Freud • 2016 • episode "Part 3" • Genius of the Modern World

79:55

Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of all time, was a world-renowned celebrity, greeted like a rock star when he appeared in public. An anti-war firebrand, Einstein also spoke out on issues ranging from women's rights and racism to immigration and nuclear arms control. But today, his image has been neutered into that of a charmingly absent-minded genius. He was, in fact, a powerful force for social change and a model for political activism. Using a wealth of rarely-seen archival footage, correspondence and new and illuminating interviews, filmmaker Julia Newman makes the case that Albert Einstein's example of social and political activism is as important today as are his brilliant, groundbreaking theories.

2020 • People

59:42

"Richard Feynman is one of the most iconic, influential and inspiring scientists of the 20th century. He helped design the atomic bomb, solved the mystery of the Challenger Shuttle catastrophe and won a Nobel Prize. Now, 25 years after his death - in his own words and those of his friends and family - this is the story of the most captivating communicator in the history of science"

2013 • People

84:11

Who is Vivian Maier? Now considered one of the 20th century's greatest street photographers, Vivian Maier was a mysterious nanny who secretly took over 100,000 photographs that went unseen during her lifetime. Since buying her work by chance at auction, amateur historian John Maloof has crusaded to put this prolific photographer in the history books. Maier's strange and riveting life and art are revealed through never-before-seen photographs, films, and interviews with dozens who thought they knew her.

2013 • People

95:15

Now 88 and battling illness, the visionary Mikhail Gorbachev, the former General Secretary of the U.S.S.R., is still gently but resolutely pushing towards his goals. Herzog celebrates Gorbachev's three remarkable accomplishments: negotiations with the U.S. to reduce nuclear weapons, cessation of Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc. All of this in six years!

2018 • People

94:05

Man on Wire is a 2008 documentary film directed by James Marsh. The film chronicles Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center and is based on Philippe Petit's book, To Reach the Clouds, which has recently been released in paperback with the new title Man on Wire. The film is crafted like a heist film, presenting rare footage of the preparations for the event and still photographs of the walk, alongside reenactments (with Paul McGill as the young Petit) and modern-day interviews with the participants. Native New Yorkers know to expect the unexpected, but who among them could've predicted that a man would stroll between the towers of the World Trade Center? French high-wire walker Philippe Petit did just that on August 7th, 1974. Petit’s success may come as a foregone conclusion, but British filmmaker James Marsh’s pulse-pounding documentary still plays more like a thriller than a non-fiction entry--in fact, it puts most thrillers to shame. Marsh (Wisconsin Death Trip, The King) starts by looking at Petit's previous stunts. First, he took on Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral, then Sydney's Harbour Bridge before honing in on the not-yet-completed WTC. The planning took years, and the prescient Petit filmed his meetings with accomplices in France and America. Marsh smoothly integrates this material with stylized re-enactments and new interviews in which participants emerge from the shadows as if to reveal deep, dark secrets which, in a way, they do, since Petit's plan was illegal, "but not wicked or mean." The director documents every step they took to circumvent security, protocol, and physics as if re-creating a classic Jules Dassin or Jean-Pierre Melville caper. Though still photographs capture the feat rather than video, the resulting images will surely blow as many minds now as they did in the 1970s when splashed all over the media. Not only did Petit walk, he danced and even lay down on the cable strung between the skyscrapers. It competed in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize: World Cinema Documentary and the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary. In February 2009, the film won the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

2008 • People

59:11

Picasso's Last Stand reveals the untold story of the last decade of the great artist's life, through the testimony of family and close friends - many of them the people he allowed into his private world in the 1960s. As his health declined in these final years, Picasso faced damaging criticism of his work and intimate revelations about his bohemian lifestyle for the first time. And yet, in the midst of disaster, he rediscovered his revolutionary spirit with a creative surge that produced some of his most sexually frank and comic work. Exhibitions of the new style horrified and disappointed contemporaries. But now his biographer Sir John Richardson and granddaughter Diana Widmaier Picasso argue that this last enormous effort produced some of his greatest and most profound art: the stunning counter-attack of a protean genius coming to terms with old age.

2018 • People