Take the intro to Fully Flared, the 2007 skateboarding film directed by Spike Jonze, Ty Evans and Cory Weincheque. And then remaster it in 720p HD and you have quite the sensory experience. Give the clip at least a minute to unfold…
Take the intro to Fully Flared, the 2007 skateboarding film directed by Spike Jonze, Ty Evans and Cory Weincheque. And then remaster it in 720p HD and you have quite the sensory experience. Give the clip at least a minute to unfold…
François Truffaut once called Werner Herzog the single most important director on the planet, and TIME magazine (with Rogert Ebert writing the related article) ranked Herzog as one of the 100 most influential people alive today. Last April, Herzog, a “romantic visionary” of the New German Cinema movement, visited the UC Santa Barbara campus where he spent roughly two hours in conversation with the author and essayist, Pico Iyer. The video above skips over two introductions, including one by Iyer himself. So if you’re looking for more context, you can always rewind to the very beginning… H/T to @eacion and via Film Studies for Free.
Just a quick note: Earlier this week, we posted a list of 25 Free John Wayne Westerns. Now comes a list of Free Alfred Hitchcock films. We have 15 Hitchcock films in total, most shot during the early stages of his career – that is, during the 1920s and 30s. And, on the list, you will find several well known classics, including The Lodger, one of Hitchcock’s great silent films; Blackmail, Hitchcock’s first “talking” or sound film; The 39 Steps, a thriller that became an early commercial and critical hit; and The Man Who Knew Too Much, a film that Hitchcock later remade for an American audience with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. These classics and eleven other films appear in the Free Hitchcock collection. Enjoy …
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In the late 1990s, Errol Morris, the acclaimed director, was hired to make a film for an “in house” conference of IBM employees. Eventually IBM canceled the conference, and the film was scrapped. (Watch a clip of it here.) Now more than a decade later, IBM has brought Morris back, this time to direct a film meant to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the company’s founding. The 30-minute film, They Were There, appears on IBM’s YouTube Channel, and it notably features music by Philip Glass.
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A year ago, Canon launched a contest called “The Story Beyond the Still,” which encouraged photographers to become filmmakers, and help viewers see “beyond the still” image. Fast forward twelve months and we have the final result: A collaborative film, now being premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, that stitches together “chapters” (or film sequences) created by six contest-winning artists, all under the direction of Vincent Laforet. Each chapter ends with a still image that creates the jumping-off point for the next chapter, giving one artist the chance to pick up where a previous artist left off. The complete collaborative film (above) runs 37 minutes. You can find more contest-winning video on Vimeo right here.
32 years after his death, John Wayne (né Marion Morrison) remains a tremendously popular movie star. According to a Harris Poll taken earlier this month (January 2011), Americans still rank The Duke as their third most favorite actor, putting him right behind Johnny Depp and Denzel Washington. No doubt about it, the legend of John Wayne continues to grow. And happily you can find a gold mine of John Wayne Western films online – all free. Today, we have pulled together a list of 25 films that span five decades of work, moving from the 1930s to the 1970s. You can find them all otherwise listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.
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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
A quick note for film aficionados: The 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival is now underway. And over the next two weeks, The YouTube Screening Room will bring you short films from festivals past and present. Right now, you can watch four new films by up-and-coming directors – 8 Bits, Andy and Zach, The High Level Bridge, and Skateistan: To Live and Skate in Kabul (above). More new films will be added on January 27th and February 3rd. In the meantime, you can catch several other short films that originally played at Sundance, or were made by Sundance Institute alumni.
via Switched.com
A year before the Wright brothers launched the first airplane flight in 1903, Georges Méliès, a French filmmaker with already 400 films to his credit, directed a film that visualized a much bigger human ambition – landing a spacecraft on the moon. Loosely based on works by Jules Vernes (From the Earth to the Moon) and H. G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon), A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) invented one of our favorite cinematic genres – the science fiction film. Today, many film critics consider Méliès’ short film an enduring classic. The Village Voice ranked it #84 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century, and you’ll almost certainly recognize the iconic shot at the 4:44 mark.
Méliès’s body of work, which goes well beyond this landmark film, has been recently collected into a new box set. Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896–1913) puts 173 rare and rediscovered films onto a 5 disc, 13-hour collection.
A Trip to the Moon has been added to our collection of Free Movies Online. You can also download a version at the Internet Archive.
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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Watch the First Russian Science Fiction Film, Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924)