Terry Gilliam Explains His Never-Ending Fascination with Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

in Animation, Art, Film | July 1st, 2016

As I recall, if you asked men in the 1990s to describe ideal the woman, a great many would have made references to Uma Thurman, who spent that decade playing high-profile roles in acclaimed movies like Pulp Fiction and Gattaca—as well as less-acclaimed movies like The Avengers and Batman & Robin (but hey, you can’t pick winners all the time). But animator, director, American Monty Python member and all-around visionary Terry Gilliam made use of the powerful appeal of Thurman’s presence even earlier, when—making The Adventures of Baron Munchausen—-he needed just the right young lady for a scene recreating Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance painting The Birth of Venus.

“The casting director in L.A. said, ‘You’ve got to meet this girl,’ ” Gilliam remembers in the clip from this year’s BBC Arts documentary Botticelli’s Venus: The Making on an Icon at the top of the post. “There she was: statuesque, beautiful, intelligent—incredibly intelligent.” He compares the original canvas itself to a “widescreen cinema,” as well as, just as aptly, to a lower art form entirely: “The winds are blowing, her hair starts billowing out, the dressing girl is bringing in the robe — it’s a really funny painting, looking at it again, because she’s there, static, elegant, naked, sexy. The robe wouldn’t look so good if the winds weren’t blowing, nor would her hair look so beautiful. It’s like, this is a commercial for shampoo!”

As Monty Python fans all know, Gilliam had worked with The Birth of Venus before, using his signature cutout animation technique, which defined much of the look and feel of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to make Venus dance. “I like testing how much I like something, or how beautiful something is, by making fun of it,” he says to his BBC interviewer. “If it withstands my silliness, it’s really great art.” Further props to Botticelli come at the end of the clip, when she asks Gilliam if he thinks Venus represents “the ultimate male fantasy.” “Oh, why not?” he immediately replies. “You don’t do much better than that. I think he really cracked that one.”

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

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Surrealist Filmmaker Jan Švankmajer Is About to Make His Final Feature Film, and You Can Help Produce It

in Animation, Film | June 22nd, 2016

No filmmaker combines live action with stop-motion quite like Jan Švankmajer, and certainly no filmmaker has used that combination to such imaginative and troubling ends. An avowed surrealist who got his start in animation more than half a century ago in his homeland of the former Czechoslovakia, he’s continued to craft his distinctive cinematic experiences however and whenever possible through the decades. His filmography now includes such enduring trips as Dimensions of Dialogue (see below), which no less a visionary than Terry Gilliam calls one of the best animated films of all time; Alice, his dark interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and Little Otik, a modernization of a folktale about a tree stump that turns into a monstrous baby.

But as well as he brings the bizarre to vivid life on screen, he’s always had higher ambitions than that. “Švankmajer is capable of creating dark yet playful worlds that dissect the very core of our society,” says the Indiegogo page now raising the funds for his latest — and last — feature film, Insects. “The civilization we live in has little interest in authentic artistic creation,” laments the filmmaker. “What it needs is well-working advertisement, the iconographic contemporary art, pushing people towards more and more mass consumption. It gets increasingly difficult to fund independent art that scrutinizes the very core of our society. Who would deliberately support their own critics?”

Now, in this age of crowdfunding, you can support one of its most entertaining critics alive yourself. Insects has already succeeded in raising the first phase of its budget, but still has a way to go before it can assure its esteemed creator and his collaborators full artistic freedom (Švankmajer is looking to raise $400,000 in total), so if you’d like to chip in, you can make yourself eligible for such rewards as the first opportunity to download the film, its Blu-Ray edition with an accompanying art book, or even — if you’ve got $15,000 to put toward the cause — “a dinner with Jan Švankmajer at his mansion in Czech Republic and a commented visit to his Kunstkabinet.” Even now, work on Insects, its I ndiegogo page assures us, is underway, with Švankmajer “very busy visiting entomological auctions, buying various kinds of bugs, doing rehearsal shots with them and so on.”

If you’d like to learn more about the drama that they’ll ultimately act out, watch the promo video at the top of the post. In it, Švankmajer describes it as set in a pub, after hours, where an amateur theater group has gathered to rehearse The Insect Play by the Čapek brothers. But “as the rehearsal progresses, the characters of the play are born and die with no regard to time,” and the actors “experience frightening transformations.” Švankmajer, who has planned not a direct adaptation of The Insect Play but a more complex work that draws inspiration both from it and The Metamorphosis by his other well-known countryman Franz Kafka, puts the appeal of this story where “bugs behave as human beings, and people behave as insects” simply: “The Čapek brothers’ play is very misanthropic. I’ve always liked that.”

Dimensions of Dialogue by Jan Svankmajer (1982)

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Animated Introduction to Charles Dickens’ Life & Literary Works

in Animation, Literature | June 21st, 2016

The social role of the writer changes from generation to generation, but at no time in the history of literary culture have novelists and poets faced more competition for the attention of their readers than they do today. Before visual media took over as the primary means of storytelling, however, many writers enjoyed the measure of fame now given to film and pop music stars. Or at least they did in the age of Charles Dickens, whose tireless self-promotion and populist sentiments endeared him to the public and made him one of the most famous men of his day.

Dickens was “a great showman” says Alain de Botton above in his School of Life introduction to the author of Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and too many more great books to name. (Find them in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) He was a natural celebrity before radio and television and, to the dismay of his more high-minded colleagues, “entertainment was at the heart of what Dickens was up to.”

But Dickens used his public platform not only to advance his career, but also to “get us interested in some pretty serious things: the evils of an industrializing society, the working conditions in factories, child labor, vicious social snobbery, the maddening inefficiencies of government bureaucracy.” Then and now, these are hardly subjects readers want to be reminded of. And yet, then as now, great storytellers can make us care despite our apathy and desire for escapist pleasure. And few writers have made readers care more than Dickens.

His “genius was to discover that the big ambitions to educate a society about its failings didn’t have to be opposed to what his critics called ‘fun’—racy plots, a chatty style, clownish characters, weepy moments, and happy endings.” Yet Dickens didn’t only seek to educate, de Botton argues; he “believed that writing could play a big role in fixing the problems of the world.” In this he was not entirely wrong, despite the anti-political sentiments of so many aesthetes who have argued otherwise, from Oscar Wilde to W.H. Auden.

Though he opposed many working class movements and had no “coherent doctrine” of social change, says Hugh Cunningham, professor of social history at the University of Kent, Dickens “helped create a climate of opinion” by emotionally moving people to sympathize with the poor and to take action in controversies already raging in the zeitgeist. In this role, Dickens preceded dozens of writers who—like himself—began their careers in journalism and sought through fiction to motivate complacent readers: naturalist novelists like Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, and muckraking realists like Upton Sinclair all owe something to Dickens’ mode of social protest through novel-writing.

De Botton goes on in his introduction to explain some of the biographical origins of Dickens’ sympathy for the afflicted, including his own time spent as a child laborer and his father’s confinement in debtor’s prison. The conditions Dickens and his characters endured are unimaginable to most privileged readers, but not to millions of people in poverty around the world who still live under the kind of squalid oppression the Victorian poor suffered. Whether any author in the 21st century can bring the same kind of sympathetic attention to their lives that Dickens did in his time is debatable, but De Botton uses Dickens’ example to argue that art and entertainment can “seduce” us into compassion and taking action for others.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

in Animation, Education, History, Online Courses | June 14th, 2016

Not since the sixties and seventies, with the black power movement, flowering of Afrocentric scholarship, and debut of Alex Haley’s Roots, novel and mini-series, has there been so much popular interest in the history of slavery. We have seen Roots remade; award-winning books like Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told climb bestseller lists; and The Freedman’s Bureau Project’s digitization of 1.5 million slavery-era documents gives citizen-scholars the tools to research the history on their own.

In addition to these developments, Slate magazine has designed a multipart, multimedia course, “The History of American Slavery,” as part of its online educational initiative, “Slate Academy.” Hosted by Slate’s Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion and featuring guest historians like Baptist, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Annette Gordon-Reed, Eric Foner and more, this thorough survey consists of a nine-part podcast, with copious supplementary essays, book excerpts, and other resources drawing on primary documents and artifacts. One supplement, the animation above, shows us the “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.”

Visualizing 315 years—“from the trade’s beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th”—the animation displays slave ships as increasing numbers of black dots zipping across the Atlantic to the Americas from the African coasts. The dots “also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board.” The Youtube video above provides only a partial representation of this impressive graphic. The full animation at Slate allows users to pause, click on individual dots, and get detailed information, when available, about the name of the ship, number of enslaved people transported, and points of origin and entry in the New World.

In all, we see animated “more than 20,000 voyages catalogued in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.” And though we typically, with typical U.S. solipsism, think of American slavery as a mostly North American phenomenon, the truth is quite the contrary:

Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747—less than 4 percent of the total—came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil.

Early slave expeditions were conducted by the Spanish and Portuguese. “In the 1700s,” writes Bouie, “Spanish transport diminishes and is replaced (and exceeded) by British, French, Dutch, and—by the end of the century—American activity. This hundred years—from approximately 1725 to 1825—is also the high-water mark of the slave trade, as Europeans send more than 7.2 million people to forced labor, disease and death in the New World.” Surprisingly, Portugal remained one of the leading nations among enslavers for most of the slave-trade’s history.

The animation and short explanatory essay by Bouie show us the staggering historical scope of the immensely profitable and profoundly inhumane enterprise that shaped not only the United States, but also—in many ways more so—Central and South America and the Caribbean. There is no history of the Americas, and no growth of many of the colonies into wealthy, world-historical nations, without slavery, nor can the wealth of Europe be in any way divorced from the profits of the slave trade and slave industry. Bouie and Onion explain in the short video above why they decided to produce the course.

For a sense of how historians’ and the public’s understanding of slavery have changed over many decades—for all kinds of ideological reasons—read this excerpt from Baptist’s groundbreaking book. As he says in an interview with Salon, most histories and recreations of the period of enslavement attempt to hide the facts: “The resistance to reckoning with the role of slavery in the trajectory that makes the U.S. the most powerful nation on earth, that’s real; that’s very, very deep…. Whatever we say about the role of the U.S. in global history, it’s absolutely clear to me that slavery is essential to the rise of U.S. power.” Slate’s series goes a long way toward telling us the true history of slavery, from the mouths of writers and scholars who engage with it daily.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

The Bizarre, Surviving Scene from the 1933 Soviet Animation Based on a Pushkin Tale and a Shostakovich Score

in Animation, Film, Literature | June 10th, 2016

Hot dumplings! Marinated apples! A barrel of cucumbers!

Want to add some quick color to your performance or film? Slip in a quick non-narrative vendor scene. No need for character or plot development. The audience will be quite content with the hawkers’ musical recitation of their wares.

The Gershwin / Heyward opera Porgy and Bess’ comic “Vendor’s Trio” makes a nice break from the tragedy.

The lively market number Who Will Buy? temporarily sidelines Oliver’s orphans to showcase the talents of the adult chorus members.

When the Simpsons’ 179th episode took Homer to New York City back in 1997, he was able to purchase such exotic delicacies as Khlav Kalash and canned crab juice from a collection of pushcarts at the base of the World Trade Center.

Less well known is the above bazaar sequence from The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda (1933), a classic of Soviet animation. This short clip is the only part of director Mikhail Tsekhanovsky’s unfinished feature-length work to survive. The rest was destroyed in a fire at the LenFilm archives in World War II, the seemingly final chapter in its troubled history.

The film was based on Alexander Pushkin’s poetic retelling of a Russian folk tale about a greedy priest, who strikes an ill-advised bargain with a brawny worker. It was published posthumously, and only after censors had changed the priest into a merchant.

As he began work on the production, Tsekhanovsky invited Dimitry Shostakovich to compose the score, an innovation at a time when musical accompaniment was added to completed silent films. Shostakovich started, but was derailed by Pravda’s 1936 denunciation of his work in an article titled “Muddle Instead of Music.”

Eventually Tsekhanovskiy threw in the towel, too.

It does not end there, however.

After Shostakovich’s death, his widow got his student, Vadim Biberga, to complete work on the unfinished score. The Russian Philharmonic Orchestra released it in 2006, as part of a Shostakovich centennial.

A commemorative live performance that same year drew fire from the local diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, who objected to the mocking portrayal of the priest. The theater bowed to pressure, staging seven priest-free numbers from the opera.

This recent history adds an air of defiance to the grotesqueries of the surviving clip, with top honors going to the smut peddler entering at the one minute mark, to extol the virtues of “a Venus with no garments and fat thighs.”

You can listen to Shostakovich’s full score here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee & Other Cartoonists Create Animations to End Distracted Driving

in Animation, Comics/Cartoons, Education, Life | May 23rd, 2016

Model Ts were the average American’s car of choice in 1921, when cartoonist Al Jaffee was born.

The father of MAD Magazine’s fold-ins was but seven when the T’s successor, the Model A, was introduced.

It would be a long time before such innovations as seat belts, baby seats, and airbags were introduced. These safety measures do a fine job of minimizing human damage in motor vehicle accidents, but they can’t prevent the collisions themselves.

To remedy this, Ford, the company responsible for the Model T and hundreds of motor vehicles since, recently enlisted Jaffee and his fellow cartoonists, MK Brown and Bill Plympton, to educate the public on the dangers of distracted driving. Turns out this preventable scourge rivals intoxication and hazardous road conditions as a leading cause of accidents.

Jaffee’s take, animated by J.J. Sedelmaier, above, will never be mistaken for filmmaker Werner Herzog’s harrowing anti-texting documentary PSA, From One Second to the Next, or even Jaffee’s own anti-drunk driving fold-in from MAD’s March 1975 issue.

Instead, he offers a gentle, child-friendly metaphor in which an uncaged bird becomes a havoc-wreaking distraction. (Fortunately, everyone’s wearing his seatbelt, and the little boy is riding in back, in compliance with CDC recommendations.)

National Lampoon alum, Brown, tiptoes closer to the true causes of distraction, with the alien-themed segment, above, also animated by Sedelmaier. If it seems likelier that the alien’s earthling wife might do her henpecking via text rather than actual call these days—well, sometimes dramatic liberties are warranted to get the message across.

Unsurprisingly, Plympton’s self-animated contribution is the most graphic, a direct descendent of his fabulously grotesque cartoon primers 25 Ways To Quit Smoking and How To Kiss. Moral? Assuming you want to keep your teeth in your head, the vegetable matter wedged in between can wait ’til you reach your destination.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky. Her plan for avoiding accidents is to refrain from driving whenever possible. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch “Beer,” a Mind-Warping Animation of Charles Bukowski’s 1971 Poem Honoring His Favorite Drink

in Animation, Poetry | May 6th, 2016

Charles Bukowski could really write. Charles Bukowski could really drink. These two facts, surely the best-known ones about the “lowlife laureate” of a poet and author of such novels as Post Office and Ham on Rye (as well as what we might call his lifestyle column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”), go together. Drinking provided enough of the subject matter of his prose and verse — and, in life, enough of the fuel for the existence he observed on the page with such rough-edged evocative artistry — that we can hardly imagine Bukowski’s writing without his drinking, or his drinking without his writing.

We would naturally expect him, then, to have written an ode to beer, one of his drinks of choice. “Beer,” which appeared in Bukowski’s 1971 poetry collection Love Is a Dog from Hell, pays tribute to the countless bottles the man drank “while waiting for things to get better,” “after splits with women,” “waiting for the phone to ring,” “waiting for the sounds of footsteps.”

The female, he writes, knows not to consume beer to excess in the male manner, as “she knows its bad for the figure.” But Bukowski, figure be damned, finds in this most working-class of all drinks a kind of solace.

“Beer” comes to life in the animation above by NERDO. “The composition is a manifesto of the author’s way of life, this is why we decided to go inside the author’s mind, and it is not a safe journey,” say the accompanying notes. “A brain solo without filter, a tale of ordinary madness, showing how much loneliness and decadence can be hidden inside a genius mind.” This wild ride passes what we now recognize as many visual signifiers of the Bukowskian experience: neon signs, cigarettes, decaying city blocks, tawdry Polaroids — and, of course, beer, literally “rivers and seas of beer,” which no less a fellow animated enthusiast of the beverage than Homer Simpson once, just as eloquently, pronounced “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

“Beer” will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hermeneutics of Toilets by Slavoj Žižek: An Animation About Finding Ideology in Unlikely Places

in Animation, Philosophy, Politics | May 4th, 2016

It’s been part of Slavoj Žižek’s schtick for years. He’s mentioned it in talks about Donald Rumsfeld and America’s misadventures in Iraq. In lectures about architecture in Spain. In English-language talks. And other languages too. Maybe you’ve never heard Žižek’s spiel about finding ideology in the unlikeliest of places. Yes, toilets. If you’ve missed out, this new animation has you covered.

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via Philosophy Matters

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Terry Gilliam Explains His Never-Ending Fascination with Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

Surrealist Filmmaker Jan Švankmajer Is About to Make His Final Feature Film, and You Can Help Produce It

An Animated Introduction to Charles Dickens’ Life & Literary Works

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

The Bizarre, Surviving Scene from the 1933 Soviet Animation Based on a Pushkin Tale and a Shostakovich Score

Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee & Other Cartoonists Create Animations to End Distracted Driving

Watch “Beer,” a Mind-Warping Animation of Charles Bukowski’s 1971 Poem Honoring His Favorite Drink

Hermeneutics of Toilets by Slavoj Žižek: An Animation About Finding Ideology in Unlikely Places

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