Trailer for His Own Life – Ric Burns’s fantastic documentary about the visionary neurologist and poetic soul Oliver Sacks, he of uncommon insight into everything from the psychological pillars of creativity to the physiological healing power of nature, and above all about love, lunacy, and a life fully lived. 

Official trailer for Fantastic Fungi, with arresting art by Louie Schwartzberg. Complement with Neil Gaiman’s “The Mushroom Hunters” and the pioneering mycological drawings of Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter. 

German filmmaker Felix Dierich uses several years of public data from the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 to render this haunting timelapse of Earth seen from space. 

Couple with this lovely animation of Carl Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot monologue. (“That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”)

via Aeon

Trailer for Astra Taylor’s documentary What Is Democracy? Special screening in New York City on November 1. 

Complement with Walt Whitman on democracy. 

Werner Herzog recommends 5 books every aspiring filmmaker should read.

Filmmakers Ben Watts and Ivan Kander have put together this impressive supercut of writers struggling with writer’s block, based on 53 popular films. While fun, it also reveals the depressing depiction of writers as mostly male and almost entirely white. Then again, this is just another symptom of #OscarsSoWhite – gone Pulitzer. 

Complement with the cognitive science of the optimal writing routine and Lou Andreas-Salomé, the first woman psychoanalyst, on creative block in letters to Rilke. 

(via Open Culture)

The great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky on why film enchants us and what the director’s true task is.

The last interview with the late, great, irreplaceable Oliver Sacks, part of a forthcoming PBS/TED biopic by filmmaker Ric Burns. 

Complement with Dr. Sacks on the measure of living, the reading list of the books that shaped him, and this lovely short film about memory inspired by his work. 

(via TED)

Happy birthday, Stanley Kubrick! The iconic film director on mortality, the fear of flying, and the purpose of existence, in a 1968 Playboy interview.

John Waters’s spectacular RISD commencement address on creative rebellion and the artist’s task to cause constructive chaos – a fine addition to the greatest commencement addresses of all time. 

Werner Herzog speaking at The New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL:

It’s a disastrous mistake that most universities are abandoning the departments for classics. It’s a monumental mistake – because we are robbing ourselves of the roots of our cultural identity, of a deeper understanding of who we are and we are heading.

Also see Herzog on creativity and self-reliance and his no-nonsense advice to the young.

From Darth Vader to Marie Antoinette to Jesus, the lives of historical figures and pop culture icons in minimalist pictogram summaries. 

Simple, marvelous supercut by Rishi Kaneria exploring Wes Anderson’s use of the colors red and yellow. Pair with Goethe on the psychology of color and emotion. 

Trailer for Lena Dunham’s wonderful HBO documentary about Hilary Knight, the illustrator behind Eloise. Complement with this vintage Knight gem. 

So much timeless wisdom for all ages in Tarkovsky’s advice to the young. 

Pair with Bertrand Russell on boredom.