Derek Jarman’s Jubilee: “It’s the Best Film about Punk” (1978)

Derek Jar­man was too old and too accom­plished to be a punk. By 1977, the open­ly gay film­mak­er and artist was already 36 and had an impres­sive CV that includ­ed doing set design for Ken Russell’s The Dev­ils and direct­ing Sebas­tiane, a land­mark in gay cin­e­ma, notable for not only its frank depic­tion of the male body but also for its dia­logue which was entire­ly in Latin. Nonethe­less, Jar­man gath­ered togeth­er nota­bles from London’s bur­geon­ing punk scene, includ­ing a young, lithe Adam Ant, to cre­ate Jubilee –the first and, arguably best, punk movie ever.

The plot, as such, cen­ters on Queen Eliz­a­beth I who, with the help of court occultist John Dee (played by Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show’s Richard O’Brien), sees her land 400 years into the future. It’s a Britain filled with garbage and plagued with crime. Queen Eliz­a­beth II, for instance, was killed in a mug­ging. As Queen Eliz­a­beth I wan­ders around the wreck­age of the British Empire, she encoun­ters a bunch of leather-clad toughs includ­ing Amyl Nitrite (played by Mal­colm McLaren pro­tégé Jor­dan), Crabs (Lit­tle Nell, also from Rocky Hor­ror) and Mad (Toy­ah Will­cox, who would lat­er go on to delight a gen­er­a­tion of tod­dlers by voic­ing The Tele­tub­bies). The high­point of the movie is, with­out a doubt, is when Jor­dan per­forms a risqué dance to a glammed up ver­sion of Rule Bri­tan­nia.

Jar­man tapped into the same feel­ings of anger, dis­il­lu­sion­ment, and nihilism that the Sex Pis­tols artic­u­lat­ed. As Jar­man told The Guardian in 1978, “We have now seen all estab­lished author­i­ty, all polit­i­cal sys­tems, fail to pro­vide any solu­tion — they no longer ring true.” Jubilee feels like a John Waters movie with­out the gross-out gags. A Paul Mor­ris­sey movie but with a clear sense of polit­i­cal pur­pose. It’s gid­dy, unin­hib­it­ed, vio­lent and occa­sion­al­ly quite dis­turb­ing.

Reac­tions to the movie were, not sur­pris­ing­ly, mixed. Yet the peo­ple who real­ly despised the flick weren’t cul­tur­al con­ser­v­a­tives as you might expect. They would fret over the film when it final­ly aired on late night TV in 1986. But in 1978, when the film came out, the very peo­ple the film was about hat­ed it. Souxsie Sioux, of Souxsie and the Ban­shees fame, had a bit part in the film but nonethe­less thought that it was “hip­py trash.” Punk fash­ion­ista Vivi­enne West­wood hat­ed the movie so much she made an insult­ing T‑shirt about it. And Adam Ant, who went to the pre­miere with his moth­er, ini­tial­ly thought the film was ter­ri­ble. Jar­man didn’t give a toss. “I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly want peo­ple to like the film or what it depicts,” he once told a reporter. “I sim­ply hope that it makes them feel that some­thing is going on.”

Yet over the years, the film’s rep­u­ta­tion has steadi­ly improved. Ant, for instance, has changed his opin­ion of Jubilee. “Today I think it’s an amaz­ing achieve­ment and tes­ta­ment to Derek Jar­man’s per­sis­tence and inge­nu­ity.” And his­to­ri­an Jon Sav­age, who lit­er­al­ly wrote the book on punk, declared that “it’s the best film about punk, for all its fail­ings.” British crit­ic Julian Upton went one step fur­ther:

Jubilee is the most impor­tant British film of the late ’70s. Okay, it faced lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion at the time — just a weak trick­le of ill-con­ceived co-pro­duc­tions, third-rate soft­core, and the usu­al her­itage and nos­tal­gia. Next to those, Jubilee, then as now, stands out like a sore thumb.

via Net­work Awe­someThe Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

Wittgen­stein: Watch Derek Jarman’s Trib­ute to the Philoso­pher, Fea­tur­ing Til­da Swin­ton (1993)

Car­avag­gio, Derek Jarman’s Take on the Baroque Painter’s Life, Work & Roman­tic Com­pli­ca­tions (1986)

The Sex Pis­tols Do Dal­las: A Strange Con­cert from the Strangest Tour in His­to­ry (Jan­u­ary 10, 1978)

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 @jonccrowAnd check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

Georges Bataille: An Introduction to The Radical Philosopher’s Life & Thought Through Film and eTexts

Charles Baudelaire’s deca­dent visions pushed the Vic­to­ri­an cult of beau­ty toward mod­ernism, Hen­ry Miller’s lurid epics pushed a then staid mod­ernism toward anar­chic beat writ­ing, and Georges Bataille and the sur­re­al­ists of his arts jour­nal Doc­u­ments gave us much of the cul­ture we have today, call it what you will if post­mod­ern is too passé. Obsessed with tor­ture, pornog­ra­phy, hor­ror, and bod­i­ly flu­ids, Bataille “want­ed to bring art down to the base lev­el of oth­er phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na,” says sur­re­al­ist schol­ar Dawn Ades. Where oth­er trans­gres­sive fig­ures of the past have most­ly been tamed, Bataille, I sub­mit, is still quite dan­ger­ous. The Bataille quote that opens the film above, A perte de vue (“As far as the eye can see”), won’t go down eas­i­ly with almost any­one: “The world,” reads nar­ra­tor Jean-Claude Dauphin, “is only inhab­it­able on the con­di­tion that noth­ing in it is respect­ed.” This, the doc­u­men­tary sug­gests, is Bataille’s phi­los­o­phy, one he defines as “a need for sen­si­bil­i­ty to call up dis­tur­bance.”

Bataille, a failed priest and some­time librar­i­an, found­ed sur­re­al­ist flag­ship Doc­u­ments in 1929, pub­lished 15 issues, then went on to write nov­els, poems, and essays for the next thir­ty years. But his most famous work has remained his first, The Sto­ry of the Eye, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished under the pseu­do­nym Lord Auch in 1928. It’s a book that even today can seem like “social anthrax,” as nov­el­ist John Wray put it, in a way that oth­er once taboo-break­ing works like Joyce’s Ulysses, for exam­ple, cer­tain­ly do not. It’s an apt com­par­i­son, not on lit­er­ary grounds, but giv­en that both writ­ers were haunt­ed by once fer­vent Catholi­cism turned to fer­vent rejec­tion. Writes Mark Hud­son in The Guardian, “he did believe in his own trans­gres­sive philoso­phies in a qua­si-reli­gious sense.” Like Joyce, “there’s a pow­er­ful dual­ism in his thought, a pro­found reli­gious impulse.” Unlike Joyce—or Bataille’s fel­low sur­re­al­ists for that mat­ter, who “excom­mu­ni­cat­ed” him from the movement—“there is still much in his work that is dif­fi­cult to redeem and far from being accom­mo­dat­ed by the mainstream—if indeed it ever can be.”

You can read four of Bataille’s chal­leng­ing pieces at Supervert’s eli­brary: The Sto­ry of the Eye and three essays, “The Use Val­ue of D.A.F. de Sade,” “The Big Toe,” and “The Cru­el Prac­tice of Art.” Bataille’s phi­los­o­phy, writes Super­vert, “appar­ent­ly lay in per­son­al experience—in par­tic­u­lar his child­hood with a sui­ci­dal moth­er and a blind, syphilitic father.” This kind of psy­chol­o­giz­ing may seem super­flu­ous, yet Bataille intro­duces him­self to us, in his own words—through audio inter­views in the first few min­utes of A pert de vue—as the prod­uct of “a sad place to be.” Per­son­al ori­gins aside, Bataille’s phi­los­o­phy has res­onat­ed wide­ly and “helped pave the way to con­tem­po­rary crit­i­cal the­o­ry.” By embrac­ing every­thing reject­ed, feared, or held in con­tempt, Bataille reclaimed every­day parts of human existence—those we euphem­ize or seek to contain—for lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy… and well, the inter­net. If some of Bataille’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tions are irre­deemable for main­stream tastes, you may find as you watch the film above and read Bataille’s writ­ing that this is for good rea­son.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Michel Fou­cault – Beyond Good and Evil: 1993 Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Theorist’s Con­tro­ver­sial Life and Phi­los­o­phy

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Doc­u­men­tary Pro­files Niet­zsche, Hei­deg­ger & Sartre

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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

Watch Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, the First Animated Movie (1906)

August and Louis Lumière might have made the first film – a sim­ple, sta­t­ic shot of work­ers leav­ing their fac­to­ry for the day – but George Méliès invent­ed the art form of cin­e­ma. Through his exper­i­ments, Méliès dis­cov­ered that mag­ic hap­pened when he turned the cam­era off and on. Peo­ple sud­den­ly dis­ap­peared into thin air. Objects appeared out of nowhere. A famed magi­cian, Méliès knew he was on to some­thing. His dis­cov­ery plant­ed the seeds for just about every cin­e­mat­ic tech­nique in the book — includ­ing ani­ma­tion. You can watch six of Méliès’ films here, includ­ing his land­mark 1902 short A Trip to the Moon.

The per­son cred­it­ed with mak­ing the first film-based ani­ma­tion, how­ev­er, is James Stu­art Black­ton with his film Humor­ous Phas­es of Fun­ny Faces (1906). You can watch it above. The short starts with the artist’s hand draw­ing on a chalk­board. Soon, how­ev­er, the draw­ing starts to move on its own. The film is as prim­i­tive as it is fun. A man in a top hat blows cig­ar smoke into a woman’s face. A clown dances. Imag­ine the shock and awe of an audi­ence not weaned on Pixar and Mick­ey Mouse watch­ing a pic­ture come to life for the first time.

Black­ton start­ed his career as a jour­nal­ist and a vaude­ville car­toon­ist. In 1896, he was assigned to cov­er Thomas Edi­son’s brand new inven­tion – the Vitas­cope, an ear­ly film pro­jec­tor. Edi­son proved to be such a good sales­man that Black­ton end­ed up buy­ing one. Soon he, along with his vaude­ville part­ner Albert Smith, found­ed one of the first ever movie stu­dios — the Amer­i­can Vita­graph Com­pa­ny. The com­pa­ny even­tu­al­ly became known for cre­at­ing some of the first movie adap­ta­tions of Shake­speare and Charles Dick­ens, but before that, they made short “trick” movies — flashy shorts to be shown dur­ing vaude­ville shows. One of those movies, The Enchant­ed Draw­ing (1900) is essen­tial­ly a filmic ver­sion of Blackton’s act with some cin­e­mat­ic sleight-of-hand thrown in. And as you can see below, it points the way to Black­ton’s break­through with Humor­ous Phas­es.

In 1911, Black­ton, along with his co-direc­tor, the spec­tac­u­lar­ly tal­ent­ed Win­sor McCay, made Lit­tle Nemo, a movie that hints at the true poten­tial of ani­ma­tion. Sure, their movie has way too much half-heart­ed live action slap stick, which pads out the run­ning time to an over-stuffed 10 min­utes, but the actu­al ani­ma­tion, which starts around 8:30, is utter­ly gor­geous. Watch it below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters

Vis­it the World of Lit­tle Nemo Artist Win­sor McCay: Three Clas­sic Ani­ma­tions and a Google Doo­dle

Ear­ly Exper­i­ments in Col­or Film (1895–1935)

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons are Made

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 @jonccrowAnd check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

 

Kafka’s Parable “Before the Law” Narrated by Orson Welles & Illustrated with Pinscreen Art

On Fri­day, we fea­tured Niko­lai Gogol’s “The Nose,” adapt­ed in 1963 through the work-inten­sive but aes­thet­i­cal­ly stun­ning means of “pin­screen ani­ma­tion” by Alexan­der Alex­eieff and Claire Park­er. But they had­n’t labored over it in total obscu­ri­ty; the year before, no less sol­id a pil­lar of Amer­i­can film than Orson Welles had com­mis­sioned their work for use in his adap­ta­tion of Franz Kafka’s The Tri­al, anoth­er work of lit­er­a­ture deeply con­cerned with the absurd. Crit­i­cal opin­ion varies about the film, which some con­sid­er Welles’ best work, oth­ers con­sid­er his worst, and oth­ers still con­sid­er a mix­ture of the two.

It cer­tain­ly remains one of his least-seen works, and yet it con­tains the most main­stream thing Alex­eieff and Park­er ever did. Very few deny the effec­tive­ness of the film’s pro­logue, which com­bines images straight from the hus­band-and-wife team’s pin­screen with Welles’ unmis­tak­able voice read­ing “Before the Law,” a para­ble from Kafka’s nov­el. Alex­eieff and Park­er’s images are still, rather than ani­mat­ed, which must have cut way down on the pro­duc­tion time.

“Before the law, there stands a guard,” Welles intones. “A man comes from the coun­try, beg­ging admit­tance to the law. But the guard can­not admit him. May he hope to enter at a lat­er time? That is pos­si­ble, said the guard. The man tries to peer through the entrance. He’d been taught that the law was to be acces­si­ble to every man. ‘Do not attempt to enter with­out my per­mis­sion,’ says the guard. I am very pow­er­ful. Yet I am the least of all the guards. From hall to hall, door after door, each guard is more pow­er­ful than the last. By the guard’s per­mis­sion, the man sits by the side of the door, and there he waits.” These words estab­lish the basis for not just The Tri­al, but seem­ing­ly Kafka’s own legal sen­si­bil­i­ty, and indeed world­view. The man waits for years, star­ing at the guard and lav­ish­ing him with bribes. He grows old and enfee­bled. Final­ly, he asks why, despite the fact that “every man strives to attain the law,” nobody else but him has ever come to attempt pas­sage through its doors. “Nobody else but you could ever have obtained admit­tance,” the guard replies. “This door was intend­ed only for you! And now, I’m going to close it.” Welles then com­ments that “the log­ic of this sto­ry is the log­ic of a dream… a night­mare.” One under­stands why the direc­tor, who endured so many futile and absurd expe­ri­ences in the enter­tain­ment indus­try, would feel drawn to such a fable. As for how he chose such appro­pri­ate imagery for it — well, maybe just good luck.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Watch Franz Kaf­ka, the Won­der­ful Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

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.

Before The Simpsons: Homer Groening Directs a 1969 Short Film, The Story, Starring His Kids Maggie, Lisa & Matt

The Sto­ry (1969) is a cute short film about two kids, Matt and Lisa, telling their younger sis­ter Mag­gie a bed­time sto­ry about meet­ing some ani­mals, and an alien, in the woods. You can watch it above. The Matt in this film is none oth­er than Matt Groen­ing, who would go on to cre­ate The Simp­sons. Their dad, Homer, made the movie. The Simp­sons, as Groen­ing admit­ted in an inter­view with Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine, is more than a lit­tle auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal.

I had been draw­ing my week­ly com­ic strip, “Life in Hell,” for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was devel­op­ing “The Tracey Ull­man Show” for the brand-new Fox net­work. He want­ed me to come in and pitch an idea for doing lit­tle car­toons on that show. I soon real­ized that what­ev­er I pitched would not be owned by me, but would be owned by Fox, so I decid­ed to keep my rab­bits in “Life in Hell” and come up with some­thing new.

While I was waiting—I believe they kept me wait­ing for over an hour—I very quick­ly drew the Simp­sons fam­i­ly. I basi­cal­ly drew my own fam­i­ly. My father’s name is Homer. My mother’s name is Mar­garet. I have a sis­ter Lisa and anoth­er sis­ter Mag­gie, so I drew all of them. I was going to name the main char­ac­ter Matt, but I didn’t think it would go over well in a pitch meet­ing, so I changed the name to Bart.

Groen­ing incor­po­rat­ed oth­er auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ments into The Simp­sons too. For instance, the Groen­ing fam­i­ly, like Bart and com­pa­ny, lived on Ever­green Ter­race. In that same inter­view with Smith­son­ian, he all but admit­ted that the show is set in his native Ore­gon. And he even hint­ed that the names of a cou­ple despised school­yard bul­lies made their way into the show.

matt-lisa-maggie

The real Homer, how­ev­er, was very dif­fer­ent from the donut-obsessed rube in the car­toon. “My father was a real man’s man, you know. He was a B17 bomber pilot in the War, sta­tioned in Eng­land. So I grew up with this very intim­i­dat­ing, tough act to fol­low,” Groen­ing told the Tele­graph. “The nice thing was that he would leave his pens out for me to play with. But then he was not par­tic­u­lar­ly approv­ing of what I came up with.”

And while the ear­ly episodes of the Simp­sons, which show Homer being per­pet­u­al­ly irri­tat­ed by his smart aleck son, hints at the com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship Groen­ing had with his father, he also cred­its him – and the movie above in par­tic­u­lar – for inspir­ing his huge­ly suc­cess­ful show.

He used to tape-record the fam­i­ly sur­rep­ti­tious­ly, either while we were dri­ving around or at din­ner, and, in 1963, he and I made up a sto­ry about a broth­er and a sis­ter, Lisa and Matt, hav­ing an adven­ture out in the woods with ani­mals. I told it to my sis­ter Lisa, and she in turn told it to my sis­ter Mag­gie. My father record­ed the telling of the sto­ry by Lisa to Mag­gie, and then he used it as the sound­track to a movie. So the idea of dra­ma­tiz­ing the family—Lisa, Mag­gie, Matt—I think was the inspi­ra­tion for doing some­thing kind of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal with “The Simp­sons.” There is an aspect of the psy­cho­dy­nam­ics of my fam­i­ly in which it makes sense that one of us grew up and made a car­toon out of the fam­i­ly and had it shown all over the world.

via Laugh­ing Squid/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Before The Simp­sons, Matt Groen­ing Illus­trat­ed a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Com­put­ers (1989)

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 @jonccrowAnd check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

Derek Jarman Creates Pioneering Music Videos for The Smiths, Marianne Faithfull & the Pet Shop Boys

Today we think of music videos, per­haps quaint­ly and not always cor­rect­ly, as the cra­dle of mod­ern Hol­ly­wood’s sense-over­load­ing, log­ic-sac­ri­fic­ing, teen-tar­get­ing, “quick-cut” style. But the medi­um, espe­cial­ly in its for­ma­tive years, offered a wide-open can­vas not just to hacks, but to auteurs as well. Case in point: the British direc­tor, artist, and writer Derek Jar­man, well known for fea­tures like Car­avag­gio, The Last of Eng­land, and Blue, but maybe even bet­ter-known, depend­ing on which cir­cles you run in, for his short films meant to pro­mote songs from a vari­ety of musi­cal-cul­tur­al fig­ures: The Smiths, Mar­i­anne Faith­full, the Pet Shop Boys, Pat­ti Smith, the Sex Pis­tols, Bryan Fer­ry. At the top of the post, we see Jar­man push­ing the bound­aries of the music video, inten­tion­al­ly or unin­ten­tion­al­ly, as ear­ly as 1979, with a 12-minute visu­al suite inter­pret­ing not one but three of Faith­ful­l’s songs.

Jar­man goes a minute longer just above for anoth­er, 1986 three-parter: The Smiths’ “The Queen is Dead,” “Pan­ic,” and “There is a Light that Nev­er Goes Out,” songs which allow him to ful­ly exer­cise his pen­chant for nos­tal­gia-sat­u­rat­ed styles of footage and acid crit­i­cism of the direc­tion of Eng­land. He would also col­lab­o­rate with his equal­ly satir­i­cal coun­try­men the Pet Shop Boys in the late 1980s and ear­ly 1990s on no few­er than four sep­a­rate videos, two of which, both from 1987, appear below: “Rent” and “It’s a Sin.” What’s more, he direct­ed their 1989 live tour, which fea­tured not only elab­o­rate cos­tumes but whole new short films pro­ject­ed onstage. With his com­bi­na­tion of the­atri­cal sense and inter­est in abstract visu­al expres­sion, Jar­man must have seemed a per­fect fit for such an aes­thet­i­cal­ly mind­ed out­fit as the Pet Shop Boys. Those qual­i­ties also placed him well to define the nature of the music video itself — in which, at its best, we can still detect his influ­ence today.

Rent

It’s a Sin

via Net­work Awe­some

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wittgen­stein: Watch Derek Jarman’s Trib­ute to the Philoso­pher, Fea­tur­ing Til­da Swin­ton (1993)

Watch Car­avag­gio, Derek Jarman’s Take on the Baroque Painter’s Life, Work & Roman­tic Com­pli­ca­tions (1986)

Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talk­ing Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dyna­mite

Tim Bur­ton Shoots Two Music Videos for The Killers

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.

Quentin Tarantino Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

To some direc­tors, the music heard in their films seems as (or more) impor­tant than the images seen or the dia­logue spo­ken. Maybe you’d make that case about Jim Jar­musch after read­ing — or, more to the point, hear­ing — our post on the music in his movies. And sure­ly many Quentin Taran­ti­no fans would regard a Reser­voir Dogs with­out “Stuck in the Mid­dle with You” or a Pulp Fic­tion with­out “Misir­lou” as not Reser­voir Dogs or Pulp Fic­tion at all. In the book­let that comes with The Taran­ti­no Con­nec­tion, a col­lec­tion of sound­track songs from Taran­ti­no’s movies, Taran­ti­no describes his per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly musi­cal­ly-inspired method of film con­cep­tion as fol­lows: “One of the things I do when I am start­ing a movie, when I’m writ­ing a movie or when I have an idea for a film is, I go through my record col­lec­tion and just start play­ing songs, try­ing to find the per­son­al­i­ty of the movie, find the spir­it of the movie. Then, ‘boom,’ even­tu­al­ly I’ll hit one, two or three songs, or one song in par­tic­u­lar, ‘Oh, this will be a great open­ing cred­it song.’ ” Hence his use of Dick Dale, the “King of Surf Gui­tar,” for the open­ing cred­its of Pulp Fic­tion.

“Hav­ing ‘Misir­lou’ as your open­ing cred­its is just so intense,” writes Taran­ti­no. “It just says, ‘You are watch­ing an epic, you are watch­ing this big old movie just sit back.’ It’s so loud and blear­ing at you, a gaunt­let is thrown down that the movie has to live up to.’ ” He goes on to describe the tak­ing of songs and arrang­ing them in a cer­tain sequence in a movie as “just about as cin­e­mat­ic a thing as you can do. You are real­ly doing what movies do bet­ter than any oth­er art form; it real­ly works in this vis­cer­al, emo­tion­al, cin­e­mat­ic way that’s just real­ly spe­cial.” And did he already know, as he set Reser­voir Dogsun-unsee­able ear-slic­ing scene to that mel­low, then twen­ty-year-old hit from Steal­ers Wheel, that “when you do it right and you hit it right then the effect is you can nev­er real­ly hear this song again with­out think­ing about that image from the movie”? Cer­tain­ly his use of Bob­by Wom­ack­’s “Across 110th Street” has fused the song with Jack­ie Brown and not the epony­mous 1972 pic­ture for which Wom­ack orig­i­nal­ly wrote it. And who has Kill Bill and does­n’t asso­ciate it with Nan­cy Sina­tra’s ver­sion of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”? “I don’t know if Ger­ry Raf­fer­ty [a mem­ber of Steal­ers Wheel] nec­es­sar­i­ly appre­ci­at­ed the con­no­ta­tions that I brought to ‘Stuck in the Mid­dle with You,’ ” Taran­ti­no adds. “There is a good chance he did­n’t.” But when it comes to under­stand­ing a song’s cin­e­mat­ic poten­tial, Taran­ti­no has long since proven he knows what he’s doing.

Across 110th Street

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

via That Eric Alper

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His Favorite Records: Bob Dylan, Fre­da Payne, Phil Ochs and More

The Pow­er of Food in Quentin Tarantino’s Films

The Best of Quentin Taran­ti­no: Cel­e­brat­ing the Director’s 50th Birth­day with our Favorite Videos

Jim Jar­musch: The Art of the Music in His Films

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.

Fans Reconstruct Authentic Version of Star Wars, As It Was Shown in Theaters in 1977

I watched Star Wars for the first time in 1977 at the ten­der age of four. And like a lot of peo­ple in my gen­er­a­tion and younger, that first time was a major, for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence in my life. I got all the toys. I fan­ta­sized about being Han Solo. And dur­ing the sum­mer of ’83, I blew my allowance by watch­ing Return of the Jedi every day for a week in the the­ater. George Lucas’ epic space opera is the rea­son why I spent a life­time watch­ing, mak­ing and writ­ing about movies. And if you asked any movie crit­ic, fan or film­mak­er who grew up in the ‘80s, they will prob­a­bly tell you a sim­i­lar sto­ry.

Over the years though, Lucas suc­cumbed to the dark side of the Force. His pre­quel tril­o­gy, start­ing with tru­ly god awful The Phan­tom Men­ace (1999), is as visu­al­ly over­stuffed as it is cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly inert. (Some­where, there’s a dis­ser­ta­tion to be writ­ten about how wide­spread feel­ings of betray­al from the pre­quels psy­chi­cal­ly pre­pared Amer­i­ca for the anx­i­ety and dis­ap­point­ments of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.)

Worse, fans who want to con­sole them­selves by watch­ing Star Wars as they remem­ber see­ing it back in the ‘80s are out of luck. Lucas has been qui­et­ly butcher­ing the orig­i­nal movies by adding CGI, sound effects and even whole char­ac­ters – like (gag) Jar Jar Binks — to suc­ces­sive spe­cial edi­tion updates. The prob­lem is these updat­ed ver­sions feel bifur­cat­ed. It’s as if two dif­fer­ent movies with two dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics were clum­si­ly stitched togeth­er. Lucas’ spare, mus­cu­lar com­po­si­tions in the orig­i­nal movie sit uneasi­ly next to its car­toony, over-wrought addi­tions. Yet this Franken­stein ver­sion is the one that Lucas insists you watch. The orig­i­nal cut is just plain not for sale. Lucas even refused to give the Nation­al Film Reg­istry the 1977 cut of Star Wars for future preser­va­tion. “It’s like this is the movie I want­ed it to be,” said Lucas in an inter­view in 2004, “and I’m sor­ry if you saw half a com­plet­ed film and fell in love with it, but I want it to be the way I want it to be.”

Thank­ful­ly, hard­core Star Wars fans are telling Lucas, respect­ful­ly, to go cram it. As Rose Eveleth in The Atlantic reports, a ded­i­cat­ed online com­mu­ni­ty has set out to cre­ate a “despe­cial­ized” edi­tion of Star Wars that strips away all of Lucas’s dig­i­tal non­sense and restores the movie to its orig­i­nal 1977 state. The de fac­to leader of this move­ment is Petr Harmy, a 25-year-old guy from the Czech Repub­lic who with the help of a legion of tech­ni­cal­ly savvy film nerds has pieced togeth­er footage from exist­ing prints and old­er DVD releas­es to cre­ate the Despe­cial­ized Edi­tion v. 2.5. (Direc­tions on where you can locate it are here.) Above Harmy talks in detail about how he accom­plished this feat. And below you can see some side-by-side com­par­isons. More can be found on Petr Harmy’s page. Final­ly, in the com­ments sec­tion below, Harmy also points us toward pages with Despe­cial­ized stills for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

Comparison014

Comparison031

Comparison032

Via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Star Wars Bor­rowed From Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Great Samu­rai Films

Frei­heit, George Lucas’ Short Stu­dent Film About a Fatal Run from Com­mu­nism (1966)

Watch the Very First Trail­ers for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi (1976–83)

Joseph Camp­bell and Bill Moy­ers Break Down Star Wars as an Epic, Uni­ver­sal Myth

Hun­dreds of Fans Col­lec­tive­ly Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

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 @jonccrowAnd check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

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