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Some Resources from the Internet Archive

Posted in Uncategorized on May 8th, 2008

Features Films on the Internet Archive

he list includes some amazing films like Akira Kurosawa’s multi-perspective masterpiece Rashomon; D.O.A. -the classic Film Noir starring Edmund O’Brien; Fritz Lang’s German masterpiece M and his Hollywood Noir Scarlet Street; Charlie Chaplin’s first full-length feature The Kid; the depression era classic My Man Godfrey; classic exploitation films from the 1930s like Sex Madness and Reefer Madness; the unedited version of They Call Me Trinity -a Spaghetti Western starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer; what many believe to be the first narrative film The Great Train Robbery; and the list goes on and on…

Delicious/jgroom/iearchivemovies

An idea I had a while back centers around a public domain film course. The logic is to organize several of these movies into a hands-on curriculum wherein students can have structured space to both analyze the history of film along the lines of genre, film form, stylistics, etc. as well as incorporating a lab element wherein they get their hands dirty by re-editing, re-mixing, and mashing up selected films as a way of using this unbelievable archive to give students a more immediate relationship to the art, craft, and beauty of film making. (Read more here.)

Rick Prelinger blogged last year about the Industrial and Sponsored Film Course being offered at NYU during the Fall 2007 semester. Most of the films on the syllabus were freely available on the Internet Archive.

The Prelinger Archive Mashups

What happens when you make close to 2,000 ephemeral public domain films freely available on the Web? People make art and more films are born!

Here’s a sample of films created with Prelinger Archives footage and uploaded to the Internet Archive. However, Rick Prelinger suspects thousands more are uploaded on other video sites. If you have a video you created using footage from the Prelinger Archives, please let us know so we can include it here. (Link to Prelinger Mashups Archive.)