David Cronenberg Visits a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

in Film | May 19th, 2022

The excite­ment over Crimes of the Future, set to pre­miere next week at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, sug­gests that David Cro­nen­berg retains a strong fan base more than half a cen­tu­ry into his film­mak­ing career. But many of us who con­sid­er our­selves part of that fan base did­n’t dis­cov­er his work in the the­ater, much less at Cannes. Rather, we found it at the video store, ide­al­ly one that devot­ed a sec­tion specif­i­cal­ly to his work — or at least to his sig­na­ture genre of “body hor­ror,” which his films would in any case have dom­i­nat­ed. Fit­ting, then, that the new Cro­nen­berg inter­view above takes place among shelves packed with, if not the VHS tapes and Laserdiscs we grew up with, then at least DVDs and Blu-Rays.

This video comes from Kon­bi­ni, a French Youtube chan­nel whose Video Club series has brought such auteurs as Claire Denis, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ter­ry Gilliam into the hal­lowed halls of Paris’ JM Vidéo.

“They have 50,000 movies, I think,” says the inter­view­er. “That’s too many,” replies Cro­nen­berg, “so you need to give me a few.” The direc­tor of Video­drome, The Fly, and Crash turns out to have no trou­ble spot­ting and dis­cussing movies of inter­est, and the list of his picks from the stock at JM Vidéo is as fol­lows:

  • Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, La Stra­da (“the begin­ning of my entrance­ment with moviemak­ing”)
  • Ing­mar Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf  (“a beau­ti­ful movie; very much a night­mare”)
  • Roger Vadim, And God Cre­at­ed Woman (Brigitte Bar­dot “was incred­i­bly sex­u­al, beau­ti­ful — I was total­ly in love with her”)
  • Jean-Pierre and Luc Dar­d­enne, Roset­ta (which the Cro­nen­berg-led 1999 Cannes jury select­ed in “the fastest vote for the Palme d’Or ever in the his­to­ry of Cannes”)
  • Rid­ley Scott, Alien (some of whose ele­ments “are exact­ly like my very low-bud­get film Shiv­ers”)
  • Paul Ver­ho­even, Total Recall (a project for which he wrote twelve screen­play drafts, reject­ed for being “the Philip K. Dick ver­sion” rather than “Raiders of the Lost Ark go to Mars”)
  • Ken Rus­sell, Altered States (which “com­bined a strange group of peo­ple who, nor­mal­ly, you would­n’t think would make a sci­ence-fic­tion movie”)
  • Abdel­latif Kechiche, Blue Is the Warmest Col­or (“a beau­ti­ful, sexy, inter­est­ing, intense movie with young actress­es who are real­ly very good, and giv­ing every­thing,” includ­ing Crimes of the Future’s own Léa Sey­doux)
  • Olivi­er Assayas, Per­son­al Shop­per (“one of the movies that con­vinced me to ask Kris­ten Stew­art to be in Crimes of the Future”)
  • Matthieu Kasso­vitz, La Haine (his intro­duc­tion to the “fan­tas­tic emo­tion­al depth” and “intel­lect” of Vin­cent Cas­sel)
  • Julia Ducour­nau, Titane (a “very dan­ger­ous” genre pic­ture that nev­er­the­less won a Palme d’Or)
  • Richard Mar­quand, Return of the Jedi (when asked to direct it, he said, “ ‘Well, I don’t usu­al­ly direct oth­er peo­ple’s mate­r­i­al,’ and they said, ‘Good­bye‘”)
  • Bran­don Cro­nen­berg, Pos­ses­sor (“my son’s movie,” the prod­uct of “a strug­gle that remind­ed me of all the dif­fi­cul­ties I ever had mak­ing a movie”)
  • Ed Emsh­willer, Rel­a­tiv­i­ty (the kind of film that showed him “you did­n’t have to go to film school, which I nev­er did, you did­n’t have to work in the film indus­try, you could make a movie your­self just because you want­ed to make a movie”)
  • Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days (“one of the movies that con­vinced me I should work with Ralph Fiennes”)
  • Nico­las Roeg, Don’t Look Now (“a very, very strong movie, very strange, very much about death, but at first you’re not aware that that’s real­ly the sub­ject mat­ter”)

As not just a film fan but a film­mak­er, Cro­nen­berg has plen­ty of relat­ed sto­ries to tell about his own pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ences in cin­e­ma. Not all of them have to do with the pic­tures that inspired him when he was com­ing of age in the nine­teen-fifties and nine­teen-six­ties. In fact, even as he approach­es his ninth decade, he clear­ly con­tin­ues to find new ideas and col­lab­o­ra­tors in the work of emerg­ing direc­tors. Per­haps that’s one rea­son he seems uncan­ni­ly undi­min­ished here, much like this sur­vivor of a video store whose shelves he brows­es. Vive JM Vidéo, et vive Cro­nen­berg.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Last Video Store: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on How the World’s Old­est Video Store Still Sur­vives Today

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Type­writ­ers in Film & Tele­vi­sion: A Super­cut

John Lan­dis Decon­structs Trail­ers of Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Films: Cit­i­zen Kane, Sun­set Boule­vard, 2001 & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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An Architect Breaks Down the Design Details of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel

in Architecture, Film | May 17th, 2022

Wes Ander­son­’s The Grand Budapest Hotel fea­tures many notable play­ers: Willem Dafoe, Til­da Swin­ton, F. Mur­ray Abra­ham, and pre­sid­ing above all, Ralph Fiennes as cel­e­brat­ed concierge Mon­sieur Gus­tave H. But it is Gus­tave’s domain, the tit­u­lar alpine health resort, that fig­ures most promi­nent­ly in the film, tran­scend­ing place, time, and polit­i­cal regime. Such an estab­lish­ment could only exist with­in Ander­son­’s cin­e­mat­ic imag­i­na­tion, which dic­tates the man­ner in which he intro­duces it to his view­ers. “It’s obvi­ous­ly a mod­el,” says archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er in the video above. “It’s fake” — an adjec­tive that, when applied to a Wes Ander­son pro­duc­tion, can only be a com­pli­ment.

Wyet­zn­er sure­ly means it that way, giv­en how much inter­est he shows through the video in the details of the Grand Budapest Hotel as con­struct­ed and revealed, one set at a time, by Ander­son and his col­lab­o­ra­tors. Envi­sioned as a kind of “French chateau grow­ing out of the moun­tain,” the build­ing incor­po­rates a mansard roof, a “rus­ti­cat­ed base” with the look of an ancient aque­duct, and Art Nou­veau canopies of the kind still seen at the entrances of the Paris Métro.

Wyet­zn­er explains the over­all image as “one of those sana­to­ri­ums you would see in the moun­tains of Europe up until the nine­teen-thir­ties” but designed by the Seces­sion­ists, who intend­ed to “uni­fy archi­tec­ture, paint­ing, and the dec­o­ra­tive arts.”

The atri­um, the cir­cu­lar recep­tion desk, the elab­o­rate­ly mul­lioned win­dows, the palette of pinks and reds: these fea­tures under­score the tit­u­lar grandeur of the tit­u­lar hotel. (They also, like the sym­me­try of so much of its con­struc­tion, remind us whose movie we’re watch­ing.) But before long, every­thing changes: the hotel finds itself in the Sovi­et nine­teen-six­ties, topped with anten­nae, paint burnt orange and avo­ca­do green, out­fit­ted with plas­tic lam­i­nate and illu­mi­nat­ed ceil­ings. “Sovi­et archi­tec­ture has this rep­u­ta­tion for being very drab, and very sad, almost,” says Wyet­zn­er, and the “updat­ed” Grand Budapest Hotel reflects this. But the Sovi­ets were also “one of the orig­i­na­tors of mod­ernism,” a move­ment whose stern opti­mism comes through in the film’s set designs — as, faint­ly but per­sis­tent­ly, does the fin de siè­cle ele­gance of the ever-more-dis­tant past.

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.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

What’s the Big Deal About Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel? Matt Zoller Seitz’s Video Essay Explains

Acci­den­tal Wes Ander­son: Every Place in the World with a Wes Ander­son Aes­thet­ic Gets Doc­u­ment­ed by Red­dit

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Why Do Wes Ander­son Movies Look Like That?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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How Hans Zimmer Created the Otherworldly Soundtrack for Dune

in Film, Music | May 16th, 2022

Many emo­tion­al moments were made at this year’s big awards shows. The Slap, amidst so many his­toric wins; poignant trib­utes and crim­i­nal omis­sions; for­mer actor-turned-wartime-hero-pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky’s speech, the return of Louis C.K…. Everybody’s got a lot to process. Pop cul­ture can feel like a St. Vitus dance. One half-expects celebri­ties to start drop­ping from exhaus­tion. But then there’s Hans Zimmer’s Oscar accep­tance speech, deliv­ered in a white ter­ry bathrobe, a minia­ture Oscar stat­uette in his pock­et, a big goofy, 2 a.m. grin on his face. The man could not have looked more relaxed, win­ning his sec­ond Oscar 30 years after The Lion King.

Was he still in lock­down? No. On the night in ques­tion, Zim­mer was in a hotel in Ams­ter­dam, on tour with his band. “His cat­e­go­ry was among the eight that were hand­ed out before the tele­vised broad­cast began,” Yahoo reports, “but he made sure his fans knew just how thrilled he was.” Zim­mer post­ed a mini-accep­tance speech to social media. “Who else has paja­mas like this?” he joked to the oth­er musi­cians gath­ered in the room. “Actu­al­ly, let me say this, and this is for real. Had it not been for you, most of the peo­ple in this room, this would nev­er have hap­pened.” He is, as he says, “for real.”

As the musi­cians who worked with Zim­mer on his Oscar-win­ning Dune sound­track (stream it here) have gone on the record to say, the process was high­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive. “He’ll out­line the desired end result rather than pre­scrib­ing a spe­cif­ic means of get­ting there,” gui­tarist Guthrie Gov­an told The New York Times. “For one cue, he just said, ‘This needs to sound like sand.’ ” Zim­mer’s meth­ods offer new ways out of the cul-de-sac much of the cre­ative indus­try seems to find itself in, repeat­ing the same unhealthy com­pul­sions. “If some­one has a great idea,” he says, “I’m the first one to say, yes. Let’s go on that adven­ture.”

Along with col­lab­o­ra­tion, there is vision, and the willingness–as Zim­mer says in Van­i­ty Fair video inter­view at the top–to “invent instru­ments that don’t exist. Invent sounds that don’t exist.” Such future-think­ing has always char­ac­ter­ized his approach, from his synth pop and new wave work in the late 70s, includ­ing a stint killing the radio star with the Bug­gles, to his ground­break­ing film com­po­si­tion work on Rain Man, The Thin Red Line, and the grit­ty block­busters of Christo­pher Nolan. Though he’s scored action and adven­ture films unlike­ly to ever be con­sid­ered art, Zim­mer’s own way of work­ing is thor­ough­ly avant-garde.

As he tells it above, the point, in com­pos­ing for Dune, was to throw out the sci­ence fic­tion boil­er­plate, the “orches­tral sounds, roman­tic peri­od tonal­i­ties” that have dom­i­nat­ed at least since Kubrick­’s 2001. On the oth­er hand, Zim­mer says, he want­ed to get rid of mod­ern syn­co­pa­tion. “Maybe in the future, we will not have reg­u­lar beats. Maybe we will have actu­al­ly pro­gressed as human beings that we don’t need dis­co beats to enjoy our­selves,” he says laugh­ing, before going on to demon­strate how he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors cre­at­ed some of the most orig­i­nal music in film his­to­ry. Of course, the dis­co beat is com­fort­ing because it mim­ics the human heart. In mak­ing his Dune score, Zim­mer was com­pos­ing for a kind of post-human future, one dom­i­nat­ed not by award-show dra­ma but by giant sand­worms.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Exper­i­men­tal Score for the New Dune Film

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

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

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This Is Spinal Tap Will Get a Sequel 40 Years Later, Reuniting Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest & Harry Shearer

in Film, Music | May 13th, 2022

Fans of James Cameron’s Avatar are express­ing aston­ish­ment that its long-expect­ed sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, will have tak­en thir­teen years to get to the­aters. That delay, of course, is noth­ing next to the 35 years that sep­a­rat­ed Blade Run­ner and Blade Run­ner 2049, or the 36 between Top Gun and Top Gun: Mav­er­ick, which comes out next month. But the recent­ly announced sequel to This Is Spinal Tap tops them all: “Spinal Tap II will see Rob Rein­er return as both film-mak­er on and off the screen along with Michael McK­ean, Har­ry Shear­er, and Christo­pher Guest,” writes the Guardian’s Ben­jamin Lee. “The film will be released in 2024 on the 1984 orig­i­nal’s 40th anniver­sary.”

Crit­ics praised This Is Spinal Tap back in 1984, but it took time to become a revered clas­sic of the impro­vised-mock­u­men­tary genre. In fact that genre had­n’t exist at all, which result­ed in some view­ers not quite get­ting the joke. “When the film first came out, we showed it in Dal­las and peo­ple came up to me and said, why would you make a movie about a band nobody’s ever heard of?” says direc­tor Rob Rein­er. “And one that’s so bad?”

Or as Christo­pher Guest remem­bers a cou­ple girls at the con­ces­sion counter observ­ing: “These guys are so stu­pid.” The befud­dle­ment extend­ed even to col­lab­o­ra­tors in the film­mak­ing process: “I don’t under­stand this,” said cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Peter Smok­ler, who’d worked on the Alta­mont doc­u­men­tary Gimme Shel­ter. “This isn’t fun­ny. This is exact­ly what they do.”

Such reac­tions pay indi­rect but great trib­ute to the painstak­ing craft and obser­va­to­ry wit of Spinal Tap’s cre­ators. Those cre­ators — Rein­er, Guest, Michael McK­ean, and Har­ry Shear­er — tell these sto­ries in the Today inter­view above, con­duct­ed in 2019 to mark This Is Spinal Tap’s 35th anniver­sary. In that time they’d occa­sion­al­ly reunit­ed as Spinal Tap for live per­for­mances and real albums, the last of which came out in 2009. Per­haps that’s kept them ready to get back into char­ac­ter, pitch-per­fect Eng­lish accents and all, and put on — as they’ll be forced to in a plot shaped by real­is­tic-sound­ing music-indus­try vagaries — one last con­cert. But like any belat­ed sequel, it brings pro­por­tion­al­ly inflat­ed fan expec­ta­tions: specif­i­cal­ly, about whether they’ll be able to go up to twelve.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ori­gins of Spinal Tap: Watch the 20 Minute Short Film Cre­at­ed to Pitch the Clas­sic Mock­u­men­tary

The Spinal Tap Stone­henge Deba­cle

Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel Pro­motes World’s Largest Online Gui­tar Les­son

Ian Rub­bish (aka Fred Armisen) Inter­views the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mock­u­men­tary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Quentin Tarantino Names His 20 Favorite Movies, Covering Two Decades

in Film | May 12th, 2022

Quentin Taran­ti­no’s film­mak­ing career began thir­ty years ago — at least if you place its start­ing point at his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in 1992. But even then he had been work­ing toward auteur­hood for quite some time, a peri­od char­ac­ter­ized by projects like My Best Friend’s Birth­day, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Through­out the three decades since he hit it big, there can be no doubt that Taran­ti­no has con­sis­tent­ly made just the films he him­self has most want­ed to see. But he’s also remained a suf­fi­cient­ly hon­est cinephile to admit that oth­er direc­tors have made films he would have want­ed to make: Fukasaku Kin­ji, for instance, whose Bat­tle Royale he prais­es in just such per­son­al terms in the video above.

In six min­utes Taran­ti­no runs down the list of his twen­ty favorite movies between 1992, when he became a direc­tor, and 2009. After giv­ing pride of place to Bat­tle Royale — a Japan­ese comedic thriller of high-school ultra­vi­o­lence that set off a wave of trans­gres­sive thrill through a world­wide “cult” audi­ence — he presents his choic­es in alpha­bet­i­cal rather than pref­er­en­tial order. The com­plete list runs as fol­lows:

  • Fukasaku Kin­ji, Bat­tle Royale
  • Woody Allen, Any­thing Else (“the Jason Big­gs one”)
  • Miike Takashi, Audi­tion
  • Tsui Hark, The Blade
  • Paul Thomas Ander­son, Boo­gie Nights
  • Richard Lin­klater, Dazed and Con­fused (“the great­est hang­out movie ever made”)
  • Lars von Tri­er, Dogville
  • David Finch­er, Fight Club
  • F. Gary Gray, Fri­day
  • Bong Joon-ho, The Host
  • Michael Mann, The Insid­er
  • Park Chan-wook, Joint Secu­ri­ty Area
  • Sofia Cop­po­la, Lost in Trans­la­tion
  • The Wachowskis, The Matrix (though its sequels “ruined the mythol­o­gy for me”)
  • Bong Joon-ho, Mem­o­ries of Mur­der
  • Stan­ley Tong, Police Sto­ry 3/Super­cop (con­tains “the great­est stunts ever filmed in any movie”)
  • Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead
  • Jan de Bont, Speed (there have been “few exhil­a­ra­tion movies quite like it”)
  • Trey Park­er and Matt Stone, Team Amer­i­ca: World Police
  • M. Night Shya­malan, Unbreak­able

Taran­ti­no may refer to Shya­malan as “M. Night Shamala­mad­ing­dong,” but he clear­ly has a good deal of respect for the man’s films. And he seems to have even more for Bruce Willis’ work in Unbreak­able, which con­tains his “best per­for­mance on film” — bet­ter, evi­dent­ly, than the not-incon­sid­er­able one he gave in a nine­teen-nineties hit called Pulp Fic­tion.

It comes as no sur­prise that Taran­ti­no names movies by his peers in the “Indiewood” gen­er­a­tion like Ander­son, Lin­klater, and Cop­po­la. But watched thir­teen years lat­er, this video also sug­gests a cer­tain cin­e­mat­ic pre­science on his part. Speed, for exam­ple, once seemed like a brain-dead block­buster but now stands as a clas­sic of Los Ange­les cin­e­ma. And we’d do well to remem­ber how far ahead of his peers Taran­ti­no was in his con­scious­ness of Asian cin­e­ma. That we all watch films from Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea today owes some­thing to Taran­ti­no’s advo­ca­cy. More than a decade before Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site dom­i­nat­ed the Acad­e­my Awards, Taran­ti­no gave him alone not one but two entries on this top-twen­ty list — which sure­ly makes up for his obvi­ous­ly hav­ing for­got­ten Bong’s name.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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The Forgotten Women of Surrealism: A Magical, Short Animated Film

in Art, Film | May 12th, 2022

“The prob­lem of woman is the most mar­velous and dis­turb­ing prob­lem in all the world,” — Andre Bre­ton, 1929 Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo.

“I warn you, I refuse to be an object.” — Leono­ra Car­ring­ton

Fash­ion mod­el, writer, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lee Miller had many lives. Dis­cov­ered by Condé Nast in New York (when he pulled her out of the path of traf­fic), she became a famous face of Vogue in the 1920s, then launched her own pho­to­graph­ic career, for which she has been just­ly cel­e­brat­ed: both for her work in the fash­ion world and on the bat­tle­fields (and Hitler’s tub!) in World War II. One of Miller’s achieve­ments often gets left out in men­tions of her life, the Sur­re­al­ist work she cre­at­ed as an artist in the 1930s.

Hailed as a “leg­endary beau­ty,” writes the Nation­al Gal­leries of Scot­land, Miller stud­ied act­ing, dance, and exper­i­men­tal the­ater. “She learned pho­tog­ra­phy first through being a sub­ject for the most impor­tant fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers of her day, includ­ing Nick­o­las Muray, Arnold Gen­the and Edward Ste­ichen.” Her appren­tice­ship and affair with Man Ray is, of course, well-known. But rather than call­ing Miller an active par­tic­i­pant in his art and her own (she co-cre­at­ed the “solar­iza­tion” process he used, for exam­ple) she’s most­ly referred to only as his muse, lover, and favorite sub­ject.

“Sur­re­al­ism had a very high pro­por­tion of women mem­bers who were at the heart of the move­ment, but who often get cast as ‘muse of’ or ‘wife of,’ ” says Susan­na Greeves, cura­tor of an all-women Sur­re­al­ist exhib­it in South Lon­don. The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of women Sur­re­al­ists is not a his­tor­i­cal over­sight, many crit­ics and schol­ars con­tend, but a cen­tral fea­ture of the move­ment itself. When British Sur­re­al­ist Eileen Agar said in a 1990 inter­view, “In those days, men thought of women sim­ply as mus­es,” she was too polite by half.

Despite their rad­i­cal pol­i­tics, male Sur­re­al­ists per­fect­ed turn­ing women into dis­fig­ured objects. “While Dalí used the female fig­ure in opti­cal puz­zles, Magritte paint­ed porni­fied faces with breasts for eyes, and Ernst sim­ply decap­i­tat­ed them,” Izabel­la Scott writes at Art­sy. Sur­re­al­ist artist René Crev­el wrote in 1934, “the Noble Man­nequin is so per­fect. She does not always both­er to take her head, arms and legs with her.” Edgar Allan Poe’s love for “beau­ti­ful dead girls” esca­lat­ed into dis­mem­ber­ment.

Dalí employed no lyri­cal obfus­ca­tion in his thoughts on the place of women in the move­ment. He called his con­tem­po­rary, Argentine/Italian artist Leonor Fini (who nev­er con­sid­ered her­self a Sur­re­al­ist), “bet­ter than most, per­haps.” Then he felt com­pelled to add, “but tal­ent is in the balls.”

When writ­ing her dis­ser­ta­tion on Sur­re­al­ism in the 1970s at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Glo­ria Feman Oren­stein found that all of the women had been total­ly left out of the record. So she found them — track­ing down and becom­ing “a close friend to many influ­en­tial female sur­re­al­ists,” notes Aeon, “includ­ing Leono­ra Car­ring­ton and Meret Elis­a­beth Oppeneim” (anoth­er Man Ray mod­el and the only Sur­re­al­ist of any gen­der to have actu­al train­ing and expe­ri­ence in psy­cho­analy­sis).

Through her research, Oren­stein “became the aca­d­e­m­ic voice of fem­i­nist sur­re­al­ism,” recov­er­ing the work of artists who had always been part of the move­ment, but who had been shoul­dered aside by male con­tem­po­raries, lovers, and hus­bands who did not see them on equal terms. In the short film above, Glo­ri­a’s Call, L.A.-based artist Cheri Gaulke “man­i­fests Oren­stein’s jour­ney into the sur­re­al with col­lage-like ani­ma­tions.” It was a quest that took her around the world, from Paris to Sami­land, and it began in Mex­i­co City, where she met the great Leono­ra Car­ring­ton.

See how Oren­stein not only redis­cov­ered the women of Sur­re­al­ism, but helped recov­er the essen­tial roots of Sur­re­al­ism in Latin Amer­i­ca, also erased by the art his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship of her time. And learn more about the artists she befriend­ed and brought to light at Art­space and in Pene­lope Rose­mon­t’s 1998 book, Sur­re­al­ist Women: An Inter­na­tion­al Anthol­o­gy.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch His Appear­ances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view (1958)

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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

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Hayao Miyazaki, The Mind of a Master: A Thoughtful Video Essay Reveals the Driving Forces Behind the Animator’s Incredible Body of Work

in Animation, Film | May 9th, 2022

“If the cin­e­ma, by some twist of fate, were to be deprived overnight of the sound track and to become once again the art of silent cin­e­matog­ra­phy that it was between 1895 and 1930, I tru­ly believe most of the direc­tors in the field would be com­pelled to take up some new line of work.” So wrote François Truf­faut in the nine­teen-six­ties, argu­ing that, of film­mak­ers then liv­ing, only Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitch­cock could sur­vive such a return to silence. Alas, Truf­faut died in 1984, the very same year that saw the release of Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind, the first ani­mat­ed fea­ture by what would become Stu­dio Ghi­b­li. Had he lived longer, he would cer­tain­ly have had to grant its mas­ter­mind Hayao Miyaza­ki pride of place in his small cat­a­log of mas­ter visu­al sto­ry­tellers.

“He does­n’t actu­al­ly write a script,” says Any-Mation Youtu­ber Cole Delaney in “Hayao Miyaza­ki: The Mind of a Mas­ter,” the video essay above. “He might write an out­line with his plan for a fea­ture, but gen­er­al­ly he draws an image and works from there.”

My Neigh­bor Totoro, for instance, began with only the image of a young girl and the tit­u­lar for­est crea­ture stand­ing at a bus stop; from that artis­tic seed every­thing else grew, like the enor­mous tree that Totoro and the chil­dren make grow in the film itself. Delaney also explores oth­er essen­tial aspects of Miyaza­k­i’s process, includ­ing the cre­ation of full worlds with dis­tinc­tive funi­ki, or ambi­ence; the incor­po­ra­tion of Ozu-style “pil­low shots” to shape a film’s space and rhythm; and the cre­ation of pro­tag­o­nists whose strong will trans­lates direct­ly into phys­i­cal motion.

“What dri­ves the ani­ma­tion is the will of the char­ac­ters,” says Miyaza­ki him­self, in a clip Delaney bor­rows from the NHK doc­u­men­tary 10 Years with Hayao Miyaza­ki. “You don’t depict fate, you depict will.” The mas­ter makes oth­er obser­va­tions on his work and life itself, which one sens­es he regards as one and the same. “I want to make a film that won’t shame me,” he says by way of explain­ing his noto­ri­ous per­fec­tion­ism. “I want to stay grumpy,” he says by way of explain­ing his equal­ly noto­ri­ous demeanor in the Ghi­b­li office. As for “the notion that one’s goal in life is to be hap­py, that your own hap­pi­ness is the goal… I just don’t buy it.” Rather, peo­ple must  “live their lives ful­ly, with all their might, with­in their giv­en bound­aries, in their own era.” The sur­pass­ing vital­i­ty of his films reflects his own: “Like it or not,” he says, “a film is a reflec­tion of its direc­tor,” and in these words Truf­faut would sure­ly rec­og­nize a fel­low auteurist-auteur.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy of Hayao Miyaza­ki: A Video Essay on How the Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Reli­gion Shin­to Suf­fus­es Miyazaki’s Films

Watch Hayao Miyaza­ki Ani­mate the Final Shot of His Final Fea­ture Film, The Wind Ris­es

What Made Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Ani­ma­tor Isao Taka­ha­ta (RIP) a Mas­ter: Two Video Essays

How Mas­ter Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Satoshi Kon Pushed the Bound­aries of Mak­ing Ani­me: A Video Essay

The Aes­thet­ic of Ani­me: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tra­di­tion of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion Direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki Shows Us How to Make Instant Ramen

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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 or on Face­book.

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How Postwar Italian Cinema Created La Dolce Vita and Then the Paparazzi

in Film, History, Media | May 4th, 2022

Those who love the work of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni must envy any­one who sees La Dolce Vita for the first time. But today such a view­er, how­ev­er over­whelmed by the lav­ish cin­e­mat­ic feast laid before his eyes, will won­der if giv­ing the intru­sive tabloid pho­tog­ra­ph­er friend of Mar­cel­lo Mas­troian­ni’s pro­tag­o­nist the name “Paparaz­zo” isn’t a bit on the nose. Unlike La Dolce Vita’s first audi­ences in 1960, we’ve been hear­ing about real-life paparazzi through­out most all of our lives, and thus may not real­ize that the word itself orig­i­nal­ly derives from Fellini’s mas­ter­piece. Each time we refer to the paparazzi, we pay trib­ute to Paparaz­zo.

In the video essay above, Evan Puschak (bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer) traces the ori­gins of paparazzi: not just the word, but the often both­er­some pro­fes­sion­als denot­ed by the word. The sto­ry begins with the dic­ta­tor Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, an “avid movie fan and fan­boy of film stars” who wrote “more than 100 fawn­ing let­ters to Amer­i­can actress Ani­ta Page, includ­ing sev­er­al mar­riage pro­pos­als.” Know­ing full well “the emo­tion­al pow­er of cin­e­ma as a tool for pro­pa­gan­da and build­ing cul­tur­al pres­tige,” Mus­soli­ni com­mis­sioned the con­struc­tion of Rome’s Cinecit­tà, the largest film-stu­dio com­plex in Europe when it opened in 1937 — six years before his fall from pow­er.

Dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, Cinecit­tà became a vast refugee camp. When peace­time returned, with “the stu­dio space being used and Mus­solin­i’s thumb removed, a new wave of film­mak­ers took to the streets of Rome to make movies about real life in post­war Italy.” Thus began the age of Ital­ian Neo­re­al­ism, which brought forth such now-clas­sic pic­tures as Rober­to Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Vit­to­rio De Sica’s Bicy­cle Thieves. In the nine­teen-fifties, major Amer­i­can pro­duc­tions start­ed com­ing to Rome: Quo Vadis, Roman Hol­i­day, Ben-Hur, Cleopa­tra. (It was this era, sure­ly, that inspired an eleven-year-old named Mar­tin Scors­ese to sto­ry­board a Roman epic of his own.) All of this cre­at­ed an era known as “Hol­ly­wood on the Tiber.”

For a few years, says Puschak, “the Via Vene­to was the coolest place in the world.” Yet “while the glit­terati cavort­ed in chic bars and clubs, thou­sands of oth­ers strug­gled to find their place in the post­war econ­o­my.” Some turned to tourist pho­tog­ra­phy, and “soon found they could make even more mon­ey snap­ping pho­tos of celebri­ties.” It was the most noto­ri­ous of these, the “Volpe di via Vene­to” Tazio Sec­chiaroli, to whom Felli­ni reached out ask­ing for sto­ries he could include in the film that would become La Dolce Vita. The new­ly chris­tened paparazzi were soon seen as the only ones who could bring “the gods of our cul­ture down to the messy earth.” These six decades lat­er, of course, celebri­ties do it to them­selves, social media hav­ing turned each of us — famous or oth­er­wise — into our own Paparaz­zo.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“The Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse”: A Video Essay on How Films Cin­e­ma­tize Cities & Places, from Man­hat­tan to Nashville, Rome, Open City to Taipei Sto­ry

Fed­eri­co Felli­ni Intro­duces Him­self to Amer­i­ca in Exper­i­men­tal 1969 Doc­u­men­tary

Cin­e­mat­ic Exper­i­ment: What Hap­pens When The Bicy­cle Thief’s Direc­tor and Gone With the Wind’s Pro­duc­er Edit the Same Film

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

Mus­soli­ni Sends to Amer­i­ca a Hap­py Mes­sage, Full of Friend­ly Feel­ings, in Eng­lish (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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