This week, filmmaker James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, The Abyss) hopes to go where only two men have gone before, diving 36,000 feet beneath the sea, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest known place on Earth. It’s basically Mount Everest in the inverse. Cameron plans to make the historic solo journey in The Deepsea Challenger, a 24-foot-long vertical torpedo, built secretly in Australia over the last year eight years. (More on that here.) And when he reaches his destination, he’ll spend six hours shooting 3‑D video of the trench and collecting rocks and rare sea creatures with a robotic arm. Or so that’s the plan.
Above, James Cameron describes his mission in a National Geographic video. Below, you’ll find an animation of the Mariana Trench dive created by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). You can track Cameron’s voyage on the NatGeo website and find a detailed description of the actual dive right here.
Terry Gilliam’s funny debut film, Storytime, features three early examples of the Monty Python animator’s twisted take on life. The film is usually dated 1968, but according to some sources it was actually put together several years later. The closing segment, “A Christmas Card,” was created in late 1968 for a special Christmas-day broadcast of the children’s program Do Not Adjust Your Set, but the other two segments– “Don the Cockroach” and “The Albert Einstein Story”–were broadcast on the 1971–1972 British and American program The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, which featured Gilliam’s Pythonesque animation sequences at the beginning and end of each show. Whatever the date of production, Storytime (now added to our collection of 675 Free Movies Online in the Animation Section) is an engaging stream-of-consciousness journey through Gilliam’s delightfully absurd imagination. If you’re a Terry Gilliam fan, don’t miss these other related items:
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Between the simple card opening D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance to the vibrating neon first onslaught of Gaspar Noé’s 2009 Enter the Void, Ian Albinson’s A Brief History of Title Design packs in countless iconic, representative, and otherwise fascinating examples of words that precede movies. As Editor-in-Chief of the blog Art of the Title, Albinson distinguishes himself as just the person you’d want to cut together a video like this. His selections move through the twentieth century from The Phantom of the Opera, King Kong, and Citizen Kane, whose stark stateliness now brings to mind the very architecture of the old movie palaces where they debuted, to the deliberate, textural physicality of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Lady in the Lake. Then comes the late-fifties/early-sixties modernist cool of The Man With the Golden Arm and Dr. No, followed by Dr. Strangelove and Bullitt, both of which showcase the work of Pablo Ferro — a living chapter of title design history in his own right. After the bold introductions to the blockbusters of the seventies and eighties — Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Alien, The Terminator — but before the freshly extravagant design work of the current century, we find a few intriguingly marginal films of the nineties. How many regular cinephiles retain fond memories of Freaked, Mimic, and The Island of Dr. Moreau I don’t know, but clearly those pictures sit near and dear to the hearts of title enthusiasts.
An elaborate work of motion graphics in its own right, Evan Seitz’s 123Films takes the titles of fourteen films — not their title sequences, but their actual titles — and animates them in numerical order. If that doesn’t make sense, spend thirty seconds watching it, and make sure you’re listening. Doesn’t that calmly malevolent computer voice sound familiar? Does the color scheme of that “4” look familiar, especially if you read a lot of comic books as a kid? And certainly you’ll remember which of the senses it takes to see dead people. This video comes as the follow-up to Seitz’s ABCinema, a similar movie guessing game previously featured on Open Culture. Where that one got you thinking about film alphabetically, this one will get you thinking about it numerically.
Bill Murray, surely both America’s most and least approachable movie star, seems for almost everything yet unavailable for almost anything. Rarely granting interviews, limiting himself (mostly) to roles he actually cares about, and famously working without an agent, he tends to pop up in places you wouldn’t expect him to. Well, aside from Wes Anderson films, where he’s remained a consistent presence since 1998’s Rushmore — but remember how startling it felt to see the star of Groundhog Day turn up in such a relatively small-scale, low-concept, genreless production in the first place? More recently, his extended cameo in Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland has become, in the fullness of time, that picture’s very raison d’être. Not long before that, he appeared in a selection at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival: it wasn’t the latest feature from a Wes Anderson or a Sofia Coppola or a Jim Jarmusch, and in fact not a feature at all, but Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca’s short FCU: Fact Checkers Unit.
Karinen and Sacca star as two lowly fact-checkers at Dictum, a publication solidly in the tradition the United Kingdom calls “lads’ mags.” (“SEX WORK OUTS,” insists one cover blurb.) Faced with a draft of an article on celebrity sleeping tips that recommends drinking a glass of warm milk before bed, “like Bill Murray,” the fellows kneel before a shrine to Alex Trebek — their personal god of facts — don their Fact Checkers Unit windbreakers, and go looking for Murray’s house. Sensing their stumbling presence, Murray finds our heroes huddled in the bathtub almost immediately after they’ve broken in. True to his reputation, Murray has not been easy to find, but true to his public persona, he proves placidly willing and able to hang out when found. After an evening of M*A*S*H, martinis, checkers, and lounge singing, the FCU boys discover the truth about Bill Murray and milk. I won’t, er, spoil it.
I can’t help but admire this casting coup; Karinen and Sacca must have gone through just as much hassle as the FCU did to find Bill Murray. (That, or they happened to know him through some coincidental connection none of us could ever replicate.) Even more impressive, in its way, is how they seemingly crafted the structure of FCU: Fact Checkers Unit to accommodate whichever hard-to-come-by celebrity they could have managed to come by. Perhaps a bigger fan than I knows of some deep, long-established connections between Bill Murray, lad’s mags, M*A*S*H, and warm milk, but nothing stops me from imagining the Kevin Spacey version. In fact, I’d like to see the Kevin Spacey version. Insert a new celebrity each week while holding all else equal, and the concept could become an avant-garde web series.
You can find this film listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.
Earlier this month, we posted a pair of Wes Anderson-directed television commercials advertising the Hyundai Azera. While I understood that, at one time, a known auteur using his cinematic powers to pitch sensible sedans would have raised hackles, I didn’t realize that it could still spark a lively debate today. Seeing as Open Culture has already featured commercials by the likes of David Lynch, Frederico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard — and I couldn’t resist linking to Errol Morris’ when discussing El Wingador — I assumed any issues surrounding this sort of business had already been settled. On Twitter, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, author of a hefty tome on Godard, seemed to corroborate this conclusion: “Bergman made commercials, so did Godard; the more distinctive the artist, the less the artist need worry about it.” “Also,” the Chicago Sun-Times’ Jim Emerson tweeted, “the, concept of “sellout” no longer exists.”
From all the ensuing back-and-forth between critics and cinephiles emerged Brody’s New Yorker blog post, “Wes Anderson: Classics and Commercials.” Pointing out that “so many great paintings were made for popes and kings and patrons, and great buildings sponsored by tycoons and corporations,” Brody finds that “the better and stronger and more distinctive the artist, the more likely it is that anything he or she does will bear the artist’s mark and embody the artist’s essence. Those who are most endangered by the making of commercials (of whatever sort in whatever medium) are those whose abilities are more fragile, more precarious, more incipient, less developed.” But a dissenting voice appears in the comment section: “The reason that Godard and Anderson can make commercials that feel more like short films is not so much because their talents are more developed; it’s because their reputation is more secure. [ … ] It would be better to regard these commercials as short films financed by a company’s patronage (with a few strings attached) than as commercials proper.”
An even more forceful objection comes from Chris Michael in the Guardian: “Is it worth remaining sceptical about art made in the direct service of a sales pitch? I think it is. Does it cheapen your talent to consistently sell its actual goals to the highest bidder? I think it does. When the goal or persuasive intent does not ‘resonate with audience in meaningful way’, but rather ’employ style to conflate love for artist with love for product’, there’s a genuine, full-frontal, non-imaginary assault on the integrity of the art’s meaning. Better to ask: What meaning? What art? Taking it further, can a car ad ever be art?” When Slate’s Forrest Wickman entered the fray, he hauled a Darren Aronofsky-directed Kohl’s spot in with him to demonstrate that “that there is such a thing as selling out,” comparing it unfavorably with Anderson’s ads as “nothing more than a second-rate ripoff, a cheap copy of ads and music videos past.”
Michael remains unimpressed: “Aronofsky really sold out least: by not prostituting his style and delivery, by not wrapping anything of himself around a dull car or department store, by just doing the job for the money like a professional. That, I can respect.” Responding, Brody holds fast in defense of Anderson’s ads, one of which he calls “a feat of astonishing psychological complexity. “These little films, which happen to be commercials for a car,” he writes, “share not only the style but also the content, the theme, and the emotional and personal concerns, of Anderson’s feature films. Yes, they’re short. Yes, there’s a difference between what can be developed in two hours and what can be developed in thirty seconds—it’s the difference between a poem and a novel, between a song and an opera.” Has Wes Anderson sold out? Is selling out still be possible? As in everything, dear reader, the task of weighing the evidence and making the decision falls ultimately to you.
It’s a simple recipe for happiness. Eliminate all negative emotions, anything that creates bad feelings and distracts from the project at hand. Clear it all away, and what’s left? The space for creativity pure and simple. That’s happiness for Hitch. Watch 20 Free Hitchcock Films online here.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.
Last December, we featured the documentary Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man in tribute to its recently passed subject, noted bookseller and eccentric George Whitman. His store Shakespeare and Company has sent a beacon from Paris’ Left Bank to writers and bibliophiles the world over for sixty years, and it continues to do so under Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman. While practically every bookstore in business today takes pains to set itself apart as something “more than just a bookstore,” Shakespeare and Company has been hip to that plan since its inception, offering a reading library, Sunday tea, a storied makeshift writers’ colony, and a taste of the early twentieth-century’s expatriate-filled Parisian literary scene. Readers well-versed in the history of that scene will notice a clever bit of attempted predestination on George Whitman’s part in naming his daughter after Sylvia Beach, the American founder of another famous bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, which operated from 1921 to 1941.
You can learn more about Sylvia Beach Whitman — much more than you’d expect to in under four minutes — from art-world documentarian Chiara Clemente’s profile of her on the Sundance Channel’s documentary series Beginnings. Whitman remembers her days as Shakespeare and Company’s official moppet, when its writers in residence — her “hundreds of brothers and sisters” — would tell her custom-made bedtime stories before flopping down on their own beds built atop the book piles. She’s since grown up and gone on to do big things with the store, including starting a biennial literary festival which has brought in the likes of Jung Chang, Paul Auster, David Hare, and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, who features in a Beginnings short of her own (see above). When not hard at work on a page of comic art, Satrapi lights up a cigarette and remembers how, due to the last forty years of constant political churn in her native Iran, no Iranian of her generation has lived anything like a “normal” life. The series also covers the early lives and first inspirations of creators including shoe designer Christian Louboutin, Blue Hill chef Dan Barber, and… well, you can’t describe Yoko Ono as anything but Yoko Ono. But you can watch her episode of Beginnings on NYTimes.com and hear about her struggle to find her way to the avant-garde after emerging from her family’s artistic traditionalism. H/T New Yorker
According to cinema lore, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, a slapdash, unprofessional $20,000 melodrama shot in a mere mistake-filled six days, has somehow, over the past 66 years, accrued a sizable and appreciative following among film noir enthusiasts. Except it turns out that, in reality, its budget probably ran to some $117,000. And those six days might have actually been three six-day weeks. And the Austrian-born Ulmer, who had not only worked for such European luminaries as F.W. Murnau, Billy Wilder, and (so he claimed) Fritz Lang, but even made The Black Cat for Universal Pictures, hardly lacked professional bona fides. And the film’s careful use of sound and striking use of light set it apart even from its brethren in the genre.
And speaking of that genre, a hearty critical agreement now holds that Detour distills, in its brief 68 minutes, the most vital emotional and aesthetic elements of film noir in a way that none of its other exemplars have managed. And mistakes? What mistakes? As Roger Ebert wrote on ushering the film into his Great Movies canon, “Placing style above common sense is completely consistent with Ulmer’s approach throughout the film.”
To recount Detour’s story here — a piano-player down on his luck; a sudden death; a scheming, venomous dame — would be to miss the point. To cite out its many, er, unconventional production choices — nonexistent backgrounds concealed with fog, shots simply flipped over and re-used, stock footage meant to pad the runtime almost to feature length, unconvincing rear projection even by 1945’s standards — would be to miss the point from another direction. The film has fallen into the public domain, so watch it free online and experience for yourself the way that, for all its apparent bluntness, it stealthily lodges itself in your sense memory. To call a movie “dreamlike” reeks of cliché, but Detour presents the elements of film noir in such a pure, naked state that you have little choice but to accept them directly, the way you would accept the “facts” of a dream. Though seemingly incompetent on all the levels subject to conscious analysis, the film operates effectively on all the levels beneath, hence the lasting inspiration it offers to certain filmmakers today. Make Detour, if you can, a double-feature with David Lynch’s Lost Highway, which plays almost like a straight tribute to Ulmer’s picture. As a dedicated transcendental meditator with a fascination for the dark side of Los Angeles and a tendency to bend archetypal characters toward his often oblique but always vivid stylistic will, Lynch has internalized Detour’s legacy — intended or otherwise — more deeply than any other filmmaker alive today.
More noir classics can be found in our collection of 60+ Free Noir Films.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
