"The year is 1888 and Louis Le Prince is finally testing his "taker" or "receiver" device for his family on their front lawn. The device is meant to capture ten to twelve images per second on film, creating a reproduction of reality that can be replayed as many times as desired. In an otherwise separate and detached world, occurrences from one end of the globe could now be viewable with only a few days delay on the other side of the world. No human...

The legendary Jean-Luc Godard adds to his influential, iconoclastic legacy with this provocative collage film essay, a vast ontological inquiry into the history of the moving image and a commentary on the contemporary world. Displaying an encyclopedic grasp of cinema and its history, Godard pieces together fragments and clips them from some of the greatest films of the past, then digitally alters, bleaches, and washes them, all in the service of reflecting...

More than a century after the Lumière brothers made their first movie, the magic of the silver screen refuses to fade. Even silent era classics, such as the futuristic Metropolis, still retain the power to astonish. The talkies introduced new genres-- among them the special-effects blockbuster, first seen in King Kong and reinvented in the 1980s with Steven Spielberg's Jaws-- that continue to inspire and enthrall. In more recent years, technological...