Documentary Movies

The Legend of the Luftwaffe began in Poland, the first victim of Hitler’s blitzkrieg. Combat cameramen filmed the aerial campaign, showing preparations for flight, massive air strikes, and the appalling…

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.

The 400 million people of China are heirs to a great civilization, as their pagodas and stone lions can attest. But they are under attack from the Japanese. Civilian refugees…

This film is less a typical musical short and more like an educational film. It consists of a narrator describing the music, composition and style of a big band.

Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. Where the two-part epic’s first half, Festival…

Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. This first half of her two-part film…

One of Joseph Cornell’s funniest films, Thimble Theater is structured like a vaudeville variety show about nature.

Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings

Expeditions in Borneo by Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson show the terrain, flora, fauna and lifestyle of Borneo as the Johnsons search for a huge orangutan.

A propaganda film made during the Spanish Civil War in support of the Republican government against the rebellion by Gen. Francisco Franco’s forces who were backed by Nazi Germany and…

This documentary short examines the special train on which mail is sorted, dropped and collected on the run, and delivered in Scotland on the overnight run from Euston, London to…

Filming of the performance show the Deutsche Wehrmacht (German Army) made during the Reichsparteitag of the NSDAP in Nurnberg 1935. Showing the readiness and the will of the newly build…

A showcase of German chancellor and Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

This Traveltalk series short visits Los Angeles, California. In one of the highlights of the film, narrator James FitzPatrick visits the Disney cartoon studio and shakes hands with Walt Disney.

This documentary, made up of 3 episodes, is based on three songs sung by anonymous people in Soviet Russia about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

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 film is a documentary portraying a struggle as man tries to subdue nature. To prevent flooding and for purposes of land reclamation, the people of the Netherlands struggle and…

One of the short little films featuring Don Aspiazu of his own orchestra, a good example of the style of Cubano jazz in the 1920’s and 1930’s, combined with some…

The film explores the story of the Bounty and is based on the 1932 novel Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.

This is a documentary of Captain R.F. Scott’s second Antarctic expedition, begun in 1910. The British, under Scott, attempted to reach the South Pole before Roald Amundsen’s Norwegians. Scott’s writings…

Arrival in the Bronx is shown with a view from an elevated train as it enters the city. Then follows a montage of sights from the Bronx. Many typical neighborhood…

Short silent documentary from 1931 about those working on the River Douro in Oporto.

An industrial film which shows the operations inside the Philips Radio plant: In a mêlée of activity, glassblowers make delicate glass bulbs. Machinery assists the bulb manufacture. A virtuoso glassblower…

This is a non-narrative film, comprised of shots that “portray a certain young man in the terms of the things that he likes”, such as the flow of the tide…

A lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbass who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the Five Year Plan.

Close up we see pistons move up and down or side to side. Pendulums sway, the small parts of machinery move. Gears drive larger wheels. Gears within gears spin. Shafts…

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

One of the first sociological and ethnographic documentary films worldwide, made by the team of sociologists and students of Professor Dimitrie Gusti (1880-1955) in the village of Drăguş, Făgăraş County,…

A silent film by John Grierson. It tells the story of Britain’s North Sea herring fishery.

Bold and exhilarating documentary account of the building of the Turkestan-Siberian railway, presented as a heroic triumph of Soviet progress over natural adversity.

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

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

Captain Edward A. Salisbury was a noted millionaire explorer and writer, whose exploration stories of the islands of the South Seas Pacific appeared often in “The National Geographic,” and other…

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.

The film is dedicated to the achievements of the Ukrainian SSR for the eleventh anniversary of the October Revolution.

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany…

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…

Robert J. Flaherty’s South Seas follow-up to Nanook of the North is a Gauguin idyll moved by “pride of beauty… pride of strength.”

A documentary on the 1924 Olympic Game in Paris.

A documentary on the Olympic games of ancient Greece, made during the 1924 games.