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In A Trip Down Memory Lane, the Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Arthur Lipsett uses newsreel footage covering 50 years to unleash a flurry of previously unrelated images – women in a beauty pageant, a scientific demonstration, an automobile catching fire – combined for unsettling and satirical effect. Created in 1965 as a ‘time capsule’, Lipsett’s collage film serves both as a glimpse into the dramatically different yet not-so-distant past, and as a peculiarly incisive exploration of what its producer, the National Film Board of Canada, calls ‘human might, majesty and mayhem’.
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Film and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
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Environmental history
In Kazakhstan, ‘atomic lakes’ still scar the landscape decades after Soviet nuclear tests
13 minutes
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Nature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
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Architecture
A 3D rendering of the Colosseum captures its architectural genius and symbolic power
17 minutes
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Making
On the Norwegian coast, a tree is transformed into a boat the old-fashioned way
6 minutes
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
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Biology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
4 minutes
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
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Gender
A filmmaker responds to Lars von Trier’s call for a new muse with a unique application
16 minutes