All three episodes from the 2002 BBC documentary Reggae: The Story Of Jamaican Music have been kindly uploaded to Youtube, and you can watch them here now. The series, comprised of three hour long episodes, details the beginnings of the genre, from the invention of ska at the end of British rule in Jamaica, right up to the turn of the century.

This Is Modern Art is a series written and presented by the English art critic Matthew Collings for BBC.

The series, originally released in 1999, won several awards including a BAFTA. It became popular both because of its sometimes jokey and sometimes thoughtful explanations of the work and attitude of a new wave of artists that had been publicized in the British mass media, and because of its author’s witty and irreverent, though highly informed, commentary style.

Collings focuses on the current state of modern art, and looks back at Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to see how they changed the definition of art, and reveals the ways modern art attempts to shock the audience.

Collings also investigates whether the once accepted view of art as merely a thing of beauty prevails today, examining the works of various artists.

We’ve embedded all six episodes into one youtube playlist for your viewing pleasure.

Episode 1 – “I am a Genius”, shortlists Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol for the “genius” category.
Episode 2 – “Shock! Horror!”, opens with Damien Hirst’s vitrines of cut-up cows and goes on to an in-depth and welcome discussion of Goya.
Episode 3 – “Lovely, Lovely”, examines the idea of beauty: is it still a valid idea in Modern art?
Episode 4 – “Nothing Matters”, is devoted largely to Minimalism, starting with Martin Creed’s roomful of white balloons…
Episode 5 – “Hollow Laughter” is all about Modern art jokes or perhaps jokes used in Modern art.
Episode 6 –  ”The Shock of the Now”, asks: “Could it be indeed that the Modern art ‘we’ have chosen is vacuous or empty?”

The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a film portrait of Hampton and his leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party, but half way through filming, Hampton was killed by Chicago police. In an infamous moment in Chicago history and politics, over a dozen armed officers from Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and FBI, burst into Hampton’s apartment on December 4, 1969 while its occupants were sleeping, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark and brutalizing the remaining occupants including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend. In ten minutes, 99 rounds were fired by the police during the raid, two of which were point blank shots to Hampton’s head. Filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk arrived a few hours later to shoot film footage of the crime scene that was later used to contradict news reports and police testimony.

The pre-dawn raid was organized to serve a warrant for illegal weapons. Originally the officers claimed self-defense, stating the Panthers fired multiple shots at the officers first. The only shot fired by the Panthers was later determined by a 1970 Federal grand jury to be a reflexive reaction in Clark’s death convulsions after being shot by the raiding team while he was holding a shotgun. The same grand jury concluded that the original investigations by the Chicago Police internal investigation division and the Cook county coroners’ office  were complete shams, with each officer being asked questions which had been previously written up and given to them, along with a set of answers. The 243 page report would go on to say, “Physical evidence, standing alone and unexplained, is sufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of these survivors’ civil rights.”

Read more about Fred Hampton’s death here

Read the declassified FBI files on Hampton here

Some time in the 1960′s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo - Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

From the director Hubert Sauper:

The old question, which social and political structure is the best for the world seems to have been answered. Capitalism has won. The ultimate forms for future societies are “consumer democracies”, which are seen as “civilized” and “good”. In a Darwinian sense the “good system” won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them.

In Darwin’s Nightmare I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this “fittest” animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil. Most of us I guess, know about the destructive mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are unable to “get it”, unable to actually believe what we know.

It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into servants and whores. Hearing and seeing the same stories over and over makes me feel sick. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonisation of Africa, globalisation of african markets is the third and deadliest humiliation for the people of this continent. The arrogance of rich countries towards the third world (that’s three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future dangers for all peoples.

It seems that the individual participants within a deadly system don’t have ugly faces, and for the most part, no bad intentions. These people include you and me. Some of us are “only doing their job” (like flying a jumbo from A to B carrying napalm), some don’t want to know, others simply fight for survival. I tried to film the personalities in this documentary as intimately as possible. Sergey, Dimond, Raphael, Eliza: real people who wonderfully represent the complexity of this system, and for me, the real enigma.

Read more about the film here

Party Monster: The Shockumentary is a 1998 documentary film detailing the rise of the club kid phenomenon of the late 80′s and early 90′s in New York City, the life of club kid and party promoter Michael Alig and Alig’s eventual murder (with Robert “Freeze” Riggs) of fellow club kid and drug dealer Angel Melendez. Produced by World of Wonder and based in part on the James St. James book on the murder, Disco Bloodbath, the film combines interview footage from Alig, St. James, scene watchers like Michael Musto and a number of other former club kids with archive footage from various parties and dramatic re-enactments. The book and this film also served as the basis for the 2003 film, Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green and Chloë Sevingny.

Cub Kids on Donahue circa 1993.

According to filmmaker Paul Trillo:

A short documentary shot during Cannes Film Festival 2011.

“Bela” follows the day in the life of a street performer named Bela Erdei or “the cat man”. Bela, a recognizable face to some, travels hours by train throughout the south of France to perform with his affectionate house cats. An affable and eccentric character who has a real passion for what he does.

According to the filmmaker Matthew Allard:

Japan has always been on the forefront of cutting edge robotics. Its roots can be traced back 200-300 years ago during the Edo period when skilled craftsmen created automata (self-operating machines). Using nothing more than pulleys and weights they were able to make the Karakuri (Japanese automata) perform amazing tasks.

Japan’s modern day robots can be traced back to the Karakuri. Today Hideki Higashino is one of the few remaining craftsmen who is determined to keep the history and tradition of Japanese Karakuri alive.

Learn more about Karakuri here

This 1978 documentary by Nigel Finch captures artist Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson traveling to Las Vegas, Barstow and Hollywood in their distinctly gonzo way.

Via the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis:

This series of films investigates how people have been colonized by the machines they have built.

Although they may not realize it, the way many people see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. Not just politics and the economy — but also in the way bodies, minds, and even the whole of the natural world are perceived.

The underlying argument is that people have given up a dynamic political model of the world — the dream of changing things for the better — for a static machine ideology that says everyone is a component in a system, and that the aim is to manage these systems and keep them stable.

From the utopian visions of the worldwide web to the idea of an interconnected global economic system, to the dream of balanced ecosystems, all these ideas share an underlying machine vision of organization and order.

The films tell an extraordinary range of stories: from novelist Ayn Rand and her tragic love affairs to the dreams and the frightening reality of the hippie communes; from the brutal politics of the Belgian Congo to the doomsday computer model behind the rise of modern environmentalism; from the lonely suicide in a London squat of the mathematical genius who invented the selfish gene theory to Alan Greenspan and his faith in a new kind of global economic system. And there’s also the computer model of the eating habits of the Pronghorn antelope.

The series argues that by embracing this new machine ideology something very precious has been given up: the idea of progress and political struggle to change the world for the better.

Episode One – Love and Power (premiered May 23, 2011 on BBC Two):

This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.

The film tells the story of two perfect worlds. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s. Many of them were also disciples of Ayn Rand. They believed that the new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone could follow their own desires, yet there would not be anarchy. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand. He became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism – “Like a New Planet”, he said.

But the dream of stability in both worlds would be torn apart by the two dynamic human forces – love and power.

As always when watching films on Youtube this is broken into multiple parts. We’ve embedded parts one and two of episode one with links to the other three parts below the videos. We’ve also included links to all five parts of episode two, which is entitled The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. The third and final episode - The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey - airs this Monday on BBC Two.

Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

Episode Two: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

45 min. Dutch TV documentary by Frans Bromet on the SoCal punk scene with footage of Suicidal Tendencies, The Germs, Venus & The Razorblades, 45 Grave, China White, Casey Cola, and Phranc.