I love videos, and I hate commercials. I’m also a bit of an info-junkie.
Happily, the WCC Library has about, oh, half a gazillion streaming videos, including documentaries, concerts, debates, tutorials and historical footage.
A majority of those videos (over 45,000) are found in the database Films on Demand (or FoD for short).
Cool things about FoD include time-linked transcripts and a citation button (making it super easy to quote a video in your papers), separate links for each short segment within a video (great for adding snippets to your presentations) and closed captioning (for watching videos when you forgot your earbuds at home).
Rather than try to tell you about all the great videos in FoD, I’m going to focus on one topic: Love.
Valentine’s Day has passed, but I consider matters of love a year-round affair. That’s good, because it might take me that long to watch all these documentaries (not all of which are suitable for young viewers).
Science fan that I am, I might start with several programs that explore the science of the phenomenon, including the Laws of Attraction, The Brain and Love, and an historical overview in Sex, a Horizon Guide. Then, there are two BBC programs that investigate ways scientists are learning to predict how relationships turn out, the minimally titled Love, as well as The Love Laboratory.
ABC News’s Love, Lust, and Marriage looks closer at “Why we stay and why we stray,” and the three-part series Infidelity: Why Do We Cheat? focuses first on the affairs of Men, then of Women and finally on Sexual Addiction.
The film After Happily Ever After gets more philosophical in questioning whether the Western ideals of lifelong monogamous partnerships are on the verge of changing.
Love at First Swipe discusses mobile dating apps, and Websex asks “What’s the Harm?”
Two videos use math to advise us on How to Find Love Online and on How to Win at Online Dating.
We learn about how young women navigate through a world of mixed messages in Redefining What’s Sexy in an Era of Sexting, Snapchat and Porn, and in one TEDTalk, we hear an argument from Al Vernacchio (that) Sex Needs a New Metaphor.
The more romantic at heart can delve into the Mystery of Love, which uses story to explore many forms of love, or learn of the risque mythology of the cleverly seductive Zeus In Love.
Watch an Oscar-winning performance in the 1950 film adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, a 2010 stage production of Romeo and Juliet: Live from Shakespeare’s Globe, or take in the works of four contemporary artists in Romance: Art 21, including Laurie Simmons’ short film The Music of Regret (with puppets and dancers).
And finally, because love shouldn’t hurt, one video will tell you about Recognizing Abusive Relationships.
I’ve created a playlist in FoD to make it simpler for you to find and watch any of the videos I’ve mentioned: http://go.hawaii.edu/KRj (case sensitive).
by Tara Severns, Special to Ka ‘Ohana