Elephants: Fragments in an Argument

This remarkable New Jersey poet-physician established an American kind of poem distinct from European forms. His work demonstrates an innovative use of common objects and experience as topics for poems as well as formal experiments with the cadences of actual American speech.

To understand eighteenth-century America through a woman's eyes, historian and author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich spent eight years working through Martha Ballard's massive but cryptic diary. "A Midwife's Tale" chronicles the interwoven stories of two remarkable women: an eighteenth-century midwife and healer and the twentieth-century historian who brought her words to light.

Rogers created this "minimalist soap opera" out of messages left on his telephone answering machine over the course of an entire year. Together with the accompanying visuals of scenes shot from the windows of the filmmaker’s New York loft, the recordings provide an amusing account of life caught between the public and the private; we see weddings take place in the church across the street, passersby struggling through the snow on the sidewalk, and gradually become submerged in the meditative rhythms of Rogers’s interior world.

Filmmaker Richard P. Rogers tried for twenty years to make a documentary about his own life. He died in 2001, leaving the project unfinished, until his widow, acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas, commissioned his former student Alexander Olch to make a film out of the pieces. Starting in the Hamptons, in the town of Wainscott, the film weaves Rogers' footage into a journey through childhood memories, a less than encouraging mother, a family background of privilege, and Rogers' persistent, dogged attempts to document his own life. Rogers' friend, actor and writer Wallace Shawn, joins in the process, as the film investigates the differences between documentary and fiction, and tells the tragic story of Rogers' life.

This portrait of an abandoned quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts, captures the striking natural beauty of the site as it explores the social rites of the young people who gather along its rugged shores to create leisure in what was once a place of toil. -Harvard Film Archive

The hero of Wallace Stevens’s poetry is the human imagination. Like Emily Dickinson’s, Stevens’s sedate and uneventful outer life concealed a lush and adventurous inner one. Such adventures were for Stevens not an escape from reality but a journey toward a new reality. Although Stevens was no philosopher–he was a bold and brilliant poet–he explored the workings of the human mind with a precision philosophers might envy.

Illustrates the writer's wandering spirit, from a childhood in Nova Scotia to travels in Brazil, and the central themes of her work: geography, landscape, and the quest for consciousness and identity through travel.

Director Robert Gardner and legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage share an in-depth viewing of Gardner's ethnographic masterwork, Forest of Bliss. The film is shown in its entirety, with Gardner occasionally pausing to elucidate, and Brakhage brilliantly observing tonality, poetic imagery, life, death, the unconscious, and, well, just being damned insightful. - dred

Originally broadcast on PBS, the film features the Barrios, a middle-class family both activated and fractured by the conflict. Instead of fleeing their country, the siblings are guided by a religious and socialist desire to help those most vulnerable and destitute, mostly peasants in the rural areas.

This film shows the Polish master animator Jan Lenica working on his film Landscape, and explores the relationship of the artist between the real world and his fantasy visions.