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Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1192
Language
English
Formats
Description
"An ecstatic voyage through the creative and spiritual universe of David Bowie, Moonage Daydream is a fittingly unclassifiable tribute to the shape-shifting rock iconoclast and his singular sound and vision. Exploding the conventions of the music documentary, director Brett Morgen remixes dazzling, never-before-seen footage of the artist throughout his career, reveling in his otherworldly presence while revealing the restless philosophical inquiry...
2) Spartacus
Series
Criterion collection volume 105
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
Spartacus is the bold gladiator slave who leads a massive slave revolt against Imperial Rome in this epic true account of man's eternal struggle for freedom.
3) Cold war
Series
Language
Polish
Description
A sweeping, delirious romance begins in the Polish countryside, where Wiktor, a musician on a state-sponsored mission to collect folk songs, discovers a captivating young singer named Zula. Over the next fifteen years, their turbulent relationship will play out in stolen moments between two worlds: the jazz clubs of decadent, bohemian Paris, to which he defects, and the corrupt, repressive Communist Bloc, where she remains, universes bridged by their...
Series
Criterion collection volume 249
Language
Français
Description
The film is considered one of the most influential political films in history, by Gillo Pontecorvo. Vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, etc. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques...
Series
Criterion collection volume 422
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A challenging, multilayered epic [of] the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne in 1908 at the age of three, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval within and without the walls of the Forbidden City."--Container.
Series
Criterion collection volume 514
Language
English
Description
In 1862, during the Kansas-Missouri border war, Jake and Jack Bull join the Confederate-sympathizing Bushwhackers after Jack's father is killed by marauding members of the abolitionist Jayhawkers. They are aided by unusual ally, Holt, who's fighting for the South despite being a former slave.
Series
Criterion collection volume 2
Language
日本語
Description
Tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire seven out-of-work warriors to protect them from invading bandits.
8) Europa
Series
Criterion collection volume 454
Language
Deutsch
Description
Leo Kessler, an American of German descent, visits Germany in 1945. He works as a night conductor on the Zentropa Railway Line, owned by a Nazi sympathizer. Leo attempts to remain neutral to the ongoing purguing of loyalists by the Allied forces, but he falls in love with the railway magnate's daughter.
9) Cold war
Series
Criterion collection volume 1005
Language
Polish
Description
"A sweeping, delirious romance [that] begins in the Polish countryside, where Wiktor, a musician on a state-sponsored mission to collect folk songs, discovers a captivating young singer named Zula. Over the next fifteen years, their turbulent relationship will play out in stolen moments between two worlds: the jazz clubs of decadent, bohemian Paris, to which he escapes, and the corrupt, repressive Communist Bloc, where she remains, universes bridged...
Series
Criterion collection volume 41
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Adaptation of Shakespeare's patriotic historical drama that celebrates the English nation and the greatness of its King. Includes medieval battle sequences with a recreation of the Battle of Agincourt.
11) La llorona
Series
Criterion collection volume 1156
Language
Español
Description
A country's bloody history stains the present in the Guatemalan auteur Jayro Bustamante's transfixing fusion of folk horror and searing political commentary, inspired by the real-life indictment of the authoritarian Efraín Ríos Montt for crimes against humanity. A notorious, now aging former military dictator stands trial for atrocities committed against Guatemala's Mayan communities. While battling legal repercussions and the people's demands for...
Series
Criterion collection volume 830
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles's extraordinary film career that was the culmination of the filmmaker's lifelong obsession with Shakespeare's ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff; the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV's wayward son Prince Hal, here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace.
Series
Criterion collection volume 514
Language
English
Description
In 1862, during the Kansas-Missouri border war, Jake and Jack Bull join the Confederate-sympathizing Bushwhackers after Jack's father is killed by marauding members of the abolitionist Jayhawkers. They are aided by unusual ally, Holt, who's fighting for the South despite being a former slave.
Series
Criterion collection volume 838
Language
Español
Appears on list
Formats
Description
A dark fable set five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Eleven-year-old Ofelia comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather, a sadistic captain in General Franco's army, hunts down Republican guerrillas who refuse to give up the fight. The violent reality in which she lives merges seamlessly with a fantastical interior world when Ofelia meets a...
15) Heaven's gate
Series
Criterion collection volume 636
Language
English
Description
A Harvard graduate, turned federal Marshal in Wyoming, learns of a government sanctioned plot by cattle barons to kill the area's European settlers for their land. The resulting battle is based on the Johnson County War of 1892.
Series
Criterion collection volume 283
Language
Polish
Description
The story of a cocky Polish youth who decides to fight the Nazis after he falls for a pretty resistance leader. As he and his friends help escapees during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the innocence of a generation is lost under the grueling conditions of war. The first in what has come to be known as the director's 'war trilogy'.
17) Kanał
Series
Criterion collection volume 284
Language
Polish
Description
Begins on the 56th day of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis during World War II. A ragtag group of trained and untrained Resistance fighters hold on to the front line. They try to live a relatively normal life, and even find time to play the piano. They achieve small victories, but must retreat into the sewers in order to survive.
Series
Criterion collection volume 411
Language
Deutsch
Description
After spending four years in prison for killing his girlfriend, lumbering man-child Franz Biberkopf is finally released back into society. He wants to stay honest now he has left jail, but it is tough in the Alexanderplatz section of Berlin. After failing to succeed in several 'regular' jobs, he falls in with some old cohorts and an on-again, off-again association with thugs. Post-war society is crumbling, and it appears that nothing will bring it...
Series
Criterion collection volume 565
Language
English
Description
In Chaplin's first talkie, he plays the duel role of dictator Adenoid Hynkel and a Jewish barber who is a dead-ringer look-alike for der Nutsie...and who thwarts his plans for world domination.
Series
Criterion collection volume 755
Language
Français
Description
1941. An idealistic, naive German officer in Nazi occupied France is assigned to the home of a middle-aged man and his grown niece. Their response to his presence - their only form of resistance - is complete silence.