How Movies Created Their Special Effects Before CGI: Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

in Film, History | December 16th, 2025

The youngest moviegoers today do not, of course, remember a time before visual effects could be created digitally. What may give us more pause is that, at this point in cinema history, most of their parents don’t remember it either. Consider the fact that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, with its once impossibly realistic (and still wholly passable) CGI dinosaurs, came out 32 years ago. That may put it, we must acknowledge, into the realm of the “classic,” the kind of picture whose entertainment value holds up despite — or because of — the qualities that fix it in its time. Equally spectacular but longer-canonized classics pose a greater challenge to the imaginations of young viewers, who can hardly guess how they could have been made “before computers.”

After seeing the notable examples provided in the new Primal Space video above, they’ll certainly understand one thing: it wasn’t easy. Even a seemingly simple effect like the pen floating loose through the zero-gravity cabin in 2001: A Space Odyssey required no small degree of ingenuity. We might naturally assume that filmmakers in 1968 would have accomplished it with a couple of pieces of Scotch tape and fishing line, but that would have resulted in unacceptable tangling problems, to say nothing of the trickiness of ensuring, quite literally, that the strings didn’t show. Instead, Kubrick’s team ended up attaching the pen to a sheet of glass — meticulously cleaned, no doubt, to eliminate the possibility of streaks — large enough to occupy the entire frame and thus go unnoticed by the viewer. It was then slowly rotated by a crank-turning assistant.

A few different effects from 2001 come in for explanation throughout the course of the video, including the multiple-exposure photography that made possible shots of spacecraft passing planets as well as the psychedelic “Star Gate” sequence toward the end. Though some of the devices used in these processes were put together just for the production, the underlying techniques had already been evolving for more than 60 years. Indeed, many were pioneered by Georges Méliès, previously featured here on Open Culture for A Trip to the Moon from 1902, the very first science-fiction film. This video goes behind the scenes of a work from the year before: L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc, or The Man with the Rubber Head, in which Méliès managed a shot in which his own cranium inflates to huge proportions without the use of so much as a zoom lens.

Other examples, drawn from a range of beloved films from Metropolis to Mary Poppins, illustrate the inventiveness born of sheer technical limitation in the days when filmmaking was a wholly analog affair. In some cases, the effects these productions pulled off with miniatures, prisms, and mirrors 60, 80, 100 years ago look as good as anything Hollywood puts on the screen today — or rather better, since the innate physicality behind them makes them feel more “real.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this video’s artificial-intelligence course sponsor makes reference to the endless range of visual possibilities available to those who master that technology. And it’s not impossible that we now stand on the cusp of a revolution in visual effects for that reason, with at least as much of an upside and downside as CGI. If so, we should prepare ourselves to hear the question, from children born today, of how anyone ever made movies before AI.

The Art of Creating Special Effects in Silent Movies: Ingenuity Before the Age of CGI

The 1927 Film Metropolis Created a Dystopian Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026–and It Hits Close to Home

How Stanley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Seven-Part Video Essay

How 2001: A Space Odyssey Became “the Hardest Film Kubrick Ever Made”

Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Anymore: A Close Look at Changing Filmmaking Techniques

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Download 1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli

in Animation, Art, Film | December 11th, 2025

You may have seen every single one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyazaki-directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service to the less widely known but also charmingly crafted likes of Ocean Waves, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and The Cat Returns. Even so, the question remains: have you really seen them all? Experiencing them in the theater or on home video is only the first stage of the process. Ideally, each element of a Ghibli movie should subsequently be appreciated in isolation and at length: by listening to the music, for example, hundreds of hours of which, available to stream, we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture.

Still, no matter how captivating Joe Hisaishi’s scores may sound on their own, Ghibli’s work is ultimately made to be seen. Given that 24 frames of their movies go by each second, it can be difficult to pick up all the details their animators include in each and every one of them.

Hence the value of the free archive of stills that the studio first made available online a few years ago, and that has steadily expanded ever since. Though only available in Japanese, it doesn’t present a great challenge even to fans with no knowledge of the language to click on the poster of their Ghibli film of choice, then to browse the variety of downloadable images associated with it.

Many of these stills are drawn from highly memorable moments across the Ghibli filmography: the children’s party on the hero of Porco Rosso’s beloved airplane; the emergence of the kodama in Princess Mononoke; the defeat of the colossal Giant Warrior in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which predates the studio’s foundation, but in any case now seems to count honorarily among its productions); the sentient flame cooking a skillet of bacon and eggs in Howl’s Moving Castle. Some of them have even been turned into wallpaper for video calls, downloadable from a page of their own. There we have another way to add a touch of Studio Ghibli’s distinctive vision to our everyday lives — and another source of inspiration to watch through the movies themselves one more time.

Enter the archive of still images here.

A Virtual Tour Inside the Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli Museum

A Tour of Studio Ghibli’s Brand New Theme Park in Japan, Which Re-Creates the Worlds of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Other Classics

Software Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Animation Studio Becomes Open Source & Free to Download

Stream Hundreds of Hours of Studio Ghibli Movie Music That Will Help You Study, Work, or Simply Relax: My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Why Do Filmmakers Call The Battle of Algiers the Greatest War Movie Ever?: Watch It Free Online

in Film, History | December 3rd, 2025

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, the loose Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another, serves up many a memorable scene. But for a certain kind of cinephile, nothing — not the terrorist attacks, not the chases, not the swerves into askew comedy — sticks in the mind quite so much as the moment in which Leonardo diCaprio’s stoned protagonist tunes in to a broadcast of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. First released in 1966 (and currently free to watch on YouTube in certain regions), that picture has now been a mainstay of film-studies syllabi long enough that one forgets just how much it would have startled its earliest viewers, more than a few of whom had no idea whether they were watching a war movie or genuine Algerian War newsreel footage.

Some of those viewers included major filmmakers, not least Stanley Kubrick, who later described all films as “false documentaries,” and Pontecorvo’s work as an especially impressive example thereof. Anthony Frewin, who worked as Kubrick’s personal assistant, remembers the director telling him that “I couldn’t really understand what cinema was capable of without seeing The Battle of Algiers. He was still enthusing about it prior to his death.”

The new StudioBinder video at the top of the post also includes testimonials from a host of other auteurs including Werner Herzog, Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone, Alfonso Cuarón, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, and Christopher Nolan.

Kathryn Bigelow — who, as the director of pictures like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, knows something about spinning recent military conflicts into compelling, realistic thrillers — pulled The Battle of Algiers from the shelves on her visit to the Criterion Collection’s closet. She calls it “probably my favorite movie of all time,” adding that “the metronome of tension is almost insufferable, but I say that as a compliment.” A young Roger Ebert, in his contemporary review of the film, warned that it “may be a deeper film experience than many audiences can withstand: too cynical, too true, too cruel and too heartbreaking. It is about the Algerian war, but those not interested in Algeria may substitute another war.”

Such a “universal frame of reference” is also common to the other highlights of the Italian neorealist movement, which also include Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and Luchino Visconti’s The Earth Trembles, with their stark black-and-white cinematography, their real, often still war-torn locations, and their mostly non-professional actors. Despite their venerability, these films can remind even us twenty-first-century viewers who feel as if we’ve seen it all just how much cinematic potential remains untapped. As Paul Thomas Anderson puts it, “It’s always a good idea to watch The Battle of Algiers again, just as a cinematic exercise to get you excited” — no alteration of consciousness required beforehand.

Fear and Desire: Stanley Kubrick’s First and Least-Seen Feature Film (1953)

How Postwar Italian Cinema Created La Dolce Vita and Then the Paparazzi

Animated Introductions to Edward Said’s Groundbreaking Book Orientalism

The Film Music of Ennio Morricone (RIP) Beautifully Performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra Play: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” & Much More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

How the “Marvelization” of Cinema Accelerates the Decline of Filmmaking

in Film | November 28th, 2025

As hard as it may be to believe, some of us have never seen a movie belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you’re one of those uninitiated, none of the countless clips incorporated into the Like Stories of Old video essay above will tempt you to get initiated. Nor will the laments aired by host Tom van der Linden, who, despite once enjoying the MCU himself, eventually came to wonder why keeping up with its releases had begun to feel less like a thrill than a chore. As if their CGI-laden sound and fury weren’t trying enough, there’s also “the constant quipping, the annoying self-awareness, the fact that everything has to be a franchise now.”

Van der Linden labels a central factor in the decline of the MCU “storytelling entropy.” Classic films, you may have noticed, concentrate practically all the energy in every facet of their production toward the expression of specific themes, stories, and characters; at their best, their every line, gesture, cut, and invention represents the tip of an artistic iceberg. Take, to use a popular example, the lightsaber introduced in Star Wars, which Van der Linden calls “not just a weapon, but a metaphor” that “symbolically communicates a lot about the philosophy of its wielder, and about the larger world that it exists in,” condensing “a multitude of meanings and ideas into a simple, singular object.”

It does so in the first two or three movies, at any rate. In the decades since, as the Star Wars universe has grown ever vaster, more complex, and conceptually unwieldy, so the proliferation and modification of the once-marvelous lightsaber has turned it into something mundane, even banal. So it goes with storytelling entropy, a phenomenon that afflicts every narrative franchise commercially compelled to grow without end. That process of expansion eventually turns even the most captivating original materials diffuse and uninvolving to all but the hardest-core fans — by which point it has usually become obvious that creators themselves have long since lost their own passion for the stories.

Most MCU viewers will admit that it has produced misses as well as hits. But Marvelization, as Van der Linden calls it, has also inspired other, imitative corporate franchises to pump out globally marketable content fiercely protected by intellectual property lawyers — and has even drained the interest out of realms of film and television that have nothing to do with superheroes, swords, or sci-fi. Hollywood has always been about the bottom line, of course, but only in recent decades have market saturation, cross-platform strategy, and maximum crossover potential come to dominate its priorities so completely. From the MCU or otherwise, a Marvelized movie is one that, at bottom, has no pressing need to be made — and that we, ultimately, feel no pressing need to see.

The Dark Knight: Anatomy of a Flawed Action Scene

The Importance of Film Editing Demonstrated by the Bad Editing of Major Films: Bohemian Rhapsody, Suicide Squad & More

Why Marvel and Other Hollywood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Painting Explains the Perils of the “Temp Score”

Why We All Need Subtitles Now

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 40 ) |

Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Anymore: A Close Look at Changing Filmmaking Techniques

in Film | November 20th, 2025

Anyone who keeps an eye on Hollywood knows — indeed, has been ever more frequently and anxiously informed — that the theater business is in trouble. If fewer of us than ever have been going out to the movies, one reason must have to do with the easy availability of home streaming, to say nothing of all the proliferating digital distractions precision-engineered to capture our attention. But could it also have to do with a change in the pictures themselves? With more than two million views racked up in just four days, the new Like Stories of Old video essay above ventures an explanation as to “Why Movies Just Don’t Feel ‘Real’ Anymore.”

In recent years, even long, colossally budgeted, and ceaselessly marketed spectacles feel strangely insubstantial on any screen, big or small. The video’s creator Tom van der Linden points to a variety of factors, beginning with a worsening lack of correspondence between the cinematic image and our perception of reality.

One clearly — or rather, readily — noticeable contributing trend is the prevalence of shallow focus, which keeps the characters in the foreground sharp but lets all the details of the background go blurry: not the way we see the real world, unless we misplace our glasses. Because we live in deep focus, deep focus cinematography feels more real to us.

Of course, not every movie can be Lawrence of Arabia. But there was a time when practically all of them did deliver what’s called “haptic visuality,” the word haptic relating to the concept of our sense of touch. Older films have a tangibility about them in large part because the filmmakers had no choice: working only or primarily with analog tools, they could only do so much to detach images from our physical experience. Digital photography, post-production CGI, and now the open abyss of AI have made anything technically possible, though as van der Linden underscores, those technologies by themselves don’t guarantee that the resulting movie won’t feel real. Ultimately, unreality is a choice, and one we moviegoers should hope the industry will stop making — if not for our satisfaction, then for its own survival.

The Importance of Film Editing Demonstrated by the Bad Editing of Major Films: Bohemian Rhapsody, Suicide Squad & More

Why Marvel and Other Hollywood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Painting Explains the Perils of the “Temp Score”

Why We All Need Subtitles Now

Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 56 ) |

Watch 50 David Bowie Music Videos Spanning Five Decades of Reinvention: “Space Oddity,” “Life on Mars?” “ ‘Heroes’,” “Let’s Dance” & More

in Film, Music | November 12th, 2025

Each of us has a different idea of when, exactly, the sixties ended, not as a decade, but as a distinct cultural period. Some have a notion of the “long sixties” that extends well into the seventies; if pressed for a specific final year, they could do worse than pointing to 1972, when David Bowie made his epoch-shifting appearance as Ziggy Stardust, backed by the Spiders from Mars, on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. It was also the year he released music videos for “Space Oddity,” the single that had begun to make his name at the time of the moon landing in 1969, and “Jean Genie,” the first single from Aladdin Sane, an album inspired in part by the debauchery of the American Ziggy tour he undertook after blasting off into stardom.

Having struggled in the sixties to find a suitable identity and audience, the young Bowie developed an unusually strong understanding of not just the music industry, but also the culture itself. One era was giving way to another, and nobody knew it better than he did. When all those hirsute figures in beards and denim, singing with ostentatious earnestness about love and freedom, disappeared, who would replace them?

In Bowie’s vision, the next phase belonged to clean-shaven, made-up androgynes in flamboyant designer costumes working grand, sometimes science fictional, and often inscrutable themes into what would strike concertgoers as almost complete theatrical experiences — and he would be the first and foremost among them.

Bowie, in other words, made the seventies his own, operating on his knowledge of and instincts about the media environment of that decade and how images would be made in it. By that time, he’d seen too many flashes in the pan of pop music to get complacent about his own prospects for endurance. The reception of “Space Oddity” as a novelty song did its part to motivate him to come up with his bisexual space-alien rock-star alter ego — and to motivate him to terminate that persona on stage in 1973. A couple of years before that, he had already sung of the importance of changes, a kind of manifesto that would guide his career through all the decades that remained. Never would Bowie adhere to a particular musical or aesthetic style for very long, an abiding tendency vividly on display in this playlist of 50 music videos on his official YouTube channel.

The experience of putting out music videos in the seventies placed Bowie well, especially compared to other artists of his generation, to make his mark on MTV in the eighties with a stadium-ready hit like “Let’s Dance.” The nineties found him taking the form in new directions, as with the cinephilically astute video for “Jump They Say” and the daringly action-free visual treatment of the reflective “Thursday’s Child” (from the album Hours…, which began as the soundtrack to the computer game Omikron: The Nomad Soul). Apart from this playlist, his channel also contains music videos for his later songs from the two-thousands and twenty-tens, from “New Killer Star” to “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” to “Blackstar” — the nature of stardom having been a preoccupation since the beginning, even though he kept on changing to the very end.

Watch David Bowie Perform “Starman” on Top of the Pops: Voted the Greatest Music Performance Ever on the BBC (1972)

David Bowie Performs “Life on Mars?” and “Ashes to Ashes” on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” (1980)

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Tribute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphaville, Welles’ The Trial & Kubrick’s 2001

Watch David Bowie’s New Video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” With Tilda Swinton

When Bowie & Jagger’s “Dancing in the Street” Music Video Becomes a Silent Film

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

The Groundbreaking Animation That Defined Pink Floyd’s Psychedelic Visual Style: Watch “French Windows” (1972)

in Animation, Film, Music | November 11th, 2025

You could argue that, of all rock bands, that Pink Floyd had the least need for visual accompaniment. Sonically rich and evocatively structured, their albums evolved to offer listening experiences that verge on the cinematic in themselves. Yet from fairly early in the Floyd’s history, their artistic ambitions extended to that which could not be heard. Can you really understand their enterprise, it’s fair to ask, if you remain merely one of their listeners, never entering the visual dimension — not just their album covers, reproductions of which still grace many a dorm room wall, but also their elaborate stage shows, music videos (which they were making before that form had a name), and films? One man had more responsibility for the development of the Floyd’s visual style than any other: Ian Emes.

In 1972, Emes took it upon himself to animate their song “One of These Days” from the previous year’s album Meddle. When the finished work, “French Windows,” aired on the BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, it caught the eye of the Floyd’s keyboard player Rick Wright. The group then got in touch with Emes, asking to use “French Windows” as a projection behind their concerts.

They went on to commission further work from him, for songs like “Speak to Me,” Time,” and “On the Run” from The Dark Side of the Moon. This professional connection endured for decades. When Roger Waters put on his own performances of The Wall — including the enormously scaled show in Berlin in 1990 — he had Emes direct its animated sequences. The post-Waters version of Pink Floyd even called up Emes in 2015 to ask him to make a film to accompany their final album The Endless River.

It was, in a way, the completion of a circle: “One of These Days” is a mostly instrumental song, and The Endless River is a mostly instrumental album; “French Windows” uses rotoscoping, which involves tracing over live action footage to make more realistically smooth animation, and the Endless River film presents its own live action footage in a manner that sometimes verges on the abstract. Both works create their own visual environments, which dovetails with what Emes, who died two years ago, once described as the appeal for him of the Floyd: “They went to architecture college and so I think their music creates spaces. It creates environments of sound and I was so stimulated that my mind would soar, and so I would see images that were stimulated by the music.” Their music takes a different form before the mind’s eye of each fan, but it was Emes who made his visions a part of their legacy.

Pink Floyd Films a Concert in an Empty Auditorium, Still Trying to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

Pink Floyd’s First Masterpiece: An Audio/Video Exploration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

Download Pink Floyd’s 1975 Comic Book Program for The Dark Side of the Moon Tour

The First Professional Footage of Pink Floyd Gets Captured in a 1967 Documentary (and the Band Also Provides the Soundtrack)

How Pink Floyd Built The Wall: The Album, Tour & Film

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Inside the Making of the Alien Suit: How H. R. Giger’s Dark Vision Came to Life in Ridley Scott’s Film

in Film, Sci Fi | November 5th, 2025

In the whole of Alien, the titular entity only appears on screen for about three minutes. That’s one reason the movie holds up so well against the other creature features of its era: in glimpses, you never get a chance to register signs of the alien’s being an artificial construction. That’s not to say it was a shoddy piece of work; quite the contrary, as explained in the new video above from CinemaTyler. Its creation demanded the dedicated efforts of an international group of professionals including special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who’d engineered the giant ape head in the 1976 King Kong remake and the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and would later work on an even more iconic extraterrestrial for E.T.).

Charged with designing the alien, and eventually with overseeing its fabrication and assembly, was the artist H. R. Giger, whose artistic sensibility occupied the intersection of organism and machine, Eros and Thanatos. Though it’s most thoroughly expressed in the deadly creature that stows away aboard the space tug Nostromo, it also, to one degree or another, pervades the whole movie’s look and feel.

Whether from the late seventies or any other period, the usual sleek, antiseptic sci-fi futures date rather quickly, a condition hardly suffered by the unrelievedly dark, dank, and dysfunctional setting of Alien. This surprisingly grimy realism makes the threat of the alien feel that much more real; hidden in its many shadows, Giger’s vision preys that much more effectively on our imagination.

Not that it was guaranteed to succeed in doing so. As CinemaTyler explains, the process of creating the alien came up against countless setbacks, all under increasingly severe constraints of both time and budget. At times the production got lucky, as when it happened upon the nearly seven-foot-tall Bolaji Badejo, who ended up wearing the alien costume (despite Scott’s insistence, early in the production, that he didn’t want to make a movie about “a man in a suit”). But it was attempting to create a being of a kind never seen on screen before, one that had to be developed through trial and error, more often the latter than the former. And it was hardly the only difficult aspect of the making of Alien, as evidenced by the eleven-and-counting episodes of CinemaTyler’s series on the subject. Maybe in space, no one can hear you scream, but one can easily imagine the cries of frustration let out by Scott, Giger, and all their pressured collaborators down here on Earth.

H. R. Giger’s Dark, Surrealist Album Covers: Debbie Harry, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Celtic Frost, Danzig & More

H. R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Journey into the Occult

Watch Six New Short Alien Films: Created to Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Film

High School Kids Stage Alien: The Play, Get Kudos from Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

How Movies Created Their Special Effects Before CGI: Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

Download 1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli

Why Do Filmmakers Call The Battle of Algiers the Greatest War Movie Ever?: Watch It Free Online

How the “Marvelization” of Cinema Accelerates the Decline of Filmmaking

Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Anymore: A Close Look at Changing Filmmaking Techniques

Watch 50 David Bowie Music Videos Spanning Five Decades of Reinvention: “Space Oddity,” “Life on Mars?” “ ‘Heroes’,” “Let’s Dance” & More

The Groundbreaking Animation That Defined Pink Floyd’s Psychedelic Visual Style: Watch “French Windows” (1972)

Inside the Making of the Alien Suit: How H. R. Giger’s Dark Vision Came to Life in Ridley Scott’s Film

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