One day in early 1962, Mel Brooks was sitting in a New York City theater watching an avant-garde film by the Scottish-born Canadian animator Norman McLaren when he heard someone in the audience expressing bewilderment.

It was 100 years ago next Sunday that the luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic Ocean with 1,514 souls aboard. It was one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history.

The online bookseller Good Books donates 100 percent of its retail profit to Oxfam’s charity projects, which tells you the sense of moral “good” their name means to evoke.

We had to do it. We had to bring back a wonderful little animation of The Bayeux Tapestry — you know, the famous embroidery that offers a pictorial interpretation of the Norman Conquest of England (1066) and the events leading up to this pivotal moment in medieval history.

The first time I saw Billy Collins speak, he appeared at my college convocation, toward the end of his years as United States Poet Laureate.

Terry Gilliam’s funny debut film, Storytime, features three early examples of the Monty Python animator’s twisted take on life. The film is usually dated 1968, but according to some sources it was actually put together several years later.

Between the simple card opening D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance to the vibrating neon first onslaught of Gaspar Noé’s 2009 Enter the Void, Ian Albinson’s A Brief History of Title Design packs in countless iconic, representative, and otherwise fascinating examples of words that precede movies.

If you’ve listened to the past decade’s conversations about food, you’ll have noticed that eating, always a pursuit, has suddenly become a subject as well. One flank of this movement of enthusiasts has taken up Michael Pollan, a professor at UC Berkeley’s journalism school, as its leading light.

Remember The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore? The short film we featured a month ago? Well, it won an Oscar tonight for best animated short film, and we’re bringing it back for one more showing, plus adding it to our list of Oscar films available online.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr.

Last year, we featured a slick animation of Cross Road Blues by the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. This morning, one of our Twitter friends highlighted for us a 2007 animation of Johnson’s Me and the Devil Blues, created by Dutch artist Ineke Goes.