You’re gearing up to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, but you haven’t read the Homeric work. Or you read it so long ago that it feels like you’ve never read it at all. No worries. Above, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the hosts of The Rest Is History podcast, take you through the major plot lines of the Odyssey, unpacking the literary and historical meaning of the epic’s different tales. It’s a good primer—just what you need to get ready for one of the bigger cinema releases this year. Enjoy!
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Despite having been composed about two and a half millennia before the invention of cinema, Homer’s Odyssey has offered tempting material to generation after generation of filmmakers. Part of the appeal is, of course, the work’s age, which obviates the need for potentially frustrating rights negotiations. But what really captures a director’s imagination about retelling the story of Odysseus’ long journey back to Ithaca must have a great deal to do with the host of monsters he encounters along the way. The giant cannibal Laestrygonians; the sirens, whose call forces Odysseus to lash himself to the mast of his ship; Scylla and Charybdis, guardians of the Strait of Messina; and perhaps most memorably of all, the towering cyclops Polyphemus.
Many or most of these fearsome characters are familiar to us even if we’ve never read the Odyssey, or indeed seen any of its adaptations. In everyday speech, we invoke the sirens’ call when describing an irresistible temptation, or Scylla and Charybdis when describing any set of equal and opposite pitfalls. And it would be a rare man, woman, or even sufficiently educated child who can’t identify the defining feature of a cyclops.
But long before all of these could enter the modern lexicon, they had to be invented in antiquity. In the new Hochelaga video above, host Tommie Trelawny investigates their origins, going over theories that suggest that some or all of these monsters had already made fairly long cultural journeys of their own before Homer put them in Odysseus’ path.
The myth of the cyclops could have been inspired by elephant skulls with large central nasal cavities, or perhaps by a brutish inversion of eyes as a signal of intelligence. It could have been a series of colossal Bronze Age stone statues on the island of Sardinia that constituted the basis for the Laestrygonians. As for the sirens, which we imagine as beautiful women, the pre-Christian ancient Greeks envisioned them as strange winged creatures making promises of knowledge. Scylla and Charybdis, representations of the destructive forces of nature, were a way of reifying the Strait of Messina’s inherent perils. Whatever their origins, all these challengers to Odysseus’ homecoming still fire up the imaginations of filmmakers, especially filmmakers inclined to high-tech spectacle: Christopher Nolan, for instance, the theatrical release of whose Odyssey begins tomorrow. We all know that the hero gets home in the end, but we’ll buy tickets for the monsters.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Many connoisseurs of architecture are enthralled by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I M Pei, who shared a belief that form follows function, or, as Wright had it, that form and function are one.
Others of us delight in gas stations shaped like teapots and restaurants shaped like fish or doughnuts. If there’s a philosophy behind these insistently playful visions, it likely has something to do with joy…and pulling in tourists.
Art historian John Margolies (1940–2016), responding to the beauty of such quirky visions, scrambled to preserve the evidence, transforming into a respected, self-taught photographer in the process. A Guggenheim Foundation grant and the financial support of architect Philip Johnson allowed him to log over four decades’ worth of trips on America’s blue highways, hoping to capture his quarry before it disappeared for good.
Despite Johnson’s patronage, and his own stints as an Architectural Record editor and Architectural League of New York program director, he seemed to welcome the ruffled minimalist feathers his enthusiasm for mini golf courses, theme motels, and eye-catching roadside attractions occasioned.
On the other hand, he resented when his passions were labelled as “kitsch,” a point that came across in a 1987 interview with the Canadian Globe and Mail:
People generally have thought that what’s important are the large, unique architectural monuments. They think Toronto’s City Hall is important, but not those wonderful gnome’s‑castle gas stations in Toronto, a Detroit influence that crept across the border and polluted your wonderfully conservative environment.
As Margolies foresaw, the type of commercial vernacular architecture he’d loved since boyhood–the type that screams, “Look at me! Look at me”–has become very nearly extinct.
And that is a maximal shame.
Your children may not be able to visit an orange juice stand shaped like an orange or the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but thanks to the Library of Congress, these locales can be pitstops on any virtual family vacation you might undertake.
(Or eschew your computer entirely—go on a real road trip, and continue Margolies’ work!)
Whatever you decide to do with them, the archive’s homepage has tips for how to best search the 11,710 color slides contained therein. Library staffers have supplemented Margolies’ notes on each image with subject and geographical headings.
This past spring, the oldest continuously operated family-owned Chinese restaurant in the United States served its last plate of chop suey. Pekin Noodle Parlor had been an institution in Butte, Montana’s Chinatown since 1911, long outlasting the town’s gold-rush boom, but according to its final, fifth-generation owner, it couldn’t survive changing attitudes toward dining out in the twenty-twenties. Whether or not COVID-influenced habits or delivery-app addiction are to blame, the Pekin’s closure constituted an occasion to reflect on the history of American Chinese food, and its rapid evolution into a distinct cuisine unto itself.
Take chop suey, which was advertised on the Pekin’s neon sign in lettering larger than the name of the restaurant itself. Often cited as an early “Chinese” dish actually invented by Chinese immigrants in the United States, it may have a certain basis in the tsap seui eaten in Guangdong province from which many of them had come.
But even there, it amounted to a technique for throwing together a hodgepodge of leftovers in a palatable manner; only with its Americanization did it acquire a distinct set of flavors and textures. A similar process seems to have produced General Tso’s chicken, broccoli beef, lo mein, and all the other dishes that the movies have convinced the world Americans eat directly from wire-handled paper boxes.
Whatever Hollywood’s tendency to exaggerate, the popularity of domestic Chinese food is real. According to the Business Insider video just above, Chinese restaurants outnumber even McDonald’s franchises in the U.S. How they reached that point owes more than a little to immigration, as anyone would expect, but also, less obviously, to restrictions on immigration. “Anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in America in the early 20th century — and had been since the latter half of the 19th century, when as many as 300,000 Chinese miners, farmers, railroad and factory workers came to the U.S.,” writes NPR’s Maria Godoy. The negative reaction to that influx underlay the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Immigration Act of 1917, with its “Asiatic Barred Zone”; and the Immigration Act of 1924, which introduced a national-origin quota system.
Despite the ostensibly severe restriction on Chinese immigration per se, the law allowed that “some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list. Voila! A restaurant boom was born.” Ditching their traditional businesses like laundries, Chinese in the U.S. would “pool their money to start luxury ‘chop suey palaces,’ then each investor would take turns running the joint for a year or 18 months” in order to earn merchant status. What sustained it all was the increasingly insatiable American demand for the food these immigrants had perfected, from chop suey to kung pao chicken to moo goo gai pan and beyond. The story neatly arrives at an American-style moral: where there’s a will, there’s a way — or rather, yǒu zhì zhě, shì jìng chéng.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In the days of popular retrofuturism—say, the first half of the twentieth century—people tended to imagine the world of tomorrow looking very much like the world of today, only with a lot more flying cars, monorails, and videophones. This is true whether those doing the imagining were titans of industry, marketing mavens, idealistic Soviets, or subjects of the Tsar, though we might think that people living under an ancient monarchical system might not expect much change. In some ways we might be right, but as we can see in the 1914 postcards here—printed as Russia entered World War I—the country did anticipate a modern, technological future, though one that still closely resembled its present.
Perhaps few but the most far-sighted of Russians predicted what the ailing empire would endure in the years to come—the disaster of the Great War, and the waves of Revolution and Civil War. Certainly, whoever painted these images foresaw no such catastrophic upheaval.
Although purporting to show us a view of Moscow in the 23rd century, they show the city very happily “still under monarchical rule,” writes A Journey Through Russian Culture, going about its daily life just as it did over three hundred years earlier, “with the addition of everything from subways to airborne public transportation, things probably seen as standard methods of transport for the future.”
Of course, there would be hot-rodded sleds on St. Petersburg Highway with headlights, fancy windshields, and what look like Christmas elves perched in them. Lubyanska Square, further up, would still host military parades of men on horseback, as children whiz by on motorbikes and subway trains rumble underneath. The Central Railway Station, above, might seem entirely unchanged, until one looks up, and sees elevated trams streaming out of the terminal like spider’s silk. Red Square, however, just below, would apparently host drag races, while people in trams and giant dirigibles look on from above.
The images have a children’s book quality about them and the festive air of holiday cards. They were apparently rediscovered only recently when a chocolate company called Eyinem reprinted them on their packaging. Like so much retrofuturism, these seem—in their bustling, yet safe, cheerful orderliness—tailor-made for nostalgic trips through Petrovsky Park, rather than imaginative leaps into the great unknown. For that, we must turn to Russian Futurism, which, both before and after World War I and the Revolution, imagined, helped bring about, but didn’t quite survive the massive technological and political disruption of the next two decades.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
It’s no small project to found a new society, especially when you’re doing it on the scale of a place like Russia. Apart from the considerable practical challenges it entails, there’s also the need for symbols bold enough to represent the underlying ideal. The avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin took it upon himself to create just such a symbol in the years after the Russian Revolution. The result is officially known as the Monument to the Third International, named for the organization tasked with the promotion of world communism (often abbreviated to Comintern). But it’s more commonly referred to as Tatlin’s Tower, perhaps in tribute to the artist’s particular vision — one too ambitious for its real-life construction even to begin.
“As part of a large-scale program to replace old czarist monuments with monuments to the revolution, the huge structure was both a symbolic sculpture and functional architecture,” write Smarthistory’s Charles Cramer and Kim Grant. “Designed to straddle the Neva river in St. Petersburg, the 1300 foot (400 meter) iron and glass Monument would surpass Paris’s Eiffel Tower in both scale and complexity.”
Indeed, it would stand taller than the yet-to-be-constructed Empire State Building, at least if you don’t count its antenna. Consisting of “a contracting double helix that spirals upward, supported by a huge diagonal girder,” Tatlin’s Tower would contain four sub-structures, each rotating at a different speed.
Yes, rotating, and “completing a full revolution in accordance with the importance of the institutions conducting their business on the inside,” as Tim Brinkof writes at Big Think. “The cube that contains the legislature would have completed a full rotation once per year. The pyramid above, housing the offices of party executives, would have needed a month. The information center, located at the very peak, would have rotated once a day, offering a 360-degree view of Petrograd,” as St. Petersburg was known in 1920. (It would be re-named Leningrad in 1924 before going back to St. Petersburg in 1991, after the end of the Soviet era.) You can learn more about how it all worked from the Architecture Enthusiast video at the top of the post, and the one from Sideprojects just above.
“Tatlin’s Tower was designed during a time when Communist rule was still nascent and party leaders sought to establish a new and distinctly socialist identity through art,” writes Brinkof. Idealized representations of the ruling class having been aggressively scrapped along with the ruling class itself, the Bolsheviks welcomed any style that could shore up their revolutionary cause, total abstraction included. Alas, though many party officials approved of Tatlin’s design, they commanded nothing like the resources to build it: “Russia would go bankrupt if it tried to acquire the insane amounts of steel and iron needed for the tower’s skeletal framework.” Perhaps Leon Trotsky, one of the project’s dissenters, was right when he called it “impractical and romantic” — and perhaps those are the very qualities that keep Tatlin’s Tower an object of fascination more than a century later.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Every time the World Cup comes around, or at least since England first and last won it 60 years ago, there’s talk of whether it’ll be brought “back home.” The idea being, of course, that football (or soccer, as it’s called in a couple of the countries hosting this year’s matches) was made in England. However the showdown with Norway goes this Sunday, and indeed how the rest of the World Cup plays out during the week thereafter, something much older — and of much less debatable origins — will be returned to Blighty: the Bayeux Tapestry, which has been kept in the eponymous Normandy town since at least the fourteen-seventies, and most likely centuries earlier than that.
This sizable and intricate piece of embroidered fabric depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the decisive event of the Norman Conquest of England. Legible today as a kind of “medieval comic strip,” as the narrator of this new animated video from the BritishMuseum puts it, the Bayeux Tapestry also reveals “medieval life in amazing detail,” while at the same time “hinting at secrets in its borders.”
For all the scholarly and popular attention paid to it, the work has yet to yield the answers to anywhere near all of its mysteries, nor to lose its fascination through familiarity. It bears, after all, quite a lot of imagery to get familiar with in the first place.
It’s one thing to behold the Bayeux Tapestry through images, however high-resolution, and quite another to behold the real thing. The English have been able to get fairly close to the latter experience since the Victorian era with the aid of the full-size replica, made in 1885, now displayed at the Reading Museum in Berkshire and previously featured here on Open Culture. But this September, the original Bayeux Tapestry will begin its residence at the British Museum, coinciding with the renovation of the Bayeux Museum. (France, for its part, gets a loan of treasures from the ship buried at Sutton Hoo and the Lewis chessmen.) If you get the opportunity to have a look before it’s returned the following year, don’t turn it down; as the World Cup shows us, you can never be sure when the next homecoming will happen.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Public and commercial spaces around the world are now lined with imagery of a vertebra-studded battle helmet and statues surrounded by flame. It’s all part of the promotional campaign for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, which will begin opening in theaters later this month. Much has been said and written about how the project represents the next phase of Nolan’s ever-grander cinematic ambitions, but banking on the spectacle value of Homer has a long history in filmmaking. When the Italian silent adaptation L’Odissea came out in 1911, for example, it was uncertain even whether audiences would tolerate the 44 minutes it took to depict Odysseus’ arduous journey home.
Though it was released in the fall of 1911 in Italy and the following winter in the U.S., L’Odissea now looks like a summer blockbuster avant la lettre, or ante litteram — or then again, given the material, πρὶν ὀνομασθῆναι, though most of us are still waiting to see just how ancient Nolan and his collaborators have allowed themselves to get.
By the standards of their day, the makers of L’Odissea appear to have spared no expense on sets, costumes, and even visual effects, most notably in its portrayal of the cyclops Polyphemus. Technically, none of it may measure up to what Nolan and company have in store, but the theatrical gestures, shifting color tints, and occasionally battered textures do their part to conjure up a reality of their own.
L’Odisseawas actually the second major literary adaptation of that year for its directors, the trio of Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro, all working at the studio Milano Films. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured their first, L’Inferno, which dramatizes the first and most famous part of Dante’s Divine Comedy at a length of 73 minutes. That runtime qualified it as the first feature-length film ever produced in Italy, by comparison to which L’Odissea may have actually felt like a more familiar viewing experience to contemporary viewers accustomed to shorts. Now that humanity has been re-acclimated to watching things a few minutes at a time here in the twenty-twenties, Nolan’s nearly three-hour Odyssey looks like a bold move indeed. But then, an epic poem demands an epic interpretation.
Note: If you click “cc” on the YouTube video above, English subtitles will appear.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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