The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of Film History Unfold in 80 Minutes

in Film, History | October 24th, 2024

The video above from YouTuber Alex Day includes clips from about 500 movies, and you’ve almost certainly seen more than a few of them. Battleship Potemkin, Dumbo, Rear Window, Dr. No, The Godfather, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Top Gun, Braveheart, Gladiator, Inception: we’re not talking about obscurities here. Whether or not you count them among your personal favorites, these motion pictures have all become near-universally known for good (and/or Oscar-related) reasons, some of which may come back to mind as you watch the history of cinema visually retold through a feature-length string of their especially recognizable scenes.

Though genre pictures dominate, “I have not selected those films that marked the development of a genre or film stream,” Day writes. “I have selected the most popular and better known ones by people. That’s why I’ve included so many American movies and less of other countries, because a lot of the most famous movies throughout history are from the U.S.” (Hence, for example, the absence of Hideo Nakata’s influential piece of “J‑horror” Ringu and the presence of Ringu, its Hollywood remake from a few years later.) No matter where in the world you happen to be, a reference to Rocky, Back to the Future, or Home Alone — or any work of Steven Spielberg, a major presence in the video — can go a surprisingly long way.

No matter how popular these movies are, it would be the rare viewer indeed who could claim familiarity with each and every one of them. Almost inevitably, the experience of watching this video turns into a game of seen-it-or-not, which sheds light on the most intensive periods of your life in filmgoing. For my part, I must have watched almost every movie included from around the turn of the millennium, when I was just coming of age as a cinephile (and when even mainstream cinema, coincidentally or otherwise, was in an especially inventive period). It recently gave me pause to hear that American Psycho is now being remade — but then, having come out nearly a quarter-century ago, it’s presumably settled into its place in cinema history.

The Most Beautiful Shots in Cinema History: Scenes from 100+ Films

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the History of Movies: From the First Moving Pictures to the Rise of Multiplexes & Netflix

The History of the Movie Camera in Four Minutes: From the Lumiere Brothers to Google Glass

Hollywood: Epic Documentary Chronicles the Early History of Cinema

Cinema History by Titles & Numbers

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Spin the 17th-Century Death Roulette Wheel & Find Out What Would Have Killed You in 1665

in History | October 23rd, 2024

A common historical misconception holds that, up until a few centuries ago, everyone died when they were about 40. In fact, even in antiquity, one could well make it to what would be considered an advanced age today — assuming one survived the great mortal peril of childhood, and then all the dangers that could befall one in all the stages of life thereafter. In the mid-seventeenth century, with the Dark Ages past and the Industrial Revolution just ahead, these threats to life included consumption, dropsy, “griping in the guts,” sciatica, “stopping of the stomach,” and of course, plague.

This information comes from the London “mortality bill” seen below, which “represents the death tally of all city parishes for the week of Aug. 15–22, 1665, when the plague had infected 96 of the 130 parishes reporting.”

So writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, who cites Shakespeare’s Restless World author Neil MacGregor as saying that “the bills cost about a penny, and were published in large print runs.” But “if medicine was still somewhat uncertain about the causes of death, those in charge of toting up deaths for the bills of mortality were even more so,” resulting in vague categorizations like “bedridden,” “frightened,” “lethargy,” and “surfeit.”

You may receive one of those fates when you spin the wheel of 17th-Century Death Roulette, a web application that cycles rapidly through mortality bills and the types of death listed therein. “In the week of July 11th, 1665 you died from Palsie.” “In the week of February 14th, 1665 you died from Kild accidentally with a Carbine, at St. Michael Wood Street.” “In the week of December 12th, 1665 you died from Winde.” Your results may not reflect the actuarial probability of what might have killed a given Londoner in that year, but all this death does, perhaps ironically, give a vivid impression of life at the time. Personally, I’m curious how dangerous those stairs at St Thomas the Apostle really were, but given that the whole church burned down in the Great Fire of the very next year, I suppose we’ll never know. Play the 17th-Century Death Roulette here.

via Metafilter

A 1665 Advertisement Promises a “Famous and Effectual” Cure for the Great Plague

The Strange Costumes of the Plague Doctors Who Treated 17th Century Victims of the Bubonic Plague

Isaac Newton Conceived of His Most Groundbreaking Ideas During the Great Plague of 1665

74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare’s Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks

in History, Technology | October 22nd, 2024

A foreign traveler road-tripping across Europe might well feel a wave of trepidation before driving a fully loaded modern automobile over a more than 2,000-year-old bridge. But it might also be balanced out by the understanding that such a structure has, by definition, stood the test of time — and, for those with a grasp of the history of engineering, that its ancient designers would have ensured its capacity to bear a load far heavier than any that would have crossed it in reality. With no scientific means of modeling stresses, as classical-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, they just had to build it tough.

Key to that toughness were arches, “made of heavy blocks laid over a falsework frame until the keystone was slotted into place.” From the late first century, stonework was supplemented or replaced by brick and Roman concrete, a substance much-featured here on Open Culture.

We’ve also covered the Roman bridges you can still cross today: Spain’s Puente de Alcántara (from the Arabic al-qanţarah, meaning “arch”), for example, which, though crossed by a quarter-million vehicles every year, “shows no signs of failing”; or France’s Pont des Marchands, which “has supported a neighborhood of multi-story shops and houses since the Middle Ages.”

But the arches of the nearly 1,000 wholly or partially surviving Roman bridges haven’t done all the work by geometry alone. “The load-bearing capacity of a bridge depended both on the solidity of its abutments and the strength — ‘shearing point’ — of its voussoirs,” or the stones of its arches between the keystone at the top and the springers at the bottom. “Since Roman builders carved voussoirs from the strongest readily available stone, their bridges tended to be impressively solid.” You wouldn’t want to run a freight train across the Puente de Alcántara, but 40-ton trucks are no problem — to say nothing of a car filled with luggage, a few kids, and even a dog or two.

The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable?

The Beauty & Ingenuity of the Pantheon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Preserved Monument: An Introduction

Why Hasn’t the Pantheon’s Dome Collapsed?: How the Romans Engineered the Dome to Last 19 Centuries and Counting

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

Roman Architecture: A Free Online Course from Yale

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

in History, Politics | October 21st, 2024

In William Faulkner’s 1938 novel The Unvanquished, the implacable Colonel Sartoris takes drastic action to stop the election of a black Republican candidate to office after the Civil War, destroying the ballots of black voters and shooting two Northern carpetbaggers. While such dramatic means of voter suppression occurred often enough in the Reconstruction South, tactics of electoral exclusion refined over time, such that by the mid-twentieth century the Jim Crow South relied largely on nearly impossible-to-pass literacy tests to impede free and fair elections.

These tests, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, were “supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education” (typically up to the fifth grade). Yet they were “in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters.”

Additionally, many of the tests were rigged so that registrars could give potential voters an easy or a difficult version, and could score them differently as well. For example, the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement describes a test administered in Alabama that is so entirely subjective that it measures the registrar’s shrewdness and cunning more than anything else.

The test here from Louisiana consists of questions so ambiguous that no one, whatever their level of education, can divine a “right” or “wrong” answer to most of them. And yet, as the instructions state, “one wrong answer denotes failure of the test,” an impossible standard for even a legitimate exam. Even worse, voters had only ten minutes to complete the three-page, 30-question document. The Louisiana test dates from 1964, the year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which effectively put an end to these blatantly discriminatory practices.

Learn more about the history of Jim Crow voter suppression at Rebecca Onion’s original post here and an update here. And here you can watch video of Harvard students trying to take the test.

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

Philosopher Richard Rorty Chillingly Predicts the Results of the 2016 Election … Back in 1998

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

The Fake Buildings of New York: What Happens Inside Their Mysterious Walls

in Architecture, History | October 16th, 2024

You can’t go on a walk with a serious enthusiast of New York history without hearing the stories behind at least a few notable, beautiful, or downright strange buildings. Yet most longtime New Yorkers, famed for tuning out their surroundings to better strive for their goals of the day, tend not even to acknowledge the structures liable to catch the attention of out-of-towners. Take 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights: “From the outside, it looks like your typical townhouse,” says urban explorer Cash Jordan in his video above — but then you notice its blacked-out windows, bunker-like metal cladding, and apparently un-openable door.

Though it was indeed a townhouse when first built in 1847, 58 Joralemon Street was hollowed out and converted into one subway-system vent back in 1907. But the buildings right on either side remain residences, one of which, as Jordan finds, sold not long ago for $6 million.

In a completely different, more isolated context stands the Strecker Memorial Laboratory on Roosevelt Island. Built in 1892 as a laboratory for City Hospital, it opened as “the first institution in the nation for pathological and bacteriological research,” an activity it makes sense to keep apart from a dense urban environment. Abandoned in the nineteen-fifties, it later became another subway facility, specifically a power conversion substation.

Jordan also visits a fake building well out on Pier 34, and one that also provides a function essential to New York transit: ventilating the smoke and exhaust out of the Holland Tunnel. Owned and operated by public agencies, these structures perform well-documented and entirely non-secret functions. The same can’t be said of the last and most striking fake building Jordan introduces, a windowless Brutalist tower constructed in 1969 at 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. Owned by AT&T, it seems once to have been a telephone switching station, but has lately been rumored to be a “huge doomsday bunker.” That’s one theory, anyway, and the building’s sinister appearance could inspire countless others. Not that many locals are imagining them, obeying as they do one of the central commandments of Manhattan: don’t look up.

New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower

An Introduction to the Chrysler Building, New York’s Art Deco Masterpiece, by John Malkovich (1994)

The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)

Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Thomas Edison’s Recordings of Leo Tolstoy: Hear the Voice of the Great Russian Novelist

in History, Literature, Technology | October 8th, 2024

Born 196 years ago, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a period of immense social, political, and technological change, paralleled in his own life by his radical shift from hedonistic nobleman to theologian, anarchist, and vegetarian pacifist. Though he did not live to see the Russian Revolution, the novelist did see Tsar Alexander II’s sweeping reforms, including the 1861 Emancipation order that changed the social character of the country. Near the end of his life, Tolstoy saw the coming of new recording technology that would revolutionize the direction of his own life’s work—telling stories.

In his later years Tolstoy appeared in the new medium of film, which captured his 80th birthday in 1908, and his funeral procession two years later. He was the subject of the first color photograph taken in Russia (top) also in 1908. And that same year, Tolstoy made several audio recordings of his voice, on a phonograph sent to him personally by Thomas Edison. You can hear one of those recordings, “The Power of Childhood,” made on April 19th, 1908, just above.

You’ll note, of course, that the great author reads in his native language. Most of the recordings he made, which he intended for the edification of his countrymen, are in Russian. Below, however, you can hear him read from his last book, Wise Thoughts For Every Day in English, German, French and Russian. The book collects Tolstoy’s favorite passages from thinkers as diverse as Lao-Tzu and Ralph Waldo Emerson. As Mike Springer wrote in a previous post on this recording, “Tolstoy rejected his great works of fiction” as an old man, “believing that it was more important to give moral and spiritual guidance to the common people.” To that end, he made a series of short recordings, which you can hear at this site, on such subjects as art, law, morality, poverty, nonviolence, and capital punishment.

The story of how Tolstoy came to make these recordings is a fascinating one. Interested in the new technology, Tolstoy made his first recording in 1895, when, writes The Moscow Times, “an Edison representative came to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate, to record the author’s voice. Those recordings were taken over the border to Berlin, where they lay in an archive until they were brought back to the Soviet Union after World War II.” When Stephen Bonsal, editor of the New York Times learned of Tolstoy’s interest in recording technology in 1907, he promised to send the novelist an Edison phonograph of his own. Edison himself, hearing of this, refused to accept any payment, and personally sent his own machine to Tolstoy’s estate with the engraved message “A Gift to Count Leo Tolstoy from Thomas Alva Edison.”

Edison asked Tolstoy for many multi-lingual recordings, requesting “short messages” in English and French, “conveying to the people of the world some thoughts that would tend to their moral and social advancement.” Tolstoy diligently made several recordings, some of which were then shipped to Edison in 1908. On February 21 of that year, the New York Times published an article on the exchange titled “Tolstoy’s Gift to Edison. Will Send Record of His Voice—Edison Gave Him a Phonograph.” The world eagerly awaited the world-famous author’s message to its “civilized peoples.” It seems however, that the message never arrived. According to Sputnik News, the fate of that legendary recording “has yet to be found out.” Nevertheless, thanks to Edison, we have several other recordings of Tolstoy’s very well-preserved voice, the record of a life lived to the end with fierce conviction and curiosity.

The Only Color Picture of Tolstoy, Taken by Photography Pioneer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1908)

Leo Tolstoy Reads From His Last Major Work in 4 Languages, 1909

Vintage Footage of Leo Tolstoy: Video Captures the Great Novelist During His Final Days

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Private Snafu: The World War II Propaganda Cartoons Created by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc

in Film, History | October 6th, 2024

Private Snafu was the U.S. Army’s worst soldier. He was sloppy, lazy and prone to shooting off his mouth to Nazi agents. And he was hugely popular with his fellow GIs.

Private Snafu was, of course, an animated cartoon character designed for the military recruits. He was an adorable dolt who sounded like Bugs Bunny and looked a bit like Elmer Fudd. And in every episode, he taught soldiers what not to do, from blabbing about troop movements to not taking malaria medication.

The idea for the series reportedly came from Frank Capra — the Oscar-winning director of It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and, during WWII, the chairman of the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit. He wanted to create a cartoon series for new recruits, many of whom were young, unworldly and in some cases illiterate. Capra gave Disney first shot at developing the idea but Warner Bros’ Leon Schlesinger, a man who was as famous for his hard-driving business acumen as he was for wearing excessive cologne, offered a bid that was 2/3rds below that of Disney.

The talent behind this series was impressive, featuring a veritable who’s who of non-Disney animating talent, including Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Friz Freleng. Snafu was voiced by Mel Blanc, who famously did Bunny Bugs, Daffy Duck and later Marvin the Martian. And one of the main writers was none other than Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel.

As you can see in the first Snafu short Coming!! (1943), directed by Chuck Jones (see above), the movie displays a salty sensibility intended for an army camp rather than a Sunday matinee. The movie opens with a deadpan voiceover explaining that, in informal military parlance, SNAFU means “Situation Normal All…All Fouled Up,” hinting that the usual translation of the acronym includes a popular Anglo-Saxon word. Later, it shows Private Snafu daydreaming about a burlesque show – complete with a shapely exotic dancer doffing her duds – as he obliviously wrecks a plane.

Though there were no writing credits for each individual episode, just listen to the voiceover for Gripes (1943), directed by Friz Freleng. Dr. Seuss’s trademark singsong cadence is unmistakable including lines like:

“The moral, Snafu, is that the harder you work, the sooner we’re gonna beat Hitler, that jerk.”

Gas! (1944), directed by Chuck Jones, features a cameo from Bugs Bunny.

And finally, Going Home, directed by Chuck Jones, was slated to come out in 1944 but the War Department kiboshed it. The rationale was never explained but some think that the film’s reference to a massive, top-secret weapon that was to be deployed over Japan was just a little too close to the Manhattan Project.

You can watch a long list of Private Snafu episodes here.

Dr. Seuss’ World War II Propaganda Films: Your Job in Germany (1945) and Our Job in Japan (1946)

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who!

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.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When Kris Kristofferson (RIP) Stood by Sinéad O’Connor at the Height of Her Controversy

in History, Music | October 3rd, 2024

One would have imagined Sinéad O’Connor impervious to any reaction from a hostile audience, no matter how vitriolic. But even for a public figure as outspoken and unapologetic as her, it could all get to be a bit much at times. Take the 1992 concert Columbia Records put on for the 30th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first album. “Available on pay-per-view,” writes the New York Times’ Marc Tracy, it “featured performances by Dylan along with some of the biggest stars of his era, among them Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Johnny Cash and Eric Clapton,” as well as the late outlaw-country icon Kris Kristofferson.

The young O’Connor also performed, despite being “at the center of a firestorm. Just two weeks earlier, the Irish singer was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live when, at the conclusion of her second and final performance of the evening, she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II and exhorted, ‘Fight the real enemy,’ a defiant act of protest against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.” It fell to Kristofferson to introduce her, whereupon she “took the stage to a cascade of applause and boos, which did not let up as O’Connor stood silently at the microphone with her hands behind her back.”

As you can see in the video at the top of the post, Kristofferson didn’t stay offstage. After a minute he “re-emerged from stage left, put his arm around O’Connor and whispered something in her ear.” The show then went on, albeit not as planned: instead of doing Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” she did Bob Marley’s “War,” the very same song she’d sung on SNL before the notorious Pope-ripping. Rather than leaving his message as a Lost in Translation moment, Kristofferson later revealed the words he’d summoned to encourage her: “ ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ To which, he said, she responded: ‘I’m not down.’ ”

That response was characteristic of O’Connor, as was her 2021 autobiography’s note that she was thinking, “I don’t need a man to rescue me, thanks.” Whatever her feelings in the moment, her friendship with Kristofferson seems to have lasted until her death last year. “Kristofferson appeared with her in the 1997 music video for the song ‘This Is to Mother You,’ ” writes Tracy. “In 2010, the two performed a duet of Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ on an Irish talk show. It was a year after Kristofferson had released a song about the 1992 incident, ‘Sister Sinead.’ ” Outwardly, the two could hardly have had less in common, but inwardly, they must have recognized each other as kindred spirits — the likes of which we’ll surely not see again.

via New York Times

Shane MacGowan & Sinéad O’Connor Duet Together, Performing a Moving Rendition of “Haunted” (RIP)

Sinéad O’Connor’s Raw Isolated Vocals for “Nothing Compares 2 U”

A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor & Performs “Nothing Compares 2 U”

5 Musical Guests Banned From Saturday Night Live: From Elvis Costello to Frank Zappa

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of Film History Unfold in 80 Minutes

Spin the 17th-Century Death Roulette Wheel & Find Out What Would Have Killed You in 1665

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks

Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

The Fake Buildings of New York: What Happens Inside Their Mysterious Walls

Thomas Edison’s Recordings of Leo Tolstoy: Hear the Voice of the Great Russian Novelist

Private Snafu: The World War II Propaganda Cartoons Created by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc

When Kris Kristofferson (RIP) Stood by Sinéad O’Connor at the Height of Her Controversy

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search