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Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

This biographical docudrama traces the life of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, from his birth in Alsace, up to the age of 30 when he made the decision to go to French Equatorial Africa and build his jungle hospital. The latter half of the film encompasses a full day in the hospital-village, following the octogenarian Samaritan in his daily rounds.

Variations on the cultural and intellectual explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in 1946.

One of the first filmed portraits of a jazz musician.

A short documentary on Paul Gauguin, a French painter and sculptor.

Documentary focused on underwater shootings and hawaiian dances.

A biographical film about cinematic illusionist Georges Méliès featuring Méliès’s widow, Jeanne d’Alcy, as herself, and their son André as his own father.

Rendez-Vous a Melbourne is the official filmed record of the 1956 Olympic Games in Australia. At the time of its release, there was much controversy in the documentary-filmmaking world over the fact that the Aussies signed over exclusive distribution rights to a French firm, resulting in a boycott from other movie companies. None of this matters when the film is seen today: though not in the same league as Leni Reifenstahl's Olympiad, this 110-minute extravaganza is consistently entertaining. Fifteen cameras were utilized to lens every aspect of the event; it was then up to editors Jean Dudrumet and Monique Lacombe to burrow through miles and miles of film to cull the highlights seen herein. Portions of Rendez-Vous a Melbourne have since resurfaced in practically every Olympics documentary -- not to mention the many TV specials attending the now-biannual event.

The planet is filled with dust and particles of all kinds, natural or originated by man. Such a state of things has of course a great many consequences for public health, with diseases like silicosis, inherent in various human activities, some of which are detailed (farming, notably the treatment of flax; industrial activity, particularly porcelain and cement work, coal mining).

François Reichenbach follows a group of young men from the day they enlist in the US Marine Corps, all the way through basic training.

Denys Colomb de Daunant (1922 - 2006) is a writer, poet, photographer and filmmaker known for being the author and co-writer of the film Crin-Blanc (1952) directed by Albert Lamorisse. Highly symbolic character of the Camargue, aristocrat and dandy, he was also a manager and hotelier. He would lead the immemorial life of an animal herder if he did not have another passion: images. The photographic apparatus and the camera are like sensitive antennas that he spreads over his world and which seek the truth beyond appearances. Since Crin Blanc his photographs have appeared in illustrated books on five continents. Among his many films, Corrida Interdite (in competition at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival) and Le Rêve des Chevaux Sauvages (Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are global short film successes. The animals, the images... a single passion: that of a free life in one of the rare countries where you can still live freely: the Camargue.

Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

A family goes on holiday, abandoning the little girl’s dog.

A documentary account of a research expedition to the Persian Gulf, following a BP-sponsored underwater survey near Bahrain in search of oil. Featuring Jacques Cousteau and the research vessel Calypso, the film captures early scientific diving and marine exploration at the intersection of industrial ambition and oceanographic discovery.

Documentary on France's industrial chemistry.

Jean-Louis Barrault, Charles Dullin and Roger Blin each say a poem. The actors do not appear on screen.

Le chant du Styrène is a 1958 French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais. The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics.

How to make the most of a defeat. How to make money from Napoleon's fiasco at Waterloo.

Part of Reichenbach's series of short documentaries on America.

Alain Resnais & Robert Hessen use the famous Picasso mural "Guernica" in combination with newspaper headlines in an anti-war cry against the Spanish Civil War. Narration by Jacques Pruvost highlights the Guernica atrocity of April 1937, followed by a poem by Paul Eluard read by María Casares to a discordant score by Guy Bernard.

Chris Marker’s travel essay Sunday in Peking transforms a long-held childhood dream into a cinematic journey through Beijing. Blending documentary observation with reflective narration, Marker captures the city’s rhythms, traditions, and everyday life in mid-1950s China with his signature curiosity and lyricism.

Les Etoiles de Midi is an engaging docudrama about some of the more spectacular exploits of French mountain climbers over the last several decades. In one re-enacted story, there is a wartime escape through the mountains, and in another, a daring rescue of a pair of climbers who had been missing. The actors themselves are adept at the sport of climbing, and they give the scenes an immediacy and real daring that brings the stories alive. A combination of their acrobatics and skill and the outstanding episodes in the history of French climbing creates a winning 78 minutes.

Join renowned explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau as he investigates aquatic habitats worldwide, showcasing whales, sharks, and diverse marine life. The film highlights the brutal realities of nature while capturing the wonder of underwater exploration, as the team ventures into previously unseen ocean depths.

Gilles Groulx's first film shot in 1955 with a camera borrowed from his brother and edited during his spare time when he worked as an editor at the Radio-Canada news service a few years before he joined the NFB. Silent film, presented as its author left it, where the soil and the dialectic of Groulx's work are already there: documentary realism, the social space to be explored, daily life, the relationship between individual and society, social disparities, the consumer society, seduction and happiness.

This short documentary records the celebration and ritual surrounding a snowshoe competition in Sherbrooke in the late 1950s. The film marked the beginning of a new approach to reality in documentary and prefigures the trademark style of the NFB's newly formed French Unit. Today, "Les raquetteurs" is considered a precursor to the birth of direct cinema.

A short documentary on the chateaux of the Loire in France was commissioned by the French Tourist Bureau.

Everyday life of fishermen on Brittany's Ile de Sein.

Balzac is a 1951 short documentary film by French director Jean Vidal. It is a biopic on the work, life, and loves of the French playwright and novelist Honoré de Balzac, his evolution as a writer and how his individual works fit into the design of La Comedie Humaine. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1952 and won first prize for best director at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival the same year.

Documentary about the inhabitants, both human and animal, of the Belgian Congo.

Nobel-prize-winning author, social justice crusader, anti-colonialist, adventure traveler, musician, and one-time Communist: André Gide was a larger-than-life character who dominated French letters from the turn of the 20th century to his death in 1951. Directed by Marc Allégret, with whom Gide traveled extensively in French Equatorial Africa, the film was made in the year leading up to the writer’s death.

Georges Delerue (composer). Commentary written by Boris Vian (under his pseudonym Michel Arras) and spoken by Jacques Mauclair. Jacques Rivette: …Chères vieilles choses, de Raymond Vogel, film imparfait, zigzagant, inégal, mais qui, dans les marges d'un essai sans imprévu sur le monde des collectionneurs, sait esquisser en mineur une sorte de phénoménologie amusante du décor et de la possession. (Arts n° 646) (auto-translation:) Jacques Rivette: ...Chères vieilles choses, by Raymond Vogel, an imperfect, zigzagging, uneven film, which, in the margins of an unexpected essay on the world of collectors, sketches out a kind of amusing phenomenology of decoration and possession. (Arts n° 646)

The wedding of actress Keiko Kishi and filmmaker Yves Ciampi.

A documentary about French marathon runner Alain Mimoun at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne.

History, advice and demonstrations of mountaineering in the Mont Blanc massif by the renowned guides of the National School of Ski and Mountaineering from Chamonix. The film starts with an historical summary illustrating the aspirations and methods that lead man to conquer the mountains. Armand Charlet teaches mountaineering techniques and takes his students to the field for glacier or rock exercises. Gaston Rebuffat makes demonstrations of particularly dangerous climbs. At altitude, people move in solitude, cold and silence, like circus acrobats without spectators, but nothing stops the modern mountaineer.

Fafai, a young boy, lives with his grandfather on the island of Glamador in the Camargue. To help the old man who can no longer work, Fafai finds a job as a caretaker. He must tame wild horses. But during a storm, they escape and swim to the island of Glamador. Fafai leaves for the island to bring back the herd... Glamador is none other than the island on which Folco and Crin-Blanc end up arriving after their escape, told in Crin-Blanc. This film is the sequel to “Crin Blanc”.

A man dreams he is in a wax museum after it is closed for the night.The statues come to life and behave in mysterious ways.

A bit of a strange story that takes place in Brussels which finally turns out to be a propaganda film for the Red Cross to encourge people to donate blood.

Olympia 52 is a 1952 French documentary film about the '52 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. Olympia 52 was produced by Peuple et Culture, a nonprofit organization, and it was the first feature-length work directed by the French filmmaker Chris Marker, who also co-wrote the narrative and served as one of the production’s four cinematographers.

Hungarian refugees in Austrian camps after the failed revolution in Budapest.

Travel journal under the form of a portrait series, silent intimate images filmed by François Reichenbach in 1954.

A poetic ode to the River Seine, Ivens' distinguished camera eye surveys its lively banks and step-stone canals with a vérité candor, a beguiling elan.

A small Breton port is falling asleep: individual and coastal fishing is dying, as is the case for François, an old sailor close to retirement. The only solution is to form a cooperative to buy a motor trawler. Five young sailors help rebuild the Roches-Douvres lighthouse in order to buy their boat "Le Tourmentin". In Brittany too, cinematographically, it was possible to make the future sing. .

In a comparative study between different forms of calligraphy, the film traces parallels between modern Japanese painting and traditional Japanese writing.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, "Moi, un noir" marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction". The film depicts an ordinary week in the lives of men and women from Niger who have migrated to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire for work.

A documentary short celebrating the life of Louis Braille, his invention of the writing system named after him, and the legacy he has left behind.

Silent footage shot on the set of CASQUE D’OR provides a glimpse of film director Jacques Becker at work.

The T.N.P., the Théâtre National Populaire, an important experimental theater directed by Jean Vilar. Franju combines sequences from theatrical performances with documentary images, creating links and confrontations between theater and the real world.

A 1959 documentary about climbing in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria. For the first time, a mountain expedition was organized for 60 young aspiring climbers, accompanied by renowned mountaineers such as Lionel Terray, Lucien Bérardini, Maurice Herzog, and Jean-Paul Gardinier. In two weeks, dozens of new routes, often extremely difficult, were established. Jacques Ertaud's camera followed the climbers through all the challenging sections of the first ascent of the south spur of Assekrem.

A Catholic holiday in a rural village in Auzelles, the filmmaker's native region in the Massif Central.

This is the only film about Big Bill Broonzy, you can see him playing the blues in a Brussels cellar.

Emperor Napoléon Ier's prodigious destiny, from his childhood in Corsica to the Return of the Ashes from Saint Helena, on the one hand, through popular imagery, engravings and paintings by great artists like David, Gros and Prud'hon, and, on the other hand, the landscapes and monuments that are the reminders of this great figure. The whole thing is unified by a commentary meant to captivate the public.

Through the portrait of Emile Zola, the story of his literary and political journey, and in particular the Dreyfus affair, this documentary evokes the streets and society of late nineteenth-century Paris. Photographs and archival documents show how much the writer's work and existence fit into the life of his time.

Using a specially designed transparent 'canvas' to provide an unobstructed view, Picasso creates as the camera rolls. He begins with simple works that take shape after only a single brush stroke. He then progresses to more complex paintings, in which he repeatedly adds and removes elements, transforming the entire scene at will, until at last the work is complete.

In a small fishermen's village in the Azores, an enormous whale is being jointed, carved and stocked. Once this task is over, the whalers ready themselves for another hunt, a fascinating but trying and dangerous experience...

From Pigalle to the Grands Boulevards, via the Champs-Élysées, a stroll through the heart of the Parisian nightlife, until the wee hours of the morning.