Poetic Documentary Movies

Morning reveals New York harbor, the wharves, the Brooklyn Bridge. A ferry boat docks, disgorging its huddled mass. People move briskly along Wall...

Robert Drew shows the sights and sounds from the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in...

In this short film Bert Haanstra gives his vision - from the water – of a tranquil Holland. During filming he held the camera upside down and...

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line...

A montage of the skyscrapers of Manhattan opens with a succession of stationary views of the upper portions of numerous buildings. This is followed...

A perfect, fast and hilarious montage. Using images from Artis (Amsterdam Zoo), Bert Haanstra shows that a couple of similarities can be discovered...

The faces of a 5:00 PM crowd descending via the Pan Am building escalators in one continuous shot. In old-fashioned black and white, these faces...

A formally free poetic documentary filmed through a summer depression in northern Portugal.

An ode to man's capacity to care for all creatures throughout their sometimes greatly protracted existence, displayed through the homegrown remedies...

A city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished...

A hypnotic and slow-burning journey through the austere landscapes of the island of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. Shot on black and...

Filmed In the heart of the mountainous villages of Greece and North Macedonia, the documentary follows a group of conservators of antiquities and...

In 1952, Haanstra made Panta Rhei , another view of Holland through the eyes of a painter and filmmaker. Its poetic images of water, skies and clouds...

On the island of La Gomera, children imagine stories while they examine archeological remains. An ethno-fictional journey in which past and present...

Tommy sets out to document walking. He meets a colorful cast of characters, attaches microphones to his feet, and contends with what it means to...

Featuring a commentary by Noël Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and...

This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic...

The pictures are burning. A house is in flames for exactly one minute. Cinema under attack: An anonymous fragment from the early days of film is...