Showing posts with label free film downloads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free film downloads. Show all posts

Monday, 15 January 2018

Links to Free Online Streaming Platforms for Films and Moving Image Work

Last updated January 17, 2018
Temperatūra ne pagal Celsijų / Off Gauge Temperature (Almantas Grikevičius, 1973)
Recommended by Herb Shellenberger. Click on CC in the frame above to switch on English subtitles.

Film Studies For Free brings you an entry that has come about because of a piece of Facebook crowdsourcing by film curator extraordinaire Herb Shellenberger. Shellenberger requested from his friends any links they had to free online streaming platforms for films and moving image work. He was especially interested in ones that are run by archives, and most interested in those outside the US/UK.

A wonderful list of links was rapidly assembled to a wide variety of international platforms, only some of which FSFF has tweeted or blogged about before. So, courtesy of Shellenberger and his friends, below is the list (with acknowledgement given to the individual suggesting each link - thanks especially to Patrick Friel for his extensive contribution, along with Herb).

If you have any further suggestions to make for the list, please use the Comments thread below.

Note: OpenCulture.com also has a great list of free online films, and currently links to at least two of the channels suggested by the crowdsourcing above). It sourced its list from the following collections: Public domain collection of film noir at Archive.org - Boing Boing; The Best: Movies in the Public Domain - Wired; Films in the Public Domain - Wikipedia; Fimoculous list of Hulu Movies; About.com: Download the Classics; Salon: The Future is Almost Now.
Temperatūra ne pagal Celsijų / Off Gauge Temperature (Almantas Grikevičius, 1973)
Recommended by Herb Shellenberger.
Online at the Lithuanian documentary films website, run by Meno Avilys: http://sinemateka.lt 
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Tuesday, 31 August 2010

Full Length Feature Films Free Online via BFI and Daily Motion


Film Studies For Free can't believe its eyes!!

The British Film Institute has entered into a partnership with the advertising-supported, video-streaming site Daily Motion to provide access to some of the incredible wealth of films that the BFI has funded and distributed over many years.

Currently, as of today, the new channel is hosting 47 films of varying lengths, from amazing silents to rare poetic documentaries (like Chris Petit's Radio On), as well as some incredibly important live action and animated fiction films, including a number of otherwise hard to see works by Terrence Davies and Lotte Reininger.

A must-visit site and a hugely laudable resource. Thank you BFI.
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Sunday, 4 July 2010

On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day!

Film Studies For Free is off on its annual holiday. 
Back in two weeks. Hasta entonces, lectores queridos



Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies at University of Warwick and author of White and The Matter of Images will join Todd Haynes to discuss issues raised by his work and the Hopper film programme at the Tate Modern, London, June 4, 2004.

In the first of a two-part interview, Reel Report speaks to maverick American director Todd Haynes about his latest movie I'm Not There, an unconventional rock biopic about the life of music legend Bob Dylan. Haynes talks about the challenges of telling Dylan's story, casting the six very different actors who play Dylan, and how he plans to take on the Bush administration with his next project (December 7, 2007).


In the second part of Reel Report's two-part interview with Todd Haynes, director of I'm Not There, the rock biopic about the life of Bob Dylan, we talk more generally about aspects of his filmmaking. In particular we ask him about his unique way of story-telling, his approach to the concept of film genres and whether his sexuality has an effect on his ability to interpret characters (December 18, 2007).

On this very appropriate day, Film Studies For Free honours Todd Haynes, a true and truly wonderful American independent filmmaker, with links, above and below, to great videos and many freely accessible and high quality online studies of his work.

Haynes is a big favourite at this blog, and why wouldn't he be as one of the most "cinema-studies literate" filmmakers working today. Here's looking forward to his forthcoming reworking of that Film Studies classic Mildred Pierce...



 Cornell Cinema events May 6, 2008





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Monday, 20 April 2009

Werner Herzog Links inc YouTube Fest

Film Studies For Free wanted to let academic fans of Werner Herzog know that (certainly in the UK, but most probably elsewhere, too, if no geoblocking) they can currently watch eight of his films on YouTube in their glorious entirety. This is thanks to the video distributor Starzmedia, one of the companies participating in YouTube's growing efforts to stream full-length films with the support of the movie companies who own the rights. Below, FSFF has embedded the trailers of seven of the Herzog films that are currently available. Click on the titles to visit the YouTube pages for the full-length films, which can be watched freely online in relatively good quality versions (Even YouTube Screens Started Small...). (Click HERE for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser added later. The Starzmedia channel for Herzog is HERE).

And, if that weren't enough excitement for one FSFF day, beneath the video-trailers, at the foot of this post, are some other choice links to freely available Herzog material online.

Aguirre The Wrath Of God



My Best Fiend





Even Dwarfs Started Small





Fitzcarraldo





Lessons Of Darkness





Woyzeck





Little Dieter Needs To Fly





Scholarly online writing about Herzog:

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Saturday, 14 February 2009

How Do You Know It's Love? Because it's from the Prelinger Archive


How Do You Know It's Love? (dir. Ted Peshak, 1950 - Coronet Instructional Films), here in a YouTube version with commentary by Josh Way. The full-length version, thankfully without the mocking voiceover, Mystery Science Theater 3000-style, is available at the Internet Archive as part of the Prelinger Archives. Sadly, it couldn't be embedded in this post.

What is love in this digital age, ponders Film Studies For Free on this fine Valentine's Day morn? Plenty of answers to that question, as well as to others of equal and greater import, are freely accessible at the Internet Archive, courtesy of the Prelinger Archives' treasure trove of Coronet Instructional Films.

The video embedded above is an adorable teen-example of Coronet's instructional genre, but also see Dating: Do's and Don'ts, Marriage Is a Partnership, Are You Popular?, Going Steady? and Communism:

Coronet Instructional Films were shown in American schools starting in about 1941. The company was an offshoot of Coronet Magazine, a digest-sized magazine that itself was owned by Esquire, Inc. Owner David Smart was deeply interested in visual education and the power of the film to teach and convince, and built a full studio on his estate in Glenview, Illinois, where at its height hundreds of films were cranked out each year. The films were sold to schools and libraries by a network of distributors and were quite successful -- in 1976 Coronet celebrated its sale of 1 million prints.

The archive collection that has publicly offered up these online video versions of the Coronet Films truly merits, and has won, Film Studies For Free's undying love. Indeed, the Prelinger Archives are ones that have been painstakingly built up as a labour of love for and devotion to otherwise rarely preserved films. The Internet Archive stores digitized versions of over 2,000 key titles from the collection for free downloading and reuse - an amazing resource for academics and all those fascinated by the crazy hinterland of the mainstream film world.

For a fascinating account of how writer, archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger set up his collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films, see A Short History of Prelinger Archives, Part I . You should also experience Rick Prelinger's Panorama Ephemera at Vectors Journal. And if you'd like to be as inspired by Prelinger's digital and other activism as FSFF is, then watch the two videos below. As for this (very platonically-) enamoured blog, it sends a dozen, red e-roses though the blogosphere to the rather fabulous (and very well partnered) Mr Prelinger, in admiration of all his valuable work.


'Interview in San Francisco, April 2007. Here, Rick Prelinger explains why he used the films from his collection to form the biggest moving image archive on the internet. He talks of his offline library, and how all the above relates to the matter of serendipity in a query-driven information environment.'


'San Francisco, April 2007. Here, Prelinger underlines how innovative technology opens up new visions of the possible, but stresses that its ultimate effect is contingent on other factors. Many media platforms simply die and are not heard from again. Regarding copyright, Rick describes its emergence from an esoteric subject to a consumer issue, but emphasizes that from the point of view of cultural production, access to original materials will go on being more important than copyright issues in most cases. In closing, he calls for a dialogue between users and producers of culture, to establish a new compact.'
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Wednesday, 12 November 2008

Documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law: free e-book and short films

The above great little comic book can currently be downloaded for free in a new and expanded edition from the Duke University Press website.

Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins takes a humorous look at copyright and fair use issues in relation to filmmaking. The book has a new foreword by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (Director of An Inconvenient Truth) and a new introduction by award-winning novelist and copyright activist Cory Doctorow.

Here's the blurb about the book (which was available, in its earlier, shorter edition, through Google Books) from the Duke University Press website:

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the Rocky theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? Eyes on the Prize, the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound by Law? reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.
The book is the fruit of the pioneering Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Do check out their fabulous website which, among many other resources (webcasts and online articles about fair use), has the following downloadable short films (via RealPlayer):

If you are a budding documentary filmmaker, or if you are teaching the next generation of budding documentarians, Film Studies For Free thinks that you should definitely check out all of the above resources.

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