Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime cookery. But director, artist, animator and all-round firework of a man Len Lye specialised in the unexpected. A simple tale of a mother cheering up her daughter with a pie from her rationing-stricken pantry (interestingly the war is never directly referred to) is skilfully crafted into a work of real artistic depth, while retaining an unpretentious charm.
Commercial and technical developments on British Rail: new freight loads, air conditioned carriages, an ultrasonic test-train for checking the permanent way, a lecture train, and a new station for motorists - all part of the railway scene in the 1970's.
Report No. 8 in a series of 13 topical films, produced since the far reaching plan for the modernisation and re-equipment of British Railways in 1955 started to take effect, to log the many developments - new services, equipment, techniques - wherever these have been introduced.
A high speed Inter-City train is the star of this impressionist film in which picture and music are brought together to enhance the mood and rhythm of the subject and hail the arrival of 125mph regular passenger services.
In a bid to encourage city-dwellers to leave behind the restrictions of war, 'The Green Girdle' escapes from the austere urban landscape of inner-city London and savours the natural delights of the capital’s rural surroundings.
The City of Sheffield is renewing itself, but until recently Sheffield's railway network exemplified the confusion and inefficiency created by competitive railway expansion in Victorian times.
An ambigious “love story” told through the 1930’s archive of a British archaelogist who took a camera on his digs in the British mandate for Palestine and fell in love with his Bedouin assistant.
This short starts out as a documentary. In a dramatization, Eadward Muybridge's photographic experiments prove that when a horse gallops, there are times when all four of the animal's feet are off the ground.
After losing nearly all of an inheritance to taxes, sisters Kay and Barbara Latimer, waitresses at a drive-in restaurant in Texas, scheme to find rich husbands.
When his car breaks down out in the country, Sniffles the mouse takes shelter in an old mill, where he meets up with "Batty," a non-stop-talking little bat who later save Sniffles from a hungry cat.
A struggling band find themselves attached to a fugitive and drawn into a series of old feuds and love affairs, as they try to stay together and find musical success.
The Saturday matinee crowd got two cowboy stars for the price of one in this lavishly budgeted western serial starring former singing cowboy Dick Foran and Buck Jones.
Serials usually spawned feature film versions, but with this film, it was the other way around. A 1932 Buck Jones Western, White Eagle was made into a serial nine years later, again starring Jones in the title role, a (supposedly) Native American Pony Express Rider defending his people against a gang of evil Whites.
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Have you watched When the Pie Was Opened yet? What did you think about it?
