Footage of Flappers from 1929 Restored & Colorized with AI

in Fashion, Film, History, Technology, Video - Politics/Society | May 4th, 2022

The flap­per is the Roar­ing 20s’ endur­ing emblem — a lib­er­at­ed, young woman with bobbed hair, rolled down stock­ings, and a pub­lic thirst for cock­tails.

(My grand­moth­er longed to be one, and suc­ceed­ed, as best one could in Cairo, Illi­nois, only to mar­ry an old­er man at the age of 17, and give birth to my father a few months before the stock mar­ket crashed, bring­ing the friv­o­li­ty of the decade to an abrupt halt.)

Our abid­ing affec­tion for the flap­per is stoked on F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s Jazz Age novel­la, The Great Gats­by, and its many stage and screen adap­ta­tions, with their depic­tions of wild par­ties fea­tur­ing guests like Miss Baedeck­er (“When she’s had five or six cock­tails she always starts scream­ing like that”) and Lucille (“I nev­er care what I do, so I always have a good time.”)


The vin­tage fash­ion blog Glam­our Daze’s new­ly col­orized footage of a 1929  fash­ion show in Buf­fa­lo, New York, at the top of this post, presents a vast­ly more sedate image than Fitzger­ald, or Ethel Hays, whose sin­gle-pan­el dai­ly car­toon Flap­per Fan­ny was wild­ly pop­u­lar with both young women and men of the time.

 

 

The scene it presents seems more whole­some than one might have found in New York City, with what Fitzger­ald dubbed its “wild promise of all the mys­tery and the beau­ty in the world”. The mod­els seem more eager ama­teurs than run­way pro­fes­sion­als, though lined up jaun­ti­ly on a wall, all exhib­it “nice stems.”

My young grand­moth­er would have gone ga ga for the cloche hats, tea dress­es, bathing suits, loung­ing paja­mas, golf and ten­nis ensem­bles, and evening gowns, though the Deep Exem­plar-based Video Col­oriza­tion process seems to have stained some mod­els’ skin and teeth by mis­take.

The orig­i­nal black and white footage is part of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Carolina’s Fox Movi­etone News col­lec­tion, whose oth­er fash­ion-relat­ed clips from 1929 include pre­sen­ta­tions fea­tur­ing Wash­ing­ton debu­tantes and col­lege coeds.

Added sound brings the peri­od to life with nary a men­tion of the Charleston or gin, though if you want a feel for 20s fash­ion, check out the col­lec­tion’s non-silent Movi­etone clip devot­ed to the lat­est in 1929 swimwear — this is a mod­ernistic beach ensem­ble of ray­on jer­sey with diag­o­nal stripes and a sun back cut…

It’s the cat’s paja­mas. As is this playlist of hits from 1929.


Explore Glam­our Daze’s guide to 1920s fash­ion his­to­ry here.

Watch the orig­i­nal black and white footage of the Buf­fa­lo, New York fash­ion show here.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Creative Animation Documents What Happened When a 1970s Self-Help Seminar Turned Into a Nightmare (NSFW)

in Film, Life | May 2nd, 2022

Self-improve­ment is a won­der­ful thing, and we obvi­ous­ly embrace the idea here at Open Cul­ture. But cor­po­rate lead­er­ship train­ings and self-help sem­i­nars can often serve to break peo­ple down rather than build them up. The cult-like men­tal­i­ty one finds in such envi­rons should not sur­prise us: 1 in 5 busi­ness lead­ers have “psy­cho­path­ic ten­den­cies”; many self-help gurus actu­al­ly do become — or start out as — nar­cis­sis­tic cult lead­ers. In the short film above by film­mak­er Joey Izzo we see one cor­po­rate lead­er­ship train­ing course that imme­di­ate­ly devolved into a night­mar­ish scene of abuse and humil­i­a­tion.

Based on an inter­view with Gene Church — a par­tic­i­pant in the 1970 four-day lead­er­ship sem­i­nar in Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia — the film mix­es ani­ma­tion, pho­tog­ra­phy, and dra­mat­ic recre­ations filmed in 16mm, por­tray­ing “an uncon­ven­tion­al Mind Dynam­ics class where par­tic­i­pants were forced to find a ‘moment of truth’ through a num­ber of degrad­ing and often vio­lent acts,” writes Rob Mun­day at Short of the Week.

Par­tic­i­pants of the men-only encounter group each paid $1000 for the priv­i­lege. All of them were dis­trib­uters of a cos­met­ics brand called Hol­i­day Mag­ic, owned by William Penn Patrick, a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire John Bircher who unsuc­cess­ful­ly ran as a Repub­li­can for gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia and who owned both Mind Dynam­ics and a cor­po­rate train­ing com­pa­ny called Lead­er­ship Dynam­ics Insti­tute.

Patrick offered his sem­i­nars both “for his peo­ple” and “who­ev­er want­ed to come,” says Church, and aimed to teach them “how to be suc­cess­ful, how to be a bet­ter hus­band, father, leader par­ent, on and on and on.” Over­promis­ing seems to be a hall­mark of fraud­u­lent self-improve­ment cours­es, and this one was no dif­fer­ent. What set it apart is the degree to which the par­tic­i­pants vol­un­tar­i­ly sub­ject­ed them­selves to what Church’s room­mate at his hotel called “a rather rough four days.” As they would learn, the true pur­pose of the course was to force its stu­dents to find their “moment of truth” through var­i­ous forms of beat­ing and tor­ture. One man was placed in a cof­fin, beat­en severe­ly, then locked in overnight; one was placed in a cage; one tied to a cross. These are just some of the hor­rors, accord­ing to the film.

Like some kind of sadis­tic Mil­gram exper­i­ment gone total­ly off the rails, the pro­gram enlist­ed all of the par­tic­i­pants to admin­is­ter beat­ings to each oth­er and pre­vent each from leav­ing. And like the Mil­gram exper­i­ment, the Mind Dynam­ics sem­i­nar stands as one of many object lessons in “the per­ils of obe­di­ence.” There are many more exam­ples of dark descents into cultish abuse in the self help world. Writer C.L. Tay­lor tells the more recent sto­ry of self-help busi­ness­man James Arthur Ray, who in 2011 was con­vict­ed of “three counts of neg­li­gent homi­cide when three peo­ple died dur­ing one of his ‘new age’ retreats.” These involved “sleep depri­va­tion, fire walk­ing, fast­ing, board break­ing and arrow break­ing,” and a sweat lodge cer­e­mo­ny that turned dead­ly.

The fact that peo­ple are often will­ing to relin­quish their auton­o­my in order grow as indi­vid­u­als says a great deal about the amount of help peo­ple per­ceive they need and the degree to which human beings can be manip­u­lat­ed by charis­mat­ic lead­ers. In most cas­es, those lead­ers have no busi­ness giv­ing advice in the first place. As one for­mer self-help “expert,” Michelle Good­man (who found her­self pushed into the are­na by her pub­lish­er) admits, “the dirty lit­tle secret of those in the advice busi­ness is that we wind up teach­ing oth­ers the lessons we most need to learn our­selves.” Her advice to those who came to her with prob­lems she could­n’t real­is­ti­cal­ly solve: “You should real­ly talk to a qual­i­fied pro­fes­sion­al about that.” To learn more about Church’s har­row­ing expe­ri­ence with Mind Dynam­ics, read his book The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Is Charles Bukows­ki a Self-Help Guru? Hear Five of His Bru­tal­ly Hon­est, Yet Odd­ly Inspir­ing, Poems and Decide for Your­self

The Sci­ence of Well-Being: Take a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale University’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Behold Octavia Butler’s Moti­va­tion­al Notes to Self

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

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Watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films Free Online: Stalker, The Mirror & Andrei Rublev

in Film | April 30th, 2022

The stench of Vladimir Putin and his inva­sion of Ukraine should­n’t taint every­thing Russ­ian, espe­cial­ly some of its finest cin­e­ma. So we’ll give you this heads up: Mos­film, the largest and old­est film stu­dio in Rus­sia, has post­ed sev­er­al major films by Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), on its offi­cial YouTube channel. Above, you can watch Stalk­er, which we’ve cov­ered amply here on Open Cul­ture. Below, stream The Mir­ror, Andrei Rublev, and Ivan’s Child­hood. Stream oth­er Mos­film movies here.

The Mir­ror

Andrei Rublev

Ivan’s Child­hood

Solaris

The Pas­sion Accord­ing to Andrei

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

Slavoj Žižek Explains the Artistry of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films: Solaris, Stalk­er & More

Watch Stalk­er, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bend­ing Mas­ter­piece Free Online

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

 

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Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Greatest Architect? –A Free Streaming Documentary

in Architecture, Film | April 27th, 2022

From Time­line comes a free stream­ing doc­u­men­tary called Frank Lloyd Wright: Amer­i­ca’s Great­est Archi­tect?: 

Frank Lloyd Wright is Amer­i­ca’s great­est ever archi­tect. But few peo­ple know about the Welsh roots that shaped his life and world-famous build­ings. Now, lead­ing Welsh archi­tect Jonathan Adams sets off across Amer­i­ca to explore Frank Lloyd Wright’s mas­ter­pieces for him­self. Along the way, he uncov­ers the tem­pes­tu­ous life sto­ry of the man behind them, and the secrets of his rad­i­cal Welsh back­ground . In a career span­ning sev­en decades, Frank Lloyd Wright built over 500 build­ings, and changed the face of mod­ern archi­tec­ture.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Amer­i­ca’s Great­est Archi­tect? will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Cre­ativ­i­ty, Nature and Reli­gion in Rare 1957 Audio

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

The Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Set

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

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In 1968, Stanley Kubrick Makes Predictions for 2001: Humanity Will Conquer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn German in 20 Minutes

in Film, Sci Fi | April 19th, 2022

kubricklist

Image by Moody Man, via Flickr Com­mons

1968. Rev­o­lu­tion was in the air and the future seemed bright. That year, Stan­ley Kubrick released his mas­ter­piece 2001: A Space Odyssey – a big-bud­get, exper­i­men­tal rumi­na­tion on the evo­lu­tion of mankind. The film was a huge box office hit when it came out; its mind-bend­ing meta­physics res­onat­ed with the culture’s new­found inter­est in chem­i­cal­ly altered states and in spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.

In the Sep­tem­ber issue from that year, Play­boy mag­a­zine pub­lished a lengthy inter­view with Kubrick. Even at a time when pub­lic fig­ures were sup­posed to sound like intel­lec­tu­als (boy, times have changed), Kubrick comes across as insane­ly well read. Dur­ing the course of the inter­view, he quotes from the likes of media crit­ic Mar­shall McLuhan, Win­ston Churchill, and 19th Cen­tu­ry poet Matthew Arnold along with a hand­ful of promi­nent aca­d­e­mics.

Kubrick is char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cagey about offer­ing any expla­na­tions of his enig­mat­ic movie but he does read­i­ly expound on philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about God, the mean­ing of life (or lack there­of) and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of extrater­res­tri­al life. But per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of the 17-page inter­view is his vision of what 2001 might look like. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to see what he got right, what might be right a bit fur­ther into the future, and what’s com­plete­ly wrong. Check them out below:

“With­in ten years, in fact, I believe that freez­ing of the dead will be a major indus­try in the Unit­ed States and through­out the world; I would rec­om­mend it as a field of invest­ment for imag­i­na­tive spec­u­la­tors.”

“Per­haps the great­est break­through we may have made by 2001 is the pos­si­bil­i­ty that man may be able to elim­i­nate old age.”

“I’m sure we’ll have sophis­ti­cat­ed 3‑D holo­graph­ic tele­vi­sion and films, and it’s pos­si­ble that com­plete­ly new forms of enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tion will be devised.”

“You might have a machine that taps the brain and ush­ers you into a vivid dream expe­ri­ence in which you are the pro­tag­o­nist in a romance or an adven­ture. On a more seri­ous lev­el, a sim­i­lar machine could direct­ly pro­gram you with knowl­edge: in this way, you might, for exam­ple, eas­i­ly be able to learn flu­ent Ger­man in 20 min­utes.”

“I believe by 2001 we will have devised chem­i­cals with no adverse phys­i­cal, men­tal or genet­ic results that can give wings to the mind and enlarge per­cep­tion beyond its present evo­lu­tion­ary capacities…there should be fas­ci­nat­ing drugs avail­able by 2001; what use we make of them will be the cru­cial ques­tion.”

“The so-called sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, mid-wifed by the pill, will be extend­ed. Through drugs, or per­haps via the sharp­en­ing or even mechan­i­cal ampli­fi­ca­tion of latent ESP func­tions, it may be pos­si­ble for each part­ner to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly expe­ri­ence the sen­sa­tions of the oth­er; or we may even­tu­al­ly emerge into poly­mor­phous sex­u­al beings, with male and female com­po­nents blur­ring, merg­ing and inter­chang­ing. The poten­tial­i­ties for explor­ing new areas of sex­u­al expe­ri­ence are vir­tu­al­ly bound­less.”

“Look­ing into the dis­tant future, I sup­pose it’s not incon­ceiv­able that a semi­sen­tient robot-com­put­er sub­cul­ture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer need­ed man.”

For such a famous­ly pes­simistic film­mak­er, Kubrick’s vision of the future is remark­ably groovy – lots of sex, drugs and holo­graph­ic tele­vi­sion. He wasn’t, of course, the only one out there who thought about the future. You can see more bold pre­dic­tions below:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Note: Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Novem­ber 2014.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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If Fritz Lang’s Iconic Film Metropolis Had a Kraftwerk Soundtrack

in Film | April 13th, 2022

The case of the copy­right his­to­ry of Fritz Lang’s influ­en­tial sci-fi mas­ter­piece Metrop­o­lis is as con­vo­lut­ed as the his­to­ry of its film print. Lang’s vision, and his orig­i­nal almost-three-hour cut was doomed to cen­sor­ship right from the start. The Nazis took out its more social­ist scenes. It’s been edit­ed, col­orized, put back togeth­er and restored. Wikipedia cur­rent­ly lists nine dif­fer­ent ver­sions. Sim­i­lar­ly, who owns the film had shift­ed from dis­trib­u­tors back to pub­lic domain, then *out* of pub­lic domain the more orig­i­nal footage was redis­cov­ered. And then comes 2023, where Metrop­o­lis will once again land in the pub­lic domain, at least in Amer­i­ca. Will we see as many legal bat­tles as we will see new remix­es and re-scores? Prob­a­bly a bit of both.

Its orig­i­nal orches­tral score is avail­able, but many fans also seek out a score more befit­ting its futur­ist ori­gins. Some­thing more elec­tron­ic.

In fact, the four-minute clip above is YouTu­ber “Kar­maGer­many’s” 2009 fan-made edit using the music of Kraftwerk. If any band of the late 20th cen­tu­ry was born to be paired with Lang’s tech­no­log­i­cal vision, it’s the Fab Four from Düs­sel­dorf. Their icy roman­tic melodies strike the right bal­ance between Metrop­o­lis’ bat­tle, then syn­the­sis, of machin­ery and the human heart. And, look Kraftwerk even cre­at­ed a song called “Metrop­o­lis,” which becomes the actu­al score above. 

Like watch­ing the Wiz­ard of Oz while Dark Side of the Moon plays, Kraftwerk’s “Metrop­o­lis” seems writ­ten for the film, with its open­ing fan­fare over the shots of the future city wak­ing up, then how it switch­es to its motorik beat as the work­ers begin their alien­at­ing fac­to­ry day. (We haven’t done a side-by-side of the extant cut of the film, so there very well may be some edit­ing at play here.)

Now, while this is just a fan’s very well made use of the band’s full cat­a­log (it dives back into the band’s spaci­er ear­ly work for the films more ten­der moment), oth­ers have gone a more offi­cial route. Kraftwerk con­tem­po­rary and mem­ber of Clus­ter, Dieter Moe­bius record­ed a four-part, 40-minute suite Musik für Metrop­o­lis. It was released posthu­mous­ly in 2015, and it is one of his spook­i­er works.

Pri­or to that, tech­no DJ and com­pos­er Jeff Mills (no rela­tion) com­posed an hour-long score in 2000 that also had its own accom­pa­ny­ing edit, and mar­ried his career in both ambi­ent and futur­is­tic elec­tron­ic beats.

If the Kraftwerk re-edit whets your tech­no whis­tle, that clip was just the open­ing scene of the 90-minute fan edit from John McWilliam. His notes: “Orig­i­nal­ly two and a half hours long it has been reduced down to one hour 23 min­utes to pace it up includ­ing remov­ing the sub­ti­tle cards between shots and plac­ing them over [the] pic­ture instead.”

The last instruc­tion from McWilliam could apply to what­ev­er score you choose, as long as it’s for Metrop­o­lis: “Best watched on a big-ass TV hooked up to a big-booty sound sys­tem.”

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

The Case for Why Kraftwerk May Be the Most Influ­en­tial Band Since the Bea­t­les

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Home Movies of Frida Kahlo (and a Side Order of Romantic Entanglements)

in Art, Film, History, Life | April 1st, 2022

Ear­ly home movies have a cer­tain pre­dictable qual­i­ty. Their sub­jects wan­der around, point­ing at things. They shoo the cam­era away with embar­rassed grins, clus­ter togeth­er awk­ward­ly, and casu­al­ly chat up their side pieces in front of their spous­es….

Wait, what now?

The vis­it between mar­ried artists Fri­da Kahlo and Diego Rivera and exiled Russ­ian Com­mu­nist leader Leon Trot­sky and his wife Natalia Sedo­va appears both cor­dial and ordi­nary in Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ivan Heisler’s footage, above.

The Trot­skys took up res­i­dence in La Casa Azul, Kahlo’s fam­i­ly home in Jan­u­ary 1937,  after Rivera per­suad­ed Pres­i­dent Lázaro Cár­de­nas to offer them sanc­tu­ary in Mex­i­co.

Short­ly after arrival, Sedo­va wrote a let­ter to friends, speak­ing warm­ly of the hos­pi­tal­i­ty she was receiv­ing:

We were breath­ing puri­fied air…A motorcar…carried us across the fields of palms and cac­ti to the sub­urbs of Mex­i­co City; a blue house, a patio filled with plants, airy rooms, col­lec­tions of Pre-Columbian art, paint­ings from all over: we were on a new plan­et, in Rivera’s house.

Heisler’s slice of life film would appear to be a con­tin­u­a­tion of this relaxed and hap­py vibe.

Trot­sky pats Rivera on the back and con­vers­es ani­mat­ed­ly with Kahlo, near­ly 30 years his junior. The two women embrace and stroll arm in arm, as the men take inter­est in a cac­tus.  Sedo­va seems  delight­ed when Rivera kiss­es her hand. Then every­one stands around and looks at trees.

Gosh, isn’t it nice when all mem­bers of two cou­ples get along so well?

Is it pos­si­ble, though, that an extra cou­ple was lurk­ing in plain sight?

Short­ly after meet­ing, Trot­sky and Kahlo entered into a brief but pas­sion­ate fling, exchang­ing sweet noth­ings in Eng­lish, con­ceal­ing love notes between the pages of books, and bor­row­ing Kahlo’s sis­ter Cristina’s house for trysts.

They called it quits in July of 1937, after Sedo­va caught on and issued her hus­band an ulti­ma­tum.

Accord­ing to the Hoover Insti­tu­tion Library and Archives, Heisler’s film was shot in 1938.

So we will amend our state­ment to say, isn’t it nice when two cou­ples get along so well, even after two of them were dis­cov­ered to be cheat­ing on their part­ners with each oth­er?

Kahlo’s and Rivera’s extra­mar­i­tal dal­liances are hard­ly news, of course.

Dan­ger­ous Minds sug­gests that part of what drew Kahlo to Trot­sky was the oppor­tu­ni­ty to get back at Rivera for his affair with Cristi­na — the sis­ter who vol­un­teered her house as love nest.

And in Van­i­ty Fair, Amy Fine Collins details how Rivera “boast­ed to any­one who would lis­ten” about Kahlo’s same sex lia­sons, but was apoplec­tic over her entan­gle­ments with men, includ­ing sculp­tor Isamu Noguchi, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Nick­o­las Muray, and Trotsky’s sec­re­tary Jean van Hei­jenoort, wit­ness to the bla­tant flir­ta­tion between the artist and his boss.

The romance with Trot­sky “infu­ri­at­ed him most” Collins writes, adding that “long after Trotsky’s assas­si­na­tion, Kahlo delight­ed in dri­ving Rivera into a rage by humil­i­at­ing him with the mem­o­ry of her affair with the great Com­mu­nist.”

…kind of makes one wish this lit­tle film had sound.

The absence of audio is also lament­ed by view­ers of this col­orized assem­blage of ama­teur footage star­ring Kahlo and Rivera.

Trot­sky appears again at the 1:03 mark. Dare we describe him as look­ing smit­ten?

There’s some spec­u­la­tion that the young woman at 1:17 is musi­cian Chavela Var­gas, anoth­er of Kahlo’s lovers. In that same moment, Kahlo proves her­self as in com­mand of her cin­e­mat­ic image as she was in her self-por­traits. She’s as self-pos­sessed as a movie star through­out.

Which makes the ear­ly glimpse of her sketch­ing en plein air in a fur coat and West­ern style hat, feet propped on a low wall, all the more dis­arm­ing.

It’s rare to see Fri­da Kahlo caught off guard, or so she appears, smil­ing and ges­tur­ing off­screen toward the osten­si­ble sub­ject of her draw­ing.

Is there a lip read­er in the house?

(Seri­ous ques­tion.)

For good mea­sure, here is even more footage — the Kahlo-Riveras at the Casa Azul, as cap­tured by Kahlo’s lover Nick­o­las Muray, whose famous 1939 por­trait of the artist in a magen­ta rebo­zo was declared “mar­velous as a Piero del­la Francesca” by her hus­band.

“To me it is more than that,” Kahlo wrote to Muray:

It is a trea­sure, and besides, it will always remind me [of] that morn­ing we had break­fast togeth­er.

Under­stand­ably, some view­ers remain dis­ap­point­ed that the snip­pets of Kahlo on film lack sound, but sure­ly the “voice” in which she wrote her many loves, Diego includ­ed, is far more expres­sive than any audio that a home movie might have cap­tured.

Which is not to say we’ll nev­er hear Fri­da. Above is a record­ing the Nation­al Sound Library of Mex­i­co believes to be her, from a radio show aired the year after her death.

The title of the text from which she is heard read­ing?

Por­trait of Diego.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Inti­ma­cy of Fri­da Kahlo’s Self-Por­traits: A Video Essay

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

What the Icon­ic Paint­ing The Two Fridas Actu­al­ly Tells Us About Fri­da Kahlo

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Fri­da Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and cre­ator, most just late­ly, of Inven­tive, Not Well-known: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Com­ply with her @AyunHalliday.

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Francis Ford Coppola Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films: The Godfather, Apocalypse Now & More

in Film | March 30th, 2022

Fifty years after its the­atri­cal release, The God­fa­ther remains a sub­ject of live­ly cinephile con­ver­sa­tion. What, as any of us might ask after a fresh semi-cen­ten­ni­al view­ing of Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s mafia mas­ter­piece, is this movie about? We need only ask Cop­po­la him­self, who has our answer in one word: suc­ces­sion. In the recent GQ inter­view above, he also explains the themes of oth­er major works with sim­i­lar suc­cinct­ness: Apoc­a­lypse Now is about moral­i­ty; The Con­ver­sa­tion is about pri­va­cy. Such clean and sim­ple encap­su­la­tions belie the nature of the film pro­duc­tion process, and espe­cial­ly that of Cop­po­la’s nine­teen-sev­en­ties pic­tures, with their large scale, seri­ous­ness of pur­pose, and prone­ness to severe dif­fi­cul­ty.

“What we con­sid­er real art is a movie that does not have a safe­ty net,” Cop­po­la says, and that applies with­out a doubt to movies like The God­fa­ther and Apoc­a­lypse Now. Much as Orson Welles once said of his own expe­ri­ence mak­ing Cit­i­zen Kane, the young Cop­po­la went into The God­fa­ther igno­rant of more or less every­thing involved in its con­tent but life in an Ital­ian-Amer­i­can fam­i­ly. But he had, in the­ater school, learned the tech­niques of “out­wit­ting the fac­ul­ty,” and deal­ing with the high­er-ups at Hol­ly­wood stu­dios turned out to require that same skill set. He thus found a way to include every ele­ment ruled insis­tent­ly out by the exec­u­tives, from New York loca­tions and a peri­od set­ting to per­form­ers like the then-unknown Al Paci­no and then-washed-up Mar­lon Bran­do.

Bran­do did­n’t take part in The God­fa­ther Part II, but he did show up at the end of Apoc­a­lypse Now for a vivid­ly mem­o­rable turn as the pow­er-mad Colonel Kurtz. As Cop­po­la remem­bers it, “when Bran­do arrived, he looked at me — he’s so smart — and he said, ‘You paint­ed your­self in a cor­ner, did­n’t you?” The actor meant that the sur­re­al qual­i­ties of the film had reached such an inten­si­ty that no con­ven­tion­al form of res­o­lu­tion could pos­si­bly suf­fice. This was the result of the fact that, as Cop­po­la puts it, “one of the things that make a movie is the movie: it con­tributes to mak­ing itself.” In oth­er words, as Cop­po­la and his col­lab­o­ra­tors shot each scene (a process that famous­ly result­ed in over one mil­lion feet of footage), the very film tak­ing shape before them sug­gest­ed its own direc­tion — in the case of Apoc­a­lypse Now, toward the ever dark­er and stranger.

Always can­did about his pro­fes­sion­al strug­gles, Cop­po­la has also been gen­er­ous with tech­ni­cal and artis­tic expla­na­tions of just how his pic­tures have come togeth­er. God­fa­ther fans will delight in his direc­tor’s-com­men­tary tracks on the first and sec­ond parts of that tril­o­gy; as for The God­fa­ther Part III, Cop­po­la released a new edit (in the man­ner of Apoc­a­lypse Now’s Redux and Final Cut) called The God­fa­ther Coda: The Death of Michael Cor­leone in 2020. He dis­cuss­es that project in the GQ inter­view, and also his work-in-progress Mega­lopo­lis. Hav­ing described The God­fa­ther as essen­tial­ly a Shake­speare­an tale, he’s now reach­ing fur­ther back in time: “Would­n’t it be inter­est­ing if you made a Roman epic but did­n’t set it in ancient Rome — set it in mod­ern New York?” He also lets us in on Mega­lopo­lis’ sur­pris­ing key word: not mega­lo­ma­nia, nor ambi­tion, nor pow­er, but sin­cer­i­ty.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Cast­ing of The God­fa­ther with Cop­po­la, Paci­no, De Niro & Caan

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

What Is Apoc­a­lypse Now Real­ly About? An Hour-Long Video Analy­sis of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Viet­nam Mas­ter­piece

How Wal­ter Murch Rev­o­lu­tion­ized the Sound of Mod­ern Cin­e­ma: A New Video Essay Explores His Inno­va­tions in Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti, The God­fa­ther & More

Great Film­mak­ers Offer Advice to Young Direc­tors: Taran­ti­no, Her­zog, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Ander­son, Felli­ni & More

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

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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