Using a montage of footage from the highest quality restorations, Suchsland illustrates Siegfried Kracauer's 1947 thesis that the rise of Nazism is anticipated in many themes found throughout Weimar cinema, while situating Kracauer in the philosophy and histories of the time. Looking at films like "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler," "Metropolis," "The Golem," and many others, Suchsland tracks the concept of the charismatic villain bewitching the people.

It's pitch black, toxic gases bubble up from deep below, sulfuric acid drips from above, and carbon monoxide fills the air. It is the interior of a startlingly beautiful, and treacherous, cave. Scientists are penetrating the depths of incredible caverns like this one, discovering abundant life hidden in the dark, and shedding new light on how life may have begun on earth and may exist on Mars and other worlds. Explore Cueva de Villa Luz in Mexico,...

A special program given at the Newton Free Library for Black History Month in 2008.

Ted Hayden goes undercover to join a gang led by a heartless fiend known only as 'Mr. Gentry.'

In this dark comedy first released during WWII, Henri Vedoux, played by Charlie Chaplin, supports his family by first marrying, and then killing wealthy widows. On another level the film is an indictment of war in which mass murder is legalized, celebrated and paraded. "Killing is the enterprise by which your system prospers," Verdoux says. "As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison."

Lincoln resident John O'Keefe presents a lecture, slide show and DVD of the Burning Man Festival, which he has attended since 2000.

"Kafi Dixon dreams of starting a land cooperative for women of color who have experienced trauma and disenfranchisement in the city of Boston. By day she drives a city bus; at night she studies the humanities in a tuition-free course. Her classmate Carl Chandler, a community elder, is the class's intellectual leader. White suburban filmmaker James documents the students' engagement with the humanities. As he looks for transformations, in their lives,...

Shortly after the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, "Izzy" Arbeiter, his family and other Polish Jews were rounded up. The young Arbeiter would spend most of the war in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, as a slave laborer for the German war effort. His parents and younger brother were sent to a concentration camp and exterminated. He was part of a "death march" through the Black Forest in southern Germany in April 1945 when he was liberated...

A documentary produced in 1979 by WGBH and the BBC to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Albert Einstein. Narrated and hosted by Peter Ustinov and written by Nigel Calder, the author of the accompanying book of the same title, the film takes place at the University of Texas' McDonald Observatory where a staff of renowned scientists and physicists take both Ustinov and the viewer through a hands on experience of the various facets of Einstein's...

On March 4, 1865, at the United States Capitol, a crowd of fifty thousand listened as President Lincoln delivered his classic second inaugural address, urging charity and forgiveness to a nation in the final throes of war. Just two months later, a train, nine cars long and draped in black bunting, pulled slowly out of a station in Washington, D.C. Dignitaries and government officials crowded the first eight cars. In the ninth rode the body of Abraham...