Related Guides
Film Databases
- 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.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition This link opens in a new window Contains a curriculum-aligned collection of videos and segments curated to support the teaching of introductory anthropology courses. Each video and segment within this collection are accompanied by a teaching guide providing background information, lesson plans, and classroom exercises and activities.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume III: Indigenous Voices This link opens in a new window Contains documentaries, feature films and shorts made by and for indigenous people and communities. Topics are simultaneously local and global, with particular emphasis on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume IV: Festivals and Archives This link opens in a new window Contains award-winning titles from contemporary ethnographic film festivals. The collection also includes field recordings and edited films by students and faculty from universities and institutions around the world, including Berkeley Media and Manchester's Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
- 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.
- Folkstreams: Documentary Films of American Culture The films on Folkstreams were produced by independent filmmakers. These documentaries focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different kinds of communities.
Browse Films, Webcasts, & Sound Archives
- Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings (AM Explorer) Delve into the cultural study of music and explore content from across the globe with this diverse and comprehensive collection. Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study.
- Ethnographic Sound Archives Online: The U.S.A. South Negro Folklore Collection, Music from the American South This little known but historically significant collection documents African American music and language in the Jim Crow South, with a focus on urban and suburban communities rarely documented at the time. It includes spirituals, hymns, and gospel music recorded by Walter Garwick between 1935-1937 from African Americans at various locations in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia (including St. John's Island), Tennessee, and Alabama. In addition to sacred music, the recordings include Gullah prayers, sermons, tales, Br'er Rabbit stories, and vendors' street cries in South Carolina; spells, remedies, and tales recorded in South Georgia; dialect and folk plays; and some secular and children's songs.
- The Cinderella No One Knows: The Grimm Brothers' Tale of Incest, Fur & Hidden Bodies (Library of Congress) Folklorist Margaret R. Yocom discusses less well-known versions of Cinderella, particularly the international story of Allerleirauh, found in Asia and Africa as well as Europe. She focuses on the heroine and her journey through the gendered, sexually redolent landscape of the tale???s provocative middle section. As she explains, it is not the marriage at the end that draws the listener in, but the way the heroine makes her way there.
- Little Red Riding Hood (streaming, Academic Video Online) Roald Dahl's scary fairy tale is directed by Donald Sturrock. Follow inch-high forest dweller Don Mini (Ian Holm) into a weird world of mice on bicycles, cows in petticoats and a wild pig sporting a Kaiser helmet. Wolfie (Danny De Vito), bored with his diet, is after a new meal and thinks Grandma Hood will make a nice change. But this drunken granny puts up a fight to the finish. Undeterred and still hungry, stupid Wolfie lies in wait for Lil' Red Riding Hood, who may be sweet but is certainly not stupid. Julie Walters plays the humans in a black comedy that will erase the memory of the traditional story forever.
- 10 Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (streaming, Academic Video Online) A total of 10 films have been produced as short screen features, aimed particularly at children — but to be enjoyed by the entire family Fairy tales available: The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Match Girl, Clumsy Hans, The Princess on the Pea, The Swineherd, In the Nursery, The Most Incredible Thing, What the Old Man Does is Always Right, The Woman with the Eggs, and What One Can Invent.
- Britannica's Fairy Tales From Around The World Presentation Of Beauty And The Beast (streaming, Academic Video Online) Beauty and the Beast: In this classic, a merchant plucks a rose for his daughter, Beauty, from Beast's garden and is forced to send the girl to live with the monster.
- Listen to the Mountain Sages (streaming, Academic Video Online) What is happening with the traditions of our elders? How can important memories be conveyed to the next generation? In Japan, a country of forests and mountains, traditional work methods that have been at the heart of mountain life for generations, like tree cutting, slash and burn agriculture and roof thatching are quietly disappearing in the course of modernization. Recently, several Japanese high school students went up to the mountains to see the people who live there and possess these skills. Their task was to enquire about their craft and about life itself, writing down what they heard, word for word, unchanged, just as it was spoken.
- Kwagh Hir (streaming, Academic Video Online) They are popularly known as the greatest democrats in Africa as their society is based on fraternal cooperation between age mates rather than on authoritative chieftaincy. Men of an age work together on communal farming and house building and celebrate their achievements with feasts famed for the excellence of their music and dance. Their women create amongst the greatest dances in Nigeria within their extended family compounds. Each year, during the dry season, when there is little farm work, the leaders of the dance teams compose songs to record recent experiences and new features in their lives which they express in the rhythms and gestures of their dance. This flare for continuous invention reached great heights of creativity in the Tiv storytelling drama known as the Kwagh-hir. Kwagh-Hir (literally meaning "something magical") is a traditional Nigerian puppet theatre show of the Tiv tribe of central Nigeria
- Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet (Library of Congress) Russell Frank defines newslore as folklore that comments on, and is therefore indecipherable without knowledge of, current events. Newslore takes multiple forms: jokes; urban legends; digitally altered photographs; mock news stories, press releases or interoffice memoranda; parodies of songs, poems, political and commercial advertisements and movie previews and posters; still or animated cartoons and short live-action films. Such material, he argues in his new book Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), can teach us more about how "ordinary Americans" responded to such events as the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, corporate malfeasance scandals, and the deaths of celebrities than we can learn from the news media.
- Dog Tags: History, Stories & Folklore of Military Identification (Library of Congress) The 100th anniversary of the official use of American personal identity tags, affectionately known as "dog tags," recently passed without fanfare. Dog tags are highly personal items to warriors of every service and to their families as well. Each dog tag carries its own human-interest story. The acts of receiving the dog tag, hanging it around the neck, and feeling it against the body constitute a silent statement of commitment. The tag itself individualizes the human being who wears it, despite his or her role as a small part of a huge and faceless organization. While the armed forces demand obedience and duty to a higher cause, dog tags, hanging under service members' shirts and close to their chests, remind them of their individuality. They bring comfort and help calm the fears of soldiers facing death: "I do not want to be forgotten; I do not want to become an 'unknown.'"
- Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to the Modern Mega-University (Library of Congress) Simon J. Bronner interprets the uses of play and ritual for students in different eras to work through tough issues of their age and environment. More broadly, campus traditions are shown to function centrally in the development of American culture.
- The Adventures of Robin Hood (dvd) The most acclaimed version of the King of Sherwood Forest. Errol Flynn is Robin Hood to Olivia de Havilland's Maid Marian. Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains are the villains. Action, drama and romance that has satisfied audiences for years.
- Alan Lomax YouTube Archive The filmwork of Alan Lomax is a resource for students, researchers, filmmakers, and fans of America's traditional music and folkways. Shot throughout the American South and Southwest over the course of seven years (1978--1985) in preparation for a PBS series, "American Patchwork," which aired in 1991, these videos consist of performances, interviews, and folkloric scenes culled from 400 hours of raw footage, many of which have never been seen publicly. The project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
- Association for Cultural Equity: Alan Lomax Archive ACE is custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive, a priceless collection of recorded music, dance, and the spoken word.
- Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s (Sound Archives) In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the "American Negro" in several southern African American prisons. Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes' field recordings—including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton—contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises.
Find Podcasts
- The Folklore Podcast What makes The Folklore Podcast so special is that many of the episodes feature eminent folklorists from around the world: researchers, authors and professors in their fields.
- Folklife Today (Library of Congress) Folklife Today tells stories about the cultural traditions and folklore of diverse communities, combining brand-new interviews and narration with songs, stories, music, and oral history from the collections of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center.
- Chasing Foxfire Chasing Foxfire is a podcast about folklore. It is also about insect collections, national monuments, apple pie recipes, the American Civil War, pine-scented house cleaner, jars full of buttons, cardboard suitcases, riots in Brooklyn, carved wooden chains, jellybeans, wishbones, and cowboy hats. In short, it’s a show about history, with an emphasis on the “story” part of the word. Join us as we look at the tales we tell about ourselves and some of the strange, funny sad, mad, and wonderful ways those tales come to be.
- The Folktale Project Folklore, fairytales and legends from around the world the way they were meant to be. Brought to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Who says you're too old for a good story?
- Encounters Each week, this podcast brings listeners together over topics like haunted houses, demon possession, alien sightings/abduction, cryptid sightings, and others. As people with life-long interests in the supernatural and paranormal and folklorists, Jesse and Ellie work together to help bring some of these stories to a broader audience.
- Myths and Legends Ever wonder about the original stories behind King Arthur and his legendary knights, Robin Hood, or Aladdin? Did you know that fairy tales weren't originally for children and are way more bizarre, ridiculous, and interesting than you ever thought possible?
- Femlore Podcast Folklore has been used for generations to share stories across cultures. Each week this season Rachael and her new co-host, Mindy, walk the winding path of folklore. They ask how the stories we tell influence today’s culture and how we view women. From murder ballads to fairytales, we discuss the power these stories have over us all. It won’t be just sad but maybe, just maybe, also uplifting.
