A quick heads up: The filmmaker Ken Burns has just released his new documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. Running nearly four hours, the film offers what The New York Times calls a “thorough and engrossing biography” of the 15th-century polymath. Currently airing on PBS, the film can be streamed online through December 17th. If you reside in the US, you can watch Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. The film’s trailer appears above.
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If you happen to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès located inside it. Dedicated to la Magie du cinéma, it contains artifacts from throughout the history of film-as-spectacle, which includes such pictures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Its focus on the evolution of visual effects guarantees a certain prominence to science fiction, which, as a genre of “the seventh art,” has its origins in France: specifically, in the work of the museum’s namesake Georges Méliès, whose A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) from 1902 we now recognize as the very first sci-fi movie.
Everyone has seen at least one image from A Trip to the Moon: that of the landing capsule crashed into the irritated man-on-the-moon’s eye. But if you watch the film at its full length — which, in the version above, runs about fifteen minutes — you can better understand its importance to the development of cinema.
For Méliès didn’t pioneer just a genre, but also a range of techniques that expanded the visual vocabulary of his medium. Take the approach to the moon (played by the director himself) immediately before the landing, a kind of shot never before seen in those days of practically immobile movie cameras — and one that necessitated real technical inventiveness to pull off.
What someone watching A Trip to the Moon in the twenty-first century will first notice, of course, is less the ways in which it feels familiar than the ways in which it doesn’t. In an era when theater was still the dominant form of entertainment, Méliès adhered to theatrical forms of staging: he uses few cuts, and practically no variety in the camera angles. It would hardly seem worth noting that a film from 1902 is silent and in black-and-white, but what few know is that colorized prints — laboriously hand-painted, frame by frame, on an assembly line — existed even at the time of its original release; one such restored version appears just above.
In truth, Méliès opened up much deeper possibilities for cinema than most of us acknowledge. As pointed out in the A Matter of Film video above, the motion pictures made before this amounted to exhibits of daily life: impressive as technological demonstrations (and, so the legend goes, harrowing for the viewers of 1896, who feared a train approaching onscreen would run them over), but nothing as narratives. Like Méliès’ other work, A Trip to the Moon proved that a movie could tell a story. It also proved something more central to the medium’s power: that it could tell that story in such a way that its images linger more than 120 years later, even when the details of what happens have long since lost their interest.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of movies. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In most cases, this may seem so trivial that it hardly merits a mention, but the very same disclaimer also rolls up after pictures very clearly intended to represent actual events or persons, living or dead. Most of us would write it all off as one more absurdity created by the elaborate pantomime of American legal culture, but a closer look at its history reveals a much more intriguing origin.
As told in the Cheddar video above, the story begins with Rasputin and the Empress, a 1932 Hollywood movie about the titular real-life mystic and his involvement with the court of Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia. Having been killed in 1916, Rasputin himself wasn’t around to get litigious about his villainous portrayal (by no less a performer than Lionel Barrymore, incidentally, acting alongside his siblings John and Ethel as the prince and czarina). It was actually one of Rasputin’s surviving killers, an exiled aristocrat named Felix Yusupov, who sued MGM, accusing them of defaming his wife, Princess Irina Yusupov, in the form of the character Princess Natasha.
The film casts Princess Natasha as a supporter of Rasputin, writes Slate’s Duncan Fyfe, “but the mystic, wary of her husband, hypnotizes and rapes her, rendering Natasha — by his logic, with which she agrees — unfit to be a wife. Yusupov contended that as viewers would equate Chegodieff with Yusupov, so would they link Natasha with Irina,” though in reality Irina and Rasputin never even met. In an English court, “the jury found in her favor, awarding her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM had to take the film out of circulation for decades and purge the offending scene for all time,” though a small piece of it remains in Rasputin and the Empress’ original trailer.
Things might have gone in MGM’s favor had the film not included a title card announcing that “a few of the characters are still alive — the rest met death by violence.” The studio was advised that they’d have done well to declare the exact opposite, a practice soon implemented across Hollywood. It didn’t take long for the movies to start having fun with it, introducing jokey variations on the soon-familiar boilerplate. Less than a decade after Rasputin and the Empress, one nonsensical musical comedy previously featured here on Open Culture) opened with the disclaimer that “any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion picture is purely coincidental” — a tradition more recently upheld by South Park.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Photos on this page courtesy of the Falklands Maritime Heritage
Few who hear the story of the Endurance could avoid reflecting on the aptness of the ship’s name. A year after setting out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drifting ice off Antarctica. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men waited for a thaw. But the Endurance was being slowly crushed, and eventually had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the history books is the sub-expedition made by Shackleton and five others in search of help, which ensured the rescue of every single man who’d been on the ship.
This harrowing journey has, of course, inspired documentaries, including this year’s Endurance from National Geographic, which debuted at the London Film Festival last month and will come available to stream on Disney+ later this fall. “The documentary incorporates footage and photos captured during the expedition by Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who [in 1914] brought several cameras along for the journey,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Filmmakers have color-treated Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used artificial intelligence to recreate crew members’ voices to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”
The fruits of an even more technologically impressive project have been released along with Endurance: a 3D digital model “created from more than 25,000 high-resolution images captured after the iconic vessel was discovered in March 2022.”
As we noted at the time here on Open Culture, the ship was found to be in remarkably good condition after well over a century spent two miles beneath the Weddell Sea. “Endurance looks much like it did when it sank on November 21, 1915. Everyday items used by the crew — including dining plates, a boot and a flare gun — are still easily recognizable among the protected wreckage.”
Endurance has, in other words, endured. Its intactness — which “makes it look as though the ship,” writes CNN.com’s Jack Guy, “has been miraculously lifted out of the Weddell Sea onto dry land in one piece” — is, in its way, as improbable and impressive as Shackleton and company’s survival of its fateful first expedition. The degree of detail captured by this new scan (not technologically feasible back at the time of the last acclaimed documentary on this subject), should make possible further, even deeper research into the story of the Endurance. But one question will remain unanswerable: would that story have resonated quite as long had the ship kept its original name, Polaris?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The site features a picture of the book’s careworn cover along with two spreads from the book’s interior —pages 8–9, where Jack Torrance is being interviewed by hotel manager Mr. Ullman, and pages 86–87 where hotel cook Dick Hallorann talks to Jack’s son Danny about the telepathic ability called “shining.”
Much of the marginalia is maddeningly hard to decipher. One of the notes I could make out reads:
Maybe just like their [sic] are people who can shine, maybe there are places that are special. Maybe it has to do with what happened in them or where they were built.
Kubrick is clearly working to translate King’s book into film. Other notes, however, seem wholly unrelated to the movie.
Any problems with the kitchen – you phone me.
When The Shining came out, it was greeted with tepid and nonplussed reviews. Since then, the film’s reputation has grown, and now it’s considered a horror masterpiece.
At first viewing, The Shining overwhelms the viewer with pungent images that etch themselves in the mind—those creepy twins, that rotting senior citizen in the bathtub, that deluge of blood from the elevator. Yet after the fifth or seventh viewing, the film reveals itself to be far weirder than your average horror flick. For instance, why is Jack Nicholson reading a Playgirl magazine while waiting in the lobby? What’s the deal with that guy in the bear suit at the end of the movie? Why is Danny wearing an Apollo 11 sweater?
While Stephen King has had dozens of his books adapted for the screen (many are flat-out terrible), of all the adaptations, this is one that King actively dislikes.
“I would do everything different,” complained King about the movie to American Film Magazine in 1986. “The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre.” King later made his own screen version of his book. By all accounts, it’s nowhere as good as Kubrick’s.
Perhaps the reason King loathed Kubrick’s adaptation so much is that the famously secretive and controlling director packed the movie with so many odd signs, like Danny’s Apollo sweater, that seem to point to a meaning beyond a tale of an alcoholic writer who descends into madness and murder. The Shining is a semiotic puzzle about …what?
Critic after critic has attempted to crack the film’s hidden meaning. Journalist Bill Blakemore argued in his essay “The Family of Man” that The Shining is actually about the genocide of the Native Americans. Historian Geoffrey Cocks suggests that the movie is about the Holocaust. And conspiracy guru Jay Weidner has argued passionately that the movie is in fact Kubrick’s coded confession for his role in staging the Apollo 11 moon landing. (On a related note, see Dark Side of the Moon: A Mockumentary on Stanley Kubrick and the Moon Landing Hoax.)
Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary Room 237juxtaposes all of these wildly divergent readings, brilliantly showing just how dense and multivalent The Shining is. You can see the trailer for the documentary above.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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.
F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, far and away the most influential early vampire movie, came out 102 years ago. For about ten of those years, Robert Eggers has been trying to remake it. He wouldn’t be the first: Werner Herzog cast Klaus Kinski as the blood-sucking aristocrat at the center of his own version in 1979, and, though not a remake, E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, from 2000, brought fresh attention to Murnau’s Nosferatu by grotesquely fictionalizing its production. In the latter picture, Willem Dafoe plays Max Schreck, the actor who took on the original role of the Dracula-inspired Count Orlok, as an actual vampire.
Dafoe changes sides in Eggers’ Nosferatu, due out this Christmas (see trailer below), by appearing as a vampire hunter. Playing Count Orlok is Bill Skarsgård, sure to be unrecognizable in full costume and makeup. “This Orlok is more of a folk vampire than any other film version,” says Eggers in a recent Vanity Fair interview. “That means he’s a dead person. And he’s not like, ‘I look great and I’m dead.’ ” What’s more, “for the first time in a Dracula or Nosferatu story, this guy looks like a dead Transylvanian nobleman. Every single thing he’s wearing down to the heels on his shoes is what he would’ve worn.” And lest any viewer with knowledge of ancient Romanian culture accuse the film of blithe inaccuracy, he also speaks a version of the extinct Dacian language.
This attention to detail will come as no surprise to fans of Eggers, who’s made his name with the historical films The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, all praised for their distinctive folkloric textures. But with Nosferatu, he pays direct homage to what’s presumably one of the major influences on his cinematic style. “The version that I watched as a kid didn’t have music,” he remembers. “It might not have had the same impact if it had had a cheesy organ score or synth score.” The video he watched was “a degraded 16-millimeter print” that had “certain frames where Max Schreck’s eyes looked like cat eyes. It’s the version that gave rise to the legends of Max Schreck actually being a vampire.”
Growing up in the rural New Hampshire of the nineties, Eggers’ interest in seeing Nosferatu meant that he “had to drive to the town that was populated and had a video store to order it, and then it came in the mail a month and a half later.” Today, we can watch it whenever we like, free online, and if you happen never to have seen it, you should certainly do so before catching the new remake. If reactions to early screenings are anything to judge by, this new interpretation of the material more than stands on its own dead, accurately heeled feet. But as Eggers surely understands better than anyone, you can’t approach the dankly seductive realm of Count Orlok without also being pulled back into cinema history.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
For many a classic action-movie enthusiast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bullitt. The narrator of the Insider video above describes it as “the scene that set the standard for all modern car chases,” one made “iconic partly because of the characters, but also because of their cars.” The pursuer drives a Dodge Charger, a muscle car that “exploded in popularity during the late sixties in the U.S.,” with a V‑8 engine and rear-wheel drive that made it “basically built for informal drag racing.” The pursued, Steve McQueen’s detective protagonist Frank Bullitt, drives an instantly recognizable Highland Green Ford Mustang, “the first major pony car, a more compact, sporty take on the muscle car.”
Bullitt could change the game, as they say, thanks not just to the cars but also the cameras available at the time, not least the Arriflex 35 II. “Smaller and more rugged” than the bulky rigs of earlier generations, it made it possible to shoot on actual city streets rather than just studio sets and rear-projection setups. (To get a sense of the difference in feel that resulted, simply compare the Bullitt chase to the one in Dr. No, the first James Bond picture, from six years before.)
This threw down the gauntlet before all action filmmakers, who over the subsequent decades would take advantage of every technological development that could possibly heighten the thrills of their own car chases.
The video also includes vehicular action movies from The French Connection and Vanishing Point to Ronin and Drive. But the most important development in recent decades actually owes to the horse-racing movie Seabiscuit, whose production necessitated a rig, now known as “the biscuit,” that “makes it look like an actor is doing the driving, while a stunt person actually steers from the driver’s pod.” Gone are the days when a star like Steve McQueen, a genuine racer of both motorcycles and cars, could handle some of the stunt driving himself; gone, too, is the era of the muscle car not programmed to shut down automatically when it goes into a drift. But for viewers in constant need of ever more spectacular, technically complex, and expensive car chases, it seems the Fast and the Furious series will always come through.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The term gaslight has gained so much traction in popular discourse so recently that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that particular usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote a stage thriller about a husband who surreptitiously rearranges things in the house so as to make his wife believe that she’s gone insane. Gas Light proved enough of a hit to be adapted for the cinema two years later, with the two words of its title streamlined into one. You can watch Thorold Dickinson’s Gaslight just above, and if you enjoy it, have a look at the rest of the more than 70 literary movies collected into this playlist from the verified YouTube channel Cult Cinema Classics.
If you know your cinema history, you’ll know that Gaslight was remade in Hollywood in 1944, directed by George Cukor and starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, and Angela Lansbury. (That version inspired Steely Dan’s song “Gaslighting Abbie,” where I first heard the word myself.)
In those days, the American film industry looked to the British one for proven material — material the British film industry, for its part, had found in literature. Take the work of a rising young director called Alfred Hitchcock, who adapted Charles Bennett’s Blackmail in 1929, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1935, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent as Sabotagein 1936, and Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn in 1939.
Today, literary adaptation seems to have become a relatively niche practice in Hollywood, but in the mid-twentieth century, it had real cachet: hence the increasing ambition of productions like The Scarlet Letter (1934), Of Mice and Men 1939, Fleischer Studios’ animated Gulliver’s Travels (1939), The Snows of Kilimanjaro(1952), and Jane Eyre (1970). Naturally, these films reflect their own eras as much as they do the authorial visions of Hawthorne, Steinbeck, Swift, Hemingway, and Charlotte Brontë. Each of these pictures offers its own way of regarding its source material. And would it seem so insane to believe that some of them may even have influence still to exert on popular culture here in the twenty-first century? Watch the playlist of 70 literary films here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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