Portraits taken by Sacha Goldberger at Super Flemish
Superheroes, as you may have noticed, are serious moneymakers these days. It started when Tim Burton rescued Batman from Adam West’s campy clutches, pouring him into a butch black rubber suit that is of a piece with a leaner, meaner Batmobile. Previously unthinkable digital special effects quickly replaced all trace of Biff! Pow!! Whammo!!! Franchise opportunities abounded as the entire Justice League went on the block.
Having looked at it from both sides now, I can only conclude that something’s lost…
…but something’s gained in the portraits of Sacha Goldberger, a photographer who harnesses the power of 17th century Flemish school portraiture to restore, nay, reveal these icons’ humanity.
The softer fabrics and Vermeer-worthy lighting of his Super Flemish project give his powerful subjects room to breathe and reflect.
Same goes for us, the viewers.
It’s much easier to dwell on the existential nature of these mythic beings when the White House isn’t exploding in the background. There are times when tights need the ballast that only a pair of pumpkin pants can provide.
Goldberger — whose previous forays into both superheroes and Flemish portraiture feature his ever-game granny — helps things along by casting models who closely resemble their cinematic counterparts. But it’s not just the bone structure. All of his sitters display a knack for looking thoughtful in a ruff. In the artist’s vision, they are “tired of having to save the world without respite, promised to a destiny of endless immortality, forever trapped in their character.”
There are few filmmakers alive today who have the mystique of Werner Herzog. His feature films and his documentaries are brilliant and messy, depicting both the ecstasies and the agonies of life in a chaotic and fundamentally hostile universe. And his movies seem very much to reflect his personality – uncompromising, enigmatic and quite possibly crazy. How else can you explain his willingness to risk life and limb to shoot in such forbidding places as the Amazonian rain forest or Antarctica?
In perhaps his greatest film, Fitzcarraldo — which is about a dreamer who hatches a scheme to drag a riverboat over a mountain — Herzog decides, for the purposes of realism, to actually drag a boat over a mountain. No special effects. No studios. In the middle of the Peruvian jungle.
The production, perhaps the most miserable in the history of film, is the subject of the documentary The Burden of Dreams. After six punishing months, a weary-looking Herzog described his surroundings:
I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just — Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and… growing and… just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they — they sing. They just screech in pain. […] But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.
His worldview brims with a heroic pessimism that is pulled straight out of the German Romantic poets. Nature is not some harmonious anthropomorphized playground. It is instead nothing but “chaos, hostility and murder.” For those sick of the cynical dishonesty of Hollywood’s current crop of Award-ready fare (hello, The Imitation Game), Herzog comes as a bracing tonic. An icon of what independent cinema should be rather than what it has largely become.
Below is Herzog’s list of advice for filmmakers, found on the back of his latest book Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. (Hat tip goes to Jason Kottke for bringing it to our attention.) Some maxims are pretty specific to the world of moviemaking – “That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.” Other points are just plain good lessons for life — “Always take the initiative,” “Learn to live with your mistakes.” Read along and you can almost hear Herzog’s malevolent Teutonic lilt.
1. Always take the initiative.
2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.
3. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
4. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
5. Learn to live with your mistakes.
6. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern.
7. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.
8. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
9. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.
10. Thwart institutional cowardice.
11. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
12. Take your fate into your own hands.
13. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.
14. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory.
15. Walk straight ahead, never detour.
16. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver.
17. Don’t be fearful of rejection.
18. Develop your own voice.
19. Day one is the point of no return.
20. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.
21. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
22. Guerrilla tactics are best.
23. Take revenge if need be.
24. Get used to the bear behind you.
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 lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
If you call yourself a film fan, you may have heard of Trailers from Hell, a video series wherein famous directors introduce and provide commentary on trailers of the films they love, the films they’ve made, or both. You’ve definitely heard of it if you call yourself a fan of schlock film, since some of the Trailers from Hell include that of The Giant Claw with commentary by Joe Dante, that of Teen Wolfwith commentary by Ti West, and that of One Million Years B.C. with commentary by John Landis.
Landis, director of comedies like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and (somehow, his favorite of the bunch) Coming to America, has recorded a great many episodes, and no surprise, since he enjoys schlock so much that he actually made a film of that name at the age of 21 — and then did a Trailer from Hell on it at the age of 63. But as one of those filmmakers possessed of a cinephilia as strong as his mastery of the craft itself, his love for movies extends to the widest possible spectrum of theme and sensibility: hence his episodes here on the decidedly non-schlocky Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and La Strada.
Much about Landis makes him exactly the kind of guy you want to hear talking about movies, be they movies like Fellini Satyriconor movies like King Kong vs. Godzilla. Not only does his sheer enthusiasm for filmgoing come through in his every observation, but he brings to bear plenty of experience with the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. He discusses, in the brief time these trailers allow, not just the qualities of the features but of the trailers themselves. He also throws in, when relevant, fascinating anecdotes from his life as a moviegoer and moviemaker. And above it all, he does it with a wonkily cinephilic sense of humor, as you’ll understand right when you hear him introduce himself in each episode — and as you’d probably expect from the guy who directed Kentucky Fried Movie.
You can watch all the Trailers from Hell from Landis, Dante, West, Karyn Kusama, Mick Garris, John Badham, and others on their Youtube channel.
Film fans have few stronger vices, I would submit, than the making of lists. But we can take some small measure of consolation from the fact that certain auteurs have occasionally done it too. Yes they make their own lists of favorite films. Quentin Tarantino has done it. So have Stanley Kubrick andWoody Allen. Same withAndrei Tarkovsky, Susan Sontag and Akira Kurosawa. And then there’s one of the most interesting lists — that of Federico Fellini, which originally appeared in Sight and Sound. It runs as follows:
Never a slave to restraint, Fellini bends the tacit rules of list-making in a few different ways here. He includes not one but three films, all by Charlie Chaplin, in the top spot, ranks the complete comedic works of both the Marx Brothers (whose 1928 The Circus you can watch above) and Laurel and Hardy in third place, and, in the most audacious act of all, adds a movie of his own to the list. Maybe the fact that he puts it at number ten scores him a humility point?
Then again, the director of La Dolce Vita, Satyricon, and Juliet of the Spirits could have found his distinctively grotesque and celebratory worldview realized nowhere but in his own work. And upon reflection, putting 8 1/2 in last place looks overmodest. “I have seen 8 1/2 over and over again, and my appreciation only deepens,” wrote Roger Ebert in a piece on the film. “It does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn’t know what he wants or how to achieve it, and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.” And he knew he was damn good.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
In 2013, Steven Soderbergh told me during an interview that he was retiring. “Five years ago, as we were finishing Che, I said, ‘OK, when I turn 50, I want to be done. I’m going to jam in as much as I can, but when I turn 50, I want to be done.’ ”
Yet Soderbergh’s concept of retirement must be different from most mortals. In the past year, he not only executive produced the Showtime series The Knick but he also directed all ten episodes. Using the handle @Bitchuation, he wrote an entire novel on Twitter called Glue. And he produced and directed a Broadway show starring Chloë Grace Moretz called The Library. And in his copious free time, he’s been producing various cinematic experiments on his website Extension 765, which included a piece that spliced together Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Gus Van Sant’s bizarro shot-by-shot remake, a black and white version of Raiders of the Lost Ark and an edit of Michael Cimino’s famously bloated Heaven’s Gates.
In his latest work, Soderbergh takes a crack at Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can watch it here. As he writes on his site:
i’ve been watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY regularly for four decades, but it wasn’t until a few years ago i started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays i decided to make my move. why now? I don’t know. maybe i wasn’t old enough to touch it until now. maybe i was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my—or anyone else’s—help, but if it’s not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it’s tied for first. meaning IF i was finally going to touch it, i’d better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring.
What that bigger idea is, however, isn’t immediately clear. Soderbergh’s version is a good 50 minutes shorter than the original. Unlike the original, which unfolds in a deliberate pace, Soderbergh’s version moves briskly. Most of the cuts aren’t immediately missed.
But there is one clear, and jarring difference between the two – he drops HAL’s unblinking electronic red eye into unexpected scenes. It pops up right in the beginning, then again when the tribe of early humans first encounter the monolith, and then again during the film’s trippy light show deep at the end. Whereas Kubrick used the HAL’s eye as a sinister example of the perils of technology and mankind’s hubris, Soderbergh turns it into something else, something more spiritual. Does it work? I don’t know. But it’s interesting.
Soderbergh goes on to argue that Kubrick, were he alive, would be a big fan of digital video and he makes a pretty compelling case.
i believe SK would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilization. regarding the former, the increased sensitivity without resolution loss allows us to really capture the world as it is, and regarding the latter, post-2001 SK generally shot matte perf film (normally reserved for effects shots, because of its added steadiness) all day, every day, something which digital capture makes moot. pile on things like never being distracted by weaving, splices, dirt, scratches, bad lab matches during changeovers, changeovers themselves, bad framing and focus exacerbated by projector vibration, and you can see why i think he might dig digital.
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 lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
In 1968, years before American Graffiti, Raiders of the Lost Ark and, shudder, the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas was a struggling filmmaker with a couple of experimental films movies under his belt. His short Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB took first prize at the National Student Film Festival, but he had yet to make the plunge into feature films. So he did what many other artists and creative types did in the past – he glommed onto a more successful friend.
The friend in this case was Francis Ford Coppola, who by 1968 had already directed three features and was starting production of his latest movie, The Rain People. Lucas talked his friend into letting him shoot a behind-the-scenes documentary about the production. The resulting doc, Filmmaker –A Diary By George Lucas, is a fascinating document of the early days of New Hollywood and the struggles of getting an independent movie made. You can watch it above.
Shot in a cinéma vérité matter, Lucas captures Coppola at his most charming, creative and passionate – dealing with the studios over the phone, consulting with a baby-faced James Caan on set and struggling to shoot a scene while battling the stomach flu. He was even forced to shave his trademark beard so as not to upset any of the local anti-hippy constabularies. The film shows Coppola making up the film as he went along. At one point, he re-writes a scene to incorporate an actual local parade. Filmmaker makes an interesting contrast with that other Coppola documentary, Hearts of Darkness, made on the set of Apocalypse Now. Here he’s filled with a youthful vigor that in Hearts, deep in the jungles of the Philippines, has transformed into half-mad egomania. Of course, the shoot for Rain People wasn’t anywhere near as epic or disastrous as Apocalypse.
On set, Lucas shot and recorded sound for the doc all by himself and generally made himself as unobtrusive as possible. “George was around in a very quiet way,” recalledRain People producer Ron Colby. “You’d look around and suddenly there’d be George in a corner with his camera. He’d just kind of drift around.”
The movie proved to be valuable for Lucas’s confidence as a filmmaker. He later described making the movie as “more therapy than anything else. “At night, after production had wrapped for the day, Lucas would go off to write the script to his first feature THX-1138.
Filmmaker finally premiered in 1977, the year that Lucas released Star Wars and completely stepped out from the shadow of his friend and mentor Coppola.
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 lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Seeing how the ever-more-distinctive cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson has developed from his feature debut Hard Eight to his new Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, you have to wonder how he learned his craft. Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master: ambitious pictures like these, artistically unusual and heavily referential but also surprisingly popular, make you sense an unschooled filmmaker behind the camera (a path to filmmaking greatness best exemplified by Quentin Tarantino).
But Anderson didn’t get this far entirely without higher education: let the record show that he did spend two semesters at Emerson College — a brief period, but one in which he took an English class from none other than David Foster Wallace. “It was the first teacher I fell in love with,” he told Marc Maron in an interview on Maron’s podcast WTF . “I’d never found anybody else like that at any of the other schools I’d been to.” Anderson even called Wallace, a professor “generous with his phone number,” to discuss “a couple crazy ideas” on a paper he was writing about Don DeLillo’s White Noise at “midnight the night before it was due.”
(At The Paris Review, Dan Piepenbringhas more on the intersection of Anderson’s life and Wallace’s, including the latter’s opinions on the former’s movies: “he was a fan of Boogie Nights, which he told a friend was ‘exactly the story’ he’d wanted to write. He was less jazzed about Magnolia, though, which he found pretentious, hollow, and ‘100% gradschoolish in a bad way.‘”)
Anderson also enrolled at New York University’s film school, but rather than staying only two semesters, he stayed only two days. In the clip up top, from an interview with critic Elvis Mitchell, Anderson recounts the whole of his NYU experience. His first instructor announced, “If anyone is here to write Terminator 2, get out.” And so Anderson thought, “What if I do want to write Terminator 2? Terminator 2’s a pretty awesome movie.” (An assessment, incidentally, from which Wallace’s greatly differs.) When he turned in a page from a David Mamet script for his first assignment and his unsuspecting teacher gave it a C+, Anderson knew he had to leave. Living off of the tuition NYU returned to him, he got to work on a short film of his own.
“My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the Bad Day at Black Rock laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school.” He said that just a few years after leaving NYU, when he hit it big with Boogie Nights — a film whose highly entertaining DVD commentary from Anderson himself provides another few years’ worth of film school at least.
Perhaps rather than trying to identify the source, we should work toward being open to inspiration in whatever guise it presents itself. It’s an approach that certainly seems to be working for Patti Smith and David Lynch, aka the Godmother of Punk and Jimmy Stewart from Mars, both a shockingly youthful 69.
One of the most exciting things about their recent segment for the BBC’s Newsnight “Encounters” series is watching how appreciative these veterans are of each other’s process.
“I want a copy of what you just said,” Smith gasps, after Lynch likens the beginnings of a creative process to being in possession of a single, intriguing puzzle piece, knowing that a completed version exists in the adjacent room.
As artists, they’re committed to peeking beneath the veneer. “What’s more horrifying than normalcy?” Smith asks.
It does seem important to note how both of these longtime practitioners mention jotting their ideas down immediately following the muse’s visit.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
