Terence Alan Smith

In 1992, at the height of the AIDS pandemic, activist Terence Alan Smith made a historic bid for president of the United States as his drag queen persona Joan Jett Blakk. Today, Smith reflects back on his seminal civil rights campaign and its place in American history.

Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconventional way of filming created a new look for documentary films where the camera’s lens was right in the middle of what ever drama was occurring.  Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1998.

Experimental short film on the excitement and rush of a day trip

Watch the chilling tale of African women whose fertility was tragically stripped away through an experimental tetanus vaccination program. Are women from other continents next?

Powerboat racing was a brand-new sport in 1904. Selwyn Edge initially won the race off Cowes (Isle of Wight) in the British-made Napier Minor as a substitute for the Napier II, but was later disqualified. Clearly the filmmakers thought at the time that they were filming the victor.

A portrait of two very different mathematicians, porridge pulleys and Pi features Fields medalist Vaughan Jones, one of the world's foremost knot theorists and an avid windsurfer, and Hendrik lenstra, a number theorist with a passion for Homer and all things classical. Porridge pulleys and Pi poses the question: how do we get first-rate research mathematicians? Hendrik lenstra and Vaughan Jones have had an extraordinary impact on mathematics; this charming documentary gives the viewer a taste of their personalities, mathematical and otherwise. A whirlwind tour of knots, geonomics, cryptography, music, Homer, elliptic curves, art, and windsurfing, the video contains sections on the history of Pi, and a suprising discovery involving a cocoa tin and an Escher print.

This film is a look at the disappearance of religious and industrial cultures in a small town (Scardovari) located in northern Italy (Po Delta). This erasure, together with the economic situation, pushes the men and women to return to the water to survive. The image as a representation of the memory of a place, of an inner landscape, of a mystery. A narrative that belongs to the world of exegesis, to an infinite world of relationships, of networks where each image enters into correspondence with another, opening up the meaning ever more and breaking the unity of history.

A mysterious light appeared in the city and quickly disappeared.