The Grateful Dead Movie: Watch It Free Online

in Film, Music | October 4th, 2020

The Grate­ful Dead Movie doc­u­ments “a tour-end­ing five night stand at the Win­ter­land Ball­room in Octo­ber 1974. These were their last shows with the Wall of Sound, and the film includes amaz­ing per­for­mances of many favorites like One More Sat­ur­day Night, Goin’ Down The Road Feel­in’ Bad, Truckin’, Sug­ar Magnolia/Sunshine Day­dream, Stel­la Blue, Casey Jones, and Morn­ing Dew.”

Enjoy it online, rather than hav­ing to drop $90 for a DVD. The Grate­ful Dead Movie 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.

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 Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played by Musi­cians Around the World

Every Grate­ful Dead Song Anno­tat­ed in Hyper­text: Web Project Reveals the Deep Lit­er­ary Foun­da­tions of the Dead’s Lyrics

10,173 Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Record­ings in the Inter­net Archive

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What Would the World of Charlie Chaplin Look Like in Color?: Watch a Colorfully Restored Version of A Night at the Show (1915)

in Film | September 30th, 2020

When we imag­ine Char­lie Chap­lin, we imag­ine a man some­how exist­ing in black-and-white. The obvi­ous rea­son is that he became not just a movie star but a cul­tur­al icon in the 1910s and 20s, the era before sound came to the movies, let alone col­or. But to attain such suc­cess required skills tai­lored to the state of the medi­um at the time: that of mak­ing peo­ple laugh with­out say­ing a word, of course, but also of craft­ing an image instant­ly rec­og­niz­able in mono­chrome. Thus we don’t always feel we’re see­ing the “real” Char­lie Chap­lin in tech­ni­cal­ly more real­is­tic col­or pho­tographs, or even col­orized ones. But what would it feel like to watch one of his clas­sic come­dies in col­or?

You can find out by watch­ing the col­orized ver­sion of A Night in the Show above. Orig­i­nal­ly released in 1915, the 25-minute short was direct­ed by and stars Chap­lin, who plays the dual role of char­ac­ters called Mr. Pest and Mr. Row­dy. Both attend the same music-hall per­for­mance, and though Mr. Pest is of the upper crust and Mr. Row­dy is a work­ing man, both get equal­ly ine­bri­at­ed, their dis­parate social class­es pro­duc­ing dif­fer­ent styles of mis­chief-mak­ing.

The Eng­lish-born Chap­lin had pre­vi­ous­ly devel­oped these char­ac­ters on stage, hav­ing played the music-hall cir­cuit him­self since ado­les­cence. Safe to say that, by the time Hol­ly­wood came call­ing, he’d seen far worse than Pest and Row­dy him­self.

The qual­i­ty of this col­oriza­tion will per­haps not win the con­tro­ver­sial process any new con­verts, but it does give us a sense of what an evening at an Eng­lish music hall of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry would actu­al­ly have looked like, a valu­able re-cre­ation now that none of us have mem­o­ries of this once-com­mon expe­ri­ence. We can more eas­i­ly imag­ine the kind of spec­ta­cles such estab­lish­ments would have offered, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to snake-charm­ing and bursts of fire, as well as its ram­shackle exag­ger­a­tions that Chap­lin so ener­get­i­cal­ly sat­i­rizes. We could also con­sid­er this his vale­dic­tion to that envi­ron­ment: the pre­vi­ous year’s-intro­duced the Tramp, who would go on to become his most beloved char­ac­ter of all, ensured that he would soon be able to put the music hall behind him for­ev­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

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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Mulan Re-Disneyfied: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#62) Discussion with Actor Michael Tow

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 30th, 2020

Is the new Mulan the equiv­a­lent for Asian-Amer­i­cans what Black Pan­ther was for African-Amer­i­cans? The largest enter­tain­ment machine we have fea­tured an all-Asian cast telling a tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese sto­ry aimed at the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence. Did it work?

Actor Michael Tow joins your hosts Eri­ca Spyres, Mark Lin­sen­may­er, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the devel­op­ment, aes­thet­ics, and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing the film. The vision of fem­i­nism changed between the orig­i­nal poem from ca. 550 C.E. (“When the two rab­bits run side by side, how can you tell the female from the male?”) to the present, and the “just be you” eth­ic (with your mag­i­cal chi!) is not the norm for Chi­na in any peri­od. Was the project in its very con­cep­tion doomed to fall short of some of its goals? Was the live-action an improve­ment over the 1998 ani­mat­ed ver­sion?

Read the poem, and watch a read­ing of the illus­trat­ed 1998 Robert San Souci book Fa Mulan that the films were based on. There have been many adap­ta­tions of the sto­ry in Chi­na.

Oth­er sources we read to pre­pare includ­ed:

Fol­low Michael on Twit­ter @michaelctow and check out his imdb cred­its. Michael host­ed a Q&A with the Mulan cast short­ly after the film’s release.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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How Storyboarding Works: A Brief Introduction to How Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson & Other Directors Storyboard Their Films

in Art, Film | September 29th, 2020

When you’re mak­ing a film with com­plex shots or sequences of shots, it does­n’t hurt to have sto­ry­boards. Though pro­fes­sion­al sto­ry­board artists do exist, they don’t come cheap, and in any case they con­sti­tute one more play­er in the game of tele­phone between those who’ve envi­sioned the final cin­e­mat­ic prod­uct and the col­lab­o­ra­tors essen­tial to real­iz­ing it. It thus great­ly behooves aspir­ing direc­tors to devel­op their draw­ing skills, though you hard­ly need to be a full-fledged drafts­man like Rid­ley Scott or even a pro­fi­cient com­ic artist like Bong Joon-ho for your work to ben­e­fit from sto­ry­board­ing.

You do, how­ev­er, need to under­stand the lan­guage of sto­ry­board­ing, essen­tial­ly a means of trans­lat­ing the rich lan­guage of cin­e­ma into fig­ures (stick fig­ures if need be), rec­tan­gles, and arrows — lots of arrows. Draw­ing on exam­ples from Star Wars and Juras­sic Park to Taxi Dri­ver and The Big Lebows­ki, the Rock­etJump Film School video above explains how sto­ry­boards work in less than ten min­utes.

As sto­ry­board artist Kevin Sen­za­ki explains how these draw­ings visu­al­ize a film in advance of and as a guide for film­mak­ing process, we see a vari­ety of sto­ry­boards rang­ing from crude sketch­es to near­ly com­ic book-lev­el detail, all com­pared to cor­re­spond­ing clips from the fin­ished pro­duc­tion.

These exam­ples come from the work of such direc­tors as Alfred Hitch­cock, Mar­tin Scors­ese, James Cameron, Wes Ander­son, and Christo­pher Nolan — all of whose films, you’ll notice, have no slight visu­al ambi­tions. When a shot or sequence requires seri­ous visu­al effects work, or even when a cam­era has to make just the right move to advance the action, sto­ry­boards are prac­ti­cal­ly essen­tial. Not that every suc­cess­ful direc­tor uses them: no less an auteur than Wern­er Her­zog has called sto­ry­boards “the instru­ments of the cow­ards,” those who can’t han­dle the spon­tane­ity of either film­mak­ing or life itself. Rather, he tells aspir­ing direc­tors to “read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read… read, read… read.” But then so did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, who did­n’t just draw his movies in advance — he paint­ed them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

How the Coen Broth­ers Sto­ry­board­ed Blood Sim­ple Down to a Tee (1984)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Paint­ed the Sto­ry­boards For Scenes in His Epic Films: Com­pare Can­vas to Cel­lu­loid

How Bong Joon-ho’s Sto­ry­boards for Par­a­site (Now Pub­lished as a Graph­ic Nov­el) Metic­u­lous­ly Shaped the Acclaimed Film

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

Down­load New Sto­ry­board­ing Soft­ware That’s Free & Open Source

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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Understanding Chris Marker’s Radical Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Distributed to High Schools in the 1970s

in Education, Film | September 25th, 2020

Pop quiz, hot shot. World War III has dev­as­tat­ed civ­i­liza­tion. As a pris­on­er of sur­vivors liv­ing beneath the ruins of Paris, you’re made to go trav­el back in time, to the era of your own child­hood, in order to secure aid for the present from the past. What do you do? You prob­a­bly nev­er faced this ques­tion in school — unless you were in one of the class­rooms of the 1970s that received the study guide for Chris Mark­er’s La Jetée. Like the inno­v­a­tive 1962 sci­ence-fic­tion short itself, this edu­ca­tion­al pam­phlet was dis­trib­uted (and recent­ly tweet­ed out again) by Janus Films, the com­pa­ny that first brought to Amer­i­can audi­ences the work of auteurs like Ing­mar Bergman, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa.

Writ­ten by Con­necti­cut prep-school teacher Tom Andrews, this study guide describes La Jetée as “a bril­liant mix­ture of fan­ta­sy and pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic romance” that “explores new dra­mat­ic ter­ri­to­ry and forms, and rush­es with a stun­ning log­ic and a pow­er­ful impact to its shock­ing cli­max.”

The film does all this “almost entire­ly in still pho­tographs, their sta­t­ic state cor­re­spond­ing to the strat­i­fi­ca­tion of mem­o­ry.” More prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, at “twen­ty-sev­en min­utes in length, La Jetée is an ide­al class-peri­od vehi­cle” that “can help stu­dents spec­u­late on the awe­some poten­tial of life as it may exist after a third world war” as well as “man’s inhu­man­i­ty to man, not only as it may occur in the future, but as it already has occurred in our past.”

“Why do you sup­pose Mark­er filmed La Jetée in still pho­tographs? What sig­nif­i­cance does the one moment of live action have?” “How does Mark­er’s con­cept of time and space com­pare with that of H.G. Wells in the lat­ter’s nov­el, The Time Machine?” “If the man of this sto­ry has helped his cap­tors to per­fect the tech­nique of time trav­el, why do they wish to liq­ui­date him?” These and oth­er sug­gest­ed dis­cus­sion ques­tions appear at the end of the study guide, all of whose pages you can read at Socks. It was pro­duced for Films for Now and The Human Con­di­tion, “two reper­to­ries for high school assem­blies and group dis­cus­sions” based on Janus’ for­mi­da­ble cin­e­ma library. (François Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows also looks to have been among their edu­ca­tion­al offer­ings.) You can see fur­ther analy­sis of La Jetée in A.O. Scot­t’s New York Times Crit­ics’ Picks video, as well as the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion video essay Echo Cham­ber: Lis­ten­ing to La Jetée.

Much lat­er, in the mid-1990s, Ter­ry Gilliam would pay trib­ute with his Hol­ly­wood homage 12 Mon­keys, and Mark­er him­self still had many films to make, includ­ing his sec­ond mas­ter­piece, the equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al Sans Soleil. But at time of this study guide’s pub­li­ca­tion, La Jetée’s con­sid­er­able influ­ence had only just begun to man­i­fest. It was around then that pio­neer­ing cyber­punk nov­el­ist William Gib­son viewed the film in col­lege. “I left the lec­ture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, pro­found­ly alone,” he lat­er remem­bered. “My sense of what sci­ence fic­tion could be had been per­ma­nent­ly altered.” Per­haps his instruc­tor heed­ed Andrews’ advice that “teach­ers would prob­a­bly do bet­ter not to ‘pre­pare’ their stu­dents for view­ing this film.” Not that any­one, in the 58 years of the film’s exis­tence, has any­one ever tru­ly been pre­pared for their first view­ing of La Jetée.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci­Fi Film, La Jetée, Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet, William Gib­son

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

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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Watch Chilling Footage of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Bombings in Restored Color

in Film, History | September 24th, 2020

“You saw noth­ing in Hiroshi­ma. Noth­ing,” says Eiji Oka­da in the open­ing of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshi­ma mon amour. “I saw every­thing,” replies Emmanuelle Riva. “Every­thing.” The film goes on to show the effects of the Amer­i­can atom­ic-bomb attack that dev­as­tat­ed the tit­u­lar city near­ly fif­teen years before. This was the first many view­ers had seen of the lega­cy of that unprece­dent­ed act of destruc­tion, and now, six decades lat­er, the cul­tur­al image of Hiroshi­ma has con­flat­ed Resnais’ stark French New Wave vision with actu­al wartime doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als. By now, we’ve all seen con­tem­po­rary pho­tographs (and even film clips) of the fate of Hiroshi­ma and sub­se­quent­ly atom­ic-bombed Nagasa­ki. Can we regard this world-his­toric destruc­tion with fresh eyes?

A Youtu­ber known as Rick88888888 offers one way of poten­tial­ly doing so: almost half an hour of col­orized (as well as motion-sta­bi­lized, de-noised, and oth­er­wise enhanced) footage of not just the explo­sions them­selves, but the ruined Japan­ese cities and their strug­gling sur­vivors, the air­planes that per­formed the bomb­ing, and the Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent who ordered it. “The Japan­ese began the war from the air at Pearl Har­bor,” says Har­ry Tru­man in a broad­cast on August 6, 1945, the day of the attack on Hiroshi­ma. “They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet.” From the Pres­i­dent, the Amer­i­can pub­lic first learned of the devel­op­ment of an atom­ic bomb, “a har­ness­ing of the basic pow­er of the uni­verse. The force from which the sun draws its pow­er has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

As we know now, this was the fruit of the Man­hat­tan Project, the secret U.S.-led research-and-devel­op­ment effort that cre­at­ed the first nuclear weapons. Its suc­cess, Tru­man says, pre­pared the Allies to “oblit­er­ate more rapid­ly and com­plete­ly every pro­duc­tive enter­prise the Japan­ese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their fac­to­ries, and their com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Let there be no mis­take; we shall com­plete­ly destroy Japan’s pow­er to make war.” That they did, although mil­i­tary his­to­ri­ans argue about about the jus­ti­fi­a­bil­i­ty of drop­ping “the bomb” as well as the exact extent it played in the ulti­mate Allied vic­to­ry. But nobody can argue with the strik­ing vivid­ness of these “col­or” motion pic­tures of the event itself and its after­math, which reminds us that the era of poten­tial nuclear anni­hi­la­tion does­n’t belong to the dis­tant past — rather, it’s a chap­ter of his­to­ry that has only just begun.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J. Robert Oppen­heimer Explains How He Recit­ed a Line from Bha­gavad Gita–“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroy­er of Worlds”–Upon Wit­ness­ing the First Nuclear Explo­sion

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

The “Shad­ow” of a Hiroshi­ma Vic­tim, Etched into Stone Steps, Is All That Remains After 1945 Atom­ic Blast

Hiroshi­ma After the Atom­ic Bomb in 360 Degrees

Way of Life: Rare Footage of the Hiroshi­ma After­math, 1946

Pho­tos of Hiroshi­ma by Hiroshi­ma Mon Amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

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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30 Buster Keaton Films: “The Greatest of All Comic Actors,” “One of the Greatest Filmmakers of All Time”

in Film | September 22nd, 2020

The great­est of the silent clowns is Buster Keaton, not only because of what he did, but because of how he did it. —Roger Ebert

In 1987, Video mag­a­zine pub­lished a sto­ry titled “Where’s Buster?” lament­ing the lack of Buster Keaton films avail­able on video­tape, “despite renewed inter­est” in a leg­end who was “about to regain his right­ful place next to Chap­lin in silent comedy’s pan­theon.” How things have changed for Keaton fans and admir­ers. Not only are most of the stone-faced com­ic genius’ films avail­able online, but he has maybe eclipsed Chap­lin as the most pop­u­lar­ly revered silent film star of the 1920s.

Keaton has always been held in the high­est esteem by his fel­low artists. He was dubbed “the great­est of all the clowns in the his­to­ry of the cin­e­ma” by Orson Welles, and served as a sig­nif­i­cant inspi­ra­tion for Samuel Beck­ett. (He was the playwright’s first choice to play Wait­ing for Godot’s Lucky, though he was too per­plexed by the script to take the role). In Peter Bogdanovich’s new doc­u­men­tary, The Great Buster: A Cel­e­bra­tion, Mel Brooks and Carl Rein­er dis­cuss his foun­da­tion­al influ­ence on their com­e­dy, and Wern­er Her­zog calls him “the essence of movies.”

For many years, how­ev­er, the state of Keaton’s fil­mog­ra­phy made it hard for the gen­er­al pub­lic to ful­ly appraise his work. “The Gen­er­al, with Buster as a train engi­neer in the Civ­il War, has always been avail­able,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2002, and has been “hailed as one of the supreme mas­ter­pieces of silent film­mak­ing. But oth­er fea­tures and shorts exist­ed in shab­by, incom­plete prints, if at all, and it was only in the 1960s that film his­to­ri­ans began to assem­ble and restore Keaton’s life­work. Now almost every­thing has been recov­ered, restored, and is avail­able on DVDs and tapes that range from watch­able to sparkling.”


Access to Keaton’s films has fur­ther expand­ed as a dozen or so entered the pub­lic domain in recent years, includ­ing two fea­tures, Sher­lock, Jr. and The Nav­i­ga­tor, this year and three more to come in 2021. You can watch thir­ty-one of Keaton’s restored, recov­ered films on YouTube, at the links below, shared by MetaFil­ter user Going to Maine, who writes, “where, oh where, in this mod­ern world, can we find the gems of his gold­en era? The obvi­ous place.”

Keaton starred in his first fea­ture-length film, The Sap­head, in 1920. For the next decade, until the end of the silent era, he dom­i­nat­ed the box office, along­side Chap­lin and Harold Lloyd, with his can­ny blend of dare­dev­il slap­stick and every­man pathos. After the twen­ties, his career floun­dered, then rebound­ed. His last pic­ture was a return to silent film in Beckett’s 1966 short, “Film,” made the year of his death. Since then, Keaton appre­ci­a­tion has become almost a form of wor­ship.

In 2018, The Gen­er­al came in at num­ber 34 on Sight & Sound’s Great­est Films of All Time list. But the BFI’s Geoff Andrew argued that it deserved the top spot, and Keaton deserves recog­ni­tion as “not mere­ly the great­est of the silent come­di­ans,” but “the great­est of all com­ic actors to have appeared on the sil­ver screen… not only a great Amer­i­can film­mak­er of the silent era,” but “one of the great­est film­mak­ers of all time, any­where.” Andrew likens him to a god, but “unlike gods… Buster has the advan­tage of being able to make us laugh. And laugh. And laugh.”

Don’t we all need a steady sup­ply of that med­i­cine these days? See Keaton’s clas­sic silent com­e­dy The Gen­er­al fur­ther up and watch 29 more Keaton films at the links below. Many will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Short Films

One Week (Sep­tem­ber 1, 1920)
Con­vict 13 (Octo­ber 27, 1920)
Neigh­bors (Decem­ber 22, 1920)
The Scare­crow (Decem­ber 22, 1920)
The Haunt­ed House (Feb­ru­ary 10, 1921)
Hard Luck (March 14, 1921)
The High Sign (April 12, 1921)
The Goat (May 18, 1921)
The Play­house (Octo­ber 6, 1921) (This con­tains a faux min­strel show seg­ment with black­face.)
The Boat (Novem­ber 10, 1921)
The Pale­face (Jan­u­ary, 1922) (Racist depic­tions of Native Amer­i­cans)
Cops (March, 1922)
My Wife’s Rela­tions (May, 1922)
The Black­smith (July 21, 1922)
The Frozen North (August 28, 1922)
The Elec­tric House (Octo­ber, 1922)
Day Dreams (Novem­ber, 1922)
The Bal­loonat­ic (Jan­u­ary 22, 1923)
The Love Nest (March, 1923)

Fea­tures

Three Ages (Sep­tem­ber 24, 1923)
Our Hos­pi­tal­i­ty (Novem­ber 19, 1923)
Sher­lock Jr. (May 11, 1924)
The Nav­i­ga­tor (Octo­ber 13, 1924)
Sev­en Chances (March 15, 1925)
Go West (Novem­ber 1, 1925)
Bat­tling But­ler (Sep­tem­ber 19, 1926)
The Gen­er­al (Decem­ber 31, 1926)
Col­lege (Novem­ber 1927)
Steam­boat Bill, Jr. (May 20, 1928)

Bonus! Two of Keaton’s Last Films

The Rail­rod­der, for the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da (Octo­ber 2, 1965)
Film, direct­ed by Samuel Beck­ett (Jan­u­ary 8, 1965)

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

List of Great Pub­lic Domain Films 

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

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How Bong Joon-ho’s Storyboards for Parasite (Now Published as a Graphic Novel) Meticulously Shaped the Acclaimed Film

in Books, Film | September 22nd, 2020

In Seoul, where I live, the suc­cess of Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site at this year’s Acad­e­my Awards — unprece­dent­ed for a non-Amer­i­can film, let alone a Kore­an one — did not go unno­ticed. But even then, the cel­e­bra­tion had already been under­way at least since the movie won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Some­thing of a home­com­ing for Bong after Snow­piercer and Okja, two projects made whol­ly or par­tial­ly abroad, Par­a­site takes place entire­ly in Seoul, stag­ing a socioe­co­nom­ic grudge match between three fam­i­lies occu­py­ing stark­ly dis­parate places in the human hier­ar­chy. The denoue­ment is chaot­ic, but arrived at through the pre­ci­sion film­mak­ing with which Bong has made his name over the past two decades.

When Par­a­site’s sto­ry­boards were pub­lished in graph­ic-nov­el form here a few months ago, I noticed ads in the sub­way promis­ing a look into the mind of “Bong­tail.” Though Bong has pub­licly declared his con­tempt for that nick­name, it has nev­er­the­less stuck as a reflec­tion of his metic­u­lous way of work­ing.

The son of a graph­ic design­er, he grew up not just watch­ing movies but draw­ing comics, a prac­tice that would lat­er place him well to cre­ate his own sto­ry­boards. In so doing he assem­bles an entire film in his mind before shoot­ing its first frame (a work­ing process not dis­sim­i­lar to that of West­ern film­mak­ers like the Coen broth­ers), which enables him and his col­lab­o­ra­tors to exe­cute com­plex sequences such as what the Nerd­writer calls Par­a­site’s “per­fect mon­tage.”

With the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Par­a­site: A Graph­ic Nov­el in Sto­ry­boards now avail­able, video essay­ists like Thomas Flight have made com­par­isons between Bong’s draw­ings and the film. Start­ing with that cel­e­brat­ed mon­tage, Flight shows that, where the final prod­uct departs from its plan, it usu­al­ly does so to sim­pli­fy the hand-drawn action, mak­ing it more leg­i­ble and ele­gant. In the short video just above, you can watch one minute of Par­a­site lined up with its cor­re­spond­ing sto­ry­board pan­els, one of which incor­po­rates a pho­to­graph of the real Seoul neigh­bor­hood in which Bong locat­ed the main char­ac­ters’ home. This is rich sto­ry­board­ing indeed, but in his intro­duc­tion to the book, Bong explains that he does­n’t con­sid­er it essen­tial to film­mak­ing, just essen­tial to him: “I actu­al­ly sto­ry­board to quell my own anx­i­ety.” Would that we could all draw world­wide acclaim from doing the same.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Secret of the “Per­fect Mon­tage” at the Heart of Par­a­site, the Kore­an Film Now Sweep­ing World Cin­e­ma

Mar­tin Scors­ese Intro­duces Film­mak­er Hong Sang­soo, “The Woody Allen of Korea”

Watch More Than 400 Clas­sic Kore­an Films Free Online Thanks to the Kore­an Film Archive

How the Coen Broth­ers Sto­ry­board­ed Blood Sim­ple Down to a Tee (1984)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Paint­ed the Sto­ry­boards For Scenes in His Epic Films: Com­pare Can­vas to Cel­lu­loid

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

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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