One site I return to on a regular basis is the Internet Archive, which is all public domain, all the time. There’s software, music, and text, but my own interest lies their film collections.
I’m talking M, The Phantom of the Opera, Battleship Potemkin, Those Three Stooges, and Carnival of Souls among the 600+ movies in their “Feature Films” section.
The Prelinger Archives is full of “ephemeral” (advertising, educational, industrial and amateur) films from the past—like tourist shots of immediatate postwar Germany, government films on saving your ass in a nuclear explosion, some great Lucky Strike commercials, and lessons on how to escape the ravages of reefer.
Over the years, the archives have expanded greatly, so that now many sub-archives have popped up in the moving images section, like German Cinema, Open Source Movies (that usually means films made by reediting the open source movies already found on the site), and Mosaic Middle Eastern News.
And it’s free. No registration, no email verifications—just find the movie you like and download it. Fantastic.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)