Wim Wenders Creates Ads to Sell Beer (Stella Artois), Pasta (Barilla), and More Beer (Carling)

in Film, Television | July 30th, 2012

Few would call Wim Wen­ders, the auteur behind Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, The Bue­na Vista Social Club, and last year’s doc­u­men­tary Pina, a “com­mer­cial” direc­tor. Yet he has, now and again, put in time as a direc­tor of com­mer­cials — adver­tise­ments, that is, for beer, food, and cam­eras. His per­son­al hymn to Leica’s crafts­man­ship aside (“As a boy,” he nar­rates, “I looked at my father’s Leica like a sacred object”), these spots don’t imme­di­ate­ly betray the iden­ti­ty of the man at the helm. Even if you’ve seen many of Wen­ders’ fea­ture films, you might not guess that he made these com­mer­cials if you just hap­pened upon them; you would, though, feel their dif­fer­ence in sen­si­bil­i­ty from the ads sur­round­ing them. The Stel­la Artois clip above includes sev­er­al atten­tion-draw­ing tele­vi­sion tropes like a pic­turesque Euro­pean coast, fast cars and motor­cy­cles, vin­tage musi­cal instru­ments, alco­hol, and fem­i­nin­i­ty, but it approach­es them in a non­stan­dard way — one that, con­se­quen­tial­ly, actu­al­ly stands a chance of draw­ing your atten­tion.

“There’s a cer­tain amount of objects that men like a lot,” says Wen­ders in a short doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of the com­mer­cial, “and they like them so much that they give them their girl­friends’ names.” We see first a motor­cy­cle named Sophie, then a con­vert­ible named Vic­to­ria, then a gui­tar named Valerie, then a beer — Stel­la. We nev­er see any actu­al women, or, for that mat­ter, any men; just places and things. Wen­ders imbues the sequence with human­i­ty through the cam­er­a’s gaze, and the behind-the-scenes footage shows it as no easy task, requir­ing take after pre­cise­ly lit take shot with cam­eras mount­ed on elab­o­rate mechan­i­cal arms that look more expen­sive than the trea­sured objects them­selves. (It also requires the direc­tor to issue instruc­tions in no few­er than three lan­guages, though I under­stand that as busi­ness as usu­al on a Wen­ders set.) For an entire­ly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on beer, watch his spot for Car­ling that involves bicy­cling over a water­fall. For a more epic take on the rela­tion­ship between mankind and machin­ery, watch what he put togeth­er for food con­glom­er­ate Bar­il­la’s 125th anniver­sary.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s New Com­mer­cials Sell the Hyundai Azera

Fellini’s Fan­tas­tic TV Com­mer­cials

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Celebrate Harry Potter’s Birthday with Song. Daniel Radcliffe Sings Tom Lehrer’s Tune, The Elements.

in Comedy, Film, Music, Science | July 27th, 2012

Some child actors are unen­dear­ing, snarky types (think Sele­na Gomez or a young Dako­ta Fan­ning). Oth­ers, you root for because even if they’re cloy­ing they seem real (Haley Joel Osment comes to mind).

Daniel Rad­cliffe, who was most cer­tain­ly a child when he was cast as Har­ry Pot­ter at 11, may fall more into the sec­ond camp. He’s as hap­less and earnest as Har­ry, and it turns out that he’s endear­ing­ly nerdier in real life than Har­ry him­self could ever be.

Rad­cliffe, who cel­e­brat­ed his 23rd birth­day this week, sealed his fate as a bit of an anorak when he appeared on the BBC’s Gra­ham Nor­ton Show and ner­vous­ly sang Tom Lehrer’s song The Ele­ments.

Maybe Radcliffe’s best sub­ject at Hog­warts would have been potions. On tele­vi­sion he admits to being a lit­tle ner­vous before launch­ing into the homage to Lehrer, explain­ing that he’d stayed up all night try­ing to mem­o­rize the song. One of Lehrer’s clas­sics, it actu­al­ly sets the peri­od­ic table of ele­ments to music. In the best ver­sions, Lehrer accom­pa­nies him­self on piano while recit­ing all of the chem­i­cal ele­ments known at the time of writ­ing (1959) to the tune of a Gilbert and Sul­li­van melody.

Har­ry Potter’s birth­day is next week (July 31), the same day author J.K. Rowl­ing cel­e­brates hers. Per­haps Pot­ter fans could cook up a birth­day cel­e­bra­tion for Pot­ter involv­ing a song about lawren­ci­um, which was added to the peri­od­ic table two years after Lehrer wrote his song. As he clev­er­ly not­ed him­self at the end of the tune,

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha’­vard,

And there may be many oth­ers, but they haven’t been dis­cav­ard

Good stuff. Wor­thy of the boy who sur­vived.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

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Miracle Mushrooms Power the Slums of Mumbai

in Film, Sci Fi | July 27th, 2012

If you want to see rough-and-ready exper­i­ments in res­i­den­tial archi­tec­ture and neigh­bor­hood con­struc­tion, look no fur­ther than the world’s largest slums. Every day, strait­ened con­di­tions and high den­si­ty force the mil­lions upon mil­lions who live in them to impro­vise cre­ative solu­tions to the chal­lenges of urban sur­vival using what­ev­er mate­ri­als and pow­er — both terms broad­ly defined — hap­pen to lay at hand. In his short New Mum­bai, film­mak­er Tobias Rev­ell turns his lens toward India, host to some of the most vast and com­plex slums around, and dis­cov­ers a high­ly uncon­ven­tion­al mate­r­i­al, a sort of organ­ic infra­struc­ture, in use in the knocked-togeth­er neigh­bor­hoods of Dhar­avi: giant mush­rooms.

Actu­al­ly, Rev­ell doesn’t dis­cov­er the mush­rooms; he invents them, telling a sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry, if not a ter­ri­bly far-fetched one, in the plain­spo­ken, street-lev­el style of a devel­op­ing-world doc­u­men­tary. He even comes up with a semi-plau­si­ble expla­na­tion for how each of these mir­a­cle mush­rooms gen­er­ates enough pow­er to run an entire build­ing: bio­log­i­cal sam­ples leak from Ams­ter­dam into the Mum­bai gang­land, and a few shad­owy types strug­gle to engi­neer them into a new kind of nar­cot­ic. When that doesn’t work, Dharavi’s sci­ence-savvy res­i­dents — refugees from a reli­gious war — get to work on adapt­ing them to a vari­ety of life-improv­ing uses. Rev­ell, no stranger to spec­u­la­tive projects that tap into mod­ern cur­rents of thought, has tak­en the zeitgeist’s notions of a new part­ner­ship between the city and nature, but run them to an intrigu­ing extreme. And you can’t deny how cool those mush­rooms look sprout­ing from the rooftops.

via @cinnamon_carter

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Martin Scorsese Appears in New Apple Ad with Siri, Plays on His Chilling Cameo in Taxi Driver

in Business, Film, Television | July 25th, 2012

In 1976, Mar­tin Scors­ese made a chill­ing cameo appear­ance in his thriller, Taxi Dri­ver. Per­haps you remem­ber the scene: Play­ing a beard­ed, name­less char­ac­ter, Scors­ese enters a cab, boss­es the dri­ver around for a while, then pro­ceeds to explain, in an uncom­fort­ably mat­ter of fact way, how he plans to kill his wife. It’ll make your hair stand on end. In a new com­mer­cial for Apple, Scors­ese plays a bossy back-seat rid­er again. But this time, there’s no killing involved, just shilling. It’s an ad for Apple’s iPhone, and it’s the lat­est in a new series of ads fea­tur­ing celebs like Zooey Deschan­nel, Samuel Jack­son and John Malkovich.

Of course, the par­al­lel between the Siri ad and the 1976 film was spot­ted by Roger Ebert. All props to him.

P.S.: In case you think we’re see­ing a par­al­lel that does­n’t actu­al­ly exist, it’s worth not­ing that both cabs have the same num­ber. Great spot by @sinyc.

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The Cowboy and the Frenchman: French Culture Through the American Eyes of David Lynch (1988)

in Film | July 24th, 2012

Some­times, to clear­ly see the cul­ture you come from, you need an out­sider to look at it for you. The French news­pa­per Le Figaro seems to have oper­at­ed on that the­o­ry when, in 1988, they cel­e­brat­ed the tenth anniver­sary of their mag­a­zine sec­tion by com­mis­sion­ing five short films from famous for­eign direc­tors — famous direc­tors for­eign to France, that is. The result­ing series, enti­tled France As Seen By…, com­pris­es Fran­co­cen­tric works by David Lynch, Wern­er Her­zog, Andrzej Wad­j­da, Lui­gi Comenci­ni, and Jean-Luc Godard, who, born in Paris but gen­er­al­ly regard­ed as “Fran­co-Swiss,” pre­sum­ably qual­i­fied as just for­eign enough. You can now watch Lynch’s short, a half-hour bit of inter­na­tion­al slap­stick called The Cow­boy and the French­man, free on Youtube.

Har­ry Dean Stan­ton stars as Slim, a chaps-wear­ing ranch fore­man “almost stone cold deaf on account of two rounds of 30.06 going off a lit­tle too close when he was thir­teen and a half.” Lynch wastes no time putting this old cow­boy of the title into an encounter with the stray French­man of same. When Slim spots him wan­der­ing across the prairie, he sends his crew (which includes Eraser­head star Jack Nance) over to las­so him. From their hap­less cap­tive, dressed in a three-piece suit and a beret, going on in French so sim­ple as not to require trans­la­tion about the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, they seize a bas­ket con­tain­ing not only wine, and not only baguettes, but a mod­el of the Eif­fel Tow­er and an end­less sup­ply of escar­got. Lynch finds a way to merge the world of the dream­ing French­man with that of the anachro­nis­tic cow­boy, bring­ing them togeth­er through sur­re­al musi­cal per­for­mances under the glow­ing­ly opti­mistic yet faint­ly sin­is­ter sheen of mid­cen­tu­ry Amer­i­cana. As is his way.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ear­ly David Lynch Short Films

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

David Lynch Debuts Lady Blue Shang­hai

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hours of Classic Crime and Mystery Movies. Discover Our Film Noir and Alfred Hitchcock Collections

in Film | July 19th, 2012

Above you’ll find Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Num­ber Sev­en­teen, free to watch in its entire­ty. Released in 1932, the film finds a gang of jew­el thieves des­per­ate to hide their lat­est boun­ty, a dia­mond neck­lace. Just when they think they’ve found the per­fect house in which to stash it — the Num­ber Sev­en­teen of the title — their plans begin to unrav­el when var­i­ous out­siders (includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to a sneaky police detec­tive) turn up there. Hitch­cock deliv­ers this sto­ry with an odd mix of sus­pense and com­e­dy, and, per­haps as a result, it has­n’t been one of his most wide­ly seen pic­tures. But you can watch it with a click of a mouse, just as you can any of the films in our col­lec­tion of 21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online. There you can expe­ri­ence many evenings of enter­tain­ment from the Eng­lish-turned-Amer­i­can mas­ter of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry cin­e­mat­ic sus­pense. From his Daphne du Mau­ri­er adap­ta­tion Jamaica Inn to his ear­ly hit The 39 Steps to his British ver­sion of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitch­cock deliv­ers ship­wrecks, con­spir­a­cies, para­noia, and uneasy roman­tic intrigue — all at no charge.

And if you watch all 21 free Hitch­cock pic­tures, don’t wor­ry; we’ve got more crime and mys­tery in store for you. Look no fur­ther than our col­lec­tion of Free Film Noir Movies. Just above, we’ve embed­ded He Walked by Night, a grit­ty tale of post­war Los Ange­les star­ring Drag­net’s Jack Webb. The film would go on to pro­vide the basis for Drag­net itself. Or per­haps you’d pre­fer to watch The Lady from Shang­hai, star­ring and direct­ed by Orson Welles, which mix­es film noir tra­di­tions with Welles’ own idio­syn­crat­ic, some­times per­fec­tion­ist and some­times down­right anti-per­fec­tion ten­den­cies; “the weird­est great movie ever made,” crit­ic Dave Kehr called it. If you’re look­ing for more noir Welles, our col­lec­tion also con­tains The Stranger, his pre­vi­ous film. Star­ring Edward G. Robin­son as a Nazi hunter, it came out as the first film after the Sec­ond World War to actu­al­ly include footage of con­cen­tra­tion camps. Both our noir and Hitch­cock col­lec­tions con­tain a great deal of his­to­ry as well as a great deal of craft. They may not make movies like these any­more, but now it’s eas­i­er than ever to watch the ones they made back then.

Relat­ed con­tent:

500 Free Movies Online

Alfred Hitch­cock: A Rare Look Into the Filmmaker’s Cre­ative Mind

François Truffaut’s Big Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (Free Audio)

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was the Genius Behind Cit­i­zen Kane

100 Great­est Posters of Film Noir

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Philip Glass, Seen and Heard Through the Cinematic Mind of Peter Greenaway (1983)

in Film, Music | July 17th, 2012

Long­time Simp­sons-watch­ers sure­ly remem­ber Home­r’s weak­ly feigned enthu­si­asm for an evening with Philip Glass: “Just an evening?” Yet for some enthu­si­asts of the com­poser’s repet­i­tive, mes­mer­iz­ing music, just an evening real­ly would­n’t sat­is­fy. Run­ning over five hours, Glass’ opera Ein­stein on the Beach arguably requires more than an evening by itself. If you don’t feel up to so exten­sive a lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence, rest assured that you’ve most like­ly heard, and may well have enjoyed, his com­po­si­tions before. A pro­lif­ic crafts­man of film scores, Glass has made music to accom­pa­ny, among many oth­er pic­tures, Errol Mor­ris’ The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War; God­frey Reg­gio’s tril­o­gy of Koy­aanisqat­si, Powaqqat­si, and Naqoyqat­si; and the hor­ror favorite Can­dy­man as well as its sequel, Can­dy­man: Farewell to the Flesh. You can learn more about what exact­ly goes on in Glass’ music and how he thinks about it in Philip Glass, which comes direct­ed by Peter Green­away as one of four 1983 por­traits of Amer­i­can com­posers.

If you watch Green­away’s films, you might find your­self sur­prised at the rel­a­tive straight­for­ward­ness of this project: no elab­o­rate set design, no fix­a­tion on lists and sys­tems, few grim­ly dry wise­cracks, and nobody more eccen­tric than Glass him­self. Between extend­ed seg­ments of Glass and his ensem­ble in con­cert, we see inter­views with Glass and his play­ers. (A sim­ple set­up, yes, but not with­out its points of strange­ness: each inter­vie­wee appears with a dif­fer­ent, always near­ly silent inter­view­er, some­times sep­a­rat­ed by a high­ly con­spic­u­ous cam­era reflec­tion.) We learn about how tran­scrib­ing Ravi Shankar’s music gave Glass the idea of “work­ing in a rhyth­mic struc­ture, not a har­mon­ic or nar­ra­tive one,” how hir­ing the sound man from the Fill­more East grant­ed his music a new tech­no­log­i­cal dimen­sion, and the kind of heck­ling he endures even after becom­ing famous. (“We get scream­ers,” he admits, quot­ing their shouts of “This isn’t music!” and “Why are you doing this to me?”) To the best of my knowl­edge, Glass has nev­er scored any of Green­away’s fea­tures. But watch­ing this doc­u­men­tary and notic­ing their shared fas­ci­na­tion with form and rep­e­ti­tion, their lack of enthu­si­asm for nar­ra­tive, their free­dom from “clear­ly pop­ulist inten­tions,” and their ten­den­cy to attract pre­dictable dis­ap­proval, I won­der why not.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Min­i­mal Glimpse of Philip Glass

Philip Glass Com­pos­es for Sesame Street (1979)

Koy­aanisqat­si at 1552% Speed

Philip Glass & Lou Reed at Occu­py Lin­coln Cen­ter: An Art­ful View

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Cinecitta Luce and Google to Bring Italy’s Largest Film Archive to YouTube

in Film, History | July 12th, 2012

Italy’s Cinecit­ta Luce pos­sess­es more than 100,000 films dat­ing back to 1927. Any­one with an inter­est in Ital­ian cul­ture, his­to­ry, or cin­e­ma will sure­ly want to take a look at them, and now, thanks to a part­ner­ship between Cinecit­ta Luce and Google, they can. As those 100,000 films under­go dig­i­ti­za­tion, they’ll make their way to Cinecit­ta Luce’s offi­cial Youtube chan­nel, which offers, to rough­ly trans­late the Ital­ian on the page, “sev­en­ty years of Ital­ian his­to­ry and social life from the twen­ties to the nineties,” the “price­less pat­ri­mo­ny of our visu­al mem­o­ry.” So far, the chan­nel has bro­ken the films into sev­en cat­e­gories: art, sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture; the Sec­ond World War; movie stars and the cat­walk; pro­tag­o­nists of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; the “dust archive” (which seems mis­cel­la­neous); mate­r­i­al relat­ed to Cinecit­ta Luce’s cur­rent film fes­ti­vals; and la dolce vita (a phrase, I would argue, bet­ter pre­sent­ed in the orig­i­nal).

At the top of this post, you’ll find a two-and-a-half-minute sequence show­cas­ing the kind of his­to­ry in motion to be found in Cinecit­ta Luce’s archive: musi­cal per­for­mances, beau­ty pageants, culi­nary fes­ti­vals, sport­ing events, movie pre­mieres, impor­tant moments in pol­i­tics and indus­try, and — for what­ev­er rea­son — all sorts of march­es. Just above this para­graph, we’ve embed­ded some news­reel footage of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni fresh off his Best For­eign-Lan­guage Film Acad­e­my Award win for 8½. But the hours of mate­r­i­al now on Cinecit­ta Luce’s Youtube chan­nel rep­re­sent only the tip of the ice­berg. We hard­ly need tell Italophiles that they’ll want to con­sid­er sub­scrib­ing, so as not to miss more from an archive the Hol­ly­wood Reporter describes as “rich in videos from the Vat­i­can, the 1960 Olymics in Rome, and sceners from gen­er­a­tions of every-day life in Rome.” And giv­en that Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed the Cinecit­ta film stu­dios and the Luce archives as engines of pro­pa­gan­da, they still retain the world’s largest col­lec­tion of Mus­soli­ni-relat­ed film. Schol­ars of dic­ta­tor­ships, take spe­cial note!

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mus­soli­ni Sends a Hap­py Mes­sage to Amer­i­ca, Helps Change Cin­e­ma His­to­ry (1927)

Fellini’s Fan­tas­tic TV Com­mer­cials

Learn Ital­ian for Free

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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