Best Documentary Movies of 1930

With Byrd at the South Pole (1930) is a documentary film about Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd and his 1st quest to the South Pole beginning at the Little America-Exploration Base. The film's soundtrack consists mostly of music and sound effects, with narration read by Floyd Gibbons. The film won at the 3rd Academy Awards for Best Cinematography.

This 12-minute silent film was an amateur film, which seems to have been made just so people would know how hard the folks in Maine work. The film starts off in the morning as these people raise the American flag and then head out to work where they do that all day. By the time the sun goes down we see how hard they work, what they eat and of course the few breaks they get with grandpa on the fiddle. I'm sure many people would be left scratching their heads as to what the point of this film was but it's also important to remember that traveling around wasn't as easy in 1930 as it is today and back then people didn't have two-hundred different television stations. So, in many ways this is an important film because it gives people the chance to see what it was really like working on a farm back in the day.

Jean Painleve short about an experimental canine surgery.

Early "shockumentary", apparently shot in Egypt, which documents the habits of opium addicts. The interiors of drug dens are shown, and at the conclusion the film an addict is shown collapsing on a sand dune; the booming voice of the narrator informs us that the addict has perished. Footage used is from the silent film Dope Fiends.

Tilly Losch in Her Dance of the Hands.

A springtime Traveltalk visit to Japan.

This Traveltalk series short takes the viewer to the island nation when it was still a British crown colony and the name Sri Lanka was 40 years in the future.

Explorer Paul Hoefler leads a safari into central Africa and what was then called the Belgian Congo, in the regions inhabited by the Wassara and the famous Ubangi tribes.

Travelogue by Andre de la Varre from 1938 that highlights key travel destinations throughout the island of Cebu in the Visayas, in the Philippines.