While the world retreat­ed indoors in March, and the cin­e­mas we knew and loved closed up shop, so many film libraries have turned around and opened up their archives to the world. This is a good thing. Don’t say you have noth­ing to watch! We have explored all the links below and can ver­i­fy that they are all indeed free to watch. Some are even free to down­load. Here’s a brief run­down of some we’ve found:

The Nation­al Film Reg­istry of the Library of Con­gress

The Library of Con­gress annu­al­ly selects films to pre­serve that it con­sid­ers “cul­tur­al­ly, his­tor­i­cal­ly or aes­thet­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant” and quite a lot of them are avail­able to screen. May we sug­gest:

Mod­es­ta, Ben­jamin Doniger’s 1955 short dra­ma about women’s rights in a rapid­ly mod­ern­iz­ing Puer­to Rico. It won the prize at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val in 1956.

St. Louis Blues, basi­cal­ly an extend­ed music video (before such a thing exist­ed) for the Queen of the Blues, Bessie Smith, from 1929.

With­in Our Gates, the astound­ing 1919 fea­ture film by Oscar Micheaux. Direct­ed by and star­ring African-Amer­i­cans, this rebut­tal to Birth of a Nation says some­thing more inci­sive about Amer­i­can racial pol­i­tics than most films cre­at­ed in the 20th cen­tu­ry.

Cin­e­math­eque Fran­caise

The phys­i­cal Cinematheque–a cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion since 1936, and cur­rent­ly housed in a Frank Gehry-designed building–might be closed, but its stream­ing plat­form, dubbed “Hen­ri” is up and show­ing some rare and restored clas­sics. On one hand, it real­ly helps if you can under­stand French, because not every­thing is sub­ti­tled. On the oth­er, there are plen­ty of silent and subbed films:

Pro­tea, Vic­torin-Hip­poly­te Jasset’s 1913 response to the Fan­tomas seri­als, fea­tures Josette Andri­ot as the slinky, sexy Mata Hari-like super-spy, a few years before Irma Vep and her sim­i­lar get-up.

The Fall of the House of Ush­er: Jean Epstein’s sur­re­al adap­ta­tion of the Poe clas­sic fea­tures bril­liant pho­tog­ra­phy and an expres­sion­ist style. Fans of The Light­house will appre­ci­ate its luna­cy.

Paris qui dort: Rene Clair’s *oth­er* sur­re­al film made in 1924 (the bet­ter known is Entr’acte), this glo­ri­ous 4K restora­tion looks like it was shot yes­ter­day as a group of friends wake up to find that all peo­ple in Paris have been frozen in place. Play time com­mences and there is some footage of climb­ing the Eif­fel Tow­er that might give you the willies. Watch it above.

Japan­ese Ani­mat­ed Film Clas­sics

With works that go back as far as 1917, this is a deep dive into the world of Japan­ese ani­ma­tion curat­ed by the Nobuo Ofu­ji Memo­r­i­al Muse­um. There’s tra­di­tion­al cell ani­ma­tion, but also a sur­pris­ing amount of cut-out ani­ma­tion

The Dull Sword, Junichi Kuichi’s short film from 1917, is a tale of a hap­less samu­rai with an end­ing told in shad­ow pup­pets.

Prop­a­gate is a 1935 film from Shige­ji Ogi­no, show­ing the cycle of plant life through a mod­ernist dance of black and white shapes, close to Oskar Fischinger in style.

Ari-chan the Ant is more what we expect from ani­ma­tion in 1941–a copy of the Disney/Merrie Melodies house style, pleas­ant enough, but under Mit­suyo Seo’s direc­tion also a cri­tique of impe­ri­al­ism, how­ev­er sub­tle. Seo would go on to direct Japan’s first fea­ture-length ani­mat­ed film, Momotaro’s Divine Sea War­riors.

Nation­al Film Preser­va­tion Foun­da­tion

Bring­ing us full cir­cle, the NFPF is a non-prof­it cre­at­ed by Con­gress in 1997 to save films that oth­er­wise would dis­ap­pear, and that includes many ear­ly ani­mat­ed films, avant-garde works, and films that were once thought lost but have since been dis­cov­ered in Aus­tralia and New Zealand, around 2,500 works.

Too Much John­son is the long-thought-destroyed film direct­ed by Orson Welles that was to be part of his 1938 mul­ti­me­dia pro­duc­tion for his Mer­cury The­ater. The archive presents both the 66 minute work print and a 34 minute reimag­ined cut.

The Fall of the House of Ush­er…wait, didn’t we already men­tion this? In fact, just like the year that brought us Armaged­don and Deep Impact, anoth­er Poe adap­ta­tion hit the screens in 1928. This one is short­er, and even more sur­re­al, and direct­ed by James Sib­ley Wat­son and Melville Web­ber.

At first this silent footage of the Negro Leagues seems a bit too comical–a base­ball ver­sion of the Harlem Globetrotters–but it’s actu­al­ly a por­trait of an era in flux, two years before seg­re­ga­tion was about to end in base­ball. Shot at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, the star of this footage is Reece “Goose” Tatum of the Cincin­nati Clowns. As the film notes point out, just because they were goof­ing off for the cam­era doesn’t mean these play­ers weren’t athletes–Hank Aaron was their short­stop before sign­ing to the Braves, and the Clowns’ rival team, the Kansas City Mon­archs, boast­ed Jack­ie Robin­son also as a short­stop.

You can find more free films in the Relat­eds below…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60 Free Film Noir Movies

Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch More Than 400 Clas­sic Kore­an Films Free Online Thanks to the Kore­an Film Archive

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Since his death 56 years ago, Yasu­jirō Ozu has only become more and more often ref­er­enced as a locus of great­ness in Japan­ese cin­e­ma. Almost with­out excep­tion, his exegetes explain the pow­er of his films first through their decep­tive sim­plic­i­ty. His movies may look and play like sim­ple mid­cen­tu­ry domes­tic dra­mas, each bear­ing a strong resem­blance to the one before, but with­in these rigid the­mat­ic and aes­thet­ic stric­tures, Ozu achieves tran­scen­dence. In fact, before becom­ing a film­mak­er in his own right Paul Schrad­er ele­vat­ed Ozu into a trin­i­ty along­side Robert Bres­son and Carl Theodor Drey­er in his 1972 book Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film.

“Per­haps the finest image of sta­sis in Ozu’s films is the lengthy shot of the vase in a dark­ened room near the end of Late Spring,” Schrad­er writes, cit­ing the 1949 pic­ture usu­al­ly count­ed among Ozu’s best. “The father and daugh­ter are prepar­ing to spend their last night under the same roof; she will soon be mar­ried. They calm­ly talk about what a nice day they had, as if it were any oth­er day. The room is dark; the daugh­ter asks a ques­tion of the father, but gets no answer. There is a shot of the father asleep, a shot of the daugh­ter look­ing at him, a shot of the vase in the alcove and over it the sound of the father snor­ing. Then there is a shot of the daugh­ter half-smil­ing, then a lengthy, ten-sec­ond shot of the vase again, and a return to the daugh­ter now almost in tears, and a final return to the vase.”

Some view­ers see the vase as an inex­plic­a­ble inclu­sion, espe­cial­ly at such a charged moment. Schrad­er sees it as sta­sis itself, “a form which can accept deep, con­tra­dic­to­ry emo­tion and trans­form it into an expres­sion of some­thing uni­fied, per­ma­nent, tran­scen­dent.” In the video essay at the top of the post, Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, exam­ines for him­self the place of the vase in Late Spring, in Ozu’s style more broad­ly, and in the body of crit­i­cal work sur­round­ing Ozu’s oeu­vre.

To Puschak’s mind, the var­i­ous read­ings of the vase by Schrad­er and oth­ers “speak to the unique pow­er that Ozu has, that he devel­oped over his long career. His style may appear sim­ple, but is in fact so fine-tuned, so care­ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed, that he has the pow­er to over­whelm the view­er, to launch a thou­sand inter­pre­ta­tions with a sin­gle cut.”

Late Spring fea­tures per­for­mances by Ozu reg­u­lars Chishū Ryū and Set­suko Hara, both of them inhab­it­ing the kind of char­ac­ters for which the direc­tor relied on them: Ryū the good-natured but firm father, Hara the by turns melan­cholic and opti­mistic but ulti­mate­ly duti­ful daugh­ter. These are arche­typ­al Ozu peo­ple, and the vase is an arche­typ­al Ozu object, as much so as the recur­ring red tea ket­tle Ozu enthu­si­asts delight in spot­ting. Those fans will under­stand the appear­ance of the vase as a kind of “pil­low shot,” the term used to describe those visu­al moments in all of Ozu’s pic­tures that have noth­ing to do with plot or char­ac­ter and every­thing to do with rhythm and reflec­tion. They depict ket­tles and vas­es, but also pago­das, clothes­line, street signs, smoke­stacks — things, not peo­ple, but things that, in their con­text, under­score Ozu’s pow­er­ful human­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Yasu­jiro Ozu, “the Most Japan­ese of All Film Direc­tors”

What Makes Yasu­jirō Ozu a Great Film­mak­er? New Video Essay Explains His Long-Admired Cin­e­mat­ic Style

Video Essay­ist Kog­o­na­da Makes His Own Acclaimed Fea­ture Film: Watch His Trib­utes to Its Inspi­ra­tions Like Ozu, Lin­klater & Mal­ick

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

How Ser­gio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghet­ti West­erns, Cre­at­ing a Per­fect Har­mo­ny of Sound & Image

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

“What is Bres­son’s genre? He does­n’t have one. Bres­son is Bres­son,” wrote mas­ter film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky in his sem­i­nal book Sculpt­ing in Time. “The very con­cept of genre is as cold as the tomb.”

Nonethe­less, Tarkovsky made two of the most praised, best-regard­ed sci­ence fic­tion films in cin­e­ma. Stalk­er is a meta­phys­i­cal rid­dle wrapped in the trap­pings of a sci-fi thriller. In the ver­dant area called the Zone, ringed off by miles of barbed wire and armed sol­diers, pil­grims come to behold an uncan­ny land­scape ruled by a pow­er­ful, oth­er­world­ly intel­li­gence. The film seemed to pre­fig­ure the Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter that hap­pened years lat­er and proved to be the unlike­ly inspi­ra­tion for a video game.

Adapt­ed from a nov­el by Stanis­law Lem, Solaris is about a space sta­tion that orbits a sen­tient plan­et that caus­es hal­lu­ci­na­tions in the cos­mo­nauts. The hyper-ratio­nal pro­tag­o­nist, Kris Kelvin, is thrown for a loop when he is con­front­ed by a dop­pel­ganger of his dead wife who killed her­self years ear­li­er. The log­i­cal side of him knows that this is a hal­lu­ci­na­tion but he falls in love any­way, only to lose her again. Kelvin is caught in a hell of repeat­ing the mis­takes of his past.

Solaris was seen as a Cold War-era response to Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both movies are mind-alter­ing deep-space epics that raise more ques­tions than they answer. Yet Tarkovsky hat­ed 2001’s osten­ta­tious use of cut­ting-edge spe­cial effects. “For some rea­son, in all the sci­ence-fic­tion films I’ve seen, the film­mak­ers force the view­er to exam­ine the details of the mate­r­i­al struc­ture of the future,” he told Russ­ian film jour­nal­ist Naum Abramov in 1970. “More than that, some­times, like Kubrick, they call their own films pre­mo­ni­tions. It’s unbe­liev­able! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is pho­ny on many points, even for spe­cial­ists. For a true work of art, the fake must be elim­i­nat­ed.”

Indeed, Tarkovsky seemed to delib­er­ate­ly half-ass the gener­ic ele­ments of film. He used leisure­ly shots of tun­nels and high­ways of 1971 Tokyo to depict the city of the future. He devot­ed only a cou­ple min­utes of the film’s near­ly three hour run­ning time to things like space­ships. And you have to love the fact that the space sta­tion in Solaris has such dis­tinct­ly unfu­tur­is­tic design ele­ments as a chan­de­lier and a wood-pan­eled library.

Tarkovsky, of course, isn’t inter­est­ed in sci­ence. He’s inter­est­ed in art and its way to evoke the divine. And his pri­ma­ry way of doing this is with long takes; epic shots that res­onate pro­found­ly even if the mean­ing of those images remains elu­sive. Solaris opens with a shot of water flow­ing in a brook and then, lat­er in the scene, there is a sud­den down­pour. The cam­era press­es into a shot of a teacup fill­ing with rain. It’s a beau­ti­ful, mem­o­rable, evoca­tive shot. Maybe the image means some­thing. Maybe its beau­ty is, in and of itself, its mean­ing. Either way, Tarkovsky forces you to sur­ren­der to his delib­er­ate cin­e­mat­ic rhythm and his pan­the­is­tic view of the world.

In a piece called Tarkovsky Shot by Shot, video essay­ist Anto­nios Papan­to­niou dis­sects a few scenes from Solaris, break­ing down each accord­ing to cam­era angle, shot type and dura­tion while point­ing out recur­ring visu­al motifs. “Dia­met­ri­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from Hollywood’s extrav­a­gant moviemak­ing Tarkovsky’s Solaris is in a cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse of its own,” writes Papan­to­niou in one of the video’s copi­ous inter­ti­tles. “Sym­bol­ic images and meta­phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions are cre­at­ed and expressed in a poet­ic way where every visu­al detail mat­ters.” Watch­ing Shot by Shot, you get a real sense of just how beau­ti­ful­ly his films unfold with those gor­geous­ly chore­o­graphed long takes. You can watch the full video above.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in June, 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mes­sage to Young Peo­ple: “Learn to Be Alone,” Enjoy Soli­tude

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.