Read more at source.
Read more at source.
This year is particularly significant for film enthusiasts. Several seminal directors debuted their first projects with sound in 1929, including Alfred Hitchcock's 'Blackmail' and Cecil B. DeMille's 'Dynamite'. Additionally, 1929 saw Walt Disney directing the iconic 'Skeleton Dance', animated by Ub Iwerks, and Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie. The original characters, Tintin and Popeye, have also entered the public domain.
The compositions of several memorable songs have joined the public domain. These include show tunes like 'Singin' in the Rain' and 'An American in Paris', jazz standards such as 'Ain't Misbehavin'' and '(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue', and classical hits like the masterwork 'Boléro'. Notable recordings include George Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' and Marian Anderson's rendition of 'My Way's Cloudy'.
Several authors have had titles enter the public domain. Noir fans will appreciate Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon' and 'Red Harvest'. Other literary works now freely accessible include 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf, 'A Farewell to Arms' by Ernest Hemmingway, 'Seven Dials Mystery' by Agatha Christie and 'The Sound and the Fury' by William Faulkner. For poetry enthusiasts, the original German version of Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' is also now in the public domain.
The beginning of a new year often brings with it a sense of renewal and opportunity. For creatives and scholars alike, this sense of opportunity is magnified as a fresh batch of works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 are now free to adapt, reuse, copy and share, thanks to their entry into the public domain.
