Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Short Circuit, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machina: there is a parallel history of cinema to be told entirely through its robots. That such a history must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as a surprise, given that he invented so many of the techniques of science-fiction filmmaking. But until recently, we didn’t actually know that the cinema pioneer who “invented everything” ever put a robot onscreen. The evidence turned up among a collection of “old and battered” reels of film that were “from before World War I and had been shuttled around from basements to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library.”
So writes the Library of Congress’ Neely Tucker, who goes on to describe the action of one of the films involving “a magician and a robot battling it out in slapstick fashion. It took a bit, but then the gasp of realization: They were looking at ‘Gugusse and the Automaton,’ a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker Georges Méliès at his Star Film company.”
Méliès himself plays the magician, who “winds up an automaton dressed like the famous clown Pierrot, which is standing on a pedestal. Once wound up, the clown begins to beat the magician with his walking stick. The magician retaliates by getting a huge sledgehammer and bashing the automaton over the head, with each blow seeming to shrink it in half, until it is just a small doll.”
In just 45 seconds, this simple film would have astonished audiences back in 1897 — and indeed retains the power to impress, provided you consider that none of the techniques to realize its effects were widely known before Méliès attempted them. He did so five years before ‘A Trip to the Moon,’ a hugely ambitious cinematic endeavor by comparison, and by far the single film that best represents his legacy.’ Yet it and Gugusse and the Automaton are clearly the work of the same artist-inventor, one who possessed that rare combination of technical know-how and artistic daring, and who understood the need for an organic relationship between spectacle and narrative. Not that either the spectacle or the narrative are highly evolved at this stage, but, as Méliès may have suspected, the cinema of robots has as long an evolution ahead of it as automata 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.
A vast, miserable proletariat squanders its days in meaningless toil. Society is under the control of ultra-wealthy business magnates. In order to pacify the underclass, the ruling class pins its hopes on a technological solution: artificial intelligence. Welcome to the year 2026, as envisioned in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. When the film premiered, not long after 1926 had come to an end, that date would have seemed arbitrarily futuristic. Now, of course, it’s the present, though our world may nowhere look quite as stylish as the Art Deco dystopia crafted at great expense and an unprecedented scale of production by Lang and company. Yet when we watch Metropolis today, the elements that now seem prescient stand out more than the fantastical ones.
The new short documentary from DW above examines the making and legacy of Metropolis, paying special attention to its considerable influence on much of the science-fiction and dystopian cinema since. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator 2, Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video: these are just a few of the productions that take no great pains to hide — and in some cases, even emphasize — their debt to Lang’s vision.
Vertiginous, intensively illuminated, infrastructure-webbed skyscraper canyons and laborers at once manipulating and being manipulated by oversized clockwork are only the most obvious images that have come down through decades of popular culture. For the origin of the wild-haired “mad scientist” surrounded by tubes and coils, look no further than Metropolis’ Rotwang.
Much could also be written — and indeed, much already has been written — about the legacy of Rotwang’s invention, the robot woman who takes on the likeness of a working-class heroine. Beyond the groundbreaking nature of its design, Metropolis has also retained attention after nearly a century thanks to the folkloric, even mythical resonances of its story. It may be technically implausible, at least from our point of view, to imagine large-scale automation coexisting with large-scale employment, however dire the jobs, but age-old narrative undercurrents allow even modern audiences to suspend disbelief (a phenomenon that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the makers of more recent sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters). We may not live in quite the 2026 that Metropolis puts onscreen, but in some sense, we do inhabit the world it made.
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.
Madman or visionary? A little of both? A genius? A brand? A mensch? David Lynch was all these things and more, and this fan-made video above serves as a quick reminder of the career and the consistency of the film director/artist/transcendental meditator who passed away last year.
Early in the video we see one of the director’s publicity stunts, when he sat in a chair on the corner of La Brea and Hollywood, next to a cow and a large poster of Laura Dern. No, the cow had nothing to do with the film he was promoting—2006’s Inland Empire—but it did stop traffic and draw attention. Lynch didn’t have an advertising budget to promote Laura Dern’s lead role in the film, so the cow had to do.
Laura Dern appeared in a majority of Lynch’s films beginning with 1986’s Blue Velvet, and the video honors their friendship (he called her “Tidbit”) as well as his collaborations with Kyle MacLachlan (who Lynch called “Kale”) and Naomi Watts. All three obviously adored him.
There’s also a compilation of Lynch swearing like a champ. Product placement in film is “bullshit,” problems on set are “fucking nuts,” and for those who sat through the “peanut sweeping” scene in Twin Peaks The Return, you’ll understand his outburst on set: “Who gives a fuc&ing $hit how long a scene is?”
We’ve linked previously to Lynch’s video where he makes quinoa, and this short edit sums up that video nicely. It’s also nice to see attention given to The Straight Story, which usually gets passed over in his filmography, despite (or maybe because of) being his sweetest movie.
The video ends with Lynch’s theory about catching ideas like fish—we’ve also highlighted this before—and then a lovely montage of title cards, reminding us all that “Directed by David Lynch” remains a guaranteed sign of quality.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
Though his movies may have benefited greatly from foreign audiences and backers, David Lynch was one of the most thoroughly American of all filmmakers. “Born Missoula, MT,” declared his Twitter bio, yet one never really associates him with a particular place in the United States (at least no extant one). From Montana, the Lynch family moved to Idaho, then Washington, then North Carolina, then Virginia. The timing of that last stint proved culturally fortuitous indeed: living in the city of Alexandria, the eighteen-year-old Lynch was close enough to the nation’s capital to attend the very first concert the Beatles played in North America, at the Washington Coliseum on February 11, 1964.
“I was into rock and roll music, mainly Elvis Presley.” Lynch recalls this unsurprising fact in the clip above (which would have been among the last interviews he gave before his death a year ago) from Beatles ’64, the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary on the Fab Four’s first U.S. tour.
“I didn’t have any idea how big this event was. And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring. It was so loud, you can’t believe. Girls shuddering, crying, screaming their heart out. It was phenomenal.” That deafening crowd noise figures into most every account of the group’s Beatlemania-era shows — and played a decisive role in their permanent retreat into the studio a couple of years later.
Lynch surely would have understood the desire for artistic exploration and control that drove the Beatles’ concentration on making records. Even the sensibilities of his work and theirs had something in common, exhibiting as they both did the unlikely combination of popularity and experimentation. Somehow, David Lynch’s films and the Beatles’ albums could venture into bewildering obscurity and sentimental kitsch without losing coherence or critical respect. And dare one imagine that the experience of witnessing the American debut of what would become the most influential rock band of all time has given Lynch his appreciation — evident in his movies, but also his own recordings — for the power of music, which he calls “one of the most fantastic things”? Even if not, it must have been, well… surreal.
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.
In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity between objects and their viewers. Its loss, Benjamin argued, was a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon caused by mass media’s imposition of distance between object and viewer, though it appears to bring art closer through a simulation of intimacy.
The essay makes for potent reading today. Mass media — which for Benjamin meant radio, photography, and film — turns us all into potential actors, critics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle. Yet it retains the pretense of ritual. We make offerings to cults of personality, expanded in our time to include influencers and revered and reviled billionaires and political figures who joust in the headlines like professional wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. As Benjamin writes:
The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.
Benjamin’s focus on the medium as not only expressive but constitutive of meaning has made his essay a staple on communications and media theory course syllabi, next to the work of Marshall McLuhan. Many readings tend to leave aside the politics of its epilogue, likely since “his remedy,” writes Martin Jay — “the politicization of art by Communism — was forgotten by all but his most militant Marxist interpreters,” and hardly seemed like much of a remedy during the Cold War, when Benjamin became more widely available in translation.
Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic politics aside, his essay anticipates a crisis of authorship and authority currently surfacing in the use of social media as a dominant form of political spectacle.
With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.
Benjamin’s analysis of conventional film, especially, leads him to conclude that its reception required so little of viewers that they easily become distracted. Everyone’s a critic, but “at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Passive consumption and habitual distraction do not make for considered, informed opinion or a healthy sense of proportion.
What Benjamin referred to (in translation) as mechanical reproducibility we might now just call The Internet (and the coteries of “things” it haunts poltergeist-like). Later theorists influenced by Benjamin foresaw our age of digital reproducibility doing away with the need for authentic objects, and real people, altogether. Benjamin himself might characterize a medium that can fully detach from the physical world and the material conditions of its users — a medium in which everyone gets a column, public photo gallery, and video production studio — as ideally suited to the aims of fascism.
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
The logical result of turning politics into spectacle for the sake of preserving inequality, writes Benjamin, is the romanticization of war and slaughter, glorified plainly in the Italian Futurist manifesto of Filippo Marinetti and the literary work of Nazi intellectuals like Ernst Jünger. Benjamin ends the essay with a discussion of how fascism aestheticizes politics to one end: the annihilation of aura by more permanent means.
Under the rise of fascism in Europe, Benjamin saw that human “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” Those who participate in this spectacle seek mass violence “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.” Distracted and desensitized, they seek, that is, to compensate for profound disembodiment and the loss of meaningful, authentic experience.
Un Chien Andalou means “an Andalusian dog,” though the much-studied 1929 short film of that title contains no dogs at all, from Andalusia or anywhere else. In fact, it alludes to a Spanish expression about how the howling of an Andalusian signals that someone has died. And indeed, there is death in Un Chien Andalou, as well as sex, albeit death and sex as processed through the unconscious minds of the young filmmaker Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí, whose collaboration on this enduringly strange movie did much to make their names. Two of its memorable images — among sixteen straight minutes of memorable images — came straight from their dreams: a hand crawling with ants, and a razor blade slicing the moon as if it were an eye.
“Less than two minutes into the picture, a man — played by the stocky, unmissable figure of Buñuel himself — stands on a balcony, gazing wolfishly at the moon,” writes New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. “Cut to the face of a woman. Cut back to the moon; a thin slice of cloud drifts across its face. Cut to an eye; a razor blade knifes neatly and without hesitation across the eyeball, whose contents well and spill like an outsized tear. Cut. At this point, if you are of a nervous disposition, you faint.”
Buñuel himself told Dalí that the sequence made him sick, though he also publicly described Un Chien Andalou as “a desperate and passionate appeal to murder.” Allergic to the direct incorporation of politics into art, he preferred to use the techniques of Surrealism to advocate for the destruction of society itself.
Yet as their careers went on, Buñuel and Dalí eventually occupied respected positions in society. Curious! Though Buñuel would keep recommitting to the power of absurdity throughout his filmography (not least in the seventies with his final trilogy, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire), it is Un Chien Andalou that holds the title of one of the most important works in the history of cinema, recognized even by those who’ve never seen it, some of whom no doubt suspect they couldn’t bear to. But if they can summon the will, they’ll find the film’s parade of unsettlingly coherent incoherence is more accessible than ever, since it has now fallen into the public domain, according to the Internet Archive. Its sense of humor may surprise them, but so too may the undiminished vividness of its flashes of sex and death, which have always been standbys of cinema — and of dreams.
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.
In 2004, the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge recorded a series of Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs for Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The next year, he released a full album of 13 Bowie classics, and in 2016–2017, he even took the songs on tour. Now, in 2026, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s passing, Jorge returns with the performance above. Set against a beautiful Brazilian coastline, he sings some of Bowie’s most beloved tracks, all while in character as Pelé dos Santos, the role he played in Anderson’s film. See the full track list below and enjoy.
Lady Stardust
Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide
Queen Bitch
Oh! You Pretty Things
Suffragette City
Changes
Rebel Rebel
Quicksand
Five Years
Team Zissou
Ziggy Stardust
Space Oddity
When I Live My Dream
Life on Mars?
Starman
When Netflix launched around the turn of the millennium, it was received as a godsend by many American cinephiles, especially those who lived nowhere near diversely programmed revival houses or well-curated video stores. A quarter-century later, it’s safe to say that those days have come to an end. Not only does the streaming-only Netflix of the twenty-twenties no longer transmit movies on DVD through the mail (a service its younger users have trouble even imagining), it ranks approximately nowhere as a preferred cinephile destination. That has to do with a selection much diminished since the DVD days — especially as regards movies more than a decade or so old — but also with a brand debased by too many bland, formulaic original productions.
Unlike the platform’s various acclaimed multi-episode dramatic series, the “Netflix movie” commands no critical respect. But it can, at least if you trust the company’s own viewership data, command a large audience, if not an especially attentive one. The general semi-engagement of Netflix viewers, as argued in the Nerdstalgic video at the top of the post, is reflected in the quality of the “movie-shaped product” now served to them.
Far from the slapped-together approximations of Hollywood we once expected from films made for TV, the stream-chart-topping likes of Red Notice and The Electric State are mega-budgeted productions brimming with big stars and large-scale visual effects. They’re also tissues of algorithm-approved narrative elements, borrowed imagery, and third-hand quips, all of them forgotten as soon as the next piece of content begins auto-playing.
On the latest Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon turned up to promote their own Netflix movie, The Rip. They don’t take long to open up about the distinctive challenges of working for that platform in this era. Damon mentions that, whereas action movies once saved their explosion-intensive set pieces for after the story gets in motion, Netflix asks, “Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” According to the filmmakers who speak about it, the needs of these so-called “second screen” viewers have assumed great importance in the studio notes offered by Netflix — which has, at this point, become a major studio in itself.
Satisfying the apparent demands of Netflix’s metrics results in what Nerdstalgic calls “visual muzak,” geared to hold out just enough familiarity and prestige to get users to press play, without ever calling so much attention to itself that they press stop. This makes the studio pictures of the nineties, when Affleck and Damon broke out, look like the stuff of a golden age. “There were a lot of really good independent movies that were being made,” Damon remembers. “They were making daring movies, and everyone just got way more conservative.” On one level, streaming platforms have greatly widened access to film in general; on another, they’ve stifled artistic individuality and risk-taking on the part of actual films. As Quentin Tarantino has pointed out, technology and economics put mainstream cinema into periods of creative retrenchment every so often: the fifties, for example, or the eighties. Whether another seventies or nineties lies ahead, today’s cinephiles can only hope.
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.
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