Modus Operandi

The history of cinematic sound, told by legendary sound designers and visionary filmmakers.

Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.

Diaries, audiotapes, videotapes and testimonials from friends and colleagues offer insight into the life and career of Gilda Radner -- the beloved comic and actress who became an icon on Saturday Night Live.

An in-depth investigation into the private world of the American writer J. D. Salinger (1919-2010), who lived most of his life behind the impenetrable wall of a self-imposed seclusion: how his dramatic experiences during World War II influenced his life and work, his relationships with very young women, his obsessive writing methods, his many literary secrets.

Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape—with U.S. help—to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.

An unprecedented and intimate look at the life, work and enduring legacy of British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993).

A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now...

Cameramen and women discuss the craft and art of cinematography and of the "DP" (the director of photography), illustrating their points with clips from 100 films, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing. Themes: the DP tells people where to look; changes in movies (the arrival of sound, color, and wide screens) required creative responses from DPs; and, these artisans constantly invent new equipment and try new things, with wonderful results. The narration takes us through the identifiable studio styles of the 30s, the emergence of noir, the New York look, and the impact of Europeans. Citizen Kane, The Conformist, and Gordon Willis get special attention.

When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".

In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.

Experience the events of September 11, 2001 through the eyes of President Bush and his closest advisors as they personally detail the crucial hours and key decisions from that historic day.

This revealing documentary honors the legendary Sidney Poitier—iconic actor, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Featuring interviews with Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Halle Berry, and more.

Lupita Nyong'o narrates a documentary about Peanuts and its creator, Charles M. Schulz. Famous fans—including Drew Barrymore, Kevin Smith, and Al Roker—share its influence on them, and a new animated story finds Charlie Brown on a quest.

He's devoted his career to uncovering stories the powerful want buried. From My Lai to Abu Ghraib, dig into the life's work of journalist Seymour Hersh.

The full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli revenge operation 'Wrath of God.' The 1972 Munich Olympics were interrupted by Palestinian terrorists taking Israeli athletes hostage. Besides footage taken at the time, we see interviews with the surviving terrorist, Jamal Al Gashey, and various officials detailing exactly how the police, lacking an anti-terrorist squad and turning down help from the Israelis, botched the operation.

A behind-the-scenes documentary about the Clinton for President campaign, focusing on the adventures of spin doctors James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.

Explore the unlikely partnership and enduring legacy of one of the most prolific power couples in entertainment history. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz risked everything to be together.

An impressionistic portrait of the iconic actor Harry Dean Stanton comprised of intimate moments, film clips from some of his 250 films and his renditions of American folk songs.

This Oscar-winning documentary recounts the harrowing stories of five Hungarian Jews who endured the horrors of the Holocaust and Hitler's reign.

In the winter of 1944, the Allied Armies stand ready to invade Germany at the coming of a New Year. To prevent it, Hitler orders an all-out offensive to re-take French territory and capture the major port city of Antwerp.

Max Manus is a Norwegian 2008 biographic war film based on the real events of the life of resistance fighter Max Manus (1914–96), after his contribution in the Winter War against the Soviet Union. The story follows Manus through the outbreak of World War II in Norway until peacetime in 1945.

Based on a true story, during World War II, four Jewish brothers escape their Nazi-occupied homeland of West Belarus in Poland and join the Soviet partisans to combat the Nazis. The brothers begin the rescue of roughly 1,200 Jews still trapped in the ghettos of Poland.

The story of the conception of a new British weapon for smashing the German dams in the Ruhr industrial complex and the execution of the raid by 617 Squadron 'The Dam Busters'.

The first woman rabbi in the world, Regina Jonas, comes to light, courtesy of Rachel Weisz – who plays her – and her father George Weisz, who was the executive producer for this poetic and beautiful documentary. The daughter of an Orthodox Jewish peddler, Jonas was ordained in Berlin in 1935. During the Nazi era and the war, her sermons and her unparalleled devotion brought encouragement to the persecuted German Jews. Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The only surviving photo of Jonas serves as a leitmotif for the film, showing a determined young woman gazing at the camera with self-confidence.

This richly illustrated historical documentary investigates the mechanism of nationalist feelings that radicalise. It shows how fascism was on the rise even a decade before the founding of the NSB, due to a number of anti-democratic initiatives led by a millionaire with a predilection for one-legged women, a market vendor, a cleric, and an artist. Historians, writers and collectors of fascist curios reveal how an initially marginal and fragmented movement grew into a radical populist party.

The film chronicles the story of how the Nazis and the IOC turned, to their mutual benefit, a small sports event into the modern Olympics. The grand themes and controversial issues from the 1936 Games have continued to this day: Monumentality, budget overruns, collusion with authoritarian regimes, corruption and sometimes even bribery.

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invades Poland, unleashing World War II. On September 17th, the Soviet Red Army crosses the border. The Polish army, unable to fight on two fronts, is defeated. Thousands of Polish men, both military and government officials, are captured by the invaders. Their fate will only be known several years later.

Recorded during World War II, this rare color film traces an RAF Bomber Command night attack on Berlin -- from strategic planning and preparation to the execution of the actual attack with Avro Lancaster bombers. Air Commodore H.I. Cozens filmed the events during a period when the Bomber Command flew into Germany nearly every night for a massive series of raids on key targets.

The story of a resistance fighter in the Nazi era: Communist Hans Löning was arrested in 1933, imprisoned in a concentration camp and tortured. The Gestapo plans to smash the resistance group around Löning. Despite the imminent threat to his life, Löning, together with his wife, organized the passive resistance of the Hamburg workers against the Hitler regime. In 1944, Löning was again taken and killed.

The secret Nazi death camp at Sobibor was created solely for the mass extermination of Jews. But on the 14th October 1943, in one of the biggest and most successful prison revolts of WWII, the inmates fought back.

A collection of material shot before and during WW2 in the director’s hometown of Banja Luka, where its quiet life was disrupted by the enemy.

This rare documentary was filmed with the participation and personal camera of Wolfgang Gorther, a German military cinematographer of the 1st mining division, who participated in the legendary ascent of Elbrus on the night of August 21, 1942. From the beginning of the Second World War and the last international winter sports week in Garmisch-Partenkirchen follows the invasion of the German troops into the Soviet Union: Dnieper, Zaporozhy, Kharkov, Rostov-on-Don, Nogaean Steppe, Caucasus – fighting at 50 degrees below zero, military expedition into the world of ice and snow; – ascent of mountain arrows and subsequent hoisting of flags on the Elbrus at an altitude of 5,633 meters.

The 43 Group was an English anti-fascist group set up by Jewish ex-servicemen in the immediate wake of World War II when, on their return to London, they encountered British fascist organisations such as Jeffrey Hamm’s “British League of Ex-Servicemen” and later Oswald Mosley’s reformed fascist party, the Union Movement.

Six sequences about Fascism and its segments throughout history.

Young, inexperienced members of the Dutch Boarder Patrol undergo an intensive training on escorting refused asylum seekers to their homeland.

Guy Martin undertakes a challenge to restore a plane from the Second World War, and recreate a parachute jump into Normandy, as thousands of Allied soldiers did during D-Day.

In February 1944, in a courtyard at Fresnes Prison, the Germans staged a spectacle to stigmatize a group of communist resistance fighters—all foreigners and mostly Jewish—who had been arrested a few weeks earlier. The propaganda aimed to discredit these fighters, portraying them as terrorists and criminals, even though they had managed to carry out numerous attacks against the occupiers in Paris. The red poster, plastered in thousands of copies across the country, would immortalize them in legend. They were subsequently executed at Mont-Valérien, near Paris. Missak Manouchian, the Armenian who led these fighters, now embodies this group in the collective memory as he is enshrined in the Panthéon, on behalf of all his comrades, 80 years after their execution.

The story of Auschwitz's twelfth Sonderkommando — one of the thirteen consecutive "Special Squads" of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of assisting in the extermination of fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life.