This scene is a part of the very first film shot produced by the Manaki Brothers. Despina, the Janaki and Milton Manaki's grandmother, was recorded weaving in one high-angle shot. For no apparent reason, the first shot made in Macedonia, in the Balkans in fact, made by these two cinematography pioneers, contains peculiar symbolics: at the moment when the grandmother Despina spins the weaving wheel, film starts rolling in our country.
Related Movies
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888)
A film by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, shot in late October 1888, showing pedestrians and carriages crossing Leeds Bridge.
The Dawn of Sound: How Movies Learned to Talk (2007)
Film historians, and survivors from the nearly 30-year struggle to bring sound to motion pictures take the audience from the early failed attempts by scientists and inventors, to the triumph of the talkies.
Laurel & Hardy: Their Lives and Magic (2011)
The lives of Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892-1957), on the screen and behind the curtain. The joy and the sadness, the success and the failure. The story of one of the best comic duos of all time: a lesson on how to make people laugh.
Nanook of the North (1922)
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.
Men Boxing (1891)
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
Grand Canyon Film Show (1915)
In 1902, Emery and Ellsworth Kolb opened a studio in the Grand Canyon and began making photographs of mule parties, landscapes, river adventures, and nearly every other dramatic scene and incident that occurred in the area. They also successfully navigated the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1911, filming their journey. This film ran in the Kolb Studio in the Grand Canyon from 1915 until Emery's death in 1976.
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)
Elephants disrupt the lives of a family deep in the jungles of Northern Siam, and an entire village.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
Days of Thrills and Laughter (1961)
An appreciative, uncritical look at silent film comedies and thrillers from early in the century through the 1920s.
Manhatta (1921)
Morning reveals New York harbor, the wharves, the Brooklyn Bridge. A ferry boat docks, disgorging its huddled mass. People move briskly along Wall St. or stroll more languorously through a cemetery. Ranks of skyscrapers extrude columns of smoke and steam. In plain view. Or framed, as through a balustrade. A crane promotes the city's upward progress, as an ironworker balances on a high beam. A locomotive in a railway yard prepares to depart, while an arriving ocean liner jostles with attentive tugboats. Fading sunlight is reflected in the waters of the harbor. The imagery is interspersed with quotations from Walt Whitman, who is left unnamed.
The Island (2017)
Dos Islas is a poetic story about old age, family and the bond between a granddaughter and a grandmother. The woman, who just turned 102, tells stories about her past and childhood. In a literary and visual way she describes the most minute details. The film dazzles the viewer with love and optimism, the time passes slowly between the two islands, which might be real people, real places or the products of the main character’s imagination.
Grandma, a Thousand Times (2011)
Teta Kaabour is an 83-year old family matriarch and sharp-witted queen bee of an old Beiruti quarter. She’s been gripped as of late by the silence of her once-buzzing household where she raised children and grandchildren. Resigned to Argileh smoking and day-long coffee drinking on a now-empty balcony, Teta now invokes the deepest memories of her violinist husband who died twenty years ago. She claims a preparedness to re-unite with him.
Häxan (1922)
Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen's legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. But the film itself is far from serious-- instead it's a witches' brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.
Passage of Venus (1874)
Photo sequence of the rare transit of Venus over the face of the Sun, one of the first chronophotographic sequences. In 1873, P.J.C. Janssen, or Pierre Jules César Janssen, invented the Photographic Revolver, which captured a series of images in a row. The device, automatic, produced images in a row without human intervention, being used to serve as photographic evidence of the passage of Venus before the Sun, in 1874.
Mai (NaN)
As the months pass through her, Mai gives us a glimpse into old age that explores between being abandoned and being belonged, passing the time and living the time.
Redefining China's Family: Women (2008)
10 May 2007 - China's staggering economic growth has overshadowed a more subtle shift in Chinese society. In domestic life, many women are now ignore the advice of their mothers and grandmothers, turning instead to counselling hotlines and, increasingly, divorce.
Amazon: Longest River in the World (1918)
Documentary by Portuguese Silvino Santos, about the Amazon, its flora, fauna, its inhabitants and among other wonderful images from the beginning of the 20th century with alternating close-up shots of caimans, jaguars and tropical flora with footage of Indigenous rituals--including some of the earliest known moving images of the Indigenous Witoto people--and longer sequences showcasing the region’s extractive industries: rubber, the Brazil nut, timber, fishing, even the egret feathers that were a staple of women’s fashion at the time.
