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Right in time for the weekend… Working in partnership with Stella Artois, TheAuteurs.com is now featuring a selection of its favorite films that have played at the Cannes Film Festival.
The lineup, including many prize winners, features movies by Federico Fellini (Amarcord), Wong Kar-wai (Happy Together), Michelangelo Antonioni (L’avventura), Jacques Tati (Mon oncle), and others. There are nine movies in total, filmed between 1958 and 2008. And they’re free until June. These films should be available worldwide, but registration is required. Kick back and start watching here.
For more great classics, see our collection of Free Movies Online.
Cannes for Free! is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Here’s a little nugget for you. The great inventor Thomas Edison visited the home of Mark Twain in 1909, and captured footage of “the father of American literature” (says Faulkner) walking around his estate and playing cards with his daughters, Clara and Jean. The film is silent and deteriorated. But it’s apparently the only known footage of the author who gave us Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain would die the next year. Quite the find by @ebertchicago
Find us on Twitter at @openculture or on Facebook here.
Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison (1909) is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Lots of new archives have been coming online lately. So, why not give them a quick mention.
CSPAN: This week, the American cable network finally completed the digitization of its vast video archive. What does that mean for you? It means you can access online every C-SPAN program aired since 1987. 160,000 hours of video in total, covering 23 years of American political history. The Times has more on this story.
Popular Science: Thanks to Google, you can now freely access a 137-year archive of Popular Science. As PopSci, founded in 1872, writes, “Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives.” If you spend some time with Brain Picking’s recent post, you’ll see why the PopSci archive holds so much interest. As a side note, you can also find a vast archive of Popular Mechanics via Google Books. Just click here and, as Wired put it, ”let the nerdgasmic loss of productivity commence.”
Spin Magazine: Google Books has also added to its virtual magazine shelf every issue of Spin, the music magazine Bob Guccione Jr. founded in 1985. As BoingBoing mentions today, it’s interesting to see “how awfully dated the design of the magazine is.”
Salman Rushdie: Now this isn’t a publicly available archive, but it’s worth knowing about. Archivists at Emory have been working with the digital assets of Salman Rushdie and developing a new field — “digital archaeology” — that will help scholars preserve and methodically study the digital remains (text documents, emails, browser logs and files) of writers and artists. You can watch Rushdie talk about the project, its challenges and benefits. (There’s another clip of him speaking here.) Then you have the archivists themselves talking about how they’re preserving Rushdie’s literary remains, down to the yellow sticky notes he attached to his computer. (Note: The Times has a piece on this project this week.)
New Magazine & Video Archives Coming Online is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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A couple of days ago, we featured a video posted on Penguin’s YouTube Channel that used a smart video technique to restore faith in the future of book publishing. A couple of our readers were quick to point out that the video’s creative element was highly similar to an award-winning video called “Lost Generation”. (See above.) And yet there was no attribution. A problem? Particularly for an entity in the intellectual property/copyright business?
UPDATE: Tonight, another reader tells us that “Lost Generation” has its own origins in a 2006 advertisement for Argentinian presidential candidate Ricardo Lopez Murphy called “The Truth.” Does this make this style of video a meme of sorts? A style that’s so out there that attribution is not worth a bother? Perhaps I’m holding Penguin’s feet too close to the fire on this one. Perhaps (as, Maria, a blogger colleague mentions via email) this highlights a bigger problem. Too much derivation. Not enough original thinking all around.
The End of Attribution? is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Robert Sapolsky – one of the world’s leading neurobiologists, a MacArthur Fellow, Stanford professor, and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers — breaks down an intriguing question. Precisely in what ways are we (humans) different from other animals inhabiting our world? The differences are fewer than we think. But there are some, and they’ll make you sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes a little more confident in humanity, and sometimes motivated to change the world, even in these cynical times. The inspiration happens during the last minute. So stay with this engaging talk until the very last.
The Uniqueness of Humans is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Smart and hopeful. But you need to stick with it for a couple of minutes. A job well done…
The End of Publishing. Or Is It? is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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BigThink asked Dr. Michio Kaku to sum up Einstein’s legacy in a nutshell. Above, you get his attempt in a quick minute. Obviously, this is just beginning to scratch the surface, and knowing you, you want to go deeper. So here you go: Leonard Susskind, a world famous physicist, offered a series of six courses for Stanford Continuing Studies, which traced the arc of modern physics. It goes from Newton to Black Holes. Naturally a tour of modern physics wouldn’t be complete without spending a good amount of time on Einstein, and that’s what Susskind does. One course (runs about 20 hours) is dedicated to Special Relativity (iTunes – YouTube) and the other focuses exclusively on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (iTunes - YouTube). This series of courses (all permanently found in the Physics section of our Free Online Course collection) has been enjoyed by viewers across the world, and we (at Stanford) have recently shipped CDs of the course to remote places with minimal bandwidth, including Nepal and Afghanistan. For more on how to learn physics online (for free, of course), see our post: Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction.
Einstein in 60 Seconds (or 40 Hours) is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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During the past decade, Tony Judt emerged as one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He’s combative, often controversial (especially when talking about Israel), and sometimes disliked. But he’s taken seriously. And many have had nothing but sheer praise for his master work, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. The NYU historian had built up a career that many envied. But then things started going wrong … physically, not intellectually. In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. And he made his diagnosis widely known earlier this year, when he published an essay, “Night,” in The New York Review of Books. The article is short, but it brings you right inside his daily experience. He writes:
During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.
But then comes the night. … If I allow a stray limb to be mis-placed, or fail to insist on having my midriff carefully aligned with legs and head, I shall suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night. I am then covered, my hands placed outside the blanket to afford me the illusion of mobility but wrapped nonetheless since—like the rest of me—they now suffer from a permanent sensation of cold. I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed…and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.
This experience hasn’t slowed down Judt a bit. In fact, quite the opposite, Judt has been ramping up his publications, proving even more prolific than before. (His latest book, Ill Fares the Land, will be published this week.) Judt’s battle with ALS and his sense of intellectual urgency get discussed in the latest edition of New York Magazine. It’s a piece well worth reading. So also is the large profile that ran in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January. Above we feature an interview with Judt posted by The Guardian.
Tony Judt, Leading Public Intellectual, Confronts ALS is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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March 15th. It translates to the Ides of March on the Roman Calendar. And it’s the date when Julius Caesar was famously assassinated in 44 B.C. To mark the occasion (today is the Ides of March), we bring you a dramatic, six-minute clip of the assassination scene from the film version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1953. The scene features Louis Calhern as Caesar, John Gielgud as Cassius and James Mason as Brutus. The film also stars Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, but we only get a fleeting glimpse of him in this scene as the plotters contrive to separate him from Caesar.
Note: You can download a free audio version of Shakespeare’s play thanks to Librivox, or get a free etext here. And if you have an iPhone, feel free to download a free app that includes all of Shakespeare plays.
Mike, one of our faithful readers, gets all of the cred for this one! Many thanks.
Julius Caesar Gets Clipped 2054 Years Ago Today is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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This weekend, The Guardian film critic and select filmmakers listed their favorite movie scenes of all time. It starts with the iconic shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (above). No surprise there. And then what? The very long car chase from The French Connection, Robet DeNiro’s talking to the mirror scene in Taxi Driver, the memorable last minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, Brian DePalma’s “blood at the prom” scene in Carrie, and some other memorable ones.
The Greatest Film Scenes Ever Shot is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Guaranteed to make you smarter, or your money back. You can follow us on Twitter here. (Or become a Facebook fan.) Here they go:
- RT @BoingBoing: Most beautiful bookstore – Buenos Aires’s Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid http://bit.ly/c5iapa
- RT @Alyssa_Milano: Two new MIT classes focus on helping #Haiti: http://is.gd/aa43H (via @brainpicker)
- RT @guardianculture: “Solar” by Ian McEwan http://bit.ly/dpqBAq
- RT @kirstinbutler: View human history’s greatest hits in 3-D http://humanorigins.si.edu/ The Smithsonian’s Human Origins Initiative
- RT @courosa: McLuhan interview from 1967 – http://bit.ly/HvVuv – much of this wisdom from 1967, while repeated , has yet to catch on.
- French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment in 1951: http://bit.ly/cEDEV5
- RT @GuardianBooks: Google partners with Italy for groundbreaking book scanning deal http://bit.ly/dxVwE7
- Looking for avant-garde film & video? Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, etc. Visit @ubuweb http://bit.ly/amomfw
- RT @philosophybites: Notes and links from the Tate Modern Classic Aesthetics course (Plato, then Hume) on www.artandallusion.com
- RT @dylanschenker: Watch The Academy Award Winning Animated Short ‘Logorama’ Online http://bit.ly/9yUvQw
- RT @freemusicarchiv: http://freemusicarchive.org now hosts over 18,000 free & legal mp3s curated by @wfmu @cbcradio3 @creativecommons & more
- Chopin’s 1848 piano played for his 200th birthday: http://bit.ly/9zyhZR Thanks Leisha
- Historian Tony Judt’s struggle with ALS (and his recent intellectual life) chronicled in New York Magazine. http://bit.ly/a8hT1W
- Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World: http://bit.ly/bgyZay Presented originally via @Longnow
- @ScottSigler “Who Needs You, Big Publishing? How Authors Can Own All Rights and Make More Money” http://bit.ly/diR2xV (via @sethharwood
- RT @EliseBlackwell: Don DeLillo on Samuel Beckett: http://bit.ly/9GuwMg (via @RhysTranter)
- RT @heoj: i love this article! Algebra in Wonderland http://nyti.ms/aaPH9w
- Spoken Verse YouTube Channel – http://bit.ly/aRTRkn – added to our Smart YouTube collection: http://bit.ly/SouTb Thanks Ryan for the tip.
Culture Tweets of the Week – March 13 is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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My old home town in time lapse video. Thanks Ian for the excellent find. Have a good weekend all.
A Day in the Life of New York City is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Christopher Hitchens — he’s an irritant to the left (a big defender of the bungled Iraq war) and to the right (an atheist who wrote the controversial bestseller God is Not Great). He’s an equal opportunity polemicist. Now, in the April edition of Vanity Fair, he’s back. This time, he’s deconstructing the Ten Commandments and offering his own updated set of commandments for our modern times. I’m normally not the biggest Hitchens fan. But, I’m on board with the gist of his guiding principles.
via @KirstinButler
Christopher Hitchens Revises the Ten Commandments is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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The Twilight Zone aired between 1959 and 1964, and it became one of America’s iconic television shows. Although the program ended long ago, the show lives on today … on the radio. Airing on 200 stations across the US, Twilight Zone Radio dramatizes Rod Serling’s classic scripts for today’s radio audiences. And it does it with help of actor Stacy Keach, the show’s host, and celebrities (Jason Alexander, Ed Begley Jr., etc.) playing lead roles in the dramas. You can catch the show on the radio (find your local radio station here). Or, right now, you can download three free episodes of past shows. Each runs about 40 minutes, and, if you find yourself hungering for more, you can always purchase individual episodes from the Twilight Zone Radio archive for $1.95.
On a related note, be sure to see our previous post: Orson Welles Vintage Radio
Twilight Zone Radio: Download Free Episodes is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Note: Some language is NOT safe for work…
This past weekend, François Alaux and Herve de Crecy’s 17 minute film, Logorama, won the Oscar for the best Short Film (Animated). The plot comes basically boils down to this: “In a world made up entirely of trademarks and brand names, Michelin Man cops pursue a criminal Ronald McDonald.” Obviously, there is some commentary here on how corporations permeate American society. The film has been brought online by GarageTV. For more films, check out our collection of Free Movies Online.
via @dylanschenkler and theflickcast.com
Logorama: The Oscar Winning Animated Short Now Online is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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Fans of avant-garde art, take note. UbuWeb hosts a vast archive of online avant-garde media, and they’ve been doing it since 1996. The site features a large mp3 sound archive, alongside an extensive film/video collection where you’ll find some vintage clips. Take these items for example:
- Four American Composers: Philip Glass – Peter Greenaway’s documentary from 1983 takes you inside the work of John Cage, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, & Robert Ashley. The clip here features the Glass segment.
- Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man - This 47 minute documentary focuses on Argentina’s beloved author. As UBU writes, the documentary is a bit of everything — “part biography, part literary criticism, part hero-worship, part book reading, and part psychology.”
- La villa Santo Sospir – Jean Cocteau, the French poet, novelist and dramatist, also shot a movie or two. Here’s his 35-minute color film from 1952…
- Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit – A video diary of beat writer Allen Ginsberg’s final days before death, and the days following.
- The Violence of the Image – Jean Baudrillard lectures at the European Graduate School.
- Un Chant d’Amour – French writer Jean Genet’s only film from 1950. Because of its explicit (though artistically presented) homosexual content, the 26-minute movie was banned and disowned by Genet later in his life, says UBU.
- Warhol’s Cinema – A Mirror for the Sixties – A 64-minute documentary on Andy Warhol’s cinema of the sixties, made in association with The Factory, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art.
This is just a quick sample of what UBU has to offer. You can dig deeper into their avant-garde media collection here. As you’ll see, the video quality can be a little uneven. But if you can’t get to a real arts cinema, then this is not a bad fallback resource.
Avant-Garde Media: The UbuWeb Collection is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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video/x-msvideo (733 808 ko) Professors are increasingly souring on students bringing their laptops to class. Some are banning them. (The Washington Post has more on that.) And some are banning them emphatically. Like the physics professor from the University of Oklahoma. (Watch the video above.) What’s the solution? Maybe this student has the right idea (said in jest).
Making the Case Against Laptops … With Liquid Nitrogen is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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The average American spends a good 100 minutes per day commuting to and from work. (More on that here.) That amounts to about 433 hours per year! Now imagine using that time to learn something new — to read a great book, to take a class from a top university, to learn a new language. To make a sharper you. Below, we highlight our free audio resources that will maximize your drive time. Before getting started, make sure you have a big mp3 player and a way to listen to your mp3 player over your car speakers. Unless you commute by subway or bus, using earbuds is generally unsafe, and often illegal.
Free Resources:
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your drive time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and many more. You can download these classic books straight to your mp3 player, then listen as you drive.
Free Courses: This list brings together over 275 free courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines. As you drive, you can immerse yourself in free courses in history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. All of these courses are available in audio.
Free Foreign Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your personal check list. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 37 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready for your drive. You’ll start speaking that new language in no time.
Ideas & Culture Programs: In this audio collection, we have gathered some of the most intellectually stimulating programs, covering the worlds of thought, film, music, books, etc. These programs will keep you thinking and culturally up-to-date. Most programs feature new daily episodes.
Science Podcasts: Maybe you’re already steeped in the liberal arts and want to get more comfortable with the world of science. Here’s a good place to start. This page includes a long list of entertaining science programs. Neuroscience, astronomy, medicine, Einstein, National Geographic. They’re all here, waiting for you.
Open Culture iPhone App: A little something special for iPhone users. When you download our free iPhone app, you can take with you, wherever you go, the items listed above. Just connect to Wi-Fi (Apple says so), download as many audio files as you want, then take them on the road, and you’re good to go.
Paid Resources: We love all things free. You know that. But sometimes paid resources deliver the goods. Here are two paid resources that I frequently end up using during my travels.
The Teaching Company: This company travels across the U.S. and records great professors lecturing on great topics. Although you can purchase these polished courses in multiple formats — Video DVD, Audio CD, Audio Tape, etc., — I generally go for the courses produced in a downloadable mp3 format. They’re cheaper and more portable. What course am I listening to right now? The History of Ancient Egypt. Please note that the company often runs sales. So if you don’t see a course at a nice price, just give it some time and a good deal will usually come along. Be sure to keep a close eye on their “On Sale” page.
Audible.com: If you’re into contemporary books, then give Audible a visit. They have the widest collection of new books on the market, and they make it easy to download books to your mp3 player. In fact, they support iPod, iPhone, Blackberry and 500 other devices. Books can be bought a la carte, or through an annual subscription. If you start a 14 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download a free audio book of your choice. At the end of 14 days, you can decide whether to stick with the subscription plan or not. Regardless of your decision, you can keep the free audio book. It’s a no risk way of trying out Audible’s service.
This post was inspired by Lifehacker’s piece from earlier today: Top 10 Tips and Tools for Commuters.
Getting Smart During Your Daily Commute is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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A quick heads up for book lovers: Goodreads is a large social network for readers, with over 3,000,000 members who review, recommend and swap books. The site also features “book-give-aways” for its members. This month you can enter to win a free copy of If You Follow Me, a novel by Malena Watrous, a talented colleague of mine at Stanford. About the book one reviewer said: It’s “the kind of book you finish and then clutch to your heart as you run around telling everyone you know that they have to read it.” The book is hitting the bookstore shelves today, and you can sign up to win a free copy until March 16.
PS Malena will be teaching an online writing course through Stanford Continuing Studies this spring. The course, called The Creative Writing Coach, is open to all. Meanwhile, we’re also piloting our first online humanities course, a philosophy course called Envisioning the Good Life. Watch the video introduction for the course here.
GoodReads is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
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