Movies: Ralph Steiner

A documentary about what happened to the Great Plains of the United States and Canada when uncontrolled farming destroyed the soil and led to the Dust Bowl....

A cinematic tone poem, showcasing the dynamic nature of water through its various forms....

Close up we see pistons move up and down or side to side. Pendulums sway, the small parts of machinery move. Gears drive larger wheels. Gears within gears spin. Shafts turn some mechanism that is out of sight. Screws revolve and move other gears; a b...

The film takes place in rural Tennessee, where communities have experienced economic and environmental devastation created by the coal mining industry. The introduction of the Highlander Folk School in 1931 by educator Myles Horton and the movement t...

A prescient documentary about city planning, which presents idyllic suburbs and nuclear families as a solution to the chaos, poverty and social decay of industrialized inner cities....

At a skid row mission, a cleric opines as men wait to eat. After his sermon, he brings out a pie and cuts it into small slices. The two men at the end of the line get none. They leave the mission and head for a garbage dump where junk becomes props f...

Shoreline images: first small breakers and the swirls they leave, then water running up the shore on a sandy beech, then water hitting pebbles and rocks. The second half is a close look at a sluggish eddy of seaweed, moving to and fro on the surface,...

Short subject commissioned by the National Youth Association to show their efforts at providing job training for unemployed poor youth....

The photographer Ralph Steiner, who had been making abstract avant-garde films in the late 1920s, contributed his own parody of American economic life with PANTHER WOMAN OF THE NEEDLE TRADES, OR THE LOVELY LIFE OF LITTLE LISA (1931). The film, which ...

A commercial for the Works Progress Administration. We see hands close up: working, playing, praying, whittling, and strumming. Hands use saws and hammers, lift stones, turn wheels, then write, type, apply a bandage, play a violin, use a compass, and...

Look Park presents close up shots of a country stream viewed in bright sunlight. The film opens with wide shots of the park to establish the location of the water, then focuses in very tight on the abstract reflections and shadows....

“Unhappy with the limited structure of league newsreels, Nykino, a splinter filmmaking collective, produced a MARCH OF TIME-type series under the banner THE WORLD TODAY. Only two episodes were released, the first premiering with Strand’s THE WAVE (19...

“People will fly to Europe to look at the adoration which Rembrandt, Caravaggio, La Tour paid to light—they will stand in awe in the center of that great vaulted room of colored glass, the Sainte Chapelle, but at home, if martinis are waiting indoors...

A pixillated, time-lapse avant-garde film about the speed with which we conduct our lives, as opposed to the more leisurely pace of natural life, the seasons, the changes in weather, the movement of wind and water....