"Paul Kedrosky: "I'm particularly fond of SmashingTelly given how it, in effect, Tivo-ifies the web"... Guy Dickinson: "David Galbraith has turned Smashing Telly into well, the new TV."... Fimoculous: "Best Blogs of 2007"... The Guardian: Video sharing on the net has uncovered a hoard of TV gems...and a number of sites have been established to lead us to them. Take smashingtelly.com."
about
"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.
Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."
From the comments, Jon picks edge of darkness in his favorite TV from the past.
“One of a long series of big drama serials that pretty much sustained British TV in the post-Play for Today years. It fed straight into the nuclear paranoia instilled from a childhood where we subconsciously listened for the early warning sirens. ”
Here it is on Veoh (a login allows you to watch it and parts 2-4 in full).
Hunter Gatherer has a great post about the classic 1948 film noir, Naked City, and the subsequent TV series which ran between 1958-1963, complete with a few choice clips.
Most so-called New York TV series were shot in studios. Friends, for example, was filmed in LA. In most episodes the only genuine NY image is of the front door in the West Village, and even this spells fake as an implausibly expensive location for its fictional occupants. Naked City is special because, befitting its title, it was filmed in large part, on location in New York and strips Manhattan bare to reveal an architecture that was far more coherent than today’s mixture of glass and steel modernism and pre-war masonry gothic.
This great opening shot from the movie shows how much bigger the downtown skyscraper cluster was relative to midtown, before the corporate center of gravity shifted. The financial district is dominated by the hypodermic needle like tower of what is now a focus of news half a century later, as the HQ of AIG with its injections of tax payer bail-out cash, while midtown looks relatively spartan revealing the since hidden laminated shards of the side facade of the Rockefeller Center.
The original Star Trek is hilariously camp to look at these days – there is a world apart from this and the later versions which appeal to techy geeks rather than nostalgia freaks. This episode is a particular favorite of mine.
While we are on the subject of full length videos, YouTube has done what it always promised, full length videos with inline ads, similar to Hulu. For the ones that I could find, embedding was disabled for individual items yet they still promote a playlist embed which then doesn’t work. This seems to destroy the essence of what made YouTube so great and viral. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Albert Lamorisse’s simple and beautiful film from 1956 is the only short film to ever win an Oscar outside of the short film category. Its about a magical balloon that travels with a young boy through Paris, and creates a unique historical record of the city in the 50’s.
Update: Film Freaks Club points out that the director of this movie invented the board game ‘Risk’.
32 min 38 sec Oct 15, 2007
This was Jean Cocteau’s first feature film. A surrealist film style that is interesting today primarily because of its continuing influence on people like David Lynch. Link
