If you’re in the UK, get ready for Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 46 years after its orig­i­nal release, it’s return­ing to the­atres near you in a dig­i­tal­ly-restored for­mat, start­ing on Novem­ber 18. (Find dates and loca­tions here.) To cel­e­brate the re-release of this “philo­soph­i­cal­ly ambi­tious, tech­ni­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive and visu­al­ly stun­ning cin­e­mat­ic mile­stone,” the British Film Insti­tute has cre­at­ed a new trail­er (above). Down below, we have the orig­i­nal 1968 trail­er (which I pre­fer) and some good back­ground items on the film itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

For the past 25 years, the high­light of every sea­son of The Simp­sons has been its Tree­house of Hor­ror Hal­loween spe­cial – an omnibus episode filled with mor­bid, and fre­quent­ly hilar­i­ous, hor­ror spoofs. It’s the one time of the year when the cre­ators of the long run­ning series feel com­fort­able with dis­em­bow­el­ing Homer, flay­ing Marge, and let­ting Mag­gie wield an axe. Arguably the best one of these seg­ments was its 1994 par­o­dy of Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing – called “The Shin­ning”. This year, The Simp­sons return to riff­ing on Kubrick in a seg­ment called “A Clock­work Yel­low.” You can watch a sec­tion of it above.

The episode cen­ters on can­ker­ous bar­tender Moe Szys­lak as the bowler-bedecked Alex who, along with Lenny, Carl and Homer (play­ing Dim, of course), spouts non­sense Nad­sat and ter­ror­izes Lon­don. When they decide to break into a house, Moe and the gang end up crash­ing an Eyes Wide Shut-style orgy host­ed by Mr. Burns. From there, the Kubrick ref­er­ences start fly­ing thick and fast, with nods to Full Met­al Jack­et, 2001: A Space Odyssey and even Bar­ry Lyn­don (“Even I for­get what this is in ref­er­ence to”). And then a scene cuts to a Simp­son­fied ver­sion of Kubrick, watch­ing the seg­ment from an edit­ing bay. “Let’s burn this,” he bel­lows at an assis­tant. “Let’s rewrite every­thing. And let’s start all over.”

The full episode is avail­able on Hulu Plus, if you have a sub­scrip­tion. If not, you can watch it for free after Octo­ber 27th. And you can watch a por­tion of “The Shin­ning” below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Fear and Desire: Stan­ley Kubrick’s First and Least-Seen Fea­ture Film (1953)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Shares Pho­tos of Her­self Grow­ing Up on Her Father’s Film Sets

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

From Albert Kin­sey, to Sig­mund Freud, to Mag­nus Hirschfeld, promi­nent social sci­en­tists have offered dis­sent­ing opin­ions to pre­vail­ing main­stream ideas about homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as a con­se­quence of parental or soci­etal influ­ences. This doesn’t mean those researchers have agreed with each oth­er, or with cur­rent ideas, but their con­clu­sions were con­tro­ver­sial and star­tling to a con­sen­sus often com­plic­it in the crim­i­nal­iza­tion and polit­i­cal repres­sion of gays and les­bians. If you haven’t heard the last name on that list above, there’s prob­a­bly a good rea­son: Hirschfeld—a gay, Jew­ish physi­cian, sex­ol­o­gist, and advo­cate in Weimar Germany—had much of his work burned by the Nazis in their 1933 rise to pow­er.

One of Hirschfeld’s works destroyed in Nazi fires was a film he co-wrote and co-starred in called Dif­fer­ent From the Oth­ers, the first gay rights movie in his­to­ry. Released in 1919, and banned in 1920, the film explored a doomed rela­tion­ship between a vio­lin­ist, played by silent star Con­rad Vei­dt, and his stu­dent. Exten­sive flash­back scenes show both char­ac­ters’ ear­ly sex­u­al expe­ri­ences, their failed attempts to change their sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion (includ­ing treat­ment with bogus “ex-gay” ther­a­pies), and their even­tu­al self-accep­tance. In their present day, the cou­ple is open­ly affec­tion­ate, until the vio­lin­ist is black­mailed and dragged into court by an extor­tion­ist, then aban­doned by his friends and fam­i­ly. He com­mits sui­cide, and his lover vows to fight the law that crim­i­nal­ized homo­sex­u­al­i­ty in Ger­many, known as Para­graph 175.

Dif­fer­ent From the Oth­ers would be lost to his­to­ry were it not for Hirschfeld’s preser­va­tion of 40 min­utes of footage in a sep­a­rate doc­u­men­tary. You can view the sur­viv­ing film above, with Eng­lish title cards. The film was part of a didac­tic series on themes of sex­u­al­i­ty that Hirschfeld made with direc­tor Richard Oswald. In each one, Hirschfeld appears as a doc­tor who inter­venes on behalf of per­se­cut­ed indi­vid­u­als. In Dif­fer­ent from the Oth­ers, he does so with the violinist’s par­ents, telling them, “You must not con­demn your son because he is a homo­sex­u­al, he is not to blame for his ori­en­ta­tion. It is not wrong, nor should it be a crime. Indeed, it is not even an ill­ness, mere­ly a vari­a­tion, and one that is com­mon to all of nature.”

In many oth­er such scenes, most of them now lost, Hirschfeld explic­it­ly states his argu­ment that, as The New York Times writes, “homo­pho­bia, not homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, was a scourge of soci­ety.” The then-rad­i­cal point of view found lit­tle con­tem­po­rary support—screenings were restrict­ed sole­ly to med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers and lawyers until the film’s destruction—but it makes this arti­fact of tremen­dous inter­est to film his­to­ri­ans and activists today. In addi­tion to Hirschfeld’s pio­neer­ing activism, the film is notable for star­ring Viedt, who went on to fame for his role in The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari.

Despite its many lacu­nae and entire miss­ing scenes, and char­ac­ters, Dif­fer­ent From the Oth­ers is cur­rent­ly being restored and turned into an expand­ed, “watch­able fea­ture,” using the sur­viv­ing rem­nants, along with found pho­tos and film stills, by the Out­fest-UCLA Lega­cy Project (see their ful­ly-fund­ed Kick­starter here). Many scenes—such as a lengthy the­o­ret­i­cal lec­ture by Hirschfeld—will be recon­struct­ed from a syn­op­sis, “a few reviews, and lit­tle else.” “You’re not see­ing the orig­i­nal,” admits UCLA Film & Tele­vi­sion Archive direc­tor Jan-Christo­pher Horek of the com­ing recon­struc­tion, “because we don’t know what the orig­i­nal looks like.” Nev­er­the­less, in what­ev­er form, Dif­fer­ent From the Oth­ers rep­re­sents a per­spec­tive at least “50 years ahead of its time,” says Horak, with an “enlight­ened the­o­ry that you wouldn’t see in this coun­try prob­a­bly until the ‘70s or ‘80s.”

Dif­fer­ent from the Oth­ers will be added to our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rudolf Braz­da, Last Man to Wear the Pink Tri­an­gle Dur­ing the Holo­caust, Tells His Sto­ry

Sig­mund Freud Writes to Con­cerned Moth­er: “Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is Noth­ing to Be Ashamed Of” (1935)

The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari: See the Restored Ver­sion of the 1920 Hor­ror Clas­sic with Its Orig­i­nal Col­or Tint­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When peo­ple talk about “inde­pen­dent cin­e­ma” today, they seem, as often as not, to talk about a sen­si­bil­i­ty — we all know, on some lev­el, what some­one means when they tell us they “like indie films.” But the term has its roots, of course, not nec­es­sar­i­ly in inde­pen­dence of spir­it, but in inde­pen­dence from sys­tems. Now that tech­nol­o­gy has grant­ed all of us the abil­i­ty, at least in the­o­ry, to make any movie we want, this dis­tinc­tion has lost some of its mean­ing, but between about twen­ty and eighty years ago, the com­mer­cial estab­lish­ments con­trol­ling pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and screen­ing enjoyed their great­est solid­i­ty (and indeed, impen­e­tra­bil­i­ty). Dur­ing that time, mak­ing a film inde­pen­dent­ly meant mak­ing a fair­ly spe­cif­ic, often anti-Hol­ly­wood state­ment. But what about before then, when the medi­um of cin­e­ma itself had yet to take its full shape?

Not only does 1913’s The Stu­dent of Prague offer an enter­tain­ing exam­ple of inde­pen­dent film from an era before even Hol­ly­wood had become Hol­ly­wood, it has a place in his­to­ry as the first inde­pen­dent film ever released. Ger­man writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and Dan­ish direc­tor Stel­lan Rye (not to men­tion star Paul Wegen­er, he of the Golem tril­o­gy) col­lab­o­rat­ed to bring to ear­ly cin­e­mat­ic life this 19th-cen­tu­ry hor­ror sto­ry of the tit­u­lar stu­dent, a down-at-the-heels bon vivant who, besot­ted with a count­ess and deter­mined to win her by any means nec­es­sary, makes a deal with a dev­il­ish sor­cer­er that will ful­fill his every desire. The catch? He sum­mons the stu­den­t’s reflec­tion out of the mir­ror and into real­i­ty. So empow­ered, this dop­pel­gänger goes around wreak­ing hav­oc. Hard­ly the osten­si­bly high-mind­ed mate­r­i­al of “indie film” — let alone “for­eign film” — from the past half-cen­tu­ry or so, but The Stu­dent of Prague treats it with respect, arriv­ing at the kind of uncom­pro­mis­ing end­ing that might sur­prise even mod­ern audi­ences. If you don’t watch it today, keep it book­marked for Hal­loween view­ing.

You can find The Stu­dent of Prague added to our big film col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Film, The Golem, with a Sound­track by The Pix­ies’ Black Fran­cis

Watch Häx­an, the Clas­sic Cin­e­mat­ic Study of Witch­craft Nar­rat­ed by William S. Bur­roughs (1922)

Watch the Quin­tes­sen­tial Vam­pire Film Nos­fer­atu Free Online as Hal­loween Approach­es

Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis: Uncut & Restored

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Alice Guy-Blaché  (1873 –1968) is the great trail­blaz­er of ear­ly cin­e­ma you prob­a­bly nev­er heard of. She was film’s first female direc­tor. She made one of the first nar­ra­tive movies ever at age 23. She wrote, direct­ed and pro­duced over 700 films. And she remains the only woman ever to build and run a movie stu­dio. Even more remark­ably, she did all of this before she had the legal right to vote, and when con­ven­tion dic­tat­ed that she wear a corset. Yet Alice Guy-Blaché‘s name doesn’t appear along­side oth­er cin­e­mat­ic pio­neers like George Méliès, Edwin S. Porter and D.W. Grif­fith in film school his­to­ry books. Some­how, she has fall­en out of the canon of great ear­ly film­mak­ers.

For­tu­nate­ly, there’s a move­ment to cor­rect this griev­ous error. In 2009, the Whit­ney Muse­um of Amer­i­can Art pro­grammed a rare screen­ing of 80 of her works. After a long cam­paign, the Direc­tors Guild of Amer­i­ca award­ed Guy-Blaché with a Life­time Achieve­ment Award. And most recent­ly, film­mak­ers Pamela Green and Jarik van Slui­js raised over $200,000 on Kick­starter for their upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary on Guy-Blaché called Be Nat­ur­al, which is being exec­u­tive pro­duced by Robert Red­ford and nar­rat­ed by Jodie Fos­ter. See a trail­er for the film below.

Born in 1873 in Paris to a book­seller, Alice Guy found work in 1894 as a sec­re­tary for Leon Gau­mont, a still pho­tog­ra­ph­er who found­ed one of the first movie stu­dios. Guy was imme­di­ate­ly tak­en with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of film and asked her boss if she could exper­i­ment with their brand new movie cam­era. Her first film was The Cab­bage Fairy (top), which shows a woman pluck­ing infants from a cab­bage patch in a sin­gle, unmov­ing shot. To a mod­ern eye, The Cab­bage Fairy might seem mere­ly like a cute film that nice­ly cap­tures Vic­to­ri­an whim­sy. But this film was made in 1896, one year after the Lumière Broth­ers screened the first films ever made. In 1896, the Lumières were still mak­ing their Actu­al­ités – doc­u­men­taries in their most basic form. Their most famous film was sim­ply of a train roar­ing into the sta­tion. Guy’s film, by con­trast, looks strik­ing­ly orig­i­nal.

Ten years lat­er, she direct­ed the big-bud­get film The Birth, Life and Death of Christ for Gau­mont Stu­dios. It was one of the first bible epics made for the sil­ver screen, requir­ing over 300 extras. You can watch it above.

By 1907, Guy mar­ried cam­era­man Her­bert Blaché and soon moved to New York. The film­mak­er, now called Alice Guy-Blaché, found­ed The Solax Com­pa­ny with her hus­band in Fort Lee, New Jer­sey. There she con­tin­ued to make ground­break­ing movies. A Fool and his Mon­ey (1912), for instance, is the first movie ever with an all African-Amer­i­can cast. It was made three years before D. W. Grif­fith direct­ed his cin­e­mat­ic landmark/racist embar­rass­ment The Birth of a Nation.

True to film indus­try con­ven­tion, her hus­band left her for an actress in the ear­ly 1920s.  Soon there­after Solax fold­ed and Guy-Blaché returned to France. She nev­er made anoth­er movie. In 1953, she was award­ed the Légion d’hon­neur by the French gov­ern­ment but, by then, most of her movies had been lost and her rep­u­ta­tion as an ear­ly cin­e­mat­ic inno­va­tor was large­ly for­got­ten by the pub­lic.

Guy-Blaché’s films will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

40 Great Film­mak­ers Go Old School, Shoot Short Films with 100 Year Old Cam­era

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

A Trip to the Moon (and Five Oth­er Free Films) by Georges Méliès, the Father of Spe­cial Effects

Watch The Hitch-Hik­er by Ida Lupino (the Only Female Direc­tor of a 1950s Noir Film)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.