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Pare Lorentz Screening Room Now Showing:The Plow That Broke The Plains, The River, and The Fight For Life

Pare Lorentz was an American original. His documentary films The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936), The River (1938) and The Fight for Life (1940) were among the first to demonstrate that films can educate and rally a nation around its history, its greatness, and its problems.

To watch the movies for free, visit the Pare Lorentz Screening Room.

Updated through 5/10.

"The filmmaker and Oakland native Sidney Peterson once scatted that after World War II, San Francisco 'was a city hanging loose, a small pocket edition, for a brief period, of the Vienna of Wittgenstein and Musil, and the Zurich of Tzara, the Cologne, the Berlin, the Paris, the Hanover, the New York of Dada.'" In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis notes that the version of Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945 - 2000 presented at Anthology Film Archives today and tomorrow and at MoMA on Sunday and Monday "doesn't go as deep or as wide as the original, of course. But it's something of a movable feast nonetheless, and it gives you plenty to chew on, starting with an entire program dedicated to Peterson, a sculptor, painter and novelist whose adventures in the seventh art in the late 1940s turned him...

I don't think I'm alone in agreeing with whoever said, "I love work. I could watch it all day"

After watching the almost pristine print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) at the Berlinale a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that the lion's share of the time spent by the vast majority of the population of the world is seldom portrayed on screen. Namely, manual labourers and their work.

Why this neglect? After all, the very first film shown commercially was Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895). The simplistic answer is that most audiences demand escapism and that the depiction of work is as tedious as the act. But I don't think I'm alone in agreeing with whoever said, "I love work. I could watch it all day."

Metropolis is set in a futuristic city where the downtrodden factory workers, all dressed in black, walk gloomily in lines towards a...