Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing might have left crit­ics scratch­ing their heads when it first came out, but it has since come to be rec­og­nized as a hor­ror mas­ter­piece. The film is both styl­is­ti­cal­ly dis­tinc­tive – those long track­ing shots, the one-point per­spec­tive, that com­plete­ly amaz­ing car­pet­ing – and nar­ra­tive­ly open-end­ed. Kubrick freights the movie with lots of sig­ni­fiers with­out clear­ly point­ing out what they sig­ni­fy: Like why is there Native Amer­i­can imagery through­out the film? Why is Jack Nichol­son writ­ing his mas­ter­piece on a Ger­man type­writer? And, for that mat­ter, why is he read­ing a Play­girl mag­a­zine while wait­ing for his job inter­view? The mul­ti­va­lence of The Shin­ing inspired a whole fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary about the mean­ing of the movie called Room 237, where var­i­ous the­o­rists talk through their inter­pre­ta­tions. Is it pos­si­ble that the movie is both about the hor­rors of the Holo­caust and about the stag­ing of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing?

So per­haps it isn’t sur­pris­ing that The Shin­ing has been the fod­der for film­mak­ers to impose their own mean­ing on the flick. A cou­ple recent video pieces have reimag­ined the movie as shot by two of the reign­ing auteurs of cin­e­ma – Wes Ander­son and David Lynch.

Wes Ander­son is, of course, the film­mak­er of such twee, for­mal­ly exact­ing works as The Roy­al Tenen­baums, Moon­rise King­dom and, most recent­ly, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Film­mak­er Steve Rams­den cre­ates a quick and wit­ty mash up of The Over­look Hotel and the Grand Budapest. The video rais­es all sorts of ques­tions. How, for exam­ple, would The Shin­ing have been dif­fer­ent with an offi­cious concierge with a pen­cil mus­tache? You can see Wes Anderson’s The Shin­ing above.

Of the two film­mak­ers, David Lynch is the­mat­i­cal­ly clos­er to Kubrick. Both have made vio­lent, con­tro­ver­sial movies that plumb the murky depths of the mas­cu­line mind. Both have made inno­v­a­tive films that play on mul­ti­ple lev­els. And both made movies that com­plete­ly freaked me out as a teenag­er. Kubrick was even a big fan of Lynch. In his book Catch­ing the Big Fish: Med­i­ta­tion, Con­scious­ness, and Cre­ativ­i­ty, Lynch recalls meet­ing Kubrick, and Kubrick telling the young film­mak­er that Eraser­head was his favorite movie. If that does­n’t pro­vide you with a lifetime’s worth of val­i­da­tion, I don’t know what will.

Richard Veri­na crams every sin­gle Lynchi­an quirk into his eight-minute video – from creepy red cur­tains to dream-like super­im­po­si­tions to real­ly inter­est­ing light fix­tures. Sure, the piece might be a minute or two too long but for hard­core fans this piece is a hoot. Veri­na even man­ages to work in ref­er­ences to Lynch’s bête noir, Dune. You can see Blue Shin­ing above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

The Mak­ing of The Shin­ing

Saul Bass’ Reject­ed Poster Con­cepts for The Shin­ing (and His Pret­ty Excel­lent Sig­na­ture)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Cities as we know them came into being when they indus­tri­al­ized in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Film as we know it came into being when its own indus­try devel­oped in the 20th. And so film came into its own in an era when cities around the world had become the most fas­ci­nat­ing places going. It makes sense, then, that ear­ly motion pic­tures — even the very ear­li­est, in the form of the Lumière broth­ers’ shots of the streets of 1980s Lyon — often took cities as their sub­jects.

“The 1920s were a key decade in the devel­op­ment of cities,” writes urban car­tog­ra­ph­er and explor­er Eric Bright­well. Not only did that era see the begin­ning of the preser­va­tion move­ment, “built around the notion that archi­tec­ture and his­to­ry were some­times as worth pre­serv­ing as wilder­ness and nature,” but “the 1920 cen­sus revealed that for the first time more Amer­i­cans lived in cities than the coun­try. Le Cor­busier began writ­ing his series, ‘1925 Expo: Arts Déco,’ and Art Deco soon became one of the archi­tec­tur­al styles most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with high-ris­es.”

Bright­well adds that “the 1920s also gave rise to the city sym­pho­ny.” They’ve been loose­ly defined “as a poet­ic, exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary that presents a por­trait of dai­ly life with­in a city while attempt­ing to cap­ture some­thing of the city’s spir­it.”

Some impor­tant exam­ples with­in the genre include films such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheel­er’s short Man­hat­ta (1921), Alber­to Cav­al­can­ti’s Rien que les heures (1926) on Paris, Wal­ter Ruttman­n’s Berlin: Die Sin­fonie der Großs­tadt (1927), André Sauvage’s Études sur Paris (1928), Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s Man With a Movie Cam­era (1929), Adal­ber­to Keme­ny and Rudolf Rex Lustig’s São Paulo, Sin­fo­nia da Metró­pole (1929), and Alexan­der Ham­mid’s Bezúčel­ná procház­ka (1930). (Even fic­tion films of the era took notice of the new urban con­di­tion in a big way; see, to name one obvi­ous exam­ple, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis.)

These films, each of a slight­ly dif­fer­ent and some­times more than slight­ly exper­i­men­tal form, do indeed cap­ture the sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty that only a city can give off. Alas, the next eighty years of the 20th century—a time when even some of the great­est metrop­o­lis­es would suf­fer pop­u­la­tion exo­dus, free­way-build­ing, and “urban renew­al” in all its forms—wouldn’t treat cities very well. But they’ve now made a come­back, sig­naled by the much-dis­cussed fact that, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, more human beings every­where live in cities than not. Maybe this new era of cities will bring about a new era of city sym­phonies. If so, its film­mak­ers will cer­tain­ly have a rich tra­di­tion to work with.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Paris Through Pen­tax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Dif­fer­ent Lens

A Drone’s Eye View of Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don, Bangkok & Mex­i­co City

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Czech cin­e­ma gained inter­na­tion­al acclaim in the 1960s with films like Close­ly Watched Trains (1966) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967) – movies that con­flat­ed the polit­i­cal with the sex­u­al in ways that were as inno­v­a­tive as they were sub­ver­sive. Much of the fuel of this New Wave of Czech film was the utter absur­di­ty of the Com­mu­nist rule and the hor­rors inflict­ed by the Nazis. Yet beneath that, there’s some­thing with­in Czech cul­ture that seems nat­u­ral­ly skep­ti­cal of author­i­ty. Franz Kaf­ka was a native of Prague, after all. And one of the most beloved books in the Czech lan­guage is Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Sol­dier Šve­jk (1923), a fre­quent­ly hilar­i­ous satire on the idio­cy of war.

The works of Czech film­mak­er Gus­tav Machatý weren’t overt­ly polit­i­cal yet they were still very sub­ver­sive. At a time when the bat­tles for uni­ver­sal suf­frage was still a recent mem­o­ry, Machatý had the audac­i­ty to show women as sex­u­al­ly autonomous beings.

Born in Prague in 1901, Machatý went to Hol­ly­wood at a young age and report­ed­ly appren­ticed under D. W. Grif­fith and Erich von Stro­heim. When he returned to his home coun­try, he start­ed mak­ing movies.

Machatý’s third fea­ture and final silent movie was Erotikon (1929), a sto­ry about a coun­try girl seduced by an upper-class cad only to get preg­nant and ostra­cized by her vil­lage. The film recalls F.W. Mur­nau in his empha­sis on faces and his expres­sion­is­tic use of the cam­era. This is per­haps most clear­ly seen in the scene above where the girl sur­ren­ders to her slick para­mour and dis­cov­ers sex­u­al bliss. The cam­era spins around as she writhes on the bed. Show­ing female sex­u­al­i­ty frankly was dar­ing at that time. Women in movies by D. W. Grif­fith and Char­lie Chap­lin were chaste and pure. They received male appetites, per­haps, but were not sub­ject to ani­mal­is­tic urges them­selves.

Four years lat­er, Machatý went even fur­ther with his movie Ekstase (1933). Ear­ly in the movie, we see the lumi­nous­ly beau­ti­ful Hedy Lamarr skin­ny-dip­ping in a pond. When her horse runs off with her clothes, she run naked over hill and dale to catch it. A bit lat­er in the movie, in a scene that recalls Erotikon, she has an earth-shat­ter­ing orgasm thanks to the strap­ping young work­er who finds her horse. Ekstase might not be the first non-porno­graph­ic film to have nude scenes but it was cer­tain­ly one of the first. And it was def­i­nite­ly the first film to clear­ly show a female orgasm.

The movie was an inter­na­tion­al sen­sa­tion. It received raves at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val only to be denied a prize because the Vat­i­can object­ed. Worse, it couldn’t get a prop­er release in the US. First Ekstase was seized by U.S. Cus­toms as pornog­ra­phy. Then, when it final­ly cleared that hur­dle, the movie ran afoul of Hollywood’s self-cen­sor­ing Hays Code. Ekstase only man­aged to screen in a hand­ful of inde­pen­dent the­aters in 1940, sev­en years after it first came out.

Nonethe­less, the noto­ri­ety of the movie turned Hedy Lamarr into a star and soon she was star­ring oppo­site Hol­ly­wood icons like Jim­my Stew­art and Clark Gable. (And just in case you thought that Lamarr was just a pret­ty face, she also co-invent­ed and patent­ed tech­nol­o­gy dur­ing WWII that laid the ground­work for things like Wi-Fi.)

Machatý had less suc­cess. As the threat of Nazism loomed, he fled back to Hol­ly­wood and end­ed up being an uncred­it­ed direc­tor for such stu­dio films as The Good Earth and Madame X. He spent the last part of his life teach­ing film at the Munich Film School before dying in 1963.

You can watch the entire­ty of Erotikon below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fritz Lang’s M: Watch the Restored Ver­sion of the Clas­sic 1931 Film

Kafka’s Famous Char­ac­ter Gre­gor Sam­sa Meets Dr. Seuss in a Great Radio Play

Broke­back Before Broke­back: The First Same-Sex Kiss in Cin­e­ma (1927)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

It may sound redun­dant, but to many peo­ple a Hitch­cock film would not be a Hitch­cock film with­out Hitch­cock. By this I mean not only Hitchcock’s mas­ter­ful com­mand of light and shad­ow, cam­era move­ment, and edit­ing, but also the brief, wit­ty appear­ances of the man him­self, in front of the cam­era.

Of course we have the droll intro of the great direc­tor’s own TV show, with his sil­hou­ette slid­ing into a car­toon of his jow­ly pro­file. We also have the chance to spot him near­ly every­where else in his body of work since he appears—as a bystander or as some form of com­ic relief—in 37 of his films: from 1927’s The Lodger to 1976’s Fam­i­ly Plot. In this last cameo, as you can see below, he appears again in sil­hou­ette.

At the top of the post, you can watch a super­cut of all 37 of these cameos. And see a com­plete list, with descrip­tions, at Wikipedia. AMC’s Tim Dirks tells us of “two recur­ring themes” in Hitchcock’s film appear­ances: “(1) Hitch­cock often car­ried a musi­cal instru­ment, and (2) Hitch­cock often used pub­lic trans­porta­tion (bus­es, trains, etc.), and was seen as a casu­al pass­er-by in the crowd in the pub­lic place (train sta­tions, at an air­port, etc.). Most of the cameos appeared ear­ly in the film, and often there was a bit of mild humor in the appear­ance.” Though they may seem nar­cis­sis­tic, Hitch­cock promised the cameos were for the sake of his fans, who cer­tain­ly appre­ci­at­ed the recur­ring trade­mark. “I always give a lit­tle thought to my appear­ances,” said the direc­tor in a 1966 inter­view, “and come on as ear­ly as possible—don’t want to hold them in sus­pense!”

The Hitch­cock cameos began by acci­dent, writes Mys­teryNet, when, “short an actor in one of his first films, Hitch­cock took it upon him­self to play the small part.” In this movie, The Lodger (watch it online), Hitch­cock actu­al­ly appears twice—as a news­room clerk and again lat­er in a crowd. He would make two appear­ances in three more films: Sus­pi­cion, Rope, and Under Capri­corn. Most of his cameos are very brief, some shot at a dis­tance, and oth­ers with his back to the cam­era. To spot Hitch­cock in your favorite of his films [you can watch 23 for free in our col­lec­tion of Free Hitch­cock films], see AMC’s com­plete list, which fea­tures thumb­nails and approx­i­ma­tions of how many min­utes into the film he appears. Also don’t miss The Tele­graph’s com­pre­hen­sive gallery of stills of Hitchcock’s cameos, like that of his Rear Win­dow appear­ance above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

23 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online 

1000 Frames of Hitch­cock: See Each of Alfred Hitchcock’s 52 Films Reduced to 1,000 Artis­tic Frames

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho (1960)

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

I’m not sure if it’s still the case today, in fact, I’m almost sure it isn’t, but in my day the ethos of an entire gen­er­a­tion could be tidi­ly summed up by ref­er­ence to a hand­ful of movies. Or at least that’s what we were led to believe, those of us who came of age in the ear­ly-to-mid 90s, when films like Richard Linklater’s Slack­er (watch free online), Ben Stiller’s Real­i­ty Bites, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks achieved almost instant cult sta­tus as totems of mid­dle class ennui—that of overe­d­u­cat­ed nar­cis­sists and direc­tion­less dream­ers and cyn­ics with ser­i­al roman­tic dis­as­ters and a gnaw­ing sense of the dwin­dling returns on their heavy invest­ment in cul­tur­al cap­i­tal.

Of this ad hoc tril­o­gy of 90s slack­er­dom, it’s Smith’s 1994 low-bud­get, black and white paean to the lives of low-wage con­ve­nience and video store clerks, their clue­less cus­tomers, and a com­ic duo of stoned hang­ers-on that per­haps holds up best, and this is because the film’s comedy—ranging from gal­lows humor to gross-out slap­stick to obser­va­tion­al geekery—seems most ground­ed in the every­day expe­ri­ences of real, absurd­ly bored, work­ing stiffs every­where. So it’s for the best that Smith decid­ed not to fin­ish the film with the orig­i­nal end­ing he shot, which you can see above. In it, the movie’s main char­ac­ter, Quick Stop clerk Dante Hicks, is killed in a rob­bery. The last image we see in this version’s har­row­ing dénoue­ment is of his corpse, awk­ward­ly wedged behind the Quick Stop counter.

It’s an end­ing that makes lit­tle sense tonal­ly. Despite the movie’s detours into the macabre, it nev­er gets seri­ous enough to jus­ti­fy this kind of heav­i­ness. As Men­tal Floss puts it, “the alter­nate end­ing to Kevin Smith’s break­through film turned a light­heart­ed vul­gar com­e­dy [see above] into a dark tragedy of Ing­mar Bergman-ish pro­por­tions.” Actor Bri­an O’Halloran, who played Dante, thought as much. “I hat­ed that end­ing,” Rolling Stone quotes him as say­ing, “I just thought it was too quick of a twist.” I guess it’s a good thing for Smith (and O’Hal­lo­ran) that he final­ly agreed, since with­out the Clerks universe’s main char­ac­ter, there may have been no Clerks 2, for what it’s worth, though Jay and Silent Bob would cer­tain­ly have gone on to their post-Clerks revenge.

Smith’s choice to keep it light also speaks to the spir­it of the time—or the spir­it of these filmed rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the time, which are ulti­mate­ly about a lack of res­o­lu­tion, a meta-lack of res­o­lu­tion, that becomes its own brand of tragi­com­e­dy. Clerks is loose­ly mod­eled on Dante’s vision of pur­ga­to­ry, but feels more like Samuel Beck­ett trans­posed to sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey. The char­ac­ters in Smith’s films for­ev­er live their lives in what post-hard­core band Fugazi so anthem­i­cal­ly called the “wait­ing room”—the kind of place where, in the midst of a per­son­al cri­sis, the most log­i­cal thing to do is debate the ethics of killing off inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors on Return of the Jedi’s Death Star.

The Clerks alter­nate end­ing appears on the 10th anniver­sary DVD of the film. You’ll prob­a­bly agree the movie works much bet­ter with­out this fatal­ly abrupt turn, but watch­ing it gives us a glimpse of a world where death—always hov­er­ing on the edges of slackerdom—intrudes to break the spell of ter­mi­nal inac­tion and emo­tion­al paral­y­sis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Kevin Smith’s Clever First Film, Mae Day: The Crum­bling of a Doc­u­men­tary (1992)

The Always-NSFW Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes Catch Up in Jay and Silent Bob Get Old Pod­cast

Hear Kevin Smith’s Three Tips For Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers (NSFW)

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

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