An Avalanche of Novels, Films and Other Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Public Domain: Virginia Woolf, Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Buster Keaton & More

in Art, Books, Film, Literature, Music | April 17th, 2018

There may be no sweeter sound to the ears of Open Culture writers than the words “public domain”—you might even go so far as to call it our “cellar door.” The phrase may not be as musical, but the fact that many of the world’s cultural treasures cannot be copyrighted in perpetuity means that we can continue to do what we love: curating the best of those treasures for readers as they appear online. Public domain means companies can sell those works without incurring any costs, but it also means that anyone can give them away for free. “Anyone can re-publish” public domain works, notes Lifehacker, “or chop them up and use them in other projects.” And thereby emerges the remixing and repurposing of old artifacts into new ones, which will themselves enter the public domain of future generations.

Some of those future works of art may even become the next Great American Novel, if such a thing still exists as anything more than a hackneyed cliché. Of course, no one seriously goes around saying they’re writing the “Great American Novel,” unless they’re Philip Roth in the 70s or William Carlos Williams (top right) in the 20s, who both somehow pulled off using the phrase as a title (though Roth’s book doesn’t quite live up to it.) Where Roth casually used the concept in a light novel about baseball, Williams’ The Great American Novel approached it with deep concern for the survival of the form itself. His modernist text “engages the techniques of what we would now call metafiction,” writes literary scholar April Boone, “to parody worn out formulas and content and, ironically, to create a new type of novel that anticipates postmodern fiction.”

We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”

In other words, it’ll be Christmas all over again in January every year, and while you can browse the publication dates of your favorite works yourself to see what’s coming available in coming years, you’ll find at The Atlantic a short list of literary works included in next-year’s mass-release, including books by Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, and P.G. Wodehouse. Lifehacker has several more extensive lists, which we excerpt below:

Movies [see many more at Indiewire]

All these movies, including:

Cecil B. DeMille’s (first, less famous, silent version of) The Ten Commandments
Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!, including that scene where he dangles off a clock tower, and his Why Worry?
A long line-up of feature-length silent films, including Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitalityand Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim
Short films by Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Our Gang (later Little Rascals)
Cartoons including Felix the Cat(the character first appeared in a 1919 cartoon)
Marlene Dietrich’s film debut, a bit part in the German silent comedy The Little Napoleon; also the debuts of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Fay Wray

Music

All this music, including these classics:

“King Porter Stomp”
“Who’s Sorry Now?”
“Tin Roof Blues”
“That Old Gang of Mine”
“Yes! We Have No Bananas”
“I Cried for You”
“The Charleston”—written to accompany, and a big factor in the popularity of, the Charleston dance
Igor Stravinsky’s “Octet for Wind Instruments”

Literature

All these books, and these books, including the classics:

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Cane by Jean Toomer
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud
Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier
Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers
Two of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder on the Links
The Prisoner, volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (note that English translations have their own copyrights)
The Complete Works of Anthony Trollope
George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan
Short stories by Christie, Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest Hemingway
Poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sukumar Ray, and Pablo Neruda
Works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Cocteau, Italo Svevo, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Maria Montessori, Lu Xun, Joseph Conrad, Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs

Art

These artworks, including:

Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space
Henri Matisse’s Odalisque With Raised Arms
Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
Yokoyama Taikan’s Metempsychosis
Work by M. C. Escher, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, and Man Ray

Again, these are only partial lists of highlights, and such highlights…. Speaking for myself, I cannot wait for free access to the very best (and even worst, and weirdest, and who-knows-what-else) of 1923. And of 1924 in 2020, and 1925 and 2021, and so on and so on….

via The Atlantic

The Public Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

List of Great Public Domain Films

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What Made Studio Ghibli Animator Isao Takahata (RIP) a Master: Two Video Essays

in Animation, Film | April 17th, 2018

Among the many acclaimed animated films of Studio Ghibli — and indeed among recent Japanese animated films in general — those directed by the outspoken, oft-retiring-and-returning Hayao Miyazaki tend to get the most attention. But even casual viewers overlook the work of the late Isao Takahata (1935–2018), the older animator formerly of Toei with whom Miyazaki founded the studio in 1985, at their peril. Though he most often played the role of producer at Ghibli, he also directed several of its films, first and most memorably 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies, the story of an orphaned brother and sister’s struggle for survival at the very end of the Second World War.

“Grave of the Fireflies is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2000, adding the picture to his “Great Movies” canon. “When anime fans say how good the film is, nobody takes them seriously. [ … ] Yes, it’s a cartoon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.”

No Western critic would frame it quite the same way now, with the implicit disclaimer about the nature of Japanese animation, thanks in no small part to what animators like Takahata have done to show the entire world the true potential of their medium since.

The quarter-century after Grave of the Fireflies saw Takahata direct four more features, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and his visually unconventional, long-in-the-making final work The Tale of Princess Kaguya. You can get a sense of Takahata’s distinctive sensibilities and sensitivities as an animation director in the Royal Ocean Film Society video essay “Isao Takahata: The Other Master” at the top of the post. It gets into the questions of why Takahata chose to tell essentially realistic, drawn-from-life stories in a form most know for its way with the fantastical, and how the visual exaggerations in his films somehow imbue them with a more solid feel of reality.

Just above, “Isao Takahata Doesn’t Get Enough Respect (A Retrospective),” by Youtuber Stevem, goes in other directions, exploring the director’s technique as well as his career, life, and personality, drawing not just from his work with Ghibli but the considerable amount he did before the studio’s foundation as well. Still, Grave of the Fireflies may well remain most filmgoers’ gateway into his filmography for the foreseeable future, not least because of its still-refreshing “anti-Hollywood” qualities. “Hollywood will have you believe that heroes are needed when times are tough,” says writer on Japanese culture Roland Kelts in a recent BBC piece on the movie. “Isao Takahata shows us the humble opposite, that when times are tough what you need most is humility, patience and self-restraint. That’s how one survives.”

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

How the Films of Hayao Miyazaki Work Their Animated Magic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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

When David Bowie Became Nikola Tesla: Watch His Electric Performance in The Prestige (2006)

in Film, Music | April 5th, 2018

Only two major actors have played inventor Nikola Tesla in pop culture: one is John C. Reilly and the other is David Bowie. As much as I love this episode of Drunk History, let’s talk about the Starman himself, who Christopher Nolan cast as Tesla in his 2006 film The Prestige.

By 2005, Bowie was in seclusion. As elucidated in the recent BBC doc, The Last Five Years, the singer was recuperating from a heart attack on his Reality tour, a tour that would turn out to be his last.

Nolan begged Bowie to take the role:

Tesla was this other-worldly, ahead-of-his-time figure, and at some point it occurred to me he was the original Man Who Fell to Earth. As someone who was the biggest Bowie fan in the world, once I made that connection, he seemed to be the only actor capable of playing the part…It took me a while to convince him, though—he turned down the part the first time. It was the only time I can ever remember trying again with an actor who passed on me.

Bowie relented and above you can see his best moment in the film (or *the* best moment in the film)–where Tesla enters through a shower of electricity to greet Robert (Hugh Jackman) and Alley (Andy Serkis). It’s a rock star entrance, for sure.

Nolan continues:

The experience of having him on set was wonderful. Daunting, at first. He had a level of charisma beyond what you normally experience, and everyone really responded to it. I’ve never seen a crew respond to any movie star that way, no matter how big. But he was very gracious and understood the effect he had on people. Everyone has fond memories of getting to spend time with him or speak to him for a little bit. I only worked with him briefly—four or five days—but I did manage to sneak a couple moments to chat with him, which are very treasured memories of mine. Normally when you meet stars, no matter how starry they are, when you see them as people, some of that mystique goes away. But not with David Bowie. I came away from the experience being able to say I was still his biggest fan, and a fan who had the very miraculous opportunity to work with him for a moment. I loved the fact that after having worked with him, I had just the same fascination with his talent and his charisma. I thought that was quite magical.

Despite a very brief role in a film called August and an appearance around the same year on Ricky Gervais’ Extras, this would be Bowie’s last major film role, and really his last filmed appearance until 2013, when he shot promos for The Next Day.

A look at the YouTube comments suggest that many viewers watched The Prestige and had no idea who was playing Tesla. And that might have just tickled the man, playing a magician in recluse high up in the mountains, more in communication with the invisible gods than the mortals.

Ricky Gervais Creates Outlandish Comedy with David Bowie

David Bowie Sings in a Wonderful M.C. Escher-Inspired Set in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth

Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee, The Rule of Eugenics (1926/35)

The Periodic Table of David Bowie: A Visualization of the Seminal Artist’s Influence and Influences

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 38 Essential Films About American Democracy

in Film, History, Politics | March 29th, 2018

Image by “Siebbi,” Wikimedia Commons

So many of us, throughout so much of the 20th century, saw the nature of American-style democracy as more or less etched in stone. But the events of recent years, certainly on the national level but also on the global one, have thrown our assumptions about a political system that once looked destined for universality — indeed, the much-discussed “end” toward which history itself has been working — into question. Whatever our personal views, we’ve all had to remember that the United States, approaching a quarter-millennium of history, remains an experimental country, one more subject to re-evaluation and revision than we might have thought.

The same holds true for the art form that has done more than any other to spread visions of America: the movies. Martin Scorsese surely knows this, just as deeply as he knows that a full understanding of any society demands immersion into that society’s dreams of itself. The fact that so many of America’s dreams have taken cinematic form makes Scorsese well-placed to approach the subject, given that he’s dreamed a fair few of them himself. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street: most of his best-known films tell thoroughly American stories, rooted in not just his country’s distinctive history but the equally distinctive politics, society, and culture that have resulted from it.

Now, along with his nonprofit The Film Foundation, Scorsese passes his understanding of America along to all of us with their curriculum, “Portraits of America: Democracy on Film.” It comes as part of their larger project “The Story of Film,” described by its official site as “an interdisciplinary curriculum introducing students to classic cinema and the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film.” Scorsese and The Film Foundation offer its materials free to schools, but students of all ages and nationalities can learn a great deal about American democracy from the pictures it includes, the sequence of which runs as follows:

Module 1: The Immigrant Experience
Introductory Lesson: From Penny Claptrap to Movie Palaces—the First Three Decades
Chapter 1: “The Immigrant” (1917, d. Charlie Chaplin)
Chapter 2: “The Godfather, Part II” (1974, d. Francis Ford Coppola)
Chapter 3: “America, America” (1963, d. Elia Kazan)
Chapter 4: “El Norte” (1983, d. Gregory Nava)
Chapter 5: “The Namesake” (2006, d. Mira Nair)

Module 2: The American Laborer
Introductory Lesson: The Common Good
Chapter 1: “Black Fury” (1935, d. Michael Curtiz)
Chapter 2: “Harlan County U.S.A.” (1976, d. Barbara Kopple)
Chapter 3: “At the River I Stand” (1993, d. David Appleby, Allison Graham and Steven Ross)
Chapter 4: “Salt of the Earth” (1954, d. Herbert J. Biberman)
Chapter 5: “Norma Rae” (1979, d. Martin Ritt)

Module 3: Civil Rights
Introductory Lesson: The Camera as Witness
Chapter 1: King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis (1970, conceived & created by
Ely Landau; guest appearances filmed by Sidney Lumet and Joseph L.
Mankiewicz)
Chapter 2: “Intruder in the Dust” (1949, d. Clarence Brown)
Chapter 3: “The Times of Harvey Milk” (1984, d. Robert Epstein)
Chapter 4: “Smoke Signals” (1998, d. Chris Eyre)

Module 4: The American Woman
Introductory Lesson: Ways of Seeing Women
Chapter 1: Through a Woman’s Lens: Directors Lois Weber (focusing on “Suspense,” 1913 and
“Where Are My Children,” 1916) and Dorothy Arzner (“Dance, Girl, Dance,” 1940)
Chapter 2: “Imitation of Life” (1934, d. John M. Stahl)
Chapter 3: “Woman of the Year” (1942, d. George Stevens)
Chapter 4: “Alien” (1979, d. Ridley Scott)
Chapter 5: “The Age of Innocence” (1993, d. Martin Scorsese)

Module 5: Politicians and Demagogues
Introductory Lesson: Checks and Balances
Chapter 1: “Gabriel Over the White House” (1933, d. Gregory La Cava)
Chapter 2: “A Lion is in the Streets” (1953, d. Raoul Walsh)
Chapter 3: “Advise and Consent” (1962, d. Otto Preminger)
Chapter 4: “A Face in the Crowd” (1957, d. Elia Kazan)

Module 6: Soldiers and Patriots
Introductory Lesson: Movies and Homefront Morale
Chapter 1: “Sergeant York (1941, d. Howard Hawks)
Chapter 2: Private Snafu’s Private War—three Snafu Shorts from WWII
Chapter 3: “Three Came Home” (1950, d. Jean Negulesco)
Chapter 4: “Glory” (1989, Edward Zwick)
Chapter 5: “Saving Private Ryan” (1998, d. Steven Spielberg)

Module 7: The Press
Introductory Lesson: Degrees of Truth
Chapter 1: “Meet John Doe” (1941, d. Frank Capra)
Chapter 2: “All the President’s Men” (1976, d. Alan J. Pakula)
Chapter 3: “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005, d. George Clooney)
Chapter 4: “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006, d. Davis Guggenheim)
Chapter 5: “Ace in the Hole” (1951, d. Billy Wilder)

Module 8: The Auteurs
Introductory Lesson: Film as an Art Form
Chapter 1: “Modern Times” (1936, Charlie Chaplin)
Chapter 2: “The Grapes of Wrath”(1940, d. John Ford)
Chapter 3: “Citizen Kane” (1941, d. Orson Welles)
Chapter 4: “An American in Paris” (1951, d. Vincente Minnelli)
Chapter 5: “The Aviator” (2004, d. Martin Scorsese)

“Division, conflict and anger seem to be defining this moment in culture,” says Scorsese, quoted in a Film Journal International article about the curriculum. “I learned a lot about citizenship and American ideals from the movies I saw. Movies that look squarely at the struggles, violent disagreements and the tragedies in history, not to mention hypocrisies, false promises. But they also embody the best in America, our great hopes and ideals.” Few could watch all 38 of the films on his curriculum without feeling that the experiments of democracy and cinema are still on to something – and hold out the promise of more possibilities than we’d imagined before.

via Indiewire

Martin Scorsese on How “Diversity Guarantees Our Cultural Survival,” in Film and Everything Else

Martin Scorsese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspiring Filmmaker Needs to See

Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: An Animated Introduction to the Most Insightful Study of American Democracy

20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism, According to Yale Historian Timothy Snyder

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Spike Lee Teaching an Online Course on Independent Filmmaking: The Course Is Now Officially Live

in Film, Online Courses | March 23rd, 2018

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

When Spike Lee makes a movie, people talk about it. People talked in 1986 when he made the black-and-white indie comedy She’s Gotta Have It; they talked even more when he came out with Do the Right Thing a few years later; they talked, with sharply divided opinion, about his most recent picture, the crime-themed musical Chi-Raq; and they’re already talking about his upcoming Black Klansman, and not just because of the title. Lee has managed to remain culturally and artistically relevant throughout a career of more than thirty years and counting, and his new online course at Masterclass just might let us in on how he’s done it.

“When you’re an independent filmmaker, and making films outside Hollywood, that’s hard,” says the long Brooklyn-based Lee in the trailer for the course above. “You have to pray on bended knee at the church of cinema.” But even as an aspiring auteur with a pocket-change budget — Lee remembers well when he “was a caterer, the producer, the director, the screenwriter, acted in it, and I was the first AD” on his first feature — you already possess “tools that can help you tell a story”: heightening dynamic camerawork to heighten the emotions, for instance, or writing characters with strong beliefs to intensify the conflicts of the story. He used such techniques when he started out, and he still uses them today.

Though Lee seems more than willing to talk about his methods, you can’t fully understand any filmmaker unless you understand that filmmaker’s influences. And so we offer you Lee’s list of 95 essential movies every aspiring director should see, expanded from his original list of 87, drawn up to hand out to the graduate-school classes he’s taught. Featuring multiple works from directors like Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, John Huston, and Stanley Kubrick, the first version of the list runs as follows:

Taken to task for that list’s lack of female filmmakers, Lee came up with these additions:

The Piano — Jane Campion (1993)

Daughters of the Dust — Julie Dash (1991)

The Hurt Locker — Kathryn Bigelow (2008)

Sugar Cane Alley - Euzhan Palcy (1983)

The Seduction of Mimi — Lina Wertmuller (1972)

Love and Anarchy - Lina Wertmuller (1973)

Swept Away - Lina Wertmuller (1974)

Seven Beauties — Lina Wertmuller (1975)

Lee’s Masterclass on filmmaking joins the site’s other offerings on the same subject from auteurs no less distinctive than Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog. Though all three became major filmmakers at different times and under different circumstances — and ended up with very different cinematic sensibilities — they all, as Lee might put it, pray at the same church.

And just as it takes the perspective of many theologists to get a sense of the ineffable essence of the divine, so it takes the perspective of many filmmakers to get an ineffable essence of cinema. You could take all three courses with Masterclass’ $180 all-access pass, or you could pay $90 for just Lee’s. Either way, you’ll learn how he made She’s Gotta Have It for a then-dirt-cheap $175,000, but these days you could surely go out and shoot your own film afterward for not much more than the cost of the Masterclass itself. It’s still hard out there for an indie filmmaker, mind you; just not quite as hard as it was.

Spike Lee’s List of 95 Essential Movies – Now with Women Filmmakers

Martin Scorsese to Teach His First Online Course on Filmmaking

Werner Herzog Teaches His First Online Course on Filmmaking

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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

Watch a Marathon Streaming of All 856 Episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and the Moving Trailer for the New Documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

in Film, Television | March 22nd, 2018

The bombast, arrogance and bloviation–maybe you need a break from it all. You may need exactly the opposite–a little Fred Rogers. If so, we’ve got two things for you. First, head over to Twitch.TV where they’re currently livestreaming all 856 episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (for a limited time). It’s a grand way of celebrating what would have been Fred’s 90th birthday this week. And then, above, watch the brand new trailer for Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the upcoming documentary by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom). Due out in June, the film “takes us beyond the zip-up cardigans and the land of make-believe, and into the heart of a creative genius who inspired generations of children with compassion and limitless imagination.” As you watch the trailer, you’ll be reminded that Rogers worked his magic during other periods of chaos and discontent, and how sorely his calming presence is missing today.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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Watch Mr. Rogers Persuade Congress to Stop Cutting PBS Budget in 1969 : Would It Stop Trump from Defunding PBS & NEA Today?

Mr. Rogers Introduces Kids to Experimental Electronic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nelson (1968)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch “Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on The 405,” the New Oscar-Winning Portrait of an Artist

in Film | March 15th, 2018

A quick fyi: IndieWire has made available on its YouTube channel “Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on The 405,” a 40-minute documentary directed by Frank Stiefel. A portrait of a brilliant 56 year old artist, the film won the Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject) at the recent Academy Awards. Here’s the gist of what it’s about:

Mindy Alper is a tortured and brilliant 56 year old artist who is represented by one of Los Angeles’ top galleries. Acute anxiety, mental disorder and devastating depression have caused her to be committed to mental institutions undergo electro shock therapy and survive a 10 year period without the ability to speak. Her hyper self awareness has allowed her to produce a lifelong body of work that expresses her emotional state with powerful psychological precision. Through interviews, reenactments, the building of an eight and a half foot papier-mache’ bust of her beloved psychiatrist, and examining drawings made from the time she was a child, we learn how she has emerged from darkness and isolation to a life that includes love, trust and support.

You can watch the complete film online. It will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Depression & Melancholy: Animated Videos Explain the Crucial Difference Between Everyday Sadness and Clinical Depression

Watch Edith+Eddie, an Intense, Oscar-Nominated Short Film About America’s Oldest Interracial Newlyweds

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czechoslovakia (1930–1989)

in Art, Film | March 14th, 2018

We couldn’t possibly ignore, here at Open Culture, the glory of movie posters: from the film noir era, from Martin Scorsese’s predictably sizable collection, and even the deeply askew interpretations seen outside the theaters of Ghana. But somehow, the visual art-inclined cinephile’s attention returns again and again to one region of the world: Eastern Europe, especially in the Cold War era. Poland’s movie posters have long since accrued a fandom around the world, but we shouldn’t neglect the equal promotional wonders of its neighboring Czechoslovakia.

Or rather, as the even mildly geographically astute will note, the neighboring Czech Republic and Slovakia. But in this case, we really do mean Czechoslovakia, the movie posters featured here having hung in its movie houses between 1930 and 1989.

Terry Posters offers a collection of more than 20,000 such works of captivating commercial art to browse (with some available to buy), most of them interpreting foreign motion pictures for the presumed sensibilities of the local audience: the films of auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky (then, of course, a fellow Soviet), Federico Fellini, and many more besides.

You can also browse Terry’s Czechoslovakian collection by year, by artist, by genre, by actor, and by the film’s country of origin. However you explore them, these posters offer a reminder of the way that cinema culture used to vary most starkly from region to region, even when dealing with the exact same movies. The “globalization” process in effect over the past thirty years has done much to make serious cinephilia possible everywhere (not least by defeating various once-formidable forms of censorship and suppression) but it may have brought an end to the multiplicity and variety of images on display here, all especially vivid pieces of a faded culture — and of a dismantled country. Enter the digital archive here.

10,000 Classic Movie Posters Getting Digitized & Put Online by the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Download

50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark

The Strange and Wonderful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More

Designer Reimagines Iconic Movie Posters With Minimalist Designs: Reservoir Dogs, The Matrix & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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

An Avalanche of Novels, Films and Other Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Public Domain: Virginia Woolf, Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Buster Keaton & More

What Made Studio Ghibli Animator Isao Takahata (RIP) a Master: Two Video Essays

When David Bowie Became Nikola Tesla: Watch His Electric Performance in The Prestige (2006)

Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 38 Essential Films About American Democracy

Spike Lee Teaching an Online Course on Independent Filmmaking: The Course Is Now Officially Live

Watch a Marathon Streaming of All 856 Episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and the Moving Trailer for the New Documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Watch “Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on The 405,” the New Oscar-Winning Portrait of an Artist

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czechoslovakia (1930–1989)

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