Few filmmakers have been so often, or so unambiguously, called masters of the medium as Andrei Tarkovsky. In acclaimed pictures like The Mirror, Stalker, and Nostalghia (find free online versions of his films here), he realized his visions without compromise. If you can engage with these visions, watching a Tarkovsky film makes for a cinematic experience without compare. Geoff Dyer, for example, one of the director’s particularly high-profile fans, recently published Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, a volume on nothing but watching Stalker. If you can’t engage with these visions, you may find watching a Tarkovsky film rough going indeed. (Admittedly, Nostalghia’s nine minutes of candle-carrying requires a certain frame of mind.) But if you make films, you’d do well to consider Tarkovsky’s methods either way. The clip above from the documentary Voyage in Timeoffers some insight into how the man thought about his work.
First and foremost, he didn’t think about it as “work,” separate from other pursuits. “It’s not hard to learn how to glue the film, how to work a camera,” Tarkovsky says. “But the advice I can give to beginners is not to separate their work, their movie, their film, from the life they live. Not to make a difference between the movie and their own life.” These words don’t come as a surprise from a director well known for crafting deeply personal films, but one suspects that creators of any kind all too rarely find it in themselves to heed them. But Tarkovsky, always described as a thoroughly rigorous man, could have lived no other way. “Cinema is a very difficult and serious art,” he continues. “It requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn’t belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.” A great demand indeed, but we’d surely have a more interesting cinema if young directors accepted it. The artistic world could use more Tarkovskys.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Another year gone by. Another 1200+ cultural blog posts in the books. Which ones did you like best? We let the data decide. Below, you’ll find the 17 that struck a chord with you. Free Art Books from The Guggenheim and The Met: Way back in January, the Guggenheim made 65 art catalogues available online, all free of charge. The catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Calder, Munch, Bacon, and Kandinsky, among others. Then, months later, The Met followed suit and launched MetPublications, a portal that now makes available 370 out-of-print art titles, including works on Vermeer, da Vinci, Degas and more.
The Best Animated Films of All Time, According to Terry Gilliam: Terry Gilliam knows something about animation. For years, he produced wonderful animations for Monty Python (watch his cutout animation primer here), creating the opening credits and distinctive buffers that linked together the offbeat comedy sketches. Given these bona fides, you don’t want to miss Gilliam’s list, The 10 Best Animated Films of All Time.
Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Guitar Solo by George Harrison: Here’s another great discovery — the long lost guitar solo by George Harrison from my favorite Beatles’ song, “Here Comes the Sun.” In this clip, George Martin (Beatles’ producer) and Dhani Harrison (the guitarist’s son) bring the forgotten solo back to life. When you’re done taking this sentimental journey, also see another favorite of mine: guitarist Randy Bachman demystifying the opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization: In June, we lost Ray Bradbury, who now joins Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick in the pantheon of science fiction. In this post, we revisit two moments when Bradbury offered his personal thoughts on the art and purpose of writing — something he contemplated during the 74 years that separated his first story from the last.
Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Speaking of science fiction, we brought you a roundup of some of the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian classics available on the web in audio, video and text formats. They include Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia,many stories by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman, and much more. Find more great works in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
This is Your Brain in Love: Scenes from the Stanford Love Competition: Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what Stanford researchers and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. And they each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine. It’s to hard watch this short film and not shed a happy tear.
Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’: In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–Flannery O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story.
33 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web: On the eve of the 2012 Academy Awards, we scouted around the web and found 33 Oscar-winning (or nominated) films from previous years. The list includes many short films, but also some long ones, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic version of War & Peace. Sit back, enjoy, and don’t forget our collection of 500 Free Movies Online, where you’ll find many great noir films, westerns, classics, documentaries and more.
The Story Of Menstruation: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946: Staying with movies for a second, we also showed you a very different mid-1940s Disney production – The Story of Menstruation. Made in the 1940s, an estimated 105 million students watched the film in sex ed classes across the US.
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web: We spent some time tracking down 23 free stories and essays published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.
Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975): In January 1975, Buckminster Fuller sat down to deliver the twelve lectures that make up Everything I Know, all captured on video and enhanced with the most exciting bluescreen technology of the day. The lecture series is now online and free to enjoy, so please do so.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story: When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight tips on how to write a short story.
Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities: A Complete List: We gathered a list of 200 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by leading universities. Most of these free courses offer “certificates” or “statements of completion.” Many new courses start in January 2013. So be sure to check it out. Also don’t miss our other new resource collection: 200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & Beyond.
To fully experience the clip above, you’ll need to be awake and pressing play at precisely 12:04 am. What you’ll be seeing is a very small segment of The Clock, a 24-hour video assemblage that keeps time with clips culled from a century’s worth of film history. Some of these markers are in the dialogue, but most are shots of clocks and watches in which a specific time is clearly visible.
If viewing the complete piece sounds like a marathon, consider that artist Christian Marclay and a phalanx of assistants spent three years locating and placing the clips and smoothing out the resulting soundtrack. Some of these moments came preloaded with the import of a High Noon. Others were of a more incidental, background-type nature prior to being cast in Marclay’s project.
Those unable to spend quality time with The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art this January can get a feel for it via philosopher and writer Alain de Botton’s brief chat with Marclay below.
- Ayun Halliday resolves to use it better in 2012. Perhaps you shouldn’t follow her on Twitter @AyunHalliday.
Thinkers, creators, and imaginers of all kinds love Powers of Ten, with good cause. If you’ve never seen Charles and Ray Eames’ still-influential film on all the various scales at which one can view the universe, take nine minutes and watch it free online. Though the original power couple of modern American design produced the film 35 years ago, the short has stayed as crisp, striking, and (literally) perspective-altering as ever. We may not need a new Powers of Ten, per se, but who wouldn’t be interested in seeing how many 21st-century interpretations of its theme 40 artists can come up with? The Powers Project has taken on this very idea, inviting contributors from Los Angeles to Köln to Wellington to Kyoto to re-envision each of the distances from which the original film views humanity, from one meter away to 1024 meters away to .000001 angstroms away.
Just above, you can watch one completed segment of the Powers Project from London’s Jordi Pagès. In it, the camera moves toward the surface of a hand and into the skin, eventually finding its way into a single blood vessel. When it eventually comes available online, the finished project will include almost as many styles of filmmaking as it does scales of viewing. Open to as many techniques of and perspectives on moving image creation as its contributors could summon, the film will take the Eames’ idea, originally all about the straight-on perception of reality, into a new realm of abstraction. Who’d have guessed how much rich artistic potential remained in, as Powers of Ten’s subtitle puts it, the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero?
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Having not seen the first installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, I am required to withhold judgment. As a Tolkien reader from the first time I could struggle through the prose, I’ll admit, I’ve been on tenterhooks (and not all reviews fill me with hope). In any case, I plan, like many a fan, to re-read Tolkien’s fairy tale novel before seeing Jackson’s film. It was my first exposure to Tolkien, and the perfect book for a young reader ready to dive into moral complexity and a fully-realized fictional world.
And what better guide could there be through The Hobbit than Tolkien himself, reading (above) from the 1937 work? In this 1952 recording in two parts (part 2 is below), the venerable fantasist and scholar reads from his own work for the first time on tape. Some dutiful fan has added a background score and a slideshow of images of the author, as well as artists’ renderings of his characters (including stills from Jackson’s Rings films).
Tolkien begins with a passage that first describes the creature Gollum; listening to this description again, I am struck by how much differently I imagined him when I first read the book. No doubt Andy Serkis deserves all the praise for his portrayal, but the Gollum of The Hobbit seems somehow so much hoarier and more monstrous than the slippery creature in Peter Jackson’s films. This is a minor point and not a criticism, but perhaps a comment on how necessary it is to return to the source of a mythic world as rich as Tolkien’s, even, or especially, when it’s been so well-realized in other media. No one, after all, knows Middle Earth better than its creator.
These readings were part of a much longer recording session, during which Tolkien also read (and sang!) extensively from The Lord of the Rings. A YouTube user has collected, in several parts, a radio broadcast of that full session here, and it’s certainly worth your time to listen to it all the way through. It’s also worth knowing the neat context of the recording. Here’s the text that accompanies the video on YouTube:
When Tolkien visited a friend in August of 1952 to retrieve a manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, he was shown a “tape recorder”. Having never seen one before, he asked how it worked and was then delighted to have his voice recorded and hear himself played back for the first time. His friend then asked him to read from The Hobbit, and Tolkien did so in this one incredible take.
Also, it may interest you to know what Tolkien’s posthumous editor, his youngest son Christopher, thinks of the adaptations of his dad’s beloved books, among many other things Middle Earth. Read Christopher Tolkien’s first press interview in forty years here, and watch him below reading the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com–including, for example The Hobbit? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
Jackson Pollock painted with the kind of visceral immediacy that frees you from having to know much about his ideas, his methods, or his life. But spend enough time gazing at his canvases and you’ll surely start to get curious. If you’ve seen Melvyn Bragg talk to Francis Bacon in studio, gallery, café, and bar on the South Bank Show’s profile of the painter, you know how expertly he can open up an artist’s world. Two years after that International Emmy-winning program, the broadcaster, writer, and House of Lords Member applied his talents toa perhaps even less understood painter in Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock. Where Bragg appeared as a participatory presence in The South Bank Show — to the extent, at one drink-sodden point, of getting tipsy himself — here he sticks to narration. His relegation to the soundtrack perhaps reflects a certain cultural distance: to an American, Bragg seems about as English a host as they come, and to the rest of the world, Pollock seems about as American a painter as they come — in his work as well as his life.
The Library Media Project describes Pollock as a “ ‘cowboy’ from Wyoming” instrumental in forging the American art movement, Abstract Expressionism. They describe his life in the smallest nutshell: “His famous ‘drip’ paintings earned him both notoriety and abuse and the pressures of new-found celebrity compounded his lifelong struggle with alcoholism, a fight he lost when he died in a car crash at the age of 44,” In its 50 Bragg-narrated minutes, Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock goes into far greater detail, using existing radio conversations with Pollock, photographer Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock at work, and interviews with critics, curators, Pollock’s colleagues, his friends, his widow, and his mistress. Where a biopic like Ed Harris’ Pollock plunges straight into the artist’s brash conduct and volatile mixture of work and life, this documentary steps slightly back, examining Pollock’s paintings and the Hemingwayesque existence that gave rise to them in a cooler — not to say more English — light. Make them a double feature, if you can.
Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock will be added to the Documentary section of our collection of 500 Free Movies Online.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Though far from the most astute scholar of physics or zombie cinema, I have to believe that this marks the first time physicists have made a contribution to the field. But perhaps only they would think to set their movie inside the Large Hadron Collider, the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s particle accelerator of record-setting size and power. (Hands up if you even knew one could go inside it.) The device has received much press for its potential to either prove or disprove the existence of a predicted elementary particle called the Higgs boson, and Decay speculates about one particular consequence of this high-profile scientific quest: what if the Higgs boson turns people into zombies? Doing his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, writer-director Luke Thompson realized that — and here I quote the press release — “the tunnels under CERN would be ideal for a zombie film.” £2000, a couple borrowed cameras, and a great deal of scavenged props and improvised filmmaking gear later, we can watch the whole thing free online.
Thompson’s entry into the zombie canon follows “a small group of students (played by physicists) after a disastrous malfunction in the world’s biggest particle accelerator. As they try desperately to escape from the underground maintenance tunnels, they are hunted by the remains of a maintenance team, who have become less than human.” This use of actual young physicists running around the actual nooks and crannies of CERN lends the project a scrappy realism, and the practice of making do with any resource at hand has a proud history in zombie filmmaking. Recall that George A. Romero, shooting the genre-defining Night of the Living Dead (also free to watch on the internet), could only raise $6,000 at a time, which forced him to find horror wherever he could.Like every strong zombie picture, Decay not only operates on meager resources but performs a certain social satire as well, in this case to do with how the nonscientific world perceives science. But no need to take it too seriously: “This film has not been authorized or endorsed by CERN,” reads the first title card. “It is purely a work of fiction.” Whew.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Thirty years ago the British television company Channel Four premiered this enchanting, lyrical film based on the award-winning Raymond Briggs children’s book, The Snowman.
The tale bears some resemblance to the earlier American story, “Frosty the Snowman,” but probes deeper into the psychology of children, conveying the fear and wonder they feel in a mysterious world, and their longing for friendship and magic. It’s more elegantly told, too, using only pictures and music to convey the story. And just as Maurice Sendak said “I refuse to lie to children,” Briggs refuses to provide a Hollywood ending.
The original version of The Snowman includes an introduction by Briggs. A later version (see above) has a similar introduction by David Bowie, who plays the grownup boy from the story. As the introduction ends, Bowie opens a drawer and pulls out a scarf that was given to him during his adventure with the snowman, proving that it was not just a dream.
In 1983, The Snowman was nominated for an Academy Award. It ranks 71st on the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest British television programs and was voted number four in UKTV Gold’s “Greatest TV Christmas Moments.” Watching The Snowman has become a holiday tradition in the UK in much the same way that watching A Charlie Brown Christmas has in America. Tonight in Britain, Channel 4 will premiere the long-awaited sequel, The Snowman and the Snowdog, set 30 years later at the same house but with a different boy.
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