Full Length Feature Films Free Online via BFI and Daily Motion

A Personal Journey with Scorsese

Uploaded by BFIfilms. - Check out other Film and TV videos.

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.

More about → Full Length Feature Films Free Online via BFI and Daily Motion

Happy birthday Albert Maysles! Videos and Other Links

[The video embedded above presents a conversation with] one of America's foremost non-fiction filmmakers, Albert Maysles who along with his brother David (1932-1987) is recognized as a pioneer of direct cinema, the distinctly American version of French cinéma vérité. Their seminal early films Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter(1970), and Grey Gardens (1976) became cult classics and are still finding new rapturous audiences. On the occasion of the publication of A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/Documents, Maysles screens selections from filmed portraits of Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, and Truman Capote, and takes audience questions (courtesy of Hammer Museum at UCLA, March 10, 2009 on YouTube).

'The documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles describes how using his digital video camera inspired him "to tape the little things that I witness in everyday life. They’d be pieces of poetry"', Aisling Kelliher, Everyday Cinema, MIT Media Lab

'We can see two types of truth here. One is the raw material, which is the footage, the kind of truth that you get in literature in diary form – it’s immediate, no one has tampered with it. Then there’s the other kind of truth that comes in extracting and juxtaposing the raw material into a more meaningful and coherent storytelling form, which finally can be said to be more than just raw data.' Stella Bruzzi citing Albert Maysles in 'The Talented Mr Ripley', EnterText 1.2, Spring 2001

It's Thanksgiving and Albert Maysles's birthday today. It's very much a poignant timing for the latter occasion as the artist (and partner to Christo) Jeanne-Claude (Denat de Guillebo), who featured in a series of the Maysles's Brothers' films, died on November 18, 2009. But, this year, Film Studies For Free is marking all three observances, and giving thanks for the Maysles's highly influential filmmaking, with its usual tribute of links, below, to high-quality scholarly and other interesting online resources, in addition to the great video embedded above.

Video and website resources:

• Albert Maysles interviewed about In Transit (with clips) at Index Magazine, 2008

• Albert Maysles's video interview at the People's Archive

• Kevin B. Lee's video essay on Grey Gardens (1975, Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer) with commentary by Vadim Rizov

• Shooting People's Albert Maysles Glasses website

• Grey Gardens Online - official website

• RealPlayer video of Albert Maysles with Christo and Jeanne-Claude

• Gimme Shelter at Google Video

• Elaine Heinzman, 'A Musical Trip to Grey Gardens', NPR, March 5, 2008

Interviews with or about the Maysles:

• Williams Cole, 'Uncontrolled Cinema: Albert Maysles', The Brooklyn Rail, July 2006

• Jonathan B. Vogels, 'Conversations with Scholars' series, Americana, Spring 2009

• Joy Yoon, 'Albert Maysles: The Ultimate Salesman', New Order, 2002

Scholarly/critical articles:

• Chloe Aaron, 'The Video Underground', Art in America, May 1971

• Søren Birkvad, 'A Battle for Public Mythology: History and Genre in the Portrait Documentary', Nordicom Review 2/2000
  

• Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray, 'Dark Days: A narrative of environmental adaptation', Jump Cut, No. 48, Winter 2006
  

• Tim O'Farrell, 'Review of Jonathan B Vogels, The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2005', Screening the Past, Vol. 20, 2006
  
•  
• Tim O’Farrell, 'No Direction Home: Looking Forward from Don’t Look Back', Senses of Cinema, 38, 2006

• H. Russell Searight, 'Review of: The Beales of Grey Gardens By Albert and David Maysles (Directors)'

• Warren Spector, 'Review of Salesman', Cinema Texas Program Notes, Vol. 14, No. 3, March 27, 1978

More about → Happy birthday Albert Maysles! Videos and Other Links

John Ellis: Film and TV Studies Resources Online

Image from A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

In yet another daring raid on a university research repository - this time, one based at Royal Holloway, University of London, home to a wonderful department of Media Arts - Film Studies For Free discovered three openly accessible articles by John Ellis, author of Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (1992), TV producer, and one of the most influential academics in the history of media theory and British cinema studies.

• John Ellis, Watching Death at Work: An Analysis of 'A Matter of Life and Death'. In: Powell, Pressburger and Others. British Film Institute, London 1978, pp. 79-104
• John Ellis, Documentary and truth on television: The crisis of 1999. In: New challenges for documentary. University of Manchester, Manchester, 2005
• John Ellis, The past as television: are television programmes more than nostalgic ephemera. In: Fare storia con la televisione. Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2006, pp. 167-172
  

FSFF then extended its search for other online research items by Ellis and found the following:

• John Ellis, 'Free Cinema', in J Ellis (ed.), 1951-1976: BFI Productions, London: BFI, 1977
• John Ellis, 'Study Aid to 'The Holy Family Album' (a half hour programme written by Angela Carter and broadcast on UK's Channel 4 on 3 December 1991 as part of the 'Without Walls' arts strand commissioned by Waldemar Janusczcak)

FSFF also wanted to share a related, and truly excellent article by a different esteemed author, which makes much good use of Ellis's work:

• John Kraniauskas, 'Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire', Radical Philosophy Issue 154, 2009

More about → John Ellis: Film and TV Studies Resources Online