The Media Services Pop-up Library hits the quad on Wednesday!

Our pop-up library from Spring 2015 with desk attendant Micah

Welcome Week is underway! We're happy to see campus buzzing again after the summer. We also know that there's a whole lot of new people on campus who haven't had a chance to explore the library yet. So we're bringing the library to you!

On Wednesday, August 24th at 4pm, we're setting up a Media Services pop-up library on the quad. We'll have a selection of new titles, classics, and television shows for checkout with your AU ID. It's the end of summer, and we get that you want more quality time outside, so now you don't even have to set foot in the library to learn about what we do.

We'll see y'all on Wednesday!

When happens when film crews lack diversity, too?

We know that the film industry has visible diversity problems, from directing to acting. We can point to the lack of racial diversity among the Oscar acting nominees as a glaring problem, but less obviously, behind-the-camera craft roles like sound and editing suffer from both subtle and overt racism.

Variety recently ran a cover story about what they've termed #ArtisansSoWhite, the white male dominance of the technical side of the film industry. Their article includes a number of troubling anecdotes, not just of racial imbalance but outright hostility. One visual effects supervisor even recounted having his skills questioned by someone who asserted he was a diversity hire.

This has implications for mentoring opportunities and the type of work available to non-white artisans; one interviewee noticed that she had worked overwhelmingly on films about African-Americans, exclusively slotted into those films by producers.

Variety's exposé is long, disconcerting, and worth a read for those interested in where the industry needs to improve.

Take a look inside our old U-matic player

If you've never had to deal with a U-matic player, consider yourself lucky. These beasts from the 70s were the ancestors of VHS players, and they are sort of a nightmare to use. We have a few on-site still so we can transfer out-of-print U-matic videos to a new format.

We think this one might've finally kicked the bucket yesterday, so our collections coordinator Molly opened it up to see if there was anything that could obviously be prepared. We were not prepared for the cyberpunk nightmare inside. Given the age, it looks like every button and toggle (and there were many) has a maze of circuitry attached. We take care of our equipment, but we wouldn't even know where to start fixing this thing.

You deserve to see the guts of a U-matic player. We're digitizing the out-of-print U-matic collection so you'll never have to deal with this.

Love British TV? See where those shows are meant to take place

Have you ever seen one of those experiments where people from other countries try to identify the United States? Let's admit that we're just as bad with the United Kingdom. Unless you've spent some time over there, everything that ends in "-shire" sounds interchangeable. And when it comes to television and movies, we just sort imagine everything taking place in a big, inspecific British countryside.

So for the rubes among us, graphic designer Tim Ritz (an AU alumnus!) put together a map of where major shows from the United Kingdom are set. As you can imagine, London hosts at least two dozen shows, but the rest of the country is littered with other hotspots. Finally seeing where Derbyshire fits into the local map gives Pride & Prejudice a whole lot more context.

Of course, the map also points out that many of these shows weren't filmed on-located. Wolf Hall, set at Hampton Court Place in London, was shot at "various castles," which just leads us right back to our original vague idea of what England looks like.

Watch HBO documentaries for free through Films On Demand

from Citizen U.S.A.

You probably know HBO for Game of Thrones and their other hit shows, but they're also known as a powerhouse of prestigious documentaries, like the Academy Award-winning Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1.

Films On Demand just signed a deal with HBO to stream their collection of documentary films, and as part of the AU community, you can watch them for free! Follow this link to the HBO section of the Films On Demand website to see what all they have. Notable titles include the veterans stories of Alive Day Memories, Arab Spring documentary In Tahrir Square, citizenship road trip Citizen U.S.A., and a look at the life of a single mother in Paycheck to Paycheck. (And don't forget When the Levees Broke!)

These are great film – not just to watch for your own enjoyment, but for coursework and scholarship. HBO documentaries have great educational value, and using one is a fun, productive way to mix up a presentation or research.

Alternative programming: Getting real about Rio

from Rio de Janeiro: Urban Future

The 2016 Rio Olympics start tomorrow, and this year seems particularly fraught. Every Olympic event has some enormous, costly, potentially negative impact on its host – remember the broken hotels in Sochi and the wasted construction in Athens? – but Rio has it worst in recent memory. The Zika virus outbreak and hazardous water conditions are enough cause for alarm, but the government's ongoing anti-crime and urban renewal efforts have revealed the dangerous state of the city.

To learn more about the challenges facing Rio as it heads into the global spotlight, consider watching one of these three streaming documentaries. (You will need to log in with your AU username/password to access these.)

• Rio de Janeiro: Urban Future
  The Urban Future series looks at programs attempting to revitalize major cities. The Rio episode highlights the displacement of families living in neighborhoods razed to build Olympic facilities. What will happen to those communities after the Olympics are over and the buildings fall into disuse?

• The Road to Rio
  Monty Python's Michael Palin hosts this unexpectedly serious travelogue, where he describes the contrast between Rio's glitzy Olympic-friendly image and marginalized neighborhoods overrun with drugs as "a mixture of construction and ruin at the same time."

• Witness: Rio
  In the grimmest of the three documentaries, Eros Hoagland takes a camera into Rio's favelas document the city's violence and the effect of the police's attempts at "pacification."

New Acquisitions - August 2016

One month left in summer! Everyone panic!

Well, don't actually panic. We're getting everything set for the fall semester, and we're stocking up on more new acquisitions. As before, we're in the process of replacing as many of our VHSes with DVDs as possible. But we're also plugging other holes in our collection. We've added Hercules, A Bug's Life, The Good Dinosaur, and Zootopia, which we think completely rounds out our collection of Disney animation.

We also want to highlight Gaming in Color, a documentary about queer experiences in gaming, and Anomalisa, an adult stop-motion film by Charlie Kaufman.

Hit the link for a list of what else is new for August...

Matt Damon in The Great Wall sadly isn't unprecedented

Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu

Last week, a trailer debuted for Matt Damon's new film, The Great Wall, set during the Song dynasty in China. Matt Damon basically has no business being in that movie, and the fact that he's the star at all sadly capitalizes on how international audiences associate white male action heroes with high production value.

It's also yet another example of whitewashing in film. For as long as Hollywood has existed, white actors have been cast in non-white parts, usually to horrifying or embarrassing results. A few months back, IndieWire rounded up the twenty most egregious examples, in case you've forgotten the extent of this lousy tradition. It affects movies good and bad, past and present. We can look at Katharine Hepburn's horrifyingly offensive portrayal of Jade Tan in 1944's Dragon Seed and shake our heads in hindsight, but it's less easy to dismiss the white casting of a real, living Indian-American man in The Social Network.

You could dismiss Damon's new role as a byproduct of international film development, but consider how bizarre it is that America's long, poor diversity track record in film has become the standard even for other countries. We can do better, folks.

Director Edgar Wright names is favorite 1000 movies (Yes, 1000)

Edgar Wright is one of the most distinctive, stylized directors working in film right now. If you've seen Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, you'll recognize his unmistakable, kinetic energy. We're all ears when he wants to share his thoughts on the art of filmmaking.

As it turns out, Wright was happy to oblige. Last week, he shared a list of his favorite 1000 films, ordered chronologically from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920 to The Neon Demon from this year.

1000 films is a lot. I haven't seen 1000 films. I couldn't even name 1000 films. But Edgar Wright can. His list finds room for everything, from the expected big movies (Ghostbusters and Vertigo) to strange cult hits (Withnail and I and John Woo's A Better Tomorrow II). Those odd ones are the most revealing about Wright's taste and influences, and they're the ones we really want to seek out.

We'd normally end a post like this with a list of some of the most interesting films on the list, but honestly, 1000 is more than we can reasonably sort through this afternoon. Dive in yourself, and we guarantee that if you're interested in Wright, you'll come back with a dozen movies you'll want to watch.

Get a DC Library card to get InstantFlix for free!

DC Public Library's Tenley-Friendship branch is just down the road from us, so we get excited when we can promote their services too. Like audiobooks! AU doesn't have a collection, but the Tenley-Friendship library is just a few blocks away.

Now DC Public is expanding its streaming video collection, which we're happy to promote too! If you have a DC Public Library card, you can now access InstantFlix (also called IndieFlix), a collection of independent movies. InstantFlix is all over the place in a good way: just on the front page, we see a Mythbusters-style reality experiment show, Sundance movies, a Jet Li kung fu movie, PBS documentaries, and something called Angry Nazi Zombies.

InstantFlix also has a "QuickPick" option that tried to give you a recommendation to watch instantly. It's like the movie version of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Plus, they have whole categories for cooking videos and campy 80s movies. They have Death Bed: The Bed That Eats! We love that it's highlighting weirder, out-of-the-way stuff.

Once you get your library card (you can register online or in-person), you'll have access to the whole InstantFlix catalog for free. Join, and binge forever

Would you work for a fictional company? (Don't mind us, we're very tired.)

Alright, listen, we're drained. The weather has been hovering near 100 degrees all week, and after a few weeks of inescapable political talk, we just need something fun and not-heady today. Maybe you do too.

So here's a silly infographic from Euroffice, a British office supply company, rating fictional corporations by how great they'd be as employers. We don't totally agree with their conclusions (Anchorman's news community is too sexist and has way too high of a mortality rate), but it's funny to think about the Weyland-Yutani Corporation from Alien in terms of their pay. Sure, you get ripped in half all the time, but they probably have great benefits

We can think of far worse employers than Office Space's Initech though. The Ministry of Information in Brazil doesn't even give you a real desk!

Checking your perspective on making a documentary

SOC's great film program often has AU students creating their own documentaries and heading out into the local community to capture a slice of life (take the Community Documentary class!). We love that AU students get to collaborate with DC to tell their stories, but there's a potentially fraught dynamic with having college students marching into town to film a struggling neighborhood for class project.

Filmmaker Edward Martinez addresses this in a new article, "Navigating the River: The Hidden Colonialism of Documentary." Martinez found himself falling into the usual traps of making a socially unconscious, potentially exploitative documentary – specifically, reducing its subjects to just standing in for their achievements rather than being actual human beings. This was never their intention, but the tropes of documentaries can encourage filmmakers to create that sort of accidentally condescending film that reinforces power imbalances. To make the problem clearer, Martinez asks "Have you ever seen a documentary about rich white people made by poor black people?"

These are problems that clearly don't only affect student films, but out friends in SOC would do well to learn from Martinez's example of a time his crew attempted to film without permission. What started a confrontation (and borderline assault) with a member of the public eventually turned into an opportunity to have a genuine conversation. Don't be the person using someone else's community to set up their tripod.

The end of the VHS, and what it means for the library

Well, we've been dreading this moment for years now: the VHS is officially obsolete.

Funai, the last company that still manufactures VHS players, will end their production at the end of the month. This comes less than a year after Betamax tapes were also discontinued. As of August 1st, the VHS will be a format permanently in the past; outside of small artisanal efforts (the article we linked to mentions a collector community that might not go down so easily), there will never be any more VHS players than currently exist in the world. That's all we've got.

This won't have too much of a practical effect for most people who have already replaced their VHS collections, but we worry about what will come of all the VHSes that have never been re-released or preserved. Countless documentaries and ephemera will become unavailable, assuming the tapes last longer than the supply of players.

For a few years now, Media Services has been in the process of preserving our VHS collection to ensure that this problem won't impact the AU community. We've been conducting an extensive audit of our VHSes to see what isn't available on any other format and whether we're within the legal grounds to digitize and create our own DVD copy of it. As part of this, we're also collaborating with other groups on campus like ATV and Athletics to preserve other valuable VHS videos, including old commencement addresses.

We still have a supply of VHS players and staff who know how to fix them, so we'll be fine in the long run. Let's take a second to commemorate this inevitable but sad moment for physical media.

See where Hollywood films around DC

DC pops up in the movies for good reason: if you want to show the halls of power, you go to Washington. And sometimes, when you're showing the halls of power, your characters have to go for a walk or get a drink. This is how places like Adams Morgan ended up in movies like Dave.

Last semester, our student staff member Sean put together this great map of all the different places in DC that have shown up on film, along with our call numbers for those movies. Most the movies filmed around the Mall, understandably, but you might be surprised to learn about Slam (HU DVD 158), which was filmed near Anacostia. We also liked that Damn Yankees (HU DVD 2706) takes place at Griffith Stadium, at the side of what's now Howard University Hospital.

The map doesn't have ever film every set in DC (no Transformers 3?), but it's a fun way to look around the city and see where movies you might love have stopped by our city. Thanks to Sean for putting this together!

It's okay: Scorsese has guilty pleasures, too

Ingmar Bergman apparently loved Ghostbusters. He's not alone among great directors. Even some of the most storied names in film loved popcorn junk once in a while; Film Comment magazine has been collecting lists of directors' favorite guilty pleasure movies for years now, and The A.V. Club rounded up some of their favorite examples.

John Carpenter's love for B-movies probably comes as no surprise given his own work (Halloween and Big Trouble in Little China), but he also loves The Conqueror, the notoriously terrible Genghis Khan period piece starring John Wayne that may have endangered the cast and crew by filming near a nuclear weapons test site. Martin Scorsese admitted to liking Exorcist II and Howard Hughes's opulent (and white-washed) Land of the Pharaohs. And Furious 7 director James Wan is a fan Disney's Tangled – not really a movie you should feel guilty about enjoying, but it's not what you'd expect from him.

Some of these movies are terrible or unwatchable today for their dated politics. But people like what people like, whether you're one of the most famous filmmakers or history or just a random person reading this blog right now. There's no such thing as a guilty pleasure if you really enjoy it!

More big movies streaming through the AU Library

Our streaming video collections got even better this month with a few additions we want to share with you – including a rotating collection that's only up for a limited time.

Firstly, we have two big new titles available to stream. When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee's documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is now available on Films on Demand, and the award-winning Argentinian film La Historia Oficial is available through Kanopy. These films are often favorites for courses at AU, and we hope having them available streaming makes them more accessible.

But for our biggest addition, we've opened the doors to our collection through Swank Digital Campus. Swank allows us to license feature films, but previously we could only share these titles with individual pre-approved classes. Now the collection is available for the AU community to watch for free, including big classic movies like The Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, and All The President's Men.

(The caveat is that we can only license Swank titles for a year at a time, so some of them will expire over the course of the year. Watch them early!)

We know that streaming plays a huge role in how people consume media, so we're excited to bring you more and more of these sorts of high-profile movies through the library.

Even reviews of media for women are more hostile

Gender-targeted abuse and harassment have long made comment sections on the internet borderline unreadable, but those same nasty attitudes have been poisoning the digital well for years in subtler ways. As a recent exposé from FiveThirtyEight shows, online reviews for television shows geared towards women have been artificially lowered by axe-grinding men.

By analyzing a trove of IMDb data, Walt Hickey discovered that among shows more often rated and watched by women, large shares of reviews by men have been extremely low. This has disproportionately tanked their scores: the average 1-to-10 rating for the top 100 shows aimed towards women trails the average for shows aimed towards men by almost a full point. For shows like America's Next Top Model – which we can attest has a health fanbase across gender – men rated the show almost three points lower than women did. But this is an issue with the aggregate, not the quality of individual shows.

It would be easy to blame this on loud sexists, but we should be blaming the way gender and media are talked about. Those men giving Tyra Banks a 1 have probably been subtly, tacitly conditioned their whole lives to look down on things made for women as inherently inferior or less engaging. So, you know, just factor in decades of systemic sexism when looking at IMDb scores.

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.)

What's it like to be a woman in cinematography?

via Variety

Much has been made about the unfortunately small pool of women directing in Hollywood and lack of the opportunities they are given. Things are even more dire for women in cinematography. According to Vulture, only 2% of cinematographers for major films are women, and none have ever been nominated for an Oscar in the entire 88 years of the Academy Awards.

To get a better sense of the state of the field, Vulture's Kevin Lincoln sat down with Natasha Braier, Maryse Alberti, and Rachel Morrison, three cinematographers of critically acclaimed films, and asked them about their experience in a male-dominated field. They dive into the difference in how they're treated on-set by colleagues and especially how societal expectations about mothers and families restricts their work opportunities (DPs commitments for big films can last for months).

Morrison suggests that she'd rather be known for her work than for who she is – but also that the spotlight on women in cinematography is necessary as the field shifts. We hope we'll get there too.

Who run the world? Ghostbusters. It's Women in Film Week on the blog

Haters be warned: the new Ghostbusters movie comes out this Friday, and we are extremely excited. It looks like a whole load of fun, and we're glad to see a big-budgeted action comedy in theaters.

But it's impossible to talk about Ghostbusters in a vacuum, because the discussion around the movie has been dominated by anger over the casting of women in the movie's central roles. Whether in coded language about the sanctity of childhood memories or just outright sexism, the uproar over funny women being Ghostbusters is a sad reminder that film and pop culture are still often hostile towards women.

So this week, we're featuring articles and stories about the experiences of women in film. Bustin' preconceptions about the state of gender equity in the film business makes us feel good.

Meet the Media Services guide collection

When we buy new items for the collection, sometimes they come with bonus guides full of interviews, essays, and commentary. These are super useful for anyone researching film or wanting to learn more about film history. We keep these guides stashed on shelves in the back corner of Media Services, and we realized that we need to make them a little easier for you to find. So we're doing that!

Whenever you check out a DVD that comes with a guidebook, you'll find a little message in the case letting you know about the extra material you can check out. If you have to watch something for a class assignment, you might find something in there to help you out.

We hope this gets you closer to some of the hidden treasures in the library collection!

RIP Abbas Kiarostami, defining voice of Iranian cinema

Over the weekend, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami died at age 76. Kiarostami was perhaps the greatest and most renowned Iranian filmmaker; he is the only to win a Palme d'Or, had an outsized influence on world cinema, and brought international attention to the Iranian film industry. His admirers include Martin Scorsese and Jean-Luc Godard, who once reportedly said "Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami."

Kiarostami's thematically powerful work often lands on lists of the greatest films ever made, not just for their historical significance but their artistic achievement. His 1997 Palme-winning Taste of Cherry is an milestone in minimalism, with long stretches of silence and inaction that divided audiences on its release.

Below, we've included a list of films by Kiarostami, including some shorts included in compilations. You might also consider watching Cinema Asia: Iran (streaming), a documentary about the history of Iranian cinema that mentions Kiarostami's work.

Segment in Lumière & Company – HU DVD 283
Crimson Gold (screenplay) – HU DVD 928
The Wind Will Carry Us – HU DVD 1334
Ten – HU DVD 1336
Close-Up – HU DVD 1344 and streaming
ABC Africa – DVD 1345
Where is My Romeo? – DVD 4320
Life and Nothing More – DVD 8247
Certified Copy – HU DVD 10031
Segment in Five: 5 Long Takes Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu – HU DVD 10290
Taste of Cherry – HU DVD 10375
Where is the Friend's Home – HU DVD 11633 
Like Someone in Love – HU DVD 11684
Through the Olive Trees – HU DVD 12018

New Acquisitions - July 2016

This month, we've added some of the most critically movies of 2015 to our collection, including The Revenant, Creed, and Concussion. But we want to focus on a particular fascinating movie that probably passed under your radar.

The Tribe is a Ukrainian crime movie filmed entirely in Ukrainian sign language. There are no translations or subtitles. Critics say the movie is captivating, even or perhaps because of the lack of understandable dialogue. Certainly nothing like it has ever been produced before, and for that alone, you owe it a shot.

Follow the link for the rest of what we have for July...

Media Services at the Movies: The Purge: Election Year

The summer blockbuster season is here! "Media Services at the Movies" will look at what big movie is coming out this week, then offer a few movies like it from our collection.

To be honest, we dismissed The Purge at first as more thinly plotted horror about people breaking into your house. Maybe it was. By its newest, third installment, the series has slowly morphed into political satire. The seeds were always there – the first movie teases that the annual crime spree started as socioeconomic violence – but reviews for The Purge: Election Year say the movie has its sights on bigger targets this time.

Using dystopian scenarios to comment on modern society has been a staple of fiction for a long time (see: 1984), but film in particular loves the genre. You can see similarities everywhere from The Hunger Games and Idiocracy to the ultra-violent movies of Paul Verhoeven. Is it fair to call the class warfare of The Purge an update to The Running Man?

So if you liked where the newest Purge is heading, consider watching some of these other movies where a nightmarish future has more in common with the present than you'd expect.

Gattaca – HU DVD 1949
A Scanner Darkly – HU DVD 2416 
Idiocracy – HU DVD 2494
Children of Men – HU DVD 2631
Soylent Green – HU DVD 5731
District 9 – HU DVD 6686
RoboCop – DVD 8164
They Live – HU DVD 9020
Logan's Run – HU DVD 11104
Silent Running – HU DVD 11609

The five years in Chicago when movies were forbidden

from Exhibitors Herald,
via Wikimedia Commons

Today, we learned about a truly bizarre moment in film history that we want to share. For as often as you hear people (usually wrongly) claiming censorship of media, you've never lived through anything like the reign of Major M.L.C. Funkhouser, film censor of the city of Chicago.

As The Chicago Tribune tells it, in 1913, Funkhouser was appointed by the Chicago police as a "censor of public morals," which allowed him to crack down on antisocial behavior. Instead of looking at public drunkenness, prostitution, gambling, or any of the other traditional public vices, Funkhouser focused all his attention on motion pictures.

Funkhouser abused his powers in absurd degree. He banned movies depicting dancing, arguing that they could lead young people to go to bars and drink. He nixed comedies that made fun of authority and required film producers to edit or rewrite the movies to allow them to play. At one point, Funkhouser even rejected a film about the Revolutionary War because it could potentially undermine national interests in World War I.

Filmmakers ridiculed the censorship almost immediately. Their films, stripped of objectionable content, were apparently incomprehensible. And through all this, none of Funkhouser's actions seemed to have any impact on the city apart from aggravating producers and audiences. After five years of this nonsense, the new mayor of Chicago found an excuse to suspend Funkhouser, closing the book on a dark age for expression on film.

To learn more about film censorship in Chicago, check out the article "Reel Life, Real Censorship" from the Chicago History Museum. We're still in disbelief that this happened.

Learn the secrets of directing from Adam Nimoy this Thursday

image via School of Communication website

Maybe you've had to direct a student film for class. Exciting! But that means you have to direct people, and if you don't have experience managing a set, you may be awkward to work with your actors without accidentally being a jerk. You need to learn the best way to communicate with your cast from the experts who have been there before – and who better than Hollywood royalty?

This Thursday, June 30th, the School of Communication will host Adam Nimoy, television director and son of actor Leonard Nimoy, for a masterclass on "Working with Actors." We'll quote the SOC description here:

One of the biggest complaints Nimoy would hear from actors on the set is that, “nobody talks to us,” except to say "move here, move there, faster, slower, louder, softer, cut, print, moving on!” This class is a way for directors to address some of those concerns and provide a deep dive into how to direct actors.

We won't pretend to know what Nimoy does, but it sounds like there's a lot more involved than just ordering your cast around really politely. You don't appear to need to register in advance, so show up before 1pm on Thursday to hear sound advice from the son of Spock himself.

Media Services at the Movies: Independence Day: Resurgence

The summer blockbuster season is here! "Media Services at the Movies" will look at what big movie is coming out this week, then offer a few movies like it from our collection.

Marvel's brand of interconnected, tonally similar action dominates the movie landscape today, but it's difficult to understate what a massive effect Independence Day had on blockbusters in 1996. Director Roland Emmerich, at the point best known for Stargate, took the template of 70s disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and updated it for the era of $100 million budgets. You can trace its influence to Deep Impact, Cloverfield, Sharknado, and basically everything by Michael Bay.

The upcoming sequel to Independence Day has the chance to re-plant the flag for big dumb disaster movies, but instead of looking forward, let's roll the clock back. As we said, disaster movies had been successful in decades prior, and Independence Day: Resurgence owes its template to that first wave of the genre. So for those looking forward to another wave of people in fleeing in panic while cities explode, the Nixon era has you covered.

The China Syndrome – HU DVD 237
The Towering Inferno – HU DVD 8555
The Andromeda Strain – HU DVD 11322
Airport – HU DVD 11854
The Poseidon Adventure – HU DVD 12591

AFI Docs begins tonight with a Werner Herzog treat on Friday

AFI Docs has arrived! For one week every summer, the American Film Institute takes over DC, hosting five days of screenings for new documentaries and documentary shorts. AFI Docs attracts top talent from around the world – including, this year, a special event with Werner Herzog and his new film Lo and Behold.

Tickets for Herzogpalooza are already sold out, but there are plenty of other documentaries to watch this week in downtown DC and Silver Spring. Highlights include...

• The Man Who Saw Too Much, about a photojournalist who covered crime and tragedy in Mexico City for five decades.
• Toucan Nation, which looks at toucan rehabilitation programs and animal welfare laws.
• Sonita, the story of an aspiring rapper living in Iran, where women are not allowed perform music.
• Obit, a behind-the-scenes look at the New York Times's obituary department.

The festival kicks off tonight with a screening of Zero Days, a new documentary from Alex Gibney (director of HBO's Going Clear) about American Stuxnet virus reporetedly designed to attack Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Tickets cost around $12 each, the usual price for a high-end movie screening. See the AFI Docs website for a full list of what's playing this week. Or you can get the official app!

See Inside Out tonight in Adams Morgan!

It's been a while since we checked in with all the outdoor movie screenings happening in DC this summer. As it turns out, there's one tonight!

The Adams Morgan BID will be screening Inside Out tonight at the Marie Reed School Soccer Field, just a block or two away from Amsterdam Falafelshop. The movie starts half an hour after sundown – which should be around 8:30 to 9-ish – and the first 50 attendees get free cookies courtesy of Tryst.

If you're still riding the Pixar train after Finding Dory this weekend and need evening plans, why not swing by AdMo for Inside Out? If you leave near AU anyway, it's convenient and, best of all, free!

Media Services at the Movies: Finding Dory

The summer blockbuster season is here! "Media Services at the Movies" will look at what big movie is coming out this week, then offer a few movies like it from our collection.

We can't think of much new to say about Pixar. The studio has some of the best talent in animation – second only to Studio Ghibli and infinitely greater than whoever made Norm of the North. Although the quality of their films has wavered a bit in recent years, you can still depend on Pixar to bring out the heart in their stories.

Pixar sequels in particular can be hit or miss. For every Toy Story 2, they put out a Cars 2. From early impressions, Finding Dory sounds like it lands in the upper levels of Pixar for its poignant take on  disability. Dory will also be beautiful, as Pixar films tend to be. They look even more beautiful in HD; we'd go as far as recommending animation as one of the reasons to make the bump up to Blu-ray.

Don't believe us? We have several of Pixar's movies in Blu-ray (not all, since we bought many before Blu-rays were a thing). If you have a Blu-ray player, check one out and see the quality difference for yourself. It'll definitely encourage you to opt for the Blu-ray of Finding Dory went it comes out.

Ratatouille – HU BLU 3814
Up – HU BLU 6690
Toy Story – HU BLU 7768
Toy Story 2 – HU BLU 7769
Toy Story 3 – HU BLU 7770
Monsters Inc. – HU BLU 8596
Inside Out – HU BLU 12881

Vanity Fair turns blockbuster movie credits into a budget list

A $200 million movie budget almost seems abstract. We can say that a whole bunch of that money went to the effects, but what does that actually mean? How much does the assistant director figure into it? Does Robert Downey Jr. just get $180 million and everyone else splits it up?

Vanity Fair made a mock movie credit roll to break down how much money goes to each crew member, and the numbers are sobering. Pay rates vary wildly from position to position; cat cameos get paid more than some stuntpeople. The most unusual are the positions where people earn different amounts for the same jobs. Set production assistants, for instance, have a $5000 range, maybe because some spend longer or only work with the second unit.

Watching a giant wall of credits can become a little numbing, but you start to get the sense of the scale of film production when you see that $229,000 went into matte painters. And if you feel a little anger at the lead actor being paid about as much as the rest of the cast combined, we don't blame you.

A roundup of Tonys-related films from the Music Library

This Sunday was the 70th Annual Tony Awards, which featured awards for a few adaptations and revivals that have existed on film before. Rather than ramble about it ourselves, we're going to turn things over to the Music Library, which put together a list of all the items in the library collections related to this weekend's big winners.

Of note for us, we have DVDs of The Color Purple, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and You've Got Mail (adapted from the same source material as She Loves Me).

FiveThirtyEight figures out the most and least successful movies based on books

A book is not a film. Each format has strong and weak points, and as common as book-to-movie adaptations are, not every story is well-suited for both. Fans of the original books might bemoan when the movie version misses the point, but sometimes movies end up being the right way to tell a story that started in print.

We were alerted to this quick study from FiveThirtyEight last year that tried to figure out, statistically, what benefited and lost the most in the move to the screen. Using ratings from Metacritic and Goodreads (admittedly not a perfect comparison since Goodreads reviews come from fans), FiveThirtyEight zeroed in on books with the greatest quality disparity from their movies. Many of the most poorly rated movie adaptations are based on young adult or genre novels – which, again, fans may have inflated ratings for.

More interesting are the movies that significantly outperform their books: Up in the Air, Apocalypse Now, The Graduate, and others on the list were either adapted from books with middling ratings or reworked the premise for the zeitgeist (both, in the case of Up in the Air). Metropolis is a particularly interesting case, because the movie brought so much invention to film as a whole that the novel has been almost totally forgotten.

Both versions of Battlefield Earth, meanwhile, continue to be despised about equally.

Media Services at the Movies: Now You See Me 2

The summer blockbuster season is here! "Media Services at the Movies" will look at what big movie is coming out this week, then offer a few movies like it from our collection.

So, we have a weird relationship with Now You See Me. Years ago, we got a publicity package from the film's producers, filled with Now You See Me shirts, hats, flashlights (?), gum (?!), and other strange branded products. Forgive us if we have a soft spot for this deeply silly movie series. It's supposed to be about magic, but it's closer to one of G.O.B.'s illusions.

Instead, let's pivot to actual magic. In particular, let's look at two films about magicians with the same name: The Illusionist. 2006's Illusionist tells a story of romance about magician in 19th century Austria-Hungary; 2010's Illusionist is a melancholy animated film based on a screenplay by late French filmmaker Jacques Tati.

Both are certainly sadder films, but they do a better job capturing the enchantment of illusions compared to... whatever Now You See Me is doing.

The Illusionist (2006) – HU DVD 1779
The Illusionist (2010) – HU DVD 8704

The next time you need a camera, check KitSplit

The AU Library is happy to lend out cameras, tripods, and microphones for students, staff, and faculty working on film projects, and SOC students also have the option to borrow equipment from the Media Production Center.

But what happens if you graduate, or if you need something higher-end or specialized? You'd normally rent from a production house, but honestly, keeping track of private rental services in the city can be difficult.

Enter KitSplit, a new site that aggregates equipment rental spots around the city. They have an extremely broad audience in mind: renters and rentees range from individuals to major corporations, and models range from the simplest up to experimental virtual reality cameras. The low-rent horror movie schlockhouse Troma Entertainment uses the service too, so if you're looking to make a film with a low budget, KitSplit could work for you.

It's great to see more local resources for film alumni folks. Consider swinging by the site if you need some nice and/or inexpensive equipment if the library isn't an option.

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!

Media Services at the Movies: Popstar

The summer blockbuster season is here! "Media Services at the Movies" will look at what big movie is coming out this week, then offer a few movies like it from our collection.

Every generation gets the music mockumentary it deserves. This is Spinal Tap remains the definitive send-up of hair metal rockstar excess. Popstar: Never Stop Never Popping, the newest film by The Lonely Island, continues the tradition by skewering Justin Bieber, celebrity ego, and flaming out in the age of social media.

It doesn't start or end there: you can look back to 1978's Beatles parody All You Need is Cash or the 90s hip-hop spoof Fear of a Black Hat. When a new type of pop star emerges, the world of film has been quick to drag music culture through the mud. Popstar's Conner4Real is the parody we need right now, but twenty years ago, it needed Chris Rock's CB4.

This is Spinal Tap – HU DVD 538
CB4 – HU DVD 6717
All You Need is Cash – HU DVD 10187
A Mighty Wind – HU DVD 10218
Fear of a Black Hat – HU DVD 12653

And because sometimes life imitates art, we also recommend Anvil! The Story of Anvil!, a real rock documentary so silly it may as well be a joke too (HU DVD 3461).

New Acquisitions - June 2016

There has been an acquisition.

Have you felt it?

(We have other things this month, too, like Out 1, a twelve-hour odyssey by recently deceased French New Wave director Jacques Rivette. Follow the link to see what else we added.)

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.

Some of the great, weird things we found while cleaning out our desks

 Now that we're in the slow months of summer, we have a chance to tidy up our department. A big part of that this summer is cleaning out desks that haven't been emptied in decades and finding all sorts of goodies in them.

Most of what we found was old files, but a few wonderful relics from the past stood out. We shared some of the best to Facebook. The catalogs are pretty amazing (look at all that wood paneling!), but the cassette of a 1984 Ted Kennedy speech at the nearby Methodist church has some real historical value. Luckily the University Archives had already backed it up!

You can own a piece of Mad Men history – even just an ashtray

Prop auctions are so irrationally fun. A pen might be worth a few cents, but if that pen appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy, my god, it's worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. The chance to own a small piece of a movie or television show is the chance for a connection to art and characters we love.

Which means that you, too, can buy the box that Peggy's walking with in that GIF.

In commemoration of the year since Mad Men's finale, the show's propmaster Ellen Freund will be auctioning over 1000 props from the show, including typewriters, office decor, and, of course, drink sets. Now you can buy the empty decadence of Sterling Cooper without actually destroying your life and alienating your family!

The auction begins on Wednesday, June 1st, but you can browse the items for sale right now. If you really, really want the model ship on Pete Campbell's desk, it can be yours.

An intro to double Palme d'Or winner Ken Loach

In a choice that shocked many critics, director Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival for I, Daniel Blake, a drama about a carpenter fighting for disability benefits. This is Loach's second Palme d'Or (a rare feat) after his 2006 Irish War of Independence film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Already, film critics are debating whether his newest work is too "aggressively Loachian."

...but what does that mean? If you aren't familiar with social advocacy British cinema, you may not have encountered the director before. Ken Loach's films tend to address issues like welfare and labor with a focus on the realistic living conditions of the individuals affected. His 1969 film Kes, about a delinquent child with minimal family support who befriends a falcon, has often been considered one of the greatest British films of all time.

By all descriptions, I, Daniel Blake fits that mold for good or for ill; the filmmaker's work has been criticized as maudlin and unsubtle at its worst. We have a bunch of Loach's films in our collection – he's been active for six decades after all – so you can judge for yourself.

Sweet Sixteen – HU DVD 1133
Bread & Roses – HU DVD 2619
The Navigators – HU DVD 2653
The Wind That Shakes the Barley – HU DVD 3374
The Spirit of '45 – HU DVD 7594
Kes – HU DVD 8370
Ae Fond Kiss... – HU DVD 8803
Raining Stones – HU DVD 10683

Great Directors (interview with Loach) – Streaming video

New to the collection: rare car commercials from great filmmakers

Occasionally, we get an unusual item in the collection that we just have to share with everyone. Sometimes it's just an oddity like Executive Koala (HU DVD 8910), but this time we have a special, unusual DVD with a place in film history.

In 2001, BMW commissioned The Hire, an anthology of eight 10-minute short films starring Clive Owen about the driving features of their cars. They were among the earliest successful branded web video content – and make no mistake, they're commercials.

What makes them special is that each film was directed by arguably one of the greatest film talents working at the time. Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai, Alejandro González Iñárritu, John Woo, and others all participated; the names BMW attracted were astounding.

The high profile is also one of the reasons you can't watch them anymore: The Hire was extremely expensive, and BMW opted not to continue hosting the videos. Very few DVD copies exist, and some versions omit one of the films because of a contract stipulation from Forest Whitaker. We got our hands on one of the complete promotional DVDs (DVD 13108), so the AU community will always have access to these lost works by great filmmakers.

Media Services at the Movies: Neighbors 2

The summer blockbuster season is here! "Media Services at the Movies" will look at what big movie is coming out this week, then offer a few movies like it from our collection.

Summer movie season is, at last, finally upon us. Although the likely biggest movie of the year (Captain America: Civil War) is already behind us, there are plenty of interesting movies over the new few months that we're eager to find similar recommendations for.

The big movie this week is Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the Seth Rogen- and Zac Efron-fronted generational comedy sequel. As before, Rogen and Rose Byrne duel with their Greek life neighbors to keep their lives under control, but there's a bit of melancholy to their rivalry. The Neighbors movies are crazy and violent, but they're also about growing, moving on, and finding yourself being the older voice of reason. In the new film, apparently even Efron's bro character finds himself drifting from his old lifestyle.

This might be an odd and controversial pairing, but to go with that introspection on growing older, we recommend a few coming-of-age films about finding yourself untethered after graduation. (We know that more than a few of our patrons will be feeling this soon, too.)

American Graffiti – HU DVD 93
Ghost World – HU DVD 362
Into the Wild – HU DVD 4130
Kicking and Screaming – HU DVD 4842
Tiny Furniture – HU DVD 9713

Our final count: 672 new DVDs this semester!

As we wrap up the academic year, we want to brag for a second. In a typical semester, we add about 200 or 300 new DVDs. Our collection grew by over 3000 titles in four years, which is a pretty great pace.

According to our stats, during the spring 2016, we added 672 new DVDs to our shelves! That's two-to-three times the normal semester output and almost a full year's worth of additions. Much of this can be chalked up to the huge volume of television we purchased (44 discs of Frasier!).

Our staff worked tirelessly to get these DVDs onto the shelf as quickly as we could, and we're proud of the sheer volume we got through. For television shows, we have to make sure all the episodes play correctly, create cases for each disc so we can circulate them individually, and catalog them so you can find them and check them out. It takes almost everyone in our unit to push these through at the rate we did, so kudos to everyone (especially our student staff, who process the cases) for the job well done.

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.

What does independent film look like today?

via Maryland Film Festival

The slow roll into summer is the time of year when we start to look at our big-picture tasks, so it seems appropriate to share a big-picture article about the state of film.

For The New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote a lengthy piece about the state of "independent film" and what the term means in 2016. Independent film has always distinguished itself from Hollywood by its open experimentation, as well as by what Brody calls the "perpetual crisis" of needing to find a direction to transform film. In his summary of the Maryland Film Festival, Brody sees the current crisis as a resistance to the entire form of the feature film. Digital distribution and cheap production with phones have outmoded the long-standing system of pitching films at festivals for theatrical release. Can "indie filmmaking" grow past its old habits?

Brody's article profiles a few interesting entries from the Maryland Film Festival, but more importantly, it shows what independent film now looks like from the ground. Filmmakers, producers, and others continue to meet behind closed doors to talk frankly about their industry. There's community, but increasingly, it's one that wants to shake out of its usual structure.

Watch Purple Rain for free at the MLK Library tonight

Prince graffiti in Tenleytown

Prince's sudden death last month still comes as a shock, and the public outpouring of grief and remembrance has reminded us of his singular musical talent. In the realm of film, Prince also left four movies of varying quality. While Under the Cherry Moon may not be remembered as more than an oddity, his soundtrack and starring role as The Kid in Purple Rain are beloved contributions to the film canon.

As part of the extended mourning period, the MLK Library downtown will host a free screening of Purple Rain at 6pm. This is part of DC Public Library's ongoing Tuesday Night Movies series. The event room can hold 250 people, so whoever shows up first gets a seat.

If you haven't seen Purple Rain before, now is the right time. This is the movie that established Prince is a superstar.

Graduated and moving onto filmmaking? Kodak may have a deal for you

Congratulations to everyone who graduated this weekend! We have no doubt you'll go on to do great things. In particular, we want to talk to AU's graduating film students, many of whom may be looking to start film projects.

If you're considering going down that path, you might need a little crowdfunding money. And if you need a little crowdfunding money, Kodak has a little bonus for you. For qualifying projects on Kickstarter, Kodak will match 20% of your fundraising in 35mm film stock. It's unclear how Kodak vets the project – we imagine access to a 35mm camera is a requirement – but this is a great offer for anyone considering taking a stab at the format who may have been worried about acquiring physical film.

Unless you're Quentin Tarantino, it can be difficult or expensive to get a whole bunch of film stock. Kodak's new initiative should help get film into the hands of more up-and-coming filmmakers. Could you be one of them? Of course you could! Get that Kickstarter together and patch Kodak an email.

Get ready for DC's outdoor movie season

Photo via Bethesda Urban Partnership

You did it! The semester's over! Despite the overcast, soggy weather, we're officially in the academic summer. For those sticking around DC for the summer (as we are), we'll keep you updated on interesting film events and happenings around town.

As part of our favorite DC summer tradition, communities all around the DMV will be hosting outdoor movie screenings from May through August. No matter where in the area you live, you'll find something interesting to watch one evening. We're most excited about the Congressional Cemetery Cinematery, a movie screening series in a graveyard.

We'll update you about these as they come up, but if you want a master list of what to expect, visit the handy website DC Outdoor Films. The site also mentions which screenings will have captions (hurray accessibility!).

On cinema and hunkiness

As we get closer to the end of the finals, we bring you hunky dudes. More specifically, we bring you an examination of the future outlook of hunky dudes in cinema. (Is there anything academic analysis can't un-sexify?)

Flavorwire's Lara Zarum wrote an insightful post about the changing representation of masculinity in movies. As the film industry pushes for better, more substantive roles for women on-screen, many have noticed an odd corollary of more movies with, to use the article's term, beefcake. Magic Mike is an obvious example of the more sexualized appearances of men, but even Daniel Craig's James Bond is, to quote CBC's Rachel Giese, "both Bond and a Bond girl at the same time."

But as Zarum notices, rather than just being walking abs, these sexualized male characters often remain the subjects and have to deal with their changing relationship with women. She cites Jamie Fraser on Outlander as an example: he's a dreamboat, but he deals with the expectations of his relationship and abuse.

The article is unsure whether these new, more conscientious male character archetypes have a net positive effect, considering they still go hand-in-hand with objectification. But they at least reveal areas that can be explored with closer consideration of gender portrayal.

In the meantime, hunks.

Take film with you over summer break with Kanopy

Three days of finals remain! Summer is close, and we imagine everyone wants to head home as soon as possible. It also means that you won't have access to our gigantic DVD collection.

Fear not: you can still stream a whole bunch of movies through Kanopy. We mentioned Kanopy last year; they have a huge library of streamable movies that you can access with your AU login. Just looking at their homepage, you can watch the George Takei documentary To Be Takei, the classic dinner conversation movie My Dinner with Andre, Hong Kong favorite In the Mood for Love, and the child-traumatizing Watership Down. That's a seriously impressive lineup without even diving deeper into the collection, especially their documentaries.

If you're aching to learn more about film on a day off, you can also watch the entire The Story of Film series through Kanopy. The Story of Film might be the greatest documentary series about the history of motion pictures, and you can binge the entire thing for free on a week off.

It's ironic that as soon as classwork is done and you have the free time to watch things, you're probably moving away from campus. But now you can take at least a big chunk of those films with you through Kanopy. Just remember your username!