After the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August, 1949, American anxiety levels ran higher. The fear of nuclear war was in the air. And a young generation of Americans soon got its introduction to Duck and Cover, the little technique that would save lives if the U.S. ever endured a Hiroshima-style bombing. Or so it was believed.
In 1951, the US government, working with Archer Productions and students from Queens, NY, produced a short instructional film given the no-frills title Duck and Cover. Shown to millions of children nationwide over many years, the film became a centerpiece of the government’s emergency preparedness program. Since then, the film has been entered into the National Film Registry (2004) and has inspired various parodies, including this recent goof from the “Australian Board of Civil Defence.” Hope you get something from this nostalgia-inducing piece of film.…
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Long before anyone started talking about “green” or “sustainability,” Jack Nicholson put his money and star power behind a new alternative energy — solar-powered hydrogen. The year was 1978, and solar hydrogen, a limitless resource, promised to lower energy costs and pollution levels, all at once. Fast forward 30+ years, and we know one thing: hydrogen Chevys never saw the light of day … until 2007.
This clip has been added to our collection of 275 Cultural Icons, where you’ll find great artists and thinkers speaking in their own words, mostly on video. The collection includes footage of Tolstoy and Twain and, of course, more contemporary figures.
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Iran had a rich tradition of filmmaking before the Revolution of 1979, when the fundamentalists burned cinemas and shut down productions. But, by the late 80s, the clerics warmed up to cinema again and a filmmaking renaissance got underway. Then, in 1997, the whole world took notice when Abbas Kiarostami won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Taste of Cherry. Nowadays, Iranian films show up regularly at film festivals worldwide.
Getting inside the vibrant Iranian film scene hasn’t been terribly easy, especially for Americans. Blame that on politics. But last year, the folks behind the Vice Guide to Film traveled to Tehran and put together a reportage on Iranian cinema past and present. It runs 23 minutes and overturns a few stereotypes along the way. Definitely worth a watch.
Note: According to our Twitter friends, the film should be viewable around the world. We only encountered one exception — Canada. So we offer our apologies in advance to Canadian viewers. You can find us on Twitter here.
With Labor Day behind us, it’s officially time to head back to school. That applies not just to kids, but to you. No matter what your age, no matter where you live, no matter what your prior level of education, you can continue deepening your knowledge in areas old and new. And it has never been easier. All you need is a computer or smart phone, an internet connection, some free time, and our free educational media collections. They’re available 24/7 and constantly updated:
Free Online Courses: Right now, you can download free courses (some in video, some in audio) created by some of the world’s leading universities — Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT and others. The courses cover pretty much every subject — from philosophy, literature and history, to physics, computer science, engineering and psychology. The collection features about 400 courses in total. And while you can’t take these courses for credit, the amount of personal enrichment offered by these lectures is endless.
Free Textbooks: Another tool for the lifelong learner. This collection brings together roughly 150 free textbooks authored by professors (and some high school teachers) across the globe. The collection will particularly benefit those interested in deepening their knowledge in economics, computer science, mathematics, physics and biology.
Free Language Lessons: Ours is an increasingly globalized world, and it certainly pays to know more than one language. With the free audio lessons listed here, you can learn the basics of Spanish, French and Italian (the languages traditionally taught in American schools). Or you can start boning up on Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages spoken by the new world powers. Taken together, you can Learn 40 Languages for Free.
Free Audio Books: This free collection gives you the ability to download audio versions of important literary works. During your downtime, you can listen to short stories by Isaac Asimov, Raymond Carver, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. Or you can settle into longer works by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Friedrich Nietzsche and James Joyce.
Free eBooks: Once again, it’s free literary works. But this time you can download e‑texts to your computer or digital reader. Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Gertrude Stein, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust and Kurt Vonnegut. They’re all on the list. And so too are The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume series of enduring works.
Great Science Videos: This list pulls together some of our favorite science videos on the web. It features about 125 videos, covering astronomy & space travel, physics, psychology and neuroscience, religion, technology and beyond.
Intelligent YouTube Sites: Have you ever wanted to separate the wheat from the chaff on YouTube? This list will give you a start. It features over 100 YouTube channels that deliver high quality educational content. Along similar lines, you may want to visit our collection of Intelligent Video Sites. Same concept but applied to sites on the web.
Cultural Icons: If you’ve ever wanted to see great thinkers, artists and writers speaking on video in their own words, this list is for you. It has Borges and Bowie, Coltrane and Coppola, Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, Tolstoy and Thomas Edison, among others. 275 cultural icons in total.
Free Movies Online: What better way to get a cultural education than to watch some free cinematic masterpieces, including 15 films with Charlie Chaplin, 22 early films by Alfred Hitchcock, 25 Westerns with John Wayne, and a number of Soviet classics by Andrei Tarkovsky. The list of 400+ films goes on. And so does your cultural education.…
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During World War II, Walt Disney entered into a contract with the US government to develop 32 animated shorts. Nearly bankrupted by Fantasia (1940), Disney needed to refill its coffers, and making American propaganda films didn’t seem like a bad way to do it. On numerous occasions, Donald Duck was called upon to deliver moral messages to domestic audiences (see The Spirit of ’43and Der Fuehrer’s Face). But that wasn’t the case with Education for Death: The Making of Nazi,a film shown in U.S. movie theaters in 1943.
Based on a book written by Gregor Ziemer, this animated short–streamable over at Archive.org–used a different lineup of characters to show how the Nazi party turned innocent youth into Hitler’s corrupted children. Unlike other topics addressed in Disney war films (e.g. taxes and the draft), this theme, the cultivation of young minds, hit awfully close to home. And it’s perhaps why it’s one of Disney’s better wartime films. (Spiegel Online has more on Disney’s WW II propaganda films here.)
Frankie — he’s only 15 and already getting ready for fatherhood. He has the best of intentions, that’s for sure. But everything around him — the lack of a father in his own life, institutions that shut him out, the gravitational pull of wayward friends, the folly of youth — make it unlikely that this story turns out well. Directed by Irish filmmaker Darren Thornton, Frankiewas named Best Short film at the Berlinale Film Festival in 2008. A big thanks to Daniel B. for sending this our way.…
It’s a quick glimpse into a bygone era, a more innocent era, before TMZ, Perez Hilton and The Superficial made being a celebrity a more difficult proposition. The date is August 1965. The place is Malibu. And the people? Some of the biggest stars in Hollywood — Paul Newman, Natalie Wood, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, and Rock Hudson — enjoying some simple, intimate moments at the beach. The video above comes from a set of films originally belonging to Roddy McDowall, all now appearing on YouTube for the first time. Other clips in the collection feature:
Early in his career, Alfred Hitchcock began making small appearances in his own films. The cameos sometimes lasted just a few brief seconds, and sometimes a little while longer. Either way, they became a signature of Hitchcock’s filmmaking, and fans made a sport of seeing whether they could spot the elusive director. From 1927 to 1976, Hitchcock made 37 appearances in total, and they’re all nicely catalogued by Hitchcock.TV and the clip above.
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
