In late September, the US military declared the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay over. “At its peak,” writes Charlie Savage in The New York Times, “106 of the 166 prisoners … were listed as participants” in the strike. That number has now dropped to 19, they say, and they’re all being given “the appropriate level of care.” What exactly does that mean? You can get an idea from this animated video created by The Guardian. In 6 minutes, you’ll get introduced to the world of people who have spent years in prison. They’ve never been charged with a crime nor given access to the legal system. Despite being cleared for release, many remain stuck in limbo year after year. When they lose hope and go on hunger strike, they have tubes and food crammed down their noses. Poignant as it may be, the colorful animation may dull your reaction to what’s actually happening in Guantánamo. Perhaps it’s better to look at these color photos to fully appreciate the Kafkaesque system the government has put in place.
What living director has drawn the descriptor “surreal” more often than David Lynch? If you’ve seen, or rather experienced, a few of his films — particularly Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire, or even the first half of his television series Twin Peaks — you know he’s earned it. Like any surrealist worth his salt, Lynch creates his own version of reality, with its own set of often unfathomable and inexplicably but emotionally and psychologically resonant qualities. In 1987, the year after his breakthrough Blue Velvet opened in theaters, the BBC apparently thought him enough of an authority on the matter of cinematic surrealism to enlist him to present an episode of Arena on the subject.
And so we’ve highlighted, just above in two parts, the fruit of their collaboration, with apologies for the straight-from-the-VHS quality of the video. (I just think of the slight muddledness as adding another welcome layer of unreality to the proceedings.)
Lynch’s duties on the broadcast include providing facts about the films and filmmakers excerpted throughout to tell the history of surrealist film. (He also provides several choice opinions, as when he calls Philadelphia “one of the sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists.”) We see bits and pieces of pictures like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 Un Chien Andalou (above), Jean Cocteau’s 1932 Blood of a Poet, Fernand Léger’s 1947 The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart, and Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée. Not only does Lynch contextualize them, he discusses their influence on his own work. Casual filmgoers who’ve caught a Lynch movie or two and taken them as the imaginings of an entertaining weirdo will, after watching this episode, come to understand how long a tradition they fit into — and they’ll no doubt want to see not just more of Lynch’s work, but his sources of inspiration as well. (They may, however, after hearing all he has to say here, still regard him as a weirdo.)
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In 1883, Antoni Gaudí, the great Catalan architect, began working on his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família, the church that has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Barcelona. Before his death in 1925, Gaudí managed to complete the crypt, apse and part of the Nativity facade. Work on the basilica slowed during the 1930s and 40s, especially during the Spanish Civil War, but picked up again in the 1950s. A series of architects carried on Gaudí’s work, completing new towers and facades. In 2000, the central nave vaulting was completed, and, since then, modern technology has put architects on track to complete the church decades ahead of schedule. The new target date is 2026 — the centenary of Gaudí’s death. Thanks to a computer-generated video released by the Sagrada Familia Foundation, you can see what the basilica, almost 150 years in the making, will look like when it’s all done. You can also take a virtual tour of the interior of the UNESCO landmark here.
It seems only natural that Joseph Stalin, who presided over perhaps the most staggeringly vast erasure of human beings, their property, their documents and histories, should have also been a meticulous editor. Whether we know it or not, the invisible hand of an editor intrudes between us and nearly everything we read (even if it’s the writer as editor), making esoteric decisions, creating alternate outcomes and deleting the past. In Stalin’s day, and still in many editorial departments today, the editor wielded a colored pencil instead of a keyboard, and hovered over manuscripts, noting addenda, correcting minutia, slashing through sentences, and scribbling indecipherable comments in the margins. Stalin’s pencil was blue, a color that was not visible when photographed.
This color becomes a metaphor for Stalin’s invisibility in a fascinating article on Stalin as editor by Holly Case, associate professor of history at Cornell University. Before Stalin was Stalin, he was Joseph Djugashvili, revolutionary bolshevik and seminary dropout, “a ruthless person, and a serious editor.” Stalin rejected 47 of Lenin’s articles to Pravda (and suppressed Lenin’s warnings about his protégée after the former’s death). And once he assumed power as head of the Soviet state in the mid-twenties, Stalin continued in this capacity, heavily rewriting documents and manuscripts, and scrawling notes and revisions over hundreds of official party documents. “For Stalin,” Case writes, “editing was a passion that extended well beyond the realm of published texts.” She comments on the paradox of the dictator’s inescapable public presence and his intrusive, yet invisible, editorial tendencies:
Stalin always seemed to have a blue pencil on hand, and many of the ways he used it stand in direct contrast to common assumptions about his person and thoughts. He edited ideology out or played it down, cut references to himself and his achievements, and even exhibited flexibility of mind, reversing some of his own prior edits.
So while Stalin’s voice rang in every ear, his portrait hung in every office and factory, and bobbed in every choreographed parade, the Stalin behind the blue pencil remained invisible. What’s more, he allowed very few details of his private life to become public knowledge, leading the Stalin biographer Robert Service to comment on the remarkable “austerity” of the “Stalin cult.”
We should not mistake Stalin’s “self-effacement,” Case writes, for modesty. She quotes the enigmatic street artist Banksy to make the point: “invisibility is a superpower.” Stalin applied the power of his pencil to thousands of official documents and pieces of propaganda, even completely rewriting the 1938 Soviet bible, The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Commissioned for a team of authors in 12 chapters, Stalin found it necessary to “fundamentally revise 11 of them” (see the first edition title page above).
Stalin’s blue pencil also intervened in more direct, and chilling ways. The document at left shows a list of people held by the NKVD, forerunners to the KGB. The blue handwriting scrawled over the list is Stalin’s. It reads “Execute everyone.”
We have another execution order below, this time in the form of a 1940 letter written by Stalin’s secret police chief Beria and recommending “execution by shooting” for around 20,000 prisoners, most of them Polish officers, at a camp in Katyn, a massacre the Soviets blamed on the Nazis. Beria’s letter (below) bears the signatures, in blue pencil, of Stalin and several Politburo members.
In addition to heavily editing propaganda and signing mass death warrants, Stalin used his pencil to deface drawings by 19th century Russian painters, scrawling “crude and ominous captions” beneath them in red or blue. He left his mark on 19 pictures, all of them nudes, most of them male. He slashed through their torsos and other body parts with the pencil (below) and wrote on one of the drawings, “Radek, you ginger bastard, if you hadn’t pissed into the wind, if you hadn’t been so bad, you’d still be alive.” Karl Radeck was a revolutionary activist in the 20s that historians believe Stalin had killed in 1939. Historian Nikita Petrov—who believes Stalin defaced the drawings between 1939 and 1946—says of them: “These captions show Stalin wasn’t just malicious and primitive, but that he was also very dangerous.” It is indeed deeply unsettling for an editor to see Stalin’s ruthless hand move freely from the violence of his slash-and-burn textual changes to that of his mass execution orders and crude, “loutish” debasement of human forms.
I believe some movies are so classic, they should be considered untouchable, an opinion I wish more Broadway producers shared.
Brace yourself. Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s heartwarming tale about a small-potatoes boxer in 1970s Philadelphia, has been turned into a musical.
It’s likely not as bad as I fear. Stallone himself is co-producing, young director Alex Timbers is deservedly hot, and lyricist Lynn Ahrens is responsible, in large degree, for Schoolhouse Rock.
All the same, prank collective Improv Everywhere’s take on one of Rocky’s most iconic scenes falls more squarely within my comfort zone. The first installment in the group’s weekly Movies in Real Life series, this Rocky features lookalike comedian Dan Black running through the streets of Philly, a crowd of kids tailing him on the final leg. (“So, uh, you have parents?” he gasps, atop the art museum steps.)
As with the annual No-Pants Subway Ride and many other Improv Everywhere stunts, a great deal of fun comes from the reactions of unsuspecting passersby. Some of my favorites are viewable in the prank’s Mission Report, a follow up with less need to stick to the script. Still in character, Black demands royalty checks from street vendors selling Rocky t‑shirts and screws with tourists posing in front of the famed Rocky statue. Small wonder Improv Everywhere’s motto is “we cause scenes.”
For those in need of refreshment, here is the original:
Silent films had a respectable showing, as it were, on Sight & Sound magazine’s last big critics poll. The votes, cast to determine the greatest motion pictures of all time, placed three silents among the top ten overall: F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. These, of course, also rank at the top of Sight & Sound’s separate list of the ten greatest silent films of all time, which came out as follows:
Though all of these pictures came out within the seemingly short 15-year span between 1916 and 1921, they represent a wide cinematic diversity: in form, in theme, in genre, in place of origin (of both the films and the filmmakers), in sensibility, in aesthetics. You probably recognize all of their names, especially if you’ve taken a film studies course, and you may think of them all as familiar, but how many have you watched? Even we avowed cinephiles have a way of tricking ourselves into believing we’ve seen all the most important movies in their entirety, when in reality we know only about, albeit sometimes a lot about, their place in the history of cinema and their currents of influence that flow into films made today.
But thanks to the internet, we can catch up with ease. Given the age of works from the silent era, most of them have passed into the public domain. You can therefore watch almost all of the top ten greatest silent films of all time, as selected by the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll, for free, online, right now. Some you can even watch right here, without leaving Open Culture: at the top of the post, you’ll find Sunrise. Just above, we’ve featured Man with a Movie Camera. Below, The Passion of Joan of Arc. To watch the others, simply click their linked titles on the list. After you’ve enjoyed everything from Murnau’s German-Expressionist-by-way-of-Hollywood romance to Keaton’s epic comedy to Buñuel’s surrealist procession of still-troubling visions, you’ll not just know where many modern cinematic techniques came from, you’ll feel how they’ve evolved over the decades. All of the films listed above appear on our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larger collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Saturday Night Live, now in its 39th season, has become more notable lately for its takes on such unintentionally (and too often painfully) funny political figures as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, rather than for its actual sketches. The show’s had some rough years, and though I can’t count myself among its current fans, for perhaps an eight-year period, from the late 80s to the mid 90s, I tried to catch every episode. Occasionally, I would have to endure what every fan of the long-running show must bear: a long nostalgic rant from my parents’ generation about how terrible the show had become and how it would never be as funny as it was in their day. But they may have just been right, since they watched it live in its infancy in the mid-seventies, when the show featured such comedic giants as Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner. Although the topical humor of those early episodes is badly dated, the raw energy radiating from people who would go on to create such enduring classics as Animal House, The Blues Brothers, The Jerk, and Caddyshack sets the bar very high for everyone who followed.
Debuting on October 11, 1975, the brainchild of Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol was originally just called the show Saturday Night to differentiate it from an ABC show called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. But from its inception, the hallmark elements were in place: the opening sketch ending in “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” (originally uttered each time by Chevy Chase); the live studio audience; the celebrity guest host (pioneered by George Carlin in the first episode); and the live musical guests (the first were Billy Preston and Janis Ian). The original cast consisted of Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Laraine Newman. In the video at the top you can see a very young Lorne Michaels introduce the eight original cast members before the first show aired in an interview on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. Asked by Snyder about the format of the show, Michaels jokingly replies, “we’ve got eight, and we’re hoping for two to really work. Not all of these people will become stars.” The cast laughs nervously. There’s no way any of them could have known how much the show would function as a star-making machine, but that is exactly what it became, even in its first season.
We are lucky to have screen tests from two of the first cast’s biggest stars-to-be, John Belushi (above) and Dan Aykroyd (below). In his audition, Belushi waggles his famous eyebrows, does a couple of brilliant Brando impressions, and generally hams it up. Aykroyd plays it straight, engaging in the smart satire of current events and pop culture that he did so well and pulling off a very credible Louisiana accent.
While some of the most famous comedians of season one, including Belushi and Aykroyd, are well known even to the raw youth of today, Lorne Michael’s first hire, the fabulous Gilda Radner, has sadly faded from pop culture memory, and there are precious few clips of her SNL work online. But Radner was a singular artist whose stand-up routines and Broadway shows are absolutely phenomenal, and still hold up today. You can see her below from her 1979 show “Gilda Live” doing a character called Candy Slice, her take on Patti Smith (who was never so wasted, I think). Notice a young Paul Schaeffer on the drums and SNL’s G.E. Smith, Radner’s first husband, on guitar. Radner’s tragic death from ovarian cancer in 1989 cast her late life in somber tones, but seeing her below, before her illness, offers but a glimpse of the tremendous physical energy and commitment she brought to her every memorable character on the show.
Americans do not live in a culture that values philosophy. I could go on about the deep veins of anti-intellectualism that run under the country like fault lines or natural gas deposits, but I won’t. Let’s just say that we favor more obvious displays of prowess: feats of strength, agility, and physical violence, for example, of the superhero variety. With this fact in mind, first-year graduate student Ian Vandewalker decided he “wanted to do something that would bring a discipline that is often seen as difficult, esoteric, and even irrelevant, into new light—especially in the eyes of young people.” Remembering a poster he once saw of “an action figure of Adam Smith with Invisible Hand action,” Vandewalker decided he would combine his own love of toys and philosophy into a philosopher action figure series he called “Philosophical Powers!” Here are just a few of Vandewalker’s creations, designed somewhat like professional wrestlers, with their various leagues and range of epithets.
He begins at the traditional beginning, with figures of “Plunderous Plato” and “Arrogant Aristotle” (above), “The Angry Ancients.” Aristotle, known as the “peripatetic” philosopher, has only one power: “walking.” His quality is attested by a rather circular syllogism: “All Philosophical Powers figures are totally awesome. This toy is a Philosophical Powers figure. Therefore, this toy is totally awesome.” Like much of Aristotle’s deductive reasoning, the argument is airtight, provided one accept the truth of its premises.
In the category of “Contumelious Continental Rationalists,” who began the revolt against those Aristotelian “Merciless Medievals,” we have “Dangerous Descartes.” René Decartes may have claimed to doubt everything—every principle that Aristotle took for granted—but he fell prey to his own errors, hence his action figure’s weakness, the “Cartesian circle.” Decartes’ method of doubt produced its own brand of dualistic certainty about his own existence as a “thinking thing,” and the existence of God, hence “certainty” is one of his action figure’s strengths.
Skipping ahead over a century, we have the lone figure in “The Abominable Absolute Idealist” series, “Hateful Hegel.” Hegel is the ultimate systematizer whose embrace of contradiction can seem maddeningly incoherent, unless we believe his metaphysic of “Absolute Spirit.” Given his dialectic of everything, Hegel’s power is that “he is infinite.” His weakness? “He is finite,” of course. Given Hegel’s teleological theory of history, people who purchase his action figure “can expect them to become more and more valuable as time passes.”
The most amusing of “The Antagonistic Analytic Philosophers” is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was himself an amusingly eccentric individual. Known for his terrible temper, which would often drive him to verbally abuse and strike those poor students who couldn’t grasp his abstruse concepts, “Vindictive Wittgenstein” has the power of “poker wielding ability.” His weakness, naturally, is his “teaching ability.” I particularly like the “notes” section of the figure’s description:
Wittgenstein figures come in two variations: the early model’s recorded messages include nonsense about language being a “picture” of the world, while the later model’s messages include nonsense about games and their “family resemblances” to one another. It’s fun to communicate! (Doll does not actually communicate. Children who claim that Wittgenstein figures talk to them with their own “private language” are mistaken or lying and should be severely beaten by their teachers.)
You can see the whole set at the Philosophical Powers site. It is problematic that we only get dead white men represented, but this is not solely the fault of Vandewalker but also a problem of history and the traditional academic history of ideas. One would hope that the concept is clever enough that it might make philosophy appealing to people who find it dull or unapproachable. That may be too lofty a goal, but these figures are sure to amuse the already philosophically-inclined, and perhaps spur them on to learn more.
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