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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Jun 23, 2015 4:00:39 GMT -5
I always end up watching more old promotional and informational shorts on youtube—they’re nice little slices of the past (for me almost always the circa 1960 past) and I thought it would be a good place to have a thread for cool old videos that would have been lost to the sands of time if it weren’t for youtube.
First up in “Hillman on Safari”—Hillman, a defunct British car marque, had a category win in the 1962 East African Safari Rally and released a short film documenting the rally—while it’s obviously focused on Hillman’s role (and what a nice suspension—if it can handle Africa certainly it can carry you in comfort through the backroads of Britain), it’s agreat for fans of early sixties small cars in general and Patricia Moss and her Saab (third-place finishers overall, IIRC, but probably the best remembered of the race’s rally drivers) are also nicely featured. Plus we get a look at British East Africa immediately prior to independence.
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Jun 23, 2015 16:29:18 GMT -5
Righto! I like this kind of stuff, too.
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eldan
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Post by eldan on Jun 23, 2015 16:44:45 GMT -5
 Get it? Cool old shorts? Guys? |
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Jun 23, 2015 18:33:18 GMT -5
Get it? Cool old shorts? Guys? I debated making this joke. |
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Jun 24, 2015 5:14:10 GMT -5
Righto! I like this kind of stuff, too. Big surprises: How real everyone looks—it’s an obvious thing, but even a little bit of motion makes people seem alive in a way that isn’t captured by most photos. How little is recognizable—not so much a surprise, but aside from a few monuments there’s little to match it with Berlin today, and certainly culturally the city’s a lot different now (can’t imagine it being so formal). |
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Post-Lupin
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Post by Post-Lupin on Jun 25, 2015 8:17:44 GMT -5
Powers Of Ten - the first film to genuinely give me a psychedelic experience.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2015 11:18:27 GMT -5
Powers Of Ten - the first film to genuinely give me a psychedelic experience. I have the Powers of Ten flipbook! |
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Jun 26, 2015 9:57:54 GMT -5
Charles and Ray Eames really did a lot of great work, especially for IBM with educational films. I followed the YouTube from Powers' beauty (and there's a hidden gem in narrator Phllip Morrison, anchor of Scientific American for a good, long while); got off at " A Communication Primer" (check out the crazy brain power in the credits); finally alighting on the other side of the looking glass at a snippet of Claude Shannon. Dig the beats, man! |
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eldan
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Post by eldan on Jun 26, 2015 13:23:50 GMT -5
Get it? Cool old shorts? Guys? I debated making this joke. That's what you get for thinking before you post. |
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Sept 15, 2015 16:30:27 GMT -5
The rare good GJI, Saul Bass’s film about redesigning the Ma Bell graphic identity:
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Feb 17, 2016 1:49:32 GMT -5
In a bit of necromancy inspired by Hippo’s World of Animal Facts, here’s a super-eighties look at a the possibilities of delphine space stations: |
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Post by Douay-Rheims-Challoner on Feb 17, 2016 12:14:03 GMT -5
Perhaps a timely pick for a contested election year, but here's a kind of documentary/argument for legal abortion that Sergei Eisenstein made in Switzerland:
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Post by Lord Lucan on Feb 20, 2016 5:39:48 GMT -5
Warning: There is a nauseating shot in this for those who've not seen it and are sensitive to such things.
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Post by Lady Bones on Feb 21, 2016 2:26:18 GMT -5
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Post by Lord Lucan on Feb 21, 2016 2:28:13 GMT -5
The eyeball one is the only one that came to mind to provide a warning about. Do you have another in mind or have you not seen it before? |
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Post by Lady Bones on Feb 21, 2016 3:41:23 GMT -5
The eyeball one is the only one that came to mind to provide a warning about. Do you have another in mind or have you not seen it before? Oh, I'm very familiar with it, I first watched it on Netflix Instant as a slightly unsuspecting young teenager years ago. I just meant that I'd honestly say the majority of the short film could warrant a warning, the ants, the sexual assault, the rotting donkey corpses, just to name a few. I wasn't really meaning to seriously correct your warning, though. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2016 19:58:04 GMT -5
Not "informational" but it counts if un chien counts:
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Mar 23, 2016 15:50:09 GMT -5
Powers Of Ten - the first film to genuinely give me a psychedelic experience. I’d been aware of the vast emptiness of outer space, but the vast emptiness of inner space—and the constant shimmering motion of everything—completely blew my mind when I first saw this. |
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Mar 23, 2016 21:13:55 GMT -5
The 1959 Oscar winner for best documentary short, this short contrasts traditional and mechanized glassblowing in the Netherlands (the latter represented by a very recognizable bottle), mirrored sonically by jazz (of interest to Lord Lucan) and a bit of light musique concrète (of interest to repulsionist). Also great in that you get to see a ton of middle-aged working-class Dutch guys from the late fifties, plus one glassblower who wears a tie to work: |
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Post by Lord Lucan on Mar 24, 2016 12:29:36 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Apr 1, 2016 21:35:07 GMT -5
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Aug 31, 2016 3:46:52 GMT -5
Although we usually think of the original Trek films as being model-heavy, they were also pioneers in CGI: here’s a short overview on how the Genesis informational video was made:
And here’s an old Open University segment focusing on the dream state CGI heads of Star Trek IV (uncanny and innovative—classic Nimoy), plus a bit more on Genesis (and some mentions of a name that will become increasingly familiar in the coming decades: Pixar):
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Aug 3, 2017 12:23:25 GMT -5
Hiroshi Teshigahara, best known for Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another was also the son of the modernist Ikebana master Sōfu Teshigahara and later became an Ikebana master himself. Watching his films—modernist and humanist, with a fine sense of nature and geometry—it’s kind of obvious in retrospect. One of Teshigahara’s first films was a gorgeous little educational film about Ikebana, focusing on his father—all that philosophy’s there, but in condensed, colorful, and subtle form.
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Sept 15, 2017 17:46:24 GMT -5
In honor of Cassini, let’s go back to when its primary investigators were out there trying to keep the funding flowing so it could make it to launch. Here’s a short film from 1992 about Cassini and its never-off-the-ground sister ship, CRAF, explaining the importance of their science goals (wildly successful in Cassini’s case, and the ESA’s Rosetta mission took up where the cancelled CRAF left off). Revel in the mix of classic NASA stock animation and early-nineties CGI, the big NASA worm logo, and the palatial setting for the French primary investigator’s presentation, intercut with a Brandenburg concerto-backed animation of a low-res probe descends onto a very los-res Titan (the featured American scientist, the very recently late Tobias Owen, speaks from a more modest park bench at SUNY-Stony Brook). Of course all our knowledge of Titan and the Saturn system was lo-res then—that we can look back and chuckle at how little we knew is one of Cassini’s legacies. I got the idea for sharing this from the LA Times’s nice oral history of Cassini, btw. |
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Jun 10, 2018 14:09:46 GMT -5
Some vintage Persian animation Ali Akbar Sadeghi’s 1974 story of a chess game, “The Rook”:
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jul 1, 2018 12:04:17 GMT -5
Here's two cool short films about how to extend surveillance of one's employees beyond the confines of the workplace and workday.
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Jun 11, 2019 15:53:37 GMT -5
We’re in an apparent golden age of conspiracy theory: flat-earth memes are so commonplace they’re passé, QAnon has gone from niche messageboard theory to a reliable bumper sticker revenue maker, blips on a new radar journalism have otherwise sober defense journalists enthusiastic about UFO’s, and Poe’s law is apparently dead. But this is hardly new for American society, which has long been host to unreliable media, hoaxes taken seriously, and earnest crackpots. Although people tend to look back on the 1950s as a sort of golden age for the United States, it was also something of a golden age for conspiracy, pseudoscience, and outright fraud—not just McCarthy, not just Dianetics, but a whole host of mostly forgotten weird (see an early edition of Martin Gardner’s Fads & fallacies in the name of science, probably yellowing in your local library, for more). One of those pseudoscientific ideas that saw renewed popularity in the early fifties was the hollow Earth. Although the film itself does not really delve into those theories (it’s more off-brand Verne crossed with off-brand Wells written by H. Rider Haggard’s non-union Mesopotamian equivalent), The Mole People, unusually, has a brief four-and-a-half minute introduction where USC English professor Frank Baxter does a brief, illustrated overview of flat Earth theories through American history. While the film’s definitely on the enjoyable-without-riffing side of MST3K features (though I like the episode itself, where Mike Nelson memorably nicknamed Baxter “Dr. Gesture”), the unusual factual introduction shows promise that the film can’t live up to. It’s as if the filmmakers were afraid their movie would play into contemporary pseudosciences and sought to head it off. Link here, since I don’t have time to figure out how to nicely embed Internet Archive videos with ubb |
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