50 Film Noirs You Can Watch For Free: A Dame with a Past. A Desperate, Doomed Man. A Gun.

in Film | December 10th, 2014

Film noir isn’t real­ly a genre. It’s a mood. Its ele­ments are so well known that they bor­der on self-par­o­dy. Neon lights. Inky black shad­ows. An emp­ty bot­tle of whiskey. A gun. A dame with a past. A des­per­ate, doomed man.

Like Ger­man Expres­sion­ism dur­ing the 1930s, it was a cul­tur­al pro­cess­ing of a his­toric trau­ma. Like French Poet­ic Real­ism dur­ing that same decade, film noir is fixed in a par­tic­u­lar cul­ture dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar time. In this case, the cul­ture was the inher­ent­ly opti­mistic one of the Unit­ed States. The time was just after World War II when the foun­da­tions of that opti­mism were severe­ly test­ed. A gen­er­a­tion of men returned from Europe and the Pacif­ic scarred and dazed by the mind-bog­gling car­nage of the war only to dis­cov­er that their women were doing just fine work­ing in fac­to­ries and offices. Is it any won­der then that per­haps the most fre­quent trope in noir is of a man, seem­ing­ly tough but riv­en with weak­ness, undone by a pow­er­ful, sex­u­al­ly-dom­i­nat­ing femme fatale?

Though those gen­der roles were quick­ly reshuf­fled and women were, for a time, ban­ished back to the realm of domes­tic­i­ty, cracks remained in the brit­tle veneer of Amer­i­can mas­culin­i­ty. Add to that exis­ten­tial anx­i­eties over the bomb and the Red Scare’s cor­ro­sive para­noia and you have a whole tox­ic stew of cul­tur­al fears bur­bling out of the Amer­i­can col­lec­tive uncon­scious. And film noir artic­u­lat­ed those fears bet­ter than just about any­thing else.

Of course, the rea­son film noir has proved to be so endur­ing is because of its look. The spare light­ing, the cant­ed angles, the grotesque shad­ows. It’s Ger­man Expres­sion­ism cast through the lens of Orson Welles. Its stark style meld­ed per­fect­ly with noir’s bleak cyn­i­cism. It should come as no sur­prise that some of the best noir direc­tors – Fritz Lang, Robert Siod­mak and espe­cial­ly Bil­ly Wilder – fled Ger­many for the warmer climes of Hol­ly­wood. The style was also cheap — lots of shad­ows means less mon­ey spent on lights. It was a boon for the scores of inde­pen­dent pro­duc­ers who made noirs on a shoe­string.

If you want get into that film noir mood, Open Cul­ture has 50, count ‘em, 50 film noir movies that you can watch right now for free. They include:

  • Detour Free – Edgar Ulmer’s cult clas­sic noir film shot in 6 days. (1945)
  • D.O.A. — Free — Rudolph Maté’s clas­sic noir film. Called “one of the most accom­plished, inno­v­a­tive, and down­right twist­ed entrants to the film noir genre.”  (1950)
  • The Hitch-Hik­er —  Free –  The first noir film made by a woman noir direc­tor, Ida Lupino. It appears above. (1953)
  • The Naked Kiss — Free - Con­stance Tow­ers is a pros­ti­tute try­ing to start new life in a small town. Direct­ed by Sam Fuller. (1964)
  • The Stranger — Free – Direct­ed by Orson Welles with Edward G. Robin­son. One of Welles’s major com­mer­cial suc­cess­es. (1946)

Check out the full list of 50 free noir films here, or find them in our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fritz Lang’s Cen­sored Noir Film, Scar­let Street, Star­ring the Great Edward G. Robin­son (1945)

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

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

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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Watch Saul Bass’s Trippy, Kitschy Short Film The Quest (1983), Based on a Ray Bradbury Short Story

in Design, Film | December 9th, 2014

Saul Bass was one of the great­est graph­ic design­ers who ever lived. He cre­at­ed the logos for such ubiq­ui­tous orga­ni­za­tions as AT&T, Unit­ed Air­lines and the Girl Scouts of Amer­i­ca. He rev­o­lu­tion­ized the art of movie titles in such films as The Man with the Gold­en Arm, Ver­ti­go and West Side Sto­ry. He may or may not have designed the famous show­er sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho. His design work was always marked by a clean, high­ly graph­ic style that you can pick out a mile away.

Yet when Bass got a chance to actu­al­ly direct, he didn’t make slick movies with sim­ple plots and great visu­als, as you might expect. Instead, he made pro­found­ly trip­py movies with great visu­als. His one and only fea­ture film, Phase IV (1974), is a deeply weird movie about evo­lu­tion. Think of it as a low-bud­get 2001: A Space Odyssey. With ants. The movie was butchered by scared dis­trib­u­tors and con­se­quent­ly, it bombed at the box office. Almost a decade lat­er, Bass, along with his sec­ond wife Elaine, made a short film called Quest, based on Ray Bradbury’s sto­ry “Frost and Fire.” You can watch it here.

The film cen­ters on a tribe of robe-sport­ing peo­ple who live for only a mere eight days. If you’re an infant on a Mon­day, you will be elder­ly by the time the next Mon­day rolls around. At the open­ing, a name­less child is born as his elders ask in hushed tones, “Is this the one?” Of course he is. The rea­son he and his tribe have a short­er shelf life than gro­cery store sushi has some­thing to do with a gate that blocks life sus­tain­ing light. “Beyond the great gate,” intones one elder, “peo­ple live 20,000 days or more.” The prob­lem is that gate is five or so days away by foot.

So after a very brief train­ing mon­tage, the youth sets off across strange and fan­ci­ful land­scapes that recall Yes album cov­ers. Along the way, he faces down a beast that looks like a bear crossed with a lam­prey, plays a video game with a Yeti on top of a zig­gu­rat, and stum­bles across a wiz­ened old man who only the pre­vi­ous week was the tribe’s gold­en boy.

The movie is incred­i­bly, hilar­i­ous­ly dat­ed, so much so that it goes right past kitsch into some­thing close to sub­lime. If you remem­ber watch­ing, and lov­ing, The Dark Crys­tal, Beast Mas­ter, Krull and Tron in your youth, you must check this out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Saul Bass’ Vivid Sto­ry­boards for Kubrick’s Spar­ta­cus (1960)

Who Cre­at­ed the Famous Show­er Scene in Psy­cho? Alfred Hitch­cock or the Leg­endary Design­er Saul Bass?

A Brief Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Saul Bass’ Cel­e­brat­ed Title Designs

Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Pon­ders Why Man Cre­ates

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

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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Hear Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Read His Strange & Visceral Poetry

in Film, Poetry | December 9th, 2014

mayakovsky

You have to give the Russ­ian Futur­ists this: those guys did­n’t mince words. It was in their 1912 pub­li­ca­tion Пощёчина общественному вкусу, known in Eng­lish as A Slap in the Face of Pub­lic Taste, that poet, play­wright, artist, actor, and film­mak­er Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (pic­tured above in the cen­ter of a group that includes Sergei Eisen­stein, Boris Paster­nak, and his muse Lilya Brik) made his lit­er­ary debut. As his sen­si­bil­i­ty devel­oped through­out the rest of that decade — a time which, of course, includ­ed the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion — Mayakovsky made him­self into an almost anti-poet­ic poet, incor­po­rat­ing the most com­mon vari­eties of lan­guage, engag­ing straight-on with pol­i­tics, and pre­sent­ing him­self as any­thing but a lofty artis­tic fig­ure.

Here, cour­tesy of PennSound, you can hear Mayakovsky him­self read­ing “An Extra­or­di­nary Adven­ture Which Hap­pened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Sum­mer in the Coun­try”:

You can read the Russ­ian here, or an Eng­lish trans­la­tion here, and even in the lat­ter ver­sion the poem’s final lines, which Mayakovsky speaks after hav­ing befriend­ed the sun itself, remain mem­o­rably invig­o­rat­ing:

Shine all the time,
for ever shine.
the last days’ depths to plumb,
to shine — !
spite every hell com­bined!
So runs my slo­gan -
and the sun’s!

PennSound also has Mayakovsky’s own read­ing of “And Could You?” [Russ­ian] [Eng­lish], a much short­er but no less strange­ly vis­cer­al work (1913), which runs, in its entire­ty, as fol­lows:

I sud­den­ly smeared the week­day map
splash­ing paint from a glass;
On a plate of aspic
I revealed
the ocean’s slant­ed cheek.
On the scales of a tin fish
I read the sum­mons of new lips.
And you
could you per­form
a noc­turne on a drain­pipe flute?

Mayakovsky, the com­plete col­lec­tion of whose trans­lat­ed poems you can down­load at Ubuweb, lived from 1893 until his sui­cide in 1930 — a span coeval with the devel­op­ment of the motion pic­ture. He took to that art form just as he took to oth­ers like the stage play and the pro­pa­gan­da poster, and it makes sense that the kind of real­i­ty-bend­ing visu­al mind revealed in his poet­ry would fall under the spell of that whol­ly new and dream­like medi­um. In his short life — all in 1918, in fact — Mayakovsky direct­ed and starred in three short films, It Can­not Be Bought for Mon­ey, Shack­led by Film, and The Young Lady and the Hooli­gan. Only the last of them sur­vives today, and you can watch it below. It’s also housed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More. More poet­ry read by great poets can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Penn Sound: Fan­tas­tic Audio Archive of Mod­ern & Con­tem­po­rary Poets

“PoemTalk” Pod­cast, Where Impre­sario Al Fil­reis Hosts Live­ly Chats on Mod­ern Poet­ry

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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When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland

in Film, Literature | December 8th, 2014

alice hux

Many film­mak­ers have tried to adapt Lewis Car­rol­l’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, but none, in the esti­ma­tion of most enthu­si­asts of either Alice or ani­ma­tion, have ful­ly suc­ceed­ed. Maybe the episod­ic nature of the book gives them trou­ble, maybe the humor and unex­pect­ed log­ic of its much-cel­e­brat­ed “non­sense” don’t real­ly trans­late from the print­ed word to the spo­ken, or maybe Car­roll knew how to han­dle the bound­ary between the real and the unre­al in a way no oth­er cre­ator can imi­tate. Nobody knows how many Alice adap­ta­tions have, con­se­quent­ly, implod­ed before even begin­ning. But when Walt Dis­ney, not a man of small ambi­tions, set about to bring Car­rol­l’s world to the sil­ver screen, he pressed on until it became 1951’s Alice in Won­der­land — about 20 years after the idea came to him in the first place.

“No sto­ry in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture has intrigued me more than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won­der­land,” Dis­ney told the Amer­i­can Week­ly in 1946. “It fas­ci­nat­ed me the first time I read it as a school­boy and as soon as I pos­si­bly could after I start­ed mak­ing ani­mat­ed car­toons, I acquired the film rights to it.” The ani­ma­tor found spe­cial per­son­al res­o­nance in the fact that “peo­ple in his peri­od had no time to waste on triv­i­al­i­ty, yet Car­roll with his non­sense and fan­ta­sy fur­nished a bal­ance between seri­ous­ness and enjoy­ment which every­body need­ed then and still needs today.”

Oth­ers attempt­ed to bring Car­rol­l’s non­sense and fan­ta­sy up to date on film in 1903, 1910, and 1915, and Dis­ney him­self had begun plan­ning an abort­ed Alice movie with silent-era icon Mary Pick­ford in the ear­ly 1930s, but by the end of the Sec­ond World War, a defin­i­tive Dis­ney adap­ta­tion had yet to appear. Enter, in the fall of 1945, Aldous Hux­ley: author of Brave New World, scriptwriter on pre­vi­ous film projects like a life of Marie Curie as well as adap­ta­tions of Pride and Prej­u­dice and Jane Eyre, habitué of the bor­der­lands between real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy, and, in Dis­ney’s words, “Alice in Won­der­land fiend.” Dis­ney need­ed such a fiend, hav­ing start­ed to fear that his desired mod­ern­iza­tion of the mate­r­i­al might upset the Car­roll faith­ful.

Hux­ley’s script, a com­bi­na­tion of live action and ani­ma­tion, deals with the friend­ship between the Oxford don Charles Dodg­son (known, of course, by the pen name Lewis Car­roll), held back from attain­ing his dreamed-of life as a librar­i­an by the uni­ver­si­ty’s stern vice chan­cel­lor, and Alice (based upon Alice Lid­dell, the real-life inspi­ra­tion for Car­rol­l’s fic­tion­al Alice), held back from all things imprac­ti­cal by her even stern­er gov­erness. Though Hux­ley enjoyed doing the work, Dis­ney found it “too lit­er­ary,” and noth­ing of it made it into the 1951 movie. Even then, the final prod­uct dis­pleased the exact­ing ani­ma­tion vision­ary, as it still does quite a few Dis­ney fans.

While the full text of Hux­ley’s screen­play has­n’t sur­vived, and much of what Hux­ley wrote to pro­duce it burnt up in a 1961 house fire, you can read a thor­ough syn­op­sis of it and more of the back­sto­ry on the project at Mouse­plan­et. For even greater detail, see also “Hux­ley’s ‘Deep Jam’ and the Adap­ta­tion of Alice in Won­der­land,” an essay by David Leon Hig­don and Phill Lerhman in the Hux­ley vol­ume of Harold Bloom’s Mod­ern Crit­i­cal Views series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See The Orig­i­nal Alice In Won­der­land Man­u­script, Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed By Lewis Car­roll (1864)

See Sal­vador Dali’s Illus­tra­tions for the 1969 Edi­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land

Alice in Won­der­land: The Orig­i­nal 1903 Film Adap­ta­tion

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

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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Future Shock: Orson Welles Narrates a 1972 Film About the Perils of Technological Change

in Film | December 5th, 2014

The begin­ning of the 1972 doc­u­men­tary Future Shock, direct­ed by Alex Grasshof, shows Orson Welles, beard­ed and chomp­ing on a cig­ar, stand­ing on an air­port peo­ple mover. He turns to the cam­era and deliv­ers a mono­logue in his trade­mark silken bari­tone. “In the course of my work, which has tak­en me to just about every cor­ner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phe­nom­e­non which I’m just begin­ning to under­stand. Our mod­ern tech­nolo­gies have changed the degree of sophis­ti­ca­tion beyond our wildest dreams. But this tech­nol­o­gy has exact­ed a pret­ty heavy price. We live in an age of anx­i­ety and time of stress. And with all our sophis­ti­ca­tion, we are in fact the vic­tims of our own tech­no­log­i­cal strengths –- we are the vic­tims of shock… a future shock.”

The doc­u­men­tary itself is won­der­ful­ly dat­ed. From its bizarre open­ing mon­tage; to its sound­track, which lurch­es from ear­ly elec­tron­ic music to jazz funk; to some endear­ing video spe­cial effects, which, for what­ev­er rea­son, most­ly cen­ters around Orson Welles’s head, the film feels thor­ough­ly root­ed in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. Yet many of the ideas dis­cussed in the movie are, if any­thing, more rel­e­vant now than in the 1970s.

The term “future shock” was invent­ed in Alvin Tof­fler’s huge­ly best­selling book of the same name to describe the con­stant, bewil­der­ing bar­rage of new tech­nolo­gies and all the result­ing soci­etal changes those tech­nolo­gies bring about. Any­one who has strug­gled to com­pre­hend a new, baf­fling and sup­pos­ed­ly essen­tial social media plat­form, any­one who has been dri­ven to paral­y­sis over the num­ber of choic­es on Net­flix, any­one who found their liveli­hood dec­i­mat­ed because of a hot new app knows what “future shock” is.

Tof­fler (along with his wife and uncred­it­ed co-writer Hei­di Tof­fler) argued that we are in the midst of a mas­sive struc­tur­al change from an indus­tri­al soci­ety to a post-indus­tri­al one – a soci­ety that bog­gles the mind with an over­load of infor­ma­tion and an over­load of con­sumer choic­es. “Change,” as they wrote, “is the only con­stant.”

Along the way, the Tof­flers man­aged to pre­dict the col­lapse of Amer­i­ca’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, along with things like Prozac, temp jobs, the inter­net and the mete­oric rise and fall of ins­ta-celebs (Alex from Tar­get, we hard­ly knew you.) Oth­er pre­dic­tions – under­wa­ter cities, paper clothes and being able to choose your own skin col­or – haven’t yet come to pass. Still, they had a sur­pris­ing­ly good track record con­sid­er­ing these pre­dic­tions were writ­ten over four decades ago.

The video ends with a plea from not Welles, but Tof­fler him­self, who is seen address­ing col­lege stu­dents.

If we can rec­og­nize that indus­tri­al­ism is not the only pos­si­ble form of tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, if we can begin to think more imag­i­na­tive­ly about the future, then we can pre­vent future shock and we can use tech­nol­o­gy itself to build a decent, demo­c­ra­t­ic and humane soci­ety. […] We can no longer allow tech­nol­o­gy just to come roar­ing down at us. We must begin to say “No” to cer­tain kinds of tech­nol­o­gy and begin to con­trol tech­no­log­i­cal change, because we have now reached the point at which tech­nol­o­gy is so pow­er­ful and so rapid that it may destroy us, unless we con­trol it. But what is the most impor­tant is we sim­ply do not accept every­thing; that we begin to make crit­i­cal deci­sions about what kind of world we want and what kind of tech­nol­o­gy we want.

Find oth­er short films nar­rat­ed by Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

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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The Classical Music in Stanley Kubrick’s Films: Listen to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

in Film, Music | December 4th, 2014

In 1967, Stan­ley Kubrick com­mis­sioned Spar­ta­cus com­pos­er Alex North to com­pose a score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, while at the edit­ing bay, he fell in love with the movie’s tem­po­rary sound­track con­sist­ing of a bunch of exist­ing works of clas­si­cal music. So in an unprece­dent­ed move, he chose those works in favor of North’s com­po­si­tion. He didn’t even re-record the tracks, as was the cus­tom at the time. He just slot­ted the exist­ing works right into the mix. And, for the pieces by Hun­gar­i­an com­pos­er Györ­gy Ligeti, he didn’t even both­er to get the rights, result­ing in a law­suit.

As you might expect, this was huge­ly con­tro­ver­sial in some cir­cles. The great com­pos­er Bernard Her­rmann, who scored every­thing from Cit­i­zen Kane to Taxi Dri­ver, was appalled. “It shows vul­gar­i­ty, when a direc­tor uses music pre­vi­ous­ly com­posed! I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the height of vul­gar­i­ty in our time. To have out­er space accom­pa­nied by The Blue Danube, and the piece not even record­ed anew!”

Yet any­one who’s ever seen 2001 knows that Kubrick made the right call. Who doesn’t think of bone-wield­ing mon­key men when they hear the open­ing notes of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra? Or who doesn’t asso­ciate The Blue Danube with a zero‑G dance between space­craft and space sta­tion?

2001 might be con­sid­ered the most expen­sive (and most prof­itable) exper­i­men­tal movie ever made. It lacks a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive. It is large­ly word­less. The most mem­o­rable char­ac­ter in the movie is not a human being but a socio­path­ic com­put­er. It ends with an awe­some­ly trip­py med­i­ta­tion on humanity’s next evo­lu­tion­ary iter­a­tion. It’s not an ordi­nary movie and so music was used in an entire­ly unor­di­nary way.

Think of those mono­liths that always appear with that oth­er­world­ly ora­to­rio by Ligeti. It’s ambigu­ous whether those alien mar­ble slabs are emit­ting the music or the music is lay­ered over top the image. Yet the music is not used to tell the audi­ence how to feel. Instead, it is like a voice from the cho­rus in an ancient Greek play, announc­ing from with­out a key moment in the film.

As Roger Ebert puts it: “North’s score … would have been wrong for ‘2001’ because, like all scores, it attempts to under­line the action— to give us emo­tion­al cues. The clas­si­cal music cho­sen by Kubrick exists out­side the action.”

Tony Palmer, direc­tor of Stan­ley Kubrick: A Life in Pic­tures, put it anoth­er way. “Before Stan­ley Kubrick, music tend­ed to be used in film as either dec­o­ra­tive or as height­en­ing emo­tions. After Stan­ley Kubrick, because of his use of clas­si­cal music in par­tic­u­lar, it became absolute­ly an essen­tial part of the nar­ra­tive, intel­lec­tu­al dri­ve of the film.”

Per­haps this is the rea­son why some com­plain that Kubrick’s movies are chilly and cere­bral. It also might explain why his use of music tends to linger in the mind.

Thanks to Spo­ti­fy, you can lis­ten to over four hours of clas­si­cal music that Kubrick used in his movies. Find the playlist above, and a list of the clas­si­cal music in Kubrick films here. The playlist fea­tures every­thing from Beethoven (A Clock­work Orange) to Schu­bert (Bar­ry Lyn­don) to Bartók (The Shin­ing). If you need to down­load Spo­ti­fy, grab the soft­ware on this site.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Clas­si­cal Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist

A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

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Scenes from Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s Philosophical, Feature-Length Animated Film (2001)

in Animation, Film, Philosophy | December 4th, 2014

Richard Lin­klater’s lat­est film Boy­hood has earned quite a lot of press by accom­plish­ing the unprece­dent­ed cin­e­mat­ic feat of telling a sto­ry over a decade long with a pro­duc­tion over a decade long, fol­low­ing the same char­ac­ters, played by the same grow­ing and aging actors, the whole time through. View­ers have under­stand­ably found it a strik­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence, but most of Lin­klater’s projects do some­thing no oth­er film has done before. His 1990s “Indiewood” break­out Slack­er (watch it online), for instance, offered not just the por­trait of the so-called Generation‑X, and not just a por­trait of the then-ris­ing Amer­i­can coun­ter­cul­tur­al Mec­ca of Austin, Texas, but a form of sto­ry­telling that seemed to drift freely from one char­ac­ter to the next, cross­ing town on the winds of idle, every­day, intense, and even non­sen­si­cal con­ver­sa­tion.

And what does Wak­ing Life do? Released in 2001, Lin­klater’s first ani­mat­ed film (he would make a sec­ond, the Philip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly, in 2006) not only fur­ther devel­ops the neglect­ed branch of ani­ma­tion known as roto­scop­ing, which involves draw­ing over live-action footage, but puts it to work for the cause of the philo­soph­i­cal film. But rather than approach­ing that enter­prise straight on, the movie inter­prets the phi­los­o­phy with which it deals through a vast cast of char­ac­ters both eccen­tric and mun­dane — intel­lec­tu­als, often, but also crack­pots, gad­flies, and just plain slack­ers. When they speak their thoughts aloud, as they do in the short clips fea­tured here, they speak on themes as var­ied, but as intrigu­ing­ly inter­con­nect­ed, as real­i­ty, free will, anar­chy, sui­cide, and cin­e­ma, all of which the ani­ma­tion vivid­ly illus­trates.

“Wak­ing Life could not come at a bet­ter time,” wrote Roger Ebert when the movie opened, less than a month after 9/11. “It cel­e­brates a series of artic­u­late, intel­li­gent char­ac­ters who seek out the mean­ing of their exis­tence and do not have the answers. At a time when mad­men think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an after­life, which is by def­i­n­i­tion unknow­able, those who don’t know the answers are the only ones ask­ing sane ques­tions. True believ­ers owe it to the rest of us to seek solu­tions that are rea­son­able in the vis­i­ble world.” Some view­ers will no doubt write off Wak­ing Life’s dia­logue — whether spo­ken by actors, pro­fes­sors, Lin­klater reg­u­lars, or utter ran­doms — as mere “dorm room con­ver­sa­tion,” but the film seems to ask an impor­tant ques­tion on that very point: are you real­ly hav­ing more inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions now than you did in the dorms?

If you have a sub­scrip­tion to Ama­zon Prime, you can watch Wak­ing Life for free right now. A ver­sion appears on Youtube for $2.99.

It’s also worth not­ing that Wak­ing Life appears on the list we recent­ly explored, 44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Watch The Idea, the First Ani­mat­ed Film to Deal with Big, Philo­soph­i­cal Ideas (1932)

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­ma­tion of Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry

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

In Dark PSA, Direc­tor Richard Lin­klater Sug­gests Rad­i­cal Steps for Deal­ing with Tex­ters in Cin­e­mas

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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The Art of Making Blade Runner: See the Original Sketchbook, Storyboards, On-Set Polaroids & More

in Film, Sci Fi | December 2nd, 2014

There’s nev­er been a bad time to revis­it Blade Run­ner, but now, with all the news about the in-devel­op­ment Blade Run­ner 2 break­ing even as you read this, it seems like an espe­cial­ly appro­pri­ate time to go deep­er into Rid­ley Scot­t’s piece of ground­break­ing, Philip K. Dick-adapt­ing cyber­punk cin­e­ma. What­ev­er you think of the prospect of a sequel, if you call your­self a Blade Run­ner fan, you’ll nev­er turn down a chance for anoth­er look behind the scenes of the orig­i­nal.

Hence our offer­ing today of BBC crit­ic Mark Ker­mod­e’s doc­u­men­tary above, On the Edge of Blade Run­ner, and, via Fla­vor­wire, a selec­tion of orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards from the film. Few sci­ence-fic­tion movies hold up so well aes­thet­i­cal­ly after 32 years, but only because few sci­ence-fction movies had so much sheer work put into their design — we are still, I imag­ine, assured a steady stream of pro­duc­tion mate­ri­als to gaze upon for a long time to come.

blade runner storyboard

In recent years, for instance, Sean Young, who played the repli­cant Rachel, released her Polaroid pho­tos from the film’s set. And if you missed it the first time around, you’ll want to cir­cle back to our post fea­tur­ing a freely read­able online ver­sion of Blade Run­ner Sketch­book, a col­lec­tion of over 100 pro­duc­tion draw­ings and pieces of art­work that orig­i­nal­ly came out along­side the film. (See it above.)

blade runner polaroid

And what­ev­er direc­tion Blade Run­ner 2 takes, promis­ing or less so, we’ll all hear a lot about it in the com­ing months. So to bal­ance out the com­ing wave of pro­mo­tion for the sec­ond one, why not watch a lit­tle of the pro­mo­tion of the first one in the form of the con­ven­tion reel below (pro­duced not least to counter all the bad press the pro­duc­tion had drawn at the time), which con­tains inter­views with some of those respon­si­ble for Blade Run­ner’s most endur­ing qual­i­ties: Rid­ley Scott, “visu­al futur­ist” Syd Mead, and visu­al effects design­er Dou­glas Trum­bull. If all three of those guys work on the sequel, well, maybe I’ll start get­ting excit­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Blade Run­ner Pro­mo­tion­al Film

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

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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