The Disgusting Food Museum Curates 80 of the World’s Most Repulsive Dishes: Maggot-Infested Cheese, Putrid Shark & More

in Food & Drink, Museums | November 8th, 2018

Often we get to know each oth­er by talk­ing which foods we like. Per­haps even more often, we get to know each oth­er by talk­ing about which foods we hate. Enter­tain­ing dis­agree­ments tend to arise from such dis­cus­sions, usu­al­ly around tra­di­tion­al­ly divi­sive comestibles like anchovies, cilantro, brus­sel sprouts, or the Japan­ese dish of fer­ment­ed soy­beans known as nat­to. But how­ev­er many of us pre­fer to avoid them, these foods all look more or less con­ven­tion­al com­pared to the dish­es curat­ed by the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um, which the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Mau­ra Jud­kis describes as “the world’s first exhi­bi­tion devot­ed to foods that some would call revolt­ing.”

“The exhib­it has 80 of the world’s most dis­gust­ing foods,” says the muse­um’s offi­cial site. Adven­tur­ous vis­i­tors will appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­ni­ty to smell and taste some of these noto­ri­ous foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinki­est cheese? Or taste sweets made with met­al cleans­ing chem­i­cals?” Jud­kis notes that “the museum’s name and its con­tents are pret­ty con­tro­ver­sial — one culture’s dis­gust­ing is anoth­er culture’s del­i­ca­cy.

That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant lar­vae eat­en in Mex­i­co, or shi­rako, the cod sperm eat­en in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chi­nese dish of nests made from bird sali­va.” It all goes to empha­size the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um’s stat­ed premis­es: â€śDis­gust is one of the six fun­da­men­tal human emo­tions. While the emo­tion is uni­ver­sal, the foods that we find dis­gust­ing are not. What is deli­cious to one per­son can be revolt­ing to anoth­er.”

With inter­est in food seem­ing­ly at an all-time high — and not just food, but tra­di­tion­al food from all around the world — the cul­tur­al stud­ies wing of acad­e­mia has begun to get seri­ous mileage out of that propo­si­tion. But the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um has tak­en on a less intel­lec­tu­al and much more vis­cer­al mis­sion, plac­ing before its vis­i­tors duri­an fruit, banned from many a pub­lic space across Asia for its sheer stink­i­ness; casu marzu, which the muse­um’s site describes as “mag­got-infest­ed cheese from Sar­dinia”; and hákarl, which Jud­kis describes as “a putrid shark meat dish from Ice­land that the late Antho­ny Bour­dain said was one of the worst things he had ever tast­ed.”

You can learn more about these and the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um’s oth­er offer­ings from the Asso­ci­at­ed Press video at the top of the post, as well as at Smith­son­ian and the New York Times. If you’d like to see, smell, and even taste some of its exhibits for your­self, you’ll have to make the trek out to Malmö, Swe­den. The project comes from the mind of Samuel West, a Swede best known for cre­at­ing the Muse­um of Fail­ure (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), whose half-Amer­i­can parent­age has made him famil­iar with sev­er­al items of U.S. cui­sine that gross out non-Amer­i­cans, from Spam to Jell‑O pas­ta sal­ad (shades of James Lileks’ mid­cen­tu­ry mid­west-focused Gallery of Regret­table Food) to Rocky Moun­tain oys­ters. Despite being Amer­i­can myself, I’ve nev­er known any­one who likes that last, a dish made of bull tes­ti­cles, or at least no one has ever admit­ted to me that they like it. But if some­one did, I’d cer­tain­ly feel as if I’d learned some­thing about them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Muse­um of Fail­ure: A Liv­ing Shrine to New Coke, the Ford Edsel, Google Glass & Oth­er Epic Cor­po­rate Fails

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More

in Books, Literature, Maps | November 7th, 2018

Plot, set­ting, char­ac­ter… we learn to think of these as dis­crete ele­ments in lit­er­ary writ­ing, com­pa­ra­ble to the strat­e­gy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the set­ting is a char­ac­ter? There are many lit­er­ary works named and well-known for the unfor­get­table places they intro­duce: Walden, Wuther­ing Heights, Howards End…. There are invent­ed domains that seem more real to read­ers than real­i­ty: Faulkner’s Yok­na­p­a­tow­pha, Thomas Hardy’s Wes­sex… There are works that describe impos­si­ble places so vivid­ly we believe in their exis­tence against all rea­son: Ita­lo Calvino’s Invis­i­ble Cities, Chi­na MiĂ©ville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Ter­tius”….

What sus­tains our belief in the integri­ty of fic­tion­al places? The fact that they seem to act upon events as much as the peo­ple who live in them, for one thing. And, just as often, the fact that so many authors and illus­tra­tors draw elab­o­rate maps of lit­er­ary set­tings, mak­ing their fea­tures real to us and embed­ding them in our minds.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, edit­ed by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of lit­er­ary maps—whether in non-fic­tion, real­ism, or fantasy—the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first lit­er­ary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Bran­well Brontë’s Ver­dopo­lis (above), and so many more.

The book is filled with essays about lit­er­ary map­ping by writ­ers and map-mak­ers, and it touch­es on the way authors them­selves view imag­i­na­tive map­ping. “For some writ­ers mak­ing a map is absolute­ly cen­tral to the craft of shap­ing and telling their tale,” writes Lewis-Jones. For oth­ers, mak­ing maps is also a way to avoid the painful task of writ­ing, which Philip Pull­man calls “a mat­ter of sullen toil.” Draw­ing, on the oth­er hand, he says, “is pure joy. Draw­ing a map to go with a sto­ry is mess­ing around, with the added fun of col­or­ing it in.” David Mitchell agrees: “As long as I was busy dream­ing of topog­ra­phy,” he says of his maps, “I didn’t have to get my hands dirty with the mechan­ics of plot and char­ac­ter.”

It may sur­prise you to hear that writ­ers hate to write, but writ­ers are peo­ple, after all, and most peo­ple find writ­ing tedious and dif­fi­cult in some part. What all of the writ­ers fea­tured in this col­lec­tion share is that they love indulging their imag­i­na­tions, mak­ing real their lucid dreams, whether through the diver­sion of draw­ing maps or the grind of gram­mar and syn­tax. Many of these maps, like Thoreau’s draw­ing of Walden Pond or Johann David Wyss’s illus­tra­tion of the desert island in The Swiss Fam­i­ly Robin­son, accom­pa­nied their books into pub­li­ca­tion. Many more remained secret­ed in authors’ note­books.

There are many such “pri­vate trea­sures” in The Writer’s Map, notes Atlas Obscu­ra: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of Mor­dor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketch­es; unpub­lished maps from the note­books of David Mitchell… Jack Kerouac’s own route in On the Road….” Do we read a lit­er­ary map dif­fer­ent­ly when it wasn’t meant for us? Can maps be sly acts of mis­di­rec­tion as well as whim­si­cal visu­al aids? Should we treat them as para­tex­tu­al and unnec­es­sary, or are they cen­tral, when an author choos­es to include them, to our under­stand­ing of a sto­ry? Such ques­tions, and many, many more, are tak­en up in The Writer’s Map, a long over­due sur­vey of this long­stand­ing lit­er­ary tra­di­tion.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

12 Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Road Trips in One Handy Inter­ac­tive Map

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Breakdown of the Artist’s Self-Shredding Painting

in Art | November 7th, 2018

By now, even those of us who pay no atten­tion at all to the art mar­ket have heard about Banksy’s lat­est art stunt: a paint­ing called Bal­loon Girl that, when it sold for $1.4 mil­lion at auc­tion, then imme­di­ate­ly shred­ded itself. Assess­ments on the intent and impact of the piece’s self-destruc­tion have var­ied: many have com­plained that, far from the bold state­ment against the eco­nom­ics of mod­ern art it may have looked like (and many of Banksy’s fans may well have come to expect from his artis­tic per­sona), it could also be noth­ing more than a cyn­i­cal pub­lic­i­ty stunt to raise the spec­u­la­tive val­ue of his work fur­ther still. And a coun­ter­point, in the words of econ­o­mist Tyler Cowen, an expert on the eco­nom­ics of cul­ture in his own right: â€śBanksy is a genius.”

So how prop­er­ly to think about the Bal­loon Girl stunt, which has received no small amount of press but which remains some­thing of an unset­tled issue? Here to help clar­i­fy the mat­ter is a new and top­i­cal episode of The Art Assign­ment, John and Sarah Green’s web series pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

As well as pro­vid­ing a brief primer on Banksy and the way his career has so far made its mark (often lit­er­al­ly) on the world, the eleven-minute video gets into how his build­ing a shred­der into a pic­ture frame and set­ting it off at the moment of sale fits into his body of work, art his­to­ry, and the inter­na­tion­al art scene as it is today.

“There are many ways a work of art comes into being, be it an addi­tive process, a sub­trac­tive process, one that must unfold in space and time, or one that’s imma­te­r­i­al and not exist­ing until the moment it’s per­formed and then dis­ap­pear­ing as soon as it’s over,” says Sarah Green. “Girl with Bal­loon was one art­work, and now it’s anoth­er that came into being through a pub­lic auc­tion but which still very much has a mate­r­i­al pres­ence, because the object was­n’t destroyed — it’s only half-shred­ded — and since it was can­vas going through, the remain­ing fringe is pret­ty sta­ble.” In a sense, then, even this self-destruc­t­ing art­work nev­er real­ly self-destruc­t­ed. So what, in artis­tic terms, actu­al­ly hap­pened to it? We may con­tin­ue argu­ing about it for years, but it will always come back to the shred­ding itself — an event reliv­able at any time in Banksy’s “direc­tor’s cut” video just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Banksy Shreds His $1.4 Mil­lion Paint­ing at Auc­tion, Tak­ing a Tra­di­tion of Artists Destroy­ing Art to New Heights

When Robert Rauschen­berg Asked Willem De Koon­ing for One of His Paint­ings … So That He Could Erase It

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

The Art Assign­ment: Learn About Art & the Cre­ative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

What Are the Most Influential Books Written by Scholars in the Last 20 Years?: Leading Academics Pick “The New Canon”

in Books | November 7th, 2018

It’s a fraught time to be an aca­d­e­m­ic. Bud­gets have been slashed, depart­ments dec­i­mat­ed, polit­i­cal bat­tles sen­sa­tion­al­ized by par­ti­san oppor­tunists, social media posts inten­si­fied into test cas­es for speech. Yet as cor­po­ratism and cul­ture wars have pushed their way into acad­e­mia in the past twen­ty plus years, more schol­ar­ship has seemed to make its way out into the main­stream, with books by aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­ans like Eric Fon­er and Ibram X. Ken­di, lit­er­ary schol­ars like Stephen Green­blatt and bell hooks, soci­ol­o­gists like Robert Put­nam, sci­en­tists like Richard Dawkins, econ­o­mists like Thomas Piket­ty, legal schol­ars like Michelle Alexan­der, and so on, top­ping best­seller lists and win­ning Nation­al Book Awards.

Such books dis­till dif­fi­cult ideas with­out dumb­ing them down, in acces­si­ble and often urgent prose. Their pop­u­lar­i­ty speaks to how they address the press­ing issues of their times, and under­cuts the stereo­type of aca­d­e­mics as jar­gon-spew­ing, out-of-touch inhab­i­tants of ivory tow­ers. And they often have the pow­er to not only rad­i­cal­ly alter pub­lic dis­course, but to inspire mass move­ments and shift pub­lic pol­i­cy.

Most of the more than 15,000 aca­d­e­m­ic books pub­lished each year—by uni­ver­si­ty press­es or tiny independents—reach only “their core audi­ence of dis­ci­pli­nary spe­cial­ists.” A few res­onate out­side their fields yet still fail to find an audi­ence out­side high­er edu­ca­tion cir­cles (nor are they real­ly meant to).

But some books by schol­ars, like those by the authors named above, “enter the pub­lic con­scious­ness,” writes The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, and thus deserve to be described as “influ­en­tial” in a broad sense, “like On the Ori­gin of Species or Das Kap­i­tal or The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams,” as Yale pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy Paul Bloom writes (while also point­ing out that none of these books’ authors were pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics). Under the ban­ner of form­ing a “New Canon,” the Chron­i­cle asked Bloom and a num­ber of oth­er scholars—including Deb­o­rah Tan­nen, pro­fes­sor of lin­guis­tics and author of sev­er­al best-sell­ing pop­u­lar books—to name what they believed were the most influ­en­tial schol­ar­ly books of the past 20 years.

Each respon­dent was asked “to select books—academic or not, but writ­ten by scholars—from with­in or out­side their own fields.” Each wrote a brief defense of their choice and, in some cas­es, of their cri­te­ria for “influ­ence.” You can read these blurbs at the Chron­i­cle’s site, and just below, see a full list of the picks. Some of the books, the Chron­i­cle con­cedes, fall “slight­ly out­side our time frame, but we includ­ed them any­way.”

Some of them are typ­i­cal­ly aca­d­e­m­ic works, like Mark Greif’s choice of Eve Kosof­sky Sedgwick’s Touch­ing Feel­ing, a book unlike­ly to inspire a Net­flix doc­u­men­tary. Oth­ers, like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, an impe­tus for Ava DuVernay’s 13th, were writ­ten for the widest of read­er­ships. Do these dis­tinc­tions make books like Alexan­der more “influ­en­tial” than those like Sedgewick’s? It all depends, I sup­pose, on what we mean by the word—and by what, or whom, or how, or why, or how many we think need to be influ­enced.

The Bet­ter Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Bowl­ing Alone: The Col­lapse and Revival of Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty, by Robert Put­nam

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incar­cer­a­tion in the Age of Col­or­blind­ness, by Michelle Alexan­der

The His­to­ry Man­i­festo, by Jo Gul­di and David Armitage

Freaks of For­tune: The Emerg­ing World of Cap­i­tal­ism and Risk in Amer­i­ca, Jonathan Levy

What Art Is, by Arthur Dan­to

Homo Deus: A Brief His­to­ry of Tomor­row, by Yuval Noah Harari

Killing the Black Body: Race, Repro­duc­tion, and the Mean­ing of Lib­er­ty, by Dorothy Roberts

The Feel­ing of What Hap­pens: Body and Emo­tion in the Mak­ing of Con­scious­ness, by Anto­nio R. Dama­sio

Pay­ing for the Par­ty: How Col­lege Main­tains Inequal­i­ty, by Eliz­a­beth A. Arm­strong and Lau­ra T. Hamil­ton

A Brief His­to­ry of NeoLib­er­al­ism, by David Har­vey

Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry: The Key Writ­ings That Formed The Move­ment, by Kim­ber­le Cren­shaw and Neil Gotan­da

The Rest­less Clock: A His­to­ry of the Cen­turies-Long Argu­ment over What Makes Liv­ing Things Tick, by Jes­si­ca Riskin

Touch­ing Feel­ing: Affect, Ped­a­gogy, Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty, by Eve Kosof­sky Sedg­wick

Ella Bak­er and the Black Free­dom Move­ment: A Rad­i­cal Demo­c­ra­t­ic Vision, by Bar­bara Rans­by

Truth and Truth­ful­ness: An Essay in Geneal­o­gy, by Bernard Williams

War Pow­ers: How the Impe­r­i­al Pres­i­den­cy Hijacked the Con­sti­tu­tion, by Peter Irons

Age of Frac­ture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Chore­og­ra­phy of Cit­i­zen­ship, by Daniel T. Rodgers

The Arg­onauts, by Mag­gie Nel­son

Read about all of the books at the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 20 Most Influ­en­tial Aca­d­e­m­ic Books of All Time: No Spoil­ers

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

74 Essen­tial Books for Your Per­son­al Library: A List Curat­ed by Female Cre­atives

Umber­to Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Top 100 Foreign-Language Films of All-Time, According to 209 Critics from 43 Countries

in Film | November 6th, 2018

What qual­i­fies as a “for­eign-lan­guage film” is in the ear of the behold­er, even if the glob­al dom­i­nance of Hol­ly­wood effec­tive­ly makes the cat­e­go­ry refer to any film in a lan­guage oth­er than Eng­lish. The sheer cul­tur­al and lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty in world cin­e­ma can seem to ren­der the term too all-encom­pass­ing to be of much crit­i­cal use. From the point of view of cinema’s purest, ear­li­est aspirations—to be an inter­na­tion­al visu­al lan­guage that tran­scends lin­guis­tic barriers—emphasizing spo­ken lan­guage dif­fer­ences can seem to miss the point of filmic art.

On the oth­er hand, these days mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar pop­corn block­busters are cre­at­ed with inter­na­tion­al audi­ences fore­most in mind. But that impulse, too—purely, venal­ly, commercial—doesn’t begin to get at what makes film both a cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic and a uni­ver­sal medi­um.

We go to the movies to be enter­tained, but also to be shocked, sur­prised, intrigued, to be let in on the lives of peo­ple we might nev­er meet. Inter­na­tion­al film, even in its most exper­i­men­tal devi­a­tions, respects the uni­ver­sal con­ven­tions that give audi­ences entry to those lives, no mat­ter what lan­guage they hear.

It is no emp­ty say­ing that “the lan­guage of film is uni­ver­sal,” as the BBC writes in the intro­duc­tion to its list of “The 100 Great­est For­eign-Lan­guage Films.” Nor is it con­tra­dic­to­ry to also point out that “the cin­e­ma of an indi­vid­ual nation is inevitably tied to its unique iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry.” The lat­ter qual­i­ty is what makes non-West­ern film chal­leng­ing, even for­bid­ding, for view­ers with more insu­lar per­spec­tives. The for­mer is what makes world cin­e­ma acces­si­ble to them nonethe­less.

If you’ve some­how avoid­ed see­ing some of the world’s great­est “for­eign-lan­guage films”—for rea­sons of sub­ti­tle-aver­sion or oth­er­wise, it’s nev­er too late to over­come your resis­tance and dis­cov­er how the cul­tur­al rich­ness of world cin­e­ma still speaks an inter­na­tion­al lan­guage. And you can hard­ly go wrong with the BBC list as a guide. Com­piled by 209 crit­ics from 43 dif­fer­ent coun­tries who speak a total of 41 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, the list seems about as inclu­sive as it gets, with some qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

“French can claim to be the inter­na­tion­al lan­guage of acclaimed cin­e­ma,” with 27 of the high­est-rat­ed films in that lan­guage, “fol­lowed by 12 in Man­darin, and 11 each in Ital­ian and Japan­ese.” A full quar­ter of the list of films come from East Asia—Japan, Chi­na, Tai­wan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. “If there’s any­thing dis­ap­point­ing about the final list,” the BBC notes, “it’s the pauci­ty of films direct­ed or co-direct­ed by women,” just four out of 100. But female crit­ics made up 45 per­cent of the respon­dents.

Just below see the first ten films on the list. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa makes the top ten twice, with Sev­en Samu­rai at num­ber one and Rashomon com­ing in at num­ber four. Kuro­sawa “was loved by crit­ics every­where,” except, per­haps sur­pris­ing­ly, in Japan, where the six crit­ics who vot­ed “didn’t go for a sin­gle Kuro­sawa film between them,” a reminder that film may be uni­ver­sal but crit­i­cism is not. Or as the great John Car­pen­ter once put it, “In France, I’m an auteur. In Eng­land, I’m a hor­ror movie direc­tor. In Ger­many, I’m a film­mak­er. In the U.S., I’m a bum.”

You can dive into the full list of top 100 “for­eign-lan­guage” films at the BBC here.

  1. Sev­en Samu­rai (Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, 1954)
  2. Bicy­cle Thieves (Vit­to­rio de Sica, 1948)
  3. Tokyo Sto­ry (Yasu­jirô Ozu, 1953)
  4. Rashomon (Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, 1950)
  5. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
  6. Per­sona (Ing­mar Bergman, 1966)
  7. 8 1/2 (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1963)
  8. The 400 Blows (François Truf­faut, 1959)
  9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
  10. La Dolce Vita (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1960)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

The Top 100 Amer­i­can Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 62 Inter­na­tion­al Film Crit­ics

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Cen­tu­ry (So Far) Named by 177 Film Crit­ics

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Exhilarating Filmmaking of Robert Bresson Explored in Eight Video Essays

in Film | November 6th, 2018

“Who’s afraid of Robert Bres­son?” New York­er film crit­ic Antho­ny Lane once asked. “Me, for a start.” But he did­n’t mean that he dread­ed screen­ings of Au hasard Balt­haz­ar, Diary of a Coun­try Priest, A Man Escaped, The Dev­il, Prob­a­bly, or any oth­er acclaimed work in the auteur’s fil­mog­ra­phy. “It’s not that I don’t look for­ward to a Bres­son pic­ture,” Lane clar­i­fied. “It’s just that as I shuf­fle into the the­atre I feel like a pupil approach­ing the prin­ci­pal’s door, won­der­ing what crimes I may have com­mit­ted and how I must answer for them.”

Even now, 35 years after his final pic­ture, Bres­son intim­i­dates with his rig­or — rig­or of the moral vari­ety, cer­tain­ly, but even more so of the aes­thet­ic vari­ety — often described (not least by the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky) in the terms of asceti­cism. Nev­er­the­less, Indiewire offers a brief and friend­ly intro­duc­tion to his cin­e­ma in the three-minute video essay at the top of the post.

Just above, in “Robert Bres­son: The Essence of Cin­e­ma,” A‑Bit­ter­Sweet-Life gets deep­er into the Bres­son­ian sen­si­bil­i­ty by show­ing clips of his films along­side clips of him work­ing and speak­ing, all nar­rat­ed with his own words.

“I always like to see and hear the film before I shoot it, to come up with things by work­ing on my own, things from my mem­o­ry or imag­i­na­tion, even if I don’t end up film­ing them,” Bres­son says in one piece of inter­view footage. “These are often things I can’t come up with on the set, so I believe it’s impor­tant to cre­ate a sol­id ground­work, a set of con­straints with­in which the film will take shape. Because I’m aware of these con­straints, I can ask my actors, non­pro­fes­sion­al actors, to sur­prise me. Unlim­it­ed sur­pris­es but with­in a lim­it­ed con­text.”

Those worlds will sound famil­iar to any­one who has read Notes sur le ciné­matographe (var­i­ous­ly trans­lat­ed as Notes on Cin­e­matog­ra­phy or Notes on the Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er), Bres­son’s col­lec­tion of max­ims lay­ing out his view of his art. If obser­va­tions like “To set up a film is to bind per­sons to each oth­er and to objects by looks,” “Emp­ty the pond to get the fish,” and “Be sure of hav­ing used to the full all that is com­mu­ni­cat­ed by immo­bil­i­ty and silence” seem abstract on the page, Film­scalpel’s â€śNotes on Pick­pock­et” illus­trates their enor­mous rel­e­vance to the effec­tive­ness of Bres­son’s work by weav­ing them direct­ly into scenes of one of his best-known works.

Film schol­ar David Bor­d­well exam­ines the same movie, but takes a much less apho­ris­tic and much more tech­ni­cal tack, in “Con­struc­tive Edit­ing in Robert Bresson’s Pick­pock­et,” which con­tex­tu­al­izes Bres­son’s tech­nique of con­struc­tive edit­ing, or build­ing a space while show­ing only small pieces of it at a time, as opposed to “ana­lyt­i­cal edit­ing” that first estab­lish­es the entire space and then moves with­in it. Just above, crit­ic and well-known Bres­son enthu­si­ast James Quant breaks down the much lat­er L’Ar­gent â€” or at least its use of reflec­tions and rep­e­ti­tion, just the R in the longer “L’Ar­gent, A to Z” video essay Quandt cre­at­ed for the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion’s release of the film.

The video essay­ist Kog­o­na­da, now a respect­ed film­mak­er in his own right, has so far put out two trib­utes to Bres­son: “Hands of Bres­son” just above, which con­cen­trates on the direc­tor’s use of those body parts, and “Once There Was Every­thing,” about the great cin­e­mat­ic effect to which he put doors all through­out his career. â€śWhy should­n’t I put ten times more doors in my films if I feel like it?” the essay quotes him as say­ing. But then, the true fan knows that Bres­son could hard­ly have coun­te­nanced using even one more door than absolute­ly nec­es­sary — or one more of any­thing else, for that mat­ter.

In Bres­son’s world, to put it in dras­ti­cal­ly reduced terms, less is more: Julian Palmer’s short video essay above even takes that phrase as its title. Bres­son’s work has many virtues, few as name­able as their sim­plic­i­ty, but for the man him­self it always had to be just the right kind of sim­plic­i­ty. In Notes sur le ciné­matographe he iden­ti­fies two types: “The bad: sim­plic­i­ty as start­ing-point, sought too soon. The good: sim­plic­i­ty as end-prod­uct, rec­om­pense for years of effort.” Or, as he he writes else­where, “It is with some­thing clean and pre­cise that you will force the atten­tion of inat­ten­tive eyes and ears.” A cin­e­ma that has for­got­ten these lessons of Bres­son’s — now there’s a tru­ly fright­en­ing propo­si­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Doors Open onto Philo­soph­i­cal Mys­ter­ies in Robert Bresson’s Films: A Short Video Essay by Kog­o­na­da

Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Film­mak­ers: Bres­son, Anto­nioni, Felli­ni, and Oth­ers

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

The Sur­re­al Film­mak­ing of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling”

in Animation, Books, Literature | November 6th, 2018


My child­hood dis­cov­ery of Edward Gorey proved rev­e­la­to­ry. I rec­og­nized my own bewil­der­ment in the blank expres­sions of his obses­sive­ly-ren­dered Edwar­dian chil­dren. His char­ac­ters, impris­oned in starched col­lars and stays, stared at the world through hol­low eyes, struck dumb by alter­nat­ing cur­rents of absur­di­ty and hor­ror. Every young­ster with bud­ding goth and New Roman­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties found them­selves drawn into Gorey’s weird worlds. Con­fessed Goreyphiles like Tim Bur­ton and Neil Gaiman took much from a style Steven Kurutz describes as “camp-macabre, iron­ic-goth­ic or dark whim­sy.”

He gave his read­ers per­mis­sion to be odd and haunt­ed, and to laugh about it, but he nev­er seemed to have need­ed such per­mis­sion him­self. He was as sui gener­is as he was mys­te­ri­ous, the scowl­ing old­er gen­tle­man with the long white beard assumed the role of an anti-San­ta, bestow­ing gifts of guilt-free, soli­tary indul­gence in dark fan­ta­sy.

But the man him­self remained shroud­ed, and that was just as well. Learn­ing more about him as an adult, I have been struck by just how close­ly he resem­bles some of his char­ac­ters, or rather, by how much he was, in work and life, entire­ly him­self.

A fash­ion­ably book­ish her­mit and Wildean aes­thete, a man to whom, “by his own admis­sion… noth­ing hap­pened,” Gorey orga­nized his life in New York around read­ing, see­ing films, and attend­ing George Balanchine’s bal­lets. (He rarely missed a per­for­mance over the course of three decades, then moved to his famed Cape Cod house when Bal­an­chine died in the mid-80s.) “Despite being a life­long Anglophile, he made just one brief vis­it to Scot­land and Eng­land,” writes Kurutz, “his only trip abroad.”

In a Proust Ques­tion­naire he answered for Van­i­ty Fair, Gorey wrote that his favorite jour­ney was “look­ing out the win­dow.” The supreme love of his life, he wrote: his cats. Those beloved crea­tures are the sub­ject of the third episode of Goreytelling, at the top, an ani­mat­ed web series con­sist­ing of short excerpts from an upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary sim­ply titled Gorey, direct­ed by Christo­pher Seufert, who spent sev­er­al years record­ing his con­ver­sa­tions with Gorey. The very Gorey-like ani­ma­tions are by Ben­jamin and Jim Wick­ey.

If you’ve ever won­dered what Edward Gorey sound­ed like, won­der no more. Hear his solid­ly Mid­west­ern accent (Gorey grew up in Chica­go) as he describes the tra­vails of liv­ing with adorable, frus­trat­ed preda­tors who destroy the fur­ni­ture and throw them­selves on his draw­ing table, ruin­ing his work. Fur­ther up, he tells the sto­ry of a mummy’s head he kept wrapped up in his clos­et, and just above he tells a sto­ry about The Loathe­some Cou­ple a 1977 book he wrote based a series of real-life mur­ders of British chil­dren by a mar­ried cou­ple. “A lot peo­ple,” he says, would tell him “this one book of yours, I real­ly find a lit­tle… much.”

Goreyphiles out there, and they num­ber in the mil­lions, will thor­ough­ly enjoy these ani­ma­tions. Gorey the doc­u­men­tary promis­es to bring us even clos­er to the cur­mud­geon­ly author and artist. His life makes for a quirky series of vignettes, but ulti­mate­ly Gorey was a “Mag­el­lan of the imag­i­na­tion,” says cul­tur­al crit­ic and biog­ra­ph­er Mark Dery. “He jour­neyed vast­ly between his ears…. So that’s where you have to look for the life. On the psy­chic geog­ra­phy of his uncon­scious,” and in the pages of his over 100 sat­is­fy­ing­ly unset­tling books.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Alfred Hitch­cock Med­i­tates on Sus­pense & Dark Humor in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

The Out­siders: Lou Reed, Hunter S. Thomp­son, and Frank Zap­pa Reveal Them­selves in Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Ani­mat­ed Inter­views

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The “Most Secretive Library in the World”: The Future Library Will Collect 100 Original Manuscripts by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & More, to Be Read for the First Time in 2114

in Books, Libraries, Literature | November 5th, 2018

Should intel­li­gent life of some form or anoth­er still inhab­it the plan­et in the year 6939, such beings might come upon an “800-pound tube of an alloy of cop­per and chromi­um called Cupaloy” that was buried 50 feet beneath what was once Queens. The first time cap­sule, low­ered under the West­ing­house exhib­it at the 1939 New York World’s Fair con­tains “35 items one might find in any run-of-the-mill Smith fam­i­ly house­hold,” as Jin­woo Chong writes at Untapped Cities, “includ­ing copies of Life mag­a­zine, a Sears and Roe­buck cat­a­log, cig­a­rettes and seeds of wheat, corn, alfal­fa and soy.”

The Future Library, a time cap­sule-like project present­ly in the works, takes a very dif­fer­ent approach to the con­cept. “A for­est is grow­ing in Nor­way,” explains an intro­duc­to­ry video on cre­ator Katie Paterson’s web­site. “In 100 years it will become an anthol­o­gy of books.” The books that will be print­ed from 1,000 trees plant­ed in Nord­mar­ka, north of Oslo, will not, how­ev­er, trans­mit min­ing and nav­i­ga­tion­al instruc­tions, but a full range of human emo­tion and per­son­al expe­ri­ence. Or so we might assume. Unlike the 1939 time cap­sule, we’ll nev­er know what’s inside them.

Scot­tish artist Pater­son has planned a library of 100 cre­ative works of fic­tion, non-fic­tion, and poetry—one man­u­script sub­mit­ted every year until 2114, when she intends them all to be print­ed in 3,000 copies each and read for the first time. Almost none of us will be there to wit­ness the event, yet “the timescale is… not vast in cos­mic terms,” she says. “It is beyond our cur­rent lifes­pans, but close enough to come face to face with it, to com­pre­hend and rel­a­tivize,” unlike the incom­pre­hen­si­ble future of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or the far-off world for which West­ing­house designed their cap­sule.

Nonethe­less, tech­no­log­i­cal, and per­haps even evo­lu­tion­ary, change has increased expo­nen­tial­ly in the past sev­er­al decades, as have the pos­si­bil­i­ties for glob­al extinc­tion events. Mar­garet Atwood, the first author to sub­mit an unpub­lished, unread man­u­script to the Future Library in 2014, is char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly less than san­guine about the exis­tence of future read­ers for her man­u­script, enti­tled Scrib­bler Moon. “It’s very opti­mistic to believe that there will still be peo­ple in 100 years,” she says in the short video above, and “that those peo­ple will still be read­ing.” Atwood imag­ines a near-future that may not even rec­og­nize our time.

Which words that we use today will be dif­fer­ent, archa­ic, obso­lete? Which new words will have entered the lan­guage? We don’t know what foot­notes we will need. Will they have com­put­ers? Will they call them some­thing else? What will they think smart­phones are? Will that word still exist?

Writ­ers for the project are cho­sen by the Future Library’s board of trustees. After the can­ny selec­tion of Atwood, they chose the equal­ly on-the-nose David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, who calls the library “the Ark of Lit­er­a­ture.” It is a strange ark, filled with ani­mals few peo­ple liv­ing now will like­ly ever see. “The world’s most secre­tive library,” The Guardian calls it.  In 2016, Ice­landic nov­el­ist and poet SjĂłn sub­mit­ted his mys­te­ri­ous text. The fourth work came from Turk­ish nov­el­ist Elif Shafak, who named the project “a sec­u­lar act of faith.”

The lat­est writer cho­sen is Man Book­er-win­ning South Kore­an nov­el­ist Han Kang, who described the Future Library as a lit­er­al expres­sion of the writer’s thoughts on their duty to pos­ter­i­ty: “I can­not sur­vive 100 years from now, of course. No one who I love can sur­vive, either. This relent­less fact has made me reflect on the essen­tial part of my life. Why do I write? Who am I talk­ing to, when I write?” Did Jane Austen imag­ine her read­ers of 100 years lat­er? Could she ever have imag­ined us?

Not only is the Future Library an act of lit­er­ary faith, but it is an eco­log­i­cal one. “The next 96 years do not look promis­ing for the seedlings,” writes Merve Emre at The New York Times, “which are more vul­ner­a­ble than their ances­tors to all man­ner of man-made dis­as­ters.” The project sym­bol­i­cal­ly binds togeth­er the fates of the book and the trees, mak­ing “the phys­i­cal­i­ty of cul­ture pal­pa­ble by insist­ing that we con­front the long, labo­ri­ous process of pre­serv­ing lan­guage.”

In 2020, the col­lec­tion of man­u­scripts will be moved to a “Silent Room” in Oslo, a “womb-shaped cham­ber fac­ing the for­est, lined with wood from its trees.” Vis­i­tors can come and ven­er­ate these secre­tive future relics in their rib­bon-wrapped gray box­es. But their contents—should the ambi­tious endeav­or go as planned—will remain as elu­sive as the shape of our col­lec­tive future 100 years from now.

via NYTimes

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish”

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast