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Film Databases & Catalogs
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Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types.
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Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
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BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
Browse Films
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A Tale of Three Chinatowns (WGBH) A TALE OF THREE CHINATOWNS explores the survival of urban ethnic neighborhoods in three American cities: Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Boston. Through the voices of residents, community activists, developers, and government officials, the film looks at the forces altering each community and the challenges that go with them, including the pressing issue of urban development and gentrification.
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City Hall (BLU) City government touches almost every aspect of our lives. Most of us are unaware of or take for granted these necessary services such as police, fire, sanitation, veterans affairs, elder support, parks, licensing of various professional activities, record keeping of birth, marriage and death as wells as hundreds of other activities that support Boston residents and visitors. CITY HALL, by Frederick Wiseman, shows the efforts by Boston city government to provide these services.
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Priced Out (streaming, Kanopy) This documentary explores the complexities and contradictions of gentrification and life after the era of "the ghetto." It powerfully illustrates how government policies and market forces combine to destroy and rebuild neighborhoods. Some embrace new investment at first, but few are left standing when new money moves in and old residents find themselves priced out.
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Metropolis (streaming, Kanopy) METROPOLIS takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and modern science fiction style, METROPOLIS stands today as the crowning achievement of the German silent cinema.
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Gaining Ground : Building Community on Dudley Street (streaming, Kanopy) In the midst of the economic meltdown, Gaining Ground explores the innovative, grassroots organizing efforts of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in Boston. DSNI was created 25 years ago when the community had been devastated by bank redlining, arson-for-profit and illegal dumping, and has become one of the preeminent models for community-based change. Over the course of two years, we watch a new generation of leaders working to prevent foreclosures and bring jobs and
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Holding Ground: The Rebirth Of Dudley Street (streaming, Kanopy) This documentary by Mark Lipman and Leah Mahan is at once a cautionary tale of urban policies gone wrong and a message of hope for all American cities. In 1985, African-American, Latino, Cape Verdean, and European-American residents of the Dudley area united to revitalize their community. Through the voices of committed residents, activists and city officials, the documentary shows how a Boston neighborhood is pro-actively creating and carrying out its own agenda for change.
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Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston (streaming, Kanopy) The story of what happened to Mission Hill is the story of many of America's older ethnic neighborhoods. Seventy years ago, Mission Hill was an Irish neighborhood of homes and small stores in which people lived near their schools, their church, and their shopping area. But between 1940 and 1980 it changed: thousands of units of public housing were built and decayed there. Nearby hospitals expanded, displacing people from their homes. Developers and speculators bought and sold property and built twenty-story apartment houses. A new, poor population and an affluent professional population arrived to compete for parts of the old neighborhood. Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston is the story of urban renewal, racial conflict, and the struggle of a neighborhood to survive these changing times.
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Sprawling from Grace (streaming, Academic Video Online) This feature length documentary explores the ravages of American suburban sprawl, what America has lost as a result, and the perils we face if we don't change the way in which we build our cities.
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My Brooklyn (streaming, Kanopy) My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson's journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Fulton Mall, a bustling African-American and Caribbean commercial district that - despite its status as the third most profitable shopping area in New York City - is maligned for its inability to appeal to the affluent residents who have come to live around it. As a hundred small businesses are replaced by high rise
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All for the Taking: 21st-Century Urban Renewal (streaming, Academic Video Online) In a highly controversial and precedent-setting decision in mid-2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution permitted local governments to use their power of eminent domain to forcibly acquire private property and transfer it to another private owner.
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The Vanishing City (streaming, Academic Video Online) The Vanishing City exposes the real politic behind the alarming disappearance of New York's beloved neighborhoods, the truth about its finance-dominated economy, and the myth of 'inevitable change.'
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Citizen Jane : battle for the city (streaming, Academic Video Online) t is a timely tale of what can happen when engaged citizens fight the power for the sake of a better world. Arguably, no one did more to shape our understanding of the modern American city than Jane Jacobs, the visionary activist and writer who fought to preserve urban communities in the face of destructive development projects.
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Cities of the Future (streaming, Academic Video Online) This video explores the future development of cities and what these cities could possibly look like. It also explores open spaces, greening and sustainable buildings, possible building dimensions in terms of height and sizes, and finally, the issues and needs of people.
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Ecopolis China (streaming, Academic Video Online) When one billion rural Chinese move to cities, our planet will change irreversibly. Finnish professor Eero Paloheimo and Chinese business magnate Zhang Yue are going to save the world by reinventing the city. T
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Cooked: Survival by Zip Code (streaming) Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history in 1995, when 739 residents--mostly elderly and black--died over the course of one week. As Cooked links the deadly heat wave's devastation back to the underlying manmade disaster of structural racism, it delves deep into one of our nation's biggest growth industries: Disaster Preparedness.
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"Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?" (streaming, Kanopy) Claire Andrade-Watkins s indie documentary portrays the fate of the Cape Verdean community from the Providence neighborhood Fox Point. The Emerson College professor and filmmaker navigates well between her own nostalgia of growing up in Fox Point and the larger history of immigration and urban gentrification. Close-knit and thriving through the 1950s, the Cape Verdean Americans were displaced by urban renewal projects and the extension of I-95 through the heart of their residential area. The colorful, engaging interviewees intimate larger themes of racism and social change with wisps of tales about zoot suits and South Main Street strolls.
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Make no little plans : Daniel Burnham and the American city (dvd) " ... reveals the fascinating life and complex legacy of architect and city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham. In the midst of late nineteenth century urban disorder, Burnham offered a powerful vision of what a civilized American city could look like, one that provided a compelling framework for Americans to to make sense of the world around them"
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Urbanized: The Issues and Strategies Behind Urban Design (streaming, Kanopy) By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, URBANIZED frames a global discussion on the future of cities.
