Safety Last, the 1923 film starring Harold Lloyd, features one of the most iconic scenes from the silent film era. Writes Roger Ebert, the scene above is “by general agreement the most famous shot in silent comedy: a man in a straw hat and round horn-rim glasses, hanging from the minute hand of a clock 12 stories above the city street. Strange, that this shot occurs in a film few people have ever seen. Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923), like all of his films, was preserved by the comedian but rarely shown.” All of that might be about to change. Along with a number of other classic works, Safety Last went into the public domain this week. So now everyone can watch the film, whenever they please. Watch a complete version on YouTube here. Restored versions of the film can be purchased through Criterion.
Do you remember the first time you saw the fourth wall broken? Few of us probably do, but maybe we all should, given how radial a departure from established dramatic convention — specifically, the convention dictating that a work of dramatic art not acknowledge the fact that it is a work of dramatic art — fourth-wall-breakage represents. Then again, a work of art can break the fourth wall subtly, too subtly to make an outsized impact on our consciousness: take, for example, all the brief but knowing glances movie characters have directed at their audiences throughout almost the entire history of cinema.
A fair few of those glances appear in the supercut of 400 breakages of the fourth wall above (which may well contain the first one you ever witnessed). It draws from films from a variety of time periods, Hollywood classics and blockbusters as well as lesser-known pictures.
Together with the Press Play fourth-wall-breakage supercut below, it provides an overview of just how wide a variety of ways filmmakers have found to momentarily breach what Vincent Canby once described as “that invisible scrim that forever separates the audience from the stage.” Most films break the fourth wall for laughs, but others have done it in service of emotional, aesthetic, and even intellectual ends.
None of this is to say that the fourth wall stood perfectly intact before the colossus of cinema came along to smash it. The concept goes at least as far back as 17th-century France, first used as a term by Molière and later more fully defined by Enlightenment icon Denis Diderot. But theatrical performers must have been breaking the fourth wall, or at least poking holes in it, even before the fourth wall was quite up: long ago, we read in historical accounts of theater around the world, audiences even expected a certain degree of interaction with the action onstage — or at least they expressed their thoughts on it, often forcefully, attempting to break the fourth wall from the other direction.
Over time, we, the creators and viewers of drama alike, built the fourth wall, and it has seldom taken us long to expect its protection in every medium we enjoy: theater and film, yes, but television, video games, and even literature as well. “It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often,” writes J.M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello, a novel that breaks the fourth wall and a host of other convention besides, “since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.” A literary storyteller of Coetzee’s caliber would know. But what other art form has been as often compared to a dream, or felt as much like a dream, as film — and what other dreams play out on, literally, a wall?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Earlier this year we informed readers that thousands of works of art and entertainment would soon enter the public domain—to be followed every year by thousands more. That day is nigh upon us: Public Domain Day, January 1, 2019. At the stroke of midnight, such beloved classics as Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas” will become the common property of the people, to be quoted at length or in full anywhere when the copyright expires on work produced in 1923. Then, 1924 will expire in 2020, 1925 in 2021, and so on and so forth.
It means that “hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films” will become freely available to distribute, remix, and remake, as Glenn Fleishman writes at Smithsonian. “Any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations… and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments.”
Those are just a few ideas. See more extensive lists of hits and obscurities from 1923 at our previous post and come up with your own creative adaptations. The possibilities are vast and possibly world changing, in ways both decidedly good and arguably quite bad. Teachers may photocopy thousands of pages without fear of prosecution; scholars may quote freely, artists may find deep wells of inspiration. And we may also see “Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow tires.”
Such crassness aside, this huge release from copyright heralds a cultural sea change—the first time such a thing has happened in 21 years due to a 20-year extension of the copyright term in 1998, in a bill sponsored by Sonny Bono at the urging of the Walt Disney company. The legislation, aimed at protecting Mickey Mouse, created a “bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and 1923.” It is fascinating to consider how a government-mandated marketing decision has affected our understanding of history and culture.
The novelist Willa Cather called 1922 the year “the world broke in two,” the start of a great literary, artistic and cultural upheaval. In 1922, Ulysses by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” were published, and the Harlem Renaissance blossomed with the arrival of Claude McKay’s poetry in Harlem Shadows. For two decades those works have been in the public domain, enabling artists, critics and others to burnish that notable year to a high gloss in our historical memory. In comparison, 1923 can feel dull.
That year, however, marked the film debut of Marlene Dietrich, the publication of modernist landmarks like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jean Toomer’s Cane and far too many more influential works to name here. Find several more at Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Lifehacker, Indiewire, and The Atlanticand have a very happy Public Domain Day.
Public domain films and books will be added to ever-growing collections:
On Facebook this morning, President Obama wrote: “As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books, movies, and music that I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors, artists, and storytellers – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018 list — I hope you enjoy reading, watching, and listening.” Note that you can hear all of the music on this Spotify playlist.
Annihilation Black Panther BlacKkKlansman Blindspotting Burning The Death of Stalin Eighth Grade If Beale Street Could Talk Leave No Trace Minding the Gap The Rider Roma Shoplifters Support the Girls Won’t You Be My Neighbor
Favorite Songs of 2018
Apes••t by The Carters
Bad Bad News by Leon Bridges
Could’ve Been by H.E.R. (feat. Bryson Tiller)
Disco Yes by Tom Misch (feat. Poppy Ajudha)
Ekombe by Jupiter & Okwess
Every Time I Hear That Song by Brandi Carlile
Girl Goin’ Nowhere by Ashley McBryde
Historia De Un Amor by Tonina (feat. Javier Limón and Tali Rubinstein)
I Like It by Cardi B (feat. Bad Bunny and J Balvin)
Kevin’s Heart by J. Cole
King For A Day by Anderson East
Love Lies by Khalid & Normani
Make Me Feel by Janelle Monáe
Mary Don’t You Weep (Piano & A Microphone 1983 Version) by Prince
My Own Thing by Chance the Rapper (feat. Joey Purp)
Need a Little Time by Courtney Barnett
Nina Cried Power by Hozier (feat. Mavis Staples)
Nterini by Fatoumata Diawara
One Trick Ponies by Kurt Vile
Turnin’ Me Up by BJ the Chicago Kid
Wait by the River by Lord Huron
Wow Freestyle by Jay Rock (feat. Kendrick Lamar)
And in honor of one of the great jazz singers of all time, who died this year, a classic album: The Great American Songbook by Nancy Wilson
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Director Guillermo del Toro, as one Twitter wag put it recently, is the kind of film friend we’d all love to have–a great conversationalist, a good listener, a fan at heart, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the form. And while it’s not rare to hear him praise Steven Spielberg, this recent Twitter post most people by surprise:
Catch Me If You Can is honestly a film I haven’t thought about since I watched it in the theaters. That’s not to say it was bad–it was an enjoyable romp with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks playing cat and mouse with each side appreciating the other side’s wiles, but apparently de Toro has watched it and thought about it often.
BenDavid Grabinski, the man who made the first volley in proclaiming Spielberg’s film underrated, is known for writing the Jackie Chan-Johnny Knoxville vehicle Skiptrace and working on the more recent Blindspotting.
“Probably Walken’s best performance after DEER HUNTER,” he adds, along with “Leonardo DiCaprio is so good you don’t judge Tom Hanks for falling for his shit.” and “There is nothing more entertaining than hearing Tom Hanks angrily yell. Better than the most expensive FX money can buy.”
(One of Grabinski’s followers mentions Amy Adams’ role, long before she hit it big. There’s also a nod to the John Williams’ score, which is light and jazzy unlike his blockbuster work.)
It’s more interesting who del Toro readily calls to mind as influences: Stanley Donen (Charade), William Wellman (The Public Enemy), Vincent Minnelli, Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), and William Wyler (Roman Holiday). These men were all workaday directors within the studio system, all skilled craftsman, but not so idiosyncratic as to stand out.
“People like Victor Fleming and Michael Curtiz I identify with more [than the likes of Martin Scorsese and Orson Welles] because they didn’t have styles…They were chameleons and they could quickly adapt; they could go from a story about heaven and the afterlife to the Civil War. They could do a lot of different subjects and they could do them well because they were good craftsmen… but they didn’t impose who they were on what that was. And I always felt I was more in their game.”
Some may disagree, as Spielberg, especially in his blockbusters, has a style that others have easily copied (J.J. Abrams, I’m looking at you.) But right from the get-go, Spielberg has always made room for other genres, from romance to historical epics to horror and sci-fi.
del Toro is not that kind of filmmaker, though his best films are when he gets personal and nostalgic, like The Devil’s Backbone. The Shape of Water certainly had its Spielbergian moments, especially in its E.T.-style rescuing of the central creature.
Now that del Toro has weighed in, hopefully he might write a little bit more on the movie in the future. For us, we might need to watch the film again.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Their one-take performance was part of Role Call, a regular feature of the Late Late Show with James Corden. Usually, this fan favorite is an excuse for Corden and a megastar guest—Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson—to bumble through the most iconic moments of their career.
These kinds of larks are more fun for being a mess, and the live studio audience screams like besotted campers at every goofy quick change and winking inside reference. Blunt and Miranda are definitely game, though one wonders if they felt a bit chagrinned that the film they are promoting, Mary Poppins Returns, is given pride of placement, while the original 1964 film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke is strangely absent.
Alas, 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is as far back as this skit’s memory goes, presumably because the audience has a greater likelihood of recognizing Marilyn Monroe than say, Howard Keel.
More interesting than the jokey horseplay with Into the Woods and The Muppet Movie is the choice to blithely cast white actors in roles that were written for black women (Dreamgirls, Little Shop of Horrors). I don’t think anyone would try to get away with that on Broadway these days, even in in a spoofy charitable event like Broadway Bares or Easter Bonnet… though if they did, getting Lin-Manuel Miranda on board would be a very good idea.
As to why Hamilton isn’t one of the titles below … it’s not a movie musical—yet!
In 1896, Thomas Edison produced The Kiss. One of the first films ever commercially screened, it adapts the then-popular musical The Widow Jones — or at least it adapts about twenty seconds of it, a kiss that happens in the very last scene. Two years later came the equally short but differently groundbreaking Something Good – Negro Kiss, a version of The Kiss starring black actors instead of white ones. Only now, thanks in part to the efforts of University of Southern California archivist Dino Everett and University of Chicago Cinema and Media Studies professor Allyson Nadia Field, has it received proper recognition as the first such kiss on film.
“To uncover the origins of Everett’s footage, Field relied on inventory and distribution catalogs, tracing the film to Chicago,” writes UChicago News’ Jack Wang. “This was where William Selig —a vaudeville performer turned film producer — had shot it on his knockoff of a Lumière Cinématographe. That camera produced the telltale perforation marks which had tipped Everett off to the print’s age.”
With support from the Museum of Modern Art, writes Hyperallergic’s Jasmine Weber, “Field not only identified the filmmaker, but the performers: Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown. Suttle is dressed in a dapper suit and bowtie, while Brown dons an ornate dress — costumes that Field says were typical of minstrel performers.”
“What makes this film so remarkable is that if you look at films from this period that feature African-Americans, first of all, most of them are white actors in blackface,” says Field in the NPR segment above. “They are caricatures. They’re certainly racist. They feature racist tropes like watermelon-eating contests and things like that. The American screen was incredibly hostile to African-Americans for much of its history,” but Something Good — Negro Kiss “refutes those kind of caricatures and asserts an image of humanity and of love.”
That image has received quite a response on the internet as the clip has circulated in the week since its induction into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry alongside the likes of The Shining, Monterey Pop, Brokeback Mountain, The Lady from Shanghai, and Jurassic Park. One lawyer-slash-critic even brought this piece of early cinema together with a piece of current cinema, mashing it up with the score of Barry Jenkins’ just-released James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk. Selig, Suttle, and Brown must have known full well that they were making something new. But did they know they were also making history?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Pioneering filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the inventors of the projected motion picture, held their first private screening in Paris in March of 1895. The streets of the French capital would go on to provide the brothers with plenty of life in motion for their new technology to capture in the years thereafter, and you can watch eight such real scenes compiled in the video above. With its startling clarity — and its more recently corrected motion and added sound — this selection of pieces of Lumière footage offers a rich six-minute cinematic time-travel experience to the City of Light between the years of 1896 and 1900.
Guy Jones, the uploader of the video on Youtube, provides the following guide to the locations:
Notre-Dame Cathedral (1896)
Alma Bridge (1900)
Avenue des Champs-Élysées (1899)
Place de la Concorde (1897)
Passing of a fire brigade (1897)
Tuileries Garden (1896)
Moving walkway at the Paris Exposition (1900)
The Eiffel Tower from the Rives de la Seine à Paris (1897)
These places have continued to provide generation after generation of filmmakers with locations for their urban cinematic visions. (The Eiffel Tower now provides an immediate visual shorthand for the city, though it certainly wouldn’t have in this Lumière footage, when it was less than ten years old.) That goes for French filmmakers as well as those of many other nationalities: even the Coen Brothers used Tuileries Garden for their short film Tuileries, previously featured here on Open Culture.
Or at least they used the subway station underneath Tuileries Garden, which wouldn’t open until 1900, the same year as the Paris Métro itself — and the year of the Paris Exposition, also known as the Exposition Universelle, which gave Parisians the chance to ride the moving sidewalk seen in the second-to-last Lumière segment.
Anyone familiar with the Paris of the 21st century will be quick to observe the differences between the city now and the city 120 years ago. But a Parisian of the 1890s might well have said they were the ones who lived in a city made unrecognizable to earlier generations, given Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s complete revision of the central city commissioned by Napoléon III and carried out between 1853 and 1870. For good or for ill, it’s just as much Haussmann’s Paris today as it was Haussmann’s Paris in the 1890s, and criticisms that the city has remained frozen in time aren’t without merit. But to see what has most dramatically changed about modern Paris — that is, what has changed about how people see and interact with modern Paris — we must turn to cinema. Might I suggest the work of Éric Rohmer?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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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