During the Golden Age of Hollywood and until 1967, mainstream movie studios were
banned by the Production Code from depicting taboo topics like drug addiction, explicit murder and venereal disease, or even showing explicit nudity. But in the 1930's and 1940's, films marketed as "educational" could and did fly under the radar, and three of the best known 'educational' propaganda exploitation films are:
Sex Madness (1935),
Reefer Madness (1936) and
The Cocaine Fiends (1938).
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 15, 2012 -
30 comments
In 2005, the Discovery Channel aired
Alien Worlds, a fictional documentary based on Wayne Douglas Barlowe's graphic novel,
Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV." Depicting mankind's first robotic mission to an extrasolar planet that could support life, the show drew from NASA's
Origins Program, the NASA/JPL
PlanetQuest Mission, and ESA's
Darwin Project. It was primarily presented through CGI, but included interviews from a variety of NASA scientists and other experts, including Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, John Craig Venter and Jack Horner. Oh, and George Lucas, too.
Official site.
Previously on MeFi. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 21, 2012 -
12 comments
The Up Series
[previously] continues. This documentary series, begun in 1964, has revisited the lives of a select group of British citizens once every seven years of their life. 56 Up, which shows the group at age 56, will air sometime in
mid-May on the BBC, but until then, have
this great Guardian article about the impact of the films on the lives of the people featured in them.
posted by showbiz_liz
on May 8, 2012 -
34 comments
But this season, PBS chose to move Independent Lens and P.O.V. to a new time slot -- 10 pm, ET, on Thursday nights. This may not seem like such a big deal at first, until you know that on Thursday nights stations can broadcast any program they like in prime time, whether it's part of the PBS schedule or not. Many take the opportunity to offers viewers locally produced programs, British sitcoms or reruns of Antiques Roadshow. As a result, episodes of the independent documentary series can now be run anywhere local stations choose to fit them in (here in New York, WNET airs the films at 11 p.m. on Sundays) or maybe not at all.
Bill Moyers writes an open letter to PBS about scheduling changes which have ruined PBS as Tuesday night destination for documentary television.
posted by hippybear
on Mar 24, 2012 -
17 comments
Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark is a 13-part documentary produced by the BBC that was first aired on in 1969. It is considered to be a landmark in British Television's broadcasting of the visual arts.
Here's the entire series (13 one-hour episodes) on
YouTube. This is a treat for those of you who like History of Art, especially so if you haven't yet got around to seeing it.
[more inside]
posted by baejoseph
on Feb 8, 2012 -
24 comments
Finnish YouTube user
Ishexan has uploaded seven English subtitled movies in parts:
Broken Blossoms (
1919),
Aelita (
1924),
The Gipsy Charmer (
1929),
The Tragedy of Elina (
1938),
The Activists (
1939),
The Wooden Pauper's Bride (
1944), and
Sampo (
1959), which is based on the epic poem
The Kalevala. The films are mostly Finnish, though
Aelita is a silent Russian sci-fi film, and
Sampo was a joint Finnish and Soviet production. More film clips inside (mostly Finnish documentaries and "dorky musical numbers").
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 30, 2011 -
12 comments
As
discussed over the weekend, in less than two weeks the millions of videos uploaded to six-year-old erstwhile YouTube competitor Google Video will
no longer be viewable. Though a download button has been added to each video page for easy back-up,
that will only be available though May 13th, and the company will not be offering transfer service for users with YouTube accounts. The search giant has been slowly winding down the service over the years since their billion-dollar buyout of YouTube, controversially
revoking purchased content (with a refund) in 2007 and
disabling new uploads in 2009. The shutdown is a big blow to the web video ecosystem, as Google Video was one of the few major services to allow free hosting of long-form video, including the content for many popular MetaFilter posts. But all is not lost! Reddit users have organized
a virtual potluck to share the most interesting and unique videos not available anywhere else, and the
Archive Team, preserver of doomed web properties like Geocities (
previously), is partnering with Archive.org to
back up as much content as possible. In that spirit, click inside for a list of some of the most popular Google Video-centric content posted here over the years.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 18, 2011 -
54 comments
Gestalten TV - Exploring Visual Culture. A series of documentaries on (mostly) art and artists.
posted by dobbs
on Nov 1, 2010 -
2 comments
Lookout Mountain Laboratories (Hollywood, CA) was originally built in 1941 as an air defense station. But after WWII, the US Air Force repurposed it into a secret film studio which operated for 22 years during the Cold War. The studio produced classified movies for all branches of the US Armed Forces, as well as the Atomic Energy Commission, until it was deactivated in 1969. During this time, cameramen,
who referred to themselves as "atomic" cinematographers, were hired to shoot footage of atomic bomb tests in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and the South Pacific. Some of their films have been declassified and can be seen
here. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 14, 2010 -
6 comments
Journeyman Pictures has uploaded nearly 4000 videos to YouTube. Many of these are trailers for the documentaries they sell, but they have also posted hundreds of full-length videos. Most are for short documentarie, but there are a lot of features too. It's somewhat daunting to explore, but the
playlists are a good place to start, and so are the shows:
Features,
Shorts,
News and
Savouring Europe, a European travelogue series. Here's a few interesting ones:
Gastronauts, about French culinary students working to make astronaut food more palatable,
Demon Drummers, about student Kodo drummers,
India's Free Lunch, about the effects of free school lunches on Indian society,
The Twitter Revolution, about YouTube and Twitter's role in the 2009 Iranian uprising,
Europe's Black Hole, about Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova,
Small Town Boy, about a gay male carnival queen in a small town in England,
The Vertigo of Lists, Umberto Eco talks about the ubiquity of lists in modern culture and
Monsters from the Id, about scientists in the science fiction films of the Fifties.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 24, 2010 -
10 comments
BBC World Service has over 500 audio documentaries you can download. The subject matter is incredibly wide ranging, for example,
internet cafés,
the influence of Islamic art on William Morris,
South African female AIDS activist Thembi Ngubane,
Yiddish,
the importance of cows,
novelist Chinua Achebe,
financial risk management,
Obama as an intellectual,
the physical and emotional effects of a car crash and many, many more. If the quantity and variety are overwhelming, you can subscribe to a
podcast, which delivers a new documentary to you every single day.
posted by Kattullus
on May 8, 2010 -
22 comments
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has put
675 reels of archival 16 mm film online via the Internet Archive. Most of the film is unedited, and stems either from Museum research, or was donated by interested amateurs. Much of it is silent, reflecting the technology of the day. One highlight are the
four surviving reels of the long-running TV show 'What in the World" (look for the episode starring Vincent Price), but the archive is full of other hidden gems, such as the
1950s archaeological expedition to Tikal, a 1940 film "
A 1000 Mile Road Trip Across America", and
Glimpses of Life Among the Catawba and Cherokee Indians of the Carolinas (1927). The films are downloadable in various formats, including MPEG2, Ogg Video, and 512Kb MPEG4. Happy browsing!
via.
posted by Rumple
on May 3, 2009 -
12 comments
To celebrate its 40th birthday, PBS has loaded - and continues to load - tons of content into its new, slick, Coverflow-ish
on-demand site. Full episodes of
American Experience,
American Masters,
Frontline,
Great Performances,
Masterpiece Theater,
Nature,
Nova, the
NewsHour and
a bunch more are now online.
posted by jbickers
on Apr 22, 2009 -
44 comments
Mentioned here earlier in its
beta form, Canada's National Film Board has released the bulk of its films online, for free, in the
NFB Screening Room.
With hundreds of films from
the 1920s onwards, including groundbreaking work by animator
Norman McLaren, documentaries, dramas,
bizarre anti-smoking (or pro-smoking?) screeds and much, much more, it's a breathtaking trove of amazing film to be discovered from north of the 49th.
[more inside]
posted by Shepherd
on Jan 22, 2009 -
53 comments
When her Japanese-American husband was sent to internment camps in California and Wyoming, Estelle Peck Ishigo chose to accompany him. An art-school teacher fired for her interracial marriage, she documented the three-and-a-half-year ordeal in
a short memoir and hundreds of
sketches and
paintings.
[more inside]
posted by Knappster
on Dec 30, 2008 -
6 comments
The Afterlife of American Clothes. "From 2003 to 2007 [filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi] visited rag yards in Miami, dug through archives in London and Washington, D.C., and traveled to Haiti to see the international secondhand markets for themselves. The result is the recent documentary
Secondhand (Pepe), which explores the global trade in used clothing."
posted by Knappster
on Aug 17, 2008 -
12 comments
Canadian author Lesley Choyce and his family share their extended encounter with a surfeit of skunks in a short documentary, avaible on YouTube
in three parts.
[more inside]
posted by CKmtl
on May 21, 2008 -
3 comments
The Red Bull Music Academy is the best in music, past & present, from around the world, under one roof, getting down just for the funk of it. It is an event that travels the world, a yearly celebration of all the journeys and breakthroughs, all the dreams and intricacies that go into the music we love.
Here on the 'tubes the RBMA mainly consists of
lectures,
interactive features, and
documentaries.
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jan 20, 2008 -
21 comments
Have a lazy sunday ahead of you? Feed your head with a few hundred downloadable and streamable
BBC Documentaries, uploaded by a single usenet user. I've only watched the majestic and sometimes depressing
The Planets and can't wait to go watch more.
posted by empath
on Jul 1, 2007 -
22 comments
Back in 1964, a documentary was commissioned by Granada Television called
Seven Up!, which aimed to test the old Jesuit maxim “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” by studying the lives of a group of children from various backgrounds to see how their lives would develop. Every seven years thereafter, director
Michael Apted has returned to see where their lives have taken them, in a series of films known as
The Up Series. You can read a great
overview of the series here. Some have followed the path expected of them. Others have moved halfway across the world.
Some have even set up their own webpage! And others still, like Neil, have found that getting to
what may be your calling in life often requires you to take a signifcant detour,
as this video from the latest edition, 49 Up, shows.
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 1, 2007 -
79 comments
Radio Lab! Already listened to everything This American Life offers or maybe looking for something a bit smarter and full of science? Maybe you'll like
Radio Lab. Maybe you'll like the mind-blowing and historically expanding episode on
music. Maybe
older history is your cup of tea -- how about
biblical times and how they sit in shoeboxes in Oxford. A stack of shows available via podcast, MP3 download
(and some .RAM, sorry).
posted by Ogre Lawless
on Oct 13, 2006 -
11 comments
