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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films: The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed

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.

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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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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.

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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.

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch David Bowie Star in His First Film Role, a Short Hor­ror Flick Called The Image (1967)

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.

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Psy­che­del­ic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Ear­ly Days with Syd Bar­rett, 1967

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.

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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.

Relat­ed Content:

The Giger Bar: Dis­cov­er the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Cre­at­ed the Night­mar­ish Mon­ster in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien

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.

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How Marlon Brando Changed Acting: Inside a Scene from On the Waterfront

in Film, History | November 4th, 2025

Mar­lon Bran­do has now been gone for more than two decades, and so thor­ough­go­ing was his impact on the art of film act­ing that younger gen­er­a­tions of movie-lovers may have trou­ble pin­ning down what, exact­ly, he did so dif­fer­ent­ly on screen. In the new video above, Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak shows them — and reminds us — using a sin­gle scene from Elia Kazan’s On the Water­front. No, it’s not the scene you’re think­ing of even if you’ve nev­er seen the movie: Puschak selects an ear­li­er one, a con­ver­sa­tion between Bran­do’s prize­fight­er-turned-long­shore­man Ter­ry Mal­loy and Eva Marie Sain­t’s young Edie Doyle, the sis­ter of the col­league Ter­ry unknow­ing­ly lured to his death.

When Edie asks Ter­ry how he got into box­ing, Ter­ry glances at the floor while launch­ing into his answer. “It’s hard to over­state how rev­o­lu­tion­ary a choice like this was in 1954,” says Puschak. “Actors just did­n’t get dis­tract­ed in this way. Trained in the­atri­cal tech­niques, they hit their spots, artic­u­lat­ed their lines, and per­formed instant­ly leg­i­ble emo­tions for the audi­ence. They did­n’t pause a con­ver­sa­tion to look under the table, turn­ing their head away from the micro­phone in the process, and they cer­tain­ly did­n’t speak while chew­ing food.” Just a few years ear­li­er, “the famous Bran­do mum­ble” would have been unthink­able in a fea­ture film; after On the Water­front, it became an endur­ing part of pop­u­lar cul­ture.

Much of the evo­lu­tion of the motion pic­ture is the sto­ry of its lib­er­a­tion from the tropes of the­ater. The ear­li­est nar­ra­tive films amount­ed to lit­tle more than doc­u­men­ta­tions of stage per­for­mances, sta­t­i­cal­ly framed from the famil­iar per­spec­tive of a spec­ta­tor’s seat. Just as the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­o­gy and tech­niques for cam­era move­ment and edit­ing allowed cin­e­ma to come into its own on the visu­al lev­el, the nature of the actors’ per­for­mances also had to change. In the mid-nine­teen-for­ties, the elec­tri­fied micro­phone allowed Frank Sina­tra to sing with the cadence and sub­tle­ty of speech; not long there­after, Bran­do took sim­i­lar advan­tage of the tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­i­ty of film to cap­ture a range of what would come to be known as his own sig­na­ture idio­syn­crasies.

On the Water­front opened fair­ly close on the heels of the Bran­do-star­ring A Street­car Named Desire and The Wild One; still to come were the likes of One-Eyed Jacks, The God­fa­ther, Last Tan­go in Paris, and Apoc­a­lypse Now. While Bran­do did­n’t appear exclu­sive­ly in acclaimed pic­tures — espe­cial­ly in the lat­er decades of his career — nev­er did he give a whol­ly unin­ter­est­ing per­for­mance. Incor­po­rat­ing the tics, hitch­es, and self-sti­fling impuls­es that afflict all our real-life com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he under­stood the poten­tial of both real­ism and odd­i­ty to bring a char­ac­ter’s inte­ri­or­i­ty out into the open, usu­al­ly against that char­ac­ter’s will. But he nev­er could’ve done it with­out his fel­low per­form­ers to act and react against, not least the for­mi­da­ble Eva Marie Saint: at 101 years old, one of our few liv­ing con­nec­tions to the vital, decep­tive­ly har­row­ing realm of post­war Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­lon Bran­do Screen Tests for Rebel With­out A Cause (1947)

When Mar­lon Bran­do Refused the Oscar for His Role in The God­fa­ther to Sup­port the Rights of Native Amer­i­cans (1973)

The God­fa­ther With­out Bran­do?: Cop­po­la Explains How It Almost Hap­pened

How Humphrey Bog­a­rt Became an Icon: A Video Essay

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Sopra­no Is “the Great­est Act­ing Achieve­ment Ever Com­mit­ted to the Screen”: A Video Essay

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.

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Celebrate Halloween with Michael Jackson’s Horrifically Entertaining “Thriller” Music Video—and a Behind-the-Scenes Documentary

in Film, Music | October 31st, 2025

Michael Jack­son’s Thriller is the best-sell­ing album of all time, and not by a par­tic­u­lar­ly slim mar­gin. The most recent fig­ures have it reg­is­tered at 51.3 mil­lion copies, as against the 31.2 mil­lion notched by the run­ner up, AC/DC’s Back in Black. But it would sure­ly be a clos­er call with­out the title song’s cel­e­brat­ed music video, thir­teen John Lan­dis-direct­ed min­utes full of not just singing and danc­ing, but also clas­sic-style Hol­ly­wood mon­sters, some of them doing that singing and danc­ing them­selves. Hal­loween night is, of course, the best time to revis­it Michael Jack­son’s Thriller, as it’s offi­cial­ly titled. This year, why not chase it with the behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­tary below, Mak­ing Michael Jack­son’s Thriller?

Younger fans may not know that “Thriller” was­n’t even released as a sin­gle until Novem­ber of 1983: about a year after the album itself, which had already spun off six songs, includ­ing enor­mous hits like “Bil­lie Jean” and “Beat It.” In fact, Jack­son’s unprece­dent­ed vision for the album had been that every song could be a hit, with no filler in between.

The high­er-ups at Epic Records felt that its pop­u­lar­i­ty, how­ev­er sen­sa­tion­al to that point, had just about run its course. That made them unwill­ing, at first, to put out “Thriller” on its own, as did the song’s campy scary-movie lyrics, sound effects, and “rap” by none oth­er than Vin­cent Price, the embod­i­ment of old-Hol­ly­wood hor­ror. (This sort of thing was­n’t with­out prece­dent: with his sib­lings, Jack­son had cre­at­ed a sim­i­lar spooky atmos­phere in “This Place Hotel,” from 1980.)

Still, at that point in his rise to the kind of fame no cul­tur­al fig­ure may ever know again, Jack­son under­stood much that the old guard did­n’t. He knew that “Thriller” could suc­ceed, not just as a song on the radio, but a mul­ti­me­dia cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. It would, of course, need a music video, but not one that mere­ly met the (still fair­ly lax) stan­dards of MTV. Impressed by the hor­ror, com­e­dy, and visu­al effects of John Lan­dis’ An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don, Jack­son called up Lan­dis and asked him to direct what he’d been envi­sion­ing for “Thriller” at fea­ture-film pro­duc­tion val­ues. The $500,000 bud­get came from tele­vi­sion net­works like MTV and Show­time, offi­cial­ly for broad­cast­ing rights to Mak­ing Michael Jack­son’s Thriller.

The doc­u­men­tary cap­tures var­i­ous aspects of the video’s cre­ation, from cast­ing to chore­og­ra­phy to shoot­ing to make­up, that last being an espe­cial­ly painstak­ing process over­seen by indus­try mas­ter Rick Bak­er. What­ev­er the rig­ors of the pro­duc­tion, Jack­son dis­plays undis­guised enjoy­ment of it all in this footage, per­haps fore­see­ing that it would cul­mi­nate in the kind of expres­sion that could come from no oth­er artist. Though an intense­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive effort, Michael Jack­son’s Thriller is true to its name in ulti­mate­ly being the prod­uct of a sin­gle, guid­ing per­for­ma­tive sen­si­bil­i­ty, some­how both uni­ver­sal­ly appeal­ing and high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic at the same time. Jack­son’s insis­tence on call­ing his music videos “short films” may have been regard­ed as a typ­i­cal eccen­tric­i­ty, but nev­er was the label more appro­pri­ate than when he brought back the old-school mon­ster movie one last, funky time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” Video Changed Pop Cul­ture For­ev­er: Revis­it the 13-Minute Short Film Direct­ed by John Lan­dis

Hear “Starlight,” Michael Jackson’s Ear­ly Demo of “Thriller”: A Ver­sion Before the Lyrics Were Rad­i­cal­ly Changed

When Mar­tin Scors­ese Direct­ed Michael Jack­son in the 18-Minute “Bad” Music Video & Paid Cin­e­mat­ic Trib­ute to West Side Sto­ry (1986)

How Michael Jack­son Wrote a Song: A Close Look at How the King of Pop Craft­ed “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”

John Lan­dis Decon­structs Trail­ers of Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Films: Cit­i­zen Kane, Sun­set Boule­vard, 2001 & More

Where Zom­bies Come From: A Video Essay on the Ori­gin of the Hor­ri­fy­ing, Satir­i­cal Mon­sters

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.

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