Watch the Opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Original, Unused Score

in Film, Music, Sci Fi | December 22nd, 2014

How does a movie become a “clas­sic”? Expla­na­tions, nev­er less than utter­ly sub­jec­tive, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would sub­mit that clas­sic-film sta­tus, as tra­di­tion­al­ly under­stood, requires that all ele­ments of the pro­duc­tion work in at least near-per­fect har­mo­ny: the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the cast­ing, the edit­ing, the design, the set­ting, the score. Out­side first-year film stud­ies sem­i­nars and delib­er­ate­ly con­trar­i­an cul­ture columns, the label of clas­sic, once attained, goes prac­ti­cal­ly undis­put­ed. Even those who active­ly dis­like Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, would sure­ly agree that its every last audio­vi­su­al nuance serves its dis­tinc­tive, bold vision — espe­cial­ly that open­ing use of “Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.”

But Kubrick did­n’t always intend to use that piece, nor the oth­er orches­tral works we’ve come to close­ly asso­ciate with mankind’s ven­tures into realms beyond Earth and strug­gles with intel­li­gence of its own inven­tion. Accord­ing to Jason Kot­tke, Kubrick had com­mis­sioned an orig­i­nal score from A Street­car Named Desire, Spar­ta­cus, Cleopa­tra, and Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf com­pos­er Alex North.

At the top of the post, you can see 2001’s open­ing with North’s music, and below you can hear 38 min­utes of his score on Spo­ti­fy. As to the ques­tion of why Kubrick stuck instead with the tem­po­rary score of Strauss, Ligeti, and Khatch­a­turi­an he’d used in edit­ing, Kot­tke quotes from Michel Cimen­t’s inter­view with the film­mak­er:

How­ev­er good our best film com­posers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a mul­ti­tude of great orches­tral music avail­able from the past and from our own time? [ … ]  Although [North] and I went over the pic­ture very care­ful­ly, and he lis­tened to these tem­po­rary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musi­cal objec­tives of each sequence he, nev­er­the­less, wrote and record­ed a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had lis­tened to, and much more seri­ous than that, a score which, in my opin­ion, was com­plete­ly inad­e­quate for the film.

North did­n’t find out about Kubrick­’s choice until 2001’s New York City pre­miere. Not an envi­able sit­u­a­tion, cer­tain­ly, but not the worst thing that ever hap­pened to a col­lab­o­ra­tor who failed to rise to the direc­tor’s expec­ta­tions.

For more Kubrick and clas­si­cal music, see our recent post: The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

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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Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Gets a Brand New Trail­er to Cel­e­brate Its Dig­i­tal Re-Release

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Ayn Rand’s Reviews of Children’s Movies: From Bambi to Frozen

in Comedy, Film | December 20th, 2014

white rand

Warm and fuzzy, she was­n’t. But that’s part­ly why it’s fun to imag­ine the acer­bic Ayn Rand tak­ing a crack at review­ing chil­dren’s movies. And that’s why it’s fun to read Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg’s par­o­dy in The New York­er, which fea­tures 17 Ran­di­an reviews of clas­sic kids films, begin­ning with Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarfs:

An indus­tri­ous young woman neglects to charge for her house­keep­ing ser­vices and is right­ly exploit­ed for her naïveté. She dies with­out ever hav­ing sought her own hap­pi­ness as the high­est moral aim. I did not fin­ish watch­ing this movie, find­ing it impos­si­ble to sym­pa­thize with the main char­ac­ter. —No stars.

Get the remain­ing movie reviews — and a few more laughs — right here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

Ayn Rand Adamant­ly Defends Her Athe­ism on The Phil Don­ahue Show (Cir­ca 1979)

Ayn Rand Trash­es C.S. Lewis in Her Mar­gin­a­lia: He’s an “Abysmal Bas­tard”

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F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trailer That Was Never Released in America

in Film | December 19th, 2014

Ask Orson Welles enthu­si­asts to name the film­mak­er’s mas­ter­piece, and most will, of course, name Cit­i­zen Kane. While Welles’ very first fea­ture film may lay cred­i­ble claim to the title of not just the finest in his oeu­vre but the finest film ever made, a grow­ing minor­i­ty of dis­senters have, in recent years, plumped for his last: 1974’s F for Fake. Too truth­ful to call a fic­tion film and too filled with lies to call a doc­u­men­tary, it brings togeth­er such seem­ing­ly dis­parate themes as author­ship, authen­tic­i­ty, art forgery, archi­tec­ture, and girl-watch­ing into what Welles him­self thought of as “a new kind of film,” but which cinephiles might now con­sid­er an “essay film,” a form exem­pli­fied by the works of, to name a well-known pro­po­nent, La jetee and Sans soleil direc­tor Chris Mark­er.

Alas, Welles revealed F for Fake in 1974 to an unready world: audi­ences did­n’t quite under­stand it, and what dis­trib­u­tors showed inter­est in buy­ing it did­n’t quite offer enough mon­ey. The fea­ture final­ly came out in Amer­i­ca in 1976, and for the occa­sion Welles put togeth­er the nine-minute “trail­er,” nev­er actu­al­ly screened in a the­ater, at the top of the post, a short essay film in and of itself pos­sessed of a sim­i­lar style to but con­sist­ing of no footage from the full-length F for Fake. As with the pic­ture to which it osten­si­bly offers a pre­view, Welles made it in col­lab­o­ra­tion with B‑movie cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Gary Graver and his girl­friend Oja Kodar — the one you see pos­ing with the tiger — hop­ing to tan­ta­lize with a sug­ges­tion of the dance of truth and fal­si­ty the film does around such sto­ried fig­ures as Pablo Picas­so, Howard Hugh­es, and infa­mous art forg­er Elmyr de Hory.

In the clip after that, you can hear film­mak­er (and some­thing of a Boswell for Welles) Peter Bog­danovich briefly dis­cuss the ori­gin of F for Fake as well as the film’s sheer unusu­al­ness. “My favorite moment is when he talks about Chartres, this extra­or­di­nary cathe­dral of Chartres which nobody knows who designed, how its author­ship is anony­mous and he con­nects that to the whole idea of author­ship and fak­ery.” That sequence from the full movie appears just above; just below, have anoth­er taste in the form of one of its pas­sages on Picas­so, fea­tur­ing Kojar as the artist’s osten­si­ble for­mer mis­tress. Seem strange? Take Bog­danovich’s words to heart: “If you get on the film’s wave­length and lis­ten to what he’s say­ing and what what he’s doing, it’s riv­et­ing. It takes you along through the rhythm of the cut­ting, and of Orson­’s per­son­al­i­ty. If you fight it, and you expect it to be a lin­ear kind of thing, then you’re not going to enjoy it.”

You can find more short films by Orson Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Dis­cov­er the Lost Films of Orson Welles

Orson Welles Tells Some Damn Good Sto­ries in the Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (1955)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

in Creativity, Film, Literature | December 19th, 2014

As we’ve not­ed before, the Eng­lish cof­fee­house has served as a stag­ing ground for rad­i­cal, some­times rev­o­lu­tion­ary social change. Cer­tain­ly this was the case dur­ing the Enlight­en­ment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry it seems, cof­fee shops in Lon­don had grown scarcer and more hum­drum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Ital­ian espres­so bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momen­tous event”:

London’s first prop­er cof­fee shop—one equipped with a Gag­gia cof­fee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gath­er, and it is said by some that the intro­duc­tion of this cof­fee bar prompt­ed the youth cul­ture explo­sion that soon changed social life in Britain for­ev­er.

“By 1972,” Watts writes, “cof­fee bars were every­where and the teenage rev­o­lu­tion was firm­ly estab­lished.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ide­al place for coun­ter­cul­tur­al maven William S. Bur­roughs—a Lon­don res­i­dent from the late six­ties to ear­ly seventies—to hob­nob with young dis­si­dents and out­siders. Bur­roughs, who so approv­ing­ly refers the pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal anar­chist pirate colony of Lib­er­ta­tia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appre­ci­ate the bud­ding anar­chism of British youth cul­ture, which would flower into punk soon enough.

Moka-Bar-Frith-Street

But rather than join­ing the cof­fee bar scene, the can­tan­ker­ous Bur­roughs had tak­en to fre­quent­ing “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to men­tion the ‘Dil­ly Boys,’ young male pros­ti­tutes who hus­tled for clients out­side the Regent Palace Hotel.”

And he had grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned with Lon­don, fum­ing, writes Ted Mor­gan in Bur­roughs biog­ra­phy Lit­er­ary Out­law, “at what he was pay­ing for his hole-in-the-wall apart­ment with a clos­et for a kitchen” and at the ris­ing price of util­i­ties. “Bur­roughs,” Mor­gan tells us, “began to feel that he was in ene­my ter­ri­to­ry.” And he thought the Moka cof­fee bar should pay the price for his indig­ni­ties.

There, “on sev­er­al occa­sions a snarling coun­ter­man had treat­ed him with out­ra­geous and unpro­voked dis­cour­tesy, and served him poi­so­nous cheese­cake that made him sick.” Bur­roughs “decid­ed to retal­i­ate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d ear­li­er employed against the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy, “turn­ing up… every day,” writes Watts, “tak­ing pho­tographs and mak­ing sound record­ings.” Then he would play them back a day or so lat­er on the street out­side the Moka. “The idea,” writes Mor­gan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had tak­en place two days ago and you super­im­posed it on what was hap­pen­ing now, which pulled them out of their time posi­tion.”

Bur­roughs also con­nect­ed the method to the Water­gate record­ings, the Gar­den of Eden, and the the­o­ries of Alfred Korzyb­s­ki. The trig­ger for the mag­i­cal oper­a­tion was, in his words, “play­back.” In a very strange essay called “Feed­back from Water­gate to the Gar­den of Eden,” from his col­lec­tion Elec­tron­ic Rev­o­lu­tion, Bur­roughs described his oper­a­tion in detail, a dis­rup­tion, he wrote, of a “con­trol sys­tem.”

Now to apply the 3 tape recorder anal­o­gy to this sim­ple oper­a­tion. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is pris­tine con­di­tion. Tape recorder 2 is my record­ings of the Moka Bar vicin­i­ty. These record­ings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Gar­den of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a record­ing made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The record­ing once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their con­trol. Tape recorder 3 is play­back. Adam expe­ri­ences shame when his dis­crace­ful behav­ior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By play­ing back my record­ings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the record­ings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They can­not effect me.

The the­o­ry made per­fect sense to Bur­roughs, who believed in a Mag­i­cal Uni­verse ruled by occult forces and who exper­i­ment­ed heav­i­ly with Sci­en­tol­ogy, Crow­ley-an Mag­ick, and the orgone ener­gy of Wil­helm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Bur­roughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On Octo­ber 30th, 1972  the estab­lish­ment closed its doors—perhaps a con­se­quence of those ris­ing rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the loca­tion became the Queens Snack Bar.

The audio-visu­al cut-up tech­nique Bur­roughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Bur­roughs and Brion Gysin from their exper­i­ments with writ­ten “cut-ups,” and Bur­roughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an inter­pre­tive “med­i­ta­tion” based on Bur­roughs’ use of audio/visual “mag­i­cal weapons” and incor­po­rat­ing his record­ings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Bur­roughs him­self made in 1966 with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Antony Balch, a dis­ori­ent­ing illus­tra­tion of the cut up tech­nique.

Not lim­it­ed to attack­ing annoy­ing Lon­don cof­fee­house own­ers, Bur­roughs’ sup­pos­ed­ly mag­i­cal inter­ven­tions in real­i­ty were in fact the fullest expres­sion of his cre­ativ­i­ty. As Ted Mor­gan writes, “the sin­gle most impor­tant thing about Bur­roughs was his belief in the mag­i­cal uni­verse. The same impulse that lead him to put out curs­es was, as he saw it, the source of his writ­ing.” Read much more about Bur­roughs’ the­o­ry and prac­tice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Mag­i­cal Uni­verse of William S. Bur­roughs,” and hear the author him­self dis­course on the para­nor­mal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lec­ture below from a writ­ing class he gave in June, 1986.

via The Great Wen

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When William S. Bur­roughs Joined Sci­en­tol­ogy (and His 1971 Book Denounc­ing It)

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

William S. Bur­roughs’ Short Class on Cre­ative Read­ing

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

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Watch Adam Savage Build Barbarella’s Space Rifle in One Day

in Design, Film | December 18th, 2014

In a new video by Test­ed, Adam Sav­age (mod­el mak­er, indus­tri­al design­er and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty) shows you how to build a repli­ca of the space rifle from the 1968 sci-fi film Bar­barel­la. To design the repli­ca, Sav­age had only one doc­u­ment to work with — a pho­to­graph show­ing Jane Fon­da hold­ing the gun, which orig­i­nal­ly appeared on the cov­er of a 1968 issue of LIFE Mag­a­zine. The 77-minute video above takes you inside Sav­age’s build process, mov­ing from start to fin­ish. If DIY is your thing, you won’t want to miss it.

via Digg

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

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David Lynch’s Music Videos: Nine Inch Nails, Moby, Chris Isaak & More

in Film, Music | December 16th, 2014

David Lynch gets sound like few oth­er direc­tors. There’s an unfor­get­table scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me where Lau­ra Palmer leads her best friend Don­na Hay­ward into what looks like a den of iniq­ui­ty for lum­ber­jacks. It’s filled with burly men and cheap women grind­ing to music blar­ing from the speak­ers. Lynch lets the music roll right over top the dia­logue. It was a shock­ing choice back in 1992 but it was the right one. The ban­ter was inten­tion­al­ly banal and obscure. The grotesque faces, the omi­nous crim­son light­ing and, most of all, that utter­ly hyp­not­ic music are all you need to tell the sto­ry, cre­at­ing a mood of dread and deca­dence. The scene is a stun­ning fusion of image, sound and edit­ing in an oth­er­wise flawed work.

Since that movie, Lynch became more and more inter­est­ed in the pos­si­bil­i­ties of sound design. He even­tu­al­ly ditched film alto­geth­er for a career in music. So per­haps it shouldn’t come as a sur­prise that, along with cre­at­ing at least three cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­pieces, one of the most influ­en­tial TV series ever made, and a string of tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials, Lynch has also made a hand­ful of music videos. You can watch them above and below.

Lynch’s first music video was for “I Pre­dict” by the band The Sparks. It was made back in 1982 when MTV was still in its infan­cy and Lynch’s career was just tak­ing off. Per­haps for that rea­son, the video has lit­tle of the styl­is­tic obses­sions that mark his lat­er work. No weird flash­ing lights. No smoke or fire. No hol­low-eyed mod­els. Instead Lynch goes for a more direct, if sil­ly, form of sur­re­al­ism – a guy (band mem­ber Ron Mael) with a Hitler mus­tache in drag doing a striptease. Does it feel Lynchi­an? No, not real­ly. But it’s still kind of dis­tress­ing.

There are two videos for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games.” One, which was on heavy rota­tion on MTV, was shot by Herb Ritts and fea­tured Isaak and super­mod­el Hele­na Chris­tensen rolling around half-naked in the Hawai­ian surf. And then there is Lynch’s video made as a tie-in to his strange, Wiz­ard of Oz obsessed noir Wild at Heart, which has much less nudi­ty – which is odd con­sid­er­ing the movie is pret­ty much non-stop boink­ing. Instead, the video is pret­ty straight­for­ward – just Isaaks and the band play­ing the tune inter­cut with shots from the flick.

After Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, Lynch turned his back on cel­lu­loid film, pre­fer­ring the end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal. His enthu­si­asm for this new tech­nol­o­gy result­ed in a flur­ry of projects includ­ing Dum­b­land, a crude­ly ani­mat­ed series pre­sent­ed in stark black and white. The video of Moby’s “Shot in the Back of the Head” is a mood­i­er ani­mat­ed work but it is def­i­nite­ly in the same vein. Check it out above.

Lynch’s video for Nine Inch Nail’s “Came Back Haunt­ed” can quite lit­er­al­ly mess with your head. The piece is packed with flash­ing red and white lights and as a result comes with the fol­low­ing warn­ing: “This video has been iden­ti­fied by Epilep­sy Action to poten­tial­ly trig­ger seizures for peo­ple with pho­to­sen­si­tive epilep­sy. View­er dis­cre­tion is advised.” You have been warned.

And final­ly here’s a music video for Lynch’s own song called appro­pri­ate­ly “Crazy Clown Time.” Not only is the video a cat­a­logue Lynch’s obses­sions – Amer­i­cana, naked women, fire – but it also fea­tures Lynch singing, who, after a bunch of effects, sounds like a cas­trat­ed Kee­bler Elf.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch’s Unlike­ly Com­mer­cial for a Home Preg­nan­cy Test (1997)

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Sur­re­al­ist Video

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

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.

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Moviedrome: Filmmaker Alex Cox Provides Video Introductions to 100+ Classic Cult Films

in Film | December 16th, 2014

If you hap­pened to pass the 1990s in Britain as a cer­tain sort of alter­na­tive and/or obscu­ran­tist cinephile, you know BBC2’s Moviedrome, which, albeit belong­ing to the proud old tra­di­tion of the tele­vi­sion movie show, showed pri­mar­i­ly cult films. But what makes for a cult film, any­way? A cult film “has a pas­sion­ate fol­low­ing, but does not appeal to every­one.” Yet cult film sta­tus “does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly guar­an­tee qual­i­ty,” nor does the box office mon­ey a pic­ture either made or failed to make. But we can cat­e­go­rize all cult films under cer­tain gen­res, and often more than one, giv­en their “ten­den­cy to slosh over from one genre into anoth­er, so that a sci­ence fic­tion film might also be a detec­tive movie, or vice ver­sa,” all shar­ing the com­mon themes of “love, mur­der and greed.”

Those words come straight from Repo Man, Walk­er, and Sid & Nan­cy direc­tor Alex Cox, a cult film­mak­er of no small renown. He also host­ed Moviedrome, pro­vid­ing much more than the stan­dard movie-show fram­ing of and intro­duc­tion to the night’s fea­ture. At the top of the post, we have his open­ing seg­ment for Edward G. Ulmer’s cheap but aston­ish­ing­ly endur­ing 1945 film noir Detour, which you can chase with the film itself just above. You may also remem­ber Car­ni­val of Souls, which we fea­tured in full as one of Time Out Lon­don’s 1oo best hor­ror films — well, Cox ably gave a Moviedrome primer on that one as well, describ­ing it as one of the most influ­en­tial cult movies of its kind ever made.

But Cox talked about a lot more than film­mak­ers some might describe as schlocky and exploita­tive; he also talked about the likes of Alfred Hitch­cock, who took schlock and exploita­tion to its high­est point of cin­e­mat­ic artistry. Last year, we fea­tured an exam­i­na­tion of Hitch­cock­’s sleight-of-hand in the mak­ing of Rope, the sus­pense mas­ter’s sup­pos­ed­ly cut-free tale of killing and decep­tion. Just above, in Cox’s intro for the film, you can hear more about why this film made the cut, as it were, into Moviedrome’s league of “cult and weirdo type movies.” You can learn about many more such dis­rep­utable-yet-rep­utable pic­tures through Cox’s many seg­ments post­ed to Youtube, as well as in the full text of his Moviedrome Guide avail­able on his “free stuff” page. The Moviedrome faith­ful might also con­sid­er hav­ing a look at this gallery of films from the show’s Alex Cox years, and the exegetic Tum­blr blog Moviedromer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Detour: The Cheap, Rushed Piece of 1940s Film Noir Nobody Ever For­gets

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

The 10 Hid­den Cuts in Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s Famous “One-Shot” Fea­ture Film

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Alfred Hitchcock Conducts a Politically Incorrect Sound Test on the Set of Blackmail (1929)

in Film | December 16th, 2014

Above we have a young Alfred Hitch­cock on the set of Black­mail (1929), con­duct­ing a rather naughty sound test with actress Anny Ondra (1929).

In case you don’t know the back­sto­ry, Black­mail was orig­i­nal­ly meant to be a silent film. How­ev­er, with talkies becom­ing the rage, Hitch­cock decid­ed mid-stream to make the film a talkie. That deci­sion did­n’t come with­out its own prob­lems. Anny Ondra, a Czech actress, spoke Eng­lish with a heavy accent and could­n’t pass as a Lon­don­er in the film. So Hitch­cock per­formed some cin­e­ma mag­ic and had Eng­lish actress Joan Bar­ry dub Ondra’s lines. In those days, dub­bing could­n’t take place in post-pro­duc­tion. It all had to hap­pen in real-time. Thus, as the cam­era rolled, Bar­ry stood out­side the frame and spoke the dia­logue into a micro­phone, while Ondra pan­tomimed the words. Through­out, Hitch­cock direct­ed Ondra while lis­ten­ing to Bar­ry through a pair of head­phones.

hitch with hair

You can watch Black­mail (Britain’s first talkie fea­ture film) online here or find it in our col­lec­tion of 23 Free Hitch­cock Films Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

37 Hitch­cock Cameo Appear­ances Over 50 Years: All in One Video

Lis­ten to François Truffaut’s Big, 12-Hour Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (1962)

The Plea­sure Gar­den, Alfred Hitchcock’s Very First Fea­ture Film (1925)

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