The first-ever film version of Alice in Wonderland (1903)

The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll's tale has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive from severely damaged materials. Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations. In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later, Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. Even the Cheshire cat is played by a family pet.

With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film's original colours for the first time in over 100 years.

Music: 'Jill in the Box', composed and performed by Wendy Hiscocks.

Rare Annular Solar Eclipse

This is what people in Africa, the Maldives and India saw on Friday as they looked skyward.


It is the longest annular solar eclipse of the millennium, it traveled its way across several African countries.


Its path continued its way through the Indian Ocean and later have been observed in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and China.

American Boy (1978)

This is a fantastic and very rare documentary film by Martin Scorsese, and one of the greatest interviews ever recorded.


The subject is his friend Steven Prince, best known for his role as "Easy Andy", the traveling gun salesman in "Taxi Driver". Prince is a manic raconteur, telling wild stories about his life as an ex-drug addict and a road manager for Neil Diamond. Scorsese intersperses home movies of Prince as a child as he talks about his family.


When talking of his years as a heroin addict, Prince tells a story about injecting adrenaline into the heart of a woman who overdosed, with the help of a medical dictionary and a Magic Marker. This story was re-enacted by Quentin Tarantino in "Pulp Fiction" (which he then claimed as a completely original idea, as usual with him).


Prince also tells a haunting story about working at a gas station in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and being robbed by a large drug crazed man, who Prince ends up shooting several times (this story was re-created in Richard Linklater's animated "Waking Life", this time with Prince doing the re-creation). The Neil Young song "Time Fades Away" is featured during the film's opening credits

Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan (1930 Newsreel Footage)

Quite a rare material.


Helen Keller, the American author, political activist and lecturer, whom I don't have to explain much about, and her instructor and lifelong companion, Anne Sullivan, appears in a Vitaphone newsreel from 1930.


In this footage Sullivan shows the way how Helen Keller learned to talk.


The final line of this footage, "I Am Not DUMB now!" is somewhat touching.

Marvin Gaye: Wie Schon Das Ist (How Sweet It Is)

Very rare song of Marvin Gaye singing in German.


The song is: Wie Schon Das Ist (How Sweet It Is), performed 1964.

The Secret Life of Adolf Hitler (1958)

The Secret Life of Adolf Hitler (1958)
Release Date: 1958 (USA)
Genre: Documentary - Biography - History


1950's television documentary special that includes interviews with Hitler's sister Paula Wolf and a fellow prisoner who was incarcerated with Hitler, actual footage shot by the Nazi's and Eva Braun's rare home movies.


* Cast :

Eva Braun ... Herself (archive footage)
Adolf Hitler ... Himself (archive footage)
Westbrook Van Voorhis ... Narrator
Paula Wolf ... Herself