While filming a documentary about Central Park in New York City, cinematographer Michael Negroponte (who narrates the film), befriends a woman carrying an overly large backpack full of her personal belongings, leading a pack of six dogs. Upon meeting Negroponte, the woman says she has been expecting him. Her name is Maggie Cogan, an eccentric yet beguiling homeless woman who claims to be the daughter of actor Robert Ryan; and also the wife of the god Jupiter, who she communicates with through radio waves.
The film opens with shots of large American forests and notes that forests are one of nature's few renewable resources, if managed wisely. A generation ago, says the narrator, a few forward thinking citizens pressed for the establishment of the Forest Service, to make sure the timber would be around for their children and grandchildren. Then the film moves on to the various uses of wood in the war, principally as replacements for items that Americans needed to go without.
The story follows filmmaker Bryan Hall's experience as a Mormon during the 2008 Presidential race. While following the debates, Hall becomes increasingly aware of the escalating attacks against a particular candidate over his religion: Mitt Romney, who happens to also be a Mormon. Hall decides to investigate this issue and comes to realize that the issue of religious bigotry in politics goes far beyond his own faith.
In 1946, the fledgling Saskatchewan Air Ambulance Service became the first government-operated air ambulance service in the world. The initial operation had former Royal Canadian Air Force pilots flying a Noorduyn Norseman bush aircraft with a crew composed of a pilot, an engineer and a nurse. The aircraft could accommodate a stretcher and at least one other passenger.
Black and White and Dead All Over portrays the struggles of American newspapers to maintain circulation and editorial quality in the early 21st century. It primarily focuses on hardships within the Philadelphia Daily News, a 90-year-old newspaper that has undergone numerous ownership changes and bankruptcy proceedings in the past decade. The film showcases the work of Laker and Ruderman, investigative reporters for the paper, as they work their beats in low-income North Philadelphia neighborhoods.
In the setting of his office at Universal Studios, Alfred Hitchcock shares his vision of what an artistic film should be in the framework of a commercial industry, the difference between suspense films and mystery films, his conception of eroticism and his vision of Scandinavian women. He also explains in details how he created the suspense in the famous sequence of North by Northwest in the corn field. The film contains an original interview with Bruce Dern, who describes Hitchcock's method as a director, and film clips from North by Northwest, Frenzy, Topaz, and Family Plot.
Fascinated by the power of the camera and obsessed with the theories of Russian film pioneer Dziga Vertov, a filmmaker decides to get a camera eye to replace the real eye he lost as a child. This visionary quest begins on the operating table where a surgeon grafts a prototype ocular implant into his eye socket. Seeking a microscopic camera that could be incorporated into his artificial eye so he could secretly film whatever he sees, the filmmaker explores the futuristic technology that could make this possible, while revisiting chapters of his own past.
