Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments For Living

in Film, Life, Philosophy | May 16th, 2016

Creative Commons photo by Lionel Allorge

If you’re a fan of science fiction or the films of David Lynch, you’ve surely seen the 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s cult classic sci-fi novel, Dune (though Lynch himself may prefer that you didn’t). And indeed, it’s very likely that, by now, you’ve heard the incredible story of what Dune might have been, had it been directed ten years earlier by psychedelic Chilean filmmaker, writer, composer, and psychotherapist Alejandro Jodorowsky. Perhaps you even caught Jonathan Crow’s post on this site featuring Jodorowsky’s proposed storyboards—drawn by French artist Moebius—for what would most certainly would have been “a mind-bogglingly grand epic” of a movie. Alas, Jodorowsky’s Dune never came about, though it did later lead to the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which Matt Zoller Seitz pronounced “a call to arms for dreamers everywhere.”

That description applies not only to the film about a film that could have been, but also to the entirety of Jodorowsky’s work, including his—thoroughly bizarre and captivating—early features, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, and the creation of a comic book universe like no other. Called “The Jodoverse,” the world of his comic books is, as writer Warren Ellis says, “astonishingly beautiful and totally mad”—again, a succinct description of Jodorowsky’s every artistic endeavor. Witness below, for example, the stunning trailer for his most recent feature film, 2014’s The Dance of Reality. You may find the visual excesses so overwhelming that you only half-hear the narration.

Listen (or read) carefully, however. Jodorowsky has as much to tell us with his cryptically poetic pronouncements as he does with his visionary imagery. Do you find his epigrams platitudinous, sententious, Pollyannaish, or naïve? Jodorowsky doesn’t mind. He calls, remember, to the dreamers, not the hard-bitten, cynical realists. And if you’re one of the dreamers who hears that call, you’ll find much to love in the list below of Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments for living. But so too, I think, will the realists. These come from Jodorowsky’s memoir The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the list comes via Dangerous Minds, who adapted it from “the better part of three pages” of text.

As Jodorowsky frames these maxims in his book, they originated with influential Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, and were told to him by Gurdjieff’s daughter, Reyna d’Assia. Perhaps that’s so. But you’ll note, if you know Jodorowsky’s writing—or simply took a couple minutes time to watch the trailer above—that they sound enough like the author’s own words to have been brought forth from his personal storehouse of accumulated wisdom. In any case, Jodorowsky has always been quick to acknowledge his spiritual teachers, and whether these are his second-hand accounts of Gurdjieff or his own inventions has no bearing on the substance therein.

Often sounding very much like Biblical proverbs or Buddhist precepts, the commandments are intended, d’Assia says in Jodorowsky’s account, to help us “change [our] habits, conquer laziness, and become… morally sound human being[s].” As she remarks in the book, before she delivers the below in a lengthy monologue, “to be strong in the great things, we must also be strong in the small ones.” Therefore…

Ground your attention on yourself. Be conscious at every moment of what you are thinking, sensing, feeling, desiring, and doing.
Always finish what you have begun.
Whatever you are doing, do it as well as possible.
Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time.
Develop your generosity ‒ but secretly.
Treat everyone as if he or she was a close relative.
Organize what you have disorganized.
Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift.
Stop defining yourself.
Do not lie or steal, for you lie to yourself and steal from yourself.
Help your neighbor, but do not make him dependent.
Do not encourage others to imitate you.
Make work plans and accomplish them.
Do not take up too much space.
Make no useless movements or sounds.
If you lack faith, pretend to have it.
Do not allow yourself to be impressed by strong personalities.
Do not regard anyone or anything as your possession.
Share fairly.
Do not seduce.
Sleep and eat only as much as necessary.
Do not speak of your personal problems.
Do not express judgment or criticism when you are ignorant of most of the factors involved.
Do not establish useless friendships.
Do not follow fashions.
Do not sell yourself.
Respect contracts you have signed.
Be on time.
Never envy the luck or success of anyone.
Say no more than necessary.
Do not think of the profits your work will engender.
Never threaten anyone.
Keep your promises.
In any discussion, put yourself in the other person’s place.
Admit that someone else may be superior to you.
Do not eliminate, but transmute.
Conquer your fears, for each of them represents a camouflaged desire.
Help others to help themselves.
Conquer your aversions and come closer to those who inspire rejection in you.
Do not react to what others say about you, whether praise or blame.
Transform your pride into dignity.
Transform your anger into creativity.
Transform your greed into respect for beauty.
Transform your envy into admiration for the values of the other.
Transform your hate into charity.
Neither praise nor insult yourself.
Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you.
Do not complain.
Develop your imagination.
Never give orders to gain the satisfaction of being obeyed.
Pay for services performed for you.
Do not proselytize your work or ideas.
Do not try to make others feel for you emotions such as pity, admiration, sympathy, or complicity.
Do not try to distinguish yourself by your appearance.
Never contradict; instead, be silent.
Do not contract debts; acquire and pay immediately.
If you offend someone, ask his or her pardon; if you have offended a person publicly, apologize publicly.
When you realize you have said something that is mistaken, do not persist in error through pride; instead, immediately retract it.
Never defend your old ideas simply because you are the one who expressed them.
Do not keep useless objects.
Do not adorn yourself with exotic ideas.
Do not have your photograph taken with famous people.
Justify yourself to no one, and keep your own counsel.
Never define yourself by what you possess.
Never speak of yourself without considering that you might change.
Accept that nothing belongs to you.
When someone asks your opinion about something or someone, speak only of his or her qualities.
When you become ill, regard your illness as your teacher, not as something to be hated.
Look directly, and do not hide yourself.
Do not forget your dead, but accord them a limited place and do not allow them to invade your life.
Wherever you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred.
When you perform a service, make your effort inconspicuous.
If you decide to work to help others, do it with pleasure.
If you are hesitating between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing.
Do not try to be everything to your spouse; accept that there are things that you cannot give him or her but which others can.
When someone is speaking to an interested audience, do not contradict that person and steal his or her audience.
Live on money you have earned.
Never brag about amorous adventures.
Never glorify your weaknesses.
Never visit someone only to pass the time.
Obtain things in order to share them.
If you are meditating and a devil appears, make the devil meditate too.

via Dangerous Minds

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tantalizing Animation

Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists (1996)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The Alchemy of Film Editing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Hannah and Her Sisters, The Empire Strikes Back & Other Films

in Film | May 16th, 2016

Writing, casting, shooting — all important parts of the filmmaking process, but the real making of a movie happens, so they say, in the editing room. Though often film editors themselves, “they” have a point: even moviegoers unfamiliar with the mechanics of editing can sense that, when something feels right onscreen, and even more so when something feels wrong, it has to do less with the pieces themselves than how those pieces have been put together.

“There’s an inbuilt relationship between the story itself, how to tell the story, and the rhythm with which you tell it,” says famed editor Walter Murch, known for his work with Francis Ford Coppola on the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, “and editing is seventy percent about rhythm.” Twenty years ago, in his book In the Blink of an Eye, Murch shed light on how an editor works. Now, cinema video essayist Tony Zhou has continued that mission with a new episode of his series Every Frame a Painting, “How Does an Editor Think and Feel?”

Zhou’s chosen medium places him well to address the question, since each video essay must require at least as much time spent editing as thinking about film in the first place. Still, asked by a friend how he knows where to cut, he can come up with only this unsatisfying answer: “Like a lot of editors, I cut based on instinct.” As to what exactly constitutes that editor’s instinct, Zhou spends the bulk of this ten-minute essay searching for answers himself, examining the cuts in pictures like Hannah and Her Sisters, In the Mood for Love, The Empire Strikes Back, Tampopo, Only Angels Have Wings, Pierrot le Fou, and All That Jazz.

He also turns to the words of editors with decades of experience in the game, including frequent Steven Spielberg collaborator Michael Kahn, frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, and even Murch himself. But ultimately, no matter how much wisdom about timing, emotions, tension, and rhythm you collect, you’ve got to sit down in the editing suite and go it alone. “If you watch anything over and over again,” Zhou says, “you eventually feel the moment when the shot wants you to cut.” If this seems like an overwhelming task, especially given hundreds of thousands of hours of footage an editor will work through in a career, do keep Kahn’s simple words in mind: “I see all that film up there — it doesn’t matter. I’m doing one piece at a time. One scene at a time. One cut at a time.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Master Class on Film Editing

The Dark Knight: Anatomy of a Flawed Action Scene

The Wizard of Oz Broken Apart and Put Back Together in Alphabetical Order

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

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

Thomas Edison’s Silent Film of the “Fartiste” Who Delighted Crowds at Le Moulin Rouge (1900)

in Comedy, Film, History, Theatre | May 16th, 2016

In 1900, Thomas Edison traveled to Paris to document the many wonders of the Exposition Universelle, and the city itself. Among the sights captured with his kinetoscope cameras were the Expo’s moving sidewalks, the Champs-Élysées, and the previous Exposition Universelle’s crown jewel, the Eiffel Tower, now eleven years old.

It wasn’t all so high-minded. Edison and his kinetoscope also caught a performance by former Moulin Rouge star, Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, above. This elegantly attired gentlemen achieved fame and fortune with a series of impressions, carried out by a rather eccentric orifice. He was not so much artiste as fartiste, a title he wore with pride.

Pujol claimed to have discovered his unusual talent as a child, and soon set about achieving different effects by using his abdominal muscles to expel not gas, but odorless air. By varying the pressure, he was able to play simple tunes. By the time he turned 30, his act had expanded to include impersonations of celebrities, musical instruments, birds, a thunderstorm and such stock characters as a nervous bride. His grand finale included such feats as blowing out candles, smoking cigarettes and playing an ocarina (below), all with the aid of a rubber hose inserted into his anus via a modest trouser slit.

What a tragedy that Edison’s short film is silent! No live piano accompaniment could do justice to this magical artistic fruit, and if there were other recordings of Pujol, they’ve been lost to history.

He lives on in the imaginations of artists who followed him.

Actor Ugo Tognazzi, below, assumed the title role in a 1983 Italian language feature.

Director Mel Brooks injected a bit of subtlety into Blazing Saddles’ beans-around-the-campfire humor when he appeared as a character named Governor William J. LePetomane.

Sadly, Pujol was left on the cutting room floor of director Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, but all is not lost. Reportedly, Johnny Depp has indicated interest in bringing this historic figure back to life. (Gentlemen, start your screenplays…)

Then there is the half hour biopic, below, directed by Monty Python alum Ian McNaughton and starring Leonard Rossiter as Pujol. Prepare to hear the opening session of the Congress of Vienna, a toad, and a four-part harmony.

via Messy Nessy Chic

Thomas Edison’s Boxing Cats (1894), or Where the LOLCats All Began

Thomas Edison Recites “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in Early Voice Recording

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch the First Sherlock Holmes Movie (1900), the Arrival of the Most Popular Character in Cinema

in Film, Literature | May 13th, 2016

According to Guinness World Records, the human literary character who pops up most often on screens big and small is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s best known creation, Sherlock Holmes. (Hamlet is a distant second.)

The list of actors who’ve had a go include Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey, Jr., Ian McKellen, Michael Caine, and Basil Rathbone.

John Cleese spoofed him on Comedy Playhouse.

John Gielgud’s celebrated voice brought Holmes to life opposite Ralph Richardson’s Dr. Watson in a 1954 radio series.

The fictional detective time warped onto Fantasy Island and the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise, in the respective form of Peter Lawford and Brett “Data” Spiner.

Although Holmes maintained that “the fair sex was (Watson’s) department,” the Soviet Union’s My Tenderly Loved Detective featured actress Yekaterina Vasilyeva as a female Sherlock named Shirley.

But no one has solved the mystery of 1900’s Sherlock Holmes Baffled, above, the very first filmed entertainment to feature the character. The director and cinematographer was Arthur W. Marvin, who went on to serve as cameraman for D. W. Griffith’s early silent films. The identity of his starring actor has unfortunately been lost to the ages.

The film itself was believed lost, too, until Michael Pointer, a historian specializing in Sherlock Holmesiana, unearthed a paper copy in a Library of Congress archive. A series of individual cards, it was intended to be viewed by Mutoscope, a single viewer, crank-operated peep show device, common in turn-of-the-century arcades.

No doubt audiences who paid a penny to watch this fairly plotless 30-second adventure were more impressed by the special effects than the anonymous actor playing the iconic detective.

To see how this mystery man’s performance measures up against other cinematic Sherlocks, check out these Holmes films found on the web. And find other great films in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More:

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Free – The film is adapted from the 1899 play “Sherlock Holmes” by William Gillette, and stars Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Ida Lupino, George Zucco and Alan Marshal. (1939)
• Dressed to Kill – Free – The last of 14 films starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson. (1941)
• Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon – Free – Sherlock Holmes rescues an inventor of a new bomb site before the Nazis can get him. (1943)
• The Woman in Green – Free – Sherlock Holmes investigates when young women around London turn up murdered, each with a finger severed off. Scotland Yard suspects a madman, but Holmes believes the killings to be part of a diabolical plot. Stars Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. (1945)
• Terror by Night – Free – Sherlock Holmes film, the thirteenth to star Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce and was directed by Roy William Neill. The story revolves around the theft of a famous diamond aboard a train. (1946)

Hear The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Vintage Radio Drama Starring John Gielgud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richardson

Arthur Conan Doyle Names His 19 Favorite Sherlock Holmes Stories

Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

in Film, History | May 12th, 2016

You may never have heard of Oscar Micheaux, but out of his “impoverished consciousness-raising exploitation potboilers,” writes critic Dave Kehr, “the American black cinema was born.” Kehr wrote that in a brief review of Micheaux’s Murder in Harlem, a “1935 mystery tale involving corpses and mysterious letters and flashbacks and Byzantine plot twists, all of which should undoubtedly prove taxing to Micheaux’s meager technical abilities. It hardly matters though, since Micheaux was his own cinematic institution.”

That movie came in the late-middle period of Micheaux’s career, which produced more than 44 pictures and qualified him as the most prolific black independent filmmaker in American cinema history as well as, in the words of Atlas Obscura’s Stephanie Weber, “a pioneer in almost every aspect of film.” Having started out as a writer, he chose for his first motion picture to adapt The Homesteader, his own novel “about a black homesteader in the Dakotas who falls in love with the daughter of a Scottish widower. In 1919, Micheaux raised the money on his own to film and produce The Homesteader in Chicago, becoming the first African American to make a feature film.”

Not only did Micheaux take on a controversial theme right away by hinting at the possibility of interracial romance (though The Homesteader’s love interest turns out, in a plot twist that must have made more sense at the time, not to actually be white), history has remembered him as standing against not just the dominant social phenomena but the dominant cinematic phenomena of his day: his second film Within Our Gates told the story of a mixed-race schoolteacher whose adoptive father stood up to the family’s white landlord, ostensibly as a response to post-World War I social instability, though some took it as a rebuke to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

“Given the times, his accomplishments in publishing and film are extraordinary,” says NAACP History, “including being the first African-American to produce a film to be shown in ‘white’ movie theaters. In his motion pictures, he moved away from the ‘Negro’ stereotypes being portrayed in film at the time.” In recent years, critics like Kehr and others have directed a bit of attention back toward Micheaux’s path-breaking body of work, and many future leading lights of black American cinema could no doubt benefit from discovering it themselves. But in his confident treatment of sensational material, his creativity-inducing technical and economic limitations, and his learn-on-the-job understanding of the mechanics of cinema, he also foreshadowed the excitement of all the waves of indie film to come.

You can watch many of Oscar Micheaux’s films free on Youtube or at the Internet Archive. Or find them in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

To learn more about Micheaux, read Patrick McGilligan’s book, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Great Black Filmmaker.

via Atlas Obscura

Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black, Starring a 19-Year-old Billie Holiday

Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

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

The Wizard of Oz Broken Apart and Put Back Together in Alphabetical Order

in Film, Random | May 11th, 2016

WARNING: This film contains extremely fast editing, flashes of light, abrupt changes in image and sound.

Back in 2001, Matt Bucy had the inspiration to do something truly original — take the entire Wizard of Oz, cut it up, and put it back together–this time in alphabetical order. And that’s precisely what he did several years later, in 2004. A coder, Bucy created an app that made it easy to deconstruct the beloved 1939 film. He told Vox:

That [app] spit out a big text file with all the words and their locations in the film, which I then imported into a spreadsheet, sorted in alphabetical and then chronological order, and fed into another little program that took the sorted list and produced the edit. So basically, it was edited in Excel.…

All told, I think it took about seven days spread out over a couple of months. Disassembly was mind-bending in itself. It was literally hard to talk after moving word by word, or syllable by syllable, through the film. English stopped sounding like language, and at times I had to stop because I could not figure out what a word was — I just couldn’t hear it right.

When finally alphabetized, the film, says Bucy, had a surprising energy to it. A certain je ne sais quoi. Yes it’s hard to describe. Maybe you can put your own words to it.

In 2016, Bucy finally made the alphabetized Wizard of Oz available to the rest of world. You can watch it here. And do heed the warning above.

via Vox

Watch the Earliest Surviving Filmed Version of The Wizard of Oz (1910)

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What Are the Most Beautifully & Creatively Shot Films of All Time? Cinematographers Pick Their Favorites

in Film | May 11th, 2016

To determine the all-around greatest films of all time, the well-known Sight and Sound Directors Poll surveys filmmakers themselves. By that same logic, then, if you want to know which movies most excel in one particular aspect, you’ll want to poll the people who work on that aspect of cinema: the actors will know which have the best acting, the editors which have the best editing, the sound designers which have the best sound design, the rigging grips which have the best-gripped rigging. And if you want to know the best-shot films of all time, you have only to ask the cinematographers.

In 1998, American Cinematographer polled the American Society of Cinematographers membership for the best-shot films of all time. Kristopher Tapley at Hitflix writes that the “cinematographers were asked for their top picks in two eras: films from 1894–1949 (or the dawn of cinema through the classic era), and then 1950–1997, for a top 50 in each case. Then they followed up 10 years later with another poll focused on the films between 1998 and 2008.”

Here are the 1894–1949 top-ten results and their cinematographers:

Citizen Kane (Gregg Toland, 1941)
Gone with the Wind (Ernest Haller, Ray Rennahan, 1939)
Sunrise (Charles Rosher, Karl Struss, 1927)
Metropolis (Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, 1927)
The Wizard of Oz (Harold Rosson, 1939)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Stanley Cortez, 1942)
Casablanca (Arthur Edeson, 1942)
Battleship Potemkin (Eduard Tisse, 1926)
The Third Man (Robert Krasker, 1950)
The Birth of a Nation (G.W. Bitzer, 1915)

“The choice of Gregg Toland’s cinematography for Citizen Kane as the best in the first 45 years of motion pictures comes as no surprise,” writes American Cinematographer’s George Turner. “No other movie has been more praised, studied and written about — or more panned, damned and blacklisted.” At the time, “audiences in general were put off by the ‘arty’ photography, overlapping dialogue, unusual cutting and Welles’s penchant for injecting startling and often irritating sound effects. It was years before the ‘newness’ of the Kane style wore off and gained widespread acceptance,” and even absorbed into the mainstream.

And those from 1950–1997:

Lawrence of Arabia (Freddie Young, 1962)
The Godfather (Gordon Willis, 1971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Geoffrey Unworth, 1969)
Days of Heaven (Néstor Almendros, 1978)
Schindler’s List (Janusz Kaminski, 1993)
Apocalypse Now (Vittorio Storaro, 1979)
The Conformist (Vittorio Storaro, 1970)
Raging Bull (Michael Chapman, 1980)
Blade Runner (Jordan Cronenweth, 1982)
Touch of Evil (Russell Metty, 1958)

Turner calls Lawrence of Arabia “perhaps the crowning achievement in the long and illustrious career of director of photography Frederick A. Young,” naming as its most famous single image “the lingering scene in which Omar Sharif, riding a camel, is first seen as a tiny spot in a mirage on the horizon. In the foreground, Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) and an Arab youth are drawing water from a well when they notice the wobbly, distorted shape coming toward them. Shimmering in waves of heat and strangely liquid colors, the rider steadily approaches the well. As he gets closer, he is still indistinct, but the ominous thumping of the camel’s feet can be heard. Sharif finally emerges from the mirage, raises his rifle and shoots the Arab. The long scene carries a strong element of dread and suspense.”

Finally, here are the results from 1998–2008:

Amélie (Bruno Delbonnel, 2001)
Children of Men (Emmanuel Lubezki, 2006)
Saving Private Ryan (Janusz Kaminski, 1998)
There Will Be Blood (Robert Elswit, 2007)
No Country for Old Men (Roger Deakins, 2007)
Fight Club (Jeff Cronenweth, 1999)
The Dark Knight (Wally Pfister, 2008)
Road to Perdition (Conrad L. Hall, 2002)
City of God (Cidade de Deus) (César Charlone, 2003)
American Beauty (Conrad L. Hall, 1999)

The American Society of Cinematographers quotes Delbonnel on Amélie’s visual victory: “This is real honor for me, especially considering the other movies in this list. These are some of the finest cinematographers, and I’m not sure I deserve to be among them, but I am very happy to be. They are all explorers.” And in that, he sums up why, when we want to know what movies to watch, we should ask the people who make movies: their real competition lies not in simply generating beauty, but in leading the art form into territory unknown.

You can watch several films on the lists–Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise and Metropolis–above. Find more great films in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via Hitflix

A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time

Metropolis: Watch a Restored Version of Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece (1927)

Watch Battleship Potemkin and Other Free Sergei Eisenstein Films

The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 358 Filmmakers

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

A Clever Supercut of Writers Struggling with Writer’s Block in 53 Films: From Barton Fink to The Royal Tenenbaums

in Film, Writing | May 10th, 2016

Quite patiently, Ben Watts cut apart and stitched together scenes from 53 films (find a complete list here) showing characters suffering through writer’s block. Adaptation, Barton Fink, Shakespeare in Love, The Royal Tenenbaums, and, yes, Throw Momma From the Train–they’re among the films featured in the 4‑minute supercut above. If you give the clip a little time, you’ll see that the supercut has an arc to it. It tells a tale, and has an ending that Hollywood would love.

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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via AV Club

A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles

A Great Compilation of “The Lick” Found in Music Everywhere: From Coltrane & Stravinsky, to Christina Aguilera

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments For Living

The Alchemy of Film Editing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Hannah and Her Sisters, The Empire Strikes Back & Other Films

Thomas Edison’s Silent Film of the “Fartiste” Who Delighted Crowds at Le Moulin Rouge (1900)

Watch the First Sherlock Holmes Movie (1900), the Arrival of the Most Popular Character in Cinema

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

The Wizard of Oz Broken Apart and Put Back Together in Alphabetical Order

What Are the Most Beautifully & Creatively Shot Films of All Time? Cinematographers Pick Their Favorites

A Clever Supercut of Writers Struggling with Writer’s Block in 53 Films: From Barton Fink to The Royal Tenenbaums

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