Robert Flaherty

This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.

In the South Seas, Samoan village life is portrayed with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a romanticized 'Gauguin idyll', the film celebrates daily rituals, communal traditions, and the passage into adulthood, suffused pride of beauty and pride of strength.

On the South Pacific island of Bora Bora, a young couple's love is threatened when the tribal chief declares the girl a sacred virgin.

Prelude to War was the first film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series, commissioned by the Pentagon and George C. Marshall. It was made to convince American troops of the necessity of combating the Axis Powers during World War II. This film examines the differences between democratic and fascist states.

The fifth film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series, revealing the nature and process of the fight between the Soviet Union and Germany in the Second World War.

An alcoholic doctor on a Polynesian island, disgusted by white exploitation of the natives, finds himself marooned on a pristinely beautiful island.

Cajun boy Alexander Napoleon Ulysses LaTour lives with his family and his beloved pet raccoon in the Louisiana bayou. When his father allows an oil barge to drill on their land, the boy questions the process and its safety.

In India, Toomai, a young mahout, helps lead the British on a large expedition to round up wild elephants.

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 existence centred around the struggle between man and his hostile but magnificent surroundings. A blend of documentary and fictional narrative, the film captures the everyday trials of life on Ireland's unforgiving Aran Islands.

The second film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series. It introduces Germany as a nation whose aggressive ambitions began in 1863 with Otto von Bismarck and the Nazis as its latest incarnation.

The life and works of the great artist Michelangelo Buonarroti are shown against the historical background of his time. Comprises his earliest artworks, and follows his life and career as he achieves lasting fame, and includes detailed looks at some of the artist's most renowned creations. A heavily re-edited cut of Curt Oertel's film Michelangelo: Das Leben eines Titanen, (1938, Switzerland) with new footage shot by Flaherty.

This short film is Godard’s message to the people of Lausanne, specifically journalist and critic Freddy Buache, addressing his reasons why he will not make a film about their town’s 500th anniversary. Rather than cynical or defensive, Godard's bemused narration of the footage of Lausanne is imaginative and even playful, a rumination on cinema's possibilities.

A visual celebration of Manhattan and its waterways on the 300th anniversary of purchase from the local Native Americans.

Developed from John Grierson's opportunistic recruitment of the well-known director and anthropologist Robert Flaherty, Industrial Britain provides a traditional picture of Britain as is interrupted by industrial stacks billowing smoke. A dramatic illustration of how the young British documentary movement grappled with the influence of the genre’s founding father, Flaherty's ethos was essentially that of a 19th-century conservative individualist, attracted to the elemental extremes of nature and suspicious of the mechanisation of the modern world.

The least typical, least known, and most controversial of director Flaherty's films depicts a vast and vague territory across the southern and midwestern United States. Here, in the period between the Depression's end and the beginning of World War II, abandoned farmhouses line dusty roadways, and forgotten farm people had almost ceased to hope for a better life.

A well known storyteller, Tomas O' Diorain tells tales of the sea around a fire in an old Irish cottage. His storytelling is juxtaposed with images of the sea. This film, thought lost was rediscovered by Houghton Library curators during a cataloging update in 2013.

A little girl watches the craftsman at work while inter-titles explain the particulars of pottery-making.