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Whether you're interested in becoming an experimental film artist or a documentarian in need of archive material, we've got just the thing for you: The Public Domain Project is a compilation of lots of free video footage, still images, audio files and 3D models. Going back as early as the 19th century and as recent as stock photos of President Obama, this content is all in the public domain, as the name implies, and it's a mix of nonfiction and fiction works, the latter including Georges Melies's 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon and Charlie Chaplin's 1914 short Kid Auto Races at Venice.  You don't have to be creative to appreciate the project, though. I've enjoyed just perusing the clips on the site and watching bits of history and...

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The American Film Institute is probably best known for those lists of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time (y'know... if it's an American production in some way). Well, every year they hold their own awards, because every group of people has to have awards. They recognize the ten best films (for this year, it's eleven due to a tie) and the ten best television programs of the year. There are not winners in these categories, but each one gets celebrated. On that front, I kind of like the AFI approach to awards. Along with the awards, AFI has put together this four and a half minute montage chronicling the last 120 years of film. Now, it would be ridiculous to cover every single year. Instead, they start with 1894's Strong Man and jump every ten years, showcasing films like Rear Window, The Godfather: Part II, Pulp Fiction, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...

Throughout the summer, an admin on the r/movies subreddit has been leading Reddit users in a poll of the best movies from every year for the last 100 years called 100 Years of Yearly Cinema. The poll concluded three days ago, and the list of every movie from 1914 to 2013 has been published today.

Users were asked to nominate films from a given year and up-vote their favorite nominees. The full list includes the outright winner along with the first two runners-up from each year. The list is mostly a predictable assortment of IMDb favorites and certified classics, but a few surprise gems have also risen to the top of the crust, including the early experimental documentary Man With a Movie Camera in 1929, Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! in 1919, the Fred Astaire film Top Hat over Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in 1935, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing over John Ford’s...

Hi all, it’s Tim, here to celebrate a milestone of particular significance in the history not just of movies, but of pop culture generally. This weekend marks a centennial of one of the most iconic figures of the modern world: silent comedian Charles Chaplin’s legendary Little Tramp, who premiered in a pair of short comedies that released 100 years ago by Keystone Studios. The second to be shot, but the first to be released, was the half-reel comic short Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. on February 7, 1914; two days later, it was followed by the single-reel Mabel’s Strange Predicament, during the production of which Chaplin threw together a costume on the fly made of too-large shoes, baggy pants, a tight jacket, and a bowler hat. Within months – if not, indeed, within weeks – the character thus assembled through a quick burst of inspiration had become a sensation with audiences,...

Why Watch? Charlie Chaplin‘s first film, Making a Living, features the man who would go on to be the planet’s biggest star donning a top hat and the creepiest face he could muster. It’s the earliest example of his potential for genius, and one of the few where we get to see a talent that’s still in the raw. By his next film, Kid Auto Races at Venice, he had debuted his Little Tramp character and launched a career in earnest. So, what better way is there to spend Labor Day than to watch how Chaplin worked? What does it cost? Just 9 minutes of your time. Check out Making a Living for yourself: Making A Living (1914) Trust us. You have time for more short films.

1914, U, BFI

This important, instructive, hugely enjoyable four-disc set contains painstakingly restored and attractively scored prints of 34 of the 35 films Charlie Chaplin made at Mack Sennett's Keystone studio between January and December 1914. They introduced Chaplin to the cinema, turning him in the process from an admired music hall artist into an accomplished film-maker, who ended the year on the threshold of becoming the most famous man in the world and its highest-paid entertainer. In the course of this astonishing 12 months, he worked with silent stars Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle and Chester Conklin, and we see a great artist evolve, appearing first as a silk-hatted pseudo-toff in his debut film, Making a Living, competing for work at a Los Angeles newspaper. In his second film, the seven-minute Kid Auto Races at Venice, he discovered his tramp persona complete with bowler and cane, delighting and puzzling the crowds at a children's...