Hit rewind: Great online film archives

1

BFI National Archive: The British Film Institute is a bonanza for anyone looking for old reels and films. It looks after one of the world’s largest most important film and television repositories. On Youtube, their playlist titled India on Film: 1899-1947 contains more than 100 clips of an India you may not even recognise. It’s time-travel without the nosebleeds.

2

FSUE Mosfilm Cinema Concern: Films from the largest and oldest film company in the Russian Federation. Switch to auto-translate on the Youtube channel and settle in with Yuri Ozerov’s sweeping two-part Battle of Moscow (1985), or Yevgeny Karelov’s 1976 mini-series Two Captains, based on the popular children’s novel about a young man’s search for a lost Arctic expedition. There’s plenty of Eisenstein and Tarkovsky too.

3

Center for Home Movies: What happened to all those amateur films Americans shot with their beloved (and clunky) Handycams? This organisation works to collect, catalogue and preserve them as cultural heritage. The archive contains scenes from everyday life, and is a riveting record of what was deemed worthy of filming by regular folks empowered by a camera. A selection of the films is available for viewing on centerforhomemovies.org.

4

British Pathé: Quite simply the finest newsreel archive in the world. The Youtube channel features a fraction of their 85,000 films of historical and cultural significance — clips of British royal weddings, war preparation, life in the colonies (including India) and new industry. Also part of the archive is the Reuters historical collection, 1.3 lakh clips from news agencies, some more than a century old.

5

Korean Classic Film: Put your subtitles on to watch more than 125 films uploaded in HD on Youtube. Black-and-white dramas from the 1960s, some very melodramatic family sagas, and grown-up films that require you to sign in and confirm your age. And, of course, love stories that have much in common with today’s K-soaps.