Over the last month or so I have been scouring the Internet Archive for pubic domain films. Below are 31 of the 38 movies I bookmarked in del.icio.us that are currently available at Internet Archive del.icio.us seems to be balking the feed after 31 entries for some reason). To see all 38 go here. The 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…
I will be building a number of these films into an idea I had that 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. Moreover, we can really start to experiment with and think through the implications of writing papers for a course with the very films themselves. An exciting conflation of the creative and analytical process of producing coursework by editing the arguments filmically. This is all made possible by the abundance of open, mashable, and freely distributed resources we have at our fingertips -isn’t it about time we started to take advantage of it?
A list of feature films freely available at the Internet Archive
Delicious/jgroom/archive.org
- View National Film Registry Picks « What’s New at the Internet Archive 5 Jan 2009
Each December, the United States National Film Preservation Board chooses up to 25 films they deem worthy of taking special action to preserve in the Library of Congress….3 of the 2008 picks can be viewed on the Archive as well as nearly 40 picks from years past. Take a look at what the filmphiles of the United States work to preserve. - Internet Archive: Details: Panorama Ephemera 16 Dec 2008
PANORAMA EPHEMERA (2004, 89:35 min., color and black and white) is a collage of sequences drawn from a wide variety of ephemeral (industrial, advertising, educational and amateur) films, touring the conflicted landscapes of twentieth-century America. The films' often-skewed visions construct an American history filled with horror and hope, unreeling in familiar and unexpected ways. - Internet Archive: Details: Negativland’s Over The Edge Freeform Radio Presents “The Death of Circuit Bending” 22 Oct 2008
Doing its best to harbinge the demise of all "cool" and "hip" artforms over the last 25 years (look where Siderealism went after OTE got a hold of it in 1988…) Over the Edge Radio will skillfully toss into the Dustbins of History's Musical Curiosities the current craze of Circuit Bending. - Internet Archive: Details: Assignment: Venezuela 21 Oct 2008
Tells the story of an American oil company executive who relocates with his family to Venezuela. - Internet Archive: Details: The Mystery Of The Leaping Fish 27 Sep 2008
Coke Ennyday, the scientific detective, divides his own time in periods for "Sleep", "Eat", "Dope" and "Drink". In fact he's used to overcome every situation with drugs: consuming it to increase his energies or injecting it in his opponents to KO them. To help the police he discovers a contraband of opium (which he eagerly tastes) transported with "… - Internet Archive: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die 6 Jun 2008
Awesome, good to know this is on the Internet Archive. - Modernism « What’s New at the Internet Archive 28 May 2008
… - Justice League of Public Domain Victorian Characters? 10 May 2008
From the "What;s New at the Internet Archive?" blog… - Patriot Act gag-order on the Internet Archive clobbered by EFF and ACLU - Boing Boing 7 May 2008
A court case has forced the FBI to withdraw its gag order against the Internet Archive, brought down after the Archive was served with a Patriot Act "National Security Letter" warrant that asked for personal information about one of the Archive's users. - Internet Archive: Day Called X, A (Part I) 23 Apr 2008
embedding and help Dramatized atomic evacuation of Portland, Oregon. - Internet Archive: Journey to Banana Land 23 Apr 2008
United Fruit's paternalistic vision of Central America and its banana business. - Internet Archive: Terrible Truth, The 23 Apr 2008
Early (and sensational) film on marijuana use as a route to heroin addiction. - Internet Archive: Destination Earth 23 Apr 2008
In this corporate-sponsored cartoon, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great. - Internet Archive: Shopping Can Be Fun: A New Concept in Merchandising 20 Apr 2008
How the Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo, California increased traffic with a sophisticated program of advertising and promotion. Excellent footage of stores and shoppers in an upscale suburb. Some footage from this film was used in IN THE SUBURBS. - | alien_pizza 16 Apr 2008
This seems to be an offshot of the internet archive project for the Italian 201 class, and boy does it make me happy. Genius!!!
You can subscribe to the RSS feed for all the public domain movies I come across click here.
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Netflix is safe, though, as long as copyright is continuously/infinitely extended. Perhaps that’s a good thing, though, since most recently-released films are such dreck… Can’t WAIT until I can grab my copy of The Emperor’s New Groove from archive.org…
You should check out RetroTV.com, which hosts free many public domain movies not listed here, including these noirs:
Detour (1945)
The Red House (1947)
Whistle Stop (1946)
Impact (1949)
Quicksand (1950)
Kansas City Confidential (1952)
The Stranger (1946)
Suddenly (1954)
Some can be downloaded using the Azureus Bit-Torrent Client.
Full details in this post from my FilmsNoir.Net blog:
http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/extra-extra-free-movies-to-download.html
Excellent additions. I actually went to the retroTV site fro your blog a week or so ago when you posted and tried the bit-Torrent for The Red House. Unfortunately it was not really impressive quality. Moreover, seems like some of the movies are in Windows Media format -making them virtually unusable for me. I would like to see the full “DVD quality” versions via bit=torrent, which is definitely the right way to distribute these. The RetroTV site mentions this for the DivX versions, but I haven’t really seen the quality increase for The Red House which was an avi file and I imagine DivX encoded. As of now, I am downloading the full versions from Internet Archive (which takes forever) and watching them via the VLC player -which works well for now. However, I may have to re-visit the RetroTV site soon and see if I am missing something, or at least stop the bitching and host my own bit-torrent files of some other films that they aren’t seeding to join in, share the goodness, and get the compression/quality issues perfected.
The trick for me anyway, is to feed the movie onto my standard definition Plasma TV from my Media Center PC, and it comes up roses…
Btw, sorry I omitted to say Great Post!