A Master List of 800 Free Classic eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

in Books, Education, Literature | October 5th, 2016

ebook-list

Maybe you’re an eBooks hold­out, a late adopter, a dis­dain­er of the book as a brand­ed “device”? I get it. Is there any­thing more ridicu­lous than putting down a book because its bat­ter­ies have run out? No amount of crow­ing about the suprema­cy of tech will make me love the smell and feel of paper less…

And yet…

With­in the charm­ing heft of print­ed books reside their lim­i­ta­tion. Trav­el­ing stu­dents, researchers, or avid read­ers must lug sev­er­al pounds of bound paper along with them on long jour­neys, or to work ses­sions at the local cof­fee shop. An eRead­er or smart­phone can hold an entire library—which one can expand ad infini­tum, it seems, on the fly.

This feature—along with the ease of copy­ing quotes and pas­sages and send­ing them across platforms—eventually sold me on the eBook as a robust sup­ple­ment to print. And if it sounds like I’m mak­ing a sales pitch, I am: for hun­dreds of free books, avail­able to read on the device of your choos­ing. Entry-lev­el Kin­dle, bud­get smart­phone, or lat­est, fan­ci­est iPad—most all will accom­mo­date the range of for­mats avail­able in our col­lec­tion of 800 Free eBooks.

Can you freely down­load the lat­est New York Times best­sellers? Not here, and I’d hope—for the sake of those hard-work­ing writers—that you’d pay to read new releas­es. Can you car­ry along with you on your next busi­ness trip or vaca­tion the works of Aris­to­tle and Freud, sev­er­al nov­els by Jane Austen and Joseph Con­rad, the mas­ter­works of Hegel, Hume, and Kant, the com­plete Shake­speare, and Proust’s mul­ti-vol­ume À la recherche du temps per­du? Quite eas­i­ly. Here’s a small sam­ple of what’s on our list:

See the full list of 800 offer­ings here. They may lack the sen­so­ry plea­sure of print, but the abil­i­ty to car­ry an entire library of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture in your pock­et has its advan­tages, to say the least. And if your trav­els include long dri­ves, you’ll also want to check out our mas­ter list of Free Audio Books.

Note: If you need help upload­ing .mobi files to your Kin­dle, you might find it use­ful to watch this video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Audio Books: Fic­tion & Lit­er­a­ture 

A Mas­ter List of 1,200 Free Cours­es From Top Uni­ver­si­ties: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lec­tures

Book Read­ers Live Longer Lives, Accord­ing to New Study from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

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

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Experience Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Virtual Reality: Download the Free App Created by Queen & Google

in Music, Technology | October 5th, 2016

You don’t just lis­ten to “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”; you expe­ri­ence it. Any­one who’s ever heard Queen’s sig­na­ture pro­gres­sive rock epic knows it, and any­one who’s ever per­formed all six min­utes of it at a karaoke bar under­stands it more deeply still. The song, which rumor holds to have cost more to record than any sin­gle to date, made use of the lat­est stu­dio tech­niques; now, tech­nol­o­gy bare­ly imag­in­able when the song hit the charts in 1975 has giv­en us a whole new way to expe­ri­ence “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”: in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, through either the Google Card­board app or as a 360° video.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between Queen, Google Play, and VR devel­op­er Eno­sis, The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence offers a three-dimen­sion­al audio­vi­su­al jour­ney fea­tur­ing “inter­ac­tive ele­ments and spa­tial sound, allow­ing you to step inside the music.” The Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Kara Weisen­stein describes it as “peer­ing into Fred­die Mercury’s brain. The musi­cian was famous­ly coy about the song’s mean­ing, and while it doesn’t give any­thing away, this expe­ri­ence ren­ders Mercury’s imag­i­na­tion in resplen­dent pur­ples and blues. The bal­lad is a play­ful won­der­land of bicy­cling skele­tons and ani­mat­ed globes. Dur­ing the opera, the scene is a spooky cave. The rock sec­tion is a neon trip through space, and the coda is a drip­py, inter­galac­tic auro­ra.”

“ ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ is unusu­al, isn’t it?” asks Queen’s lead gui­tarist and self-described VR pro­po­nent Bri­an May in the video on the mak­ing of The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence above. “Even 40 years lat­er, or what­ev­er it is, [the 1975 song] still sounds inno­v­a­tive.” And it began inspir­ing inno­va­tion right after its record­ing, when it led to the six-minute film that, years before MTV, prac­ti­cal­ly invent­ed the form of the music video. Does this new project her­ald an era when every sin­gle must, by neces­si­ty, come accom­pa­nied by a full-fledged VR jour­ney? For the moment, that ques­tion remains among the unan­swered, right along­side the one Queen has been ask­ing for over four decades now: “Is this the real life? Is this just fan­ta­sy?”

Enter the The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence here. 

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside the Rhap­sody: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ (2002)

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

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

The Music of Queen Re-Imag­ined by “Extra­or­di­nary” Clas­si­cal Pianist, Natalia Pos­no­va

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. 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.

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Marshall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buckminster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Modern Technology & Media (1971)

in Art, Radio, Television, Theatre | October 4th, 2016

45 years ago, four emi­nences took the stage at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to: Irish actor Jack Mac­Gowran, best known for his inter­pre­ta­tions of Samuel Beck­ett; Eng­lish poet and drama­tist W.H. Auden; Amer­i­can archi­tect and the­o­rist of human­i­ty’s way of life Buck­min­ster Fuller; and Cana­di­an lit­er­ary schol­ar turned media tech­nol­o­gy ora­cle Mar­shall McLuhan. Now only did all four men come from dif­fer­ent coun­tries, they came from very dif­fer­ent points on the intel­lec­tu­al and cul­tur­al map. The CBC record­ed them for broad­cast on its long-run­ning series Ideas, pref­ac­ing it with an announce­ment that “the osten­si­ble sub­ject of their dis­cus­sion is the­atre and the visu­al arts.”

Key word: osten­si­ble. “That top­ic is soon for­got­ten as two modes of per­cep­tion clash,” says the announc­er, “that of Pro­fes­sor McLuhan, who is one of the most famous inter­preters of con­tem­po­rary 20th-cen­tu­ry cul­tur­al trends, and that of W.H. Auden, who cheer­ful­ly admits to being ‘a 19th-cen­tu­ry man’ and sees no rea­son to change.” And so, though Fuller and Mac­Gowan do occa­sion­al­ly pro­vide their per­spec­tive, the pan­el turns into a rol­lick­ing debate between McLuhan and Auden, more or less from the point where the for­mer — mak­ing one of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly com­pelling procla­ma­tions — declares that mod­ern media brings us to a world in which “there is no audi­ence. There are only actors.” But the lat­ter objects: “I pro­found­ly dis­ap­prove of audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion.”

By the ear­ly 1970s, tele­vi­sion had long since found its way into homes all across Amer­i­ca, Cana­da, and Britain, but the thinkers of the time had only just begun to grap­ple with its con­se­quences. “We’ve just seen Apol­lo 14, which has some visu­al effects going with it. It’s a new type of the­ater, obvi­ous­ly,” says McLuhan, draw­ing one of many audi­ence laughs. On the sub­ject of tele­vi­sion’s con­fla­tion of fact and fic­tion, Auden does­n’t mince words: “I think TV is a very, very wicked medi­um. That’s all I can say.” McLuhan empha­sizes that, as a pro­fes­sion­al observ­er of these phe­nom­e­na, “I have stead­fast­ly reserved moral judg­ment on all media mat­ters.” Auden: “I don’t.”

Yet the author of The Age of Anx­i­ety and the author of The Guten­berg Galaxy turn out to have more in com­mon than their con­flict might sug­gest. Both in their 60s by the time of this dis­cus­sion (“Thank God I can remem­ber the world before World War I,” says the poet) and both 1930s con­verts to Catholi­cism, they also both har­bored deep sus­pi­cions of tech­nolo­gies like tele­vi­sion. Auden, who insists he would nev­er dream of owing a TV set him­self, seems to look down on it as mere­ly low­brow, but McLuhan has dark­er sus­pi­cions: “You are miss­ing the name of the game, sir. You are actu­al­ly imag­in­ing that those lit­tle images you see on TV are TV. They are not. What is TV is that fire stream pour­ing out of that tube into your gut.”

Even while pre­dict­ing still-unheard-of advances in tele­vi­su­al tech­nol­o­gy (at one point attempt­ing to engage Mac­Gowran on “the imme­di­ate prospect of four- and five-dimen­sion­al TV”), McLuhan also fore­sees it as the poten­tial spark for such cat­a­clysms as a glob­al race war, going so far as to sug­gest that “if you want to save a fan­tas­tic blood­bath on this plan­et, which will be very trau­mat­ic, very cathar­tic, and very trag­ic — in the Greek sense — we turn off TV total­ly. For good.” Auden, of course, actu­al­ly approves of that par­tic­u­lar idea of McLuhan’s, though he evinces lit­tle opti­mism about its fea­si­bil­i­ty. “Why won’t it hap­pen?” asks McLuhan. “Because peo­ple like the damn things,” he replies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing (1976)

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

W.H. Auden Recites His 1937 Poem, ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. 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.

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Pete Seeger Teaches You How to Play Guitar for Free in The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide (1955)

in Education, Music | October 4th, 2016

800px-pete_seeger_1986

Image by Josef Schwarz, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Along with earnest polit­i­cal pop­ulism and a renewed inter­est in region­al cul­tures, the folk revival of the fifties and six­ties brought with it a lib­er­at­ing sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty, as young writ­ers, singers, and artists dis­cov­ered that, tru­ly, any­one can play gui­tar. Or rather, any­one can pick up most any stringed instru­ment and, with a few fun­da­men­tals, enjoy the expe­ri­ence of writ­ing and play­ing music in a way that seemed unavail­able or for­bid­ding before peo­ple like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan appeared on the scene.

Both pop­u­lar­iz­ers of Woody Guthrie’s Depres­sion-era bal­lads and of obscure blues and folk artists, Dylan and Seeger took very dif­fer­ent approach­es to their art. The for­mer cul­ti­vat­ed a mys­tique that seems impos­si­ble to pen­e­trate, and that has made him seem—as Todd Haynes’ mas­ter­ful film I’m Not There dramatizes—like a series of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But Seeger has always been Seeger, from his gen­tle, aw-shucks demeanor and warm acces­si­bil­i­ty to his staunch­ly pro­gres­sive mes­sages that speak to chil­dren and reg­u­lar folks as well as to those with more sophis­ti­cat­ed tastes and tal­ents.

So it seems only nat­ur­al that Seeger released an album of gui­tar instruc­tion, The Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide, addressed to both begin­ners and more advanced play­ers. “I guess any musi­cal instru­ment can be as hard to play as you want to make it,” Seeger begins, in one of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly flu­id tran­si­tions from song to speech: “If you want­ed to be a per­son like Andres Segovia or Mer­le Travis, why it would take a life­time of train­ing. But for most of us, play­ing a gui­tar can be about as sim­ple as walk­ing.” After that reas­sur­ing com­par­i­son, he does remind us, how­ev­er, that “it took us all a cou­ple years to learn how to walk.”

Seeger begins with first steps—tuning the instrument—and patient­ly leads his lis­ten­ers through some basic chord shapes, strum­ming tech­niques, and then more advanced pick­ing meth­ods, alter­nate tun­ings, and styles like Fla­men­co, “Rhum­ba Rhythm,” and “Mex­i­can Blues.” You can lis­ten to the album track-by-track on Spo­ti­fy, fur­ther up. (You can also find it kick­ing around on YouTube.) Like the great edu­ca­tor he was, Seeger also includes some help­ful visu­al aids in the album’s lin­er notes (see them here), includ­ing draw­ings of chord fin­ger­ings, musi­cal nota­tion, and gui­tar tab­la­ture for those who don’t read music. In addi­tion to his read­able instruc­tions, he also includes the lyrics to all of the folk songs ref­er­enced through­out.

“Prac­tice each small sec­tion over and over,” he writes in his intro­duc­tion, “until it comes easy. Actu­al­ly, if you enjoy play­ing the gui­tar, you shouldn’t think of it as prac­tic­ing, in the for­mal sense. Rather sim­ply play for your own enjoy­ment and that of your friends.” He also rec­om­mends that his lis­ten­ers “beg, bor­row, or steal” the records he ref­er­ences in the book­let, for “they will be of help to you in giv­ing you an idea of the scope and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment.” I can’t think of a music teacher more invit­ing than Seeger, nor a method more relaxed.

A sec­ond vol­ume fea­tur­ing Jer­ry Sil­ver­man appeared soon after, and upped the ante a good bit. “Musi­cal stan­dards are on the rise,” Sil­ver­man says in his intro­duc­tion, “the vir­tu­oso folk gui­tarist is on the scene.” He promis­es to help the “strum­ming pop­u­la­tion… keep pace with the upward spi­ral.” You can be the judge of how suc­cess­ful he is in that effort. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we don’t have Silverman’s sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als avail­able, but you can lis­ten to the com­plete Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide: Vol­ume 2 above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Tay­lor Gives Free Acoustic Gui­tar Lessons Online

Learn to Play Gui­tar for Free: Intro Cours­es Take You From The Very Basics to Play­ing Songs In No Time

Paul McCart­ney Offers a Short Tuto­r­i­al on How to Play the Bass Gui­tar

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

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Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion not only rad­i­cal­ly reshaped social and polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions in the soon-to-be Sovi­et Union, but it also rad­i­cal­ized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Rus­sia for 300 years,” com­ments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “cul­ture as an instru­ment of polit­i­cal con­trol.” As the Bol­she­viks swept away lum­ber­ing czarist elit­ism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be pop­ulist and proletarian—spearheaded by such exper­i­men­tal artists as film­mak­er Dzi­ga Ver­tov, poet, futur­ist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “supre­ma­tist” painter Kaz­imir Male­vich. While many of these artists were denounced as bour­geois obscu­ran­tists when the dog­mas of social­ist real­ism became their own instru­ments of polit­i­cal con­trol, for sev­er­al years, the nascent Com­mu­nist state pro­duced some of the most for­ward-think­ing art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first ful­ly syn­thet­ic music ever made, cre­at­ed by inno­v­a­tive meth­ods that pre­dat­ed syn­the­siz­ers by sev­er­al decades. We’ve like­ly all heard of the Theremin, for exam­ple, invent­ed in 1919 by Sovi­et engi­neer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, oth­er inven­tive tech­nol­o­gists and com­posers had begun to exper­i­ment with oscil­lo­scopes and mag­net­ic tape, cut­ting or draw­ing wave­forms by hand to cre­ate syn­thet­ic sounds.

One avant-garde Sovi­et com­pos­er, Arse­ny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound record­ing tech­nol­o­gy in film. The process of opti­cal sound uses an audio track record­ed on a sep­a­rate neg­a­tive that runs par­al­lel with the film (see it explained above). After the devel­op­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy, writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Bauhaus artist Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy sug­gest­ed that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be cre­at­ed from exper­i­men­ta­tion with the opti­cal film sound track.”

Tak­ing up the chal­lenge after the first Russ­ian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “pro­duced (pos­si­bly) the first short film with a hand-drawn syn­thet­ic sound­track.” One very short exam­ple of his tech­nique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it pre­serves a fas­ci­nat­ing tech­nique and a look at what might have been had this tech­nique, and oth­ers like it, borne more fruit. Mono­skop describes Avraamov as “a com­pos­er, music the­o­rist, per­for­mance insti­ga­tor, expert in Cau­cu­sian folk music, [and] out­spo­ken crit­ic of the clas­si­cal twelve-tone sys­tem.” He was also the com­mis­sar of a min­istry set up to encour­age “the devel­op­ment of a dis­tinct­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art and lit­er­a­ture.” It’s not entire­ly clear how what he called “orna­men­tal sound” tech­niques fit that pur­pose. But along with inno­va­tors like Evge­ny Sholpo and Niko­lai Voinov—whose fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that tech­nolo­gies gen­er­al­ly used to deliv­er enter­tain­ment and pro­pa­gan­da to pas­sive mass audi­ences could be manip­u­lat­ed by hand to cre­ate some­thing entire­ly unique.

The exper­i­ments of these sound pio­neers per­haps held lit­tle appeal for the aver­age Russ­ian, but they were enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly writ­ten up in a 1936 issue of Amer­i­can mag­a­zine Mod­ern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gal­lagher, “briefly formed a research insti­tute in Moscow, where they hoped to cre­ate syn­thet­ic voic­es and under­stand the musi­cal lan­guage of geo­met­ric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed with­in a year.”

via @WFMU/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Watch Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Sur­viv­ing Film, The Lady and the Hooli­gan (1918)

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

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Helen Keller Had Impeccable Handwriting: See a Collection of Her Childhood Letters

in Education, History, Letters, Life | October 3rd, 2016

keller-handwriting

Image by Flickr, cour­tesy of Perkins School for the Blind

The inspi­ra­tional blind and deaf activist and edu­ca­tor Helen Keller learned to speak aloud, but, to her great regret, nev­er clear­ly.

Her care­ful pen­man­ship, above, is anoth­er mat­ter. Her impec­ca­bly ren­dered upright hand puts that of a great many sight­ed peo­ple—not all of them physi­cians—to shame.

Keller learned to write—and read—with the help of embossed books as a stu­dent at Perkins School for the Blind. The Unit­ed States didn’t adopt Stan­dard Braille as its offi­cial sys­tem for blind read­ers and writ­ers until 1918, when Keller was in her late 30’s. Pri­or to that blind read­ers and writ­ers were sub­ject­ed to a num­ber of com­pet­ing sys­tems, a sit­u­a­tion she decried as “absurd.”

Some of these sys­tems had their basis in the Roman alpha­bet, includ­ing Boston Line Type, the brain­child of Perkins’ Found­ing Direc­tor, Samuel Gri­d­ley Howe, an oppo­nent of Braille. Stu­dents may have pre­ferred dot-based sys­tems for tak­ing notes and writ­ing let­ters, but Boston Line Type remained Perkins’ approved print­ing sys­tem until 1908.

There’s more than an echo of Boston Line Type in Keller’s blocky char­ac­ters, as well as her spac­ing. Devi­at­ing from pen­man­ship forms learned at school is a lux­u­ry exclu­sive to the sight­ed. Until for­ma­tion became instinc­tu­al, Keller relied on a grooved board to help her size her char­ac­ters cor­rect­ly, an exhaust­ing process. Small won­der that she end­ed many of her ear­ly let­ters with “I am too tired to write more.”

Perkins has pub­lished a Flickr album of let­ters Keller wrote between the ages of 8 and 11 to then-direc­tor Michael Anag­nos, includ­ing 3 pages in French. Leaf­ing through them, I mar­veled less at her abil­i­ty and deter­mi­na­tion than my (sight­ed) 16-year-old son’s lack of inter­est in devel­op­ing a respectable-look­ing hand.

Keller’s hand­writ­ing is so above reproach that it quick­ly fades to the back­ground, upstaged by her charm­ing man­ners and girl­ish pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. A sam­ple:

If you go to Rou­ma­nia, please ask the good queen Eliz­a­beth about her lit­tle invalid broth­er and tell her that I am very sor­ry that her dar­ling lit­tle girl died. I should like to send a kiss to Vit­to­rio, the lit­tle prince of Naples, but teacher says she is afraid you will not remem­ber so many mes­sages.

Browse Perkins’ col­lec­tion of Keller’s hand­writ­ten let­ters to Michael Anag­nos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Helen Keller Speaks About Her Great­est Regret — Nev­er Mas­ter­ing Speech

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Spe­cial Friend­ship: He Treat­ed Me Not as a Freak, But as a Per­son Deal­ing with Great Dif­fi­cul­ties

“A Glo­ri­ous Hour”: Helen Keller Describes The Ecsta­sy of Feel­ing Beethoven’s Ninth Played on the Radio (1924)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and wine­mak­er who played Annie Sul­li­van in her high school’s pro­duc­tion of The Mir­a­cle Work­er. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Silliest Film”

in Film, Sci Fi | October 3rd, 2016

metropolis-wells

When we watch Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis now, we see an aes­thet­i­cal­ly dar­ing land­mark work of sci­ence-fic­tion cin­e­ma. When H.G. Wells watched Metrop­o­lis back in 1927, the year of its release, he saw some­thing very dif­fer­ent indeed. “I have recent­ly seen the sil­li­est film,” wrote the author of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine as an open­er for his New York Times review. “I do not believe it would be pos­si­ble to make one sil­li­er.”

Despite its giant bud­get, Metrop­o­lis gives “in one eddy­ing con­cen­tra­tion almost every pos­si­ble fool­ish­ness, cliché, plat­i­tude, and mud­dle­ment about mechan­i­cal progress and progress in gen­er­al, served up with a sauce of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty that is all its own.” His­to­ry remem­bers Lang and Wells both as vision­ar­ies who looked, often with lit­tle opti­mism, to the future, but clear­ly they had a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion as to how that future would actu­al­ly play out.

The sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-mind­ed Wells took the impres­sion­is­tic Metrop­o­lis lit­er­al­ly, tak­ing issue with — among oth­er things — how its air­planes “show no advance on con­tem­po­rary types”; its “motor cars are 1926 mod­els or ear­li­er”; its vision of a ver­ti­cal­ly strat­i­fied city look, “to put it mild­ly, high­ly improb­a­ble”; the appar­ent con­di­tion that the city’s “machines are engaged quite furi­ous­ly in the mass pro­duc­tion of noth­ing that is ever used”; and the sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty of its mak­ers, “who are all on the side of soul and love and such like.”

Metrop­o­lis opened to mixed reviews at first (some of which you can read here), but no con­tem­po­rary crit­ic could match Wells for sheer dis­dain. “Nev­er for a moment does one believe any of this fool­ish sto­ry; nev­er for a moment is there any­thing amus­ing or con­vinc­ing in its drea­ry series of strained events,” he wrote, steer­ing his point-by-point take­down to its con­clu­sion. “It is immense­ly and strange­ly dull. It is not even to be laughed at.”

Strong stuff, but the high­est form of film crit­i­cism, as the French New Wave would lat­er artic­u­late, is film­mak­ing. And so, in 1936, came Things to Come, anoth­er cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle of the future, this one built to the osten­si­bly more plau­si­ble spec­i­fi­ca­tions Wells laid out as its screen­writer — that film itself just one more pre­de­ces­sor to the unend­ing series of dystopias, utopias, and every kind of future in-between to appear on the screen over the next eight decades.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten by H.G. Wells, Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts the World’s Very Dark Future

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. 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.

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