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Glas won the master filmmaker Bert Haanstra a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Short Documentary in 1959. The film contrasts the production of handmade crystal from the Royal Leerdam glass factory with automated bottle-making machines in the Netherlands. An industrial film with a bebop heart, its lyrical use of light and sound still looks and sounds fabulous, some 60 years after it was made.
Producer and Director: Bert Haanstra
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Technology and the self
Greetings from Green Bank – the small town where modern technology is banned
10 minutes
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Stories and literature
What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?
10 minutes
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Dance and theatre
How a Noh mask-maker summons a lifelike face from a single block of wood
16 minutes
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The ancient world
What wine vessels reveal about politics and luxury in ancient Athens and Persia
16 minutes
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Art
David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white
15 minutes
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Love and friendship
When drawing your muse hundreds of times becomes an exercise in love
7 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
Is simulation theory a way to shirk responsibility for the world we’ve created?
13 minutes
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Biology
A dazzling slice-by-slice exploration of wood exposes hidden patterns and hues
2 minutes
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Family life
In Rwanda, Sébastien finds traces of personal history in the wake of national tragedy
21 minutes