We discuss the appeal of this Julian-Fellowes-penned British historical drama in light of the new film. Is this really “a new era” or just more of the same, and is that bad?
Your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by returning guest Jon Lamoreaux (host of The Hustle music podcast), plus a couple: former newscaster Corrinne MacLeod (whom Mark SCANDOLOUSLY went on one date with at age 12) and her husband, the photographer Michael MacLeod.
We talk about the excellent casting and how such a big cast gets juggled, the appeal of this particular historical setting, revolutions against the class system in the show, and the soapy plots. How can a film give us enough of such a big cast? We also touch on The Gilded Age, Bridgerton, Howard’s End, Gosford Park, The Great, Poldark, and more.
John Waters hasn’t made a movie in quite some time, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone quiet. In fact he’s remained as visible a cultural figure as ever by working in other forms: writing a new novel, acting on television, delivering commencement addresses. His dedication to that last pursuit is such that he even kept it up in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year he delivered his commencement speech for New York’s School of Visual Arts not at Radio City Music Hall, as scheduled, but in front of a green screen in Baltimore — which, of course, only enriched the Watersesque sensibility of the proceedings.
Having been forced into the role of “virtual keynote speaker,” Waters made up for it this year by delivering, in person, a make-up commencement address for the SVA classes of both 2020 and 2021. And he did it onstage at Radio City, a venue “known for family movies and the Rockettes. What the hell am I doing here?” As usual in this phase of his career, Waters expresses surprise to find himself in the role of elder statesman.
“In 2020, the School of Visual Arts gave me an honorary degree for, I guess, causing trouble,” he says. “This year, the National Film Registry — yes, that’s part of the Library of Congress, the U.S. Government, for god’s sake — selected my film Pink Flamingos, which New York magazine once called ‘beyond pornography,’ to its annual list of 25 culturally historic films.”
Safe to say that, half a century after its release, Waters’ most notorious motion picture doesn’t repel the establishment as it once did. And indeed, here in the 2020s, how can an artist get transgressive at all? Waters has much encouragement and advice for young people in search of new boundaries to violate. “Outsider old master paintings, narrative abstract expressionism, impenetrable pop, decorative minimalism, non-conceptualism, video folk art, appropriated NFT”: these are just a few of the artistic ventures not yet attempted that could turn their popularizers into cultural phenomena. “You too can fail upwards, if you try,” Waters insists, but you’ve got to do it with a sense of humor. “Mock yourself first. Then you can be as crazily righteous as you want.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Earlier this week we featured Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. You can watch that most ambitious of all filmed versions of War and Peace free online on the Youtube channel of Mosfilm, the Soviet Union’s national studio. Though the U.S.S.R. may have gone, Mosfilm hasn’t. Under the direction of filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov, the studio has soldiered on as a quasi-private production company and put out a variety of films, many of them rooted in Russian history and literature. Five years ago, Shakhnazarov himself directed an eight-part adaptation of another beloved Tolstoy novel, Anna Karenina.
War and Peace (watch here) has been made into four different films. But that’s nothing beside the at least seventeen Anna Karenina movies in existence, not counting Shakhnazarov’s. It was first released in a relatively short cut, its runtime truncated to a bit over two and a half hours, as Anna Karenina: Vronsky’s Story.
That version’s narrative focused, as you may have guessed, on the life of Anna’s irresistible aristocratic lover. Later, Russia‑1 television broadcast Shakhnazarov’s work in full as an eight-episode series simply titled Anna Karenina, which you can now watch free online, in full, at Mosfilm’s Youtube channel. Stream all parts above.
In a sense, this serial format is well suited to Tolstoy’s novel, originally published as it was in installments between 1875 and 1877. But even those who’ve read Anna Karenina’s thousand pages over and over again will have reasons to be surprised by Shakhnazarov’s version, which takes the story of family, class, infidelity, faith, and feudalism in directions of its own. It also incorporates material from outside Tolstoy’s oeuvre, such as “During the Japanese War” and “Stories About the Japanese War” by Vikenty Veresaev, a doctor, writer, and Tolstoy scholar who participated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Like any “free adaptation,” Shakhnazarov’s version of Anna Karenina, will send its viewers back to the book — and ensure that they never read it quite the same way again.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
“America has only three great cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” This quotation has been repeated for decades — not least, unsurprisingly, in New Orleans. I saw and heard it often on my last trip there, and though attributions varied, most credited the remark to either Mark Twain or Tennessee Williams. According to Quote Investigator, no historical evidence points to either man as the line’s originator, though “the notion that only three cities in the U.S. were commendable or distinctive has a very long history.”
In 1895, for instance, the then-popular comedienne Vernona Jarbeau said that “there are only three cities in the United States that I would care to live in, and one of them is San Francisco.” But she said it, one should note, to a San Francisco newspaper; who’s to say the crowd-pleasing instinct wouldn’t have motivated a transposition of her preference elsewhere in America? New Orleans, then in existence for more than half a century, possessed an even longer-established distinctiveness. The embellished galleries of the French Colonial buildings in the 1898 film clip above, identify the city at a glance.
Even more New Orleanian, of course, is what’s going on in the street: the city’s signature festivity, the Mardi Gras parade. “The film is not only the oldest moving picture of a New Orleans Mardi Gras; it’s the oldest film of New Orleans,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Jane Recker. Recently rediscovered in Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum, the two-minute clip shows us — on detail-absorbing 68-millimeter film — that “one float is pineapple-themed, with riders wearing hats shaped like pieces of pineapple and vests resembling pineapple skin. Another features the Rex, the ‘King of the Carnival,’ sitting atop a float decorated with tasseled globes.”
“Contemporary viewers will surely recognize the film’s parade as a Mardi Gras celebration, though the event features some distinct differences from the one that takes over the Big Easy’s streets today,” writes Artnet’s Sarah Cascone. “There are, for example, no beads, no barricades, no police. Onlookers don suits and top hats and parasols, a far more formal approach than that taken by 21st-century revelers.” Here in the 2020s their revelry has been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and only this year did New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parade tradition resume. Perhaps it’s too much to hope that the dress sense of spectators 124 years ago will make a comeback as well.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
On the question of whether novels can successfully be turned into films, the cinephile jury remains out. In the best cases a filmmaker takes a literary work and reinvents it almost entirely in accordance with his own vision, which usually requires a book of modest or unrealized ambitions. This method wouldn’t do, in other words, for War and Peace. Yet Tolstoy’s epic novel, whose sheer historical, dramatic, and philosophical scope has made it one of the most acclaimed works in the history of literature, has been adapted over and over again: for radio, for the stage, as a 22-minute Yes song, and at least four times for the screen.
The first War and Peace film, directed by and starring the pioneering Russian filmmaker Vladimir Gardin, appeared in 1915. Japanese activist filmmaker Fumio Kamei came out with his own version just over three decades later. Only in the nineteen-fifties, with large-scale literary adaptation still in vogue, did the mighty hand of Hollywood take up the book. The project went back to 1941, when producer Alexander Korda tried to put it together under the direction of Orson Welles, fresh off Citizen Kane.
For better or worse, Welles’ version would surely have proven more memorable than the one that opened in 1956: King Vidor’s War and Peace expediently hacked out great swathes of Tolstoy’s novel, resulting in a lush but essentially unfaithful adaptation. This was still early in the Cold War, a struggle conducted through the amassing of soft power as well as hard. “It is a matter of honor for the Soviet cinema industry,” declared an open letter published in dthe Soviet press, “to produce a picture which will surpass the American-Italian one in its artistic merit and authenticity.”
The gears of the Soviet Ministry of Culture were already turning to get a superior War and Peace film into production — superior in scale, but far superior in fealty to Tolstoy’s words. This put a formidable challenge in front of Sergei Bondarchuk, who was selected as its director and who, like Gardin before him, eventually cast himself in the starring role of Count Pyotr “Pierre” Kirillovich Bezukhov. As a production of Mosfilm, national studio of the Soviet Union, War and Peace could marshal an unheard-of volume of resources to put early nineteenth-century Russia onscreen. Its furniture, fixtures, and other objects came from more than forty museums, and its thousands of uniforms and pieces of military hardware from the Napoleonic Wars were recreated by hand.
The most expensive production ever made in the Soviet Union, War and Peace was also rumored to be the most expensive production in the history of world cinema to date. With a total runtime exceeding seven hours, it was released in four parts throughout 1966 an 1967. Now, thanks to Mosfilm’s Youtube channel, you can watch them all free on Youtube. 55 years later, its production values still radiate from each and every frame, something you can appreciate even if you know nothing more of War and Peace than that — as a non-Russian filmmaker of comparatively modest production sensibilities once said — it’s about Russia.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
We all learned a bit about the Second World War in school, or perhaps more than a bit. But for a great many of us, what we know of that period of history comes less from teachers and textbooks than it does from movies. World War II as a cinematic genre has existed since the early years of World War II itself, and at this point it has produced so many films that not even the most avid historically-minded cinephile could watch them all. Many such pictures, of course, take enormous liberties with their source material. But if you concentrate on just the most accurate parts of the most acclaimed movies about World War II, you can piece together a reasonably truthful portrayal of its events.
Such is the premise, at any rate, of the video above, “Timeline of WW2 in Films.” Created by Youtuber Salokin, it arranges clips from dozens of films released over the past half-century — Patton, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Battle of Britain, Dunkirk — in historical order.
Opening with footage from Roman Polanski’s The Pianist referring to the invasion of Poland in September 1939, it goes on to cover that year by drawing from the depiction of Soviet-Japanese border conflicts like the Battles of Khalkhin Go and Nomonhan in Kang Je-gyu’s My Way, then from the depiction of the titular fights on the Karelian Isthmus in Pekka Parikka’s The Winter War.
As Korean and Finnish productions, respectively, My Way and The Winter War offer perspectives on World War II different from the American one taken by Hollywood movies — Hollywood having once been the only motion-picture industry with the resources to re-create the war in a convincing manner. But the development of global film production in recent decades has also given rise to widely seen World War II movies from countries like Australia, Germany, Denmark, and Russia, to name a few countries whose films appear in this video. Not all of them agree perfectly with history as taught in the United States, but then, American World War II movie enthusiasts have unresolvable conflicts of their own: do you prefer Saving Private Ryan, for instance, or The Thin Red Line?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli have won immense worldwide acclaim, in large part because they so fully inhabit their medium. Their characters, their stories, their worlds: all can come fully to life only in animation. Still, it’s true that some of their material did originate in other forms. The pre-Ghibli breakout feature Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, for instance, began as a comic book written and drawn by Miyazaki (who at first laid down the condition that it not be adapted for the screen). Four years later, by the time of My Neighbor Totoro, the nature of Ghibli’s visions had become inseparable from that of animation itself.
Now, almost three and a half decades after Totoro’s original release, the production of a stage version is well underway. Playbill’s Raven Brunner reports that the show “will open in London’s West End at The Barbican theatre for a 15-week engagement October 8‑January 21, 2023.
The production will be presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and executive producer Joe Hisaishi.” Japan’s most famous film composer, Hisaishi scored Totoro as well as all of Miyazaki’s other Ghibli films so far, including Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away (itself adapted for the stage in Japan earlier this year).
As you can see in the video just above, the RSC production of Totoro also involves Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. “The puppets being built at Creature Shop are based on designs created by Basil Twist, one of the UK’s most innovative puppeteers,” writes Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye, and they’ll be supplemented by the work of another master, “Mervyn Millar, of Britain’s cutting-edge Significant Object puppet studio.” Even such an assembly of puppet-making expertise will find it a formidable challenge to re-create the denizens of the enchanted countryside in which Totoro’s young protagonists find themselves — to say nothing of the titular wood spirit himself, with all his mass, mischief, and overall benevolence. As for how they’re rigging up the cat bus, Ghibli fans will have to wait until next year to find out.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Andrei Tarkovsky understood cinema in a way no filmmaker had before — and, quite possibly, in a way no filmmaker has since. That impression is reinforced by any of his films, five of which are available to watch free on Youtube. You’ll find them on the Youtube channel of Mosfilm, which was once the Soviet Union’s biggest film studio. It was for Mosfilm that Tarkovsky directed his debut feature Ivan’s Childhoodin 1962. Based on a folkloric war story by Soviet writer Vladimir Bogomolov, the film had already been made by another young director but rejected by the studio. Tarkovsky’s version both satisfied the higher-ups and, with its international success, introduced the world to his own distinctive cinematic vision.
“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me.” These are the words of Ingmar Bergman, to whom Tarkovsky would much later pay tribute with his final film, The Sacrifice, produced in Bergman’s homeland of Sweden.
But in between these films would come five others, each widely considered a masterwork in its own way. Andrei Rublev offers a Tarkovskian view of the fifteenth-century Russia inhabited by the eponymous icon painter. Solaris adapts Stanislaw Lem’s science-fiction novel of a sentient planet and its psychological manipulation of cosmonauts onboard a nearby space station.
It was with 1975’s Mirror that Tarkovsky turned inward. Drawing as deeply as possible from the artistic potential of his medium, he created a cinematic experience rich with memory, history, reality, and dreams — a kind of “poetry” in cinema, as one often hears his work described. The resulting break with many of the conventions and expectations attached to motion pictures at the time polarized critical and popular reaction. But the intervening 47 years have venerated Tarkovsky’s artistic brazenness: in Sight & Sound’s most recent 100 Greatest Films of All Time poll, Mirror came in at number nineteen, seven places higher than Andrei Rublev.
Despite having come in three spots below Andrei Rublev on the Sight & Sound poll, 1979’s Stalker is to many Tarkovsky fans far and away the auteur’s greatest achievement. Its apparently linear, vaguely science-fictional narrative presents a journey into “the Zone,” a mysterious region containing a room that grants the wishes of all who enter it. This simplistic-sounding premise belies a film of infinite depth: “I’ve seen Stalker more times than any film except The Great Escape,” writes Geoff Dyer (who once devoted an entire book to the former). “It’s never quite as I remember. Like the Zone, it’s always changing.” We watch Stalker — or indeed, anything in Tarkovsky oeuvre — not to see a movie, but to see “the reason cinema was invented.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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