Posted on Fri, Feb. 08, 2008

Video clips

Don't have time for a full Lincoln movie? There are plenty of oddly fascinating Lincoln clips on YouTube:

Lincoln pennies make Lincoln portrait

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lexNgiV3-dY

This is weird but hypnotic and, like a Lay's chip of video, you simply can't watch it just once: An artist makes a Lincoln portrait entirely of pennies. Time-lapse videography means You Are There.

Johnny Cash reads the Gettyburg Address

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok6gCxm92cY

As an interpreter of the Great Emancipator, the Man in Black ain't half bad.

'Abe Lincoln in Illinois': fight footage

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aptX8OfD18Q

Choreographed cinematic fighting has come a long, long way since 1940. Big on reaction shots, short on actual signs of violence.

'Gore Vidal's Lincoln'

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPfcVwStNO8

Sam Waterston has the Lincoln look down but speaks exactly as he does while lecturing the revolvatron of assistant district attorneys on Law & Order, whereas Mary Tyler Moore as Mary appears to be channeling that Bluegrass classic, the Kentucky Wild Woman. Mary: "I could hit a squirrel at 30 yards through the eyes." Well, alrighty, then.

Abraham Lincoln animated from life

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzw4kcPmjCM

A sequence of Abraham Lincoln photos manipulated to show the president speaking, blinking, turning his head. Oddly compelling to realize that the one thing you really want to know about Lincoln? How he moved.

D.W. Griffith's 'Abraham Lincoln'

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRIpon0OW54

As stilted and politically incorrect as this 1930 movie is, remember that Griffith was working only 65 years after Lincoln's death.

Lincoln on 'Star Trek'

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kGJLMsyzKY

Captain Kirk's hero makes the transition from 1865 Washington to the Enterprise with an amazing sense of political correctness. Spock, apparently not grasping the importance of Lincoln, is still a jerk.