Thomas Edison’s Silent Film of the “Fartiste” Who Delighted Crowds at Le Moulin Rouge (1900)

in Comedy, Film, History, Theatre | May 16th, 2016

In 1900, Thomas Edison traveled to Paris to document the many wonders of the Exposition Universelle, and the city itself. Among the sights captured with his kinetoscope cameras were the Expo’s moving sidewalks, the Champs-Élysées, and the previous Exposition Universelle’s crown jewel, the Eiffel Tower, now eleven years old.

It wasn’t all so high-minded. Edison and his kinetoscope also caught a performance by former Moulin Rouge star, Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, above. This elegantly attired gentlemen achieved fame and fortune with a series of impressions, carried out by a rather eccentric orifice. He was not so much artiste as fartiste, a title he wore with pride.

Pujol claimed to have discovered his unusual talent as a child, and soon set about achieving different effects by using his abdominal muscles to expel not gas, but odorless air. By varying the pressure, he was able to play simple tunes. By the time he turned 30, his act had expanded to include impersonations of celebrities, musical instruments, birds, a thunderstorm and such stock characters as a nervous bride. His grand finale included such feats as blowing out candles, smoking cigarettes and playing an ocarina (below), all with the aid of a rubber hose inserted into his anus via a modest trouser slit.

What a tragedy that Edison’s short film is silent! No live piano accompaniment could do justice to this magical artistic fruit, and if there were other recordings of Pujol, they’ve been lost to history.

He lives on in the imaginations of artists who followed him.

Actor Ugo Tognazzi, below, assumed the title role in a 1983 Italian language feature.

Director Mel Brooks injected a bit of subtlety into Blazing Saddles’ beans-around-the-campfire humor when he appeared as a character named Governor William J. LePetomane.

Sadly, Pujol was left on the cutting room floor of director Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, but all is not lost. Reportedly, Johnny Depp has indicated interest in bringing this historic figure back to life. (Gentlemen, start your screenplays…)

Then there is the half hour biopic, below, directed by Monty Python alum Ian McNaughton and starring Leonard Rossiter as Pujol. Prepare to hear the opening session of the Congress of Vienna, a toad, and a four-part harmony.

via Messy Nessy Chic

Thomas Edison’s Boxing Cats (1894), or Where the LOLCats All Began

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

in Film, History | May 12th, 2016

You may never have heard of Oscar Micheaux, but out of his “impoverished consciousness-raising exploitation potboilers,” writes critic Dave Kehr, “the American black cinema was born.” Kehr wrote that in a brief review of Micheaux’s Murder in Harlem, a “1935 mystery tale involving corpses and mysterious letters and flashbacks and Byzantine plot twists, all of which should undoubtedly prove taxing to Micheaux’s meager technical abilities. It hardly matters though, since Micheaux was his own cinematic institution.”

That movie came in the late-middle period of Micheaux’s career, which produced more than 44 pictures and qualified him as the most prolific black independent filmmaker in American cinema history as well as, in the words of Atlas Obscura’s Stephanie Weber, “a pioneer in almost every aspect of film.” Having started out as a writer, he chose for his first motion picture to adapt The Homesteader, his own novel “about a black homesteader in the Dakotas who falls in love with the daughter of a Scottish widower. In 1919, Micheaux raised the money on his own to film and produce The Homesteader in Chicago, becoming the first African American to make a feature film.”

Not only did Micheaux take on a controversial theme right away by hinting at the possibility of interracial romance (though The Homesteader’s love interest turns out, in a plot twist that must have made more sense at the time, not to actually be white), history has remembered him as standing against not just the dominant social phenomena but the dominant cinematic phenomena of his day: his second film Within Our Gates told the story of a mixed-race schoolteacher whose adoptive father stood up to the family’s white landlord, ostensibly as a response to post-World War I social instability, though some took it as a rebuke to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

“Given the times, his accomplishments in publishing and film are extraordinary,” says NAACP History, “including being the first African-American to produce a film to be shown in ‘white’ movie theaters. In his motion pictures, he moved away from the ‘Negro’ stereotypes being portrayed in film at the time.” In recent years, critics like Kehr and others have directed a bit of attention back toward Micheaux’s path-breaking body of work, and many future leading lights of black American cinema could no doubt benefit from discovering it themselves. But in his confident treatment of sensational material, his creativity-inducing technical and economic limitations, and his learn-on-the-job understanding of the mechanics of cinema, he also foreshadowed the excitement of all the waves of indie film to come.

You can watch many of Oscar Micheaux’s films free on Youtube or at the Internet Archive. Or find them in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

To learn more about Micheaux, read Patrick McGilligan’s book, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Great Black Filmmaker.

via Atlas Obscura

Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black, Starring a 19-Year-old Billie Holiday

Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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What Happens When a Japanese Woodblock Artist Depicts Life in London in 1866, Despite Never Having Set Foot There

in Art, History | May 4th, 2016

The affinities between England and Japan go far beyond the fact that both are tea-loving nations with a devotion to gardens; far beyond the fact that both drive on the left, are the world’s leading overseas investors, and are rainy islands studded with green villages. They go even beyond the fact that both have an astringent sense of hierarchy, subscribe to a code of social reticence, and are, in some respects, proud, isolated monarchies with more than a touch of xenophobia. The very qualities that seem so foreign, even menacing, to many Americans in Japan — the fact that people do not invariably mean what they say, that uncertain distances separate politeness from true feelings, and that everything is couched in a kind of code in which nuances are everything — will hardly seem strange to a certain kind of Englishman.

That astute comparison comes from an essay called “For Japan, See Oscar Wilde” by Pico Iyer, a writer uniquely well-placed to sense this sort of thing by virtue of his childhood in England and longtime residence as an adult in Japan. His Indian heritage and penchant for world travel have also equipped him to write with clarity about the ways — sometimes grotesque, sometimes delusional, sometimes aspirational, sometimes fantastical — in which one country can perceive another.

In the case of the somehow separated-at-birth nations of England and Japan, we have some direct documentation of the former as dreamed of by the latter in Utagawa Yoshitora’s 1866 triptych Igirisukoku Rondon no zu.

“Together, the three images depict a street scene near the River Thames, complete with thronging English pedestrians, two sailing ships, horses, oxen, and carriages,” writes Slate’s Rebecca Onion: “The images would have sold fairly cheaply, in the thriving market in woodblock (ukiyo‑e) prints in 19^th-century Japan. Utagawa, a relatively minor artist from an extensive lineage of woodblock printers, also produced portraits of Kabuki actors, triptychs of historical battle scenes, and images of foreigners in Yokohama—one of the only places in Japan where they were allowed to trade at the time. (Here’s an 1861 print titled ‘Two Americans.’) Utagawa probably did not visit London, and was instead working from secondhand reports.”

That would make him a perfect subject for Iyer, who has tended to specialize in writing not just about the places of the world but the places of the mind. While the people of Utagawa’s London of the mind display a simplified typical English style of dress, and do so before a proud domed building and a mighty-looking, elaborately rigged sailing ship, their composition remains somehow quintessentially Japanese. But then, how much separates the quintessentially Japanese from the quintessentially English? “The actual people who live in Japan,” said Oscar Wilde as quoted in Iyer’s essay, “are not unlike the general run of English people.”

And the affinity goes both ways. When Prince Fushimi Sadanaru made a state visit to England forty years after Utagawa made his prints, he hoped to catch a performance of The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan’s hit comic opera set very much in the Japan of the English mind (and one that faces accusations of cultural imperialism to this day). Alas, the British government had preemptively canceled all performances during the Prince’s stay for fear of offending him. This prompted a Japanese journalist in London to later see the show himself. He went on to write of his disappointment: he’d gone in expecting “real insults” to his homeland, only to find “bright music and much fun.”

via Slate’s The Vault/Two Nerdy History Girls

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The Best Writing Advice Pico Iyer Ever Received

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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An Ancient Philosophical Song Reconstructed and Played for the First Time in 1,000 Years

in History, Music | April 26th, 2016

Above and below, you can watch musicians perform “Songs of Consolation,” a 1,000-year-old song set “to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy,” an influential medieval text written during the 6th century. According to Cambridge University, the performance of the piece, which had been lost in time until recently, didn’t come easily:

[T]he task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.

Now, after more than two decades of painstaking work on identifying the techniques used to set particular verse forms, research undertaken by Cambridge University’s Dr Sam Barrett has enabled him to reconstruct melodies from the rediscovered leaf of the 11th century ‘Cambridge Songs’.

The song is performed here by Benjamin Bagby, Hanna Marti and Norbert Rodenkirchen, three members of the medieval music ensemble known as Sequentia.

via Cambridge/IFL Science

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction That is ‘100% Accurate’

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Mesmerizing Animation, Made of Photos from Early-1900s America, Lets You Travel in a Steampunk Time Machine

in Animation, History | April 26th, 2016

Surely you remember Cheers, if only from the sitcom’s syndicated reruns ceaselessly aired around the world. And if you remember Cheers, you’ll remember no part of it more vividly than its opening credits sequence, which broke from the well-established tradition of showing the faces of the series’ cast members.

Instead, writes Stephen Cole at Fonts in Use, the studio charged with creating the sequence “collected archival illustrations and photographs of bar life, culled from books, private collections, and historical societies. They hand-tinted the images and paired them with typography inspired by a turn-of-the-century aesthetic.”

As fondly as we remember their work, the art of bringing turn-of-the-century photos to life has come a long way indeed since Cheers debuted in 1982. Take, for instance, the short above: The Old New World by Russian photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov, who in just over three and a half minutes takes us right back to early-1900s America. “The photos show New York, Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore between 1900 and 1940, and were obtained from the website Shorpy,” writes Petapixel’s Michael Zhang, quoting Zakharov’s own description of the work as a “photo-based animation project” as well as a chance to “travel back in time with a little steampunk time machine.”

You can see a gallery of more of the materials that went into The Old New World at Behance. Just as those Cheers opening credits evoked the conviviality of old-time tavern culture, Zakharov’s film evokes what it meant — or at least, to all of us currently alive and thus without any living memory of that era, what we think it meant — to live in the headiest cities going in the headiest country going, places whose booming industry and culture held out seemingly infinite promise, even on quiet days.

Should Netflix picks Cheers as their next beloved sitcom to revive, they might consider going to Zakharov for a new title sequence. He’s certainly got all the pictures of Boston he’d need.

via Petapixel

London Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Layered Onto Footage from 2013

James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904

Watch 1920s “City Symphonies” Starring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Watch the Titanic Sink in Real Time in a New 2‑Hour, 40 Minute Animation

in Animation, History | April 19th, 2016

From the makers of Titanic: Honor and Glory–a PC video game that lets you sail aboard a fully detailed re-creation of the RMS Titanic–comes an animation that lets you watch the sinking of the Titanic in real time. According to the web site Titanic Facts, the ship sank in two hours and 40 minutes in 1912. And that’s precisely how long things take to unfold in the video above. The animation narrates the events in a fairly straightforward way–nothing like the dramatic scenes painted in James Cameron’s 1997 fictionalized film. But it’s still worth the watch.

In the Relateds below, you can check out two related clips — a vintage clip showing footage of the actual Titanic in 1911, and another animated reenactment of the Titanic sinking, this one created by Cameron himself.

via coudal.com

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemian Coffee Bars Documented in a Vintage 1959 Newsreel

in Food & Drink, History | April 15th, 2016

I live in Seoul, by some measures the most coffee shop-saturated city in the world. But modern coffee life here (which I recently wrote about for the Los Angeles Review of Books) only really developed after Starbucks came to town around the turn of the 21st century. We’ve now got more Starbucks locations per capita than anywhere else, and even so, the homegrown Korean chains well outnumber those under the green mermaid. To understand how the coffee-house culture we know across the world today took its shape, we have to look back to London in the late 1950s, specifically as captured in the Look at Life newsreel on the city’s bohemian coffee house boom just above.

“Coffee is big business,” says its narrator, over a montage of neon signs advertising places like The Coffee House, Las Vegas Coffee Bar, Heaven & HELL Coffee Lounge, and La Roca. “The coffee bar boom in Britain began in 1952, when the first espresso machine arrived from Italy and was set up here, in London’s Soho.” The city’s many entrepreneurs vigorously seized the opportunity — maybe too vigorously, since “for every three coffee bars that opened up, two closed down.” They hadn’t planned on a few different factors, including overhead high enough that “if a character sits for half an hour over one cup of coffee, his share of the rent, heat, light, and service mount to the point where the management is paying him.”

They should’ve counted themselves lucky that the likes of me and my generation weren’t alive back then to, on a similarly single coffee, spend half the day typing on our laptops. But London’s midcentury coffee houses soon learned to diversify, offering Look at Life plenty–in its vivid colors and with its broad sense of humor–of life to look at: we see coffee bars hopping with live music and those who dance to it; jukebox coffee bars geared toward pompadoured hipsters; the film industry-beloved coffee bar in which T.S. Eliot once wrote the immortal line, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”; an “invisible coffee house” behind whose false newsstand front “curious characters congregate”; the Moka, which William S. Burroughs once shut down with his cut-up techniques; and even the famous Le Macabre, decorated with countless skeletal mementos mori.

The newsreel also finds its way to a coffee shop established by a newspaper where “university students and other assorted eggheads meet to put the world right — or more often left,” which reminds me of Guardian Coffee, a pop-up coffee house in a shipping-container complex in London’s Shoreditch (in some sense, the Soho of the 21st century) co-run by the eponymous newspaper, which I visited on my last trip to England. The Guardian Coffee experiment has since ended, but the Guardian has retained its interest in the beverage itself, as evidenced by recent articles like Rosie Spinks’ “The Caffeine Curse: Why Coffee Shops Have Always Signaled Urban Change.”

“As the coffee shop has become a byword for what everyone hates about urban change and gentrification – first come the creatives and their coffee shops, then the young professionals, then the luxury high-rises and corporate chains that push out original residents – it’s worth asking if that charge is fair,” Spinks writes. “As the function of the coffee house in London has evolved over time, was its early iteration so radically different than the ones many of us type and sip away in today?” And whatever form they take, coffee houses remain, as Look at Life calls them, “bright — or dim — fanciful, imaginative new additions to the British scene.” Or the American scene, or the Korean scene, or indeed the global scene.

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Creates Ad for Coffee in the 1650s

J.S. Bach’s Comic Opera, “The Coffee Cantata,” Sings the Praises of the Great Stimulating Drink (1735)

The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

Black Coffee: Documentary Covers the History, Politics & Economics of the “Most Widely Taken Legal Drug”

How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

Hipsters Ordering Coffee

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Leonardo da Vinci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

in History, Technology | April 7th, 2016

We think of Leonardo da Vinci as one of the great humanists, a thinker and creator whose achievements spanned the realms of art, architecture, natural science, engineering, and letters. We less often think of him as an innovator of the tools of as destructive a practice as war, but a true polymath — and the life of Leonardo more or less defines that concept — knows no boundaries. The website Leonardo da Vinci Inventions lists among the machines he came up with an armored car (“precursor to the modern tank”), an 86-foot crossbow, and a triple barrel cannon (at a time when even gunpowder itself hadn’t yet attained worldwide use).

Many of Leonardo’s inventions, no matter how thoroughly he diagrammed their designs and mechanics in his notebooks, never got out of the realm of the theoretical in his lifetime — and some remain machines of the imagination. But as Nick Squires reported in the Telegraph a few years ago, a late 15th-century cannon dug up in Croatia “bears a striking resemblance to sketches drawn by the Renaissance inventor, notably in his Codex Atlanticus — the largest collection of his drawings and writing. Mounted on a wooden carriage and wheels, it would have allowed a much more rapid rate of fire than traditional single-barreled guns — in a precursor to modern day machine guns.”

Italian-renaissance-art.com offers more detail on all these Leonardo-designed weapons, and the historical context which drove him to work on them:

He was a man of his time and the need for military engineers provided him with employment, travel opportunities, and the chance to continue his scientific work unhindered. Renaissance Italy was a collection of independent city states who became engaged in incessant warfare with each other.

“This provided a market for the technically advanced weapons needed to gain military advantage over the enemy” — and an opportunity for Leonardo to work out his ideas for “new weaponry, bridging, bombarding machines, trench draining,” and more. Leonardo’s work during this period included 15th-century blueprints for “an armored vehicle made from wood and operated by eight men” turning cranks, an antiquity-inspired “scythed chariot,” breech-loading and water-cooled guns not entirely different in concept from the steam cannons used in the World War II, and “a repeating ‘machine gun’ operated by a man-powered treadmill.”

You can see a real-life example of Leonardo’s leaf-spring catapult built by a Society for Creative Anachronism member here. But if you try to follow the instructions and assemble his other ingenious military devices, prepare for disappointment. The Telegraph’s Tom Leonard wrote up an early-2000s BBC documentary that claimed this Renaissance Man’s Renaissance Man “inserted a series of deliberate flaws into his inventions to make sure that they could never be used,” for instance, “when the tank, a tortoise-like contraption, was tested by the Army, it immediately became clear that its gears had been set against each other.”

Leonardo possibly crippled his own designs in order to serve the function of absent “patent laws to protect him from having his designs copied,” and possibly because he “was a pacifist who was aware that his warlord masters might try to find military uses for his inventions.” Either way, at least he died a few hundred years too early to witness the First World War, in which tanks, machine guns, and all the rest of it turned into surely more horrifying a spectacle than all the battles of Renaissance Italy put together.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (1482)

Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490) Is Much Cooler Than Yours

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Thomas Edison’s Silent Film of the “Fartiste” Who Delighted Crowds at Le Moulin Rouge (1900)

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

What Happens When a Japanese Woodblock Artist Depicts Life in London in 1866, Despite Never Having Set Foot There

An Ancient Philosophical Song Reconstructed and Played for the First Time in 1,000 Years

Mesmerizing Animation, Made of Photos from Early-1900s America, Lets You Travel in a Steampunk Time Machine

Watch the Titanic Sink in Real Time in a New 2‑Hour, 40 Minute Animation

The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemian Coffee Bars Documented in a Vintage 1959 Newsreel

Leonardo da Vinci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

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