The Five Best North Korean Movies: Watch Them Free Online

Accord­ing to offi­cial pro­pa­gan­da, Kim Jong-Il was a remark­ably impres­sive indi­vid­ual. He learned to walk when he was just three weeks old; he wrote 1,500 books while at uni­ver­si­ty; and, dur­ing his first and only game of golf, he scored 11 holes in one. Yet for some rea­son becom­ing the world’s first North Kore­an pro­fes­sion­al golf play­er didn’t seem to inter­est Kim. He want­ed to make movies. So, in 1978, while his father Kim Il-Sung was still the country’s supreme leader, Kim set out to mod­ern­ize the film indus­try of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic People’s Repub­lic of Korea.

“The North’s film­mak­ers are just doing per­func­to­ry work,” Kim said to South Kore­an film direc­tor Shin Sang-ok. “They don’t have any new ideas…their works have the same expres­sions, redun­dan­cies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with cry­ing and sob­bing. I did­n’t order them to por­tray that kind of thing.”

the-flower-girl.480.270.s

Of course, Kim’s bold plan to jump­start the indus­try was to kid­nap Shin and his wife, both celebri­ties in South Korea. He was abduct­ed in Hong Kong and, when he had the temer­i­ty to try to escape, he end­ed up spend­ing four years toil­ing in prison, sub­sist­ing on lit­tle more than grass and a lit­tle rice. Even­tu­al­ly, Shin was approached by Kim and giv­en an offer he dare not refuse: make movies in North Korea.

Like the films cranked out in Chi­na dur­ing the height of the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, North Kore­an movies are large­ly pro­pa­gan­da deliv­ery sys­tems designed exclu­sive­ly for a domes­tic audi­ence. After Shin’s kid­nap­ping, DPRK movies start­ed to get just a bit less didac­tic. Simon Fowler, who writes prob­a­bly the only Eng­lish-lan­guage blog on North Kore­an cin­e­ma, just wrote an arti­cle for The Guardian where he select­ed the best films to come out of the Her­mit king­dom. You can watch a few of these movies here and find the oth­ers at The Guardian. They might be goofy, maudlin and ham-fist­ed, but for movie mavens and afi­ciona­dos of Com­mu­nist kitsch, they are fas­ci­nat­ing.

Per­haps the most impor­tant North Kore­an movie ever is The Flower Girl (1972). Watch it above. Set dur­ing Japan’s colo­nial occu­pa­tion of Korea, the film fol­lows a young woman who endures one injus­tice after anoth­er at the hands of the Japan­ese before Kim Il-Sung’s army march­es into her vil­lage and saves the day. The movie set the tem­plate for many of the movies to come after­wards. As Fowler writes, “the impor­tance of The Flower Girl with­in the DPRK can­not be over­es­ti­mat­ed. The star, Hong Yong-hee, adorns the one won bank note in North Korea, and is revered as a nation­al hero. Although not always an easy watch, those want­i­ng to learn more about the aver­age North Kore­ans’ sen­si­bil­i­ties could do far worse than to watch this pic­turesque but trag­ic film.”

Hong Kil Dong (1986) is clear­ly one of the movies Shin Sang-ok influ­enced; it fore­ground­ed enter­tain­ment over ide­ol­o­gy, a rar­i­ty at that point in the coun­try’s film his­to­ry. The movie is about a char­ac­ter from Kore­an lit­er­a­ture who, like Robin Hood, not only robs from the rich and gives to the poor but knows how to deliv­er a beat­down. Hong plays out like a par­tic­u­lar­ly low-bud­get Shaw Broth­ers kung fu spec­ta­cle with plen­ty of fly­ing kicks, sword play and wire work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCKSR0JArUQ#t=5000

And final­ly, there’s Pul­gasari (1985), North Korea’s attempt at mak­ing a kai­ju movie. Set in feu­dal times, the film is about a stat­ue that comes to life, grows to mon­strous pro­por­tions and, unable to sate its unquench­able thirst for met­al, starts to smash things. Shin man­aged to get tech­ni­cal help for the movie from Toho, the same Japan­ese stu­dio that cranked all those Godzil­la movies. In fact, they even got vet­er­an kai­ju actor, Ken­pachi­ro Sat­suma, to don a rub­ber suit for this movie. Years lat­er, Pul­gasari was released in Japan about the same time as Roland Emmerich’s god awful Hol­ly­wood remake of Godzil­la (not to be con­fused with Gareth Edward’s god awful Hol­ly­wood remake from ear­li­er this year). Sat­suma pub­li­cal­ly stat­ed what a lot of Japan­ese pri­vate­ly thought – Pul­gasari is bet­ter than Emmerich’s big-bud­get dud.

Not long after Shin com­plet­ed Pul­gasari, he and his wife man­aged to escape in Vien­na thanks to the help of the CIA and a host of oth­er unlike­ly par­ties.  Kim Jong-Il might have had super human abil­i­ties, but tal­ent reten­tion did not seem to be one of them.

You can watch the three films list­ed above, plus Marathon Run­ner and Cen­tre For­ward over at  The Guardian.

More free films can be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kim Jong-il’s Godzil­la Movie & His Free Writ­ings on Film The­o­ry

North Korea’s Cin­e­ma of Dreams

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrowAnd check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

David Lynch Takes the ALS Ice Coffee Bucket Challenge

Thanks to Lau­ra Dern, David Lynch took the ALS Ice Buck­et Chal­lenge. And, of course, there’s a twist — which involves a dou­ble shot of espres­so and Lynch play­ing “Some­where Over the Rain­bow” on the trum­pet. If you ever won­dered what Lynch looks like with­out his clas­sic quiff, you won’t want to miss this one minute bit.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Sur­re­al­ist Video

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Direc­tors, Includ­ing Felli­ni, Wilder, Tati & Hitch­cock

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Portraits: Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson & Many Others (1970–1987)

warhol polaroids

Polaroid pho­tog­ra­phy, which looked about to fade out for­ev­er for a while there, has in recent years made a come­back. Chalk it up, if you must, to a grand revalu­ing wave of the phys­i­cal­ly ana­log in our age of dig­i­tal ephemer­al­i­ty — the same tide on which enthu­si­asm for vinyl, zines, and even VHS tapes has risen again. But we must acknowl­edge that Andy Warhol, in a sense, got there first. It hard­ly counts as the only mat­ter on which the mas­ter­mind of the Fac­to­ry showed pre­science; take, for instance, his quip about every­one in the future get­ting fif­teen min­utes of fame, a pre­dic­tion which, as Jonathan Lethem put it, has in our present hard­ened into “drab pro­ces­sion­al.” Some of these very 21st-cen­tu­ry peo­ple now enjoy­ing (or endur­ing) their own fif­teen min­utes — most of them pre­sum­ably not even born with­in Warhol’s life­time — sure­ly keep a Polaroid cam­era at hand. They acknowl­edge, on some lev­el, what the con­sum­mate 20th-cen­tu­ry “pop artist” sensed: that the osten­si­bly cheap and dis­pos­able, includ­ing self-devel­op­ing film used for untrained vaca­tion snap­shots and mere ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al for “real” works of art, has its own kind of per­ma­nence.

Here we have a selec­tion of Warhol’s own works of Polaroid pho­tog­ra­phy, a medi­um he took up around 1970 and used to fur­ther his inter­est in por­trai­ture. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley Art Muse­um, just one of the insti­tu­tions to put them on dis­play, says that “these images often served as the basis for his com­mis­sioned por­traits, silk-screen paint­ings, draw­ings, and prints.” The wide sub­set they showed “reveals that super­stars were not the only fig­ures that Warhol pho­tographed with his Polaroid Big Shot, the dis­tinct plas­tic cam­era he used for the major­i­ty of his sit­tings. Over half of those who sat for him were lit­tle known or remain uniden­ti­fied.” Whether of Mick Jag­ger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simp­son, Deb­bie Har­ry, him­self, a row of bananas, or some­one faint­ly rec­og­niz­able yet ulti­mate­ly unnam­able, each of Warhol’s Polaroids remains “ful­ly iden­ti­fied with the art­work that ulti­mate­ly grew out of it; the face depict­ed becomes a kind of sig­ni­fi­er for larg­er cul­tur­al con­cepts of beau­ty, pow­er, and worth.”

You can see at least 85 of Warhol’s polaroid por­traits at a site called These Amer­i­cans.

Now what would Warhol, a known ear­ly enthu­si­ast of com­put­er art, have said about the arrival of Insta­gram fil­ters meant to make our instan­ta­neous, high-res­o­lu­tion dig­i­tal pho­tos look like Polaroids again?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Watch Lau­rence Olivi­er, Liv Ull­mann and Christo­pher Plummer’s Clas­sic Polaroid Ads

Ital­ian Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mau­r­izio Gal­im­ber­ti Cre­ates Cubist Polaroid Col­lages of Artists & Celebri­ties

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How to Listen to the Radio: The BBC’s 1930 Manual for Using a New Technology

BBC Good Listening

Click to enlarge

A com­par­i­son between the inven­tion of radio and that of the Inter­net need not be a strained or superf­i­cal exer­cise. Par­al­lels abound. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool that first drew the world togeth­er with news, dra­ma, and music took shape in a small but crowd­ed field of ama­teur enthu­si­asts, engi­neers and physi­cists, mil­i­tary strate­gists, and com­pet­ing cor­po­rate inter­ests. In 1920, the tech­nol­o­gy emerged ful­ly into the con­sumer sec­tor with the first com­mer­cial broad­cast by Westinghouse’s KDKA sta­tion in Pitts­burgh on Novem­ber 2, Elec­tion Day. By 1924, the U.S. had 600 com­mer­cial sta­tions around the coun­try, and in 1927, the mod­el spread across the Atlantic when the British Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (the BBC) suc­ceed­ed the British Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny, for­mer­ly an exten­sion of the Post Office.

Unlike the Wild West fron­tier of U.S. radio, since its 1922 incep­tion the BBC oper­at­ed under a cen­tral­ized com­mand struc­ture that, para­dox­i­cal­ly, fos­tered some very egal­i­tar­i­an atti­tudes to broadcasting—in cer­tain respects. In oth­ers, how­ev­er, the BBC, led by “con­sci­en­tious founder” Lord John Rei­th, took on the task of pro­vid­ing its lis­ten­ers with “ele­vat­ing and educa­tive” mate­r­i­al, par­tic­u­lar­ly avant garde music like the work of Arnold Schoen­berg and the Sec­ond Vien­nese School. The BBC, writes David Stubbs in Fear of Music, “were pre­pared to be quite bold in their broad­cast­ing pol­i­cy, mak­ing a point of includ­ing ‘futur­ist’ or ‘art music,’ as they termed it.” As you might imag­ine, “lis­ten­ers proved a lit­tle recal­ci­trant in the face of this high­brow pol­i­cy.”

In response to the vol­ume of lis­ten­er com­plaints, the BBC began a PR cam­paign in 1927 that sought to train audi­ences in how to lis­ten to chal­leng­ing and unfa­mil­iar broad­casts. One state­ment released by the BBC stress­es respon­si­ble, “cor­rect,” lis­ten­ing prac­tices: “If there be an art of broad­cast­ing there is equal­ly an art of lis­ten­ing… there can be no excuse for the lis­ten­er who tunes in to a pro­gramme, willy nil­ly, and com­plains that he does not care for it.” The next year, the BBC Hand­book 1928 includ­ed the fol­low­ing cas­ti­ga­tion of lis­ten­er antipa­thy and rest­less­ness.

Every new inven­tion that brings desir­able things more eas­i­ly with­in our reach there­by to some extent cheap­ens them… We seem to be enter­ing upon a kind of arm-chair peri­od of civil­i­sa­tion, when every­thing that goes to make up adven­ture is dealt with whole­sale, and deliv­ered, as it were, to the indi­vid­ual at his own door.

It’s as if Ama­zon were right around the cor­ner, and, in a cer­tain sense, it was. Like per­son­al com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy, the wire­less rev­o­lu­tion­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tions and offered instant access to infor­ma­tion, if not yet goods, and not yet on an “on-demand” basis. Unlike Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, how­ev­er, British com­mer­cial radio strove might­i­ly to con­trol the ethics and aes­thet­ics of its con­tent. The hand­book goes on to elab­o­rate its pro­posed rem­e­dy for the poten­tial cheap­en­ing of cul­ture it iden­ti­fies above:

The lis­ten­er, in oth­er words, should be an epi­cure and not a glut­ton; he should choose his broad­cast fare with dis­crim­i­na­tion, and when the time comes give him­self delib­er­ate­ly to the enjoy­ment of it… To sum up, I would urge upon those who use wire­less to cul­ti­vate the art of lis­ten­ing; to dis­crim­i­nate in what they lis­ten to, and to lis­ten with their mind as well as their ears. In that way they will not only increase their plea­sure, but actu­al­ly con­tribute their part to the improve­ment and per­fec­tion of an art which is yet in its child­hood.

It seems that these lengthy prose pre­scrip­tions did not con­vey the mes­sage as effi­cient­ly as they might. In 1930, BBC admin­is­tra­tors pub­lished a hand­book that took a much more direct approach, which you can see above. Titled “Good Lis­ten­ing,” the list of instruc­tions, tran­scribed below, pro­ceeds under the assump­tion that any dis­sat­is­fac­tion with BBC pro­gram­ming should be blamed sole­ly on impa­tient, sloth­ful lis­ten­ers. As BBC pro­gram advi­sor Fil­son Young wrote that year in a Radio Times arti­cle, “Good lis­ten­ers will pro­duce good pro­grammes more sure­ly and more cer­tain­ly than any­thing else… Many of you have not even begun to mas­ter the art of lis­ten­ing. The arch-fault of the aver­age lis­ten­er is that he does not select.”

GOOD LISTENING

Make sure that your set is work­ing prop­er­ly before you set­tle down to lis­ten.

Choose your pro­grammes as care­ful­ly as you choose which the­atre to go to. It is just as impor­tant to you to enjoy your­self at home as at the the­atre.

Lis­ten as care­ful­ly at home as you do in a the­atre or con­cert hall. You can’t get the best out of a pro­gramme if your mind is wan­der­ing, or if you are play­ing bridge or read­ing. Give it your full atten­tion. Try turn­ing out the lights so that your eye is not caught by famil­iar objects in the room. Your imag­i­na­tion will be twice as vivid.

If you only lis­ten with half an ear you haven’t a quar­ter of a right to crit­i­cise.

Think of your favourite occu­pa­tion. Don’t you like a change some­times? Give the wire­less a rest now and then.

All maybe more than a lit­tle con­de­scend­ing, per­haps, but that last bit of advice now seems eter­nal.

via WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles’ Radio Per­for­mances of 10 Shake­speare Plays

Hear Vin­tage Episodes of Buck Rogers, the Sci-Fi Radio Show That First Aired on This Day in 1932

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Brian May’s Homemade Guitar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motorcycle Parts & More

It’s called “The Red Spe­cial.” Or some­times “The Fire­place.” That’s the gui­tar that Bri­an May (gui­tarist of Queen and physics researcher) began build­ing with his father cir­ca 1963, when Bri­an was about 16 years old. Lack­ing mon­ey but not inge­nu­ity, the father-son team built the gui­tar using mate­ri­als found around the home. The neck of the gui­tar was fash­ioned from an 18th-cen­tu­ry fire­place man­tel, the inlays on the neck from a moth­er-of-pearl but­ton. For the body, they used wood from an old oak table. Then the bricoleurs com­bined a bike sad­dle­bag hold­er, a plas­tic knit­ting nee­dle tip, and motor­bike valve springs to cre­ate a tremo­lo arm. It’s a kind of mag­ic! But here’s per­haps the most amaz­ing part of the sto­ry. The result­ing gui­tar was­n’t a rick­ety nov­el­ty. May used The Red Spe­cial dur­ing Queen’s record­ing ses­sions and live per­for­mances, and he still appar­ent­ly plays a restored ver­sion today. If you find your­self inspired by this DIY sto­ry, you can head over to Bri­an­May­Gui­tars and buy your own Red Spe­cial repli­ca.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

The Mak­ing of Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 Hit “Under Pres­sure”: Demos, Stu­dio Ses­sions & More

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

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Paris Through Pentax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Different Lens

http://vimeo.com/104088954

Mai­son Carnot, an ad stu­dio in France, has pro­duced a delight­ful short film that lets you see Paris through the viewfind­er of the clas­sic Pen­tax 67 cam­era. Antoine Pai, one of the film­mak­ers, told Petapixel, “As Parisians, we are so used to the charm of our city that we for­get some­times to take a minute and observe.” “Mar­cel Proust once said, ‘Mys­tery is not about trav­el­ing to new places but it’s about look­ing with new eyes.’ That is total­ly what we felt while shoot­ing this film.” To see Paris through a dif­fer­nent lens, watch Paris Through Pen­tax above. To get the back­sto­ry on the con­trap­tion Mai­son Carnot jer­ry-rigged to shoot the film, head over to Petapix­el.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online

feynman textbook1

Image by Tamiko Thiel, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Last fall, we let you know that Cal­tech and The Feyn­man Lec­tures Web­site joined forces to cre­ate an online edi­tion of The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics. They start­ed with Vol­ume 1. And now they’ve fol­lowed up with Vol­ume 2 and Vol­ume 3, mak­ing the col­lec­tion com­plete.

First pre­sent­ed in the ear­ly 1960s at Cal­tech by the Nobel Prize-win­ning physi­cist Richard Feyn­man, the lec­tures were even­tu­al­ly turned into a book by Feyn­man, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands. The text went on to become arguably the most pop­u­lar physics book ever writ­ten, sell­ing more than 1.5 mil­lion copies in Eng­lish, and get­ting trans­lat­ed into a dozen lan­guages.

The new online edi­tion makes The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics avail­able in HTML5. The text “has been designed for ease of read­ing on devices of any size or shape,” and you can zoom into text, fig­ures and equa­tions with­out degra­da­tion. Dive right into the lec­tures here. And if you’d pre­fer to see Feyn­man (as opposed to read Feyn­man), we would encour­age you to watch ‘The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law,’ Feynman’s  sev­en-part lec­ture series record­ed at Cor­nell in 1964.

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics is now list­ed in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Text­books.

Pho­to­graph by Tom Har­vey. Copy­right © Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es (part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties)

Free Physics Text­books

‘The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law’: Richard Feynman’s Leg­endary Course Pre­sent­ed at Cor­nell, 1964

The Richard Feyn­man Tril­o­gy: The Physi­cist Cap­tured in Three Films

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Philosopher Alain Badiou Performs a Scene From His Play, Ahmed The Philosopher (2011)

Alain Badiou occu­pies an odd place in con­tem­po­rary phi­los­o­phy. Show­ered with superla­tives like “France’s great­est liv­ing philoso­pher” and “one of the great­est thinkers of our time,” he some­how doesn’t mer­it even a cur­so­ry entry in that defin­i­tive aca­d­e­m­ic ref­er­ence site, the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy. Whether this is sim­ply an edi­to­r­i­al over­sight or an inten­tion­al slight, I am not qual­i­fied to say.

Per­haps one of the dif­fi­cul­ties of writ­ing con­cise­ly on Badiou is that Badiou him­self roams far and wide—from Hegel to Lacan, Kant, Marx, Descartes, and even St. Paul. Not eas­i­ly iden­ti­fi­able as belong­ing to one school or anoth­er, Badiou’s work, though staunch­ly polit­i­cal­ly left, resists anti-human­ist post­mod­ernism and seeks to ground truth in uni­ver­sals. It’s an unsur­pris­ing tack giv­en that he first trained in math­e­mat­ics.

As if his philo­soph­i­cal work weren’t enough, Badiou also writes nov­els and plays. Of the lat­ter, his Ahmed the Philoso­pher: 34 Short Plays for Chil­dren & Every­one Else has recent­ly appeared in an Eng­lish trans­la­tion by Joseph Lit­vak. Just above, you can see Lit­vak as Ahmed and Badiou him­self as “a cur­mud­geon­ly French demon,” writes Crit­i­cal The­o­ry, “who takes joy in inform­ing for the police.” Filmed in Ger­many in 2011,

This scene, enti­tled “Ter­ror,” serves as a com­men­tary on French xeno­pho­bia towards Arab immi­grants. Badiou at one point also draws ref­er­ence to Nazi-occu­pied France, a sort of “good old days” for Badiou’s cal­lous char­ac­ter.

Badiou as the “demon of the cities” spot­lights the brute lim­i­ta­tions imposed by vio­lent, unjust police, who sum­mar­i­ly exe­cute inno­cent peo­ple in the streets. Tak­ing per­verse plea­sure in describ­ing such an occur­rence, the demon leers, “I like to imag­ine that I’m hid­den behind a cur­tain. I sali­vate!” before going on to describe with rel­ish the even ugli­er sce­nario of a “bun­gled” shoot­ing. The audi­ence gig­gles uneasi­ly, unsure quite how to respond to the exag­ger­at­ed evil Badiou per­forms. It seems unthink­able, absurd, their ner­vous laugh­ter sug­gests, that any­one but a car­toon dev­il could take such sadis­tic delight in this kind of cru­el­ty, much less, as the demon does, ini­ti­ate it with anony­mous libel. It’s an unnerv­ing per­for­mance of an even more unnerv­ing piece of writ­ing. Below, you can see more scenes from Ahmed the Philoso­pher, per­formed in Eng­lish sans Badiou at UC Irvine in 2010.

If you like Badiou as an actor, this may be your only chance to see him per­form. How­ev­er, the extro­vert­ed philoso­pher hopes to break into Hol­ly­wood in anoth­er capacity—bringing his trans­la­tion of Plato’s Repub­lic to the screen, with, in his grand design, Brad Pitt in the lead­ing role, Sean Con­nery as Socrates, and Meryl Streep as “Mrs. Pla­to.” I wish him all the luck in the world. With the block­buster suc­cess of religous epics like Noah, per­haps we’re primed for a Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of ancient Greek thought, though like the for­mer film, purists would no doubt find ample rea­son to fly up in arms over a guar­an­teed mul­ti­tude of philo­soph­i­cal blas­phemies.

via Crit­i­cal The­o­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Fou­cault and Alain Badiou Dis­cuss “Phi­los­o­phy and Psy­chol­o­gy” on French TV (1965)

Rad­i­cal Thinkers: Five Videos Pro­file Max Horkheimer, Alain Badiou & Oth­er Rad­i­cal The­o­rists

Hear Michel Foucault’s Lec­ture “The Cul­ture of the Self,” Pre­sent­ed in Eng­lish at UC Berke­ley (1983)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.