How Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai Perfected the Cinematic Action Scene: A New Video Essay

in Film | October 26th, 2016

Jonathan Lethem knows a thing or two about storytelling as well as about caped comic-book characters, and on a recent podcast appearance he accused films about the latter of an inability to do the former: “I think one of the least satisfying film genres I’ve ever encountered is the contemporary superhero movie, which just seems to me kind of dead on arrival. I can’t even get into the hair-splitting about, ‘Oh, but there are three or four good ones.’ I just don’t see any life there.” How can such big productions filled with so much action play out so lifelessly on the screen? Perhaps the work of Akira Kurosawa, known in his day as the “Emperor” of Japanese film, can show us the answer.

“Wouldn’t scenes that display the pinnacle of physicality work better,” asks video essayist Lewis Bond over images of the Avengers battling towering monsters in the centers of major cities, Spider-Man swinging huge arcs through some kind of smoke-and-spark factory, and Batman beating up Superman, “if they also conveyed an emotional intensity to match this? Action and emotion need not be separated by a chasm as they so often are, and this is where the greatness of Seven Samurai lies.” He shows us in “Drama Through Action,” a study of how Kurosawa’s best-known picture delivers its action with impact, which appeared earlier this month on Channel Criswell, previously the source of video essays on such masters of cinema as Yasujirō Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Bond points to several different factors that make the action in Kurosawa’s 1954 epic adventure of the Sengoku era, despite its technological impoverishment compared to the superhero blockbusters of the 21st century, feel so much more meaningful. A focus less on the action itself and the protagonists performing it than on the consequences of that action meaning that “death carries significance.” A “situational awareness” and clear portrayal of “the characters’ short-term objectives” means that the audience can follow, and thus feel, their successes and failures. A clear establishment of geography enables viewers to place the combatants, and themselves, on the battlefield. A sparing use of cutting and slow motion keeps emotionally charged moments charged.

These and other techniques skillfully employed by Kurosawa and his collaborators ensure that, in Seven Samurai, “every moment of action communicates a sense of urgency” — exactly the quality lacked, in other words, by the expensive and furious yet strangely dull superhero spectacles of today. “To me, Seven Samurai is still the most forward-thinking piece of cinema ever created,” says Bond. “What it did for the way action is photographed can still be seen today. And when it isn’t seen, it probably should be.” Take heed, young directors slated to take on the next wave of superhero-franchise cinematic reboots: to make your entries stand out, you have only to learn from the Emperor.

How Star Wars Borrowed From Akira Kurosawa’s Great Samurai Films

The Geometric Beauty of Akira Kurosawa and Wes Anderson’s Films

The Dark Knight: Anatomy of a Flawed Action Scene

What Makes Yasujirō Ozu a Great Filmmaker? New Video Essay Explains His Long-Admired Cinematic Style

Watch a Video Essay on the Poetic Harmony of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Filmmaking, Then View His Major Films Free Online

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Movie Studios Rejected Scripts During the Silent-Film Era: A Cold, 17-Point Checklist Circa 1915

in Film | October 20th, 2016

Born during the era of silent movies, the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company produced a series of Charlie Chaplin films in 1915, most notably including The Tramp. The Essanay document above shows us one thing: It didn’t take long for the film industry to master the cold rejection letter. Filmmakers could pour their heart and soul into writing a script. And what did they get in return? A list of 17 possible reasons to reject a manuscript, with a deflating check mark next to a particular item. That’s it. No further explanation offered.

Essanay closed in 1925, probably to the delight of some. You can still find some of Essanay’s films in our collection of 65 Free Charlie Chaplin Films Online.

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via @tedgioia

Read Rejection Letters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut & Andy Warhol

No Women Need Apply: A Disheartening 1938 Rejection Letter from Disney Animation

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Editor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trotskyite” Novel Animal Farm (1944)

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The Best Commercial Ever? James Brown Sells Miso Soup (1992)

in Film, Food & Drink, Music, Television, Travel | October 14th, 2016

Most stars are understandably choosy about what products, if any, they’re willing to endorse. Serious artists are mindful about their reputations.

The late great Godfather of Soul James Brown lent his prodigious talents to McDonalds (for a price), but it’s worth noting that most of the heavy lifting was done by a cast of unknowns playing ticket holders fortifying themselves before a hotly anticipated concert. Brown arrives at the end, to bedazzle everyone in the restaurant with his fancy footwork, sequined suit, and sheer proximity.

Clearly, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business had standards.

(Since his death in 2006, his hits have been used to sell athletic wear, gin, beer, and pork tenderloin, proof that these things are harder to control from beyond the grave.)

Japanese television is one arena where many Western celebrities are willing to relax their usual policies. The prospect of an enormous paycheck for so little work is hard to beat, though in the age of Youtube, there’s a far greater likelihood that their core fans will see the results.

Youtube was not a concern in 1992, when Brown filmed the above 15-second spot for Nissin Cup Noodles. No one can accuse him of phoning it in. He dances, lip synchs soup-centric Japanese lyrics to the tune of Sex Machine, and even—in a longer version on a kitchen set—pours boiling water into the cup, just like millions of budget-conscious artists and students the world over.

What he doesn’t do is “bite and smile,” a staple of commercial acting. He raises a forkful of product to his mouth with an obliging grin, but doesn’t ingest so much as a noodle.

For that, we must turn to former bodybuilder and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, who supplemented his movie career as Nissin Cup Noodles’ previous Japanese TV pitchman. Not only did he consent to funny costumes, he pile drives that ramen like a World Record in Competitive Eating depends on it. None of that clowning for Brown!

Readers, we invite you to contribute to our scholarship of Western celebs’ Japanese TV commercials in the comments section below.

David Bowie Sells Ice Cream, Sake, Coke & Water: Watch His TV Commercials from the 1960s Through 2013

Jim Henson’s Violent Wilkins Coffee Commercials (1957–1961)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Incredibly Strange Film Show: Revisit 1980s Documentaries on David Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Other Filmmakers

in Film | October 11th, 2016

Every filmmaker, no matter how mainstream or underground, has to get the inspiration to become a filmmaker somewhere. “I used to watch the programme Jonathan Ross did in the late 80s called The Incredibly Strange Film Show and they did a whole hour on Sam Raimi,” remembers Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright, who in those days couldn’t imagine what it took to enter the impossibly distant world known as Hollywood. “I definitely hadn’t seen The Evil Dead as it was banned on video at the time – but I saw the Jonathan Ross documentary and I was staggered. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”

Although the show only ran 12 episodes, The Incredibly Strange Film Show featured documentaries on not just Sam Raimi but David Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and other directors with filmographies as distinctive as their personalities. (You’ll find other episodes on this Youtube playlist.) Ross and his team go all out, interviewing not just the auteurs behind Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, and The Holy Mountain themselves but their friends, family members, and collaborators in various locations important to their work and their lives. (Ross even takes the step of dressing like his subjects, buttoning his shirt all the way up in the Lynch episode and so on.)

The Incredibly Strange Film Show originally aired in 1988 and 1989, but after decades of celebration in cinema culture, does the work of the likes of Lynch, Waters, and Jodorowsky still count as “incredibly strange”? Their movies certainly do endure, but not by sheer oddity alone. We’ve seen plenty of stranger or more extreme images than theirs committed to celluloid in the years since, but we’ve arguably seen far fewer equally coherent and personal visions successfully make the transition from obscurity to influence. These elder statesmen of famous fringe film, in other words, each in his own way made the zeitgeist itself a little more incredibly strange. Long may that achievement inspire.

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

David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film (1987)

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 Faceboo k.

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

Hear Bill Murray’s Favorite Poems Read Aloud by Murray Himself & Their Authors

in Film, Literature, Magazines, Poetry | October 10th, 2016

I’d be wary of any movie star who invites me to his hotel room to “read poetry” unless said star was documented poetry nut, Bill Murray.

Earlier this year, Leigh Haber, book editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, reached out to Murray to see if he’d share some of his favorite poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. In true Murray-esque fashion, he waited until deadline to return her call, suggesting that they meet in his room at the Carlyle, where he would recite his choices in person.

Such celebrity shenanigans are unheard of at the Chateau Marmont!

Murray’s favorite poems:

“What the Mirror Said” by Lucille Clifton

At the top of the page, Murray reads the poem at a benefit for New York’s Poets House, adopting a light accent suggested by the dialect of the narrator, a mirror full of appreciation for the poet’s womanly body. Clifton said that the “germ” of the poem was visiting her husband at Harvard, and feeling out of place among all the slim young coeds. Thusly does Murray position himself as a hero to every female above the age of … you decide.

“Oatmeal” by Galway Kinnell

Kinnell, who sought to enliven a dreary bowl of oatmeal with such dining companions as Keats, Spenser and Milton, shared Murray’s playful sensibility. In an interview conducted as part of Michele Root-Bernstein’s Worldplay Project he remarked:

… it doesn’t seem like play at the time of doing it, but part of the whole construct of the work, and even though the work might be extremely serious and even morose, still there’s that element of play that is just an inseparable part of it.

“I Love You Sweatheart” by Thomas Lux

Murray told O, which incorrectly reported the poem’s title as “I Love You Sweetheart” that he experienced this one as a vibration on the inside of his ribs “where the meat is most tender.” It would make a terrific scene in a movie, and who better to play the lover risking his life to misspell a term of endearment on a bridge than Bill Murray?

“Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Alas, we could find no footage of Nye reading her lovely poem aloud, but you can read it in full over at The Poetry Foundation. It’s easy to see why it speaks to Murray.

via O, The Oprah Magazine

Bill Murray Reads Great Poetry by Billy Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Manguso

Bill Murray Gives a Delightful Reading of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1996)

Bill Murray Reads Poetry at a Construction Site: Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins & More

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defying Stunts Captured in Animated Gifs

in Film | October 6th, 2016

In the days of silent comedy, jokes by necessity consisted of physical routines. Charlie Chaplin’s mournful expressions, slumped shoulders, and funny walks immediately come to mind, as well as his slapstick bits and pratfalls. Just as memorable are the daredevil, death-defying stunts of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, who competed with each other throughout their careers. The stonefaced Keaton “suffered most when the talkies arrived,” notes Jana Prikryl in The New York Review of Books, and “never commanded the wealth or popularity” of Chaplin or Lloyd in his day.

Nonetheless, as Tony Zhou demonstrated recently in his video essay series Every Frame a Painting, Keaton has since become one of those filmmakers who are “so influential that no matter where you look, you see traces of them everywhere.” His framing crops up in Wes Anderson’s careful set-pieces; his “acrobatics and stunts” in Jackie Chan’s action sequences; and his deadpan demeanor in Bill Murray’s endearing sad-sack performances. Keaton was, said Orson Welles, “the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema.” In the silent era, that also meant he was the greatest of all the stuntmen.

“No silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton,” Roger Ebert wrote with deep admiration. Even Harold Lloyd’s vertigo-inducing clock scenes in 1923’s Safety Last used trick sets to lessen the risks. Keaton not only took on the full risk himself in his most famous stunt scenes—many of which you can see in gif form here—he also “doubled for some of his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own.” In Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, top), Keaton stands in the exact spot of an upper window of the façade of a house that comes down around him. In his 1926 classic The General, further down, he performs a jaw-dropping feat—using one railroad tie to push aside another while riding on the cow catcher of a moving locomotive.

Further up, in 1923’s Three Ages—the first film Keaton wrote, directed, and starred in—he performs an authentically terrifying stunt that gives acrophobic viewers instant chills. Just above, from the following year’s Sherlock Jr., we see a similarly heart-racing feat as Keaton clutches a roadblock gate and falls two stories into a speeding car. And in 1928’s The Cameraman, below, he goes down with a tall collapsing platform. Keaton’s visual comedy was superb; “he’s airily nimble,” Charlie Fox writes in a Cabinet essay on the silent star’s fall into alcoholism after the talkies left his career stranded; “Nobody else’s body yielded so smoothly to the sublime mindlessness that the best physical comedy requires.”

In just these few key scenes, we see how Keaton’s stunts stripped away what Prikryl calls the “sappy, blatant slapstick [he] disdained” in other actors’ work (“I didn’t like overacting,” he remarked). But part of the dryness of Keaton’s high-wire visual comedy came from the fact that many of these scenes were unrehearsed first takes, which “gave the action sequences a documentary flavor… because what was captured on film was a bold attempt at something really dangerous or difficult, not a practiced slam dunk.”

In his later years, Keaton’s career saw something of a resurgence after he beat his chronic drinking. “His job,” late in life, Fox writes, “became making quick appearances in unexpected places”—a Smirnoff Vodka ad in 1957, a brief role in Sunset Boulevard. “Always, in these later performances, he arrives from and returns to a becalmed region of the past.” Perhaps nowhere was Keaton’s physical expressiveness put to more use in this period than in a role which, in many ways, he found at least as challenging as his early silent-era stuntwork: a 1965 collaboration with Samuel Beckett in the modernist writer’s only foray into film (excerpt above): a short tribute to the silent era that is unsurprisingly, “far more complex” conceptually than its forebears, but no less evocative of the existential plight embodied by Keaton’s lonely, embattled-yet-stoic characters.

via Metafilter

Buster Keaton: The Wonderful Gags of the Founding Father of Visual Comedy

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russian Revolution not only radically reshaped social and political institutions in the soon-to-be Soviet Union, but it also radicalized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Russia for 300 years,” comments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “culture as an instrument of political control.” As the Bolsheviks swept away lumbering czarist elitism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be populist and proletarian—spearheaded by such experimental artists as filmmaker Dziga Vertov, poet, futurist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “suprematist” painter Kazimir Malevich. While many of these artists were denounced as bourgeois obscurantists when the dogmas of socialist realism became their own instruments of political control, for several years, the nascent Communist state produced some of the most forward-thinking art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first fully synthetic music ever made, created by innovative methods that predated synthesizers by several decades. We’ve likely all heard of the Theremin, for example, invented in 1919 by Soviet engineer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, other inventive technologists and composers had begun to experiment with oscilloscopes and magnetic tape, cutting or drawing waveforms by hand to create synthetic sounds.

One avant-garde Soviet composer, Arseny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound recording technology in film. The process of optical sound uses an audio track recorded on a separate negative that runs parallel with the film (see it explained above). After the development of this technology, writes Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds, Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy suggested that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be created from experimentation with the optical film sound track.”

Taking up the challenge after the first Russian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “produced (possibly) the first short film with a hand-drawn synthetic soundtrack.” One very short example of his technique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it preserves a fascinating technique and a look at what might have been had this technique, and others like it, borne more fruit. Monoskop describes Avraamov as “a composer, music theorist, performance instigator, expert in Caucusian folk music, [and] outspoken critic of the classical twelve-tone system.” He was also the commissar of a ministry set up to encourage “the development of a distinctly proletarian art and literature.” It’s not entirely clear how what he called “ornamental sound” techniques fit that purpose. But along with innovators like Evgeny Sholpo and Nikolai Voinov—whose fascinating experiments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that technologies generally used to deliver entertainment and propaganda to passive mass audiences could be manipulated by hand to create something entirely unique.

The experiments of these sound pioneers perhaps held little appeal for the average Russian, but they were enthusiastically written up in a 1936 issue of American magazine Modern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gallagher, “briefly formed a research institute in Moscow, where they hoped to create synthetic voices and understand the musical language of geometric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed within a year.”

via @WFMU/Dangerous Minds

Soviet Inventor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Early Electronic Instrument That Could Be Played Without Being Touched (1954)

Eight Free Films by Dziga Vertov, Creator of Soviet Avant-Garde Documentaries

Watch Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Surviving Film, The Lady and the Hooligan (1918)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Silliest Film”

in Film, Sci Fi | October 3rd, 2016

When we watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis now, we see an aesthetically daring landmark work of science-fiction cinema. When H.G. Wells watched Metropolis back in 1927, the year of its release, he saw something very different indeed. “I have recently seen the silliest film,” wrote the author of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine as an opener for his New York Times review. “I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.”

Despite its giant budget, Metropolis gives “in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” History remembers Lang and Wells both as visionaries who looked, often with little optimism, to the future, but clearly they had a difference of opinion as to how that future would actually play out.

The scientifically-minded Wells took the impressionistic Metropolis literally, taking issue with — among other things — how its airplanes “show no advance on contemporary types”; its “motor cars are 1926 models or earlier”; its vision of a vertically stratified city look, “to put it mildly, highly improbable”; the apparent condition that the city’s “machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used”; and the sentimentality of its makers, “who are all on the side of soul and love and such like.”

Metropolis opened to mixed reviews at first (some of which you can read here), but no contemporary critic could match Wells for sheer disdain. “Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; never for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events,” he wrote, steering his point-by-point takedown to its conclusion. “It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at.”

Strong stuff, but the highest form of film criticism, as the French New Wave would later articulate, is filmmaking. And so, in 1936, came Things to Come, another cinematic spectacle of the future, this one built to the ostensibly more plausible specifications Wells laid out as its screenwriter — that film itself just one more predecessor to the unending series of dystopias, utopias, and every kind of future in-between to appear on the screen over the next eight decades.

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metropolis (1927)

Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Written by H.G. Wells, Accurately Predicts the World’s Very Dark Future

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai Perfected the Cinematic Action Scene: A New Video Essay

How Movie Studios Rejected Scripts During the Silent-Film Era: A Cold, 17-Point Checklist Circa 1915

The Best Commercial Ever? James Brown Sells Miso Soup (1992)

The Incredibly Strange Film Show: Revisit 1980s Documentaries on David Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Other Filmmakers

Hear Bill Murray’s Favorite Poems Read Aloud by Murray Himself & Their Authors

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defying Stunts Captured in Animated Gifs

Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Silliest Film”

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