The Complete Tarkovsky. Online. Free.

So, I learned about this from a comment here at LookingCloser.org today…

All of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films are online, in their entirety, and you can watch them at no cost. (Well, except the cost of time and mental energy… which, with Tarkovsky, is expensive.)

I’ve only just begun to check it out, but it appears to be true. Thanks to the commenter – John – for the tip!

Now the next question: Is it legit?

Tyler at artsandfaith.com says,

Wow. It even has his student films on there. I didn’t think I’d ever find those.

I checked a few of the videos — The Killers doesn’t have subtitles, BTW–and noticed the FilmAnnex.com logo in the corner of the screen. When I went to the site, it looked like another one of those sketchy pirate video sites, but then I found this, which makes it sound like the whole concept might be legitimate. I don’t know enough about new media to really understand it, but it sounds like Film Annex works with filmmakers (the blog entry mentions Abel Ferrara, whose site doesn’t appear to have any full-length movies) to create websites as a platform to stream videos and then splits the ad revenues with them.