Aimee Mann - Save me

The music video, shot during the filming of Magnolia, was directed by the film’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson, and uses many of the film’s actors including Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Tom Cruise. The video inserts Mann into various scenes from the film as she performs the song. Unlike in many such music videos, there was no digital manipulation involved; the scenes were shot at the end of filming days with Mann and actors who were asked to stay in place.

Placebo - Protège-moi

Controversial director Gaspar Noe created this homage to the orgy scene from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) for a single from Placebo’s greatest hits album. In one fluid take the camera follows a pair of young girls through various sexual pairings before having sex in a corner.

Noé later stated in an interview that this video was the only short film where he had been given complete creative control. Not surprisingly the video was never officially released as it was too sexually explicit to be shown.

Making 'The Shining'

Stanley Kubrick allowed his then 17-year-old daughter, Vivian, to make a documentary about the production of The Shining. Created originally for the BBC television show Arena, this documentary offers rare insight into the shooting process of a Kubrick film.

Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair (Guy Maddin, 2009)

The basis for Guy Maddin’s Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair  is blasting Isabella Rossellini out of an electric chair over and over again. Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair, part of the Urban Screens series at the festival, which is projecting three works onto office buildings throughout the city. It’s an archetypal Maddin film, conflating sex, death and film history in a manic seven minutes.

Eva (Gaspar Noe, 2005)

3 Short films made by Gaspar Noe starring Eva Herzigova and created for le Grand Journal de Canal + at Cannes Filmfestival 2005.

No One Will Play with Me (Werner Herzog, 1976)

A short film by Werner Herzog. The film focuses on a boy, Martin, who is outcast from the other children at his school. The film was made with pre-school children in Munich, and is partially based on true stories which Herzog heard from the children themselves. The use of a raven as a central plot element was inspired by the story of the raven from Herzog’s earlier film The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner.

The film can be seen below:

Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun (Werner Herzog, 1989)

Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun (German: Wodaabe - Die Hirten der Sonne) is a documentary film by Werner Herzog. The film explores the social rituals and cultural celebrations of the Saharan nomadic Wodaabe tribe. Particular focus is given to the Gerewol celebration, which features an elaborate male beauty contest to win wives.

Although the film may be considered to be ethnographic, Herzog commented that: "[My films] are anthropological only in as much as they try to explore the human condition at this particular time on this planet. I do not make films using images only of clouds and trees, I work with human beings because the way they function in different cultural groups interests me. If that makes me an anthropologist then so be it." The opening shots of the film depicts a celebration of male beauty, showing males dancing in elaborate costume, accentuating their height and whites of their eyes and teeth to attract females, as we hear "Ave Maria" in the background (a 1901 recording made by the last castrato of the Vatican).

God's Angry Man (Werner Herzog, 1983)

This documentary film revolves around Doctor Gene Scott, one of the more famous televangelists in California. He stars in a show where he exhibits a strong, aggressive temperament and talks about beatitude, urging his listeners to send sums of money to his church’s bank account. Scenes from this show alternate with a series of dialogues with the preacher in which he talks about himself and his private life.

The film was produced for television.

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

M (German: M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder) is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed more than a dozen films previously.

Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Metropolis, 1927 [2001 Restored Version]

Metropolis is a German expressionist film directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film was produced in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA). The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark. About $200 million in todays money.

Luminous People (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2007)

A trip along the Mekong River (on the border between Thailand and Laos) to scatter the ashes of a dead father. On the soundtrack, a crew-member recalls how his late father visited him in a dream. The presence of the dead, the memories of the living.

Thirdworld (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 1998)

"This film depicts landscapes, metaphorically and actuality, of the southern island called Panyi. It reflects the impression of the shooting time at the island for several days. The sounds are taken from different sources, but all were recorded while the subjects were not aware of the recording apparatus. Thus, this piece may be called a re-constructed documentary. The title is intended as a parody of the word that is being used by the West to describe Thailand or other exotic landscapes. This film is the voice from individuals who reside in such environment. The film is presented in crude and rugged quality, as it is a product from the uncivilized." -Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The film can be seen on Youtube: Part 1 | Part 2

Download the film here

Haiku (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)

To commemorate the 15th anniversary of Visions du Réel, the festival has asked select filmmakers for the gift of images, in the form of cinematic haikus. Each short film in the Haiku series is comprised of “three shots to contemplate reality and to capture, in the manner of Japanese poems, the unforeseeable, fleeting eternity of a moment, to be discovered at the beginning of each projection."

The Seafarers (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)

The Seafarers (1953) - Part 1

The Seafarers (1953) - Part 2

Stanley Kubrick's first film made in color. Lost for over 40 years! The documentary extolls the benefits of membership to the Seafarers International Union.

Although often referred to as a "documentary", this is actually a promotional film, made for the Seafarers International Union.

Flying Padre (Stanley Kubrick, 1951)

After Kubrick sold his first short film, the self-financed Day of the Fight, to RKO in 1951, the company advanced the 23-year-old filmmaker money to make a documentary short for their Pathe Screenliner series. Flying Padre was the result.

In an interview in 1969, Kubrick referred to Flying Padre as "silly".

Day of the Fight (Stanley Kubrick, 1951)

Day of the Fight is an American short subject documentary film shot in black-and-white and also the first picture directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick financed the film himself, and it is based on his pictorial for Look Magazine (January 18, 1949) entitled Prizefighter.

Kubrick and Alexander Singer (who acted as assistant director and a cameraman for this film) used daylight-loading Eyemo cameras that take 100-foot spools of 35mm black-and-white film to shoot the fight, with Kubrick shooting hand-held (often from below) and Singer's camera on a tripod.

The film cost Stanley Kubrick $3,900 to make and he sold it to RKO for $4,000.

Sky Arts Opera Shorts (with Werner Herzog, Sam Taylor-Wood, & Dougal Wilson)

Sky Arts and English National Opera have teamed up for a unique collaboration with leading figures from the visual arts to produce short films. Werner Herzog, Sam Taylor-Wood and Dougal Wilson’s short-films accompany a popular aria from ENO’s 2008/09 Sky Arts Season.

The varied body of work was produced to celebrate six years of Sky Arts’ season sponsorship of ENO and both organisations’ commitment to widening the appeal of opera. Set to recordings by ENO Orchestra conducted by ENO Music Director Edward Gardner, they feature singers Peter Auty, Geraint Dodd, Mary Plazas and Mark Stone.

The films shown in an exclusive documentary, Opera Shorts: Behind The Scenes, on Sky Arts. Featuring interviews with all three directors, and their films in full, the programme reveal the story behind this innovative project.

The short films can be seen below:

Precautions Against Fanatics (Werner Herzog, 1969)

Precautions Against Fanatics (German: Massnahmen gegen Fanatiker) is a short film by Werner Herzog filmed at a harness racing track near Munich, Germany. It was Herzog’s first film shot in color.

Remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark and letter from Spielberg

The first 10 minutes of shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Over the course of seven years in the 1980s, three young friends - Jayson Lamb, Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos - undertook the mammoth task of remaking their favourite movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981), shot-for-shot; even arranging a premiere for the finished piece in 1989, in a local auditorium. However, it was a hugely successful screening of the since-forgotten film in 2003, at the Butt-Numb-A-Thon festival in Austin, that began the buzz which led to the note below; a priceless letter of appreciation to the amateur filmmakers from the greatest source possible: Steven Spielberg.

from Tarantino to Brilliante Mendoza

Note above was written by Quentin Tarantino in May 2009 at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. In it, Tarantino congratulates fellow nominee Brilliante Mendoza on his film Kinatay, a movie which triumphed at the festival and beat Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds to win the Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director). 

A letter sent by Michael Powell to Martin Scorsese

(via)

That Moment: Magnolia Diary

A very in-depth documentary that follows the very over-worked director Paul Thomas Anderson through a gruelling 80+ days of shooting for the film Magnolia (1999). Very funny behind the scenes material and interviews, press junket video and various screenings and meetings are presented to us, just to let us know how hard it really is to make a 188-minute film.

This feature-length documentary is featured on the 2 disc DVD of Magnolia (1999) released in 2000.

Indonesian Exploitation Cinema

A 25-minute documentary on the Indonesian movie boom of the 1970s and early 1980s. If you've never explored Indonesian exploitation and horror filmmaking, this is a great documentary to get yourself familiar.

The rest of the videos can be seen below:

Birth of Cinema

The Cinema on the Road: A Personal Essay on Cinema in Korea (Jang Sun-woo, 1995)

Part 1

Produced as part of the BFI’s series of films commemorating the centennial of cinema, The Cinema on the Road is an extraordinarily unique look at the place of cinema and filmmaking in Korean society. Jang travels the length and breadth of Korea, interviewing both well-known film personalities and random individuals he meets in his travels. He finally ends up on Jindo Island, where a shaman, Kim Dae-rye, performs a traditional exorcism. Beginning with the Japanese occupation, moving through Korean military dictatorships, and now facing furious competition from Hollywood, Korean cinema has indeed, Jang implies, been plagued by a number of powerful demons. It’s time, the film says, to put them to rest.

The rest of the film can be seen below:

Doodlebug (Christopher Nolan, 1997)

Doodlebug, a short film by Christopher Nolan, 1997

Tribute to Eric Rohmer by Jean-Luc Godard

Tribute to Éric Rohmer (French: Hommage à Éric Rohmer) is a short 2010 video commissioned by Les Films du Losange as a tribute to Éric Rohmer by his friend and former colleague Jean-Luc Godard. It was first presented at the Soirée en hommage à Éric Rohmer on February 8, 2010 at the Cinémathèque Française.

The short film consists of various titles of articles that Rohmer wrote for Cahiers du Cinema appearing on a black background as Godard's narration muses about brief, fragmented memories of Rohmer. It ends with a shot of Godard looking directly into the camera, the 16:9 image's aspect ratio suddenly squished into 4:3, as he finishes his monologue.

Meetin' Woody Allen (Jean-Luc Godard, 1986)

Meetin’ Woody Allen is a 1986 short film by Jean-Luc Godard. In the film, he interviews his “old friend” Woody Allen. Throughout the film there are cuts in the interviews featuring photographs and film clips from Woody Allen’s films. The two of them talk about movies, life, relationships to other directors and actors and Woody’s past. The segments of the interview are separated by title cards, black cards and white type, a Woody Allen trademark. It runs for 26 minutes. The video can be seen below...

Une catastrophe by Jean-Luc Godard

Une catastrophe, Jean-Luc Godard's trailer for the 2008 Viennale.

Entitled Une catastrophe, the film is a kind of cinematographic poem about violence and love, conceived in Godard's characteristic montage and combination of cinematic material, sounds, language and music. It includes short excerpts from Eisensteins' Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the collective film People on Sunday (1930), accompanied by a Low German 18th-century poem from Western Pomerania with the lines: Kumm du um Middernach / Kumm du Klock een / Vader slöpt / Moder slöpt / ik slap alleen. Klopp an de Kammerdör / fat an de Klink. / Vader meent / Moder meent / dat deit de Wind

Foutaises (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1989, France)

Foutaises a.k.a. Things I Like, Things I Don't Like (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1989, France)

Dominique Pinon talks to the camera describing his likes and dislikes, ranging from the simple such as "I hate men with a beard but no moustache" to the more touching, "I like to think that after death can't be worse than before birth." Each of his examples is accompanied by a visual demonstration.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet reused this technique in his 2001 flim Amélie when introducing the characters.

Fantasmagorie (Émile Cohl, 1908, France)

Fantasmagorie, the very first animated film in the history of the cinema, by the french animator Emile Cohl, otherwise known as “The Father of the Animated Cartoon.” Produced by Gaumont, France, in 1908,  the film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look.

Cohl made over 250 films between 1908 and 1923, of which 37 survive in film archives. And several – Le cauchemar de Fantoche (1908) and The Hasher’s Delirium (1910) – appear right here on YouTube.

Kodak 1922 Kodachrome Film Test

A sample of some of the earliest color motion picture film.

This footage is from the George Eastman House collections. Preservation was completed by the museum's Motion Picture Department, a project of Sabrina Negri, a student in Eastman House's L. JeffreySelznick School of Film Preservation and a recipient of the Haghefilm Foundation Fellowship.

Alice in Wonderland (Cecil Hepworth, 1903)

Alice in Wonderland (Cecil Hepworth, 1903)

The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll's tale has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive from severely damaged materials. Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations. In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later, Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. Even the Cheshire cat is played by a family pet.

With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film's original colours for the first time in over 100 years.

Fuller and Pacino screentest

This is a Screentest for "The Godfather" performed by Samuel Fuller and Al Pacino.

My Best Friend's Birthday (Quentin Tarantino, 1987)

My Best Friend's Birthday is the first movie written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It was was shot on 16mm and made in between 1984 and 1987, and the original version clocked in at about 70 minutes long. The film had caught fire in a editing lab and most of the ending of the film was lost. The surviving part of the film can be seen above.

And you can also see the whole script here.

Diary (Tim Hetherington, 2010)

Diary (2010) the last short film by Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

"Diary is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.” -Tim Hetherington (British photojournalist and director of Academy Award-nominated documentary film Restrepo, who was killed in Libya.)

You can watch Diary above and also visit a slideshow of Hetherington’s photographic work here.

(via Open Culture)

Last film of Laurel & Hardy c.1956

This home movie was filmed in c. 1956 at the Reseda, California home of Stan Laurel’s daughter, Lois. It features Stan Laurel and his wife Ida Laurel, Oliver Hardy and his wife Virginia Jones, Andy Wade (who shot the film), Stan’s daughter Lois, her husband Rand Brooks and their children Randy and Laurie. (via)