Film & Television Studies

Preserved by the BFI National Film Archive, this is an archive of 100+ short documentary films made by the British Council during the 1940s designed to show the world how wartime Britain lived, worked and played.

National Archives (UK). This site contains a range of archive clips with background information, dating from the early 20th century to the Cold War era.

Weekly videos in which directors comment on the craft of movie-making.

(sponsored by MIT). Video and performance archive of Shakespeare performances from many parts of the world.

(from the website) The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library’s vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to the viewers worldwide.

Digital motion picture and television collections collected by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress.

Watch and listen to a selection of films, television and radio programs preserved by UCLA Library's Film & Television Archive.

(Internet Archive ->  Moving Image Archive ->) Sub-collection of the Moving Image Archive. 7,000+ digitized and videotape titles and a large collection of home movies, amateur and industrial films. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions.

Contains thousands of free digital movies uploaded by Archive users which include: classic full-length films, daily alternative news broadcasts, cartoons, and concerts. Many are available for free download.

EU-funded portal to the digital collections of 35+ European film archives. Offers free access to digital videos, photographs, magic lantern slides, film posters, and text materials.

Provides online access to Europe's television heritage through videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. Explore selected content from early 1900s to the present.

Highlights from British Pathé and the Reuters historical collection of British newsreels covering the twentieth century.
Note: British Pathé has its own YouTube Channel.

An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor, producing and distributing documentary films, animation, web documentaries, and alternative dramas. The NFB has uploaded for free viewing for personal use thousands of films from its archive going back to 1939. it also provides written commentaries on many of its films,

(Hosted on the Internet Archive) Streaming video of archival newsreels, shown in theatres, dating from 1929-1967. These newsreels are the precursors of television news reporting.

Digital archive of avant-garde film and video.

The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains recordings (speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches) documenting North American English dialects. Forty-three states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and parts of Canada are represented. Recording dates range from 1941 to 1984, with the bulk being recorded 1968-1982.

Explore 60,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word and human and natural environments.

16,000 BBC sound effects from the 1920s onwards are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use for personal, educational or research purposes. Browse by broad category (e.g., animals), search within a category, or search the entire database.

Includes @300 audio examples of English dialects from England and Wales.

Sound recordings of interviews with actors, stage designers, writers and critics, theatregoers, etc. talking about post-war British theatre.

The Boston Public Library sound collection includes hundreds of thousands of audio recordings in a variety of historical formats, including wax cylinders, 78 rpms, and LPs. The recordings span many genres, including classical, pop, rock, jazz, and opera – from 78s produced in the early 1900s to LPs from the 1980s.