Here’s a wonderful glimpse into the animation techniques that were pioneering at the time of Disney’s first feature-length animation, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ You get to see some shots of Snow White being drawn and photographed, sound effects being recorded, and people arriving at the premiere. You also get a good dose of the Disney sexism in which all women who work on a film are referred to as ‘pretty girls.’ It’s basically an advertisement for the film, but it’s a good one.
When Sri Lanka banned goods from the north during a war with the Tamil Tigers, newspapers had to find the paper they needed for publishing. Kannan Arunasalam made this short documentary film about people who take their work in journalism very seriously.
Via Brain Pickings
This is a charming look at the world’s greatest bike race from 1962. I see that Louis Malle is credited as one of the directors. You can see the incredible efforts put in by racers in the mountains and how back in the early sixties they would eat fruit on their bikes and sometimes dart into village restaurants along way to snatch bottles of water, wine and ice cream! The film also mentions the issue of doping as it was practiced in 1962 which seems to have mainly been an effort to mask the pain. The one depressing thing about this film is that it shows the sport of bike racing in 1962 was as uniformly white as it is today. The complete lack of diversity in the Tour de France is a shame and an unforgivable embarrassment to the race itself and to the sport as a whole. The damn race is so white that it makes my teeth hurt to watch it. And I watch every stage of it every single year. So trust me, it’s an all-white event and the organizers and teams should be investigated for that issue which is actually far more important than the doping issue. Every single racer dopes. But quite obviously the dope is only given to white racers. The Tour de France is becoming a European NASCAR. Just go ask Lance.
Between 1988 and 1998 filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard made a film called ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma.’ Though it purports to be a sort of cinema history, reflecting on how cinema intersects with the 20th century, I think it is more likely a vision of how cinema works in the mind of one filmmaker. The images drift in and out, overlapping and complimenting one another just as they would in the mind. Don’t look for accuracy or understanding. Just watch the film. It’s very difficult to find pieces of this lengthy work online. But these are three good chunks and they certainly stand up as a taste.
More about the film at Mubi.
Michel Montecrossa’s latest video examines the desperation behind the rioting in Great Britain. His direct and heartfelt approach works to cut through all the recent bullshit about the rioters being simple thugs with nothing more on their minds than robbery and destruction. Riots are open wounds that erupt after enormous damage has already been done to a population. The seething pressure is always there for a long time before exploding in everyone’s faces. By definition, riots involve damage and robbery. What else would there be to do at a riot? Riots are anger and desperate hopelessness that cannot be controlled. Yes, of course one must punish people who burn down buildings. But one must also have the intellect and social responsibility to seriously look at why children and adults would feel so awful that the only thing they can think of doing is burning down a city. That is serious rebellion and it is going to spread. The world is under incredible economic pressure and the people who suffer understand that governments tied to extreme wealth and corporate interests are responsible. Populations are going off like bombs. The uprisings in the Middle East are directly connected to the uprisings London because both groups of people have become aware that the same corporations control what happens in both places. The dictators and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are kept there because they provide certain corporations with efficiency in the region. Assad is exterminating people in Syria because it is convenient for Western companies and politicians that he do so. The Western governments have wanted globalization and now they’ve got it. Globalization of uprisings and riots. One must remember that the riots in Great Britain were started by a policeman who killed a young man. A policeman who chose, just like the policemen in Syria, to point his gun and fire a bullet into the body of a human being. A violent reaction to such an act should be expected in most cases.
Here’s a 1969 British documentary on the development of the computer beginning with the code-breaking work by Alan Turing during World War II.