You can now watch Jean-Luc Godard's first narrative film

Once in a while, a lost film appears, delighting film buffs and historians. In the past few years, we've seen a lost Méliès film, a Hitchcock, and a Star Wars-related short all turn up after decades of absence. But this weekend, someone uploaded the Holy Grail: Jean-Luc Godard's first narrative film.

Une Femme Coquette (embedded above) was suddenly and unexpectedly uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday. Although it's not a masterwork, it's enormously historically significant. As The A.V. Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky says, you can see some of Godard's early tics and style that would eventually become influential in the French New Wave.

We're stunned that more and more films continue to be unearthed, especially such important ones. Come on, The Day the Clown Cried!

Here, have an R2-D2 bird

We've been posting here a bit less frequently while we handle start-of-the-semester business, but  with the understandably rising national stress levels, we wanted to send out the week with something positive.

So, please enjoy this bird that sounds like R2-D2. Happy Friday!

The best movies of the year – spliced into one video

Every year, film critic David Ehrlich puts together a montage of what he considered the 25 best films of the year. Ehrlich's tastes tend to lean towards interesting visuals, but we're not complaining. His montages are visual feasts, so he gets to pick whatever he wants. Moonlight tops the list, understandably given the praise we've heard.

This year's supercut has a few surprising selections, including Beyonce's Lemonade and the ESPN documentary series OJ: Made in America. We also love Ehrlich's choice of using music from other notable movies this year. There are a few bonus movies thrown in at the start, too. Ghostbusters wouldn't make the top 25, but we're happy to see the Holtzmann dance again.

Look inside the Library of Congress's explosive film vault

Drive down to Culpepper, VA and you'll find the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, home to the Library of Congress's film archive. This is where preservationists keep a massive storehouse of tens of thousands of films – classics, flops, and even reportedly Jerry Lewis's unreleased disaster The Day the Clown Cried.

YouTube channel Great Big Story managed to a rare peek behind the scenes, and the level of security needed for the collection is astounding. Archivist George Willeman explains that many early films in their collection are printed on nitrate, an explosive chemical that could probably take down building (remember the ending of Inglourious Basterds?). So, much of the archive is kept in a former nuclear bunker.

Thankfully, we don't work with nitrate, so the AU Library isn't going to blow up. Let's thank the archivists doing the heavy lifting.

No, a silent film of a train probably didn't cause mass hysteria

You've probably heard this one before: back during the dawn of motion pictures, a short movie showing a train heading for the camera caused audiences to freak out and try to run from the theater. It's a funny anecdote about how much of an impact film made – and it makes those audiences look pretty naive.

But as Atlas Obscura's Eric Grundhauser explains, this probably never actually happened. We can trace the story to a specific film (1898's Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), the lack of circumstantial evidence like news stories and police accounts of a mobscene suggests this was just a myth. If anything, it was a metaphor for the powerful impact of film, one that spread so quickly it was parodied in a 1901 short (embedded above).

So although audiences probably didn't actually panic, the mental image was real. It might've been exaggerated shorthand. Think of it like a turn-of-the-century straw man argument.

The first Star Wars trailer is missing a whole lot

For Throwback Thursday (do we have to use the hashtag if it's on a blog?), here's a neat piece of film history. In December 1976, the first trailer for Star Wars was released, about half a year before the movie. Episode Nothing supplied some context in a recent blog post explaining why it looks so rough.

Star Wars was still a work-in-progress at this point in its production. Apart from a few quick space shots, most of the trailer avoids scenes with special effects; the only lightsabers that appear in screen weren't colo red in yet, for instance. And perhaps most glaringly in hindsight, the trailer doesn't have the iconic John Williams score. Without that adventurous music, the movie seems almost dour.

It's a fun glimpse at how a studio decided to promote a movie they didn't realize would be a juggernaut. The whole thing is a dark mishmash that reportedly cost about $4000. We guarantee that if 20th Century Fox knew what would follow, they wouldn't throw together something like this.

Help a beloved LA film library preserve their old VHSes

If you read this blog, you know we have an affinity for digital preservation and weird, niche films that aren't available anymore. We do our best to serve the university community in those areas, but there are other groups with their own missions. Take Vidiots, a video rental store that's served Los Angeles film nerds (including directors like David O. Russell) for decades with its massive library of hard-to-find titles.

Now, Vidiots has launched a crowdfunding campaign to take wants to take their collection into the modern era by digitally preserving as much of their collection as possible. Vidiots has thousands of rare VHSes that are presumably deteriorating and may be the last copies remaining of certain films, and Vidiots wants to digitize those tapes, license them, and check them out to whoever wants a copy. Additional funds will go to creating programming to showcase these films. This is a huge benefit to the LA film community – which more or less overlaps exactly with Hollywood.

If you want to support a good cause that makes the world of film a better place, consider kicking a few dollars their way. Their campaign has about a month left to raise $45,000, any amount helps.

Every Frame a Painting looks at the surprisingly unmemorable state of modern film soundtracks

Every Frame a Painting continues to be one of the best online film criticism video series. Usually the channel looks at editing and composition, but this time, creator Tony Zhou turned his sights to a very difficult film question: why are modern film soundtracks so uninspiring?

Zhou puts forward a cohesive argument, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe as its focus. Over the last twenty years, movie soundtracks have become background music that matches rather than sets the mood of what's happening on-screen. That's not inherently good or bad, but it's less memorable than the fanfares and character themes from older blockbusters.

The video spends much of its time addressing a bigger concern, the use of "temp music" in editing. During production, films are often scored with placeholder music from other composers, frequently soundtracks from other movies. Increasingly, rather than starting from scratch, filmmakers ask composers to match the placeholder music, resulting in a soundtracks gradually sounding identical and borrowing the same generic structure and composition.

Speaking unobjectively, we hope that turns around. We understand why tone-setting scores have become popular, but Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future music is far more lovable than his work on The Avengers.

SOC's Media that Matter series kicks off with Thank You for Playing

Every semester, SOC's Media that Matter film series highlights social issues as captured on the screen, from race issues in America to the ethics of food. It's a very AU film series in the best way, and often, the screening includes a discussion with the filmmakers. Last semester, the series included a screening of Best Picture winner Spotlight and an interview with then-Boston Globe editor Martin Barton.

Media that Matter starts again this Wednesday with a screening of Thank You for Playing, a documentary about the development of the video game That Dragon, Cancer – an autobiographical game by Amy and Ryan Green about caring for their infant, who was diagnosed with cancer. That Dragon, Cancer is a raw, emotional experience to play, and Thank You for Playing looks at the people who chose to tell their story through an unexpected medium.

The screening begins at 6pm on Wednesday, September 14th, in the McKinley Building's Forman Theater; the film will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers led by AU Game Lab's Lindsay Grace.

Fandor spotlights twenty acclaimed films by women

Fandor has established itself as the premier digital film service for cinema buffs: in addition to their streaming library, they run Keyframe, a daily film essay and video blog. If you haven't followed them already and like film, you probably should. For one of their videos (embedded above), Keyframe polled fifty film critics about their favorite works directed by women and created a montage of the top twenty results.

As with the cinematographer interviews, the question is whether it's productive to view films primarily through the lens of the filmmaker's gender. In short, it is. As the video's creator Scout Tafoya says, women still face an uphill battle in terms of criticism, funding, and most troublingly acknowledgment for their work. "Unless we make noise," Tafoya adds, "we'll allow it to continue."

Keyframe did their part, so we're sharing it. Take at look at the striking imagery from twenty films by women. (Meshes of the Afternoon is unlike anything we've seen in a while.)

Meet the new canon of black film

As much as we enjoy poring over lists of the best films ever made, Aisha Harris and Dan Kois make a good point over at Slate: those lists are overwhelmingly white. And when film buffs follow those recommendations in search of the great art, they'll watch predominantly white movies. We can lose sight of contributions to film from people of color this way.

So Harris and Kois assembled "filmmakers, critics, and scholars" the produce The Black Film Canon, a list of the fifty greatest films by black directors. Notably, this excludes a few prominent films about blackness, like Coming to America, but it reflects the talent of black filmmakers who are often overlooked in the grand assessment of film history. The list spans decades, genres, and countries, including notable African cinema. (Though we do like that Spike Lee warranted his own category.)

We embedded Slate's supercut of The Black Film Canon above. We have most of the movies on their list; a Pinterest board will be coming shortly, so stay tuned!

Watch AU commencement addresses from years past

AU's commencement ceremonies this year featured addresses from notable speakers like CNN's John King and US Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Luckily, since we live in the era of free high-quality web video, you can watch all those on AU's official YouTube channel.

We've had a lot of exciting commencement speeches in the years before that, so what happened to those? AU has taped the ceremonies for years, and now the AU Library is stepping up to make them available.

Our collection coordinator Molly Hubbs has been hard at work digitizing old commencement tapes and putting videos of the big speeches online for anyone to view for free. The collection is still a work in progress (there's 16 video right now), but you can watch commencement addresses from David Gregory, Diane Rehm, Tim Russert, and others. We expect over 50 videos in the collection when it's complete.

These videos are a cool piece of AU history that you previously couldn't see, now available to the whole AU community with the help of the library. Go ahead, spend a lazy summer afternoon diving back through the school's history.

Every Frame a Painting turns inward with a look at the editing process

Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos's Every Frame a Painting is one of the best film criticism channels on YouTube. The creators are excellent editors, and the attention they put into the pace and structure of the videos shows.

Appropriately, this month, Every Frame a Painting's new video looks at the editing process. Zhou edits films professionally, but when asked, he has trouble figuring out how to describe the logic behind editing film. As the video describes, it's all about reading the emotions of the scene. Stories have rhythms and natural beats, and you can cut earlier or later to get a different reaction from the audience. Where you cut a shot can make moments land differently, and figuring out what each scene needs is sometimes just a feeling.

We can't put it into words much better, so watch the video for some terrific examples of how different editing techniques can change scenes. The examples from From a Few Dollars More, Taxi Driver, and A Brighter Summer Day are particularly interesting and should give you a great idea of the sort of instinctive rhythm that great editors have.

Why do TV characters who love coffee not actually drink coffee?

Want to ruin every television show you'll watch for the next week? Look at the cups people drink coffee from.

Critic Myles McNutt has noticed the prevalence of people drinking coffee on TV. It's an easy way to make characters seem relatable and gives them a reason to stand around or meet together. But something has been bugging him for years: their cups are almost always empty. Actors gesture around with cups that should be splashing around or at least have a little weight.

This is a common production flaw, but rather than mock it, McNutt uses it to make a point about the challenging nature of film production. Filling prop cups with liquid could be a nightmare if they spill, especially if they contain real coffee. In the often tightly budgeted world of television especially, having a realistic Starbucks cup is the lowest priority item.

If you want to play along at home, McNutt started #EmptyCupAwards for people similarly annoyed by this. Just don't get sucked down a black hole of noticing every production shortcut.

Movies don't get worse than watching them on Videodisc

Occasionally, we have a laugh about some of the obsolete media formats we keep stocked behind the desk. We still have a large number of VHS tapes and a handful of LaserDiscs – and even an extremely unloved U-matic player that looks like part of the Space Shuttle.

But there's a format even clunkier than all of those. Behold, the CED Videodisc.

The video by retro technology group Techmoan, embedded above, explores this horrible media format. CED Videodiscs combine the impracticality of listening to music on vinyl, the blurry quality of VHS tapes, and the short running time of LaserDiscs. Discs only half an hour on each side and need to be flipped halfway through a movie. And if a Videodisc had any damage or particles stuck on the surface, it would skip wildly; many older discs are almost unwatchable.

We don't have any Videodiscs in our collection, probably because the format was dead by 1984. You'll have to make do with this video if you want to experience the absolutely worst way to watch a movie. Skip to about the 20 minute mark to see it in action.

Koyaanistocksi is filmmaking out of balance

Here's a fun one to start off the week: Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi is a striking experimental film that uses footage of nature, people, and technology to convey our often dissociated relationship with the world. It's an unusual, groundbreaking work that, along with its outstanding Philip Glass soundtrack, has become a touchstone for awe-inspiring cinema.

Koyaanisqatsi is also more than the sum of its parts, as demonstrated in the hilarious new video embedded above, Koyaanistocksi. Jesse England recreated the trailer for the 1982 film entirely with stock footage, and his cut matches the original shot-for-shot. It also clearly isn't as good as the original, which makes it a great example of how compelling filmmaking is distinct from just putting together a string of images.

Filmmaking lessons aside, Koyaanistocksi is hilarious for people who will recognize the shots. Life is so out of balance that the sorts of shots that used to be terrifying commentary on society are now packaged and sold by iStock as filler videos.

Hollywood's big new technology is 90 years old

As movie theaters search for new technology to drag people into theaters, the latest promise comes from Barco Escape, a three-screen technology designed for "immersive cinema" with a panoramic view or, potentially, action on three different screens at once.

But as Dennis Duffy once said, technology is cyclical. These ideas have come up before – in spectacular fashion.

Back in the 50s, the Cinerama format had a similar concept, using three projectors on a wide-angled screen to create a broader picture. The technique seemed so unusual at the time that the first Cinemera film, This Is Cinerama, is basically a commercial for the format; it opens with an educational lecture about the history of film to prepare viewers for what will come next. Flicker Alley released This Is Cinerama on Blu-ray a few years ago, complete with a fake curved screen. (Available from the AU Library under HU BLU 10798.)

Other movies have used multiple projectors to show several scenes at once, maybe none more famously than the 1927 silent film Napoleon. The 5-hour-long behemoth of a movie includes a sequence with three different projectors running at once. Because of the changing size of the screen and length, Napoleon is nearly impossible to watch correctly at home. You'll have to catch one of the rare theatrical screenings, held only 14 times since the 1930s. (A Blu-ray will also come out later this year.)

Or maybe, if Barco Escape catches on, you can watch Napeleon there. Everything old is new again!

RocketJump Film School breaks down film cuts

Our staff will be out for a few days for a library conference, so we want to leave you with something substantive to chew on for the week. Enter RocketJump Film School, a film production education group that has been releasing dense, informative videos about specific aspects of filmmaking. It gets pretty wonky; see their video about the difference in camera lens quality for an example.

RJFS's latest video, embedded above, is an 11-minute crash course on cuts, wipes and transitions. This is an excellent overview of the types of cuts filmmakers use and, more importantly, why they use them. Even regular movie fans will learn something from here. Take "cutting on action," for instance: it's a fairly common trick to enhance the action of a movie, and it can help your appreciation of film to look for those techniques.

The entire RocketJump Film School video collection is worth watching if you want to dip you toes into learning about film production, and even for those who are just fans, they'll help you appreciate the film a little more.

David Lynch evasively answers some questions about Eraserhead in 1979

David Lynch continues to be the favorite director of weirdos everywhere, ourselves included. So much of his appeal is tied to Eraserhead, his terrifying, confusing 1977 feature film debut. Eraserhead still defies explanation and analysis, and fans have for decades attempted to work out the symbolism and meaning of characters like the Man in the Planet.

As the embedded video attests, this isn't a new phenomenon. Two years after the film's release, UCLA film students interviewed Lynch about his inscrutable masterpiece, only to come away perhaps even more puzzled. Lynch defers on many questions about the movie's themes, which he points out are intentionally abstract and open to interpretation. Instead, he seems to prefer talking about stories from its bizarre production, like the time he got a dead cat from a veterinarian for a deleted scene.

The interview is notably the product of amateurs, and you can see Lynch's bemusement as the students read quotes from reviews as discussion prompts. But this nearly forty-year-old clip offers a glimpse of the director talking at length about the intentional choices behind his most famous work. Just don't expect too much clarity: when asked to clarify his description of the film as "a dream of dark and troubling things," Lynch simply answered "No."

Atlas Obscura thinks Fritz Lang may have invented rocket countdowns

Life imitates art, but rarely does art have the chance to define the hallmark of a totally unrelated field. For an example of when a film managed to capture the public imagination that strongly, read Cara Giaimo's article for Atlas Obscura about how German director Fritz Lang essentially popularized the basic ideas of space travel.

Giaimo ties Lang's 1929 silent film Woman in the Moon to the booming popularity of rocketry in post-World War II Germany. Lang worked with a rocket scientist through the film's production to depict space travel as realistically as possible, often making up concepts as needed. A number of their hypothetical inventions, like a multi-stage engine, have become standard in space travel.

But their biggest artistic license was the use of a countdown before a rocket launch. That was entirely a filmmaking technique to build tension in the absence of sound, but it was so effective that it immediately became part of the popular imagination. The next time you watch any sort of space launch, remember that we have Fritz Lang to thank, accidentally, for that countdown from ten.

Woman in the Moon so accurately predicted the future of rocketry that Hitler reportedly banned the film during Germany's development of the V-2 rocket. We have no idea if that's true, but you can certainly watch it now. Borrow our DVD copy at the Media Services desk (HU DVD 1285).