Nietzsche’s Concept of Superman Explained with Monty Python-Style Animation

in Animation, Philosophy | November 20th, 2015

Friedrich Niet­zsche first intro­duced the con­cept of the Über­men­sch — often trans­lat­ed in Eng­lish as “The Super­man” — in his influ­en­tial philo­soph­i­cal work, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra (1883), writ­ing:

I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is some­thing that is to be sur­passed. What have ye done to sur­pass man?

All beings hith­er­to have cre­at­ed some­thing beyond them­selves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than sur­pass man?…

Lo, I teach you the Super­man!

The Super­man is the mean­ing of the earth. Let your will say: The Super­man SHALL BE the mean­ing of the earth!

I con­jure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super­earth­ly hopes! Poi­son­ers are they, whether they know it or not.

Despis­ers of life are they, decay­ing ones and poi­soned ones them­selves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blas­phe­my against God was the great­est blas­phe­my; but God died, and there­with also those blas­phe­mers. To blas­pheme the earth is now the dread­fulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknow­able high­er than the mean­ing of the earth!

As Eva Cybul­s­ka observes in an arti­cle on Phi­los­o­phy Now, Niet­zsche nev­er quite spelled out what he meant by Übermensch/The Super­man, leav­ing it to lat­er inter­preters to fill in the blanks. She notes: “RJ Holling­dale (in Niet­zsche) saw in Über­men­sch a man who had organ­ised the chaos with­in; [Wal­ter] Kauf­mann (Niet­zsche) a sym­bol of a man that cre­at­ed his own val­ues, and Carl Jung (Zarathustra’s Sem­i­nars) a new ‘God’. For Hei­deg­ger it rep­re­sent­ed human­i­ty that sur­passed itself, whilst for the Nazis it became an emblem of the mas­ter race.”

You can now add to the list of inter­pre­ta­tions anoth­er by Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life. In a new­ly-released ani­mat­ed video, de Bot­ton treats The Super­man as the incar­na­tion of human per­fec­tion. Embody­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics pos­sessed by Goethe, Mon­taigne, Voltaire and Napoleon (peo­ple who came clos­est to achiev­ing per­fec­tion in Niet­zsche’s mind), the Übermenschen/Supermen will live by their own val­ues (Pagan in nature); delight in their supe­ri­or­i­ty and take pity on the weak; per­haps hurt peo­ple in the name of achiev­ing great things; accept that suf­fer­ing can be a nec­es­sary evil; use cul­ture to raise the men­tal­i­ty of the soci­ety around them; and beyond.

Whether you see The Super­man dif­fer­ent­ly is anoth­er ques­tion. You can down­load Thus Spake Zarathus­tra from our Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche col­lec­tion and come up with your own take.

And, tan­gen­tial­ly, you can watch The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon Free Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

The Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche: Down­load Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Hear Clas­si­cal Music Com­posed by Friedrich Niet­zsche: 43 Orig­i­nal Tracks

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Niet­zsche to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

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Edvard Munch’s The Scream Animated to the Psychedelic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Winter Version

in Animation, Art | November 11th, 2015

Back in the spring, we fea­tured Roman­ian ani­ma­tor Sebas­t­ian Cosor’s ani­ma­tion of Edvard Munch’s The Scream set to Pink Floy­d’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.” But the win­ter­time has almost come, which neces­si­tates not just a change in the clothes we wear, but a change in the ani­ma­tions of The Scream we watch. For­tu­nate­ly, Cosor has already put togeth­er a sea­son­al­ly appro­pri­ate ver­sion of his ear­li­er video, which you can see above.

The set­ting of Munch’s orig­i­nal Scream paint­ing can, with its depop­u­lat­ed land­scape under a hot orange sky, look pret­ty hell­ish, even before you notice the ago­nized fel­low writhing in the mid­dle of it. Would­n’t it feel alto­geth­er more pleas­ant under a snow­fall? And the scream­er him­self — sure­ly he’d give off a jol­lier vibe if he wore a San­ta hat? Cosor has answered these ques­tions and oth­ers in this humor­ous two-minute CGI film, which once again unites 1970s psy­che­del­ic rock with late-19th/ear­ly-2oth-cen­tu­ry Nor­we­gian paint­ing.

Some may con­sid­er this a kind of des­e­cra­tion of an impor­tant work of art (whether they mean the Nor­we­gian paint­ing or the psy­che­del­ic rock), but even those who don’t might har­bor one seri­ous objec­tion: isn’t the mid­dle of Novem­ber a bit ear­ly to haul out the Christ­mas stuff? Fair enough, as the hol­i­day dec­o­ra­tions in stores and pub­lic places do seem to appear a lit­tle ear­li­er each year. But if we can’t make an excep­tion for the case of a fes­tive pro­duc­tion as strange as this, for what can we make an excep­tion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edvard Munch’s Famous Paint­ing The Scream Ani­mat­ed to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Pri­mal Music

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Oth­er Artists Put Online by Norway’s Nation­al Muse­um of Art

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

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An Animated Kurt Vonnegut Visits NYU, Riffs, Rambles, and Blows the Kids’ Minds (1970)

in Animation, Literature | November 10th, 2015

Kurt Von­negut nev­er grad­u­at­ed from col­lege, but that did­n’t stop him from vis­it­ing col­lege class­rooms, or from giv­ing com­mence­ment speech­es (nine of which were pub­lished last year in a vol­ume called If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young). If you’ve expe­ri­enced a Von­negut speech, you know he had a ten­den­cy to riff and ram­ble. But he also enter­tained and edu­cat­ed. Above, the lat­est video from Blank on Blank cap­tures the essence of a Von­negut class­room vis­it, ani­mat­ing a talk the author gave to a class at NYU on Novem­ber 8, 1970. Top­ics include: the para­noia that goes into writ­ing and the exhaus­tion it brings about, his child­hood in Indi­ana, the death of his par­ents, and his odd con­cept for a new short sto­ry called “The Big Space Fuc%,” which fea­tures a war­head filled with sperm. It leaves the kids a lit­tle stunned.

The full talk orig­i­nal­ly aired on WBAI 99.5 FM New York and now resides in the Paci­fi­ca Radio Archives. You can lis­ten to the full, unedit­ed tape below.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? For exam­ple, John Malkovich read­ing Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons? Or James Fran­co read­ing Slaugh­ter­house-Five? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaughterhouse-Five,Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Kurt Von­negut Cre­ates a Report Card for His Nov­els, Rank­ing Them From A+ to D

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How Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy Can Empower You to Live the Life You Truly Want

in Animation, Philosophy | November 2nd, 2015

The lat­est install­ment from The School of Life’s ani­mat­ed video series intro­duces us to Jean-Paul Sartre’s con­cept of bad faith, a con­cept inte­gral to his phi­los­o­phy, Exis­ten­tial­ism. As Mark Lin­sen­may­er, one of the founders of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast, explained on our site back in 2011, “bad faith” is a ten­den­cy we have to “dis­as­so­ci­ate our­selves from our actions,” or more com­mon­ly, to claim we have “more lim­it­ed choic­es [in life] than we actu­al­ly do.” He went on to say:

Bad faith is pos­si­ble because of the nature of the self… There is no pre­de­ter­mined ‘human nature’ or ‘true you,’ but instead you are some­thing built over time, by your own freely cho­sen actions, too often using the roles and char­ac­ter­is­tics oth­ers assign to you.

As is their wont, The School of Life takes Sartre’s notion of bad faith and applies it to every­day life, show­ing how it can help you cre­ate the life you want to live–from enter­ing into more sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ships, to get­ting out of dead-end jobs.

For any­one look­ing to get a fair­ly acces­si­ble intro­duc­tion to Sartre’s phi­los­o­phy, you might want to start with his 1946 lec­ture, Exis­ten­tial­ism is a Human­ism. And down below, in the Relat­eds sec­tion, we have more help­ful intro­duc­tions to Sartre’s lib­er­at­ing phi­los­o­phy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Doc­u­men­tary Presents Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

140+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

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Watch “The Poetry of Perception”: Harvard Animates Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson & William Carlos Williams

in Animation, Poetry, Science | October 29th, 2015

Two years ago, a series of ani­mat­ed sci­ence videos began to pop up on a Vimeo account called Har­vardX Neu­ro­science. As its name sug­gests, it’s com­ing out of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, and, with the help of ani­ma­tors, they orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed a series of sci­en­tif­ic shorts pitched between the lay­man and the seri­ous sci­en­tist. In the last month, how­ev­er, they’ve stepped fur­ther into the arts realm with a mini-series of ani­ma­tions (five and count­ing as of this writ­ing) that look to poet­ry to explain what sci­ence ren­ders dry and aca­d­e­m­ic.

The new video series fea­tures “rep­re­sen­ta­tions of per­cep­tion and sen­sa­tion” as real­ized through the poems of Walt Whit­man, America’s great tran­scen­den­tal­ist poet, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, and William Car­los Williams (whose own read­ing is used as the audio for a video). Open­ing all the sens­es to the won­ders of the world is “the ori­gin of all poems” accord­ing to Whit­man, and this cura­tion focus­es on smell, taste, sight, touch, and sound to prove his point.

The read­ers you hear in this videos, col­lec­tive­ly enti­tled Poet­ry of Per­cep­tion, include poet/artist Peter Bleg­vad, Anna Mar­tine, Harvard’s own Sarah Jes­sop, and artist/animator Nak Yong Choi. And the ani­ma­tions are brought to you by Sophie Koko Gate, Han­nah Jacobs, Lily Fang, Isaac Hol­land, Bri­an Smee, all who bring a tac­tile, muta­ble qual­i­ty to these short poems.

There will be anoth­er three videos in the series, so please book­mark the Vimeo account.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Walt Whitman’s Poem “A Noise­less Patient Spi­der” Brought to Life in Three Ani­ma­tions

William Car­los Williams Reads His Poet­ry (1954)

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Reads Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1952)

The Sec­ond Known Pho­to of Emi­ly Dick­in­son Emerges

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Fly Through 17th-Century London’s Gritty Streets with Prize-Winning Animations

in Animation, History | October 29th, 2015

Crit­ics did not love 2004 film The Lib­er­tine, star­ring John­ny Depp as dis­solute 17th cen­tu­ry poet and court favorite John Wilmot, the sec­ond Earl of Rochester. The Guardian fault­ed its grim tone and his­tor­i­cal inac­cu­ra­cies and called it “grimy and pre­ten­tious.” I dis­agree with this take, but a fond­ness for Rochester (and for the peri­od in gen­er­al) bias­es me in the movie’s favor. Addi­tion­al­ly, as some admir­ing crit­ics point­ed out, dour script­ing aside, the film’s depic­tion of 17th cen­tu­ry Lon­don is indeed most con­vinc­ing. You can almost feel the muck that clings to every­thing, and smell the rank stench of body odor bare­ly cov­ered by per­fume. Writer Kather­ine Ashen­burg has called the 17th cen­tu­ry “prob­a­bly the dirt­i­est cen­tu­ry in West­ern his­to­ry” (Lon­don didn’t clean up for anoth­er cou­ple hun­dred years), and The Lib­er­tine takes pains to bring the period’s filth to vivid, stink­ing life.

Which brings us to anoth­er authen­tic recre­ation of 17th cen­tu­ry Lon­don, one we’ve fea­tured here before and that you can see again at the top of the post. Designed by six plucky stu­dents from De Mon­fort Uni­ver­si­ty, the three-minute CGI tour through the city’s sooty Tudor streets before The Great Fire of 1666 resem­bles a video game; but it also gives us a per­sua­sive sense of the city’s scale, lay­out, and, yes, it’s grim­i­ness. In our pre­vi­ous post, we quot­ed Lon­don­ist, who not­ed, “Although most of the build­ings are con­jec­tur­al, the stu­dents used a real­is­tic street pat­tern [tak­en from his­tor­i­cal maps] and even includ­ed the hang­ing signs of gen­uine inns and busi­ness­es.” Though its unsan­i­tary streets are emp­ty, one can eas­i­ly imag­ine walk­ing them in this prize-win­ning ani­ma­tion. Less invit­ing, how­ev­er, are those 17-cen­tu­ry Lon­don streets at night in anoth­er, eight-minute ani­ma­tion below, cre­at­ed by anoth­er De Mont­fort team called Tri­umphant Goat.

Bra­ziers and lanterns glow­er in dank alley­ways, a fore­bod­ing haze hangs in the night air, hand-drawn want­ed posters adorn the walls, and pools of mud­dy water col­lect among rough cob­ble­stones. Here, I can imag­ine John­ny Dep­p’s Rochester pick­ing his way along a dusky side street, head­ed for some clan­des­tine assig­na­tion with a sta­ble­boy or scullery maid. You can read about the mak­ing of this night­time scene here, where team mem­ber James Teeple dis­cuss­es the research meth­ods and tech­ni­cal objec­tives of the project, in terms that make it sound as though this is one lev­el of a video game, although it isn’t clear what the game is about. “We real­ly pushed the idea of this being a His­tor­i­cal recre­ation,” writes Teeple, “so that meant too much cre­ative license was a bad thing in our eyes.”

Final­ly, in the video below, we see a bright­ly-lit tour of St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered, if over­all a less pol­ished pre­sen­ta­tion than the two tours above. This ani­ma­tion was pre­sum­ably cre­at­ed by De Mont­fort design stu­dents as well, though there’s lit­tle infor­ma­tion on its Vimeo page. Though the city was sig­nif­i­cant­ly redesigned after the 1666 fire, in these first two ani­ma­tions espe­cial­ly, we get a sense of the city Samuel John­son described sev­en­ty years after that great con­fla­gra­tion as a place where “mal­ice, rap­ine, acci­dent, con­spire, / And now a rab­ble rages, now a fire.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

A Drone’s Eye View of Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don, Bangkok & Mex­i­co City

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

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

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An Animated Bill Murray on the Advantages & Disadvantages of Fame

in Animation | October 28th, 2015

I could watch Bill Mur­ray in pret­ty much any film. And, for that mat­ter, any ani­ma­tion too.

So let’s queue up the brand new ani­mat­ed video from Blank on Blank, and watch Mur­ray riff on the pros and cons of being rich & famous.

Pro: You get to buy your moth­er a nice new car.

Con: When her car breaks down, she does­n’t just get the car towed. She whips out your Amex card and buys the tow truck too. And so it goes.

The inter­view from this Blank on Blank episode was record­ed in 1988 by writer T.J. Eng­lish, while writ­ing a pro­file on Bill Mur­ray for Irish Amer­i­ca mag­a­zine. Find more Blank on Blank ani­ma­tions list­ed in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joni Mitchell Talks About Life as a Reluc­tant Star in a New Ani­mat­ed Inter­view

New Ani­ma­tion: Hunter S. Thomp­son Talks with Studs Terkel About the Hell’s Angels & The Out­law Life

B.B. King Explains in an Ani­mat­ed Video Whether You Need to Endure Hard­ship to Play the Blues

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New Film Extraordinary Tales Animates Edgar Poe Stories, with Narrations by Guillermo Del Toro, Christopher Lee & More

in Animation, Film, Literature | October 28th, 2015

Edgar Allan Poe cre­at­ed a body of work that will seem­ing­ly nev­er go out of style, espe­cial­ly around Hal­loween time. Not only do his sto­ries and poems still inspire dread in the 21st cen­tu­ry, but so also do the many hun­dreds of Poe retellings and adap­ta­tions cre­at­ed in the 166 years since the author’s mys­te­ri­ous death. But, we might ask, after so many film adap­ta­tions from so many clas­sic hor­ror actors and direc­tors, whether we need yet anoth­er one? You’ll have to make up your own mind, but if you’re any­thing like me, you’ll watch the trail­er above for Lion King and Aladdin ani­ma­tor Raul Garcia’s Poe anthol­o­gy Extra­or­di­nary Tales and answer “Yes!” and “More please!” And you can see more, in the clips below from Garcia’s incred­i­ble-look­ing film, hit­ting the­aters on Octo­ber 23rd.

One rea­son the new treat­ment of the five sto­ries Gar­cia ani­mates seems to work so well is that they draw on the tal­ents of actors and direc­tors who have pre­vi­ous­ly deliv­ered clas­sic Poe retellings. For exam­ple, “The Fall of the House of Ush­er,” above, is nar­rat­ed by the late, great Christo­pher Lee, who joins hor­ror leg­end Vin­cent Price as one of the great­est read­ers of Poe’s “The Raven.” The voice-over is Lee’s last role, and it’s hard to think of a more fit­ting final act for the ven­er­a­ble hor­ror maven. (Lee was also at the time record­ing “a heavy-met­al-rock-opera based on Charlemagne’s life”—one of many met­al albums he record­ed.)

Gar­cia has cre­at­ed a unique look for each fea­turette. For “Ush­er,” he tells Car­los Aguilar at Indiewire, “the idea was for the char­ac­ters to look as if they were carved out of wood, like if they were fig­ures that belonged to Czech ani­ma­tor Jirí Trn­ka.” Just hear­ing Lee above intone the phrase “an unex­pect­ed sense of insuf­fer­able gloom” is enough to con­vince me I need to see the rest of this film.

Just above, we have a clip from a much less famous Poe sto­ry, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valde­mar,” a chill­ing detec­tive tale about a man mes­mer­ized in artic­u­lo mor­tis—at the moment of death. Nar­rat­ed by Eng­lish actor Julian Sands, who has made his own appear­ances in sev­er­al hor­ror films, the ani­ma­tion style comes direct­ly out of clas­sic E.C. hor­ror comics like Tales From the Crypt, which drew many an idea from Poe, bas­ing one sto­ry “The Liv­ing Death!” on “M. Valde­mar.” The “mauve, yel­low and mossy green com­ic-book pan­els,” writes a New York Times review, “prove that you don’t need fan­cy tech­nol­o­gy to achieve a third dimen­sion.”

You’ll notice the unmis­tak­able vis­age of Vin­cent Price in the char­ac­ter of the mes­merist, and you’ll like­ly know of Price’s own turn as Poe him­self in An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe. Price also starred in Roger Cor­man’s many Poe adap­ta­tions—begin­ning with House of Ush­er—and Gar­cia has tapped the leg­endary Cor­man’s voice for Extra­or­di­nary Tales, as well as con­tem­po­rary hor­ror direc­tor extra­or­di­naire Guiller­mo Del Toro. And if this weren’t hor­ror roy­al­ty enough, Garcia’s ani­mat­ed take on “The Tell-Tale Heart” fea­tures none oth­er than Bela Lugosi, in an archival read­ing of the sto­ry the Drac­u­la actor made some­time before his death in 1956. Read more about how Gar­cia found the Lugosi audio and con­ceived of Extra­or­di­nary Tales in his inter­view here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Vin­cent Price Turn Into Edgar Allan Poe & Read Four Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries (1970)

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Clas­sics Sto­ries by Edgar Allan Poe Nar­rat­ed by James Mason in a 1953 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Ani­ma­tion & 1958 Dec­ca Album

The Mys­tery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 The­o­ries on What Caused the Poet’s Demise 166 Years Ago Today

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

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