YouTube Film School

It's no NYU or UCLA, and no film professor worth his under-funded salary would advise it, but YouTube is becoming a solid place to land a preliminary film education.

Spend a little time on the mega-video site and you'll find a brigade of cineastes have been working overtime in recent weeks and months to rescue YouTube from its lowbrow origins. Cat-dances and lip-syncs, be damned: the website now hosts some of the most breathtaking cinematic masterpieces of the 20^th century. At this rate, piracy just doesn't stand a chance. Welcome to the open-source society, where anyone can witness the following landmark movie moments (on a 5-inch square screen):

-- The famous "Odessa Steps" sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's montage masterpiece Battleship Potemkin.

-- Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's surrealist headscratcher, "Un Chien Andalou", along with more dada experiments from May Ray and Fernand Leger's famous "Ballet Mechanique."

-- The opening reel of Abel Gance's 1929 impressionistic epic, Napoleon, which shows the children staging a giant snow fight.

-- Several works from the mother of the American avant-garde Maya Deren, including her surreal feminist gem, "Meshes of the Afternoon" as well as the famous experimental work of Kenneth Anger ("Scorpio Rising").

-- Les Blank's strange and funny 20-minute documentary "Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe", which climaxes with the famous German director doing just that.

And the list goes on… Sure, a big-screen DVD is better. But when you need to edify yourself with a little Fritz Lang or Jean-Luc Godard (last week someone uploaded his entire 1967 feature Week End!), YouTube is the place to go -- and it's a lot cheaper than USC.