A Celebration of the Motion Picture


We have grown up with the movies, lived our lives with them, and their images are indelible in our memory. PRECIOUS IMAGES, directed by Chuck Workman, celebrates those images and the directors who helped create them: a stoic Ma Joad riding off to California in "The Grapes of Wrath", Dorothy and her friends dancing down the yellow brick road, Eddie Murphy giving us the high sign in "Beverly Hills Cop", Lillian Gish rocking the cradle in "Intolerance", Orson Welles whispering "rosebud", Mickey Mouse fighting off a magic broom carrying buckets of water to the music of the Sorcerer's Apprentice in "Fantasia", Dustin Hoffman walking down a crowded city street dressed as a woman, Ingrid Bergman asking Sam to play that song, Spike Lee breaking a window in "Do The Right Thing", Forrest Gump alone on a shrimp boat at sunset, Obiwan Kenobe unveiling his laser sword, the mother ship landing in "Close Encounters", Scarlett O'Hara standing in a field at Tara, backlit against the red sky.

These are just a dozen of the 462 memorable images from American motion pictures captured in six and a half minutes called PRECIOUS IMAGES, dynamically edited to selections from classic scores: "Psycho" and "The Pink Panther," Gene Kelly singing in the rain, "As Time Goes By." The final impact is one of excitement, warmth, and wonder. Almost every shot, many of them less than a second, evokes a memory, a movie. They engage us, entertain us, and delight us. PRECIOUS IMAGES won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short of 1986, and has gone on to become the most widely shown short film in history.

In 1986, the Directors Guild of America, in honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of its founding, gave this film to the audiences of America and the world, but every major motion picture studio lent support and cooperation in the production of this short film, as well as exhibitor organizations, guilds, unions, laboratories. . . virtually the entire industry joined in this labor of love for an art form and an industry that has created these memorable moments in time.

PRECIOUS IMAGES has played at several film festivals all over the world. These festivals include Cannes, Filmex, Sundance, USA Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival, Barcelona Film Festival, Showeast, Showest and many others.

PRECIOUS IMAGES has played in thousands of theaters, and plays continuously at the Museum of the Moving Image in London, as well as the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York. It plays in over one hundred University Film Departments, and is one of the most popular films in the Museum of Modern Art Circulating Film Collection.

Back to Filmography