Thousands of movies & hundreds of museum for free! Something to occupy you during confinement!

It seems that we are now more than a billion people confined around the World. Safe from Coronavirus; rushing on Netflix isn’t necessarily the most interesting thing to do. With a simple internet connection you have access to thousands of movies for free and also to incredible museums around the world!  So this is the moment refine your cinematographic culture, or just to escape your house by exploring museums around the world. Saying the coronavirus is an opportunity … I won’t go that far. But like you, who read me, I am confined in my Parisian apartment, and I try to find all the tricks to occupy myself without spending money 😉

 

Thousands of free movies to revisit your cinematography’s culture!

An incredible number of great cinema classics are available online; and for a good reason as they are now in the public domain! Here are a few sites where you can find great classics, movies that have fallen into oblivion or even rare gems!

 

A veritable Ali Baba’s cave of cinematographic , the Archive.org site has more than 6,500 movies in free access! Metropolis by Fritz Lang, The 39 steps by Alfred Hitchcock, The Vagabond by Charlie Chaplin, or Freaks by Tod Browning! If you are curious this site is a gold mine! you will find there radio archives, books, and also software; everything for keeping you busy for hours.

More underground, the Openculture.com site offers more than 1150 movies including short films by David Lynch, or even feature films by Quentin Tarantino; a gold mine for film buffs who will most certainly discover works they don’t know yet. This platform also offers audio books, eBooks, Moocs; most of them in English.

As I am French I have to noticed that a lot of French movies in their full versions are also available on Youtube.com!

You understand perfectly, no subscription needed to see a good movie! Of course you can still take advantage of the Amazon Video 30-day free trial offer and of course if you are a fan of series you can jump on Netflix! But frankly with those links, if you love watching movies, you will have everything to be busy!

 

Hundreds of museums to visit from home, as if you where there!

You will be able to travel around the world! New-York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Madrid; discover museums without flying and with spending hours in line… Isn’t it great?

Here is a small list of museums that offer 360° Virtual Tours or a nice overview of theirs collection online. Of course I may have forgotten some; please let me know in comments and I will had them.

The Louvre in Paris! A Parisian like me couldn’t start with another museum; first because the Louvre is for me the heart of Paris with its Cour Carrée, the Tuileries Garden and this glass pyramid that we have  finally adopted. The site offers 3 thematic tours; the collections of Pharaonic Egypt, visits to the ditches and the dungeon of the old fortress or the gallery of Apollo. I still regret that the visit lacks a bit of fluidity especially for this magnificent museum.

 

The National Gallery in London will offer you a lot of online exhibitions. But above all the highlight of the show is a real 3D visit that is worth it!  I’ve get lost during this visit, but it was a real nice discovery

 

The Met in New-York provides almost all of its collection in a static version; from the classics like Vermeer or Bruegel to fashion exhibitions focusing on Coco Chanel, Dior, Rei Kawakubo, etc. The most interesting part remains the 360° project with small 3D videos that give you a very good idea of what this fabulous museum is.

 

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is certainly the one that offers real alternatives for this confinement. They have coloring and lessons workshops for children, quizzes to find out your knowledge’s level of the master Van Gogh and of course a micro walk inside the museum.This is not the most complete site in terms of virtual visit; however it is the only museum that continues to share interesting stuff on all its social networks.

 

The Queen Sofia Museum in Madrid. In addition to the fact that this museum having the fantastic Picasso’s Guernica, it also have in its interior courtyard a magnificent Calder; similar to the one we can found at the Louisiana Museum nearby Copenhaguen… You understand, I love Calder! The museum has made some efforts to put online multimedia content, videos and even a microsite dedicated to Guernica. But no virtual visit! too bad, it would have been a real plus!

 

The Palace of Versailles also offers virtual exhibitions, certainly a bit static and classic; but which have the merit of showing and discovering its splendor. The site still offers a virtual tour of the Queen’s small house, but the 3D production is not a top one. If Versailles makes you dream, you will discover magnificient chandeliers, grandiose garden and other little wonders.

But the list does not stop here, because many museums have entrusted Google with the development of their virtual tours! On the site of the New-York Moma, if you wish to explore the museum; you will find yourself directly on Google in the Art & Culture Section. Telling you that I am a fan of Google will be a lie; but this section is a bottomless pit of virtual visits of museums and Art Galleries! These tours will allow you to travel the world and discover unsuspected treasures: stroll through the Orsay Museum in Paris, teleport to Los Angeles to discover the J. Paul Getty Museum or the Tate in London.

 

My favorite : Frida Kahlo’s garden, which I had the chance to visit; including a virtual tour of her studio and also her incredible kitchen, as if you were there. It’s more than exotic and it allows you to dream for a moment!

The oddity of the moment: The Grand Palais in Paris which offers a virtual exhibition focusing on cats in the art world! If you like cats this is a very very nice virtual tour. That visit allows me to present you the UMA – Universal Museum of Art – which is for me the most complete site to offer high level virtual visits. The UMA team reconstitue museums or places and reinsert artworks there. Their approach to the virtual visit is really innovative and technically the best we can see. In addition, it is today the only virtual museum where you will find a Street Art Tour including artists like Vhils, Ludo, Jef Aérosol, Shepard Fairey and many others. I will come back to you on this specific point with a full article speaking only about Virtual Street Art Tours 😉

 

If you have other great plans to see movies for free, or if you know great virtual museum tours; do not hesitate to leave me a comment and I will update the article.

And of course those of you who love Street Art, you can also walk for free in Brooklyn, in Queens, in the heart of Manhattan, but also Mexico City or on the paradisiac island of Holbox, you have a good choice on my blog and it’s free!;-)

See you soon for a new article on a very big name in Street Art!

Take good care of Yourself! Stay at Home, it’s saving lifes!