As the last cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions to come of age have redis­cov­ered, urban liv­ing has its ben­e­fits. One of those ben­e­fits is the abil­i­ty to keep an eye on your neigh­bors — quite lit­er­al­ly, giv­en a sit­u­a­tion of build­ings in close prox­im­i­ty, suf­fi­cient­ly large win­dows, and min­i­mal usage of drapes. Fortysome­thing Brook­lyn cou­ple Alli and Jacob find them­selves turned into voyeurs by just such a sit­u­a­tion in Mar­shall Cur­ry’s The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow, the Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Acad­e­my Awards. “Do they have jobs, or clothes?” asks Alli, over­come by the frus­tra­tion of look­ing after her and Jacob’s three young chil­dren. “All they do is host dance par­ties and sleep ’till noon and screw.”

You may rec­og­nize Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller, who play Alli and Jacob, from their appear­ances in Noah Baum­bach’s While We’re Young. That film, too, dealt with the envy New York Gen-Xers feel for seem­ing­ly more free­wheel­ing New York Mil­len­ni­als, but The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow takes it in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion.

Cur­ry based it on “The Liv­ing Room,” an episode of the sto­ry­telling inter­view pod­cast Love and Radio in which writer and film­mak­er Diana Weipert tells of all she saw when she enjoyed a sim­i­lar­ly clear view into the life of her own younger neigh­bors. “Am I sup­posed to have maybe respect­ed their pri­va­cy and just looked away?” Weipert asks, rhetor­i­cal­ly. “But it’s impos­si­ble because that’s the way the chairs face. They face the win­dow! I could­n’t have not seen them if I want­ed to.”

Then again, she adds, “I guess I could’ve not got­ten the binoc­u­lars.” That irre­sistible detail makes it into The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow as a sym­bol of Alli and Jacob’s sur­ren­der to their fas­ci­na­tion with the cou­ple across the street. “They’re like a car crash that you can’t look away from,” as Alli puts it. “Okay, a beau­ti­ful, sexy, young car crash.” Yet both she and her hus­band, like any human beings with a par­tial view of oth­er human beings, can’t help but com­pare their cir­cum­stances unfa­vor­ably with those seen from afar. Even­tu­al­ly, as in “The Liv­ing Room,” the twen­tysome­things expe­ri­ence a rever­sal of for­tune, chang­ing Alli and Jacob’s view of them. They also regain the view of them­selves they’d lost amid all their voyeurism — enough of it to make them for­get that the observers can also be observed.

The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Father and Daugh­ter: An Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Film

The Last Farm: An Oscar Nom­i­nat­ed Short Film

Watch A Sin­gle Life: An Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short About How Vinyl Records Can Take Us Mag­i­cal­ly Through Time

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.

James Pogue in the Baf­fler recent­ly lament­ed the rise of “share­able writ­ing,” man­i­fest in a now-com­mon breed of arti­cle both “easy for pub­lish­ers to repro­duce” and for read­ers to absorb. Share­abil­i­ty requires, above all, that pieces “be sim­ple to describe and pack­age online.” This in con­trast to the writ­ing pub­lished by, say, The New York­er in decades past. “Every time I have a rea­son to pull up a piece from the archives, I am shocked at how strange and out­ré the old­er pieces read — less like work from a dif­fer­ent mag­a­zine than doc­u­ments from an alien soci­ety.” That alien soci­ety pro­vides the back­drop for Wes Ander­son­’s next fea­ture film The French Dis­patch, whose trail­er has just come out.

Any­one who watch­es one of Ander­son­’s films will sus­pect him of lov­ing all things mid-cen­tu­ry — that is to say, the arti­facts of life as it was lived in the decades fol­low­ing the Sec­ond World War, espe­cial­ly in west­ern Europe. This love comes through in the look and feel of even Ander­son­’s ear­li­er pic­tures, like Rush­more and The Roy­al Tenen­baums, whose sto­ries osten­si­bly take place in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca. But in recent years Ander­son has gone in for increas­ing­ly intri­cate peri­od pieces, set­ting Moon­rise King­dom in mid-1960s New Eng­land and The Grand Budapest Hotel in the years 1932, 1968, and 1985, all in the imag­ined Euro­pean coun­try of Zubrowka. The French Dis­patch takes place in the 1960s in the very real Euro­pean coun­try of France, but a fic­tion­al town called “Ennui-sur-Blasé” that allows Ander­son to con­jure up a mid-20th-cen­tu­ry France of the mind.

The mid-cen­tu­ry objects of Ander­son­’s love include The New York­er, a mag­a­zine he’s read and col­lect­ed since his teen years. The influ­ence of that love on The French Dis­patch has not gone unno­ticed at the cur­rent New York­er. A piece pub­lished there offer­ing stills of Ander­son­’s new film describes it as “about the doings of a fic­tion­al week­ly mag­a­zine that looks an awful lot like — and was, in fact, inspired by — The New York­er. The edi­tor and writ­ers of this fic­tion­al mag­a­zine, and the sto­ries it publishes—three of which are dra­ma­tized in the film — are also loose­ly inspired by The New York­er.” Head­ing the tit­u­lar dis­patch is Arthur How­itzer, Jr., played (nat­u­ral­ly) by Bill Mur­ray and inspired by New York­er found­ing edi­tor Harold Ross. Owen Wilson’s Herb­saint Saz­er­ac is “a writer whose low-life beat mir­rors Joseph Mitchell’s.” Jef­frey Wright as Roe­buck Wright, “a mashup of James Bald­win and A. J. Liebling, is a jour­nal­ist from the Amer­i­can South who writes about food.”

Oth­er reg­u­lar Ander­son play­ers include Adrien Brody’s Julian Cadazio, an art deal­er “mod­elled on Lord Duveen, who was the sub­ject of a six-part New York­er Pro­file by S. N. Behrman, in 1951.” Con­sid­er, for a moment, that there was a time when a major mag­a­zine would pub­lish a six-part pro­file of a British art deal­er who had died more than a decade before — and when such a piece of writ­ing would draw both con­sid­er­able atten­tion and acclaim. There are those who crit­i­cize as mis­placed Ander­son­’s appar­ent nos­tal­gia for times, places, and cul­tures like the one The French Dis­patch will bring to the screen this sum­mer. But here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, inun­dat­ed as we are by what Pogue calls the “large­ly voice­less and pre­cise­ly for­mu­la­ic” writ­ing of even respectable pub­li­ca­tions, can we begrudge the film­mak­er his yearn­ing for those bygone days? The only thing miss­ing back then, it might seem to us fans, was Wes Ander­son movies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

Watch Wes Anderson’s Charm­ing New Short Film, Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Star­ring Jason Schwartz­man

Watch the New Trail­er for Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Film, Isle of Dogs, Inspired by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

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.

There’s been a lot of talk about the blur­ring of nation­al and lin­guis­tic bound­aries at the Acad­e­my Awards this year. Have we entered a new era of moviemak­ing inter­na­tion­al­ism? “His­to­ry, that nev­er-fail­ing fount of irony,” writes Antho­ny Lane at The New York­er, “may be of assis­tance at this point.” When Louis B. May­er first pro­posed the Acad­e­my in 1927 at the Ambas­sador Hotel in Los Ange­les, it was to be called the Inter­na­tion­al Acad­e­my of Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences. “The word ‘Inter­na­tion­al’ didn’t last long. It smacked of places oth­er than Amer­i­ca, so it had to go.”

As every stu­dent of the medi­um knows, how­ev­er, not only have var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al styles dom­i­nat­ed film since its incep­tion, but so too have var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic languages—among them the pro­duc­tion of abstract “visu­al music” films like those pio­neered by Ger­man-Amer­i­can artist and film­mak­er Oskar Fischinger, who worked on the spe­cial effects for Fritz Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon, cre­at­ed sev­er­al dozen short films, and inspired Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia.

Fischinger’s work also inspired anoth­er, far less famous Amer­i­can film­mak­er, Mary Ellen Bute, a Hous­ton-born, Yale-edu­cat­ed ani­ma­tor and exper­i­men­tal direc­tor who “pro­duced over a dozen short abstract ani­ma­tions between the 1930s to the 1950s,” notes Ubuweb, “set to clas­si­cal music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with col­or­ful forms, ele­gant design and spright­ly, dance-like rhythms.” See sev­er­al of her short films above and below.

Bute col­lab­o­rat­ed with many promi­nent cre­ators, includ­ing com­pos­er Joseph Schillinger, musi­cian and inven­tor Thomas Wil­fred, Leon Theremin, ani­ma­tor and direc­tor Nor­man McLaren, and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ted Nemeth, whom she mar­ried in 1940.

The films in Bute’s See­ing Sound series are “like a mar­riage of high mod­ernism and Mer­rie Melodies”—and the shorts proved so com­pelling they were screened reg­u­lar­ly at Radio City Music Hall in the 1930s.

Like Fischinger’s, her ani­ma­tions spoke a pure­ly abstract lan­guage, though they some­times ges­tured at sto­ry (as in “Spook Sport,” fur­ther down). “We need a new kinet­ic, visu­al art form—one that unites sound, col­or and form,” she told the New York World-Telegram in 1936. She con­ceived of sounds and images as work­ing in har­mo­ny or coun­ter­point, along the same math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples. “I want­ed to manip­u­late light to pro­duce visu­al com­po­si­tions in time con­ti­nu­ity,” Bute wrote in 1954, “much as a musi­cian manip­u­lates sound to pro­duce music.”

The lan­guage of film has nar­rowed con­sid­er­ably in the decades since Bute made her films, it seems, exclud­ing exper­i­ments like visu­al music. In so doing, con­tem­po­rary cinema—with its reliance on nar­ra­tive plot­ting and dia­logue as its cen­tral engines—has exclud­ed a sig­nif­i­cant part of the human expe­ri­ence. In her last film, her only fea­ture, Bute adapt­ed pas­sages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book that turned lit­er­a­ture into music as Bute had sought to do with film.

She opens her Finnegans Wake with title cards bear­ing quo­ta­tions from Joyce, includ­ing a quote she also used to explain her tran­si­tion from abstract, ani­mat­ed film to a movie with actors and sets: “One great part of every human exis­tence is passed in a state which can­not be ren­dered sen­si­ble by the use of wide-awake lan­guage, cut-and-dry gram­mar and go-ahead plot.” Such mod­ernist abstrac­tion in cin­e­ma, Bute wrote, adds up to more than “nov­el­ty,” a word some­times used to describe her work to the pub­lic. Like Joyce, her use of abstrac­tion, she wrote, “is about the essence of our Being.”

via @reaktorplayer

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Exper­i­men­tal Film with Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Music Fea­tur­ing Anaïs Nin (1952)

Watch the Med­i­ta­tive Cinepo­em “H20”: A Land­mark Avant-Garde Art Film from 1929

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