Flicker Alley

Gathered from archives and attics and now seen for the first time, The Lost Kennedy Home Movies, by celebrated filmmaker Harrison Engle (The Indomitable Teddy Roosevelt), tells the story of the children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, as they grew up in the 1930s and ‘40s through November 1963. The g...

Narrated by Leonard Maltin, Cinema Finds Its Voice tells the story of how sound was paired with images in the early era of cinema. Although combining sound with image had been considered since the birth of cinema, the technology needed would take years of enhancements before the industry was comp...

Narrated by Leonard Maltin, Cinema’s First Colors surveys the elaborate history of inventions and evolutions in early technology to bring color to the motion picture screen, from 18th-century pre-cinema to the dawn of Technicolor. Grounded in a wealth of recent scholarship and illustrated with ra...

In the early 1980s, documentary filmmaker Stephen Schaller was instrumental in the rediscovery and restoration of The Lumberjack (1914), the oldest surviving film made in Wisconsin, and produced by a group of itinerant filmmakers who traveled from town to town making "local talent" pictures. Scha...

A Photoscene, produced by Gaumont in 1911, is an early synched sound-on-disc motion picture system.

A Kinetoscope is a cylinder-based synch sound system produced by Edison and based on his phonograph.

An inventive, animated short film on how the optical sound-on-film recording system worked.

This Oscar-winning musical short film was the first released in "three-strip" Technicolor.

Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Becky Sharp was the first feature in entirely three-strip Technicolor.

A crucial film produced by itinerant filmmakers traveling town to town making "local talent" films.