I found this very interesting film from 1937, that I strongly believe is free from copyright. It is 15 minutes and presents a Swedish newspaper, including several of its journalists, and a tour around the editorial and printing offices.
From this film, I made 5-10 second long clips that present each journalist, to illustrate many Wikipedia articles, and some 1-2 minute clips to present printing technology. I uploaded each clip separately, adding categories and descriptions in English and Swedish.
This takes a lot of time!
In addition, I created Timed Text subtitles for some of my clips, but these are of course not shown for the full film, since they are two different items. To get subtitles for the full film, I would have to copy the text and recompute all the time offsets.
Whole film, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Varje_dag_en_v%C3%A4rldsrevy.ogv
A clip with English text, explaining page layout, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ombrytning_Stockholms-Tidningen_1937....
The HTML 5 <video> tag has attributes for start and stop time, so shouldn't it be possible to just upload the whole film once and then specify these attributes in each article, e.g. [[File:myfilm.ogv|thumb|start=4:38|end=4:47|John Doe]]? Is this possible today? Is it used anywhere, so I can see an example?
This film comes from a new website, filmarkivet.se, which was launched just this month. It's a cooperation between the archives of the Swedish Film Institute and the multimedia department of the Swedish National Library. I happen to know the people in both places, so we should establish some formal cooperation as soon as the head of archives is back from the Berlin film festival.