New Jim Jarmusch Documentary on Iggy Pop & The Stooges Now Streaming Free on Amazon Prime

in Film, Music | April 8th, 2017

FYI: Jim Jar­musch’s new doc­u­men­tary Gimme Dan­ger–his “love let­ter” to punk icons Iggy Pop and The Stooges–is steam­ing free right now on Ama­zon Prime. If you have Ama­zon Prime, you can start stream­ing the film here. If you don’t, you can sign up for a 30-day free tri­al, watch the doc, and then decide whether to remain a sub­scriber or not. It’s your call. (Note: they also offer a sim­i­lar deal for audio­books from Audi­ble.)

Hav­ing the watched the film just last week­end, I’ll say this: Gimme Dan­ger is worth the watch. But it just scratch­es the sur­face of what Pop and the Stooges were all about. To go deep­er, I’d rec­om­mend pick­ing up a copy of Please Kill Me: The Uncen­sored Oral His­to­ry of Punk (now released in a 20th anniver­sary edi­tion), which gives you a more com­plete and raw account of the rise and fall of this influ­en­tial band.

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Watch Marcel Marceau Mime The Mask Maker, a Story Created for Him by Alejandro Jodorowsky (1959)

in Dance, Film | April 7th, 2017

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, as any­one who’s wit­nessed a movie of his play out onscreen might guess, has steeped him­self in the mys­ti­cal arts, but it would take an astute view­er to guess that he received some of his ear­li­est train­ing in the field of mime. Dur­ing his time in Paris in the 1950s, the Chilean-born film­mak­er, yet to shoot a sin­gle frame but hav­ing already run his own per­for­mance troupe back in San­ti­a­go, began study­ing under Éti­enne Decroux, not only a mas­ter of mime but a mas­ter teacher of mime. Jodor­owsky then joined and went on a world tour with a mime group led by one of Decroux’s espe­cial­ly promis­ing stu­dents, one Mar­cel Marceau.

Few today could think of mime with­out Marceau’s name com­ing to mind, and none could think of Marceau with­out hav­ing at least a sense that the man rede­fined the art. Per­form­ers had, of course, used their bod­ies to word­less­ly evoke dif­fer­ent ele­ments of the human expe­ri­ence since antiq­ui­ty, but Marceau — who could take his view­ers through an entire human life in four min­utes — brought it to anoth­er lev­el entire­ly.

Some of Jodor­owsky’s fans might say the same about the direc­tor, and in the video above they can wit­ness per­haps the two men’s only sur­viv­ing cre­ation: Marceau’s 1959 per­for­mance of The Mask Mak­er, a piece Jodor­owsky thought up for him.

“Jodor­owsky would say, ‘Mar­cel, will you accept if I give you an idea for a sto­ry?’ ” remem­bered Marceau in a late inter­view. “I replied, ‘Of course, if the idea is good.’ Jodor­owsky said, ‘What do you think of a man who tries on dif­fer­ent masks show­ing a vari­ety of emo­tions? He puts on a laugh­ing mask that gets stuck on his face; he tries des­per­ate­ly but it will not come off. He has to blind him­self to take it off his face.’ I did the chore­og­ra­phy myself, and then we shared the rights for this pan­tomime.” Two oth­er Marceau-Jodor­owsky works in mime fol­lowed, The Saber of the Samu­rai and “anoth­er cru­el tale” called The Eater of Hearts.

At once shocked and moved, accord­ing to Pro­ject­ed Fig­ures’ “Brief Guide to Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky,” by the “excess of vio­lence” in these mime rou­tines, Marceau nev­er­the­less per­formed them with what looks like the fullest com­mit­ment to the con­cept. Jodor­owsky in turn made use of what he’d learned from Marceau even as he switched arts and began mak­ing films. The influ­ence shows in his very first short film, 1957’s La Cra­vate, a word­less phys­i­cal per­for­mance for the cam­era. His­to­ry has­n’t record­ed whether Marceau ever watched it, but he’d sure­ly rec­og­nize his for­mer col­lab­o­ra­tor’s sen­si­bil­i­ty in the con­tent: it also goes by the Eng­lish title The Sev­ered Heads.

A 1975 ver­sion appears below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­cel Marceau Mimes the Pro­gres­sion of Human Life, From Birth to Death, in 4 Min­utes

How Mar­cel Marceau Start­ed Mim­ing to Save Chil­dren from the Holo­caust

Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s 82 Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Derek Jarman’s Daring 12-Minute Promo Film for Marianne Faithfull’s 1979 Comeback Album Broken English (NSFW)

in Film, Music | April 6th, 2017

Note: There are a few not-safe-for-work scenes in the film.

The world of music video was in its infan­cy in the late 1970s. MTV had yet to exist, and pro­mo­tion­al films for sin­gles were seen as use­ful for the times when a show could­n’t book a band to play live, or the band just didn’t play live any more. Into this world fell many a com­mer­cial direc­tor, used to the pro­mo­tion side of the pro­mo film busi­ness. But there were also direc­tors like Derek Jar­man, the punk­est of UK direc­tors at that time. This new for­mat paid the bills in between fea­tures, and let him exper­i­ment.

Though he would go on to work with the Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths, Jarman’s first pro­mo video is above, for three songs from Mar­i­anne Faithfull’s mas­ter­piece of a new wave album, Bro­ken Eng­lish (1979).

Faith­full had been out of the pub­lic eye for years, hav­ing spent a lot of the ’70 try­ing to kick her drug habit. The anger and cyn­i­cism of this album, her cracked but com­mand­ing voice, and the elec­tron­ic sounds were such that many for­get she released two oth­er “come­back albums” before this one. On Bro­ken Eng­lish she force­ful­ly rewrites her own his­to­ry as an artist, not con­tent to be seen as a drug casu­al­ty or Mick Jagger’s ex-girl­friend.

Jar­man was known at the time as the con­tro­ver­sial film­mak­er of both the homo­erot­ic Sebas­tiane and the anti-Roy­al Jubilee, which more than any film at the time encap­su­lat­ed the UK punk scene. It’s both bru­tal and roman­tic and charm­ing­ly D.I.Y.

The Bro­ken Eng­lish pro­mo film fea­tures three songs, brack­et­ed by black and white footage of Faith­full wan­der­ing around Lon­don and play­ing Space Invaders in a local arcade. The first, “Witch’s Song,” is the clos­est to Jarman’s short films dur­ing that peri­od: lan­guid, ambigu­ous­ly gen­dered young peo­ple, apoc­a­lyp­tic dock­side ruins, reflect­ed mir­rors, occultism and debauch­ery. The sec­ond, “The Bal­lad of Lucy Jor­dan,” fea­tures scenes of domes­tic­i­ty dou­ble exposed and/or pro­ject­ed over footage of Faith­full. The final one, for the title track, is a short col­lage of 20th cen­tu­ry fas­cism and car­nage, fea­tur­ing Hitler, Mus­soli­ni, Oswald Mosley, British strikes, and self-immo­lat­ed monks.

The two artists got along so well that she record­ed the theme song for his film The Last of Eng­land, fea­tur­ing a very young Til­da Swin­ton.

Both Jar­man and Faith­full went on to suc­cess­ful­ly rein­vent them­selves, but for the 21st cen­tu­ry view­er, they are also both worth redis­cov­er­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Very Young Mar­i­anne Faith­full Sings Her First Hit, ‘As Tears Go By’ (1965)

Watch David Bowie & Mar­i­anne Faith­full Rehearse and Sing Son­ny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” (1973)

Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Mar­i­anne Faith­full Singing “As Tears Go By” (1966)

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.

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Graphic Designer Redesigns a Movie Poster Every Day, for One Year: Scarface, Mulholland Dr., The Graduate, Vertigo, The Life Aquatic and 360 More

in Art, Film | April 5th, 2017

No scene in a movie counts for as much as its open­ing, but even before its first frame pass­es through the pro­jec­tor, its poster has already made the real first impres­sion. This remains basi­cal­ly as true in the era of dig­i­tal cin­e­ma as it was when film actu­al­ly passed through pro­jec­tors. But while film­mak­ers only occa­sion­al­ly go back and retool their past works — not that the expe­ri­ence of, say, George Lucas and the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­o­gy vouch­es for the prac­tice — film posters can eas­i­ly under­go any num­ber of revi­sions through the decades. What cinephile graph­ic design­er would­n’t want to take a shot at cre­at­ing a new face for a favorite movie?

Last year, the Syd­ney-based design­er Peter Majarich took shots at 365 of them, cre­at­ing one new poster for an exist­ing movie each and every day. “The feat is a huge under­tak­ing,” writes the Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Diana Shi, “but Majarich’s final prod­ucts nev­er give the impres­sion of last-minute cre­ations; instead, they show off an acute atten­tion to detail and a bold, dig­i­tal-influ­enced style. The inven­tive­ness of each poster reveals how much of a cinephile Majarich real­ly is.” His selec­tions include “a pool of zeit­geist direc­tors, Oscar win­ners, and art-house films with cult fol­low­ings.

A ren­der­ing of De Palma’s Scar­face is a sub­tle assem­bly of white pow­der to stark­ly draw out Al Pacino’s pro­file. While what looks like a body of com­plex cod­ing lan­guage forms the blank-star­ing face of Ali­cia Vikander’s lead in Ex Machi­na.” You can browse all these at A Movie Poster a Day, see them dis­played in sequence in the video above, and buy them on his design com­pa­ny’s site.

Their simul­ta­ne­ous aes­thet­ic and cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences will please design- and film-lovers alike (groups hard­ly sep­a­rate on the Venn dia­gram any­way), and while many con­sti­tute good visu­al gags, the best pro­vide new per­spec­tives on even much-watched favorite movies.

For Wes Ander­son­’s The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou, Majarich depicts the emo­tion­al sub­mer­sion of its sea­far­ing pro­tag­o­nist; for Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go he works only with the title itself imbu­ing the type with the com­bi­na­tion of shock and dread on dis­play in the film; for David Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dri­ve he uses a pink-skied land­scape of the tit­u­lar Los Ange­les road lead­ing off, as Lynch’s work often does, to who knows where. After you’ve seen the first 286, you’ll come upon a selec­tion that will hard­ly sur­prise you: Gary Hus­twit’s Hel­veti­ca.

via Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

Down­load Vin­tage Film Posters in High-Res: From The Philadel­phia Sto­ry to Attack of the Crab Mon­sters

A Look Inside Mar­tin Scorsese’s Vin­tage Movie Poster Col­lec­tion

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Stream 72 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Blade Runner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopian Future

in Film, Games, Sci Fi | April 4th, 2017

As reflex­ive­ly as we may now describe the 2019 Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner as “dystopi­an” — and indeed, as vivid a mod­ern dystopia as cin­e­ma has yet pro­duced — who among us would­n’t want to spend at least a few hours there? Much of the sur­face appeal is, of course, visu­al: the rainy neon-lined streets, the indus­tri­al fear­some­ness, those tow­er-side video geisha. But no film tru­ly suc­ceeds, at cre­at­ing a world or any­thing else, with­out the right sound. We may not con­scious­ly real­ize it when we watch the movie, no mat­ter how many times we’ve seen it before, but the son­ic ele­ments, all care­ful­ly craft­ed, do more than their fair share to make Blade Run­ner feel like Blade Run­ner.

And so the best way to put your­self into Blade Run­ner’s world may be to sur­round your­self with its sounds, a task made much eas­i­er by “ambi­ent geek” Crysknife007, whose Youtube chan­nel offers a playlist of ambi­ent noise from Blade Run­ner places. These include Deckard’s apart­ment, the Tyrell Build­ing, the Brad­bury Hotel, and oth­ers, each of which loops for a con­tin­u­ous twelve hours. (The com­plete playlist above runs for 72 hours.) Some of the loca­tions even die-hard fans of the movie might not rec­og­nize, because they come from anoth­er exten­sion of Blade Run­ner’s real­i­ty: the 1997 PC adven­ture game that has a new cast of char­ac­ters play out a dif­fer­ent sto­ry in the pro­to-cyber­punk urban set­ting with the same neces­si­ty for just the right sound to cre­ate just the right atmos­phere

Crysknife007, who as an ambi­ent musi­cian goes under the name “Cheesy Ner­vosa,” seems to have a side line in this sort of thing: last month we fea­tured oth­er sci-fi-inspired selec­tions from the same Youtube chan­nel like the sounds of the ship’s engine from Star Trek: the Next Gen­er­a­tion and the TARDIS from Doc­tor Who. But it’s Blade Run­ner, as Thom Ander­sen says in his doc­u­men­tary Los Ange­les Plays Itself, that “con­tin­ues to fas­ci­nate. Per­haps it express­es a nos­tal­gia for a dystopi­an vision of the future that has become out­dat­ed. This vision offered some con­so­la­tion because it was at least sub­lime. Now the future looks brighter, hot­ter, and bland­er.” But even as the real 2019 draws near, what­ev­er the future actu­al­ly ends up look­ing like, we at least know we can keep it sound­ing inter­est­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

Music That Helps You Sleep: Min­i­mal­ist Com­pos­er Max Richter, Pop Phe­nom Ed Sheer­an & Your Favorites

42 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner, Alien, Star Trek and Doc­tor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Philosophy of The Matrix: From Plato and Descartes, to Eastern Philosophy

in Film, Philosophy | March 31st, 2017

Do you take the red pill or the blue pill? The ques­tion, which at its heart has to do with either accept­ing or reject­ing the illu­sions that con­sti­tute some or all of life as you know it, became part of the cul­ture almost imme­di­ate­ly after Mor­pheus, Lawrence Fish­burne’s char­ac­ter in The Matrix, put it to Keanu Reeves’ pro­tag­o­nist Neo. That film, a career-mak­ing suc­cess for its direc­tors the Wachows­ki sis­ters (then the Wachows­ki broth­ers), had its own elab­o­rate vision of a false real­i­ty entrap­ping human­i­ty as the actu­al one sur­rounds it, a vision made real­iz­able by the finest late-1990s com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed spe­cial effects. But the ideas behind it, as this Film Radar video essay shows, go back a long way indeed.

The first and by far the most respect­ed of the tril­o­gy, The Matrix “large­ly inter­prets Pla­to’s Alle­go­ry of the Cave. Imag­ine a cave. Inside are peo­ple who were born and have spent their entire lives there, chained into a fixed posi­tion, only able to see the wall in front of them. As far as they know, this is the entire world.” The Wachowskis ask the same ques­tion Pla­to does: “How do we know what our real­i­ty real­ly is?”

When they have Mor­pheus bring Neo out of his “cave” of every­day late-20th-cen­tu­ry exis­tence, they do it in a man­ner anal­o­gous to Pla­to’s Anal­o­gy of the Sun, in which “the sun is a metaphor for the nature of real­i­ty and knowl­edge con­cern­ing it,” and the eyes of the fear­ful few forced out of their cave need some time to adjust to it.

But when one “unplugs” from the illu­sion-gen­er­at­ing Matrix of the title — a con­cept now in con­sid­er­a­tion again thanks to the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the “sim­u­la­tion argu­ment” — a longer jour­ney toward that real­ly-real real­i­ty still awaits. The sec­ond and third install­ments of the tril­o­gy involve a dive into “reli­gious phi­los­o­phy from the East,” espe­cial­ly the idea of escape from the eter­nal soul’s rein­car­na­tion “into oth­er phys­i­cal forms in an infi­nite cycle where the soul is left to wan­der and suf­fer” by means of a spir­i­tu­al quest for “enlight­en­ment, by unit­ing body and mind with spir­it.” This leads, inevitably, to self-sac­ri­fice: by final­ly “allow­ing him­self to die,” Neo “is reunit­ed with spir­it” and “becomes the true sav­ior of human­i­ty” — a nar­ra­tive ele­ment not unknown in reli­gious texts even out­side the East.

These count as only “a few of the philo­soph­i­cal ideas the Wachowskis explore in the Matrix tril­o­gy,” the oth­ers includ­ing Robert Noz­ick­’s “Expe­ri­ence Machine,” Descartes’ “Great Deceiv­er,” and oth­er con­cepts from Kant and Hume “ques­tion­ing real­i­ty, causal­i­ty, and free will, not to men­tion the obvi­ous com­men­tary on tech­nol­o­gy or a sub­mis­sive soci­ety.” Of course, philo­soph­i­cal explo­ration in The Matrix involve count­less fly­ing — and grav­i­ty-defy­ing — fists and bul­lets, much of it per­formed by char­ac­ters clad in reflec­tive sun­glass­es and black leather. Per­haps that dat­ed­ness has prompt­ed the recent announce­ment of a Matrix reboot: though the styles may change, if it hap­pens, the ideas would no doubt remain rec­og­niz­able to Pla­to him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Are We Liv­ing Inside a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: An Intro­duc­tion to the Mind-Bog­gling “Sim­u­la­tion Argu­ment”

Philip K. Dick The­o­rizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Com­put­er-Pro­grammed Real­i­ty”

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

The Matrix: What Went Into The Mix

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch the Trippy Screen Projections Used by Pink Floyd During their Dark Side of the Moon Tours

in Film, Music | March 30th, 2017

Even in the ear­ly years of Pink Floyd’s career, the band was exper­i­ment­ing with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the live expe­ri­ence. Already daz­zling audi­ences with boom­ing sound, col­or­ful light shows, and bub­bling translu­cent oil pro­jec­tions, the group called in Abbey Road engi­neers to design a quadro­phon­ic sound sys­tem in 1967 to send Rick Wright’s key­boards around the con­cert hall, along with nature sounds, foot­steps, or mani­a­cal laugh­ter.

By the time of Dark Side of the Moon, the band had even more of a bud­get, and began to screen short films, some ani­mat­ed, dur­ing their world tour con­certs. Not real­ly pro­mo­tion­al videos, these films haven’t been seen out­side their live con­text since. But the Inter­net has a way of find­ing these things.

Ear­li­er this month, sev­er­al YouTube users uploaded the film reels used on Pink Floyd’s 1974 North Amer­i­can Tour, with music from Dark Side of the Moon added back in to give an indi­ca­tion of how it was used in the show. (The mix­es are also quite dif­fer­ent from the album–maybe a fan can tell us from where these come?)

We get some very Kubrick-like trav­el­ing shots down both an emp­ty hos­pi­tal cor­ri­dor and of Heathrow’s arrival lounge, and lat­er a fist punch­ing a bowl of eggs, Zabriskie Point-like explod­ing tele­vi­sions, shots of Nixon and Idi Amin, and final­ly back to open­ing shots of the moon for the finale.

But there’s also moments of ani­ma­tion cre­at­ed then-unknown film­mak­er Ian Emes.

The up-and-com­ing and self-taught artist had already made an ani­ma­tion “French Win­dows” set to the Floyd song “One of these Days,” filled with trip­py land­scapes and roto­scoped dancers. It won awards at ani­ma­tion fes­ti­vals and was shown on British TV. Accord­ing to Emes:

“Hav­ing seen my film French Win­dows on BBC’s The Old Grey Whis­tle Test, the band com­mis­sioned me to make their first-ever ani­mat­ed film, which they sub­se­quent­ly toured the world with. The Time sequence is used to this day. It was a breath­tak­ing expe­ri­ence to see my film pro­ject­ed live at Wem­b­ley Are­na before a huge crowd of tripped out fans.”

The con­cert films dif­fered from coun­try to coun­try, shar­ing 75 per­cent of their footage, which means if you are a true fan, you’ll have to watch the British Tour ver­sion and the French Tour to know what you’re miss­ing. The British ver­sion fea­tures more infor­ma­tion, but it’s not clear if it’s also by Emes.

After Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd con­tin­ued to bring visu­als into their live shows, most notably anoth­er ani­ma­tion for “Wel­come to the Machine,” seen below. This time they used anoth­er up-and-com­ing illus­tra­tor and ani­ma­tor called Ger­ald Scarfe to cre­ate the har­row­ing graph­ics. Scarfe, of course, would lat­er cre­ate many more works for Pink Floy­d’s The Wall, and those ani­ma­tions would be used in con­cert and lat­er in the Alan Park­er film, The Wall.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd Per­forms on US Tele­vi­sion for the First Time: Amer­i­can Band­stand, 1967

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

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.

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The Origins of Anime: Watch Free Online 64 Animations That Launched the Japanese Anime Tradition

in Animation, Film | March 30th, 2017

Japan­ese ani­ma­tion has a way of seem­ing per­pet­u­al­ly new and dar­ing, but it now goes back at least a cen­tu­ry. Hav­ing carved out its own aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al space in world cul­ture, ani­me (even for­eign­ers who’ve nev­er watched so much as a minute of it know the Japan­ese term) con­tin­ues to gen­er­ate a dis­tinc­tive kind of excite­ment in its view­ers. That goes for rel­a­tive­ly recent fea­tures that have already attained clas­sic sta­tus, like the lush, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly real­is­tic and fan­tas­ti­cal works of Hayao Miyaza­ki, the dark­er, deep­er visions like Mamoru Oshi­i’s Ghost in the Shell, and the diver­si­ty of works in between. But how did those qual­i­ties man­i­fest in the very ear­li­est ani­me? We can now eas­i­ly see for our­selves, thanks to the selec­tion of 64 Japan­ese ani­mat­ed film clas­sics made freely avail­able online, as a cel­e­bra­tion of the cen­te­nary of the form, by Japan’s Nation­al Film Archive.

“The most excit­ing of these are the two ear­li­est extant ani­me The Dull Sword (Namaku­ra Gatana, 1917) and Urashima Tarō (1918),” writes Nishika­ta Film Review’s Cathy Munroe Hotes, “films which were con­sid­ered lost until copies were mirac­u­lous­ly dis­cov­ered in an antique shop in Osa­ka in 2008.  As the vast major­i­ty of pre-war films have been lost due to nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, war, and gen­er­al neglect, each of these 64 films is an impor­tant glimpse into ear­ly ani­me his­to­ry and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese cul­ture.”

You can also browse the Nation­al Film Archive’s online col­lec­tion of ear­ly ani­ma­tion by direc­tor. Watch­ing the works of cer­tain espe­cial­ly pro­lif­ic ones like Noburō Ōfu­ji and Yasu­ji Mura­ta (whose 1929 The Old Man’s Lump Removed, not avail­able in the col­lec­tion, appears above), you might come away con­vinced that, even in its first decades, Japan­ese ani­ma­tion had devel­oped its auteur cul­ture.

The move­ment (which some­times bare­ly qual­i­fies as such) and sound (if any) in some of these shorts could hard­ly impress today, at least on a tech­ni­cal lev­el. Nev­er­the­less, those of us who’ve felt the excite­ment of the best of ani­me will rec­og­nize in the pre­sen­ta­tion of the images them­selves — in its dynamism, its humor, its cre­ativ­i­ty — the spe­cial ani­mat­ing spir­it, as it were, that first sparked our inter­est. Whether the some­times slap­dash likes of Speed Rac­er, Robot­ech, or Kim­ba the White Lion, which intro­duced gen­er­a­tions of West­ern­ers to ani­me in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, real­ly marked that much of an improve­ment on crude pro­duc­tion of, say, Murata’s My Ski Trip from 1930 remains open to debate, but through them all we can trace the devel­op­ment of the style and sen­si­bil­i­ty that, to this day, no ani­ma­tion but the Japan­ese vari­ety has tru­ly mas­tered.

Enter the Nation­al Film Archive ani­me col­lec­tion here.

(NOTE: the Nation­al Film Archive assures us that the Eng­lish ver­sion of the site “will be avail­able in a month or two,” but you can find Eng­lish-sub­ti­tled films there even now.)

via coudal.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

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

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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