Productions

Intelligent Television produces television, films, and video in close association with universities, libraries, museums, archives, and leading cultural and educational institutions worldwide.

The company is also now establishing a nonfiction studio and distributed production network for cultural and educational institutions keen to engage more systematically with the moving image.

Funding for our work comes from investors, advertisers, underwriters, philanthropies, and government agencies.

Featured productions include programs on the history of the American South; the history of Harlem; the science of memory; the story of the American labor movement; the history of film; war in the 20th century; open access to science and medicine; U.S. foreign policy; Russian literature; creativity; and innovation:

"Within the Law” is a public media and university education project that has, as its heart, the recreation of a lost 1917 feature film.

Over 50 percent of early American cinema is lost--destroyed for one reason or another---and with it has vanished much of early 20th-century American history, culture, and society. This project tells the public and students about early cinema by inviting them to participate in the reconstruction of an early silent film based on the film's surviving clues--the Broadway play it was based on, the musical score (recently discovered) that was composed specifically for it, contemporary press reviews, production stills, and other films from its once-vibrant production company, Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Studios.

The project is producing the recreated two-hour-long movie; an interactive online environment where users can learn about early American film and upload their own contribution to Within the Law’s visual and musical reconstruction; and a documentary about the film, film production in New York in the 1910s and 1920s, and this new process of film paleontology and the historical reconstruction of media.

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In 1943, the U.K. government broadcast a radio and print appeal to British citizens, urging that they send any photographs, postcards, and images acquired or taken before the war depicting the coastline of continental Europe. And citizens responded--millions of photographs were mailed and delivered to the Admiralty.

INT researchers recently found this collection lying in thousands of boxes in one of the world's great museums. Seventy years ago, the U.K. government used these images in war-planning for the June 1944 D-Day invasion. This documentary shows how, for “Operation Overlord,” hundreds of servicemen and servicewomen hand-coded and tagged these images with longitude and latitude and other geographical information, effectively taking millions of pieces of information crowd-sourced from the public and turning them into critical intelligence that helped to turn the tide of the war.

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Intelligent Television, Insignia Films, Alexandria Productions, and PBS are producing an epic television and education project on the history of the American South in the 20th century.

Such an initiative is long overdue. Southerners of every era have believed that the worlds of their youth and the cultures of their region are vanishing. This concern motivates the historians, archivists, and filmmakers involved in the project. Indeed, the urgency behind “The South” becomes stronger with each Southerner's death. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and June Carter Cash, with their diverse backgrounds in Southern music, are now gone. Strom Thurmond and David Brinkley, with their divergent views of Southern politics, are gone. Dale Earnhardt of North Carolina and Willie Morris of Mississippi are gone. Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have passed into history.

As these iconic figures disappear, “The South” must move quickly to collect, archive, and convey their history and legacies.

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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.

Intelligent Television is mobilizing new assets for the teaching and study of American foreign policy, assembling and producing new and archival moving image and recorded sound assets into a rich and openly available repository to help make the teaching and study of U.S. foreign policy more engaging for university students in the age of YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, and Twitter.

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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.

Under Hitler’s direct command, Special Commission agents stationed in France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland systematically acquired more than 10,000 art objects, objects that, in turn, were shipped on to Germany and Austria for wartime storage in castles and deep underground mines that had been converted for the purpose. Such was Hitler’s attachment to the project that when he committed suicide in Berlin in April 1945, the scale model of the museum was there, underground in the bunker, next to him.

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What is a memory? How are memories made? How are memories lost? Erased? How does a group—a society—remember, then memorialize, an event, especially now in the digital age?

American history involves countless memorializations of great and hard events—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, The Great Depression, the attacks of September 11, to name but several. Our social memory works its way out in our museums; our monuments; our holidays (Memorial Day has its own a complicated history); our historical societies and archives; media; reenactments; and the names we put on streets and public spaces.

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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” is a story that focuses on the invention of writing almost simultaneously in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It traces the developments that led to the invention of alphabetic writing and the subsequent revolution in the spread of literacy—in the west, through the adoption of alphabetic writing by the Greeks and then the Romans; in the east with the spread of alphabetic writing through Aramaic and finally through Arabic scripts and their offshoots.

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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.”

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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?

The Korean War lasted three years, killed off 35,000 Americans and 3 million Koreans, and involved the armed forces of 16 countries. It was the first hot war in the American battle against communism and almost careened into worldwide nuclear conflagration. It pitted commanders in the field against commanders in the White House, and many so-called “great men” of history—Truman, MacArthur, Mao, Stalin—against each other.

“The Coldest Winter” tells the story of the Korean War based on the newest work of history from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam. The film, like the book, is based on interviews with American, Korean, and Chinese veterans, politicians, journalists, and other eyewitnesses, and on the raw materials recorded in their wartime notebooks, letters home, published an unpublished memoirs, photos and films.

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For centuries, Russian literature, reform, and revolution have always been intertwined. The sheer size of Russia, its brutal climate, the violence of its history, and the heroism and genius of its people all have contributed to a world of literature like no other.

"The Story of Russian Literature" film and online environment explore that spellbinding literary culture and history. Throughout that exploration, we ask, where is the new Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Gogol, waiting to be discovered by the English-speaking world?

The project draws extensively on library and archival holdings in Russia and the West including at Mosfilm, Gosteleradiofond, the New York Public Library, Columbia University's Bakhmetyeff Archive, and in other special collections.

Supported by the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication, and produced in association with Wilton Films, the film premieres in 2012.

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For further information about Intelligent Television projects and productions, or to get involved, please contact the company.