You’ll find many a bold claim on Wikipedia, even on the page for Bert Haanstra’s Glass, a 1958 short doc­u­men­tary on glass­mak­ing in the Nether­lands, which, as of this writ­ing, men­tions that the film “is often acclaimed to be the per­fect short doc­u­men­tary.” Just the sort of thing you’d want to take with a grain of salt, right? But if you watch Glass itself, which won the 1959 Acad­e­my Award for Doc­u­men­tary Short Sub­ject, you might find your­self join­ing in on that sup­posed cho­rus of acclaim.

Prashant Par­vat­neni at The Essen­tial Mys­tery calls Glass “at once a pas­sion­ate cel­e­bra­tion of human labour and crafts­man­ship and a bit­ing cri­tique of the mech­a­nis­tic mass-pro­duc­tion of objects. On the very sur­face this doc­u­men­tary can appear as a demon­stra­tive film keen­ly elu­ci­dat­ing the very basic process­es that go into the mak­ing of hand­made glass­ware and jux­ta­pos­ing it with the process of bot­tle-mak­ing in a mech­a­nised fac­to­ry.

Yet this very jux­ta­po­si­tion cou­pled with a Haanstra’s strong styl­is­tic inter­ven­tion takes the film into a polem­i­cal space.” Tak­ing a slight­ly dif­fer­ent tone, Colos­sal’s Christo­pher Job­son high­lights the jazz of the tra­di­tion­al half, and the “whim­si­cal score of more syn­the­sized music” in the mod­ern half. “Also,” he adds, “there’s a ton of great smok­ing!”

Job­son does­n’t men­tion that these guys also some­how man­age to keep smok­ing even while blow­ing glass — an impres­sive feat indeed, and just one of the impres­sive qual­i­ties on dis­play in Glass’ brief run­time. Even­tu­al­ly, the footage turns back from the fac­to­ry to the work­shop, and soon it begins oscil­lat­ing between the two, cut­ting to the jazzy rhythm and even mak­ing the machines and work­men into musi­cal instru­ments of a kind. The Dutch glass­mak­ing indus­try has sure­ly changed in the past half-cen­tu­ry, but stu­dents of Dutch film can’t ignore the work of Haanstra, who in addi­tion to this and oth­er doc­u­men­taries short and long, direct­ed fea­tures includ­ing Fan­fare, still one of the most pop­u­lar films in the Nether­lands ever. But as any film his­to­ri­an might sus­pect — and here comes anoth­er bold claim — Glass will out­live them all.

Glass 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.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Man Cre­ates: Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Look at Cre­ativ­i­ty (1968)

Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short, The Dot and the Line, Cel­e­brates Geom­e­try and Hard Work (1965)

Watch the Funky, Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Film Fea­tur­ing the Music of Herb Alpert & the Tijua­na Brass (1966)

36 Free Oscar Win­ning Films Avail­able on the Web

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Every decade, when the British Film Insti­tute (BFI) announces the out­come of its Sight & Sound Poll of the Great­est Films of All Time, cinephiles lis­ten; no less a seri­ous movie per­son than Roger Ebert called it, among the count­less polls of great movies, “the only one most seri­ous movie peo­ple take seri­ous­ly.” When the BFI con­ducts the poll, it divides those polled into two groups: one for crit­ics like Ebert, and one for direc­tors like, say, Quentin Taran­ti­no, whose thor­ough knowl­edge of cin­e­ma and absolute seri­ous­ness as a movie per­son almost makes him a crit­ic as well, albeit one who does his crit­i­cism in the form of movies.

In the 2002 poll, Taran­ti­no named these as the great­est films of all time:

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Ser­gio Leone, 1966)
• Rio Bra­vo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
• Taxi Dri­ver (Mar­tin Scors­ese, 1976)
• His Girl Fri­day (Howard Hawks, 1940)
• Rolling Thun­der (John Fly­nn, 1977)
• They All Laughed (Peter Bog­danovich, 1981)
• The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)
• Car­rie (Bri­an De Pal­ma, 1976)
• Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973)
• Dazed and Con­fused (Richard Lin­klater, 1993)
• Five Fin­gers of Death (Chang-hwa Jeong, 1972)
• Hi Did­dle Did­dle (Andrew W. Stone, 1943)

You can watch two of Taran­ti­no’s 2002 picks, the for­mal­ly exper­i­men­tal caper com­e­dy Hi Did­dle Did­dle as well as His Girl Fri­day, the cap­stone of the screw­ball com­e­dy sub­genre, for free online. Once you’ve enjoyed the both of them, why not have a look at Taran­ti­no’s selec­tions a decade on, for the 2012 Sight & Sound direc­tors poll, to com­pare and con­trast, with the new titles bold­ed:

• Apoc­a­lypse Now (Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, 1979)
• The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976)
• Car­rie (Bri­an de Pal­ma, 1976)
• Dazed and Con­fused (Richard Lin­klater, 1993)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Ser­gio Leone, 1966)
• The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)
• His Girl Fri­day (Howard Hawks, 1939)
• Jaws (Steven Spiel­berg, 1975)
• Pret­ty Maids All in a Row (Roger Vadim, 1971)
• Rolling Thun­der (John Fly­nn, 1997)
• Sor­cer­er (William Fried­kin. 1977)
• Taxi Dri­ver (Mar­tin Scors­ese, 1976)

Taran­ti­no’s 2012 selec­tions reveal a clear increase in appre­ci­a­tion, or at least will­ing­ness to vote his appre­ci­a­tion, for high-pro­file pic­tures of the 1970s — Apoc­a­lypse Now, Jaws, Taxi Dri­ver, The Bad News Bears — a decade whose cin­e­ma to which the direc­tor has made no lack of homage. We’ll have to wait six more years, until the 2022 poll, to get a full sense of how Taran­ti­no’s idea of the canon has changed. Will the grim, satir­i­cal, and lurid films of the 70s con­sume most of his list by then? Will he favor a dif­fer­ent era of film his­to­ry entire­ly? I’d only put mon­ey on one thing for sure about the pref­er­ence of this film­mak­er who loves dia­logue even more than vio­lence: His Girl Fri­day isn’t going any­where.

You can find His Girl Fri­day and Hi Did­dle Did­dle on our list, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Tarantino’s 10 Favorite Films of 2013

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns, Start­ing with The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His Favorite Films Since 1992

Watch His Girl Fri­day, Howard Hawks’ Clas­sic Screw­ball Com­e­dy Star­ring Cary Grant, Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Paint­ing, as any Art His­to­ry 101 lec­tur­er will tell you, found the moti­va­tion to turn abstract when pho­tog­ra­phy trumped it in the game of life­like rep­re­sen­ta­tion. But what push­es pho­tog­ra­phy, and even motion pic­tures, to give abstrac­tion a try? The vast major­i­ty of films made today still rep­re­sent real­i­ty in some basi­cal­ly direct fash­ion, but almost since the first appear­ance of the medi­um, cer­tain artists have tried to push it in oth­er direc­tions. If you know the work of only one abstract film­mak­er, you prob­a­bly know the work of Stan Brakhage, crafts­man of such vivid and dis­tressed cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences as Cat’s Cra­dle and Dog Star Man. But who pre­ced­ed him?

The title of the very first abstract film­mak­er has been dis­put­ed, but we at least know who made sev­er­al ear­ly abstract mas­ter­pieces. Today we present two of them, Hans Richter’s Rhyth­mus 21, made in 1921, and from three years lat­er, Viking Eggeling’s Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale. “Clock­ing in at just over three min­utes, it’s a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from the news­reels, romances, cliff-hang­ers, and pen­ny-dread­fuls that made up the bulk of film pro­duc­tion in the ear­ly 20s,” writes the Get­ty’s Jan­non Stein of Richter’s hyp­not­i­cal­ly geo­met­ric pic­ture, “the first decade in which the film indus­try began to play a major eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al role around the world.”

But Richter, Stein con­tin­ues, “cred­it­ed his friend Viking Eggeling with the idea of explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties for abstract ani­ma­tion. In fact, they’d worked togeth­er on a series of paint­ings on scrolls that pre­ced­ed both of Richter’s first films, as well as Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale,” which you can watch just above. This ver­sion opens with an endorse­ment from no less dar­ing a mind than archi­tect-artist-the­o­reti­cian Fred­er­ick John Kiesler, who describes it as “the best abstract film yet con­ceived” and “an exper­i­ment to dis­cov­er the basic prin­ci­ples of the orga­ni­za­tion of time inter­vals in the film medi­um.” I, per­son­al­ly, would call it some­thing like a pure shot of the art-deco aes­thet­ic which we now know, of course, not from the film it pro­duced in the 20s, but the archi­tec­ture.

That may excite you or it may not, but words have nev­er quite suit­ed the abstract. If Richter, Eggeling, Brakhage, or any who came between them or have come after them share a mis­sion, that mis­sion involves mak­ing movies that no words can real­ly describe. Eggeling would pass on the year after Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale, but Richter would go on to a long life and career that includ­ed oth­er projects meant to take film beyond its con­ven­tion­al uses, such as 1947’s “sto­ry of dreams mixed with real­i­ty,” Dreams that Mon­ey Can Buy. Even now, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, it seems that the medi­um has a long way to go before it makes use of all the cre­ative space avail­able to it — which should only encour­age the next Richters and Eggelings of the world.

Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale and Rhyth­mus 21 will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

CBS Evening News with Wal­ter Cronkite Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Under­ground Films and the Vel­vet Under­ground (1965)

Man Ray and the Ciné­ma Pur: Four Sur­re­al­ist Films From the 1920s

Un Chien Andalou: Revis­it­ing Buñuel and Dalí’s Sur­re­al­ist Film

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Sur­re­al­ist First Film (1934)

The Seashell and the Cler­gy­man: The World’s First Sur­re­al­ist Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.