Made in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and full German reunification, November Days is a reckoning with a country where time was still out of joint. Through adventurous montage, Ophuls relates the perspectives of very different individuals, from advocates for transition and reform to petty bureaucrats and legendary Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf. What results is a complex portrait of East German society on the eve of its vanishing. With English subtitles.

Hotel Terminus is one of Marcel Ophuls's signature achievements. Through nuances of mise-en-scène and editing, the examination of the life, times, and trial of Lyon Gestapo head Klaus Barbie becomes a multifaceted exploration of human motivation and mendacity. The film includes startling passages of Lumière-like discovery, but also incorporates multiple levels of staging and performance. A clear rebuttal of cinema vérité ideals of invisible observation, it makes clear why Ophuls has exerted such a profound influence on the interventionist strain of contemporary documentary. With English subtitles.

With war imminent, American filmmaker Frank Capra watched Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) for the first time and came away shaken and despondent. Struggling to find a way to communicate the urgency and meaning of the Second World War to a skeptical American public, Capra decided to produce counter-propaganda by taking found footage from existing newsreels and documentaries, re-editing the footage to produce new montage effects, and adding explanatory, sometimes humorous, narration in an "everyman" idiom (provided here by Walter Huston). The Battle of Britain, fourth of the seven Why We Fight films, is exemplary. Restored by the United States National Archives.

Despite their reputation for optimism, many of Capra's major films, especially the ones he made in the years surrounding the Second World War, are equally preoccupied with existential crises and ultimate concerns. Like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the protagonist of Meet John Doe is brought to the edge of self-destruction before rediscovering purpose. Capra's rich visual imagination and vigorous approach to montage is evident throughout. His abiding interest in the mechanisms and rhetoric of political persuasion is paradoxically ambiguous and trenchant.

Max Ophüls's only film in the Netherlands was the most elaborate and expensive Dutch production of the period. The episodic exploration of the shifting value of currency anticipates the circular systems of exchange central to the later French Ophüls films La Ronde (1950) and The Earrings of Madame De... (1953), but it is infused with the Brechtian musical didacticism of The Threepenny Opera (1928). Ophüls's carefully calibrated mise-en-scène is perfectly complemented by the masterful lighting of Expressionist cinematographer (and fellow German exile) Eugen Schüfftan. Restored by EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam). With English subtitles.

A landmark in the development of documentary form, The Sorrow and the Pity is a prismatic exploration of life under occupation. Using a series of interlinked filmmaking strategies - including the judicious arrangement of speakers, montage associations with existing film footage, inventive framing, and evocative mise-en-scène - the perspectives of political luminaries are juxtaposed with those of shopkeepers. The results are often surprising and belie easy judgment, which is what makes this holistic portrait of French society between 1939 and 1945 so uniquely compelling. English subtitles available.

The expansive and absorbing documentary films of Marcel Ophuls (1927-2025) open up new perspectives on the complexities of history and the perennial challenges of justice and memory.

Like its partner film The Bridge (1928), this "cine-poem" exemplifies the ambiguous tension in early City Symphonies between quotidian observation and abstract formalism. The familiar spaces of rainy Amsterdam are made to appear startlingly new through Ivens's adventurous editing. Rain was originally shown without music at Amsterdam's Filmliga and international film societies, and is presented that way here.

The greatest of the Dutch film pioneers, Joris Ivens (1898-1989) led a peripatetic life and made important documentaries in countries ranging from Spain and the United States to Indonesia, China, and Vietnam. For this early city film, however, he focused on a subject much closer to home: the Koningshaven Bridge in Rotterdam. Ivens’s Constructivist inclinations and deep knowledge of Dutch painting are complemented by a uniquely lyrical approach to montage.

Luis Buñuel's pseudo-documentary was shot in the area around the town of La Alberca in Spain's impoverished Las Hurdes region. Part ethnography, part anthropological travelogue, and part Surrealist fiction, this landmark hybrid pushes the boundaries of the nascent documentary form and demonstrates the director's penchant for paradox. Originally silent, Buñuel later added a French narration and extracts from the final symphony of Johannes Brahms (No. 4, Op. 98, 1884). English subtitles available.

The quintessential Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou was the incendiary cinematic debut of co-directors Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Buñuel's witty and perpetually surprising montage disrupts ordinary patterns of logic, simultaneously parodying and celebrating l'amour fou. According to legend, for the first 1929 screenings, Buñuel manually juxtaposed recordings of the Prelude to Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (1859) and an Argentinian tango. This has since become the established score for the film. With English subtitles.

In this subtle and multifaceted documentary, Peter Delpeut tries to summon up the inner life of the autodidactic East German artist Johanna Kaiser (1912-1991), who took up painting upon her retirement in the 1970s. With English subtitles.

Peter Delpeut's last fictional feature is based on the life of pioneering Italian-British photojournalist Felice Beato (1832-1909). Beato's photographs of life in South and East Asia are among the most enduring records of the nineteenth century, and Delpeut concentrates on his life in Japan during the period it emerged as Asia's preeminent imperial power and the Lumières invented their projection machine. English subtitles available.

In this structurally elegant dance film, Peter Delpeut uses new digital tools to interweave the hands of five chief conductors of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.

Peter Delpeut's fantastical pseudo-documentary The Forbidden Quest investigates the stories of the last surviving crew member of the Hollandia, which disappeared en route to Antarctica in 1905. Inspired equally by early twentieth century explorers and the mythic films of pioneer Robert Flaherty, Delpeut reinvents his approach to found footage montage in a playful narrative context.

Both deeply ironic and startlingly sincere, Wide Angle Saxon uses parodies of the structural film and other contemporaneous forms of avant-garde cinema as part of an Augustinian conversion narrative.

In one of his most audacious and powerful films, Stan Brakhage transforms the Alaskan landscape into an image of the natural sublime. The iconography of Frederic Church and Caspar David Friedrich is reworked and reinvented through bold and dynamic montage.

The great mythological and psychological themes that animate John Boorman's films are given a contemporary inflection in this blackly comic crime drama about a Dublin gangster who runs afoul of both the police and the IRA. One of Boorman's finest works, it is also his most trenchant examination of late twentieth-century Ireland. The General was awarded Best Director at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, and Boorman's mastery of movement, rhythm, space, and performance is evident throughout. Presented in the original black-and-white version.

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Syberberg has produced Nightsong. An extension of his Demmin Cantos (2024), it powerfully connects the physical spaces in Demmin with the wartime memories embedded within and around them. Structured as a War Requiem, Nightsong incorporates extended extracts from the Latin Requiem of Mozart and the German Requiem of Brahms into its densely layered montage. The short 80 Years After (2025), which provides context for the events of 1945 and Nightsong, is included as a supplement. With English subtitles.

Lyrical Nitrate was the first of several found footage films that Peter Delpeut made from the Jean Desmet collection of EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Desmet worked in every area of the film industry between 1907 and 1916 - the period in which narrative films became increasingly sophisticated and transitioned from small theaters housing a few people to ever-expanding movie palaces - and he preserved tinted nitrate prints of many of the films he distributed. Delpeut reworked the material into a rich montage that is as illuminating as it is moving. Lyrical Nitrate makes clear that the presence of color and even signs of decay deepen the phantasmagoric experience of motion in early cinema. Subtitles available.

With lyricism and wit, director Peter Delpeut and composer Loek Dikker have drawn fresh attention to the power of silent film, given new meaning to fragments of found footage, and helped to revitalize poetic cinema in the Netherlands.