The 15 Greatest Documentaries of All Time: Explore Films by Werner Herzog, Errol Morris & More

There are two kinds of peo­ple in this world: those who rec­og­nize the phrase “corny dia­logue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the for­mer cat­e­go­ry, your mind is almost cer­tain­ly filled with images of bleak Mid­west­ern win­ters, mod­est trail­er homes, hood­ed fig­ures smash­ing an already-junk­yard-wor­thy car, and above all, one man try­ing — and try­ing, and try­ing — to put anoth­er man’s head through a kitchen cab­i­net. If you fall into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, it’s high time you watched Amer­i­can Movie, Chris Smith and Sara Price’s doc­u­men­tary about a hap­less aspir­ing Wis­con­sin hor­ror film­mak­er Mark Bor­chardt that has, in the 25 years since its release, become a minor cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto itself.

Amer­i­can Movie right­ful­ly occu­pies the top spot in the new Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy video above, which ranks the fif­teen great­est doc­u­men­taries of all time. The list fea­tures well-known works by the most acclaimed doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers alive today, like Fred­er­ick Wise­man’s Titi­cut Fol­lies, which cap­tures a tal­ent show at an insti­tu­tion for the “crim­i­nal­ly insane”; Errol Mor­ris’ The Thin Blue Line, which proved instru­men­tal in solv­ing the very mur­der case it exam­ines; and Wern­er Her­zog’s Griz­zly Man, which deals in Her­zog’s sig­na­ture height­ened yet mat­ter-of-fact man­ner with the iron­ic fate of an eccen­tric bear enthu­si­ast.

Doc­u­men­tary film has expe­ri­enced some­thing of a pop­u­lar renais­sance over the past few decades, begin­ning in 1994 with Steve James’ Acad­e­my Award-win­ning Hoop Dreams (which comes in at num­ber sev­en). More recent exam­ples of doc­u­men­taries that have gone rel­a­tive­ly main­stream include Joshua Oppen­heimer’s The Act of Killing (num­ber three), in which par­tic­i­pants in Indone­si­a’s mass polit­i­cal vio­lence of the nine­teen-six­ties recall their own bru­tal­i­ty in detail, and O.J.: Made in Amer­i­ca (num­ber five), which revis­its the “tri­al of the cen­tu­ry” now so close and yet so far in our cul­tur­al mem­o­ry. There are also intrigu­ing films of a much low­er pro­file, like William Greaves’ chaot­ic Sym­biopsy­chotax­i­plasm: Take One and the late Jonas Mekas’ epi­cal­ly but mod­est­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal As I Was Mov­ing Ahead Occa­sion­al­ly I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beau­ty.

If you watch only one of these fif­teen doc­u­men­taries, make it Amer­i­can Movie, which repays repeat­ed view­ings over a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry (as I can per­son­al­ly con­firm) with not just its com­e­dy — inten­tion­al or unin­ten­tion­al — but also its insight — again, inten­tion­al or unin­ten­tion­al — into the nature of cre­ation, friend­ship, and human exis­tence itself. “If ever, in your cre­ations, there’s doubt, or you ever feel like you’ve lost your way, if there was ever a film to watch, to realign your­self, it is Amer­i­can Movie,” says The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy cre­ator Lewis Bond. Even those of us not ded­i­cat­ed to any par­tic­u­lar art form could stand to be remind­ed on occa­sion that, as Bor­chardt mem­o­rably puts it, “life is kin­da cool some­times.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

50 Must-See Doc­u­men­taries, Select­ed by 10 Influ­en­tial Doc­u­men­tary Film­mak­ers

Watch 80 Free Doc­u­men­taries from Kino Lor­ber: Includes Films on M. C. Esch­er, Stan­ley Kubrick, Han­nah Arendt, Hilma af Klint & More

Errol Mor­ris Makes His Ground­break­ing Series First Per­son Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Inter­views with Genius­es, Eccentrics, Obses­sives & Oth­er Unusu­al Types

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

The 10 Great­est Doc­u­men­taries of All Time Accord­ing to 340 Film­mak­ers and Crit­ics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

When François Truffaut Made a Film Adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

The pro­tag­o­nist of Ray Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 is a “fire­man” tasked with incin­er­at­ing what few books remain in a domes­tic-screen-dom­i­nat­ed future soci­ety forced into illit­er­a­cy. Late in life, Ray Brad­bury declared that he wrote the nov­el because he was “wor­ried about peo­ple being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a cer­tain irony giv­en that the lat­est adap­ta­tion was made for HBO (2018). That project, which one crit­ic likened it to “a Glax­o­SmithK­line pro­duc­tion of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” will prob­a­bly not be the last Fahren­heit 451 movie. Nor was it the first: that title goes to the one Nou­velle Vague auteur François Truf­faut’s film direct­ed in 1966, though many count that as a dubi­ous hon­or.

A con­tem­po­rary review in Time mag­a­zine mem­o­rably called Truf­faut’s Fahren­heit 451 a “weird­ly gay lit­tle pic­ture that assails with both hor­ror and humor all forms of tyran­ny over the mind of man,” albeit one that “strong­ly sup­ports the wide­ly held sus­pi­cion that Julie Christie can­not actu­al­ly act.”

Truf­faut bold­ly cast Christie in a dual role, as both pro­tag­o­nist Ray Mon­tag’s TV-and-pill-addict­ed wife and the young rebel who even­tu­al­ly lures him over to the pro-book lib­er­a­tion move­ment. Though some view­ers see it as the pic­ture’s fatal flaw, Scott Tobias, writ­ing at The Dis­solve, calls it a “mas­ter­stroke” that ren­ders the near­ly iden­ti­cal char­ac­ters “the abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tives of con­for­mi­ty and non-con­for­mi­ty they had always been in the book.”

It’s easy to imag­ine what appeal the source mate­r­i­al would have held for Truf­faut, the most lit­er­ary-mind­ed leader of the French New Wave; recall the shrine to Balzac kept by young Antoine Doinel in Truf­faut’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal debut The 400 Blows. By the time he went to work on Fahren­heit 451, his sixth fea­ture, he’d become what the Amer­i­can behind-the-scenes trail­er calls an “inter­na­tion­al­ly famous French direc­tor.” But this time, cir­cum­stances con­spired against him: his increas­ing­ly frac­tious rela­tion­ship with Jules and Jim star Oskar Wern­er did the lat­ter’s per­for­mance as Mon­tag no favors, and the mon­ey hav­ing come from the U.K. forced him to work in Eng­lish, a lan­guage of which he had scant com­mand at the time.

Truf­faut him­self enu­mer­ates these and oth­er dif­fi­cul­ties in a pro­duc­tion diary pub­lished over sev­er­al issues of Cahiers du Ciné­ma (begin­ning with num­ber 175). Yet near­ly six decades lat­er, his trou­bled inter­pre­ta­tion of Fahren­heit 451 still fas­ci­nates. New York­er crit­ic Richard Brody calls it “one of Truffaut’s wildest films, a cold­ly flam­boy­ant out­pour­ing of visu­al inven­tion in the ser­vice of lit­er­ary pas­sion and artis­tic mem­o­ry as well as a repu­di­a­tion of a world of uni­form con­ve­nience and com­fort­able con­for­mi­ty.” Today we may won­der why the paraso­cial rela­tion­ship Mon­tag’s wife anx­ious­ly main­tains with her tele­vi­sion, which must have seemed fan­tas­ti­cal in the mid-six­ties, feels dis­com­fit­ing­ly famil­iar — and how long it will be before Fahren­heit 451 gets re-adapt­ed as a binge-ready pres­tige TV dra­ma.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Truf­faut Became Truf­faut: From Pet­ty Thief to Great Auteur

Ralph Steadman’s Hell­ish Illus­tra­tions for Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Dystopi­an Nov­el Fahren­heit 451

Behold Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries

Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451? A New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Explains

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

Behold Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories

Sergei Bon­darchuk direct­ed an 8‑hour film adap­ta­tion of War and Peace (1966–67), which end­ed up win­ning an Oscar for Best For­eign Pic­ture. When he was in Los Ange­les as a guest of hon­or at a par­ty, Hol­ly­wood roy­al­ty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Bil­ly Wilder lined up to meet the Russ­ian film­mak­er. But the only per­son that Bon­darchuk was tru­ly excit­ed to meet was Ray Brad­bury. Bon­darchuk intro­duced the author to the crowd of bemused A‑listers as “your great­est genius, your great­est writer!”

Ray Brad­bury spent a life­time craft­ing sto­ries about robots, Mar­tians, space trav­el and nuclear doom and, in the process, turned the for­mer­ly dis­rep­utable genre of Sci-Fi/­Fan­ta­sy into some­thing respectable. He influ­enced legions of writ­ers and film­mak­ers on both sides of the Atlantic from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman to Fran­cois Truf­faut, who adapt­ed his most famous nov­el, Fahren­heit 451, into a movie.

That film wasn’t the only adap­ta­tion of Bradbury’s work, of course. His writ­ings have been turned into fea­ture films, TV movies, radio shows and even a video game for the Com­modore 64. Dur­ing the wan­ing days of the Cold War, a hand­ful of Sovi­et ani­ma­tors demon­strat­ed their esteem for the author by adapt­ing his short sto­ries.

Vladimir Sam­sonov direct­ed Bradbury’s Here There Be Tygers, which you can see above. A space­ship lands on an Eden-like plan­et. The humans inside are on a mis­sion to extract all the nat­ur­al resources pos­si­ble from the plan­et, but they quick­ly real­ize that this isn’t your ordi­nary rock. “This plan­et is alive,” declares one of the char­ac­ters. Indeed, not only is it alive but it also has the abil­i­ty to grant wish­es. Want to fly? Fine. Want to make streams flow with wine? Sure. Want to sum­mon a nubile maid­en from the earth? No prob­lem. Every­one seems enchant­ed by the plan­et except one dark-heart­ed jerk who seems hell-bent on com­plet­ing the mis­sion.

Samsonov’s movie is styl­ized, spooky and rather beau­ti­ful – a bit like as if Andrei Tarkovsky had direct­ed Avatar.

Anoth­er one of Bradbury’s shorts, There Will Come Soft Rain, has been adapt­ed by Uzbek direc­tor Naz­im Tyuh­ladziev (also spelled Noz­im To’laho’jayev). The sto­ry is about an auto­mat­ed house that con­tin­ues to cook and clean for a fam­i­ly of four unaware that they all per­ished in a nuclear explo­sion. While Bradbury’s ver­sion works as a com­ment on both Amer­i­can con­sumerism and gen­er­al Cold War dread, Tyuhladziev’s ver­sion goes for a more reli­gious tact. The robot that runs the house looks like a mechan­i­cal snake (Gar­den of Eden, any­one?). The robot and the house become undone by an errant white dove. The ani­ma­tion might not have the pol­ish of a Dis­ney movie, but it is sur­pris­ing­ly creepy and poignant.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Beau­ti­ful, Inno­v­a­tive & Some­times Dark World of Ani­mat­ed Sovi­et Pro­pa­gan­da (1925–1984)

Enjoy 15+ Hours of the Weird and Won­der­ful World of Post Sovi­et Russ­ian Ani­ma­tion

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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The Puzzle of Docudramas — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #167

 

When we’ve already heard about someone’s per­son­al scan­dal in the news, do we need to also see it dra­ma­tized with A‑list actors? Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Bak­er dis­cuss Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May Decem­ber fic­tion­al­iz­ing the long-after­math of the much pub­li­cized Mary Kay Letourneau sto­ry.

The main events of May Decem­ber are fic­tion­al (based on a sto­ry by screen­writer Samy Burch along with Alex Mechanik): An actress (Natal­ie Port­man) research­ing her future role vis­its the renamed Letourneau (Julianne Moore) and her now-adult hus­band (Charles Melton), whom she seduced (molest­ed) start­ing at age 12. So is this art film fun­da­men­tal­ly unlike the oth­er recent drama­ti­za­tions that we touch on, includ­ing Joe vs. Car­oleInvent­ing AnnaDirty JohnThe ActThe Shrink Next Door, and The Thing About Pam? We also talk about Real­i­ty. as an exam­ple of films depict­ing how hor­ri­ble it is to be arrest­ed.

Note that while Aman­da Knox’s sto­ry was made into a TV movie, the pres­tige TV dra­ma ver­sion is still in process. Her pod­cast is called Labyrinths.

One of the arti­cles we reviewed about May Decem­ber is this one from Vox.

Fol­low us @law_writes@sarahlynbruck@ixisnox@MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop, includ­ing recent episodes that you haven’t seen on this site. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts.

This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

The Most Beautiful Shots in Cinema History: Scenes from 100+ Films

If you’re an even mild­ly enthu­si­as­tic film­go­er, these two short com­pi­la­tions from The Solomon Soci­ety will get your life flash­ing before your eyes. They trans­port me to my ninth birth­day screen­ing of The Night­mare Before Christ­mas; my VHS view­ings of Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off at home sick from school; the obses­sion with Blade Run­ner that put me on the road to cinephil­ia; the thrill I got in high school from aes­thet­i­cal­ly dar­ing yet cine­plex-screened major motion pic­tures like Fight Club and The Cell; my induc­tion into auteur cin­e­ma through Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Bar­ry Lyn­don, 2001: A Space Odyssey (seen at Seat­tle’s space-age Cin­era­ma in the actu­al year of 2001), A Clock­work Orange, and The Shin­ing; the sur­prise pub­lic debut Paul Thomas Ander­son­’s The Mas­ter — which hap­pened to fol­low a revival screen­ing of The Shin­ing.

Of course, you’ll expe­ri­ence a flood of dif­fer­ent movie-relat­ed mem­o­ries than I did. Maybe these videos will bring back the exhil­a­ra­tion of see­ing Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Pulp Fic­tion, or even Reser­voir Dogs, back in the nineties. The sto­ry of my own cinephile life could hard­ly be told with­out ref­er­ence to ear­ly Wes Ander­son pic­tures like Rush­more and The Roy­al Tenen­baums.

But per­haps you’ve felt more of an impact from the lat­er, even more visu­al­ly intri­cate work of his that appears here, like The Dar­jeel­ing Lim­it­ed or The Grand Budapest Hotel. Or you could be a movie-lover of a dif­fer­ent stripe alto­geth­er, for whom noth­ing sat­is­fies quite like a clas­sic block­buster, be it the orig­i­nal Star Wars or a long-acclaimed dra­ma like The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion.

The sec­ond of these videos begins with a clip of an inter­view with no less an auteur than Orson Welles. Asked where he got the con­fi­dence to make Cit­i­zen Kane, he replies, “Igno­rance. Sheer igno­rance. There is no con­fi­dence to equal it. I thought you could do any­thing with a cam­era that the eye could do or the imag­i­na­tion could do. And I did­n’t know that there were things you could­n’t do, so any­thing I could think up in my dreams, I attempt­ed to pho­to­graph.” It’s safe to say that none of the dozens upon dozens of shots col­lect­ed here could have been cap­tured by film­mak­ers over­ly con­scious of the impos­si­ble. But how­ev­er strik­ing they look indi­vid­u­al­ly, they’re all even more pow­er­ful in their prop­er con­text: their con­text with­in not just the film, but also the life of the behold­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy That Changed Cin­e­ma: Explor­ing Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Stan­ley Kubrick, Peter Green­away & Oth­er Auteurs

How Famous Paint­ings Inspired Cin­e­mat­ic Shots in the Films of Taran­ti­no, Gilliam, Hitch­cock & More: A Big Super­cut

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

The Great­est Cut in Film His­to­ry: Watch the “Match Cut” Immor­tal­ized by Lawrence of Ara­bia

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)

The broth­ers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pio­neers of cin­e­ma, and their 45-sec­ond La Sor­tie de l’U­sine Lumière à Lyon, or Work­ers Leav­ing the Lumière Fac­to­ry in Lyon (1895), is often referred to as the first film. But his­to­ry turns out to present a more com­pli­cat­ed pic­ture. As pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, Louis Le Prince’s Round­hay Gar­den Scene pre­dates the Lumière broth­ers’ work by six and a half years. But it is La Sor­tie that cin­e­ma his­to­ri­ans regard as the more impor­tant pic­ture, and indeed, as “the inven­tion of movies for mass audi­ences.”

So writes Ryan Lat­tanzio at IndieWire, who goes on to explain that “the Lumière broth­ers were among the first film­mak­ers in world his­to­ry, pio­neer­ing cin­e­mat­ic tech­nol­o­gy as well as estab­lish­ing the com­mon gram­mar of film.”

In an essay re-print­ed on Sens­es of Cin­e­ma, the direc­tor Haroun Faroc­ki frames La Sor­tie as hav­ing estab­lished the grand sub­jects like reg­i­men­ta­tion and indi­vid­u­al­i­ty with which motion pic­tures have dealt ever since. “For over a cen­tu­ry cin­e­matog­ra­phy had been deal­ing with just one sin­gle theme,” he writes. “Like a child repeat­ing for more than a hun­dred years the first words it has learned to speak in order to immor­tal­ize the joy of first speech.”

Faroc­ki also draws an anal­o­gy with “painters of the Far East, always paint­ing the same land­scape until it becomes per­fect and comes to include the painter with­in it.” And just as Hoku­sai paint­ed sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ver­sions of his famous The Great Wave off Kana­gawa, the Lumière broth­ers did­n’t shoot just one La Sor­tie, but three. Though each one may look the same at first glance to the eyes of twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry view­ers, they’re actu­al­ly dis­tin­guished by many sub­tle dif­fer­ences, includ­ing the sea­son-reflect­ing attire of the work­ers and the num­ber of hors­es draw­ing the car­riage. And so, if we choose to cred­it the Lumière broth­ers with invent­ing cin­e­ma as we know it, we must also cred­it them with  a more dubi­ous cre­ation, one we’ve come to know all too well in recent decades: the remake.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Films of the Lumière Broth­ers & the Birth of Cin­e­ma (1895)

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

See 21 His­toric Films by Lumière Broth­ers, Col­orized and Enhanced with Machine Learn­ing (1895–1902)

The Ear­li­est Known Motion Pic­ture, 1888’s Round­hay Gar­den Scene, Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumière Broth­ers to Google Glass

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

 

Kino Lorber Lets You Stream 146 Films on YouTube: Tilda Swinton, Samuel L. Jackson, Steve Buscemi, Buster Keaton & More

The film dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny Kino Lor­ber now allows you to stream com­plete films on YouTube for free. Since we first men­tioned this ini­tia­tive back in 2022, the list of stream­able films has grown. Among the now 146 films, you will find a mix­ture of doc­u­men­taries and cin­e­mat­ic works, includ­ing Derek Jar­man’s Blue; Fela Kuti: Music Is The Weapon (a doc­u­men­tary explor­ing the life and work of the African musi­cian); The Search for One-Eye Jim­my with Steve Busce­mi, Samuel L. Jack­son, and John Tur­tur­ro; Buster Keaton’s Three Ages; Gary Coop­er in A Farewell to Arms; Genius With­in: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould; and War Requiem with Til­da Swin­ton, Derek Jar­man and Lau­rence Olivi­er.

Find the list of 146 films here, or stream them all above.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How to Watch Hun­dreds of Free Movies on YouTube

Watch 70+ Sovi­et Films Free Online, Cour­tesy of Mos­film, the Hol­ly­wood of the Sovi­et Union

Watch Free Cult Films by Stan­ley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Stream­ing Ser­vice

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A Preview of Sora, the New OpenAI Tool That Creates Remarkable AI-Generated Videos

A lit­tle over four years ago, we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture a set of real­is­tic images of peo­ple who don’t actu­al­ly exist. They were, as we would now assume, whol­ly gen­er­at­ed by an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem, but back in 2018, there were still those who doubt­ed that such a thing could be done with­out furtive human inter­ven­tion. Now, after the release of tools like Ope­nAI’s Chat­G­PT and DALL‑E, few such doubters remain. In recent weeks, anoth­er Ope­nAI prod­uct has caused quite a stir despite hav­ing yet to be prop­er­ly released: Sora, which can use text prompts to cre­ate not just replies in kind or still images, but minute-long video clips.

“This is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly real­ly impres­sive and real­ly fright­en­ing,” says Youtu­ber Mar­ques Brown­lee in his intro­duc­tion to Sora above. He exam­ines some of the demo videos released so far by Ope­nAI, high­light­ing both their strengths and weak­ness­es.

It would be dif­fi­cult not to feel at least a lit­tle aston­ish­ment at the result Sora has pro­duced from the fol­low­ing prompt: “A styl­ish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glow­ing neon and ani­mat­ed city sig­nage. She wears a black leather jack­et, a long red dress, and black boots, and car­ries a black purse. She wears sun­glass­es and red lip­stick. She walks con­fi­dent­ly and casu­al­ly. The street is damp and reflec­tive, cre­at­ing a mir­ror effect of the col­or­ful lights. Many pedes­tri­ans walk about.”

There’s some­thing Blade Run­ner going on here, in more sens­es than one.  The not-quite-human qual­i­ties about this “footage” do stand out on clos­er inspec­tion, and in any case make the whole thing feel, as Bown­lee puts it, “a lit­tle bit… off.” But as he also empha­sizes, repeat­ed­ly, it was just a year ago that the bizarre AI-gen­er­at­ed Will Smith eat­ing spaghet­ti made the social-media rounds as a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the state of the art. The under­ly­ing tech­nol­o­gy has clear­ly come a long, long way since then, and though the mate­r­i­al so far released by Ope­nAI may feel faint­ly awk­ward and “video-gamey,” they clear­ly show Sora’s capa­bil­i­ty to cre­ate videos plau­si­ble at first and even sec­ond glance.

This may spell trou­ble not just for those cur­rent­ly in the stock-footage busi­ness, but also for those who hap­pen to believe every­thing they watch. Brown­lee calls the impli­ca­tions “insane­ly sketchy dur­ing an elec­tion year in the US,” but he may take some com­fort in the fact that Sora is not, at the moment, avail­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic. There are also explain­ers, like the one from the Wall Street Jour­nal video above, in which AI-indus­try pro­fes­sion­al Stephen Mess­er points out the tell­tale glitch­es of AI-gen­er­at­ed video, many of which have to do with the fin­er details of physics and anato­my. And if you find your­self pay­ing unusu­al atten­tion to the con­sis­ten­cy of the num­ber dig­its on Mess­ner’s hands, just tell your­self that this is how it feels to live in the future.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Will AI Change the World?: A Cap­ti­vat­ing Ani­ma­tion Explores the Promise & Per­ils of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ates Real­is­tic Pho­tos of Peo­ple, None of Whom Actu­al­ly Exist

A New Course Teach­es You How to Tap the Pow­ers of Chat­G­PT and Put It to Work for You

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Art & the Future of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch the Final Chap­ter of the “Every­thing is a Remix” Series

DALL‑E, the New AI Art Gen­er­a­tor, Is Now Open for Every­one to Use

How Peter Jack­son Used Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Restore the Video & Audio Fea­tured in The Bea­t­les: Get Back

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.