What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

At least since The Can­ter­bury Tales, the set­ting of the medieval tav­ern has held out the promise of adven­ture. For their cus­tomer base dur­ing the actu­al Mid­dle Ages, how­ev­er, they had more util­i­tar­i­an virtues. “If you ever find your­self in the late medieval peri­od, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d bet­ter find your­self an inn, tav­ern, or ale­house,” says Tast­ing His­to­ry host Max Miller in the video above. The dif­fer­ences between them had to do with qual­i­ty: the tav­erns were nicer than the ale­hous­es, and the inns were nicer than the tav­erns, hav­ing begun as full-ser­vice estab­lish­ments where cus­tomers could stay the night.

As for what inn‑, tavern‑, or ale­house-goers would actu­al­ly con­sume, Miller men­tions that the local avail­abil­i­ty of ingre­di­ents would always be a fac­tor. “You might just get a veg­etable potage; in some places it would just be beans and cab­bage.”

Else­where, though, it could be “a fish stew, or some­thing with real­ly qual­i­ty meat in it.” For the recipe of the episode — this being a cook­ing show, after all — Miller choos­es a com­mon medieval meat stew called buke­nade or bok­nade. The actu­al instruc­tions he reads con­tain words reveal­ing of their time peri­od: the Bib­li­cal sound­ing smyte for cut, for instance, or eyroun, the Mid­dle Eng­lish term that ulti­mate­ly lost favor to eggs.

The cus­tomers of tav­erns would orig­i­nal­ly have drunk wine, which in Eng­land was import­ed from France at some expense. As they grew more pop­u­lar, these busi­ness­es diver­si­fied their menus, offer­ing “cider from apples and per­ry from pears,” as well as the pre­mi­um option of mead made with hon­ey. Ale­hous­es, as their name would sug­gest, began as pri­vate homes whose wives sold ale, at least the excess that the fam­i­ly itself could­n’t drink. How­ev­er infor­mal they sound, they were still sub­ject to the same reg­u­la­tions as oth­er drink­ing spots, and alewives found to be sell­ing an infe­ri­or prod­uct were sub­ject to the same kind of pub­lic humil­i­a­tions inflict­ed upon any medieval mis­cre­ant — the likes of whom we might rec­og­nize from any num­ber of the high-fan­ta­sy tales we read today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

The Entire Man­u­script Col­lec­tion of Geof­frey Chaucer Gets Dig­i­tized: A New Archive Fea­tures 25,000 Images of The Can­ter­bury Tales & Oth­er Illus­trat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Watch 10 Great German Expressionist Films: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & More

In 1913, Ger­many, flush with a new nation’s patri­ot­ic zeal, looked like it might become the dom­i­nant nation of Europe and a real rival to that glob­al super­pow­er Great Britain. Then it hit the buz­z­saw of World War I. After the Ger­man gov­ern­ment col­lapsed in 1918 from the eco­nom­ic and emo­tion­al toll of a half-decade of sense­less car­nage, the Allies forced it to accept dra­con­ian terms for sur­ren­der. The entire Ger­man cul­ture was sent reel­ing, search­ing for answers to what hap­pened and why.

Ger­man Expres­sion­ism came about to artic­u­late these lac­er­at­ing ques­tions roil­ing in the nation’s col­lec­tive uncon­scious. The first such film was The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari (1920), about a malev­o­lent trav­el­ing magi­cian who has his ser­vant do his mur­der­ous bid­ding in the dark of the night. The sto­ry­line is all about the Freudi­an ter­ror of hid­den sub­con­scious dri­ves, but what real­ly makes the movie mem­o­rable is its com­plete­ly unhinged look. Marked by styl­ized act­ing, deep shad­ows paint­ed onto the walls, and sets filled with twist­ed archi­tec­tur­al impos­si­bil­i­ties — there might not be a sin­gle right angle in the film – Cali­gari’s look per­fect­ly mesh­es with the nar­ra­tor’s dement­ed state of mind.

Sub­se­quent Ger­man Expres­sion­ist movies retreat­ed from the extreme aes­thet­ics of Cali­gari but were still filled with a mood of vio­lence, frus­tra­tion and unease. F. W. Mur­nau’s bril­liant­ly depress­ing The Last Laugh (1924) is about a proud door­man at a high-end hotel who is uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly stripped of his posi­tion and demot­ed to a low­ly bath­room atten­dant. When he hands over his uni­form, his pos­ture col­laps­es as if the jack­et were his exoskele­ton. You don’t need to be a semi­oti­cian to fig­ure out that the doorman’s loss of sta­tus par­al­lels Germany’s. Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a land­mark of ear­ly sound film, is the first ser­i­al killer movie ever made. But what starts out as a police pro­ce­dur­al turns into some­thing even more unset­tling when a gang of dis­tinct­ly Nazi-like crim­i­nals decide to mete out some jus­tice of their own.

Ger­man Expres­sion­ism end­ed in 1933 when the Nazis came to pow­er. They weren’t inter­est­ed in ask­ing uncom­fort­able ques­tions and viewed such dark tales of cin­e­mat­ic angst as unpa­tri­ot­ic. Instead, they pre­ferred bright, cheer­ful tales of Aryan youths climb­ing moun­tains. By that time, the movement’s most tal­ent­ed direc­tors — Fritz Lang and F.W. Mur­nau — had fled to Amer­i­ca. And it was in Amer­i­ca where Ger­man Expres­sion­ism found its biggest impact. Its stark light­ing, grotesque shad­ows and bleak world­view would go on to pro­found­ly influ­ence film noir in the late 1940s after anoth­er hor­rif­ic, dis­il­lu­sion­ing war. See our col­lec­tion of Free Noir Films here.

You can watch 10 Ger­man Expres­sion­ist movies – includ­ing Cali­gari, Last Laugh and M — for free below.

  • Nos­fer­atu â€” Free â€” Ger­man Expres­sion­ist hor­ror film direct­ed by F. W. Mur­nau. An unau­tho­rized adap­ta­tion of Bram Stok­er’s Drac­u­la. (1922)
  • The Stu­dent of Prague â€” Free â€” A clas­sic of Ger­man expres­sion­ist film. Ger­man writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and Dan­ish direc­tor Stel­lan Rye bring to life a 19th-cen­tu­ry hor­ror sto­ry. Some call it the first indie film. (1913)
  • Nerves â€” Free â€” Direct­ed by Robert Rein­ert, Nerves tells of “the polit­i­cal dis­putes of an ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive fac­to­ry own­er Herr Roloff and Teacher John, who feels a com­pul­sive but secret love for Rolof­f’s sis­ter, a left-wing rad­i­cal.” (1919)
  • The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari â€” Free â€” This silent film direct­ed by Robert Wiene is con­sid­ered one of the most influ­en­tial Ger­man Expres­sion­ist films and per­haps one of the great­est hor­ror movies of all time. (1920)
  • Metrop­o­lis â€” Free — Fritz Lang’s fable of good and evil fight­ing it out in a futur­is­tic urban dystopia. An impor­tant clas­sic. (1927)
  • The Golem: How He Came Into the World â€” Free â€” A fol­low-up to Paul Wegen­er’s ear­li­er film, “The Golem,” about a mon­strous crea­ture brought to life by a learned rab­bi to pro­tect the Jews from per­se­cu­tion in medieval Prague. Based on the clas­sic folk tale, and co-direct­ed by Carl Boese. (1920)
  • The Golem: How He Came Into the World â€” Free â€” The same film as the one list­ed imme­di­ate­ly above, but this one has a score cre­at­ed by Pix­ies front­man Black Fran­cis. (2008)
  • The Last Laugh Free â€” F.W. Mur­nau’s clas­sic cham­ber dra­ma about a hotel door­man who falls on hard times. A mas­ter­piece of the silent era, the sto­ry is told almost entire­ly in pic­tures. (1924)
  • Faust — Free - Ger­man expres­sion­ist film­mak­er F.W. Mur­nau directs a film ver­sion of Goethe’s clas­sic tale. This was Mur­nau’s last Ger­man movie. (1926)
  • Sun­rise: A Song of Two Humans â€” Free â€” Made by the Ger­man expres­sion­ist direc­tor F.W. Mur­nau. Vot­ed in 2012, the 5th great­est film of all time. (1927)
  • M â€” Free â€” Clas­sic film direct­ed by Fritz Lang, with Peter Lorre. About the search for a child mur­der­er in Berlin. (1931)

For more clas­sic films, peruse our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2014.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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:

What Is Ger­man Expres­sion­ism? A Crash Course on the Cin­e­mat­ic Tra­di­tion That Gave Us Metrop­o­lis, Nos­fer­atu & More

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Cam­era Shot That Defined Clas­sic Films by Welles, Hitch­cock, Taran­ti­no & More

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

When the Nazis Declared War on Expres­sion­ist Art (1937)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Discover the Art of Henrique Alvim Corrêa

War1

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has ter­ri­fied and fas­ci­nat­ed read­ers and writ­ers for decades since its 1898 pub­li­ca­tion and has inspired numer­ous adap­ta­tions. The most noto­ri­ous use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my lit­tle name­sake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Hal­loween radio play caused pub­lic alarm (though not actu­al­ly a nation­al pan­ic). After the occur­rence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extreme­ly sur­prised to learn that a sto­ry, which has become famil­iar to chil­dren through the medi­um of com­ic strips and many suc­ceed­ing and adven­ture sto­ries, should have had such an imme­di­ate and pro­found effect upon radio lis­ten­ers.”

War5

Sure­ly Welles knew that is pre­cise­ly why the broad­cast had the effect it did, espe­cial­ly in such an anx­ious pre-war cli­mate. The 1898 nov­el also star­tled its first read­ers with its verisimil­i­tude, play­ing on a late Vic­to­ri­an sense of apoc­a­lyp­tic doom as the turn-of-the cen­tu­ry approached.

But what con­tem­po­rary cir­cum­stances eight years lat­er, we might won­der, fueled the imag­i­na­tion of Hen­rique Alvim Cor­rĂŞa, whose 1906 illus­tra­tions of the nov­el you can see here? Wells him­self approved of these incred­i­ble draw­ings, prais­ing them before their pub­li­ca­tion and say­ing, â€śAlvim Cor­rĂŞa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”

War3

Indeed they cap­ture the nov­el­’s uncan­ny dread. Mar­t­ian tripods loom, ghast­ly and car­toon­ish, above blast­ed real­ist land­scapes and scenes of pan­ic. In one illus­tra­tion, a grotesque, ten­ta­cled Mar­t­ian rav­ish­es a nude woman. In a sur­re­al­ist draw­ing of an aban­doned Lon­don above, eyes pro­trude from the build­ings, and a skele­tal head appears above them. The alien tech­nol­o­gy often appears clum­sy and unso­phis­ti­cat­ed, which con­tributes to the gen­er­al­ly ter­ri­fy­ing absur­di­ty that emanates from these fine­ly ren­dered plates.

War2

Alvim Cor­rĂŞa was a Brazil­ian artist liv­ing in Brus­sels and strug­gling for recog­ni­tion in the Euro­pean art world. His break seemed to come when the War of the Worlds illus­tra­tions were print­ed in a large-for­mat, lim­it­ed French edi­tion of the book, with each of the 500 copies signed by the artist him­self.

wells illustrated

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Cor­rĂŞa’s tuber­cu­lo­sis killed him four years lat­er. His War of the Worlds draw­ings did not bring him fame in his life­time or after, but his work has been cher­ished since by a devot­ed cult fol­low­ing. The orig­i­nal prints you see here remained with the artist’s fam­i­ly until a sale of 31 of them in 1990. You can see many more, as well as scans from the book and a poster announc­ing the pub­li­ca­tion, at The Pub­lic Domain Review and the Mon­ster Brains site.

War4

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Very First Illus­tra­tions of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1897)

Hear Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Radio Broad­cast from 1938: The Orig­i­nal Tale of Mys­te­ri­ous Objects Fly­ing Over New Jer­sey

Edward Gorey Illus­trates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inim­itable Goth­ic Style (1960)

Orson Welles Meets H.G. Wells in 1940: The Leg­ends Dis­cuss War of the Worlds, Cit­i­zen Kane, and WWII

H.G. Wells Inter­views Joseph Stal­in in 1934; Declares “I Am More to The Left Than You, Mr. Stal­in”

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

Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

Peo­ple under­stand evo­lu­tion in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways. We’ve all heard a vari­ety of folk expla­na­tions of that all-impor­tant phe­nom­e­non, from “sur­vival of the fittest” to “humans come from mon­keys,” that run the spec­trum from broad­ly cor­rect to bad­ly man­gled. One less often heard but more ele­gant way to put it is that all species, liv­ing or extinct, share a com­mon ances­tor. This is true of evo­lu­tion as Dar­win knew it, and it could well be true of oth­er forms of “evo­lu­tion” out­side the bio­log­i­cal realm as well. Take lan­guages, which we know full well have changed and split into dif­fer­ent vari­eties over time: do they, too, all share a sin­gle ances­tor?

In the Rob­Words video above, lan­guage Youtu­ber Rob Watts starts with his native Eng­lish and traces its roots back as far as pos­si­ble. He ascends up the fam­i­ly tree past Low West Ger­man, past Pro­to-Ger­man­ic — “a lan­guage that was the­o­ret­i­cal­ly spo­ken by a sin­gle group of peo­ple who would even­tu­al­ly go on to become the Swedes, the Ger­mans, the Dutch, the Eng­lish, and more” — back to an ances­tor of not just Eng­lish and the Ger­man­ic lan­guages, but almost all the Euro­pean lan­guages, as well as of Asian lan­guages like Hin­di, Pash­tu, Kur­dish, Far­si, and Ben­gali. Its name? Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean.

Watts quotes the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry philol­o­gist Sir William Jones, who wrote that the ancient Asian lan­guage of San­skrit has a struc­ture “more per­fect than the Greek, more copi­ous than the Latin, and more exquis­ite­ly refined than either, yet bear­ing to both of them a stronger affin­i­ty, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of gram­mar, than could pos­si­bly have been pro­duced by acci­dent.” As with such con­spic­u­ous­ly shared traits observed in dis­parate species of plant or ani­mal, no expert “could exam­ine all three with­out believ­ing them to have sprung from some com­mon source, which, per­haps, no longer exists.”

The evi­dence is every­where, if you pay atten­tion to the sort of unex­pect­ed cog­nates and very-near­ly-cog­nates Watts points out span­ning geo­graph­i­cal­ly and tem­po­ral­ly var­i­ous lan­guages. Take the Eng­lish hun­dred, the Latin cen­tum, the Ancient Greek heka­ton, the Russ­ian sto, and the San­skrit Shatam; or the more deeply buried resem­blances of Eng­lish heart, the Latin cordis, the Russ­ian serd­ce, and the san­skrit hrd. In some cas­es, lin­guists have actu­al­ly used these com­mon­al­i­ties to reverse-engi­neer Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean words, though always with the caveat that the whole thing “is a recon­struct­ed lan­guage; it’s our best guess of what a com­mon ances­tral lan­guage could have been like.” Was there a still old­er lan­guage from which the non-Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean-descend­ed lan­guages also descend­ed? That’s a ques­tion to push the lin­guis­tic imag­i­na­tion to its very lim­its.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Was There a First Human Lan­guage?: The­o­ries from the Enlight­en­ment Through Noam Chom­sky

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

The Alpha­bet Explained: The Ori­gin of Every Let­ter

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History

Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talk­ing up not just sci­ence itself, but also its prac­ti­tion­ers. If asked to name the great­est sci­en­tist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find him­self unable to choose. But that’s hard­ly Tyson’s style, as evi­denced by the clip above from his 92nd Street Y con­ver­sa­tion with Fareed Zakaria. “Who do you think is the most extra­or­di­nary sci­en­tif­ic mind that human­i­ty has pro­duced?” Zakaria asks. “There’s no con­test,” Tyson imme­di­ate­ly responds. “Isaac New­ton.”

Those famil­iar with Tyson will know he would be pre­pared for the fol­low-up. By way of expla­na­tion, he nar­rates cer­tain events of New­ton’s life: “He, work­ing alone, dis­cov­ers the laws of motion. Then he dis­cov­ers the law of grav­i­ty.” Faced with the ques­tion of why plan­ets orbit in ellipses rather than per­fect cir­cles, he first invents inte­gral and dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus in order to deter­mine the answer. Then he dis­cov­ers the laws of optics. “Then he turns 26.” At this point in the sto­ry, young lis­ten­ers who aspire to sci­en­tif­ic careers of their own will be ner­vous­ly recal­cu­lat­ing their own intel­lec­tu­al and pro­fes­sion­al tra­jec­to­ries.

They must remem­ber that New­ton was a man of his place and time, specif­i­cal­ly the Eng­land of the late sev­en­teenth and ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­turies. And even there, he was an out­lier the likes of which his­to­ry has hard­ly known, whose eccen­tric ten­den­cies also inspired him to come up with pow­dered toad-vom­it lozenges and pre­dict the date of the apoc­a­lypse (not that he’s yet been proven wrong on that score). But in our time as in his, future (or cur­rent) sci­en­tists would do well to inter­nal­ize New­ton’s spir­it of inquiry, which got him pre­scient­ly won­der­ing whether, for instance, “the stars of the night sky are just like our sun, but just much, much far­ther away.”

“Great sci­en­tists are not marked by their answers, but by how great their ques­tions are.” To find such ques­tions, one needs not just curios­i­ty, but also humil­i­ty before the expanse of one’s own igno­rance. “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” New­ton once wrote, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy play­ing on the seashore, and divert­ing myself in now and then find­ing a smoother peb­ble or a pret­ti­er shell than ordi­nary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undis­cov­ered before me.” Near­ly three cen­turies after his death, that ocean remains for­bid­ding­ly but promis­ing­ly vast — at least to those who know how to look at it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Stag­ger­ing Genius of Isaac New­ton

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents a Brief His­to­ry of Every­thing in an 8.5 Minute Ani­ma­tion

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dict­ed That the World Will End in 2060

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Isaac New­ton Cre­ates a List of His 57 Sins (Cir­ca 1662)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Hear an AI Chatbot, Masquerading as a Clueless Grandmother, Waste the Time of an Internet Scam Artist

And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based tele­com com­pa­ny O2 has devel­oped a chat­bot (“named Daisy”) that per­forms a noble task. Imper­son­at­ing an elder­ly grand­moth­er, the chat­bot engages with inter­net fraud­sters and then sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly frus­trates them and wastes their time. As part of a demo, notes The Guardian, Daisy wast­ed a series of fraud­sters’ time for up to 40 min­utes each–“when they could oth­er­wise have been scam­ming real peo­ple.” The AI sys­tem was trained on real scam calls–according to Vir­gin Media O2’s mar­ket­ing direc­tor, Simon Valcarcel–so it “knows exact­ly the tac­tics to look out for, exact­ly the type of infor­ma­tion to give to keep the scam­mers online and waste time.” If you have three min­utes to spare, you can lis­ten to Daisy clown a scam artist above.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stir­ring Let­ter About Chat­G­PT and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty: “We Are Fight­ing for the Very Soul of the World”

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online: David Byrne’s True Stories, Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep & More

It’s Fri­day, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our fam­i­ly, our friends, our sig­nif­i­cant oth­er, or — for some cinephiles, best of all — by our­selves. If you haven’t yet lined up any home-cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence in par­tic­u­lar, con­sid­er tak­ing a look at this playlist of 31 fea­ture films just made avail­able to stream by Warn­er Bros. You’ll know the name of that august Hol­ly­wood stu­dio, of course, but did you know that it put out True Sto­ries, the musi­cal plunge into tabloid Amer­i­ca direct­ed by Talk­ing Heads’ David Byrne? Or Wait­ing for Guff­man, the first impro­vised movie by Christo­pher Guest and his troupe of crack comedic play­ers like Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Cather­ine O’Hara, and Park­er Posey?

That may already strike many Open Cul­ture read­ers as the mak­ings of a fine dou­ble fea­ture, though some may pre­fer to watch the ear­ly work of anoth­er kind of auteur: Michel Gondry’s The Sci­ence of Sleepsay, or Richard Lin­klater’s Sub­Ur­bia (a stage-play adap­ta­tion that could well be paired with Sid­ney Lumet’s Death­trap).

If you’re in more of a mood for crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed his­tor­i­cal dra­ma, you have your pick of The Wind and the Lion, Mutiny on the Boun­ty, The Year of Liv­ing Dan­ger­ous­ly, The Mis­sion, and Michael Collins. And if you’d been mean­ing to get around to such nine­teen-eight­ies lit­er­ary adap­ta­tions as The Bon­fire of the Van­i­ties or The Acci­den­tal Tourist, well, your chance has final­ly come.

“It’s a fair­ly wild selec­tion,” The Verge’s Jess Weath­erbed writes of this playlist, point­ing out its “dread­ful flops like 2000’s Dun­geons & Drag­ons movie, Bob­cat Goldthwait’s Hot to Trot (1988), and Eddie Murphy’s The Adven­tures of Plu­to Nash (2002).”

But if you’re just look­ing to have some fun, there’s no rea­son you could­n’t fire up the likes of Mr. Nice Guy, Jack­ie Chan’s first Eng­lish-lan­guage pic­ture. Should that prove too refined, Warn­er Bros. has also gen­er­ous­ly made avail­able Amer­i­can Nin­ja V — a non-canon­i­cal entry in that series, we should note, star­ring not orig­i­nal Amer­i­can Nin­ja Michael Dudikoff, but direct-to-video mar­tial-arts icon David Bradley. On Fri­day night, after all, any view­ing goes.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Kino Lor­ber Lets You Stream 146 Films on YouTube: Til­da Swin­ton, Samuel L. Jack­son, Steve Busce­mi, Buster Keaton & More

365 Free Movies Stream­ing on YouTube

Watch 99 Movies Free Online Cour­tesy of YouTube & MGM: Rocky, The Ter­mi­na­tor, Four Wed­dings and a Funer­al & More

How to Watch Hun­dreds of Free Movies on YouTube

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores

Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visu­al as well. But these qual­i­ties, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been chal­lenged for at least three cen­turies, not least by com­posers them­selves. Take Anto­nio Vival­di, whose Le quat­tro sta­gioni, or The Four Sea­sons, of 1718–1720 evoke not just broad impres­sions of the epony­mous parts of the year, but a vari­ety of nat­ur­al and human ele­ments char­ac­ter­is­tic to them. In the course of less than an hour, its lis­ten­ers — whether of the ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry or the ear­ly twen­ty-first — “see” spring, sum­mer, autumn, and win­ter unfold vivid­ly before their mind’s eye.

Now, com­pos­er Stephen Mali­nows­ki has visu­al­ized The Four Sea­sons in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent way. As pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, he uses his Music Ani­ma­tion Machine to cre­ate what we might call graph­i­cal scores, which abstract­ly rep­re­sent the instru­men­tal parts that make up wide­ly loved clas­si­cal com­po­si­tions in time with the music itself.

On this page, you can watch four videos, with each one visu­al­iz­ing one of the piece’s con­cer­ti. Fans of the Music Ani­ma­tion Machine will notice that its for­mer­ly sim­ple visu­als have tak­en a big step for­ward, though what can look at first like a psy­che­del­ic light show also has a clear and leg­i­ble order.

?si=xEQ3Twamh82m3Yhr

For “Spring” and “Autumn,” Mali­nows­ki ani­mates per­for­mances by vio­lin­ist Shunske Sato and musi­cians of the Nether­lands Bach Soci­ety; for “Sum­mer” and “Win­ter,” per­for­mances by Cyn­thia Miller Freivo­gel and ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here for their ren­di­tions of Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos and “Air on the G String,” Pachel­bel’s Canon, and indeed The Four Sea­sons). Gen­er­al­ly under­stand­able at a glance — and in many ways, more illu­mi­nat­ing than actu­al­ly see­ing the musi­cians play their instru­ments — these scores also use a sys­tem called “har­mon­ic col­or­ing,” which Malinkows­ki explains here. This may add up to a com­plete audio­vi­su­al expe­ri­ence, but if you’d also like a lit­er­ary ele­ment, why not pull up The Four Sea­sons’ accom­pa­ny­ing son­nets while you’re at it?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why We Love Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons: An Ani­mat­ed Music Les­son

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons Per­formed on Orig­i­nal Baroque Instru­ments

Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons Brought to Life in Sand Ani­ma­tions by the Hun­gar­i­an Artist Fer­enc Cakó

Yes’ Rick Wake­man Explores Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons, and Why It Was the First Con­cept Album

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Story Collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923)

Harry-Clarke--Poe--Tales-of-Mystery-and-Imagination--8_900

As you’ve prob­a­bly noticed if you’re a reg­u­lar read­er of this site, we’re big fans of book illus­tra­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly that from the form’s gold­en age—the late 18th and 19th century—before pho­tog­ra­phy took over as the dom­i­nant visu­al medi­um. But while pho­tographs large­ly sup­plant­ed illus­tra­tions in text­books, mag­a­zines, and news­pa­pers over the course of the 20th cen­tu­ry, works of fic­tion, which had been rou­tine­ly pub­lished in lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed edi­tions, sud­den­ly became the fea­ture­less banks of words we know today. Though image-heavy graph­ic nov­els and com­ic books have thrived in recent decades, the illus­trat­ed lit­er­ary text is a rar­i­ty indeed.

Harry-Clarke--Poe--Tales-of-Mystery-and-Imagination--3_900

Why did this change come about? “I real­ly don’t know,” writes Christo­pher Howse at The Tele­graph, but he points out that the era of illus­trat­ed fic­tion for grown-ups end­ed “after the death of the big Vic­to­ri­an nov­el­ists,” like Dick­ens and Trol­lope. Before adult pic­ture-books went out of style, sev­er­al now-famous artists made careers as book illus­tra­tors. When we think of the big names from the peri­od, we think of Aubrey Beard­s­ley and Gus­tave DorĂ©, both of whom we’ve cov­ered heav­i­ly here. We tend not to think of Irish artist Har­ry Clarke—a rel­a­tive latecomer—but we should. Of the many incred­i­ble illus­tra­tions from famous works of lit­er­a­ture we’ve fea­tured here, my favorite might be Clarke’s 1926 illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust.

Harry-Clarke--Poe--Tales-of-Mystery-and-Imagination--14_900

So out-there are some of his illus­tra­tions, so delight­ful­ly night­mar­ish and weird, one is tempt­ed to fall back on that rather sopho­moric expla­na­tion for art we find dis­turb­ing: maybe he was on drugs! Not that he’d need them to con­jure up many of the images he did. His source mate­r­i­al is bizarre enough (maybe Goethe was on drugs!). In any case, we can def­i­nite­ly call Clarke’s work hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry, and that goes for his ear­li­er, 1923 illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mys­tery and Imag­i­na­tion as well, of which you can see a few choice exam­ples here.

Harry-Clarke--Poe--Tales-of-Mystery-and-Imagination--6_900

Dublin-born Clarke worked as a stained-glass artist as well as an illus­tra­tor, and drew his inspi­ra­tion from the ear­li­er art nou­veau aes­thet­ic of Beard­s­ley and oth­ers, adding his own roco­co flour­ish­es to the elon­gat­ed forms and dec­o­ra­tive pat­terns favored by those artists. His glow­er­ing figures—including one who looks quite a bit like Poe him­self, at the top—suit the fever­ish inten­si­ty of Poe’s world to per­fec­tion. And like Poe, Clarke’s art gen­er­al­ly thrived in a seduc­tive­ly dark under­world filled with ghouls and fiends. Both of these pro­to-goths died young, Poe under mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances at age 40, Clarke of tuber­cu­lo­sis at 42.

Harry-Clarke--Poe--Tales-of-Mystery-and-Imagination--13_900

Clarke’s illus­trat­ed edi­tion of Poe con­tained 8 full-col­or plates and 24 black and white illus­tra­tions. The Irish artist also notably illus­trat­ed edi­tions of the fairy tales of Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen and Charles Per­rault, with images that—as you might imagine—are like­ly to ter­ri­fy some sen­si­tive chil­dren. You can pur­chase your own edi­tion of the Clarke-illus­trat­ed Poe here, re-released in 2008 by Calla Press. And to see all 24 of Clarke’s black and white plates, head over to 50 Watts.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tave Doré’s Macabre Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Sto­ries (1894)

Édouard Manet Illus­trates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edi­tion Trans­lat­ed by Stephane Mal­lar­mĂ© (1875)

Har­ry Clarke’s 1926 Illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic 60s

Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illus­trat­ed by Aubrey Beard­s­ley in a Strik­ing Mod­ern Aes­thet­ic (1894)

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

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How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish

We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal won­ders of our age, espe­cial­ly since arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence seems to be back on the slate of pos­si­bil­i­ties. While there would be no Sil­i­con Val­ley with­out sil­i­ca sand, semi­con­duc­tors are hard­ly the first mar­vel human­i­ty has forged out of that kind of mate­r­i­al. Con­sid­er the three mil­len­nia of his­to­ry behind the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword, long known even out­side the Japan­ese lan­guage as the katana (lit­er­al­ly “one-sided blade”) — or, more to the point of the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, the 1,200 years in which such weapons have been made out of steel. How Japan­ese Mas­ters Turn Sand Into Swords

In explain­ing the sci­ence of the katana, Ver­i­ta­si­um host Derek Muller begins more than two and a half bil­lion years ago, when Earth­’s oceans were “rich with dis­solved iron.” But then, cyanobac­te­ria start­ed pho­to­syn­the­siz­ing that iron and cre­at­ing oxy­gen as a by-prod­uct. This process dropped lay­ers of iron onto the sea floor, which even­tu­al­ly hard­ened into lay­ers of sed­i­men­ta­ry rock.

With few such for­ma­tions of its own, the geo­log­i­cal­ly vol­canic Japan actu­al­ly came late to steel, import­ing it long before it could man­age domes­tic pro­duc­tion using the iron oxide that accu­mu­lat­ed in its rivers, recov­ered as “iron sand.”

By that time, iron swords would no longer cut it, as it were, but the addi­tion of char­coal in the heat­ing process could pro­duce the “incred­i­bly strong alloy” of steel. Cer­tain Japan­ese sword­smiths have con­tin­ued to use steel made with the more or less tra­di­tion­al smelt­ing process you can see per­formed in rur­al Shi­mane pre­fec­ture in the video. To the dis­ap­point­ment of its pro­duc­er, Petr Lebe­dev, who par­tic­i­pates in the whole process, the foot-oper­at­ed bel­lows of yore have been elec­tri­fied, but he hard­ly seems dis­ap­point­ed by his chance to take up a katana him­self. He may have yet to attain the skill of a mas­ter swords­man, but under­stand­ing every sci­en­tif­ic detail of the weapon he wields must make slic­ing bam­boo clean in half that much more sat­is­fy­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

A Vin­tage Short Film about the Samu­rai Sword, Nar­rat­ed by George Takei (1969)

A Demon­stra­tion of Per­fect Samu­rai Swords­man­ship

An Origa­mi Samu­rai Made from a Sin­gle Sheet of Rice Paper, With­out Any Cut­ting

Watch the Old­est Japan­ese Ani­me Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place

Char­lie Chap­lin start­ed appear­ing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the Unit­ed States had a major case of â€śChap­lini­tis.” Chap­lin mus­tach­es were sud­den­ly pop­ping up every­where–as were Chap­lin imi­ta­tors and Chap­lin look-alike con­tests. A young Bob Hope appar­ent­ly won one such con­test in Cleve­land. Chap­lin Fever con­tin­ued burn­ing hot through 1921, the year when the Chap­lin look-alike con­test, shown above, was held out­side the Lib­er­ty The­atre in Belling­ham, Wash­ing­ton.

Accord­ing to leg­end, some­where between 1915 and 1921, Chap­lin decid­ed to enter a Chap­lin look-alike con­test, and lost, bad­ly.

A short arti­cle called â€śHow Char­lie Chap­lin Failed,” appear­ing in The Straits Times of Sin­ga­pore in August of 1920, read like this:

Lord Des­bor­ough, pre­sid­ing at a din­ner of the Anglo-Sax­on club told a sto­ry which will have an endur­ing life. It comes from Miss Mary Pick­ford who told it to Lady Des­bor­ough, “Char­lie Chap­lin was one day at a fair in the Unit­ed States, where a prin­ci­pal attrac­tion was a com­pe­ti­tion as to who could best imi­tate the Char­lie Chap­lin walk. The real Char­lie Chap­lin thought there might be a chance for him so he entered for the per­for­mance, minus his cel­e­brat­ed mous­tache and his boots. He was a fright­ful fail­ure and came in twen­ti­eth.

A vari­a­tion on the same sto­ry appeared in a New Zealand news­pa­per, the Pover­ty Bay Her­ald, again in 1920. As did anoth­er sto­ry in the Aus­tralian news­pa­per, the Albany Adver­tis­er, in March, 1921.

A com­pe­ti­tion in Char­lie Chap­lin imper­son­ations was held in Cal­i­for­nia recent­ly. There was some­thing like 40 com­peti­tors, and Char­lie Chap­lin, as a joke, entered the con­test under an assumed name. He imper­son­at­ed his well known film self. But he did not win; he was 27th in the com­pe­ti­tion.

Did Chap­lin come in 20th place? 27th place? Did he enter a con­test at all? It’s fun to imag­ine that he did. But, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, many con­sid­er the sto­ry the stuff of urban leg­end. When one researcher asked the Asso­ci­a­tion Chap­lin to weigh in, they appar­ent­ly had this to say: “This anec­dote told by Lord Des­bor­ough, who­ev­er he may have been, was quite wide­ly report­ed in the British press at the time. There are no oth­er ref­er­ences to such a com­pe­ti­tion in any oth­er press clip­ping albums that I have seen so I can only assume that this is the source of that rumour, urban myth, what­ev­er it is. How­ev­er, it may be true.”

I’d like to believe it is.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in ear­ly 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

6o+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

What Would the World of Char­lie Chap­lin Look Like in Col­or?: Watch a Col­or­ful­ly Restored Ver­sion of A Night at the Show (1915)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

 

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