Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

in Film, History | December 17th, 2018

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?

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Dra­mat­ic Footage of San Fran­cis­co Right Before & After the Mas­sive­ly Dev­as­tat­ing Earth­quake of 1906

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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The Revolutionary Title Sequences and Trailers Created by Pablo Ferro: Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Stop Making Sense, Bullitt & Other Films

in Animation, Film | December 17th, 2018

Pablo Fer­ro, who died last month after more than 60 years in graph­ic design, had such an impact on cin­e­ma that we’ve all felt it at one time or anoth­er, despite the fact that he nev­er direct­ed a sin­gle fea­ture him­self. Rather, he made his mark with title sequences and trail­ers, each of them exud­ing no small amount of then-rev­o­lu­tion­ary and still dif­fi­cult-to-imi­tate style. Hav­ing emi­grat­ed from Cuba to New York at the age of twelve, Fer­ro taught him­self to ani­mate before find­ing his first free­lance work in illus­tra­tion and then his first real job in adver­tis­ing. For his com­mer­cials he devel­oped a sig­na­ture style of rapid cut­ting, a new aes­thet­ic made to sell new prod­ucts, and that impressed many who saw them, includ­ing a cer­tain Stan­ley Kubrick, then at work on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb.

“He said we could sell the movie as a prod­uct,” Fer­ro remem­bers Kubrick telling him in an in-depth three-part inter­view at Art of the Title. “I said that would be great.” The result­ing trail­er’s inter­play of image, sound, voiceover, and espe­cial­ly text looked like noth­ing that had ever come before, and even it turned out not to be Fer­ro’s most mem­o­rable con­tri­bu­tion to the film.

That hon­or belongs to the open­ing cred­its above, which lay­er Fer­ro’s sig­na­ture hand let­ter­ing — an ele­ment request­ed by clients again and again through­out the rest of his career. (“He asked me what I thought about human beings,” Fer­ro remem­bers of Kubrick in the inter­view. “I said one thing about human beings is that every­thing that is mechan­i­cal, that is invent­ed, is very sex­u­al. We looked at each oth­er and real­ized — the B‑52, refu­el­ing in midair, of course, how much more sex­u­al can you get?!”)

Four years lat­er, in 1968, Fer­ro would use cut­ting-edge split-screen image tech­niques to craft an even more visu­al­ly stun­ning open­ing title sequence for Nor­man Jew­ison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, a mas­ter­piece of style made to open a film itself cel­e­brat­ed as a mas­ter­piece of style. Fer­ro describes it as an expe­ri­ence “where it was a chal­lenge to make it both sim­ple to watch and under­stand, and fit­ting for the film. I was lucky that the cos­tumes and the cin­e­matog­ra­phy had the look of, like, a bizarre mag­a­zine. The whole film felt like a the­atri­cal show.”

Lat­er that same year, anoth­er set of Fer­ro-designed titles would open anoth­er Steve McQueen-star­ring thriller, Bul­litt, which need­ed each and every one of its visu­al ele­ments to reflect the dare­dev­il sen­si­bil­i­ty, albeit a con­trolled one, at its core. Fer­ro got a bit wilder when he worked for Kubrick again, cut­ting togeth­er the trail­er below for 1971’s A Clock­work Orange. Though rem­i­nis­cent of his Dr. Strangelove trail­er in its use of onscreen text — “SATIRIC,” “BIZARRE,” “FRIGHTENING,” “METAPHORICAL,” and “BEETHOVEN,” among oth­er suit­able descrip­tors — it dis­pens­es entire­ly with voic­es, those of the film’s char­ac­ters or oth­er­wise, rely­ing entire­ly on the intri­cate lay­er­ing of music and image for its con­sid­er­able effect.

“Every frame is per­fect with the music and it tells you the whole sto­ry at the same time with­out say­ing a word or read­ing words aloud,” as Fer­ro him­self puts it. “I could see why nobody imi­tat­ed it — it takes a lot of work.”

With all this on his résumé, it makes sense that more work con­tin­ued to come his way until the end, includ­ing trail­ers and titles for  Stop Mak­ing Sense, Beetle­juice, Men in Black, and L.A. Con­fi­den­tial, all of which, and much else besides, you can see in the Art of the Title ret­ro­spec­tive video below. Though Pablo Fer­ro him­self has gone, his influ­ence on film will no doubt last for decades and decades to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

Inside the Mak­ing of Dr. Strangelove: Doc­u­men­tary Reveals How a Cold War Sto­ry Became a Kubrick Clas­sic

40 Years of Saul Bass’ Ground­break­ing Title Sequences in One Com­pi­la­tion

Watch 25 Alfred Hitch­cock Trail­ers, Excit­ing Films in Their Own Right

The Art of Film and TV Title Design

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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How the Astonishing Sushi Scene in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Was Animated: A Time-Lapse of the Month-Long Shoot

in Animation, Film, Food & Drink | December 14th, 2018

Since the moviego­ing pub­lic first start­ed hear­ing it twen­ty years ago, Wes Ander­son­’s name has been a byword for cin­e­mat­ic metic­u­lous­ness. The asso­ci­a­tion has only grown stronger with each film he’s made, as the live-action ones have fea­tured increas­ing­ly com­plex ships, trains, and grand hotels — to say noth­ing of the cos­tumes worn and accou­trements pos­sessed by the char­ac­ters who inhab­it them — and the stop-motion ani­mat­ed ones have demand­ed a super­hu­man atten­tion to detail by their very nature. It made per­fect sense when it was revealed that Isle of Dogs, Ander­son­’s sec­ond ani­mat­ed pic­ture, would take place in Japan: not only because of Japan­ese film, which opens up a vast field of new cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences to make, but also because of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese cul­ture, whose metic­u­lous­ness match­es, indeed exceeds, Ander­son­’s own.

Most of us first expe­ri­ence that tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese metic­u­lous­ness through food. And so most of us will rec­og­nize the form of the ben­to, or meal in a box, pre­pared step-by-step before our eyes in Isle of Dogs, though we may nev­er before have wit­nessed the actu­al process of carv­ing up the wrig­gling, scur­ry­ing sea crea­tures that fill it.

One view­ing of this 45-sec­ond shot is enough to sug­gest how much work must have gone into it, but this time-lapse of its 32-day-long shoot (with­in a longer sev­en-month process to make the entire sequence) reveals the extent of the labor involved. In it you can see ani­ma­tors Andy Bid­dle (who’d pre­vi­ous­ly worked on Ander­son­’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and before that his ani­mat­ed The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox) and Tony Far­quhar-Smith painstak­ing­ly posi­tion­ing and repo­si­tion­ing each and every one of the ben­to’s ingre­di­ents — all of which had to be spe­cial­ly made to look right even when chopped up and sliced open — as well as the dis­em­bod­ied hands of the sushi mas­ter prepar­ing them.

Shoot­ing stop-motion ani­ma­tion takes a huge amount of time, and so does mak­ing sushi, as any­one who has tried to do either at home knows. Per­form­ing the for­mer to Ander­son­ian stan­dards and the lat­ter to Japan­ese stan­dards hard­ly makes the tasks any eas­i­er. But just as a well craft­ed ben­to pro­vides an enjoy­able and uni­fied aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence, one that would­n’t dare to remind the con­sumer of how much time and effort went into it, a movie like Isle of Dogs pro­vides thrills and laughs to its view­ers who only lat­er con­sid­er what it must have tak­en to bring such an elab­o­rate vision to life on screen. If you want to hear more about the demands it made on its ani­ma­tors, have a look at the Vari­ety video above, in which Andy Gent, head of Isle of Dogs’ pup­pet depart­ment, explains the process and its con­se­quences. “It took three ani­ma­tors, because it broke quite a few peo­ple to get it through the shot,” he says. “Sev­en months lat­er, we end up with one minute of ani­ma­tion.” But that minute would do even the most exact­ing sushi mas­ter proud.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the New Trail­er for Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Film, Isle of Dogs, Inspired by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

The Geo­met­ric Beau­ty of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wes Anderson’s Films

Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unex­pect­ed Par­al­lels Between Two Great Film­mak­ers

The His­to­ry of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Span­ning 116 Years, Revis­it­ed in a 3‑Minute Video

How to Make Sushi: Free Video Lessons from a Mas­ter Sushi Chef

The Right and Wrong Way to Eat Sushi: A Primer

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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Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burger King Whopper–While Wishing the Burger Came from McDonald’s (1981)

in Art, Film, Food & Drink | December 12th, 2018

In the ear­ly 1980s, Dan­ish exper­i­men­tal film­mak­er Jør­gen Leth came to Amer­i­ca intent on cap­tur­ing it live as it was actu­al­ly lived across that vast, still-new, and often strange coun­try. The result, 66 Scenes from Amer­i­ca, offers images of road­side motels and din­ers, desert land­scapes, the Man­hat­tan sky­line, miles of lone­ly high­way, and stars and stripes aplen­ty. Halfway through it all comes the longest, and per­haps most Amer­i­can, scene of all: Andy Warhol eat­ing a fast-food ham­burg­er. A few moments after he accom­plish­es that task, he deliv­ers the film’s most mem­o­rable line by far: “My name is Andy Warhol, and I just fin­ished eat­ing a ham­burg­er.”

“Leth did not know Warhol, but he was a bit obsessed with him so he def­i­nite­ly want­ed to have him in his movie,” writes Dai­l­yArt’s Zuzan­na Stan­s­ka. And so when Leth came to New York, he sim­ply showed up at Warhol’s Fac­to­ry and pitched him the idea of con­sum­ing a “sym­bol­ic” burg­er on film. “Warhol imme­di­ate­ly liked the idea and agreed to the scene – he liked it because it was such a real scene, some­thing he would like to do.”

When Warhol showed up at the pho­to stu­dio Leth had set up to shoot the scene, com­plete with a vari­ety of fast-food ham­burg­ers from which he could choose, he had only one ques­tion: “Where is the McDon­ald’s?” Leth had­n’t thought to pick one up from the Gold­en Arch­es as well, not know­ing that Warhol con­sid­ered McDon­ald’s pack­ag­ing “the most beau­ti­ful.”

Warhol had a deep inter­est in Amer­i­can brands. “What’s great about this coun­try is that Amer­i­ca start­ed the tra­di­tion where the rich­est con­sumers buy essen­tial­ly the same things as the poor­est,” he wrote in The Phi­los­o­phy of Andy Warhol. “You can be watch­ing TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the Pres­i­dent drinks Coke, Liz Tay­lor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of mon­ey can get you a bet­ter Coke than the one the bum on the cor­ner is drink­ing. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Sure­ly the same could be said of any par­tic­u­lar fast-food burg­er, even if Warhol could­n’t have his pre­ferred brand on that par­tic­u­lar day in New York in 1981. In the event, he chose a Whop­per from Burg­er King, still a well-known brand if hard­ly as icon­ic as McDon­ald’s — or, for that mat­ter, as icon­ic as Warhol him­self.

Above, you can see Leth talk­ing years lat­er about his expe­ri­ence film­ing Warhol.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

130,000 Pho­tographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Avail­able Online, Cour­tesy of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty

When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Mac­in­tosh (1984)

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Warhol’s Cin­e­ma: A Mir­ror for the Six­ties (1989)

The Case for Andy Warhol in Three Min­utes

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Ham­burg­er Recipe

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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Wes Anderson’s Breakthrough Film, Rushmore, Revisited in Five Video Essays: It Came Out 20 Years Ago Today

in Film | December 11th, 2018

“I gen­uine­ly don’t know what to make of this movie.” So said emi­nent New York­er film crit­ic Pauline Kael about Rush­more, Wes Ander­son­’s sec­ond film. But hav­ing spent the bet­ter part of a decade in retire­ment by that point, she did­n’t pub­lish that judg­ment; rather, she spoke it straight to Ander­son him­self, who had rent­ed out a the­ater to give her a per­son­al screen­ing. “I was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed by Ms. Kael’s reac­tion to the movie,” Ander­son writes in his rec­ol­lec­tion of the event. Upon its release on Decem­ber 11, 1998 — twen­ty years ago today — a fair few of its view­ers would echo Kael’s bewil­der­ment. But just as many would feel they’d seen the ear­ly work of a mas­ter, and time would soon vin­di­cate that feel­ing: whether you love his movies or can’t stand them, Wes Ander­son became Wes Ander­son because of Rush­more.

“There are few per­fect movies,” says crit­ic and Wes Ander­son spe­cial­ist Matt Zoller-Seitz. “This is one of them.” His video essay on Rush­more, part of a series adapt­ed from his book The Wes Ander­son Col­lec­tion, breaks down just a few of the ele­ments that have made the film so beloved. “At once arch and earnest, know­ing and inno­cent,” Ander­son­’s sto­ry of a flak­i­ly ambi­tious teenage prep-school boy Max Fis­cher’s friend­ship with a mid­dle-aged steel mag­nate Her­man Blume — and the affec­tions for a wid­owed first-grade teacher that turn that friend­ship into a rival­ry — “feels unique and furi­ous­ly alive.”

Draw­ing deeply from the per­son­al­i­ty and expe­ri­ence of Ander­son him­self (and those of his co-writer and fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Owen Wil­son) as well as The 400 Blows, The Grad­u­ate, and oth­er clas­sic pic­tures, it nev­er does so in an obvi­ous or pre­dictable man­ner.

Of all the strokes of luck required for the then-twen­tysome­thing Ander­son even to get the chance to make a movie like Rush­more (espe­cial­ly after his debut fea­ture Bot­tle Rock­et seemed to have van­ished with­out a trace), no coup was greater than the cast­ing of Bill Mur­ray as Blume. It “res­onates back­ward through film his­to­ry,” says Zoller-Seitz, “because Max is a geeky teenage ver­sion of a cer­tain kind of 80s and 90s hero. Rush­more’s mas­ter­stroke is how it takes the piss out of those char­ac­ters: it implies that maybe the brava­do that those 80s and 90s char­ac­ters had was just a cov­er for fear and depres­sion.” Quite a depth of insight for a young film­mak­er to pos­sess — but then, many once under­es­ti­mat­ed the young Ander­son, whose sen­si­bil­i­ties get fur­ther exam­ined in the Screen­Prism video essay “Rush­more: Por­trait of Wes Ander­son as a Young Man,” and they did so at their per­il.

“The charms of this movie are abun­dant,” says the New York Times’ A.O. Scott in his Crit­ic’s Pick video on Rush­more. “It has whim­si­cal pro­duc­tion design; clever and sharp writ­ing; ten­der, com­i­cal per­for­mances; a bril­liant use of pop music to under­score and slight­ly ironize the emo­tions being expressed on the screen.” Scott sin­gles out the strength of its visu­al com­po­si­tions, which Ander­son uses to, for exam­ple, “arrange peo­ple in the frame in such a way as to show every­thing about their rela­tion­ship — a kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal dimen­sion to the space that almost makes the dia­logue sec­ondary.” It all comes in ser­vice of telling two sto­ries in coun­ter­point, one “about an ado­les­cent com­ing to terms with his lim­i­ta­tions” and anoth­er about “an artist com­ing into pos­ses­sion of his pow­ers.”

Over the past twen­ty years, the crit­i­cal con­sen­sus on Rush­more has shift­ed almost uni­ver­sal­ly away from assess­ments like Kael’s and toward those like Scot­t’s. In the video above, a more mature Ander­son reflects on mak­ing the movie — and mak­ing it, in fact, at the very same high school he went to him­self. “The strongest asso­ci­a­tion for me is being back in class,” he says. “In the end, the thing that strikes me most force­ful­ly when I think back on it is just that I went home.” He also adds that “I don’t even know how we man­aged to get Rush­more made, or why,” giv­en the appar­ent fail­ure of Bot­tle Rock­et, a pic­ture on which he and Wil­son had labored for years. “Rush­more was more expen­sive, maybe even a bit stranger, and yet it seemed just to hap­pen. I think it was just lucky.” Espe­cial­ly lucky for us view­ers over the past two decades, as well as the gen­er­a­tions of Rush­more fans still to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

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

A Glimpse Into How Wes Ander­son Cre­ative­ly Remixes/Recycles Scenes in His Dif­fer­ent Films

Wes Anderson’s Cin­e­mat­ic Debt to Stan­ley Kubrick Revealed in a Side-By-Side Com­par­i­son

Wes Ander­son Names 12 of His Favorite Art Films

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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Movie Accent Expert Analyzes 31 Actors Playing Other Famous People: Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, and More

in English Language, Film, How to Learn for Free, Life | December 7th, 2018

Well-known fig­ures’ voic­es are often as dis­tinc­tive as their thou­sand-watt smiles and influ­en­tial hair­dos.

While there is some evi­dence as to the accents and idio­syn­crat­ic speech pat­terns of such his­tor­i­cal heavy hit­ters as Thomas Edi­son, Flo­rence Nightin­gale, and Har­ry Hou­di­ni, tech­no­log­i­cal improve­ments have real­ly upped the ante for those charged with imper­son­at­ing real life peo­ple from the mid 20th-cen­tu­ry onward.

Natal­ie Port­man had to sus­tain her Jack­ie Kennedy imper­son­ation for an entire fea­ture-length biopic, a per­for­mance dialect coach Erik Singer gives high marks, above. Port­man, he explains, has tru­ly inter­nal­ized Jackie’s idi­olect, the indi­vid­ual quirks that add yet anoth­er lay­er to such sig­ni­fiers as class and region.

As evi­dence, he sub­mits a side-by-side com­par­i­son of the First Lady’s famous 1962 tele­vised tour of the White House ren­o­va­tions she had spear­head­ed, and Portman’s recre­ation there­of.

Port­man has done her home­work with regard to breath pat­tern, pitch, and the refine­ment that strikes most 21st cen­tu­ry ears as a bit stilt­ed and strange. Most impres­sive to Singer is the way Port­man trans­fers Kennedy’s odd­ly musi­cal elon­ga­tion of cer­tain syl­la­bles to oth­er words in the script. Tis no mere par­rot job.

Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-win­ning turn as Ray Charles suc­ceeds on copi­ous research and his abil­i­ty to inhab­it Charles’ habit­u­al smile. Obvi­ous­ly, the pos­ture in which an indi­vid­ual holds their mouth has a lot to do with the sound of their voice, and Foxx was blessed with plen­ty of source mate­r­i­al.

The 1982 epic Gand­hi pro­vid­ed the ver­sa­tile Ben Kings­ley with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to show­case not one, but two, idi­olects. The adult Gand­hi under­went a dra­mat­ic and well doc­u­ment­ed evo­lu­tion from the British accent he adopt­ed as a young law stu­dent in Lon­don to a proud­ly Indi­an voice bet­ter suit­ed to inspir­ing a nation to uni­fy against its British col­o­niz­ers.

It’s like­ly that many of us have nev­er con­sid­ered the speech-relat­ed build­ing blocks Singer scru­ti­nizes while ana­lyz­ing 29 oth­er per­for­mances for the WIRED video, above—epenthesis, tongue posi­tions, rel­a­tive degrees of emphat­ic mus­cu­lar­i­ty, and retroflex consonants—but it’s easy to see how they play a part.

Singer invites you to expand his research and teach­ing library by record­ing your­self speak­ing extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly and read­ing from two sam­ple texts here. Pray that who­ev­er plays you in the biopic gets it right.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Gives a Quick Demon­stra­tion of British Accents

Why Do Peo­ple Talk Fun­ny in Old Movies?, or The Ori­gin of the Mid-Atlantic Accent

Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Pol­ish, Irish, Aus­tralian, Yid­dish & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City through Decem­ber 20th in the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta, and the book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Stream 48 Classic & Contemporary German Films Free Online: From Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt

in Film | December 6th, 2018

If you’re read­ing this, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist clas­sic The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari. As soon as Robert Weine’s 1920 film came out, it was described as essen­tial. Or as one review­er wrote, “so-called cul­tured peo­ple who fail to see it are neglect­ing their edu­ca­tion.” There are dozens more Ger­man films to which that sen­tence might apply. Films from the country’s explo­sive Weimar moment—which also pro­duced Metrop­o­lis, Nos­fer­atu, M, Faust, etc.—to those of the New Ger­man Cin­e­ma move­ment of the 1960s and 70s, which gave the world such enfants ter­ri­bles as Wim Wen­ders, Mar­garethe von Trot­ta, Wern­er Her­zog, and Rain­er Maria Fass­binder. The furi­ous­ly pro­lif­ic Fass­binder died in 1982 at 37, but the for­mer three direc­tors have con­tin­ued to make inter­na­tion­al­ly-known films into the 21st cen­tu­ry.

You may have seen Von Trotta’s Han­nah Arendt (trail­er above), which won mul­ti­ple awards in 2012. Or per­haps you caught Car­o­line Link’s WWII-themed Nowhere in Africa, which won an Oscar that same year. The Nazi era may have laid waste to the Ger­man film industry—whose biggest tal­ents end­ed up exiled in Hol­ly­wood—and the post­war years are often thought of as a “lost decade” (wrong­ly, it seems). But on the whole, Ger­man film­mak­ers have pro­duced some of the most visu­al­ly dis­tinc­tive, nar­ra­tive­ly thrilling, and emo­tion­al­ly raw films in world cin­e­ma since its begin­nings.

WERNER HERZOG TEACHES FILMMAKING. LEARN MORE.

Germany’s cul­tur­al insti­tute, the Goethe Insti­tut, is hon­or­ing the lega­cy of Ger­man film, from its clas­sic to its con­tem­po­rary peri­ods, with 48 films free to stream on Kanopy. (The films include sub­ti­tles in Eng­lish.) The ini­tia­tive is just one part of Wun­der­bar, a cel­e­bra­tion that includes “Goethe Pop Ups in the US,” with film screen­ings, fes­ti­vals, appear­ances by Ger­man film­mak­ers, and an online series of crit­i­cal arti­cles by Ger­man and Amer­i­can experts.

If you haven’t seen Dr. Cali­gari, Nos­fer­atu, Metrop­o­lis, or Faust, you can stream them now at the Goethe Institut’s Kanopy. You can also see Han­nah Arendt, Nowhere in Africa, and oth­er acclaimed con­tem­po­rary films. Herzog’s 1971 Aguirre, the Wrath of God is in the col­lec­tion, as is Frank Beyer’s far more obscure Trace of Stones from 1966, a film banned for 25 years by East Ger­man offi­cials after its release.

There are doc­u­men­taries on artists like Joseph Beuys and Ger­hard Richter, on Mar­lene Diet­rich and, nat­u­ral­ly, Ger­man beer. Films by direc­tors Anne Birken­stock, Chris­t­ian Pet­zold, and Tom Tyk­w­er. Berlin Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val nom­i­nee Beloved Sis­ters appears. There are films that “so-called cul­tured peo­ple” are expect­ed to have seen, and many more unlike­ly to show up on the syl­labus of a sur­vey course.

Per­haps only one of these movies has been specif­i­cal­ly cred­it­ed with grim­ly pre­dict­ing the future—as Siegfried Kra­cauer alleged in his book Cali­gari to Hitler. But all of these are films that deserve a wide audi­ence out­side their nation­al bor­ders. To view the Goethe Institut’s selec­tion of 48 films, you’ll need to sign up for a free Kanopy account, which you can do with your Google or Face­book logins or with an email address. Then sim­ply set your home library as “Goethe-Insti­tut” and you can stream any or all of the films in the col­lec­tion, from 1920’s Cali­gari to 2017’s Axolotl Overkill, on IOS and Android devices, Apple TV, Roku, Chrome­cast, or your com­put­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Watch Wern­er Herzog’s Very First Film, Her­ak­les, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)

Film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Pho­tog­ra­phy

The Top 100 For­eign-Lan­guage Films of All-Time, Accord­ing to 209 Crit­ics from 43 Coun­tries

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

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Mira Nair, Director of Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake, Teaches an Online Course on Indie Filmmaking

in Film, Online Courses | November 30th, 2018

FYI: Mira Nair, the direc­tor of Mon­soon Wed­ding and The Name­sake, has just released an online mas­ter­class on inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing. In 17 video lessons, the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed direc­tor teach­es stu­dents how to “make a big impact on a small bud­get, evoke the best from actors and non-actors, and pro­tect your cre­ative vision so you tell the sto­ry that can only come from you.” Nair’s course runs $90. But for $180, you can get an All-Access Pass to Mas­ter­class’ cat­a­logue of 45 cours­es, which includes cours­es by a num­ber of oth­er promi­nent filmmakers–Martin Scors­ese, Spike Lee, Ken Burns, Ron Howard, Wern­er Her­zog and more. Not to men­tion actors and actress­es like Samuel L. Jack­son and Helen Mir­ren.

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing & Life Advice

Direc­tor Robert Rodriguez Teach­es The Basics of Film­mak­ing in Under 10 Min­utes

The Stu­dent of Prague: The Very First Inde­pen­dent Film (1913)

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