• October (Then Days That Shook the World)
  directed by Sergei Eisenstein
  
  October was commissioned to Sergei Eisenstein by the Soviet Central Committee in charge of festivities to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The filmaker chose to capture the spirit of the February and October 1917. The result is, from its opening moments on, a visually stunning film and a symphony of non-stop rhythmic editing.

  Eisenstein was allowed complete access to the city of Leningrad and its populace; he even was able to film at the czar's Winter Palace. Eisenstein meticulously researched the period, using newsreels, news reports and photographs, actual footage of the events in Petrograd shot by film editor Esther Shub, and John Reed's book "Ten Days That Shook the World". No professional actors were used in OCTOBER: Via the use of "typage," Eisenstein's casting theory, all characters, from worker to aristocrat, were played by appropriate types culled from the population. Quite a few had even been participants in the history Eisenstein had set out to recreate.

• New York -I- Cosmopolis 1919-1931
  directed by Ric Burns
  
  Nearly a century-and-a half of capitalist growth and astonishing demographic and physical transformation comes to an extraordinary climax during the roaring twenties, as New York finishes assembling the components of a mass consumer society, and becomes the cultural capital of the world. Themes of democracy and capitalism are brought to a moving zenith during the period, as New York's hybrid cultural style mixes high culture and low, black culture and white, in a new and distinctively American form, that is manufactured in New York and distributed to the rest of the world. As new media, and new "clean" industries like radio, magazine publishing, advertising and public relations make their home in a new area of town New York embarks on its most frenzied bout of speculative capitalism yet. The film concludes with the skyscraper war, the stok market rise, the Crash and the building of the Empire State Building, the greatest icon on the New York skyline.

• Three Songs about Lenin
  directed by Dziga Vertov
  
  Described by H.G. Well's as "one of the greatest and most beautiful films I have ever seen" this was Vertov's most personal work and the capstone of his career. Three Songs about Lenin reveals the Soviet leader as seen through the eyes of the people, represented by three songs. The first, "My Face Was in a Dark Prison", concerns the life of a young Muslim woman. "We Loved Him" deals with Lenin's life and death. The third song, "In a Big City of Stone", shows the accomplishments of his rule.
  

• Strike
  directed by Sergei Eisenstein

  Eisenstein's Strike, with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, marks the most remarkable cinematic debut in history. Triggered by the suicide of a worker unjustly accused of theft, a strike is called by the laborers of a Moscow factory. The managers, owner and the Czarist government dispatch infiltrators in an attempt to break the workers's unity. Unsuccessful, they hire the police and in the film's most harrowing and powerful sequences, the unarmed strikers are slaughtered in a brutal confrontation.

  
  

• Berlin - Symphony of a Great City - 1926
  directed by Walther Ruttman
  

Berlin, Smphony of a Great City offers a kaleidoscopic view of a single day in the life of the bustling metropolis. Carl Mayer, influenced by the naturalistic 'Kammerspiel' movement, envisioned " a melody of pictures" sprung from daily reality instead of the stylized artificiality of the studio-boung expressionist film. Following Mayer's rought outline, photographer Karl Freund deployed a team of cameramen to explore the avenues, alleyways and factories of Berlin and secure hidden-camere glimpses of the people and machinery that provide the city with its constant motion. The many hours of footage were then edited into a series of five acts, like movements of a symphony, by Walther Ruttmann as a continuation of his experiments with abstract motion.

• Paris was a Woman
  directed by Greta Schiller

In the first quarter of the 20th century Paris was the undisputed cultural capital of the world. It was also the meeting place for a new generation of independent women, who literally flocked to the West Bank of Paris and made it their home. Authors, Colette, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein joined painters Romaine Brookes and Marie Laurencin, photographers Bernice Abbott and Gilsele Freund, publishers and booksellers Sylvia Beach and Adrienn Monnier and journalist Janet Flanner and together they created a new legendary community.

Using groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies combined with other visual sources this intimate documentary intertwines interview and anecdote to recreate the mood and flavour of this exceptional female artistic community in Paris during its most magical era.

• The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
  directed by Ray Muller

A spellbinding account of the woman best known as Hitler's moviemaker and recently hailed by the New York Times as "one of the greatest woman filmmakers ever". In this remarkable documentary, Leni Riefenstahl addressed her past for the first time on camera. While she never actually joined the Nazi Party, as the creator of the single most effective propaganda film ever made, "Triumph of the Will", Riefenstahl has spent much of her life trying to live down her association with the Third Reich. Her personal relationship with Hitler is still in question.

• Triumph of the Will
  directed by Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl's breathtaking film record of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally is universally regarded as one of the most outstanding documentaries ever made, as well as a true milestone in World Cinema. Employing radically new ideas about montage and light, it is the ultimate fusion of film craftsmanship bordering on genius and propaganda bordering on sheer nightmare. Spectacular, awesome, powerful and chilling, "Truimph of the Will" captures all the sinister and illusory attractiveness of Nazism at the height of its power.

• New York - II - City of Tomorrow - 1929-1941
  directed by Ric Burns
  
  "New York - City of Tomorrow" chronicles the dramatic and increasingly fateful events following the crash of 1929 - as the greatest depression in American history plunged the city and nation into economic gloom. In little more than ten years, immense new forces were unleashed in New York, as two of the most remarkable New Yorkers of all time came to the fore - Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses - attempting to create in the darkest of times a bold new city of the culture. Charting the demise of Major Jimmy Walker and the ascendancy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, the documentary traces the fate of Harlem during the Depression; the complex impact of the automobile on the city; and the immense public works projects that permanently altered the landscape of New prophetic blueprint for a "World of Tomorrow", radically unlike the city that was its home.

• The World at War - The Final Solution - I Auschwitz Part 1

"The World at War" is widely acknowledged to be the most comprehensive television history of the Second World War ever made. These episodes are parts of the "Special Presentation" not shown on the TV.

Disbelief; historical anti-semitism; the Nazi stranglehold; the rebirth of the nation; the ideal of the S.S.; Nazism takes shape, Jewish emigration; Poland annex, re-Germanisation; the ghettos; extermination.

• The World at War - The Final Solution - II Auschwitz Part 2

The Extermination centres; preparing the final solution; the ghettos; what could be worse? arriving at Auschwitz; the first reprive; the changing priorities of life; where is the whole world? Handling the dead; the shocking reality.