Public and commercial spaces around the world are now lined with imagery of a vertebra-studded battle helmet and statues surrounded by flame. It’s all part of the promotional campaign for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, which will begin opening in theaters later this month. Much has been said and written about how the project represents the next phase of Nolan’s ever-grander cinematic ambitions, but banking on the spectacle value of Homer has a long history in filmmaking. When the Italian silent adaptation L’Odissea came out in 1911, for example, it was uncertain even whether audiences would tolerate the 44 minutes it took to depict Odysseus’ arduous journey home.
Though it was released in the fall of 1911 in Italy and the following winter in the U.S., L’Odissea now looks like a summer blockbuster avant la lettre, or ante litteram — or then again, given the material, πρὶν ὀνομασθῆναι, though most of us are still waiting to see just how ancient Nolan and his collaborators have allowed themselves to get.
By the standards of their day, the makers of L’Odissea appear to have spared no expense on sets, costumes, and even visual effects, most notably in its portrayal of the cyclops Polyphemus. Technically, none of it may measure up to what Nolan and company have in store, but the theatrical gestures, shifting color tints, and occasionally battered textures do their part to conjure up a reality of their own.
L’Odisseawas actually the second major literary adaptation of that year for its directors, the trio of Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro, all working at the studio Milano Films. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured their first, L’Inferno, which dramatizes the first and most famous part of Dante’s Divine Comedy at a length of 73 minutes. That runtime qualified it as the first feature-length film ever produced in Italy, by comparison to which L’Odissea may have actually felt like a more familiar viewing experience to contemporary viewers accustomed to shorts. Now that humanity has been re-acclimated to watching things a few minutes at a time here in the twenty-twenties, Nolan’s nearly three-hour Odyssey looks like a bold move indeed. But then, an epic poem demands an epic interpretation.
Note: If you click “cc” on the YouTube video above, English subtitles will appear.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Alfred Hitchcock was not American, as even casual viewers of his television show could tell right away. He may have exaggerated his Englishness, but like more than a few high-profile outsiders, he also used his cultural position to render the United States all the more vividly in his work. Growing up, he amassed enough second-hand knowledge of the country in which he would one day live that he already knew his way around New York when first he set foot there. But it was some years after he relocated to Hollywood that his films began to feel American — and, eventually, more American than those made by domestic directors, thanks in part to his unconventional perspective on local sources of inspiration.
Take the architecture. Asked by François Truffaut about Norman Bates’ “ghostly house” in Psycho, he explained that “the mysterious atmosphere is, to some extent, quite accidental. For instance, the actual locale of the events is in northern California, where that type of house is very common.” He wasn’t trying to “reconstruct an old-fashioned Universal horror picture atmosphere,” but “simply wanted to be accurate.” Yet the house is reported to have been inspired by an east-coast model as well, and one found in art: Edward Hopper’s paintingHouse by the Railroad(top), from 1925, itself made with reference to a real Victorian mansion that still stands in Haverstraw, New York, between a railroad and a cemetery.
Hitchcock had already made use of Hopper, that most cinematic of American painters. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the visual influence of Hopper paintings from the nineteen-twenties and thirties like Automat, Night Windows, Hotel Room, and Room in New York on Rear Window. “Both artists explored the loneliness that results from modernization,” writes Tim Brinkhof at Artnet. “Hopper’s paintings and Hitchcock’s films explore the extent to which progress and urban modernization have made the world lonelier and, as a result, capable of acts of explosive, irrational violence,” a capability personified in the disturbed motel-keeper Norman Bates.
“The [Haverstraw] house was built in 1885, near the crest of a hill that rises steeply from the west bank of the Hudson River,” writes Paul Bochner in the Atlantic. “By the turn of the century it had been abandoned; neighborhood children called it haunted.” It was later purchased by the district attorney of Rockland County, whose eldest daughter remembered that, “when she was thirteen, she looked out her bedroom window and saw a man sitting across the road, painting.” The man was, of course, Edward Hopper. She wouldn’t have known, seventeen years before Nighthawks, that he was on his way to becoming one of the country’s most famous artists. As for what the house would one day become in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, then just starting his career on the other side of the Atlantic, nobody could have imagined.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Villains who live in opulent, remote modernist houses may have been a cliché since the last century, but given Hollywood’s addiction to the tried and true, they do still turn up now and again. Unsurprisingly, few filmmakers have managed to use them anywhere near as memorably as Alfred Hitchcock did. Think back to North by Northwest, that showcase of both late-fifties high style and unadulterated Hitchcockery, and any number of images come right to mind: the deadly crop duster bearing down on Cary Grant, the hang off the edge of Mount Rushmore, the cheeky cut to the train entering the tunnel. But on the architecturally inclined, the deepest impression is made by not a shot but a set: the house — modernist, opulent, remote — occupied by James Mason’s villain Phillip Vandamm.
The look of the Vandamm House betrays considerable inspiration from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, especially his “iconic Fallingwater, best known for its astonishing projected porches cantilevered over a running stream.” As the Hollywood story goes, Hitchcock asked Wright himself about the possibility of designing the house, but when the architect asked for ten percent of the film’s entire budget, the job went to production designer Robert F. Boyle.
Despite the highly un-Wrightian steel beams supporting the cantilevered living room (inserted because Grant needed a way to climb in), moviegoers left the theater assuming that they’d witnessed a showdown in one of his houses. In fact, like so many of Hitchcock’s famous built environments, the structure didn’t actually exist: Boyle and his collaborators constructed pieces on sets, completing the rest with matte paintings. Yet their work did, in a sense, bring the Vandamm House into the world. A North by Northwest fan since childhood, architect John Boccardo just this year achieved his $45 million dream of building it for real. Apart from faithfully replicating onscreen details, he also put in an eighteen-seat home theater, possibly on the safe assumption that the buyer will be a fellow cinephile — who, given that the house overlooks Park City, Utah rather than sits atop Mount Rushmore, will surely rue the day Sundance decided to move to Boulder. See photos here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery, “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching, it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian’s Russell Grossman writes, “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.”
Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence for the work of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was the only person Einstein wanted to meet in California during his second, 1930–31 visit to the U.S., when he was “at the height of his fame,” notes Claire Cock-Starkey at Mental Floss, “with newspapers tracking his every move and academics clamoring for explanations of his theories.”
The admiration, of course, was mutual. Their first meetings happened outside the press’s scrutiny, at Universal Studios, “where the pair took a tour and had lunch together. They hit it off straight away, sharing quick wits and curious minds.” In his autobiography, Chaplin writes that Einstein’s wife Elsa finagled an invitation to dinner at Chaplin’s house. And he “was only too happy to oblige,” Cock-Starkey writes, arranging an “intimate dinner, at which Elsa regaled him with the story of when Einstein came up with his world-changing theory, sometime around 1915.”
The two continued to correspond, and the big public unveiling of their friendship came when Chaplin invited Einstein to the premiere of City Lights in 1931 (see photo up top) where the mega-celebrities from very different worlds were greeted by reporters, photographers, and adoring crowds. There are several recorded versions of their conversation. In one account, Einstein expressed bemusement at the cheering, and Chaplin remarked, “the people applaud me because everyone understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you.”
Chaplin himself wrote in his 1933–34 travelogue, A Comedian Sees the World, that one of Einstein’s sons uttered the line, weeks afterward: “You are popular [because] you are understood by the masses. On the other hand, the professor’s popularity with the masses is because he is not understood.” Yet another version, circulating on the Nobel Prize’s Instagram and collecting tens of thousands of likes, has the exchange take place in a dialogue.
Einstein: “What I most admire about your art, is your universality. You don’t say a word, yet the world understands you!”
Chaplin: “True. But your glory is even greater! The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say.”
Whatever they really said to each other, it’s clear Einstein saw something in Charlie Chaplin worth emulating. Chaplin left his mark on Existentialist philosophy, lending the name of his film Modern Times to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s influential journal, Les Temps Modernes. He left a legacy on Beat poetry, lending the name City Lights to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s infamous San Francisco bookstore and publisher. And it seems he also maybe had some small effect on physics, or on the most famous of physicists, who might have harbored a secret ambition to be a silent film comedian—or to communicate, at least, with the universal effectiveness of one as skilled as Charlie Chaplin, favorite of geniuses and grandmothers (and genius grandmothers) everywhere.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
In summer of 1984, American popular culture was dominated by Ghostbusters, a blockbuster that combined sharp comedy and spectacular visual effects on a scale — and in an unlikely harmony — moviegoers had never seen before. Its great success advanced the careers of everyone involved, not least that of Bill Murray. Having already been an early (if not immediately beloved) Saturday Night Live cast member and given much-praised performances in comedies like Caddyshack, Stripes, and Tootsie, he brought his famously detached sensibility to the role of the ghost-busting Dr. Peter Venkman and thereby became the most in-demand comic actor in Hollywood. When, less than six months later, The Razor’s Edge opened with Murray in the starring role, fans bought tickets in hopes of more laughs.
It’s not as if they hadn’t been warned. The Razor’s Edge was adapted from a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, a popular writer in his day, but hardly a straightforward humorist. On the promotional circuit, Murray stressed that this was “a serious movie,” not a comedy but a drama. Nevertheless, both critics and audiences at the time had trouble accepting him in the role of Larry Darrell, a once-lighthearted young man who comes back from World War I overwhelmed by the need to venture back out into the world in search of the ultimate truths of existence. Murray was driven to make the film (for which he took pay only as co-screenwriter) out of the deep identification he felt with the character, which can only have intensified the sting of its failure.
That Larry was a fellow Chicagoan only explains part of the appeal. Murray’s thirtieth birthday, the birth of his first child, and the death of friends like Doug Kenney and John Belushi (who’s indirectly eulogized in the film) had put him in a reflective state of mind, while his growing wealth and fame brought personal and psychological challenges of their own. The prospect of exotic location shoots in Paris and the Himalayas, where Larry’s peripatetic seeking takes him, may have sweetened the deal. Revisited today, the result has plenty of memorable moments, some of them possessed of genuine beauty and grandeur. Alas, the story Maugham tells in the novel, rich with the subtleties of memory, perception, and deception, doesn’t survive the Hollywood tendencies toward over-compression and literal-mindedness.
It must be said that some of the blame lies with Murray himself, whose goofball instincts clash against the nineteen-twenties setting; as he later admitted, he and director John Byrum were wrong to insist on a period piece. (Just imagine the possibilities of Murray playing a returned Vietnam veteran instead.) Regardless, he continued to follow his inner Larry in the aftermath, decamping to Paris with his young family in order to live and learn far from the American scene he knew. It was there that he encountered the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, whose influence on Murray’s persona we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. That marked another step along the path of experience that would lead him to play wiser, sadder, yet never entirely unfunny characters in pictures like Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation — and, in so doing, win dramatic respectability after all.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We’ve previously featured a series of remarkable little films of French artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. Here we wrap things up with just one more: a rare glimpse of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin.
The footage was taken in 1915, two years before Rodin’s death. There are several sequences. The first shows the artist at the columned entrance to an unidentified structure, followed by a brief shot of him posing in a garden somewhere. The rest of the film, beginning at the 53-second mark, was clearly shot at the palatial, but dilapidated, Hôtel Biron, which Rodin was using as a studio and second home.
The mansion was built as a private residence in the early 18th century, and served as a Catholic school for girls from 1820 until about 1904, when it became illegal for public money to be used for religious education. When the last of the nuns cleared out, the rooms of the Hôtel Biron were rented out to a diverse group of people that included some notable artists: Jean Cocteau, Isadora Duncan, Henri Matisse and Rainer Maria Rilke, who served for a time as Rodin’s secretary. It was Rilke’s wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff Rilke, who first told Rodin about the place in 1909.
Rodin first rented four rooms on the main floor, but was alarmed when he learned of plans to sell the property off in pieces to developers. So he made a deal with the government: In exchange for bequeathing all his works to the French state, the sculptor was allowed to occupy the mansion for the rest of his life, and after he died, the estate would become the Musée Rodin.
By the time actor Sacha Guitry and his cameraman arrived to film this scene from Ceux de Chez Nous, or “Those of Our Land,” Rodin was the sole occupant of the Hôtel Biron. The film shows the 74-year-old artist walking down the weed-covered steps of the mansion and working inside, chipping away at a marble statue with a hammer and chisel. When Rodin was asked once about how he created his statues, he said, “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.
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If you had to pick a single figure to represent the concept of the film auteur, you could do much worse than Stanley Kubrick. That’s not to call him the greatest director who ever lived, nor even to call his body of work the greatest in cinema. But no filmography more clearly bears the stamp of a single presiding intelligence across various eras, genres, and styles. On one level, Kubrick never made the same movie twice. On another, each is but a facet of the larger project of rendering on film his ever more aesthetically immaculate, ever less comforting worldview, one that encompasses both Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, both Lolita and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For that and other reasons, Kubrick’s filmography has long occupied a peculiar position in cinema culture. Despite having provided generations of moviegoers their introduction to the “art house,” it also repays the most serious degrees of engagement and scrutiny. Somehow, as Lewis Bond puts it in the recorded Twitch stream above, Kubrick has remained both cinema’s gateway drug and its “final boss.”
You may know Bond’s name — or more likely, recognize his voice — from the many film-related video essays of his (under the banners of Channel Criswell, The Cinema Cartography, and now The House of Tabula) we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, including an exegesis of Kubrick he made nearly a decade ago. It says something that even someone as auteur-obsessed for as long as he’s been can’t resist another trip to the well.
Over the two-hour course of his stream, Bond discusses each and every one of Kubrick’s films while ranking them against each other. It will hardly provoke much controversy that he starts at the bottom with the ramshackle thriller Fear and Desire, the debut feature that even Kubrick himself attempted to strike from the record. What really gets cinephiles talking are the relative merits of the pictures higher up the list: Does The Shining transcend horror, or Dr. Strangelove transcend comedy? Is the sensationalism of A Clockwork Orange or the stateliness of Barry Lyndon to be counted for or against those films? Is Eyes Wide Shut a late masterpiece or, as some thought in 1999, a late mess? Bond jokes that his is the objectively correct ranking of Kubrick’s filmography, and perhaps it does align with critical consensus on many points. But few film-lovers will be entirely free of the temptation to watch through it and judge again for themselves.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As we’ve noted before, the English coffeehouse has served as a staging ground for radical, sometimes revolutionary social change. Certainly this was the case during the Enlightenment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the early 20th century it seems, coffee shops in London had grown scarcer and more humdrum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Italian espresso bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momentous event”:
London’s first proper coffee shop—one equipped with a Gaggia coffee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gather, and it is said by some that the introduction of this coffee bar prompted the youth culture explosion that soon changed social life in Britain forever.
“By 1972,” Watts writes, “coffee bars were everywhere and the teenage revolution was firmly established.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ideal place for countercultural maven William S. Burroughs—a London resident from the late sixties to early seventies—to hobnob with young dissidents and outsiders. Burroughs, who so approvingly refers to the possibly apocryphal anarchist pirate colony of Libertatia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appreciate the budding anarchism of British youth culture, which would flower into punk soon enough.
But rather than joining the coffee bar scene, the cantankerous Burroughs had taken to frequenting “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to mention the ‘Dilly Boys,’ young male prostitutes who hustled for clients outside the Regent Palace Hotel.”
And he had grown increasingly disillusioned with London, fuming, writes Ted Morgan in Burroughs’ biography Literary Outlaw, “at what he was paying for his hole-in-the-wall apartment with a closet for a kitchen” and at the rising price of utilities. “Burroughs,” Morgan tells us, “began to feel that he was in enemy territory.” And he thought the Moka coffee bar should pay the price for his indignities.
There, “on several occasions a snarling counterman had treated him with outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy, and served him poisonous cheesecake that made him sick.” Burroughs “decided to retaliate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d earlier employed against the Church of Scientology, “turning up… every day,” writes Watts, “taking photographs and making sound recordings.” Then he would play them back a day or so later on the street outside the Moka. “The idea,” writes Morgan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position.”
Burroughs also connected the method to the Watergate recordings, the Garden of Eden, and the theories of Alfred Korzybski. The trigger for the magical operation was, in his words, “playback.” In a very strange essay called “Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden,” from his collection Electronic Revolution, Burroughs described his operation in detail, a disruption, he wrote, of a “control system.”
Now to apply the 3 tape recorder analogy to this simple operation. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is in pristine condition. Tape recorder 2 is my recordings of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder 3 is playback. Adam experiences shame when his discgraceful behavior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot affect me.
The theory made perfect sense to Burroughs, who believed in a Magical Universe ruled by occult forces and who experimented heavily with Scientology, Crowley-an Magick, and the orgone energy of Wilhelm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Burroughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On October 30th, 1972 the establishment closed its doors—perhaps a consequence of those rising rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the location became the Queens Snack Bar.
The audio-visual cut-up technique Burroughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their experiments with written “cut-ups,” and Burroughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an interpretive “meditation” based on Burroughs’ use of audio/visual “magical weapons” and incorporating his recordings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Burroughs himself made in 1966 with cinematographer Antony Balch, a disorienting illustration of the cut up technique.
Not limited to attacking annoying London coffeehouse owners, Burroughs’ supposedly magical interventions in reality were in fact the fullest expression of his creativity. As Ted Morgan writes, “the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing.” Read much more about Burroughs’ theory and practice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs,” and hear the author himself discourse on the paranormal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lecture below from a writing class he gave in June, 1986.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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