Do you crave the enriching history of Ken Burns’s celebrated documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009) but don’t have 12 hours to spare? The US filmmaker Ryan Maxey has a droll and delightful short film that will give you the broad strokes in just four diligently researched minutes. With a collage style and a muzak soundtrack, (Unofficial) History of the National Parks aims to entertain, but ultimately arrives at a deeper question about humanity’s potential for curbing its most self-destructive impulses.
Director: Ryan Maxey
Website: Parks Project
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Consciousness and altered states
What do screens depicting serene natural scenes mean to those living in lock-up?
12 minutes
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Architecture
A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture
14 minutes
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Home
Life moves slowly in a Romanian mountain village, shaped by care and the seasons
13 minutes
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Nature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
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Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes
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Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes