Why “White Christmas,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Let It Snow,” and Other Classic Christmas Songs Come from the 1940s

in History, Music | December 23rd, 2021

Cast your mind back, if you will, to Christ­mas­time eighty years ago, and imag­ine which hol­i­day songs would have been in the air — or rather, which ones would­n’t have been. You cer­tain­ly would­n’t have heard the likes of “Jin­gle Bell Rock” or “Rockin’ Around the Christ­mas Tree,” rock-and-roll itself not yet hav­ing emerged in the form we know today. Even the thor­ough­ly un-rock­ing “Sil­ver Bells” would­n’t be record­ed until 1951, for the now-for­got­ten Bob Hope film The Lemon Drop Kid. What of chil­dren’s favorites like “Here Comes San­ta Claus,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Rein­deer,” and “Frosty the Snow­man”? None were pop­u­lar until Gene Autry laid them down in 1947, 1949, and 1950, respec­tive­ly.

Even “The Christ­mas Song,” whose most beloved ver­sion was record­ed by Nat King Cole, was­n’t writ­ten until 1945 (as was  “Let It Snow”). The year before that brought “Have Your­self a Mer­ry Lit­tle Christ­mas”; the year before that, “San­ta Claus Is Comin’ to Town” and “I’ll Be Home for Christ­mas.” That was record­ed first and most defin­i­tive­ly by Bing Cros­by, the singer most close­ly iden­ti­fied with the 1940s Christ­mas-music boom. That boom began, as the Ched­dar Explains video at the top of the post tells it, with Cros­by’s Christ­mas Day 1941 ren­di­tion of “White Christ­mas,” just weeks after the attack on Pearl Har­bor.

“It’s no coin­ci­dence that the boom in Christ­mas tunes came dur­ing World War II, when tens of thou­sands of Amer­i­can sol­diers were abroad defend­ing their coun­try, no doubt long­ing for the sim­ple warmth of home,” writes The Atlantic’s Eric Har­vey. “Irv­ing Berlin invest­ed ‘White Christ­mas’ with the sort of metero­log­i­cal long­ing that comes from liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, but troops picked up on the sen­ti­ment, mak­ing the song a clas­sic in this regard.” This also hap­pened to be the zenith of the gold­en age of radio (a com­pi­la­tion of whose Christ­mas broad­casts we fea­tured last year here on Open Cul­ture). “By the 1940s, radios were a default pres­ence in most Amer­i­can homes. And by the late 1940s tele­vi­sion was grow­ing out of radio, and through the 1950s the pair set hol­i­day liv­ing rooms around the coun­try aglow with musi­cal per­for­mances.”

That most pop­u­lar Christ­mas songs still come from the 1940s and 50s (a Spo­ti­fy playlist of which you can find here) has giv­en rise to the­o­ries of a Baby-Boomer con­spir­a­cy to pre­serve their own child­hoods at all costs to the cul­ture. But then, as Christo­pher Ingra­ham writes in The Wash­ing­ton Post, “the post­war era real­ly was an excep­tion­al time in Amer­i­can his­to­ry: jobs were plen­ti­ful, the econ­o­my was boom­ing, and Amer­i­ca’s influ­ence on the world stage was at its peak.” Thus “what we now think of as the hol­i­day aes­thet­ic isn’t just about a par­tic­u­lar time of the year — it’s also very much about a par­tic­u­lar time of Amer­i­can his­to­ry.” This aligns with the per­cep­tion that Christ­mas has turned from a reli­gious hol­i­day into an Amer­i­can one. But take it from me, an Amer­i­can liv­ing in Korea: even on the oth­er side of the world, you can’t escape its songs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes Music Sound Like Christ­mas Music? Hear the Sin­gle Most Christ­massy Chord of All Explained

Stream 48 Hours of Vin­tage Christ­mas Radio Broad­casts Fea­tur­ing Orson Welles, Bob Hope, Frank Sina­tra, Jim­my Stew­art, Ida Lupino & More (1930–1959)

David Bowie & Bing Cros­by Sing “The Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy” (1977)

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

The Sto­ry of The Pogues’ “Fairy­tale of New York,” the Boozy Bal­lad That Has Become One of the Most Beloved Christ­mas Songs of All Time

Stream a Playlist of 79 Punk Rock Christ­mas Songs: The Ramones, The Damned, Bad Reli­gion & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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J.R.R. Tolkien Sent Illustrated Letters from Father Christmas to His Kids Every Year (1920–1943)

in Art, Law, Literature | December 22nd, 2021

It does­n’t take chil­dren long to sus­pect that San­ta Claus is actu­al­ly their par­ents. But if Mom and Dad demon­strate suf­fi­cient com­mit­ment to the fan­ta­sy, so will the kids. This must have held even truer for the fam­i­ly of the 20th cen­tu­ry’s most cel­e­brat­ed cre­ator of fan­tasies, J. R. R. Tolkien. Before Tolkien had begun writ­ing The Hob­bit, let alone the Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy, he was hon­ing his sig­na­ture sto­ry­telling and world-build­ing skills by writ­ing let­ters from Father Christ­mas. The tod­dler John Tolkien and his infant broth­er Michael received the first in 1920, just after their Great War vet­er­an father was demo­bi­lized from the army and made the youngest pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leeds. Anoth­er would come each and every Christ­mas until 1943, two more chil­dren and much of a life’s work lat­er.

Every year, Tolkien’s Father Christ­mas had a great deal to report to John, Michael, and lat­er Christo­pher and Priscil­la. Apart from the usu­al has­sle of assem­bling and deliv­er­ing gifts, he had to con­tend with a host of oth­er chal­lenges includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to attacks by maraud­ing gob­lins and the acci­den­tal destruc­tion of the moon.

The cast of char­ac­ters also includes an unre­li­able polar-bear assis­tant and his cubs Pak­su and Valko­tuk­ka, the sound of whose names hints at Tolkien’s inter­est in lan­guage and myth. Since the pub­li­ca­tion of the col­lect­ed Let­ters From Father Christ­mas a few years after Tolkien’s death, enthu­si­asts have iden­ti­fied many traces of the qual­i­ties that would lat­er emerge, ful­ly devel­oped, in his nov­els. The spir­it of adven­ture is there, of course, but so is the humor.

Under­stand­ing seem­ing­ly from the first how to fire up a young read­er’s imag­i­na­tion, the mul­ti­tal­ent­ed Tolkien accom­pa­nied each let­ter from Father Christ­mas with an illus­tra­tion. Col­or­ful and evoca­tive, these works of art depict the scenes of both mishap and rev­el­ry described in the cor­re­spon­dence (itself stamped with a Tolkien-designed seal from the North Pole). How intense­ly must young John, Michael, Christo­pher, and Priscil­la have antic­i­pat­ed these mis­sives in the weeks — even months — lead­ing up to Christ­mas. And how aston­ish­ing it must have been, upon much lat­er reflec­tion, to real­ize what atten­tion their father had devot­ed to this fam­i­ly project. Grow­ing up Tolkien no doubt had its down­sides, as rela­tion to any famous writer does, but unmem­o­rable hol­i­days can’t have been one of them.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Let­ter From Father Christ­mas” To His Young Chil­dren

Dis­cov­er J. R .R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed Christ­mas Cards That Were Too Avant-Garde for Hall­mark (1960)

Andy Warhol’s Christ­mas Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The 850 Books a Texas Lawmaker Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Students Feel Uncomfortable

in Current Affairs | December 22nd, 2021

“Who’s afraid of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry?” asked lawyer, legal schol­ar and Har­vard pro­fes­sor Der­rick Bell in a 1995 essay. Bell helped pio­neer the dis­ci­pline in the 70s, and until recent­ly, it remained most­ly con­fined to aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals, grad school sem­i­nars and the pages of pro­gres­sive mag­a­zines. Now the phrase is every­where. What hap­pened? Did rad­i­cal schol­ars force third graders to read foot­notes? Or did con­ser­v­a­tives show up fifty years late to a con­ver­sa­tion, skip the read­ing, and decide the best way to respond was to lash out indis­crim­i­nate­ly at every iden­ti­ty and civ­il rights issue that makes them uncom­fort­able, start­ing with kinder­garten and work­ing their way up? Maybe Bell’s ques­tion has answered itself.

In the recent moral pan­ic over CRT, the term has become a denun­ci­a­tion, a shib­bo­leth that can apply to any his­to­ry, civics, or lit­er­a­ture les­son broad­ly con­strued, whether taught through cur­rent events, fic­tion, poet­ry, mem­oir, non­fic­tion, or any mate­r­i­al — to use the lan­guage of the “anti-CRT” Texas House Bill 3979 — that might make a stu­dent “feel dis­com­fort, guilt, anguish, or any oth­er form of psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Con­nec­tions to Bel­l’s crit­i­cal race the­o­ry are ten­u­ous, at best. As Allyson Waller notes at the Texas Tri­bune, that aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline “is not being taught in K‑12 schools.”

This fact means lit­tle to right wing leg­is­la­tors, school board mem­bers and par­ents’ groups, who have found a con­ve­nient boogey­man on which to project their anx­i­eties. What the Texas bill means in prac­tice has been impos­si­ble to parse. Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union lawyer Emer­son Sykes filed a fed­er­al suit over a sim­i­lar law in Okla­homa, argu­ing that it’s “so vague,” as Michael Pow­ell reports at The New York Times, “that it fails to pro­vide rea­son­able legal guid­ance to teach­ers and could put jobs in dan­ger.” A Black prin­ci­pal near Dal­las has already been forced to resign in the anti-CRT pan­ic, for writ­ing a pub­lic let­ter after George Floy­d’s death that declared, “Edu­ca­tion is the key to stomp­ing out igno­rance, hate, and sys­temic racism.”

In anoth­er part of the state, a dis­trict-lev­el exec­u­tive direc­tor of cur­ricu­lum has rec­om­mend­ed teach­ing “oth­er per­spec­tives” on the Holo­caust to meet the bil­l’s man­dates. Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors are not the only ones tar­get­ed by the bill and its sup­port­ers. “One minute they’re talk­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry,” says mid­dle school librar­i­an Car­rie Damon. “Sud­den­ly I’m hear­ing librar­i­ans are indoc­tri­nat­ing stu­dents. One library in Llano Coun­ty, about 80 miles north­west of Austin, shut down for three days for a “thor­ough review” of every chil­dren’s book. At the statewide lev­el, Texas Repub­li­can State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Matt Krause launched an anti-CRT witch-hunt, in advance of a run for State Attor­ney Gen­er­al, by email­ing a list 850 books to state super­in­ten­dents, ask­ing if any of them appeared in their libraries.

The list, writes Dani­ka Ellis at Book Riot, is “a bizarre assort­ment of titles, for­mat­ted in a way that sug­gests it’s copy-and-past­ed from library list­ings.” It includes books about human rights, sex edu­ca­tion, any and every LGBTQ top­ic, race, Amer­i­can his­to­ry, and polic­ing. Iron­i­cal­ly, it also includes books about burn­ing books and bul­ly­ing (a prob­lem caus­ing stu­dent walk­outs around the coun­try). The books range from those for young chil­dren to mid­dle and high school stu­dents and col­lege-aged young adults. Most of them “were writ­ten by women, peo­ple of col­or and LGBTQ writ­ers.” It also includes “a par­tic­u­lar­ly puz­zling choice,” writes Pow­ell (prob­a­bly a mis­take?): Cyn­i­cal The­o­ries by Helen Pluck­rose and James Lind­say, two authors who have made careers out of expos­ing what they allege are ille­git­i­mate “griev­ances” in acad­e­mia.

You can see Krause’s full list here. The state rep’s “motive was unclear,” Pow­ell writes, but it seems clear enough he wished to flag these books for pos­si­ble removal. Giv­en that crit­i­cal race the­o­ry is not, in fact, a phrase that means “any­thing that makes con­ser­v­a­tives feel guilty and/or uncom­fort­able” but is fore­most a legal the­o­ry, we might ask legal ques­tions like cui bono? – “who ben­e­fits” from ban­ning the books on Krause’s list? Who feels uncom­fort­able and guilty when they read about racist polic­ing, healthy gay rela­tion­ships, or the civ­il rights move­ment– and why? Should that dis­com­fort pro­vide just cause for cen­sor­ship and the vio­la­tion of oth­er stu­dents’ rights to qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al? How can the sub­jec­tive stan­dard of “com­fort” be used to eval­u­ate the edu­ca­tion­al val­ue of a book?

Debates over free inquiry in edu­ca­tion seem nev­er to end. (Con­sid­er that the first book banned in Colo­nial North Amer­i­ca mocked the Puri­tans, who them­selves loved noth­ing more than ban­ning things.) As we approach the ques­tion this time around, it seems we might have learned not to ban books under vague laws that empow­er big­ots to hunt down an amor­phous ene­my so insid­i­ous it can lurk any­where and every­where. Such laws have their own his­to­ry, too, in the U.S. and else­where. Nowhere have they led to a state of affairs most of us want, one free from vio­lence, big­otry, dis­crim­i­na­tion and state repres­sion — that is, unless we need such things to make us com­fort­able.

via Book Riot

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

America’s First Banned Book: Dis­cov­er the 1637 Book That Mocked the Puri­tans

Read 14 Great Banned & Cen­sored Nov­els Free Online: For Banned Books Week 2014

It’s Banned Books Week: Lis­ten to Allen Gins­berg Read His Famous­ly Banned Poem, “Howl,” in San Fran­cis­co, 1956

When L. Frank Baum’s Wiz­ard of Oz Series Was Banned for “Depict­ing Women in Strong Lead­er­ship Roles” (1928)

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

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Class Critiques in Squid Game, Succession, etc. — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #112

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | December 22nd, 2021

Pop­u­lar shows have com­ment­ed on wealth inequal­i­ty by show­ing how dire the sit­u­a­tion is for the poor and/or how dis­con­nect­ed and clue­less the rich are. How effec­tive is this type of social com­men­tary?

Your host Mark Lin­sen­may­er is joined by philoso­pher and NY Times writer Lawrence Ware, nov­el­ist and writ­ing pro­fes­sor Sarahlyn Bruck, and edu­ca­tor with a rhetoric doc­tor­ate Michelle Par­rinel­lo-Cason to dis­cuss the appeal of both real­i­ty show (“fish­bowl”) hor­ror and satire. Is it OK if we don’t like any of the char­ac­ters in Suc­ces­sion? Does Squid Game actu­al­ly deserve its 94% on Rot­ten Toma­toes? Are we even capa­ble as Amer­i­can view­ers of appre­ci­at­ing what it’s try­ing to do?

We also touch on White Lotus, The Hunt, Schit­t’s Creek, tor­ture porn, social com­men­tary in songs, and more. Lurk­ing in the back­ground here are foun­da­tion­al works for this trend: Par­a­site, Get Out, Bat­tle Royale, and The Hunger Games.

A few arti­cles we may have drawn on for the dis­cus­sion:

Hear more from our guests on past episodes: Law on var­i­ous PEL dis­cus­sions on race and reli­gion, Sarahlyn on PMP on soap operas, Michelle on PMP on board games. Fol­low them @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck and @DaylaLearning.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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How the Beatles Experimented with Indian Music & Pioneered a New Rock and Roll Sound

in Music | December 21st, 2021

If the Bea­t­les’ exper­i­ments with Indi­an clas­si­cal music helped bridge their tran­si­tion from tour­ing pop stars to avant-garde stu­dio wiz­ards, it can seem less obvi­ous how seri­ous­ly they took Indi­an clas­si­cal music itself, though the band intro­duced mil­lions of West­ern­ers to Ravi Shankar and oth­er Indi­an musi­cians (some of whom did not get cred­it on albums like Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band and were only dis­cov­ered decades lat­er). Because of the Bea­t­les, the sitar is indeli­bly asso­ci­at­ed in the West with psy­che­delia, and Indi­an clas­si­cal forms and instru­ments have entered the pop music ver­nac­u­lar to stay. But none of that’s to say the band set out to accom­plish these goals in their first dal­liance with East­ern sounds.

That intro­duc­tion came in the most unse­ri­ous of ways dur­ing the mak­ing of 1965’s slap­stick Help!: a chase scene in a Lon­don Indi­an restau­rant. The Bea­t­les would come to regret mak­ing the movie alto­geth­er, and nev­er quite under­stood it while they were mak­ing it. (“It was wrong for us,” Paul McCart­ney lat­er reflect­ed. “We were guest stars in our own movie.”)

Its sto­ry fea­tured a sin­is­ter, stereo­typ­i­cal “East­ern sect,” as Lennon put it, and the restau­rant scene, he said, was “the first time that we were aware of any­thing Indi­an.”

Lennon lat­er called the movie “bull­shit” but reflect­ed on its musi­cal impor­tance: “All of the Indi­an involve­ment,” he said in a 1972 inter­view, “came out of the film Help!” As George Har­ri­son recalled, the restau­rant scene was life-chang­ing:

I remem­ber pick­ing up the sitar and try­ing to hold it and think­ing, ‘This is a fun­ny sound.’ It was an inci­den­tal thing, but some­where down the line I began to hear Ravi Shankar’s name. The third time I heard it, I thought, ‘This is an odd coin­ci­dence.’ And then I talked with David Cros­by of The Byrds and he men­tioned the name. I went and bought a Ravi record; I put it on and it hit a cer­tain spot in me that I can’t explain, but it seemed very famil­iar to me. The only way I could describe it was: my intel­lect didn’t know what was going on and yet this oth­er part of me iden­ti­fied with it. It just called on me … a few months elapsed and then I met this guy from the Asian Music Cir­cle organ­i­sa­tion who said, ‘Oh, Ravi Shankar’s gonna come to my house for din­ner. Do you want to come too?’

Har­ri­son fol­lowed up the vis­it with sev­er­al weeks of study under Shankar (see them play­ing togeth­er in Rishikesh, India, below) and the Asian Music Cir­cle in Lon­don. He began apply­ing what he learned from Shankar to Bea­t­les songs. “With­in You With­out You,” from Sgt. Pep­per’s, for exam­ple, was based on a Shankar com­po­si­tion.

The first offi­cial Bea­t­les release to fea­ture Indi­an instru­men­ta­tion involved none of the band’s mem­bers. It was, rather, a med­ley of “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “I Should Have Known Bet­ter,” played on sitar, tablas, flute, and fin­ger cym­bals for the restau­rant scene and released on the North Amer­i­can record­ing of Help! In that same year, how­ev­er, the band used Indi­an sounds them­selves for the first time on Rub­ber Soul when the sitar appeared on the record­ing of “Nor­we­gian Wood.” The track “need­ed some­thing,” Har­ri­son said. “We would usu­al­ly start look­ing through the cup­board to see if we could come up with some­thing, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up — it was just lying around; I hadn’t real­ly fig­ured out what to do with it. It was quite spon­ta­neous: I found the notes that played the lick. It fit­ted and it worked.” The song has been her­ald­ed as the first appear­ance of “raga rock.” Not long after­ward, Har­ri­son com­posed “Love You To” for Revolver in 1966, a song that not only incor­po­rat­ed the hyp­not­ic drone of the sitar but also inte­grat­ed clas­si­cal Indi­an musi­cal the­o­ry into its com­po­si­tion.

In the video at the top, pianist and teacher David Ben­nett demon­strates how the Bea­t­les did not sim­ply pick up the sitar as a nov­el­ty instru­ment; they found ways to com­bine West­ern rock idioms with a tra­di­tion­al East­ern musi­cal vocab­u­lary. “Love You To” makes “exten­sive use of Indi­an instru­men­ta­tion like sitar, table and tam­bu­ra,” says Ben­nett, “but the song’s treat­ment of har­mo­ny, melody, and struc­ture was also heav­i­ly influ­enced by the Indi­an style rather than being based on a chord pro­gres­sion like most West­ern pop music.” We learn how the song uses a drone note — a root note of C — through­out, “typ­i­cal of Indi­an clas­si­cal music,” and we learn the def­i­n­i­tion of terms like “raga” and “alap”: a short intro­duc­to­ry sec­tion — such as that which opens “Love You To” — “usu­al­ly in free time, where the key cen­ter and raga are estab­lished.”

How seri­ous­ly did the Bea­t­les take Indi­an clas­si­cal music? That depends on which Bea­t­le you mean. In Har­rison’s hands, at least, an explo­ration of the musi­cal tra­di­tions of the sub­con­ti­nent pro­duced a unique body of psy­che­del­ic rock wide­ly imi­tat­ed but nev­er par­al­leled — one that did not use exot­ic instru­men­ta­tion sim­ply as orna­ment but rather as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn and change and adapt to new forms. Find out in Ben­net­t’s video how each of the Bea­t­les’ “raga rock” songs from the mid-six­ties incor­po­rat­ed Indi­an clas­si­cal music in var­i­ous ways, and lis­ten to a playlist of those songs here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

How George Mar­tin Defined the Sound of the Bea­t­les: From String Quar­tets to Back­wards Gui­tar Solos

Hear Bri­an Eno Sing The Bea­t­les’ “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” as Part of The Best Live Album of the Glam/Prog Era (1976)

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

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An AI Computer Watched Hitchcock’s Vertigo 20 Times & Then Made Its Own Disturbing Movie

in Film, Technology | December 21st, 2021

If you could watch only one movie, Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go would hard­ly be the worst choice. Its con­tain­ment and expres­sion of such a range of cin­e­ma’s pos­si­bil­i­ties sure­ly did its part to bring it to the top spot on Sight & Sound’s most recent crit­ics’ poll of the great­est films of all time. But what if Ver­ti­go was all you knew of the entire world? Such is the case with the arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem used by artist Chris Peters to cre­ate “Ver­ti­go A.I.,” the short film above. As the sys­tem repeat­ed­ly “watched” Ver­ti­go over a two-day peri­od, says Peters’ offi­cial site, the artist “record­ed the machine’s neur­al net­work form­ing in real time — the ‘movie expe­ri­ence’ — made man­i­fest.”

This expe­ri­ence is a five-minute film, “not footage in the tra­di­tion­al sense of pho­tographed scenes, but footage of the inter­nal expe­ri­ence of a new intel­li­gence learn­ing about our world for the first time.” As for what we hear, “a sep­a­rate A.I. was used to write a nar­ra­tion for the record­ings. Giv­en a few lines of dia­logue from Ver­ti­go, the machine gen­er­at­ed sen­tences that went off on their own wild tan­gents.”

After about thir­ty sec­onds, any cinephile will rec­og­nize the visu­al source mate­r­i­al. As for the “sto­ry” told over the images, one can only imag­ine what process­es the cho­sen pieces of Ver­ti­go’s screen­play went through in the mind of the machine. “In the dream, I was in a room with a fig­ure,” begins the nar­ra­tor. “He was tall and cov­ered in white.”

Dreams make for noto­ri­ous­ly dull sub­ject mat­ter, but then, the endur­ing appeal of cin­e­ma has long been explained through its abil­i­ty to trans­port us into a state not at all dis­sim­i­lar from dream­ing. Ver­ti­go in par­tic­u­lar, as Sight & Sound edi­tor Nick James puts it, is “a dream-like film about peo­ple who are not sure who they are but who are busy recon­struct­ing them­selves and each oth­er to fit a kind of cin­e­ma ide­al of the ide­al soul-mate.” 27 spots below it on the mag­a­zine’s crit­ics’ poll comes Mul­hol­land Dri­ve by David Lynch, a film sim­i­lar­ly praised for its com­pelling but elu­sive sto­ry and its images seem­ing­ly pulled straight from the uncon­scious. Suit­ably, “Ver­ti­go A.I.” has some­thing more than a lit­tle Lynchi­an about it, mak­ing one won­der how the A.I. would han­dle Lynch’s fil­mog­ra­phy — and how we would han­dle the result.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Intro­duces Clas­sic Movies: From Cit­i­zen Kane and Ver­ti­go to Lawrence of Ara­bia and Gone with the Wind

Gaze at Glob­al Movie Posters for Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go: U.S., Japan, Italy, Poland & Beyond

Aban­doned Alter­nate Titles for Two Great Films: Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go

Watch “Sun­spring,” the Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Star­ring Thomas Mid­dled­itch (Sil­i­con Val­ley)

Watch Bri­an Eno’s Exper­i­men­tal Film “The Ship,” Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Eating Kentucky Fried Chicken Became a Christmas Tradition in Japan

in Business, Food & Drink | December 20th, 2021

This time of year, the inter­net thrills to the fact that the Japan­ese eat Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en for Christ­mas. Those Japan­ese cus­tomers who want a pre­mi­um KFC din­ner with all the trim­mings ready by Christ­mas Eve should reserve it well in advance, much as they do with the elab­o­rate­ly dec­o­rat­ed kurisuma­su kee­ki that fol­lows it as dessert. Less well-under­stood are the ori­gins of this curi­ous mod­ern cus­tom. The Japan­ese them­selves, even those who reli­gious­ly tuck into a Colonel Sanders-brand­ed Christ­mas din­ner each year, are sub­ject to cer­tain mis­con­cep­tions. At least in my expe­ri­ence, every Japan­ese per­son has expressed sur­prise when told that KFC at Christ­mas­time is not an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion.

KFC’s mar­ket­ing in Japan has long exploit­ed an asso­ci­a­tion with Amer­i­can her­itage, implic­it­ly or indeed explic­it­ly.” Colonel Sanders is dis­cov­ered as a boy of sev­en bak­ing rye bread in the roomy kitchen of his ‘old Ken­tucky home,’ ” writes Japa­nol­o­gist John Nathan in his mem­oir Liv­ing Care­less­ly in Tokyo and Else­where, describ­ing a KFC tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial of the 1980s.

“ ‘A life­time lat­er,’ the nar­ra­tor intoned, ‘this same tra­di­tion of excel­lence was trans­ferred by the Colonel to his fried chick­en.’ The pre­pos­ter­ous sell­ing point was KFC as tra­di­tion­al, aris­to­crat­ic food from the Amer­i­can South. I couldn’t imag­ine a more amus­ing exam­ple of an Amer­i­can adver­tis­er play­ing to Japan’s nation­al obses­sion with Amer­i­can val­ues and man­ners.”

This com­mer­cial appears in The Colonel Comes to Japan, a 1981 half-hour doc­u­men­tary Nathan filmed for the WGBH busi­ness series Enter­prise. So does Loy West­on, the Amer­i­can exec­u­tive in charge of KFC’s Japan­ese oper­a­tions, who insists that the aris­toc­ra­cy angle offers no “con­sumer ben­e­fit.” But when informed by a Japan­ese exec­u­tive that the spot test­ed bet­ter than any they’d pro­duced before, he responds sim­ply: “I give up. This is Japan.” Four decades lat­er, West­ern­ers who want to suc­ceed doing busi­ness in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun must still share that atti­tude — espe­cial­ly when pre­sent­ed with strate­gies they lack the cul­tur­al ground­ing to com­pre­hend.

KFC’s pres­ence in Japan goes back to 1970, when its first store opened for the Osa­ka World Expo. Its man­ag­er Takeshi Okawara was the one to think of pro­mot­ing the chain’s “par­ty bar­rels” of chick­en as a fes­tive sub­sti­tute for an Amer­i­can-style turkey din­ner. The inspi­ra­tion, accord­ing to the Ched­dar Exam­ines video at the top of the post, was being asked by a local school to deliv­er chick­en to its Christ­mas par­ty dressed as San­ta Claus. (His will­ing­ness to do so no doubt played a part in his lat­er becom­ing Japan­ese KFC’s chief exec­u­tive.) With­in a few years “Ken­tucky Christ­mas” had become a house­hold phrase, and one still used in the more recent TV com­mer­cials com­piled just above.

In Japan, a coun­try where Chris­tians con­sti­tute just one or two per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, eat­ing KFC has become one of Christ­mas’ pri­ma­ry cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions. The Christ­mas song “Sutek­ina Hol­i­day” by Mariya Takeuchi — now world-famous as the singer of the revived-by-Youtube 1980s dance tune “Plas­tic Love” — is com­mon­ly known as “the Ken­tucky Christ­mas song.” With Christ­mas­time busi­ness account­ing for a star­tling ten per­cent of Japan­ese KFC’s sales in any giv­en year, mea­sures have been tak­en to ensure that the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic does­n’t put too much of a dent into it: the intro­duc­tion of some social dis­tanc­ing, for exam­ple, into its noto­ri­ous­ly long hol­i­day lines. Ken­tucky Christ­mas has proven a suc­cess year after year in Japan, but thus far it has­n’t been adopt­ed in oth­er Asian coun­tries. It cer­tain­ly has­n’t in Korea, where I live — but then again, we’ve got much bet­ter fried chick­en out here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hōshi: A Short Film on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

In Japan­ese Schools, Lunch Is As Much About Learn­ing As It’s About Eat­ing

The Restau­rant of Mis­tak­en Orders: A Tokyo Restau­rant Where All the Servers Are Peo­ple Liv­ing with Demen­tia

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whopper–While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Jean Renoir’s Great Anti-War Film Grand Illusion Became “Cinematographic Enemy Number One” to the Nazis

in Film, History | December 20th, 2021

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, Nazi pro­pa­gan­da min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels did not admit to spread­ing a “Big Lie.” As schol­ar of Ger­man pro­pa­gan­da Ran­dall Bytwerk says, “Goebbels always main­tained that pro­pa­gan­da had to be truth­ful. That doesn’t mean he didn’t lie, but it would be a pret­ty poor pro­pa­gan­dist who pub­licly pro­claimed that he was going to lie.” Still, Goebbels inces­sant­ly accused oth­ers of lying and spread­ing dis­hon­est pro­pa­gan­da, and he bru­tal­ly sup­pressed those truths he found incon­ve­nient. He was par­tic­u­lar­ly incensed at the 1937 release of a film by French direc­tor Jean Renoir (son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir) called La Grande Illu­sion — a film that ques­tioned sev­er­al fan­tasies the Nazis seemed des­per­ate to main­tain.

Among these were the idea that war was inevitable and desir­able, that a nat­ur­al aris­toc­ra­cy should rise above the com­mon horde — and that elites should have no sol­i­dar­i­ty or sym­pa­thy for Jews or oth­er minori­ties. These beliefs were cen­tral to fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy and to Goebbels’ pro­pa­gan­da project. Renoir’s Grand Illu­sion under­mined them all, despite the fact that it was set in World War I and based on an even ear­li­er British book, Nor­man Angell’s The Great Illu­sion, from 1909, which argued that war in Europe was eco­nom­i­cal­ly destruc­tive in con­trast to mutu­al co-oper­a­tion. Goebbels so feared Renoir’s anti-war film he called it “cin­e­mato­graph­ic ene­my num­ber one” and ordered every print turned over and burned and the orig­i­nal neg­a­tives destroyed.

Cin­e­ma Tyler explains in the video at the top how the effort to stamp out The Grand Illu­sion “had the full might of the Nazi pro­pa­gan­da machine on a mis­sion to destroy every copy.” They failed. As Roger Ebert notes, the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive, assumed destroyed in a 1942 Allied air raid, “had already been sin­gled out by a Ger­man film archivist named Frank Hensel, then a Nazi offi­cer in Paris, who had it shipped to Berlin.” In the 1960s, Renoir him­self “super­vised the assem­bly of a ‘restored’ print,” Then, thir­ty years lat­er, at the time of Ebert’s writ­ing in 1999, the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive resur­faced and a sparkling new print cir­cu­lat­ed, renew­ing praise for a movie about which Franklin Roo­sevelt pro­claimed, at the time of its release, “all the democ­ra­cies in the world must see this film.”

The film came out as Nazi Ger­many and the Sovi­et Union squared off aggres­sive­ly in mon­u­men­tal pavil­ions for the 1937 Inter­na­tion­al Expo­si­tion of Arts and Tech­nics in Mod­ern Life in Paris. Ger­many was three years away from invad­ing France, and while Renoir could not have known the future, the film uses its char­ac­ters “to illus­trate how the themes of the first war would trag­i­cal­ly wors­en in the sec­ond,” Ebert writes. It cen­ters on three cap­tured French offi­cers: “De Boield­ieu (Pierre Fres­nay), from an old aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly.… Marechal (Jean Gabin), a work­ing­man, a mem­ber of the emerg­ing pro­le­tari­at, and Rosen­thal (Mar­cel Dalio), a Jew­ish banker who has iron­i­cal­ly pur­chased the chateau that de Boield­ieu’s fam­i­ly can no longer afford.”

The French offi­cers’ jailor, wound­ed pilot von Rauf­fen­stein (played by great Ger­man silent direc­tor Erich von Stro­heim), believes him­self to have more in com­mon with de Boield­ieu than the lat­ter does with his coun­try­men, and in many respects, this proves so. Still, the French aris­to­crat uses his priv­i­lege, as we might say today, to help the oth­er pris­on­ers escape, at the cost of his life. When Marechal and Rosen­thal are giv­en shel­ter by a Ger­man farm wid­ow, “per­haps Renoir is whis­per­ing that the true class con­nec­tion across ene­my lines is between the work­ers, not the rulers,” writes Ebert. Per­haps it was also the nation­al sol­i­dar­i­ty among the pris­on­ers that unset­tled Goebbels — their per­sis­tent, “sin­gle obses­sion: to escape,” despite the com­forts of their cap­tiv­i­ty, as the film’s trail­er says dra­mat­i­cal­ly above. The war had not yet begun, and yet, writes A.O. Scott at The New York Times:

In France the late 1930s were the years of the Pop­u­lar Front, an attempt by the left to counter the rise of fas­cism and over­come its own ten­den­cies toward sec­tar­i­an­ism and ortho­doxy. The polit­i­cal face of the front was Léon Blum, a mod­er­ate Jew­ish Social­ist whose two trun­cat­ed, frus­trat­ing terms as prime min­is­ter coin­cid­ed with the pro­duc­tion and release of Renoir’s film.… The action takes place dur­ing World War I (in which Renoir had served as a pilot), when the Drey­fus Affair was still a recent mem­o­ry, but it has an eye on con­tem­po­rary anti-Semi­tism and labor mil­i­tan­cy as well as a sub­tle, anx­ious pre­mo­ni­tion of glob­al con­flicts to come.

Grand Illu­sion not only inspired two of the most famous moments of film his­to­ry — the tun­nel in The Great Escape and the singing of “La Mar­seil­laise” in Casablan­ca — but it remains in its own right one of the great­est films ever made. (Orson Welles claimed it as one of only two films he would take with him “on the ark.”) It con­tin­ues in its “gen­tly iron­ic” way, to “ques­tion all kinds of ‘illu­sions,’ ” writes David M. Lubin, “that, in [Renoir’s] view sus­tain mod­ern war­fare: that one side is moral­ly supe­ri­or to the oth­er… that class divi­sions are nat­ur­al, that men must be con­ven­tion­al­ly man­ly, that Jews are infe­ri­or to Gen­tiles, and so forth.” Rather than sim­ply denounce Grand Illu­sion as a big, pro­pa­gan­dis­tic lie, Goebbels tried to have it snuffed out of exis­tence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fas­cists Are Made

Redis­cov­ered: The First Amer­i­can Anti-Nazi Film, Banned by U.S. Cen­sors and For­got­ten for 80 Years

Watch a Grip­ping 10-Minute Ani­ma­tion About the Hunt for Nazi War Crim­i­nal Adolf Eich­mann

Watch Georges Méliès’ The Drey­fus Affair, the Con­tro­ver­sial Film Cen­sored by the French Gov­ern­ment for 50 Years (1899)

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

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An Oscar-Winning Animation of Charles Dickens’ Classic Tale, A Christmas Carol (1971)

in Animation, K-12, Literature | December 20th, 2021

I HAVE endeav­oured in this Ghost­ly lit­tle book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my read­ers out of humour with them­selves, with each oth­er, with the sea­son, or with me. May it haunt their hous­es pleas­ant­ly, and no one wish to lay it. — Charles Dick­ens

Some twen­ty years before Tim Bur­ton’s The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, anoth­er ani­mat­ed enter­tain­ment inject­ed “the most won­der­ful time of the year” with a potent dose of hor­ror.

Sure­ly I’m not the only child of the 70s to have been equal parts mes­mer­ized and strick­en by direc­tor Richard Williams’ faith­ful, if high­ly con­densed, inter­pre­ta­tion of Charles Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol.

The 25-minute short fea­tures a host of hair-rais­ing images drawn direct­ly from Dick­ens’ text, from a spec­tral hearse in Scrooge’s hall­way and the Ghost of Marley’s gap­ing maw, to a night sky pop­u­lat­ed with mis­er­able, howl­ing phan­toms and the mon­strous chil­dren lurk­ing beneath the Ghost of Christ­mas Present’s skirts:

Yel­low, mea­gre, ragged, scowl­ing, wolfish; but pros­trate, too, in their humil­i­ty. Where grace­ful youth should have filled their fea­tures out, and touched them with its fresh­est tints, a stale and shriv­elled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twist­ed them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, dev­ils lurked, and glared out men­ac­ing. No change, no degra­da­tion, no per­ver­sion of human­i­ty, in any grade, through all the mys­ter­ies of won­der­ful cre­ation, has mon­sters half so hor­ri­ble and dread… This boy is Igno­rance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that writ­ten which is Doom, unless the writ­ing be erased. 

Pro­duc­er Chuck Jones, whose ear­li­er ani­mat­ed hol­i­day spe­cial, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christ­mas!, is in keep­ing with his clas­sic work on Bugs Bun­ny and oth­er Warn­er Bros. faves, insist­ed that this car­toon should mir­ror the look of the John Leech steel engrav­ings illus­trat­ing Dick­ens’ 1843 orig­i­nal.

D.T. Neth­ery, a for­mer Dis­ney ani­ma­tion artist and fan of this Christ­mas Car­ol explains that the desired Vic­to­ri­an look was achieved with a labor-inten­sive process that involved draw­ing direct­ly on cels with Mars Omnichrom grease pen­cil, then paint­ing the backs and pho­tograph­ing them against detailed water­col­ored back­grounds.

As direc­tor Williams recalls below, he and a team includ­ing mas­ter ani­ma­tors Ken Har­ris and Abe Lev­i­tow were rac­ing against an impos­si­bly tight dead­line that left them pulling 14-hour days and 7‑day work weeks. Report­ed­ly, the final ver­sion was com­plet­ed with just an hour to spare. (“We slept under our desks for this thing.”)

As Michael Lyons observes in Ani­ma­tion Scoop, the exhaust­ed ani­ma­tors went above and beyond with Jones’ request for a pan over London’s rooftops, “mak­ing the entire twen­ty-five min­utes of the short film take on the appear­ance of art work that has come to life”:

…there are scenes that seem to involve cam­era pans, or sequences in which the cam­era seem­ing­ly cir­cles around the char­ac­ters. Much of this involved not just ani­mat­ing the char­ac­ters, but the back­grounds as well and in dif­fer­ent sizes as they move toward and away from the frame. The hand-craft­ed qual­i­ty, cou­pled with a three-dimen­sion­al feel in these moments, is down­right tac­tile.

Revered British char­ac­ter actors Alis­tair Sim (Scrooge) and Michael Hordern (Marley’s Ghost) lent some extra class, repris­ing their roles from the ever­green, black-and-white 1951 adap­ta­tion.

The short­’s tele­vi­sion pre­miere caused such a sen­sa­tion that it was giv­en a sub­se­quent the­atri­cal release, putting it in the run­ning for an Oscar for Best Ani­mat­ed Short Sub­ject. (It won, beat­ing out Tup-Tup from Croa­t­ia and the NSFW-ish Kama Sutra Rides Again which Stan­ley Kubrick had hand­picked to play before A Clock­work Orange in the UK.)

With the­aters in Dal­las, Los Ange­les, Port­land, Prov­i­dence, Tal­la­has­see and Van­cou­ver can­celling planned live pro­duc­tions of A Christ­mas Car­ol out of con­cern for the pub­lic health dur­ing this lat­est wave of the pan­dem­ic, we’re hap­py to get our Dick­en­sian fix, snug­gled up on the couch with this ani­mat­ed 50-year-old arti­fact of our child­hood.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Neil Gaiman Read A Christ­mas Car­ol Just as Dick­ens Read It

Charles Dick­ens’ Hand-Edit­ed Copy of His Clas­sic Hol­i­day Tale, A Christ­mas Car­ol

A Christ­mas Car­ol, A Vin­tage Radio Broad­cast by Orson Welles (1939)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hear Brian Eno Sing The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” as Part of The Best Live Album of the Glam/Prog Era (1976)

in Music | December 18th, 2021

After leav­ing Roxy Music and its tour-record-tour-record cycle, Bri­an Eno became a stu­dio record­ing artist, cre­at­ing mul­ti­lay­ered mas­ter­works of pro­gres­sive pop, pro­to-punk, and ambi­ent envi­ron­ments, often on the same album. As a fan, how­ev­er, you had zero chance of see­ing Eno play any of this live. That is, except for one brief moment in 1976 that just hap­pens to be one of the best live albums of the glam/prog era: 801 Live. It’s pure light­ning in a bot­tle, and for a taster may we direct your ears to the open­ing num­ber, a groov­ing, funky, spacey cov­er of “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” (writ­ten as T.N.K. on the track list).

Here’s the thing, this wasn’t even Eno’s band. This was instead the band of fel­low Roxy Music mem­ber Phil Man­zan­era, who formed an ad-hoc super­group of friends to play three gigs in Eng­land. With Roxy Music tem­porar­i­ly on hia­tus, Man­zan­era brought in Bill Mac­Cormick, from his oth­er side group Qui­et Sun, on bass; Fran­cis Monkman from Curved Air on key­boards; pop­u­lar ses­sion drum­mer Simon Philips; and gui­tarist Lloyd Wat­son, who Eno fans will know from his whacked-out slide on “Some of them Are Old” from his first album. Eno pro­vides the major­i­ty of every­thing else, list­ed in the cred­its as “key­boards, syn­the­siz­ers, gui­tar, vocals and tapes.”

It’s the vocals that are key, though, and his warm tones are per­fect for this re-arranged Bea­t­les clas­sic. They also ele­vate the album through­out from “decent live gig” to essen­tial lis­ten­ing. His ver­sion of Qui­et Sun’s angu­lar “Rong­wrong” is smooth and wist­ful, turn­ing a jokey tune into…well, into an Eno song.

The band only rehearsed three weeks before the three-city tour start­ed, begin­ning in Nor­folk, then play­ing the Read­ing Fes­ti­val, and final­ly end­ing in Lon­don at Queen Eliz­a­beth Hall, where the show was record­ed. For a set-list con­sist­ing of Eno songs, Man­zan­era songs, space jams, two 1960s cov­ers (the oth­er being the Kinks’ “You Real­ly Got Me”) and played by a band that hadn’t real­ly met a month before, it’s a rock-sol­id album. It also sounds fan­tas­tic, almost like a “live in the stu­dio” record­ing save for the applause in-between num­bers.

Eno has rarely played live since then, and when he has it’s been his ambi­ent music, most recent­ly at a one-night-only con­cert with his broth­er at the Acrop­o­lis in Greece. But to hear the vel­vety glam-god rock­ing out? It’s just 801 Live, my friends, and that’s all you real­ly need.

via @MrCompletely

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno Launch­es His Own Radio Sta­tion with Hun­dreds of Unre­leased Tracks: Hear Two Pro­grams

Hear Bri­an Eno’s Rarely-Heard Cov­er of the John­ny Cash Clas­sic, “Ring of Fire”

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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60 Film Noir Movies Online

in Film | December 18th, 2021

noir film pic

Dur­ing the 1940s and 50s, Hol­ly­wood entered a “noir” peri­od, pro­duc­ing riv­et­ing films based on hard-boiled fic­tion. These films were set in dark loca­tions and shot in a black & white aes­thet­ic that fit like a glove. Hard­ened men wore fedo­ras and for­ev­er smoked cig­a­rettes. Women played the femme fatale role bril­liant­ly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these ele­ments fig­ured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most Amer­i­can film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir.

If you head over to this list of Noir Films, you can find 60 films from the noir genre, includ­ing some clas­sics by John Hus­ton, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang and Ida Lupino. The list also fea­tures some cin­e­mat­ic leg­ends like Humphrey Bog­a­rt, Peter Lorre, Bar­bara Stan­wyck, Edward G. Robin­son, and even Frank Sina­tra. Hope the col­lec­tion helps you get through the days ahead.

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 

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essen­tial Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Noir Films

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

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