These 22 digitally remastered shorts from 1952-1954 were made during a tumultuous time for The Three Stooges. First, in 1952 Curly succumbed to the illness brought on by his stroke six years earlier; he was only forty-eight when he died. Shemp had really hit his stride by this time and he is at the top of his game in the new shorts from this period, but budget cutbacks at Columbia forced director Jules White to recycle some old footage, so although the work in this collection is first-rate, one can't help but wonder what could have been done if they'd had the opportunity to develop more new material.

ADRIA is an artistic analysis of film as a medium and of its meaning as SCHOOL OF SEEING. The subjects of this analysis are the beginnings of the Austrian hobby and amateur film creation, restricted to holiday movies from the Adriatic Sea. The footage was analyzed according to set focal points (image detail, camera movement, etc.) then dissected according to serial aspects (tracking shots, pans, etc.) and edited into new sequences (descriptions, reactions, etc.)

These sequences are liberated from their individual isolation and unified in a sequence that reflects the general situation. This general situation reflects upon two aspects. One is the first active involvement with film as a medium - in front of and behind the camera - and the other aspect highlights social contexts such as the first holiday abroad and organizing one’s leisure time.Therefore the private depiction of an individual situation becomes a document of a general situation.

This film documents a large-scale event

organized by the Utagoe (Singing Voice) working class choral and musical movement

that took place over the course of three days in Tokyo on November 27, 1954 at Kyoritsu

Auditorium and Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. Tens of thousands of people from

factories and farming villages across Japan take part. Folk songs from different local

regions of Japan are sung and laborer choruses perform. Choruses and songs and dances

from Korea and China are heard. The finale is a mass choral performance of “The Unforgivable Atom Bomb.”