Ralph Steiner Movies

A documentary about what happened to the Great Plains of the United States and Canada when uncontrolled farming destroyed the soil and led to the...

Close up we see pistons move up and down or side to side. Pendulums sway, the small parts of machinery move. Gears drive larger wheels. Gears within...

Shoreline images: first small breakers and the swirls they leave, then water running up the shore on a sandy beech, then water hitting pebbles and...

The film takes place in rural Tennessee, where communities have experienced economic and environmental devastation created by the coal mining...

A cinematic tone poem, showcasing the dynamic nature of water through its various forms.

A prescient documentary about city planning, which presents idyllic suburbs and nuclear families as a solution to the chaos, poverty and social decay...

A commercial for the Works Progress Administration. We see hands close up: working, playing, praying, whittling, and strumming. Hands use saws and...

At a skid row mission, a cleric opines as men wait to eat. After his sermon, he brings out a pie and cuts it into small slices. The two men at the...

The photographer Ralph Steiner, who had been making abstract avant-garde films in the late 1920s, contributed his own parody of American economic...

“Unhappy with the limited structure of league newsreels, Nykino, a splinter filmmaking collective, produced a MARCH OF TIME-type series under...

A pixillated, time-lapse avant-garde film about the speed with which we conduct our lives, as opposed to the more leisurely pace of natural life, the...

Short subject commissioned by the National Youth Association to show their efforts at providing job training for unemployed poor youth.

Look Park presents close up shots of a country stream viewed in bright sunlight. The film opens with wide shots of the park to establish the location...

“People will fly to Europe to look at the adoration which Rembrandt, Caravaggio, La Tour paid to light—they will stand in awe in the...