Productions
Intelligent Television produces innovative films, television, and video in close association with universities, museums, libraries, archives, and other cultural and educational institutions.
The company works with many of world’s leading directors, producers, and cinematographers in its productions, joining them together with leading historians, scientists, journalists, policymakers, librarians, curators, and other scholars and activists committed to education worldwide.
Funding for Intelligent Television productions comes from philanthropic foundations, government agencies, corporate underwriters, corporate advertisers, and investors. With this support, Intelligent Television has begun building a nonfiction studio and production network for cultural and educational institutions keen to engage with the moving image.
Intelligent Television is producing programs on the history of the American South; the nature of memory; the history of American comedy; the American labor movement; war and foreign policy; communications policy; open access to science and medicine; and other projects in association with leading cultural and educational institutions. Featured productions include:
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
American troops fight heroically in a distant land against an unfamiliar enemy whose numbers far exceed their own. Meanwhile their leaders, blinded by hubris and a determination to remake the world, decide to press the attack recklessly in a way that may result in an epic worldwide conflagration.
Sound familiar? [more....]
The South
Intelligent Television, Alexandria Productions, Insignia Films, and PBS are producing an epic television, education, and library project on the American South in the 20th century. Such an epic project is long overdue. [more....]
Harlem
Harlem occupies a unique place in the imagination of black America and the rest of the world. For black urban life and culture, Harlem’s legendary history embodies the struggle for African-American equality; its role as the cultural capital of black America, giving birth to art, literature, music, ideas, and politics, has influenced the lives and minds of minority people worldwide. Though it is a place on an island in a city, centered around its main artery of New York’s 125th Street yet comprising East Harlem, Central Harlem, and West Harlem, reaching north into Washington Heights and Inwood and south into Morningside Heights and upper Fifth Avenue, its influence has never been geographically confined; indeed, as David Levering Lewis, one of its greatest historians has written, Harlem is, was, and will always be as well a “place in the mind”—a “construct of culture”—“to be encountered in brownstones near Howard University in Washington, faculty houses on the Fisk University campus in Nashville, the Algonquin Hotel dining room, or on the left bank of the Seine.” [more....]
Literacy: A Visual History
Recent discoveries in the Middle East and new research from scholars worldwide have helped to rewrite what we previously knew—or thought we knew—about the birth and development of literacy and civilization. “Literacy: A Visual History” draws largely upon the leadership work of Bruce Zuckerman, a leading authority on ancient Near Eastern texts and inscriptions who leads an ongoing effort to document high resolution images of literacy artifacts and to distribute them worldwide for scholarly research and educational purposes. [more....]
The Memory Project
What is a memory? How are memories made? How are memories lost? Erased? How does a group—a society—remember, then memorialize, an event? The story of American history involves countless memorializations of the great and hard events in American history—from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War the attacks of September 11. Our social memory works its way out in our museums; monuments; national, regional, state, and local historical societies; archives; holidays (including Memorial Day, has its own a complicated history); libraries; street names; films and media; reenactments; and the names we put on buildings. [more....]
Hitler’s Museum
The Linz Museum—conceived of by Adolf Hitler, designed by architect Albert Speer, financed and administered by Martin Bormann, envied (at times even sabotaged) by Hermann Goering, stocked by Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Posse, Hermann Voss and the Sonderauftraug, or “Special Commission,” of more than 20 of Hitler’s leading art specialists (curators of paintings, prints, armor, and coins, restorers, photographers, librarians, architects, and engineers)—was among the strangest of Hitler’s criminal ambitions, envisioned to become the Nazis’ Smithsonian Institution: a Louvre for the 1,000-Year Reich. A colossal art museum created to house the world’s greatest Aryan cultural achievements, this campus of buildings in Linz was planned to hold works by all of the great masters of Europe that the Nazis bought and seized during the occupation of Europe. [more....]
The Open Access Documentary Project
Intelligent Television and BioMed Central are co-producing a set of videos celebrating the benefits of open access to scientific and medical research. The Open Access Documentary Project will facilitate the ongoing work of BioMed Central and Intelligent Television in promoting open access to science and medicine in fields as diverse as malaria research and particle physics. The producers are now assembling an international editorial board and contacting institutions that hold archival and production resources that will be vital to the Project. [more....]
American Foreign Policy: A Video History
The history of American foreign policy is studied on campuses throughout the country, with distinguished programs at the undergraduate and graduate level at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Rutgers, Texas, Yale, and other institutions. Although in their daily lives students receive information about contemporary American foreign policy (the war on terror, arms treaties, environmental accords) through online and moving-image media, the overwhelming majority of assets deployed in teaching and learning U.S. foreign relations in history, political science, law and economics is textual in nature. [more....]
The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up
In Hollywood they like to say that every American has two businesses—his own, and show business. The fact is, in show business, maybe the most ruthless of all businesses, many of the good and the great—Barry Diller, David Geffen, Michael Ovitz, Bernie Brillstein, Mike Medavoy—are veterans of one part of the ambition factory, the only school for show business: the talent agency mailroom. [more....]
For further information about Intelligent Television projects and productions, or to get involved, please contact the company.