circle Closes
An examination of four different films, which to varying degrees, center on a prop or an object or an item that crosses various characters lives and passes from hand to hand in THE CIRCLE CLOSES. The story in each film is, to a certain extent, told from the point of view of...Watch Movie
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Ryan
This Oscar-winning animated short from Chris Landreth is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Ryan is living every artist's worst nightmare - succumbing to addiction, panhandling on the streets to make ends...Watch Movie
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Sergei / Sir Gay
As a teenager, Eisenstein signed his drawings with 'Sir Gay'. Roguish essayist Rappaport sees clear signs of his sexual preferences throughout the Russian’s film oeuvre. Numerous asides illustrate how Hollywood productions likewise frequently played with nods and winks and...Watch Movie
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Salut les Cubains
The final film in the CINEVARDAPHOTO triptych is the oldest, SALUT LES CUBAINS. In 1963, Varda thoughtfully gave order to 1,800 photos that she had recently taken on a trip to Cuba. In just 30 minutes, the photographer/filmmaker achieves a sprawling depiction of the country,...Watch Movie
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The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer
This early film by renowned animators Stephen and Timothy Quay is structured as a series of little lessons in perception, taught by a puppet simulacrum of Jan Svankmajer (whose head is an opened book) to a doll (whose head the master empties of dross and refills with a similar...Watch Movie
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Ulysse
For ULYSSE, Agnes Varda grants herself the unusual screen credit of cinecrit, but the exercise in question is actually the titular photograph she took on a beach in 1954. She tracks down two of her three former models (the third is a dead goat) to find out if the picture still means as much to...Watch Movie
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Cornell, 1965
I worked as Joseph Cornell's assistant during the summer and fall of 1965, during which time I shot four rolls of Kodachrome 16mm film in and around Cornell's house. The scenes included a brief biographical glimpse of Cornell and his work, as well as his working environment, which is perhaps the...Watch Movie
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Meaning of Robots
This short film profiles the benevolent Mike Sullivan, who has been in the process of shooting a stop-motion robot mating film in his New York City apartment for the last ten years. Obsessed with the meticulous construction of the miniature robot stars, his apartment now...Watch Movie
