Cutting Corners

15 Miles On The Erie Canal (Part 1)

2006

The Erie Canal was an engineering marvel in its time and remains so today. This documentary travels from Palmyra to the Genesee River, stopping along the way to visit the people and places that make the canal so special. Canal historian Thomas Grasso offers insight into the canal’s past while the Golden Eagle String Band provides the music track.

Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine

2023

A unique behind-the-scenes access to NASA’s ambitious mission to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, following a team of engineers and scientists as they take the next giant leap in our quest to understand the universe.

Secrets of the Empire State Building

2019

Mach 2

2016

The Concorde remains a legend of the sky. In both looks and performance, it was incomparable, and the technology behind it was nothing less than revolutionary. Learn all about this magnificent craft that was able to fly at over 1300 mph, linking Paris and London to New York in under 4 hours. A unique flying machine, it remains the only supersonic commercial aircraft in the history of aviation.

Tour Eiffel : La Grande Épopée

2014

Safety on the Move: Track Haulage Safety

1982

Focuses on an open-pit mining operation. Shows huge haulage trucks, pointing out existing and potential hazards involved in their operation. Re-enacts common accidents, explains their causes and outlines the steps necessary to prevent their re-occurrence.

High Steel

1965

A dizzying view of Manhattan in the 1960s, the tallest town in the world, and the men who work cloud-high to keep it growing. They are the Mohawk Indians from Kahnawake, near Montréal, famed for their skill in erecting the steel frames of skyscrapers. The film shows their nimble work, high above the pavement, but there are also glimpses of the quieter community life of the old Kahnawake Reserve.

Skyscraper

1959

Nominated for an Academy Award, this live-action short film playfully chronicles the construction of the Tishman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Silver Memories

2000

Heralded as a palace among minor and major league baseball stadiums, Silver Stadium set a standard of excellence from opening day. From May 1929 through the 1990s Silver Stadium served as home to Rochester's historic baseball team, The Rochester Red Wings, as well as many other sporting teams. When not being used as a baseball stadium, the space served as center stage for a variety of traveling acts. Hear from the people closest to the history of this magnificent facility as they take you on a journey through The Memories of Silver.

An Artisan's Legacy: Tsunekazu Nishioka

2012

In-depth look at the twilight years, spent training apprentices, of temple builder Nishioka Tsunekazu, who was called the "devil" as he devoted his life to temple architecture. His insistence on the gargantuan timescale of linking life to the next millennium emerges from people who knew him. Remarkable as well for showing the unknown backstage of temple architecture. Nishioka, known as "the last temple carpenter," handled the major Showa-era repairs of Horyuji temple, and in 1990 was at the scene of the reconstruction work for Yakushi temple.

L'Odyssée Rosetta, 900 jours sur une comète

2017

Several hundred million kilometers away, the space probe "Rosetta" and the small lander "Philae" orbit the sun on the comet "Churyumov-Gerasimenko", without any contact with Earth. On September 30, 2016 - two years after the launch of "Philae" - the landing of "Rosetta" on the comet marked the end of a space mission rich in discoveries, successes and setbacks. The documentary "Rendezvous with a comet: Mission Rosetta" revisits this extraordinary space adventure. After the landing of "Philae" on the comet "Churi" in November 2014 - probably one of the greatest successes in space research since the moon landing - the mission continued and provided a whole series of surprises.

Rosies of the North

1999

They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.

Framing John DeLorean

2019

A documentary interspersed with acted scenes, this portrait of John DeLorean covers the brilliant but tragically flawed automaker's rise to stardom and shocking down fall.

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

2018

Documentary on psychedelic potash mines, expansive concrete seawalls, mammoth industrial machines, and other examples of humanity’s massive, destructive reengineering of the planet.

Home Made

1919

Ford Educational Weekly No. 164, produced by the Ford Motor Company about prefabricated houses. A new idea in house building in which the parts of the house are made in the factory, all ready to be assembled on the lot. Inspired Buster Keaton's first solo film entitled One Week, a parody borrowing events from the plot and following the narrative structure that divides the action into days of the week marked by pages falling from a calendar.