Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
All What Is Somehow Useful rhythmically arranges pictures from a series of early 20th-century animal experiments to a decidedly disturbing effect, evoking something of an eerie children’s story or lullaby, filled with friendly barnyard creatures whose fates are rather less cheerful. The sequences seem to reveal something both impressive and sinister about human nature, illustrating how adept we’ve become at using animals to serve our own ends. The short film features glass-plate photographs from a collection at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg’s Institute of Agricultural and Nutrition Sciences in Germany.
Director: Pim Zwier
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes