Watch City Out of Time, A Short Tribute to Venice, Narrated by William Shatner in 1959

Last month, Canada lost one of its important filmmakers, Colin Low. Over a career spanning six decades, Low worked on over 200 productions at the National Film Board of Canada. He won countless awards, including two Short Film Palme d’Or awards at the Cannes Film Festival. His work inspired other soon-to-be-influential filmmakers, like Ken Burns and Stanley Kubrick. And he helped pioneer the giant-screen IMAX format.

Above you can watch City Out of Time, Low’s short tribute to Venice. The 1959 film, writes the National Film Board of Canada, “depicts Venice in all its splendor. In the tradition of Venetian painter Canaletto, the film captures the great Italian city’s elusive beauty and fabled landscapes, where spired churches and turreted palaces soar into a blue Mediterranean sky.” The film also features a narration by a young William Shatner, then only 28 years old, whose voice sounds nothing like the one we’d hear several years later in Star Trek, never mind those unforgettable spoken-word albums he started releasing in the late 1960s.

City Out of Time will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

The second film on the page is Low’s 1952 animation, The Romance of Transportation in Canada, which won a Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Related Content:

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A Short History of the Venice Biennale, the World’s Most Important Art Exhibition


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