Imagine two prisoners, each one placed in solitary confinement. The police offer a deal: if each betrays the other, they’ll both get five years in prison. If one betrays the other but the other keeps quiet, the betrayer will walk free and the betrayed will serve ten years. If neither say anything, they’ll both be locked up, but only for two years. Unable coordinate, both prisoners will likely betray each other in order to secure the best individual outcome, despite the fact that it would be better on the whole for both to keep their mouths shut. This is the “prisoner’s dilemma,” a thought experiment much-cited in game theory and economics since the middle of the twentieth century.
Though the situation the prisoner’s dilemma describes may sound quite specific, its general form actually conforms to that of a variety of problems that arise throughout the modern world, in politics, trade, interpersonal relations, and a great many others besides.
Blogger Scott Alexander describes the prisoner’s dilemmas as one manifestation of what Allen Ginsberg called Moloch, the relentless unseen force that drives societies toward misery. Moloch “always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.” Or, as he’d put it to Chewy the gingerbread man, “Betray your friend Crispy, and I’ll make a fox eat only three of your limbs.”
Such is the situation animated in gloriously woolly stop-motion by Ivana Bošnjak and Thomas Johnson in the TED-Ed video at the top of the post, which replaces the prisoners with “sentient baked goods,” the jailer with a hungry woodland predator, and years of imprisonment with bitten-off arms and legs. After explaining the prisoner’s dilemma in a whimsical manner, it presents one proposed solution: the “infinite prisoner’s dilemma,” in which the participants decide not just once but over and over again. Such a setup would allow them to “use their future decisions as bargaining chips for the present one,” and eventually (depending upon how heavily they value future outcomes in the present) to settle upon repeating the outcome that would let both of them walk free — as free as they can walk on one gingerbread leg, at any rate.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Back in April 2020, animator Henning M. Lederer launched his “Books & Sleeves” project where he turns abstract geometric patterns, all featured on vintage book and record covers, into mesmerizing moving images. Above, you can watch the second installment of the project, which doesn’t disappoint.
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Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.
Cal Arts animation student Michelle Cheng’s character design primer, above, draws attention to the many hats an animator must be prepared to wear when bringing to life a figure who actually existed:
Was Robespierre the first modern dictator, icily fanatical, an obsessive who used his political power to try to impose his rigid ideal of a land of Spartan ‘virtue’? Or was he a principled, self-abnegating visionary, the great revolutionary martyr who, with his Jacobin allies, succeeded in leading the French Revolution and the Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds?
Cheng believes an animator’s first job is to understand any given character’s role in the larger story, and her research suggests that “there is never just one story.”
In the end, animators make choices based on the narrative they wish to push, enlisting palettes and styles that will support their favored approach.
Cheng went into this assignment perceiving Robespierre to be “a prime example of situational irony, a fanatical dictator who had sent hundreds of people to the guillotine only to be guillotined himself in the end.”
This, she readily admits, is a two-dimensional understanding.
Though he only lived to thirty-six, the man evolved. Robespierre, the symbol of the Reign of Terror, is distinct from Robespierre the individual citizen.
This duality led her to concoct a range of Robespierres — evil, good, and neutral.
All three animated characters are garbed in the neoclassical fashion typical of a progressive gentleman of the period — shirt, breeches, stockings, waistcoat, coat, a lacy cravat, and a curled wig.
Cheng, in consultation with fellow Cal Arts animator Janelle Feng, equipped the “evil” version with an ominous, figure-concealing black cloak lined in blood red. Angles and points are emphasized, the face draws on his opponents’ sinister descriptions of his habitual expressions, and subtle nods to punk and Goth cater to modern sensibilities.
The “good” version employs rosy Rococo hues to lean into the Robespierre his friends and family knew — a poet who loved his pet pigeons.
History prevents Cheng from ditching his signature wig entirely, but she granted herself some leeway, softening it for a more natural look.
Between these two poles is the “neutral” Robespierre, perhaps the most challenging to depict.
Feng took the lead on this one, seeking to strike a balance between his reportedly unprepossessing appearance and his revolutionary fire.
She retained the striped coat of his most iconic portrait, but updated it to a cool green palette. His nickname — the Incorruptible — is embodied in his firm comportment.
The video draws to a close with a review of the various ways Robespierre has been depicted in art and film over the years, a vivid reminder of Cheng’s assertion that “there is never just one story.”
Quite a few generations of American children have by now grown up knowing the names of Max and Dave Fleischer — albeit knowing even better the names of the characters they animated, like Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman. The kids who first thrilled to Max Fleischer’s early “Out of the Inkwell” series, which he started in the late nineteen-tens and continued into the late nineteen-twenties, would naturally have seen them in a movie theater. But most of us under the age of eighty would have received our introduction to the lively, whimsical, and often bizarre world of the brothers Fleischer through the television, a medium hungry for cartoons practically since its inception.
The charm of Fleischer cartoons may still feel effortless a century after their creation, but anyone familiar with animation knows how painstaking that creation would have been; by the same token, bringing the surviving films back to pristine condition is a more complicated job than most viewers would imagine.
The current offerings on Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored’s channel include Betty Boop and Pudgy in “Happy You and Merry Me,” Bimbo the Dog in “Teacher’s Pest,” and even the short but lavish Technicolor fantasy “Somewhere in Dreamland,” which brightened up the grim days of the Great Depression for all who saw it. The restorers have also worked their magic on Fleischer holiday cartoons like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” (including with the latter a side-by-side comparison of the new restoration with the existing sixteen-millimeter DVD print). Yes, Christmas has just passed, but it will come again next year, and bring with it the latest generation’s chance to be delighted by Fleischer cartoons crisper and more vivid than the ones with which any of us grew up.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Attention young artists: don’t let your day job kill your dream.
In the mid-70s, David Godlis kept body and soul together by working as an assistant in a photography studio, but his ambition was to join the ranks of his street photographer idols — Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, to name a few.
As Godlis told Sergio Burns of Street Photography, “the 60’s and 70’s were great for photographers:”
The 35mm camera was kind of like the new affordable technology of the day. Like having an iPhone you couldn’t talk on. Cool to look at, fun to use. Photography was only just beginning to be considered an art form. Which left plenty of room for inventing yourself. The movie Blow-Up showed off the kind of cool lifestyle that could be had. Photography seemed both adventurous and artistic. There were obviously a million career paths for photographers back then. From the sublime to the ridiculous. But plenty of opportunities to experiment and find your own way.
Still, it’s a tough proposition, being a street photographer whose day job gobbles all available light.
Or rather, it was until Godlis blundered into New York’s late, great punk club, CBGB’s, and resolved to “take street pictures at night without a flash, and make all these people look as interesting as a Ramones’ song sounds.”
The Klosters, who were granted full access to Godlis’ digital archive (a request Lewie Klosters likened to “asking the president for the nuke codes”), breathe extra life into this bygone scene by hand-cutting and puppeteering images of such stalwarts as The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Alex Chilton, and Blondie.
Those who inhabited the scene in an offstage capacity are also given their due, from the door attendant and the bartender with the Dee Dee Ramone haircut to owner Hilly Kristal, his dog, and the cool kid patrons packing the legendarily filthy establishment.
This seems to be a reflection of the irrepressible, and endlessly curious Godlis’ world view. As Lewie, who had 16 hours of audio interview to draw from, told the Vimeo blog’s Ina Pira:
Ken Burns could make his next 20 hour documentary on Godlis alone. If you ever bump into him, and you will — he’s everywhere all at once in the Village, ask him about some of our favorite stories that hit the cutting room floor: Jager at the Revlon Bar, the bum pissing out the window, when he was held at gunpoint in Boston, about Merv and the Heinekens, and seeing Bob Dylan window shopping. Just to name a few.
Though regarded by many as near-impossibly difficult to judge, avant-garde art can be put to its own test of time: does it still feel new ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years later? Now that most of Walter Ruttmann’s short animated films have passed the century mark, we can with some confidence say they pass that test. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture his Lichtspiel Opus 1, the first avant-garde animation ever made. Now, with this playlist, you can watch it and several of its successors, which together date from the years 1921 through 1925.
“A trained architect and painter,” writes Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi, Ruttmann “worked as a graphic designer prior to becoming involved with film. He fought in WWI, suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time recovering in a sanatorium.”
It was after that harrowing experience that he plunged into the still-new medium of animation, and he evidently brought the combined aesthetic refinement of architecture, painting, and graphic design with him. His four-part Opus series (top) shows us “how abstract animation doesn’t become dated as quickly as representational animation because its creation is not predicated upon the stylistic trappings of its era.”
This also holds true for Ruttmann’s advertising work, including the three-minute Der Sieger just above. Portraying “the struggles of a durable Excelsior tire that climbs entire buildings and wraps itself around the sun to protect it from triangular shapes with mean-looking faces,” as this summary of a talk by film scholar Michael Cowan puts it, the short “is a perfect example testifying to how a lot of avant-garde artists — contrary to popular belief — never lost sight for a certain applicability of their art in that their concepts of form also implied a certain idea of ‘forming’: the potential to take different shapes through morphing, to find ordering principles, or even to communicate the ideological impetus of forming a national body.”
That last holds especially true for Ruttmann’s “later work within the context of National Socialism”: an unfortunate-sounding context, though it must be noted that he displeased Adolf Hitler enough to be personally removed by the dictator from the project that would become Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. His artistic philosophy may have been compatible with selling tires, but it seems not to have served the much more bombastic and literal form of Nazi propaganda. That is, of course, to Ruttman’s credit, as is the freshness his early animations still exude these hundred or so years later. As Amid writes, “the graphic forms used in his film are the same building blocks — raw and unadorned — used by artists today.” But how many artists today use them with such elegance?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Many of us can remember a time when artificial intelligence was widely dismissed as a science-fictional pipe dream unworthy of serious research and investment. That time, safe to say, has gone. “Within a decade,” writes blogger Samuel Hammond, the development of artificial intelligence could bring about a world in which “ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag” (as previously featured here on Open Culture.) “You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything.”
“The problem with the way we build AI systems now is we give them a fixed objective,” Russell says. “The algorithms require us to specify everything in the objective.” Thus an AI charged with de-acidifying the oceans could quite plausibly come to the solution of setting off “a catalytic reaction that does that extremely efficiently, but consumes a quarter of the oxygen in the atmosphere, which would apparently cause us to die fairly slowly and unpleasantly over the course of several hours.” The key to this problem, Russell argues, is to program in a certain lack of confidence: “It’s when you build machines that believe with certainty that they have the objective, that’s when you get sort of psychopathic behavior, and I think we see the same thing in humans.”
A less existential but more common worry has to do with unemployment. Full AI automation of the warehouse tasks still performed by humans, for example, “would, at a stroke, eliminate three or four million jobs.” Russell here turns to E. M. Forster, who in the 1909 story “The Machine Stops” envisions a future in which “everyone is entirely machine-dependent,” with lives not unlike the e‑mail- and Zoom meeting-filled ones we lead today. The narrative plays out as a warning that “if you hand over the management of your civilization to machines, you then lose the incentive to understand it yourself or to teach the next generation how to understand it.” The mind, as the saying goes, is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. The same is true of machines — and even truer, we may well find, of mechanical minds.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
André Hörmann and Anna Samo’s short animation, Obon, opens on a serene scene — a quiet forest, anda red torii gate framing moonlight on the water.
But then we notice that the water is choked with bodies, victims of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Akiko Takakura, whose reminiscences inspired the film, arrived for work at the Hiroshima Bank just minutes before the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” over the city, killing some 80,000 instantly.
Takakura-san, who had been cleaning desks and mooning over a cute co-worker with her fellow junior bank employee Satomi Usami when the bomb hit, was one of the 10 people within a radius of 500 meters from ground zero to have survived .
(Usami-san, who fought her way out of the wreckage with her friend’s assistance, later succumbed to her injuries.)
Animator Samo, whose style harkens to traditional woodcuts, based her depiction of the horrors confronting the two young women when they emerge from the bank on the drawings of survivors:
Without craft or artistry to hide behind, the drawings told stories unfiltered, made me hear shaking voices saying: this is what happened to us.
Takakura-san attempted to capture one such image in a 1974 drawing:
I saw one corpse with burning fingers. Her hand was raised and her fingers were on fire, blue flames burning them down to stumps. A light charcoal-colored liquid was oozing onto the ground. When I think of those hands cradling beloved children and turning the pages of books, even now my heart fills with a deep sadness.
Takakura-san was 84 when writer/director Hörmann traveled to Japan to meet with historians, nuclear scientists, peace researchers and elderly survivors of the atomic bomb. Over the course of three 90 minute sessions, he noticed a quality that set her apart from the other survivors he interviewed :
…the stories that she told me there was always a glimmering light of hope in the midst of all of the horror. For me, it was a sigh of relief to have this moment of hope and peace, it was beautiful. It is impossible to just tell a story that is all pain. Ms. Takakura’s story was a way for me to look at this dark piece of history and not be emotionally crushed.
Her perspective informs the film, which travels backward and forward throughout time.
We meet her as a tiny, kimono-clad old woman in modern day Japan, whose face now bears a strong resemblance to her father’s. Her back is crisscrossed with scars of the 102 lacerations she sustained on the morning of August 6, 1945.
We then see her as a little girl, whose father, “a typical man from Meiji times, tough and strict,” is unable to express affection toward his daughter.
This changed when the 19-year-old was reunited with her family after the bombing, and her father asked for forgiveness while tenderly bathing her burned hands.
To Hörmann this “tiny moment of happiness” and connection is at the heart of Obon.
Animator Samo wonders if Takakura-san would have achieved “peace with the world that was so cruel to her” if her father hadn’t tended to her wounded hands so gently:
What does an act of love in a moment of despair mean? Can it allow you to you go on with a normal life, drink tea and cook rice? If you have seen so much death, can you still look people in the eyes, get married and give birth to children?
The film takes its title from the annual Buddhist holiday to commemorate ancestors and pay respect to the dead.
As an old woman, Takakura-san tends to the family altar, then travels with younger celebrants to the river for the release of the paper lanterns that are believed to guide the spirits back to their world at the festival’s end.
The face that appears in her glowing lantern is both her father’s and a reflection of her own.
8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945,
a very clear morning.
The mother preparing her baby’s milk,
the old man watering his potted plants,
the old woman offering flowers at her Buddhist altar,
the young boy eating breakfast,
the father starting work at his company,
the thousands walking to work on the street,
all died.
Not knowing an atomic bomb would be dropped,
they lived as usual.
Suddenly, a flash.
“Ah ~
Just as they saw it,
people in houses were shoved over and smashed.
People walking on streets were blown away.
People were burned-faces, arms, legs-all over.
People were killed, all over
the city of Hiroshima
by a single bomb.
Those who died.
A hundred? No. A thousand? No. Ten thousand?
No, many, many more than that.
More people than we can count
died, speechless,
knowing nothing.
Others suffered terrible burns,
horrific injuries.
Some were thrown so hard
their stomachs ripped open,
their spines broke.
Whole bodies filled with glass shards.
Clothes disappeared,
burned and tattered.
Fires came right after the explosion.
Hiroshima engulfed in flames.
Everyone fleeing, not knowing where
they were or where to go.
Everyone barefoot,
crying tears of anger and grief,
hair sticking up, looking like Ashura*,
they ran on broken glass, smashed roofs
along a long, wide road of fire.
Blood flowed.
Burned skin peeled and dangled.
Whirlwinds of fire raged here and there.
Hundreds, thousands of fire balls
30-centimeters across
whirled right at us.
It was hard to breathe in the flames,
hard to see in the smoke.
What will become of us?
Those who survived, injured and burned,
shouted, “Help! Help!” at the top of their lungs.
One woman walking on the road
died and then
her fingers burned,
a blue flame shortening them like candles,
a gray liquid trickling down her palms
and dripping to the ground.
Whose fingers were those?
More than 50 years later,
I remember that blue flame,
and my heart nearly bursts
with sorrow.
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