R. Crumb Illustrates Genesis: A Faithful, Idiosyncratic Illustration of All 50 Chapters

It is wide­ly accept­ed among schol­ars that the first few books of the Bible—including, of course, Gen­e­sis, with its cre­ation myths and flood story—are a patch­work of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sources, pieced togeth­er by so-called redac­tors. This “doc­u­men­tary hypoth­e­sis” iden­ti­fies the lit­er­ary char­ac­ter­is­tics of each source, and attempts to recon­struct their dif­fer­ent the­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal con­texts. Pri­mar­i­ly refined by Ger­man schol­ars in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the the­o­ry is very per­sua­sive, but can also seem pret­ty schemat­ic and dry, rob­bing the orig­i­nal texts of much of their live­li­ness, rhetor­i­cal pow­er, and ancient strange­ness.

Anoth­er Ger­man schol­ar, Her­mann Gunkel, approached Gen­e­sis a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. “Every­one knows”—write the edi­tors of a schol­ar­ly col­lec­tion on the foun­da­tion­al Bib­li­cal text—Gunkel’s “mot­to”: “Gen­e­sis ist eine Samm­lung von Sagen”—“Genesis is a col­lec­tion of pop­u­lar tales.” Rather than read­ing the var­i­ous sto­ries con­tained with­in as his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives or the­o­log­i­cal trea­tis­es, Gunkel saw them as redact­ed leg­ends, myths, and folk tales—as ancient lit­er­a­ture. “Leg­ends are not lies,” he writes in The Leg­ends of Gen­e­sis, “on the con­trary, they are a par­tic­u­lar form of poet­ry.”

Such was the approach of car­toon­ist and illus­tra­tor Robert Crumb, who took on illus­trat­ing the entire book of Gen­e­sis, “a text so great and so strange,” he says, “that it lends itself read­i­ly to graph­ic depic­tions.” In the short video above, Crumb describes the cre­ation nar­ra­tive in the ancient Hebrew book as “an arche­typ­al sto­ry of our cul­ture, such a strong sto­ry with all kinds of metaphor­i­cal mean­ing.” He also talks about his gen­uine respect and admi­ra­tion for the sto­ries of Gen­e­sis and their ori­gins. “You study ancient Mesopotami­an writ­ings,” says Crumb, “and there’s all of these ref­er­ences in the old­est Sumer­ian leg­ends about the tree of knowl­edge” and oth­er ele­ments that appear in Gen­e­sis, mixed up and redact­ed: “That’s how folk leg­ends and all that shit evolve over cen­turies.”

The Bib­li­cal book first struck Crumb as “some­thing to sat­i­rize,” and his ini­tial approach leans on the irrev­er­ent, scat­o­log­i­cal tropes we know so well in his work. But he instead decid­ed to pro­duce a faith­ful visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the text just as it is, illus­trat­ing each chap­ter, all 50, word for word. The result, writes Col­in Smith at Sequart, is “idio­syn­crat­ic, ten­der-heart­ed and ulti­mate­ly inspir­ing.” It is also a crit­i­cal visu­al com­men­tary on the text’s cen­tral char­ac­ter: Crumb’s God “is reg­u­lar­ly, if not exclu­sive­ly, por­trayed as an unam­bigu­ous­ly self-obsessed and blood­thirsty despot, ter­ri­fy­ing in his demands, ter­ri­fy­ing in his bru­tal­i­ty.” Arguably, these traits emerge from the sto­ries unaid­ed, yet when we’re told, for exam­ple, that “The Lord regret­ted hav­ing made man on Earth and it griev­ed him in his heart,” Crumb “shows us noth­ing of regret and grief, but rather a furi­ous old dic­ta­tor appar­ent­ly tot­ter­ing on the edge of mad­ness.”

“It’s not the evil of men that Crumb’s con­cerned with,” writes Smith, “so much as the psy­chol­o­gy of a crea­ture who’d slaugh­ter an entire world.” In that inter­pre­ta­tion, he echoes crit­ics of the Bible’s the­ol­o­gy since the Enlight­en­ment, from Voltaire to Christo­pher Hitchens. But he doesn’t shy away from graph­ic depic­tions of human bru­tal­i­ty, either. Crumb’s move away from satire and deci­sion to “do it straight,” as he told NPR, came from his sense that the sweep­ing, vio­lent mythol­o­gy and “soap opera” rela­tion­ships already lend them­selves “to lurid illustration”—his forté. Orig­i­nal­ly intend­ing to do just the first cou­ple chap­ters “as a com­ic sto­ry,” he soon found he had a mar­ket for all 50 and “stu­pid­ly said, ‘okay, I’ll do it.’” The work—undertaken over four years—proved so exhaust­ing, he says he “earned every pen­ny.”

Does Crumb him­self iden­ti­fy with the reli­gious tra­di­tions in Gen­e­sis? Raised a Catholic, he left the church at 16: “I have my own lit­tle spir­i­tu­al quest,” Crumb says, “but I don’t asso­ciate it with any par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. I think that the tra­di­tion­al West­ern reli­gions all are very prob­lem­at­ic in my view.” That said, like many non­re­li­gious peo­ple who read and respect reli­gious texts, he knows the Bible well—better, it turned out, than his edi­tor, a self-described expert. “I just illus­trate it as it’s writ­ten,” said Crumb, “and the con­tra­dic­tions stand.”

When I first illus­trat­ed that part, the cre­ation, where there’s basi­cal­ly two dif­fer­ent cre­ation sto­ries that do con­tra­dict each oth­er, and I sent it to the edi­tor at Nor­ton, the pub­lish­er, who told me he was a Bible schol­ar. And he read it, and he said wait a minute, this does­n’t make sense. This con­tra­dicts itself. Can we rewrite this so it makes sense? And I said that’s the way it’s writ­ten. He said, that’s the way it’s writ­ten? I said, yeah, you’re a Bible schol­ar. Check it out. 

Crumb invites us all to “check it out”—this col­lec­tion of arche­typ­al leg­ends that inform so much of our pol­i­tics and cul­ture, whether the bizarre and cost­ly cre­ation of a fun­da­men­tal­ist “Ark Park” (“dinosaurs and all”), or the Bib­li­cal epics of Cecil B. DeMille or Dar­ren Aronof­sky, or the poet­ry of John Mil­ton, or the inter­pre­tive illus­tra­tions of William Blake. Whether we think of it as his­to­ry or myth or some patch­work quilt of both, we should read Gen­e­sis. R. Crum­b’s illus­trat­ed ver­sion is as good—or better—a way to do so as any oth­er. See more of his illus­tra­tions at The Guardian and pur­chase his illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca, Accord­ing to the Irrev­er­ent Com­ic Satirist Robert Crumb

R. Crumb’s Vibrant, Over-the-Top Album Cov­ers (1968–2004)

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

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

Ayn Rand Issues 13 Commandments to Filmmakers for Making Good Capitalist Movies (1947)

Annex - Cooper, Gary (Fountainhead, The)_07

A cou­ple Christ­mases ago, we fea­tured the sto­ry of how Ayn Rand helped the FBI “iden­ti­fy” It’s a Won­der­ful Life as a piece of com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da, which does make one won­der: what kind of movie would she have Amer­i­ca watch instead? We know exact­ly what kind, since, in 1947, the author of The Foun­tain­head and Atlas Shrugged, nev­er one to shrink from the task of explain­ing her ideas, wrote the “Screen Guide for Amer­i­cans,” accord­ing to Pale­o­fu­ture, a pam­phlet meant for dis­tri­b­u­tion to Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­ers in order to make them aware of what she saw as a com­mu­nist push to poi­son the movies with anti-Amer­i­can ide­ol­o­gy.

“The pur­pose of the Com­mu­nists in Hol­ly­wood, Rand writes, “is not the pro­duc­tion of polit­i­cal movies open­ly advo­cat­ing Com­mu­nism. Their pur­pose is to cor­rupt our moral premis­es by cor­rupt­ing non-polit­i­cal movies — by intro­duc­ing small, casu­al bits of pro­pa­gan­da into inno­cent sto­ries — thus mak­ing peo­ple absorb the basic premis­es of Col­lec­tivism by indi­rec­tion and impli­ca­tion.” And so, to coun­ter­act the sub­tly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic pow­er of It’s a Won­der­ful Life and its ilk, she pro­pos­es fight­ing fire with fire, issu­ing these thir­teen cor­rec­tive film­mak­ing com­mand­ments:

  1. Don’t take pol­i­tics light­ly. “To hire Com­mu­nists on the the­o­ry that ‘they won’t put over any pol­i­tics on me’ and then remain igno­rant and indif­fer­ent to the sub­ject of pol­i­tics, while the Reds are trained pro­pa­gan­da experts — is an atti­tude for which there can be no excuse.”
  2. Don’t smear the free enter­prise sys­tem. “Don’t preach or imply that all pub­licly-owned projects are noble, human­i­tar­i­an under­tak­ings by grace of the mere fact that they are publicly-owned—while preach­ing, at same time, that pri­vate prop­er­ty or the defense of pri­vate prop­er­ty rights is the expres­sion of some sort of vicious greed, of anti-social self­ish­ness or evil.”
  3. Don’t smear indus­tri­al­ists. “You, as a motion pic­ture pro­duc­er, are an indus­tri­al­ist. All of us are employ­ees of an indus­try which gives us a good liv­ing. There is an old fable about a pig who filled his bel­ly with acorns, then start­ed dig­ging to under­mine the roots of the oak from which the acorns came. Don’t let’s allow that pig to become our sym­bol.”
  4. Don’t smear wealth. “If the vil­lain in your sto­ry hap­pens to be rich—don’t per­mit lines of dia­logue sug­gest­ing that he is the typ­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a whole social class, the sym­bol of all the rich. Keep it clear in your mind and in your script that his vil­lainy is due to his own per­son­al character—not to his wealth or class.”
  5. Don’t smear the prof­it motive. “Don’t give to your char­ac­ters — as a sign of vil­lainy, as a damn­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic, a desire to make mon­ey. Nobody wants to, or should, work with­out pay­ment, and nobody does — except a slave.”
  6. Don’t smear suc­cess. “It is the Com­mu­nists’ inten­tion to make peo­ple think that per­son­al suc­cess is some­how achieved at the expense of oth­ers and that every suc­cess­ful man has hurt some­body by becom­ing suc­cess­ful. It is the Com­mu­nists’ aim to dis­cour­age all per­son­al effort and to dri­ve men into a hope­less, dispir­it­ed, gray herd of robots who have lost all per­son­al ambi­tion, who are easy to rule, will­ing to obey and will­ing to exist in self­less servi­tude to the State.”
  7. Don’t glo­ri­fy fail­ure. “While every man meets with fail­ure some­where in his life, the admirable thing is his courage in over­com­ing it — not the fact that he failed.”
  8. Don’t glo­ri­fy deprav­i­ty. “Don’t drool over weak­lings as con­di­tioned ‘vic­tims of cir­cum­stances’ (or of ‘back­ground’ or of ‘soci­ety’) who ‘couldn’t help it.’ You are actu­al­ly pro­vid­ing an excuse and an ali­bi for the worst instincts in the weak­est mem­bers of your audi­ences.”
  9. Don’t deify “the com­mon man.” “No self-respect­ing man in Amer­i­ca is or thinks of him­self as ‘lit­tle,’ no mat­ter how poor he might be. That, pre­cise­ly, is the dif­fer­ence between an Amer­i­can work­ing man and a Euro­pean serf.”
  10. Don’t glo­ri­fy the col­lec­tive. “If you preach that it is evil to be dif­fer­ent — you teach every par­tic­u­lar group of men to hate every oth­er group, every minor­i­ty, every per­son, for being dif­fer­ent from them; thus you lay the foun­da­tion for race hatred.”
  11. Don’t smear an inde­pen­dent man. “Remem­ber that Amer­i­ca is the coun­try of the pio­neer, the non-con­formist, the inven­tor, the orig­i­na­tor, the inno­va­tor. Remem­ber that all the great thinkers, artists, sci­en­tists were sin­gle, indi­vid­ual, inde­pen­dent men who stood alone, and dis­cov­ered new direc­tions of achieve­ment — alone.”
  12. Don’t use cur­rent events care­less­ly. “It is a sad joke on Hol­ly­wood that while we shy away from all con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects on the screen, in order not to antag­o­nize any­body — we arouse more antag­o­nism through­out the coun­try and more resent­ment against our­selves by one cheap lit­tle smear line in the midst of some musi­cal com­e­dy than we ever would by a whole polit­i­cal trea­tise.”
  13. Don’t smear Amer­i­can polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions. “It is true that there have been vicious Con­gress­men and judges, and politi­cians who have stolen elec­tions, just as there are vicious men in any pro­fes­sion. But if you present them in a sto­ry, be sure to make it clear that you are crit­i­ciz­ing par­tic­u­lar men — not the sys­tem. The Amer­i­can sys­tem, as such, is the best ever devised in his­to­ry. If some men do not live up to it — let us damn these men, not the sys­tem which they betray.”

Have any real motion pic­tures passed Rand’s pro-cap­i­tal­ist test? (Read her full pam­phlet here.) The film adap­ta­tion of The Foun­tain­head came out in 1949, and Rand her­self at first praised it as “more faith­ful to the nov­el than any oth­er adap­ta­tion of a nov­el that Hol­ly­wood has ever pro­duced.” But lat­er she turned against it, claim­ing to have “dis­liked the movie from begin­ning to end” and swear­ing nev­er again to sell her nov­els with­out reserv­ing the right to pick the direc­tor and screen­writer as well as to edit the film her­self. She did­n’t live to exer­cise those rights on Atlas Shrugged the movie, which came out as a tril­o­gy between 2011 and 2014, so we’ll nev­er know for sure if the movie met her strin­gent ide­o­log­i­cal stan­dards — but with Meta­crit­ic scores of 28%, 26%, and 9%, we can safe­ly assume they would­n’t meet her cin­e­mat­ic ones.

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ayn Rand Helped the FBI Iden­ti­fy It’s a Won­der­ful Life as Com­mu­nist Pro­pa­gan­da

The Out­spo­ken Ayn Rand Inter­viewed by Mike Wal­lace (1959)

A Free Car­toon Biog­ra­phy of Ayn Rand: Her Life & Thought

Žižek Blames the US Gov­ern­ment Shut­down on Ayn Rand’s Acolytes Who Caused the 2008 Col­lapse

Ayn Rand’s Phi­los­o­phy and Her Resur­gence in 2012: A Quick Primer by Stan­ford His­to­ri­an Jen­nifer Burns

Ayn Rand’s Reviews of Children’s Movies: From Bam­bi to Frozen

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Art Market Demystified in Four Short Documentaries

Spend an hour or two at MoMA, Tate Mod­ern, or some oth­er world class muse­um and inevitably you’’ll over­hear some vari­a­tion of “my sev­en-year-old could paint that.”

May­haps, Madam, but how much would it fetch at auc­tion?

As a new doc­u­men­tary series, the Art Mar­ket (in Four Parts), makes clear, the mon­e­tary val­ue of art is tricky to assign.

There are excep­tions, of course, such as in the irre­sistible Picas­so anec­dote cit­ed in the trail­er, above.

Usu­al­ly how­ev­er, even the experts must resort to an edu­cat­ed guess, based on a num­ber of fac­tors, none of which can tell the whole sto­ry.

As jour­nal­ist and for­mer direc­tor of New York’s White Columns gallery, Josh Baer, points out in the series’ first episode below, even art mar­ket indices are an unre­li­able tool for assess­ing worth. A por­trait of actress Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor by Andy Warhol failed to attract a sin­gle bid at auc­tion, though art­net Price Data­base report­ed sales of between $27 mil­lion and $31.5 mil­lion for oth­er “Liz” paint­ings by the same artist.

I’d have thought a sig­na­ture as famous as Warhol’s would con­fer the same sort of ins­ta-worth Picas­so claimed his John Han­cock did.

The unpre­dictabil­i­ty of final sales fig­ures has led auc­tion hous­es to issue guar­an­tees in return for a split of the prof­its, a prac­tice Sotheby’s North and South Amer­i­ca chair­man, Lisa Den­ni­son, likens to an insur­ance pol­i­cy for the sell­er.

With the excep­tion of the ill-fat­ed Warhol’s great big goose egg, the num­bers bat­ted around by the series’ influ­en­tial talk­ing heads are pret­ty stag­ger­ing. Snap­py edit­ing also lends a sense of art world glam­our, though gal­lerist Michele Mac­carone betrays a cer­tain weari­ness that may come clos­er to the true ener­gy at the epi­cen­ter of the scene.

As for me, I couldn’t help think­ing back to my days as a recep­tion­ist in a com­mer­cial gallery on Chicago’s tourist friend­ly Mag­nif­i­cent Mile. I was con­temp­tu­ous of most of the stuff on our walls, which ran heav­i­ly to pas­tel gar­den par­ties and har­le­quins posed in front of rec­og­niz­able land­marks. One day, a cou­ple who’d wan­dered in on impulse dropped a ridicu­lous sum on a florid beach scene, com­plete with shim­mer­ing rain­bows. Rich they may have been, but their utter lack of taste was appalling, at least until the wife excit­ed­ly con­fid­ed that the paint­ing’s set­ting remind­ed them of their long ago Hawai­ian hon­ey­moon. That clar­i­fied a lot for me as to art’s true val­ue. I hope that the cou­ple is still alive and enjoy­ing the most for their money’s worth, every sin­gle day.

The Art Market’s oth­er three parts, “Gal­leries,” “Patrons,” and “Art Fairs,” will be released week­ly through mid-June. And we’ll try to add them to this post, as they roll out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Warhol: The Bell­wether of the Art Mar­ket

Braque in Bulk: Cost­co Gets Back into the Fine Art Mar­ket

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She wrote about her brief stint as a gallery recep­tion­ist in her third book, Job Hop­per: The Check­ered Career of a Down-Mar­ket Dilet­tante. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Watch the Three Original Wizard of Oz Feature Films, Produced by L. Frank Baum Himself

As a film, The Wiz­ard of Oz of 1939 is so icon­ic, so well known, that any sequel has been treat­ed as an affront to Amer­i­can cul­ture. Just see for exam­ple, the reviled Return to Oz and the mediocre response to Oz the Great and Pow­er­ful. How­ev­er, spin-offs and recon­tex­tu­al­ized works, like The Wiz (the musi­cal) and Wicked (the oth­er musi­cal, based on a nov­el), do real­ly well as long as they remain tied to Vic­tor Fleming’s film.

Even before the days of Judy Gar­land, the Oz sto­ries made for pop­u­lar cin­e­ma. We already told you about the 1910 silent short film ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz, which con­fus­ing­ly packs much of the orig­i­nal children’s book and the stage play adap­ta­tion (from 1902) into 13 crazed min­utes, redo­lent of Georges Méliès’ sci-fi films and filled with beau­ties on parade and a very active mule char­ac­ter called Hank.

Mean­while, the pro­lif­ic author of the Oz series, L. Frank Baum, reel­ing from tak­ing a loss on the stage play ver­sion of his sto­ry, decid­ed to make some mon­ey in cin­e­ma. In 1914, he and some friends from the Los Ange­les Ath­let­ic Club (who called them­selves the Uplifters) start­ed their own pro­duc­tion house, Oz Film Man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­pa­ny, based in Los Ange­les. Baum thought he had plen­ty of mate­r­i­al to work with, mak­ing good-natured chil­dren’s films to com­pete with the more pop­u­lar west­erns.

All three of Baum’s fea­tures are now avail­able on YouTube, with Baum’s first film, The Patch­work Girl of Oz, from 1914, at the top of this page. Adapt­ing his 1913 book, Baum changed plot devices, adding in vaude­ville rou­tines and stop-motion ani­ma­tion. A French acro­bat called Pierre Coud­erc played the Patch­work Girl in the stunt sequences, and the film is also notice­able for an ear­ly appear­ance by Hal Roach and Harold Lloyd, who became such fast friends on the pro­duc­tion that they went on to make their own films.

After that His Majesty, the Scare­crow of Oz, was released in 1914, and retells the Wiz­ard of Oz sto­ry in its own way, but gives the Scare­crow a new ori­gin sto­ry. Hank the Mule returns, as do some more pan­tomime ani­mals. This time, the movie was made as pro­mo­tion for the upcom­ing book of a sim­i­lar name, but did not help sales in the end.

The final film pro­duced was The Mag­ic Cloak of Oz, based on a non-Oz Baum book called Queen Zixi of Ix, but Baum knew that any­thing with Oz in the title could sell. Para­mount didn’t how­ev­er, and delayed release for two years. This sur­viv­ing ver­sion is miss­ing a reel, and British dis­trib­u­tors divid­ed it up into two sep­a­rate films.

Shot all at the same time, Baum was hop­ing to quick­ly make his investors’ mon­ey back, but this didn’t hap­pen and the Oz Film Man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­pa­ny shut­tered soon after, with Baum dying in 1919 at age 62, with no idea how influ­en­tial his one book would become.

These orig­i­nal Oz films will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Heart­less: The Sto­ry of the Tin Man

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Essential Elements of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Infographic

infographic

What makes film noir film noir? Like Supreme Court jus­tice Pot­ter Stew­art mak­ing his famous pro­nounce­ment on obscen­i­ty, we can hon­est­ly claim to know it when we see it. But what ele­ments, exact­ly, do we only see con­verge in the high, undis­put­ed lev­els of the film noir canon? Design­er Melanie Patrick and writer Adam Frost have, at the behest of the British Film Insti­tute, come up with a handy info­graph­ic (click here to view it in a larg­er for­mat) that explains and visu­al­izes the par­tic­u­lars of the “shad­owy world of one of clas­sic Hollywood’s most beloved sub­gen­res.”

First, film noir needs the right cast of char­ac­ters, includ­ing an inves­ti­ga­tor with “rel­a­tive integri­ty” like Sam Spade or Philip Mar­lowe, a crim­i­nal (“usu­al­ly a mur­der­er”), one “bad, beau­ti­ful” woman, and anoth­er “good, bland” woman. These char­ac­ters should come from a script based on a piece of Amer­i­can pulp fic­tion such as The Mal­tese Fal­con or Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty, ide­al­ly adapt­ed by a Euro­pean émi­gré direc­tor like Fritz Lang or Bil­ly Wilder and replete with heavy drink­ing and smok­ing, “stolen mon­ey or valu­ables,” and obses­sions with the past, all wrapped up in a bleak, con­vo­lut­ed sto­ry that plays out in an urban set­ting by night.

The hey­day of film noir last­ed from the ear­ly 1940s to the late 1950s, right in the mid­dle of the tyran­ny of the Motion Pic­ture Pro­duc­tion Code, bet­ter known as the Hays Code, which, in lim­it­ing “the amount of sex and vio­lence that could be shown on screen,” forced film­mak­ers to get cre­ative and con­vey dra­mat­ic ten­sion pri­mar­i­ly with light­ing and com­po­si­tion. It also meant that the finest film noir made max­i­mal­ly effec­tive use of its dia­logue, pro­duc­ing such immor­tal­ly snap­py exchanges as the one in Mur­der My Sweet when Philip Mar­lowe shoots back to a woman who announces she finds men very attrac­tive, “I imag­ine they meet you halfway.” The info­graph­ic above also high­lights the impor­tance of a styl­ish poster and a star­tling tagline, ulti­mate­ly arriv­ing at the name of the sole film that pos­sess­es every ele­ment of film noir — and hence “the noiri­est film ever.”

All this comes as the fruit of research into “around 100 of the most high­ly regard­ed film noirs,” and the info­graph­ic’s cre­ators have made some of their data avail­able to view on a Google spread­sheet. Should you now feel like con­duct­ing a film-noir inves­ti­ga­tion of your own, we can offer you a few leads, includ­ing the five essen­tial rules of film noir, Roger Ebert’s ten essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tics of film noir, “noir­chae­ol­o­gist” Eddie Muller’s list of 25 noir films that will stand the test of time, a col­lec­tion of film noir’s 100 great­est posters, and of course, our col­lec­tion of 60 film noir movies free to watch online. But stay alert; if we’ve learned one thing from watch­ing film noir, it’s that inves­ti­ga­tions, no mat­ter the rel­a­tive integri­ty with which you con­duct them, don’t always go as planned.

Thanks to Melanie for let­ting us fea­ture her work!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60 Free Film Noir Movies

Watch Scar­let Street, Fritz Lang’s Cen­sored Noir Film, Star­ring the Great Edward G. Robin­son (1945)

25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time: A List by “Noir­chael­o­gist” Eddie Muller

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essen­tial Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Noir Films

100 Great­est Posters of Film Noir

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Influence of Miles Davis Revealed with Data Visualization: For His 90th Birthday Today

miles-davis-universe

Miles Davis would have cel­e­brat­ed his 90th birth­day today. And though he’s been gone for 25 years (hard to believe), he remains arguably the most influ­en­tial fig­ure in jazz. How influ­en­tial? Glad you asked. A new web­site called “The Uni­verse of Miles Davis” has tried to quan­ti­fy and visu­al­ize Davis’ influ­ence by comb­ing through Wikipedia, and find­ing every Eng­lish-lan­guage Wikipedia page (2,452 in total ) that links to the main Miles Davis entry on Wikipedia. Turn­ing those links into graph­ics, the site visu­al­izes Miles’ rela­tion­ships and asso­ci­a­tions, reveal­ing the far-reach­ing influ­ence of Miles Davis in a nov­el way. You can enter “The Uni­verse of Miles Davis” here.

This inter­ac­tive site was pro­duced by Poly­graph, “an exper­i­men­tal pub­li­ca­tion devot­ed to com­plex top­ics and dis­course.”

via Forbes

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis’ Entire Discog­ra­phy Pre­sent­ed in a Styl­ish Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion

The Paint­ings of Miles Davis

Miles Davis’ “South Side Chica­go Chili Mack” Recipe Revealed

Watch Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Char­lie Parker’s “Con­fir­ma­tion” & Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Recordings: World & Classical Music, Interviews, Nature Sounds & More

Online archives, gal­leries, and libraries offer Vegas-sized buf­fets for the sens­es (well two of them, any­way). All the art and pho­tog­ra­phy your eyes can take in, all the music and spo­ken word record­ings your ears can han­dle. But per­haps you’re still miss­ing some­thing? “Geordies bang­ing spoons” maybe? Or “Tawang lamas blow­ing conch shell trum­pets… Ton­gan tribes­men play­ing nose flutes…,” the sound of “the Assamese wood­worm feast­ing on a win­dow frame in the dead of night”?

No wor­ries, the British Library’s got you cov­ered and then some. In 2009, it “made its vast archive of world and tra­di­tion­al music avail­able to every­one, free of charge, on the inter­net,” amount­ing to rough­ly 28,000 record­ings and, The Guardian esti­mates “about 2,000 hours of singing, speak­ing, yelling, chant­i­ng, blow­ing, bang­ing, tin­kling and many oth­er verbs asso­ci­at­ed with what is a unique­ly rich sound archive.”

But that’s not all, oh no! The com­plete archive, titled sim­ply and author­i­ta­tive­ly “Sounds,” also hous­es record­ings of accents and dialects, envi­ron­ment and nature, pop music, “sound maps,” oral his­to­ry, clas­si­cal music, sound record­ing his­to­ry, and arts, lit­er­a­ture, and per­for­mance (such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s short dis­course on “Wire­less,” ani­mat­ed in the video below).

The 80,000 record­ings avail­able to stream online rep­re­sent just a selec­tion of the British Library’s “exten­sive col­lec­tions of unique sound record­ings,” but what a selec­tion it is. In the short video at the top of the post, The Wire Mag­a­zine takes us on a mini-tour of the phys­i­cal archive’s metic­u­lous dig­i­ti­za­tion meth­ods. As with all such wide-rang­ing col­lec­tions, it’s dif­fi­cult to know where to begin.

One might browse the range of unusu­al folk sounds on aur­al dis­play in the World & Tra­di­tion­al music sec­tion, cov­er­ing every con­ti­nent and a daunt­ing meta­cat­e­go­ry called “World­wide.” For a more spe­cif­ic entry point, Elec­tron­ic Beats rec­om­mends a col­lec­tion of “around 8,000 Afropop tracks” from Guinea, record­ed on “the state-sup­port­ed Syli­phone label” and “released between 1958 and 1984.”

Edison Disc Phonograph

Oth­er high­lights include “Between Two Worlds: Poet­ry & Trans­la­tion,” an ongo­ing project begun in 2008 that fea­tures read­ings and inter­views with “poets who are bilin­gual or have Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage, or who oth­er­wise reflect the project’s theme of dual cul­tures.” Or you may enjoy the exten­sive col­lec­tion of clas­si­cal music record­ings, includ­ing “Hugh Davies exper­i­men­tal music,” or the “Oral His­to­ry of Jazz in Britain.”

The cat­e­go­ry called “Sound Maps” orga­nizes a diver­si­ty of recordings—including region­al accents, inter­views with Holo­caust sur­vivors, wildlife sounds, and Ugan­dan folk music—by ref­er­ence to their loca­tions on Google maps.

Not all of the mate­r­i­al in “Sounds” is sound-based. Record­ing and audio geeks and his­to­ri­ans will appre­ci­ate the large col­lec­tion of “Play­back & Record­ing Equip­ment” pho­tographs (such as the 1912 Edi­son Disc Phono­graph, above ), span­ning the years 1877 to 1992. Also, many of the recordings—such as the won­der­ful first ver­sion of “Dirty Old Town” by Alan Lomax and the Ram­blers, with Ewan Mac­Coll and Peg­gy Seeger (below)—feature album cov­ers, front and back, as well as disc labels.

The record­ings in the Archive are unfor­tu­nate­ly not down­load­able (unless you are a licensed mem­ber of a UK HE/FE insti­tu­tion), but you can stream them all online and share any of them on your favorite social media plat­form. Per­haps the British Library will extend down­load priv­i­leges to all users in the future. For now, brows­ing through the sheer vol­ume and vari­ety of sounds in the archive should be enough to keep you busy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Fea­tures 17,000 Blues & Folk Record­ings

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

1,000 Record­ings to Hear Before You Die: Stream a Huge Playlist of Songs Based on the Best­selling Book

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

Wake Up & Smell the Coffee: The New All-in-One Coffee-Maker/Alarm Clock is Finally Here!

Last year, British design­er Josh Renouf announced plans to build the Barisieur, a com­bi­na­tion alarm clock/coffee brew­er that will wake you up, then serve you a nice hot cup of cof­fee, as you open your eyes and greet the new day. Here’s how Engad­get described it at the time:

Using induc­tion heat­ing and stain­less steel ball bear­ings, the Barisieur boils water for pour-over brew, giv­ing off the aro­ma of your favorite beans as you rise to start the day. There’s even a cooled slot for a spot of milk and stor­age for sug­ar and extra grounds.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the first orders for the Barisieur can be placed through Kick­starter. They’re look­ing to raise $555,000 through their Kick­starter cam­paign. (Watch the video above for infor­ma­tion on that.) The first 300 back­ers will be able to pre-order their Barisieur at a low price ($292).

Note: The updat­ed ver­sion can now be pur­chased on Ama­zon.

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 Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemi­an Cof­fee Bars Doc­u­ment­ed in a Vin­tage 1959 News­reel

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Cre­ates Ad for Cof­fee in the 1650s

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.