It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having originated in Asia, that religion — or philosophy, or way of life, or whatever you prefer to call it — now has adherents all over the world. Modern-day Buddhists need not make an arduous journey in order to undertake an even more arduous course of study under a recognized master; nor are the forms of Buddhism they practice always recognizable to the layman. What’s more surprising is that the transplantation into and hybridization with other cultures that has brought about so many novel strains of Buddhism was going on even in the ancient world.
Take, for example, the “Greco-Buddhism” described in the Religion for Breakfast video above, the story of which involves a variety of fascinating figures both universally known and relatively obscure. The most famous of all of them would be Alexander the Great, who, as host Andrew Henry puts it, “conquered a massive empire stretching from Greece across central Asia all the way to the Indus River, Hellenizing the populations along the way.”
But “the cultural exchange didn’t just go one way,” as evidenced by the still-new Buddhist religion also spreading in the other direction, illustrated by pieces of text and works of art clearly shaped by both civilizational currents.
Other major players in Greco-Buddhism include the philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, who traveled with Alexander and took ideas of the suspension of judgment from India’s “gymnosophists”; Ashoka, emperor of the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC, an avowed Buddhist who renounced violence for compassion (and proselytization); and King Menander, “the most famous Greek who converted to Buddhism,” who appears as a character in an early Buddhist text. It can still be difficult to say for sure exactly who believed what in that period, but it’s not hard to identify resonances between Buddhist principles, broadly speaking, and those of such widely known ancient Greek schools of thought as Stoicism. Both of those belief systems now happen to have a good deal of currency in Silicon Valley, though what legacy they’ll leave to be discovered in its ruins a couple millennia from now remains to be seen.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the literary zaniness of The Muppet Show and the scientific enthusiasm of Cosmos. The “ship of the imagination” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot may in fact owe something to the episode above, one of nine, directed by none other than It’s A Wonderful Life’s Frank Capra. “Strap on your wits and hop on your magic carpet,” begins the special, “You’ve got one, you know: Your imagination.” As a guide for our imagination, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Raysenlists the humanities—specifically three puppets representing Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and, somewhat incongruously for its detective theme, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who plays the foil as an incurious spoilsport. The show’s host, Frank Baxter (“Dr. Research”) was actually a professor of English at UCLA and appears here with Richard Carlson, explaining scientific concepts with confidence.
The one-hour films became very popular as tools of science education, but there are good reasons—other than their datedness or Dr. Baxter’s expertise—to approach them critically. At times, the degree of speculation indulged by Baxter and the writers strains credulity. For example, writes Geoff Alexander in Academic Films for the Classroom: A History, 1958’s The Unchained Goddess (above) “introduces the viewer to bizarre concepts such as the possibility of ‘steering’ hurricanes away from land by creating bio-hazards such as ocean borne oil-slicks and introducing oil-based ocean fires.” These grim, fossil fuel industry-friendly scenarios nonetheless openly acknowledged the possibility of man-made climate change and looked forward to solar energy.
Along with some dystopian weirdness, the series also contains a good deal of explicit Christian proselytizing, thanks to Capra. As a condition for taking the job, “the renowned director would be allowed to embed religious messages in the films.” As Capra himself said to AT&T president Cleo F. Craig:
If I make a science film, I will have to say that scientific research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit… I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.
At times, writes Alexander, “the religious perspective is taken to extremes,” as in the first episode, Our Mr. Sun, which begins with a quotation from Psalms and admonishes “viewers who would dare to question the causal relationship between solar energy and the divinity.” The Unchained Goddess, above, is the fourth in the series, and Capra’s last.
Afterward, a director named Owen Crump took over duties on the next four episodes. His films, writes Alexander, “did not overtly proselytize” and “relied less on animated characters interacting with Dr. Baxter.” (Watch the Crump-directed Gateways to the Mind above, a more sober-minded, yet still strangely off-kilter, inquiry into the five senses.) The last film, The Restless Sea was produced by Walt Disney and directed by Les Clark, and starred Disney himself and Baxter’s replacement, Sterling Holloway.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest comedy stars of the silent era, but as it happened, they never shared the screen until well into the reign of sound. In fact, their collaboration didn’t come about until 1952, the same year that Singin’ in the Rain dramatized the already distant-feeling advent of talking pictures. That hit musical deals with once-famous artists coping with a changing world, and so, in its own way, does Limelight, the film that finally brought Chaplin and Keaton together, dealing as it does with a washed-up music-hall star in the London of 1914.
A specialist in downtrodden protagonists, Chaplin — who happened to have made his own transition from vaudeville to motion pictures in 1914 — naturally plays that starring role. Keaton appears only late in the film, as an old partner of Chaplin’s character who takes the stage with him to perform a duet at a benefit concert that promises the salvation of their careers. In reality, this scene had some of that same appeal for Keaton himself, who had yet to recover financially or professionally after a ruinous divorce in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and had been struggling for traction on the new medium of television.
Though Limelight may be a sound film, and Chaplin and Keaton’s scene may be a musical number, what they execute together is, for all intents and purposes, a work of silent comedy. Chaplin plays the violin and Keaton plays the piano, but before either of them can get a note out of their instruments, they must first deal with a series of technical mishaps and wardrobe malfunctions. This is in keeping with a theme both performers essayed over and over again in their silent heyday: that of the human being made inept by the complications of an inhuman world.
But of course, Chaplin and Keaton’s characters usually found their ways to triumph at least temporarily over that world in the end, and so it comes to pass in Limelight — moments before the hapless violinist himself passes on, the victim of an onstage heart attack. In the real world, both of these two icons from a bygone age had at least another act ahead of them, Chaplin with more films to direct back in his native England and Europe, and Keaton as a kind of living legend for hire, called up whenever Hollywood needed a shot of what had been rediscovered — not least thanks to TV’s re-circulation of old movies — as the magic of silent pictures.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As a New York City subway rider, I am constantly exposed to public health posters. More often than not these feature a photo of a wholesome-looking teen whose sober expression is meant to convey hindsight regret at having taken up drugs, dropped out of school, or forgone condoms. They’re well-intended, but boring. I can’t imagine I’d feel differently were I a member of the target demographic. The Chelsea Mini Storage ads’ saucy regional humor is far more entertaining, as is the train wreck design approach favored by the ubiquitous Dr. Jonathan Zizmor.
Public health posters were able to convey their designated horrors far more memorably before photos became the graphical norm. Take Salvador Dalí’s sketch (below) and final contribution (top) to the WWII-era anti-venereal disease campaign.
Which image would cause you to steer clear of the red light district, were you a young soldier on the make?
A portrait of a glum fellow soldier (“If I’d only known then…”)?
Or a grinning green death’s head, whose choppers double as the frankly exposed thighs of two faceless, loose-breasted ladies?
Created in 1941, Dalí’s nightmare vision eschewed the sort of manly, militaristic slogan that retroactively ramps up the kitsch value of its ilk. Its message is clear enough without:
Stick it in—we’ll bite it off!
(Thanks to blogger Rebecca M. Bender for pointing out the composition’s resemblance to the vagina dentata.)
As a feminist, I’m not crazy about depictions of women as pestilential, one-way deathtraps, but I concede that, in this instance, subverting the girlie pin up’s explicitly physical pleasures might well have had the desired effect on horny enlisted men.
A decade later Dalí would collaborate with photographer Philippe Halsman on “In Voluptas Mors,” stacking seven nude models like cheerleaders to form a peacetime skull that’s far less threatening to the male figure in the lower left corner (in this instance, the very dapper Dalí himself).
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
One often hears that there’s no money to be made in music anymore. But then, there was no money to be made in music when Bob Dylan started his career either—at least according to Bob Dylan. “If you could just support yourself, you were doin’ good,” he says in an interview clip included in the short compilation above. “There wasn’t this big billion-dollar industry that it is today, and people do go into it just to make money.” He appears to have made that remark in the late nineteen-eighties (to judge by his Hearts of Fire look), by which time both the industry and nature of popular music had evolved into very different beasts than they were in the early sixties, when he made his recording debut.
“Machines are making most of the music now,” Dylan adds. “Have you noticed that all songs sound the same?” It’s a complaint people had four decades ago, thinking of synthesizers and sequencers, and it’s one they have today, with streaming algorithms and artificial-intelligence engines in mind.
Not that Dylan could be accused of failing to change up his sound, or even of refusing to acknowledge what advantages they offered to the individual musician: “You can have your own little band, like a one-man band, with these machines,” he admitted, however obvious the limitations of those machines at the time. But he understood that this new convenience, like that introduced by so many other technological developments, came at a cultural price.
Even in the seventies, recording was becoming perilously easy. In the sixties, no matter if you were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or indeed Bob Dylan, “you played around, you paid enough dues to make a record.” But bands of the following generation “expect to make a record right away, without anybody even hearing them.” As for the solo acts, “if you’re a good-looking kid, or you’ve got a good voice, they expect you to be able to do it all,” but “if you don’t have experience to go with it, you’re just going to be disposable,” a mere instrument of producers who took authorial charge over the records they oversaw. All these decades later, when it’s become easier than ever to find any kind of music we could possibly want, nobody must be less surprised than Bob Dylan to hear “so much mediocrity going on.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The epistemological nightmare we seem to be in, bombarded over our screens and speakers with so many moving-image messages per day, false and true, is at least in part due to the paralysis that we – scholars, journalists, and regulators, but also producers and consumers – are still exhibiting over how to anchor facts and truths and commonly accepted narratives in this seemingly most ephemeral of media. When you write a scientific paper, you cite the evidence to support your claims using notes and bibliographies visible to your readers. When you publish an article in a magazine or a journal or a book, you present your sources – and now when these are online often enough live links will take you there. But there is, as yet, no fully formed apparatus for how to cite sources within the online videos and television programs that have taken over our lives – no Chicago Manual of Style, no Associated Press Stylebook, no video Elements of Style. There is also no agreement on how to cite the moving image itself as a source in these other, older types of media.
The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, published by the MIT Press on February 25, 2025, looks to make some better sense of this new medium as it starts to inherit the mantle that print has been wearing for almost six hundred years. The book presents 34 QR codes that resolve to examples of iconic moving-image media, among them Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination (1963); America’s poet laureate Ada Límon reading her work on Zoom; the first-ever YouTube video shot by some of the company founders at the San Francisco Zoo in 2005; Darnella Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s murder; Richard Feynman’s physics lectures at Cornell; courseware videos from MIT, Columbia, and Yale; PBS documentaries on race and music; Wikileaks footage of America at war; January 6 footage of the 2021 insurrection; interviews with Holocaust survivors; films and clips from films by and interviews with Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut and others; footage of deep fake videos; and the video billboards on the screens now all over New York’s Times Square. The electronic edition takes you to their source platforms — YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, others — at the click of a link. The videos that you can play facilitate deep-dive discussions about how to interrogate and authenticate the facts (and untruths!) in and around them.
At a time when Trump dismisses the director of our National Archives and the Orwellian putsch against memory by the most powerful men in the world begins in full force, is it not essential to equip ourselves with proper methods for being able to cite truths and prove lies more easily in what is now the medium of record? How essential will it become, in the face of systematic efforts of erasure, to protect the evidence of criminal human depravity – the record of Nazi concentration camps shot by U.S. and U.K. and Russian filmmakers; footage of war crimes, including our own from Wikileaks; video of the January 6th insurrection and attacks at the American Capitol – even as political leaders try to scrub it all and pretend it never happened? We have to learn not only how to watch and process these audiovisual materials, and how to keep this canon of media available to generations, but how to footnote dialogue recorded, say, in a combat gunship over Baghdad in our histories of American foreign policy, police bodycam footage from Minneapolis in our journalism about civil rights, and security camera footage of insurrectionists planning an attack on our Capitol in our books about the United States. And how should we cite within a documentary a music source or a local news clip in ways that the viewer can click on or visit?
Just like footnotes and embedded sources and bibliographies do for readable print, we have to develop an entire systematic apparatus for citation and verification for the moving image, to future-proof these truths.
* * *
At the very start of the 20th century, the early filmmaker D. W. Griffith had not yet prophesied his own vision of the film library:
Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance, there will be long rows of boxes or pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to “read up” on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.
No one yet had said, as people would a century later, that video will become the new vernacular. But as radio and film quickly began to show their influence, some of our smartest critics began to sense their influence. In 1934, the art historian Erwin Panofsky, yet to write his major works on Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, could deliver a talk at Princeton and say:
Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 per cent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies, the social consequences would be catastrophic.
And in 1935, media scholars like Rudolf Arnheim and Walter Benjamin, alert to the darkening forces of politics in Europe, would begin to notice the strange and sometimes nefarious power of the moving image to shape political power itself. Benjamin would write in exile from Hitler’s Germany:
The crisis of democracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions governing the public presentation of politicians. Democracies [used to] exhibit the politician directly, in person, before elected representatives. The parliament is his public. But innovations in recording equipment now enable the speaker to be heard by an unlimited number of people while he is speaking, and to be seen by an unlimited number shortly afterward. This means that priority is given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment. […] This results in a new form of selection—selection before an apparatus—from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors.
At this current moment of champions and stars – and dictators again – it’s time for us to understand the power of video better and more deeply. Indeed, part of the reason that we sense such epistemic chaos, mayhem, disorder in our world today may be that we haven’t come to terms with the fact of video’s primacy. We are still relying on print as if it were, in a word, the last word, and suffering through life in the absence of citation and bibliographic mechanisms and sorting indices for the one medium that is governing more and more of our information ecosystem every day. Look at the home page of any news source and of our leading publishers. Not just MIT from its pole position producing video knowledge through MIT OpenCourseWare, but all knowledge institutions, and many if not most journals and radio stations feature video front and center now. We are living at a moment when authors, publishers, journalists, scholars, students, corporations, knowledge institutions, and the public are involving more video in their self-expression. Yet like 1906, before the Chicago Manual, or 1919 before Strunk’s little guidebook, we have had no published guidelines for conversing about the bigger picture, no statement about the importance of the moving-image world we are building, and no collective approach to understanding the medium more systematically and from all sides. We are transforming at the modern pace that print exploded in the sixteenth century, but still without the apparatus to grapple with it that we developed, again for print, in the early twentieth.
* * *
Public access to knowledge always faces barriers that are easy for us to see, but also many that are invisible. Video is maturing now as a field. Could we say that it’s still young? That it still needs to be saved – constantly saved – from commercial forces encroaching upon it that, if left unregulated, could soon strip it of any remaining mandate to serve society? Could we say that we need to save ourselves, in fact, from “surrendering,” as Marshall McLuhan wrote some 60 years ago now, “our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, [such that] we don’t really have any rights left”? Before we have irrevocably and permanently “leased our central nervous systems to various corporations”?
You bet we can say it, and we should. For most of the 130 years of the moving image, its producers and controllers have been elites—and way too often they’ve attempted with their control of the medium to make us think what they want us to think. We’ve been scared over most of these years into believing that the moving image rightfully belongs under the purview of large private or state interests, that the screen is something that others should control. That’s just nonsense. Unlike the early pioneers of print, their successors who formulated copyright law, and their successors who’ve gotten us into a world where so much print knowledge is under the control of so few, we – in the age of video – can study centuries of squandered opportunities for freeing knowledge, centuries of mistakes, scores of hotfooted missteps and wrong turns, and learn from them. Once we understand that there are other options, other roads not taken, we can begin to imagine that a very different media system is – was and is – eminently possible. As one of our great media historians has written, “[T]he American media system’s development was the direct result of political struggle that involved suppressing those who agitated for creating less market-dominated media institutions. . . . [That this] current commercial media system is contingent on past repression calls into question its very legitimacy.”
The moving image is likely to facilitate the most extraordinary advances ever in education, scholarly communication, and knowledge dissemination. Imagine what will happen once we realize the promise of artificial intelligence to generate mass quantities of scholarly video about knowledge – video summaries by experts and machines of every book and article ever written and of every movie and TV program ever produced.
We just have to make sure we get there. We had better think as a collective how to climb out of what journalist Hanna Rosin calls this “epistemic chasm of cuckoo.” And it doesn’t help – although it might help our sense of urgency – that the American president has turned the White House Oval Office into a television studio. Recall that Trump ended his February meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy by saying to all the cameras there, “This’ll make great television.”
The Moving Image: A User’s Manual exists for all these reasons, and it addresses these challenges. And these challenges have everything to do with the general epistemic chaos we find ourselves in, with so many people believing anything and so much out there that is untrue. We have to solve for it.
As the poets like to say, the only way out is through.
–Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world. His new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, is just out from the MIT Press.
Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mastery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skepticism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent picture “a universal means of expression,” whereas the talkies, as they were then known, “necessarily have a limited field.” Nevertheless, he was too astute a reader of public tastes to believe he could stay silent forever, though he only began to speak onscreen on his own terms — literally, in the case of Modern Times. In that celebrated film, his iconic character the Tramp sings a song, but does so in an unintelligible hash of cod French and Italian, and yet still somehow gets his meaning across, just as he had in all his silent movies before.
That scene appears in the CinemaStix video essay above on “the moment the most famous silent comedian opens his mouth,” which comes not in Modern Times but The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s 1940 send-up of the then-ascendant Adolf Hitler. In it, Chaplin plays two roles: the narrow-mustachioed Hitler parody Adenoid Hynkel who “speaks” in a tonally and rhythmically convincing ersatz German, and a Tramp-like Jewish Barber interned by Hynkel’s regime whose only lines come at the film’s very end.
Dressed as the dictator in order to escape the camp, the Barber suddenly finds himself giving a speech at a victory parade. When he speaks, he famously does so in Chaplin’s natural voice, expressing sentiments that sound like Chaplin’s own: inveighing against “machine men with machine minds,” making a plea for liberty, brotherhood, and goodwill toward men.
Though it may have been Chaplin’s biggest box-office hit, The Great Dictator isn’t his most critically acclaimed picture. When it was made, the United States had yet to enter the war, and the full nature of what the Nazis were doing in Europe hadn’t yet come to light. This film’s relationship with actual historical events thus feels uneasy, as if Chaplin himself wasn’t sure how light or heavy a tone to strike. Even his climactic speech was only created as a replacement for an intended final dance sequence, though he did work at it, writing and revising over a period of months. It’s more than a little ironic that The Great Dictator is mainly remembered for a scene in which a comic genius to whom words were nothing as against image and movement forgoes all the techniques that made him a star — and indeed, forgoes comedy itself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies that 77 million Americans voted into the White House a criminal reality TV star from NBC, one groomed by a reality TV producer from CBS, who then appointed his Cabinet from Fox and X and World Wrestling Entertainment?
It’s a long story, but the moving image had something to do with it – which is to say, the way we have let television, video, and screen culture run almost entirely unregulated, purely for profit, and without regard to its impact on the minds of our citizens. And it’s no accident that the media and technology tycoons surrounding the President at his White House inauguration – from Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, TikTok, X, you name it – control the screens, networks, and technologies that propagate the lies we’re forced to inhale every day. He invited them.
What’s worse is that they accepted.
* * *
It’s a long story indeed – one that stretches back to the dawn of man, back tens of thousands of years to the time when our predecessors existed on Earth without a single written word between them. “Literacy,” the philosopher, Jesuit priest, and professor of literature Walter Ong has written, “is imperious.” It “tends to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought.” This arrogance, for Ong, is so overreaching because the written word – writing, text, and print generally – is actually such a brand-new phenomenon in the long history of man. Our species of Homo sapiens, Ong reminds us, has been around only for some 30,000 years; the oldest script, not even 6,000; the alphabet, less than four. Mesopotamian cuneiform dates from 3,500 BC; the original Semitic alphabet from only around 1,500 BC; Latin script, or the Roman alphabet that you’re reading now, from the seventh century BC. “Only after being on earth some 500,000 years (to take a fairly good working figure) did man move from his original oral culture, in which written records were unknown and unthought of to literacy.”
For most of human existence, we’ve communicated without print— and even without text. We’ve been speaking to one another. Not writing anything, not drawing a whole lot, but speaking, one to one, one to several, several to one, one to many, many to one. Those who consider writing, text, and print as “the paradigm of all discourse” thus need to “face the fact,” Ong says, that only the tiniest fraction of human languages has ever been written down – or ever will be. We communicate in other ways besides writing. Always have. Always will. Ong presses us to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of the “normal oral or oral- aural consciousness” and the original “noetic economy” of humankind, which conditioned our brains for our first 500,000 years – and which is at it once again. Sound and human movement around sound and pictures sustained us “long before writing came along.” “To say that language is writing is, at best, uninformed,” Ong says (a bit imperiously himself). “It provides egregious evidence of the unreflective chirographic and/or typographic squint that haunts us all.”
The unreflective chirographic squint. We squint, and we see only writing. Up to now, we’ve found truth and authority only in text versions of the word. But writing, when it, too, first appeared, was a brand-new technology, much as we regard cameras and microphones as brand- new technologies today. It was a new technology because it called for the use of new “tools and other equipment,” “styli or brushes or pens,” “carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood,” “as well as inks or paints, and much more.” It seemed so complicated and time- consuming, we even used to outsource it. “In the West through the Middle Ages and earlier” almost all those devoted to writing regularly used the services of a scribe because the physical labor writing involved – scraping and polishing the animal skin or parchment, whitening it with chalk, resharpening goose-quill pens with what we still call a pen-knife, mixing ink, and all the rest – interfered with thought and composition.
The 1400s changed all that. Gutenberg started printing on his press in Germany, in 1455. The great historians of print – Robert Darnton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Lucien Febvre, Anthony Grafton – tell us about how printing passed through patches of explosive growth, and how that growth was unnoticed at the time. Thirty years after Gutenberg cranked up his shop in Mainz, Germany had printers in only forty towns. By 1500, a thousand printing presses were in operation in Western Europe, and they had produced roughly 8 million books. But by the end of the 1500s, between 150 and 200 million books were circulating there.
Like ours, those early years, now 500 years ago, were full of chaos – the new technology seemed overwhelming. Harvard University Librarian Emeritus Robert Darnton has written, “When the printed word first appeared in France in 1470, it was so brand new, the state did not know what to make of it.” The monarchy (keep this in mind) “reacted at first by attempting to extinguish it. On January 13, 1535, Francis I decreed that anyone who printed anything would be hanged.” For the moving image today, with all of us on our iPhones, the modern cognate of hanging everyone recording or sharing video might seem extreme. But in the long view, we too, comparatively speaking, don’t yet know what to “make” of this new medium of ours.
That’s partly because it, too, is so young. The Lumiere brothers showed the first movie to public customers in France in 1895 – only 130 years ago. But today video is becoming the dominant medium in human communication. It accounts for most of our consumer internet traffic worldwide. The gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made now crosses the global internet every two minutes. Nearly a million minutes of video content cross global IP networks every sixty seconds. It would take someone – anyone – 5 million years to watch the amount of video that scoots across the internet each month. YouTube – YouTube alone – sees more than 1 billion viewers watching more than 5 billion videos on its platform every day. Video is here, and everywhere. It’s part of every sporting event, it’s at every traffic stop, it’s at every concert and in every courtroom. Twenty network cameras actively film the Super Bowl. The same number work Centre Court at Wimbledon. It’s in every bank, in every car, plane, and train. It’s in every pocket. It’s everywhere. For whatever you need. Dog training. Changing a tire. Solving a differential equation. Changing your mood.
It’s taken control. It’s just us who’ve been slow to realize it. Some 130 years into the life of the moving image, we are in what Elizabeth Eisenstein, writing about print, called the elusive transformation: it’s hard to see, but it’s there. If you picture an airplane flight across an ocean at night, you can sense it. As the sky darkens and dinner is served, the most noticeable thing about the plane is that almost everyone is sitting illuminated by the video screens in front of them. The screen and the speaker are now at the heart of how world citizens communicate. In many ways we are the passengers on this plane, relying no longer on the printed page, but on the screen and its moving images for much of the information we are receiving (and, increasingly, transmitting) about our world. The corruption and malfeasance and occasional achievements of our modern politicians; scientific experiments; technological developments; newscasts; athletic feats – the whole public record of the twenty-first century, in short – is all being recorded and then distributed through the lens, the screen, the microphone, and the speaker. Now text may be losing its hold (short as that hold has been) on our noetic imagination – especially its hold as the most authoritative medium, the most trustworthy medium, the medium of the contract, the last word, as it were.
Donald Trump and the greedy, cowardly technologists that surround him know it. They have the data; but they also intuit it. And they are clamping down on our access to knowledge even as the opposite seems true – which is that Apple, Netflix, Tiktok, and YouTube are making video ever freer, and more ubiquitous.
This marks the end of Part 1 of Peter Kaufman’s essay. You can now find Part 2 here.
–Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world. His new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, is just out from the MIT Press.
Robots seem to have been much on the public mind back in the nineteen-thirties. Matt Novak at Paleofuture gives the example of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in newspaper stories about a robot that had done the unthinkable: a mechanical man had shot its inventor.” Despite being a typical example of the experimental-fictive journalistic style of that era, it nevertheless reflected “a time when robots represented something fearful,” and were indeed “a potent symbol of runaway automation and job loss.” Novak cites the statistic that “about 25% of jobless Americans thought automation was to blame for their unemployment by the end of the Great Depression.”
Not much more than a decade after the very term robot was coined, in Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., robots were in need of some good PR. Enter Shell Oil, which had not only the resources to commission an eye-catching advertising film, but also a robot-shaped emblem familiar to many consumers.
“The Birth of the Robot,” which made its theatrical debut in 1935, tells that character’s origin story in hyper-saturated Gasparcolor, beginning with the very motor of existence–turned by the hand of Old Father Time–while Venus plays her music out toward the stars. We then descend to Earth to find a motorist happily careening around the Egyptian desert, not just between but over the Pyramids. (Tourism must have been different in those days.)
Then a storm hits, at which point even the least attentive viewer will notice the striking characteristics of “The Birth of the Robot“ ‘s visual style. It was animated in stop motion by a New Zealander named Len Lye, who was already known for shorts like “A Colour Box” and “Kaleidoscope,” funded, respectively, by the United Kingdom’s General Post Office and Imperial Tobacco. Taking a considerable narrative and aesthetic step forward from those, Lye produces a charming, fanciful result from what was clearly a laborious process. Despite having been reduced to bones in the sand, our protagonist is eventually brought back to life by a few drops of Shell oil, albeit not in human but in humanoid robot form — and ready to show off a few moves that, today, would belong in a Boston Dynamics commercial.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Say what you want about YouTube’s negative effects (endless soy faces, influencers, its devious and fascist-leaning algorithms) but it has offered to creators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve been a fan of Adam Neely’s work. A jazz musician and a former student at both the Berklee College of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, his YouTube channel is a must for those with an interest in the how and why of music theory. If not for Neely’s talent and YouTube’s platform we wouldn’t have the above: a 30 minute (!) exploration of the bossa nova standard, “The Girl from Ipanema.” And it is worth every single minute. (Even the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim himself could not have convinced traditional television execs to give him that long an indulgence.)
Seeing we haven’t featured Neely on Open Culture before, let this be a great introduction, because this is one of his better videos. It also helps that the subject matter just happens to be one of the most covered standards in pop history.
Its legacy is one of lounge lizards and kitsch. Neely shows it being used as a punchline in The Blues Brothers and as mood music in V for Vendetta. I remember it being hummed by two pepperpots (Graham Chapman and John Cleese) in a Monty Python skit. And Neely gives us the “tl;dw” (“too long, didn’t watch”) summary up front: the song’s history concerns blues music, American cultural hegemony, and the influence of the Berklee College’s “The Real Book.” There’s also loads of music theory thrown in too, so it helps to know just a little going in.
Neely first peels back decades of elevator music covers to get to the birth of the song, and its multiple parents: the Afro-Brazilian music called Samba, the hip nightclubs of Rio de Janeiro during the 1950s, the hit film Black Orpheus which brought both samba and bossa nova (the “new wave”) to an international audience, Jobim and other musicians’ interest in American blues and jazz chords, and American interest from musicians like Stan Getz. All this is a back and forth circuit of influences that results in this song, which borrows its structure from Tin Pan Alley composers like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, and inserts a sad, self-pitying B‑section after two A‑section lyrics about a young woman passing by on a beach (lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, who also wrote the screenplay to Black Orpheus).
The key in which you play the song also reveals the cultural divide. Play it in F and you are taking sides with the Americans; play it in Db and you are keeping it real, Brazilian style. Neely breaks apart the melody and the chord sequences, pointing out its repetition (which makes it so catchy) but also its ambiguity, which explains endless YouTube videos of musicians getting the chord sequence wrong. And, what exactly *is* the true chord sequence? And how is it a riff on, of all things, Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”? Neely also shows the progression of various covers of the song, and what’s been added and what’s been deleted. Leaving things out, as he illustrates with a clip from Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lectures, is what gives art its magic.
There’s so much more to this 30 minute clip, but you really should watch the whole thing (and then hit subscribe to his channel). This essay is exactly what YouTube does best, and Neely is the best of teachers, a smart, self-deprecating guy who mixes intellect with humor. Plus, you’ll be humming the song for the rest of the day, just a bit more aware of the reason behind the ear worm.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Some remember the nineteen-nineties in America as the second coming of the nineteen-fifties. Whatever holes one can poke in that historical framing, it does feel strangely plausible inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Circular Sun House. Though not actually built until 1967, it was commissioned from Wright by shipping magnate Norman Lykes in 1959, the last year of the architect’s life. Almost dated though it may have looked by the time of its completion, supervised by Wright’s apprentice John Rattenbury, it would have accrued some retro cachet over the subsequent decades. Then, in the renovation-mad nineties, the house’s owners brought Rattenbury back out to do a thorough update and remodel.
The result is a kind of hybrid fifties-nineties aesthetic, which will suit some tastes better than others. But then, so do all the residences designed by Wright, of which the Circular Sun House in Phoenix, Arizona, is the very last.
In the Architectural Digest video above, posted when the house went on the market in 2021, real estate agent Deanna Peters points out a few of its Wrightian features: its circular form, but also its curved hallways, its custom-built cabinetry (Philippine mahogany, of course), its signature “compression-and-release” and “inside-out” spatial effects, its cantilevered balcony, its integration with the desert environment, and even its carport — Wright’s own coinage, and indeed his own invention.
Also in the manner of most Wright-designed homes — as he himself was known to acknowledge, and not without a boastful note — the Circular Sun House seems easier to look at than to live in, let alone maintain. “The 3‑bedroom home last sold in 2019, before it had a brief period on Airbnb (rented for approximately $1,395 a night),” wrote Homes & Gardens’ Megan Slack in 2023. At that time, it was on the market for $8.5 million, about half a million dollars more than its owner wanted in 2021. Paradoxically, though it remains unsold as of this writing, its asking price has risen to $8,950,000. Wright’s name brings a certain premium, of course, but so do the trends of the moment: one hears, after all, that the nineties are back.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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