World War I began 100 years ago, on 28 July 1914. The initial trigger, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, produced something of a “domino effect,” where European powers, bound by pre-existing international alliances, chose sides and fell rather obviously into a catastrophic war. It started as a European war, pitting Allied powers against Central powers. But, soon enough, it became international, involving a long list of countries from Africa, North and South America, Asia, and Australasia. The trench warfare that became such an important part of World War I ensured that the battle lines moved ever so slowly, at least until the final stages of the war. That grinding quality gets captured remarkably well by EmperorTigerstar’s latest YouTube video, “World War I: Every Day,” which shows “the changing front lines of World War I every day from Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war to the armistice of November 11, 1918.” It also includes the changing front lines in Africa and the Pacific. (A legend, below, will help you sort out the various different players.) When you’re done watching “World War I: Every Day” (above), you’ll perhaps want to spend time with EmperorTigerstar’s previous video, “World War II in Europe: Every Day,” which documents an even bloodier war unfolding at a dramatic pace.
Legend:
Maroon = Central Powers and annexed lands.
Burgundy = Areas militarily occupied by the Central Powers.
Red = Central Power puppet or client states.
Brown = Central Powers in an armistice.
Pink = Central Power gains for that day.
Dark blue = Allied powers.
Blue = Central Powered lands militarily occupied by the Allies.
Blue-grey = Allied powers in an armistice.
Light blue = Allied gains for that day.
Some teens of my acquaintance have been agitating for a meeting with a Holocaust survivor. These encounters, common enough in my childhood, are growing less so as those with firsthand knowledge enter their golden years. Bear in mind that Eva Lavi, the youngest person named on Oskar Schindler’s List, is now 76.
Sir Nicholas Winton is definitely an inspiring figure, and not just for his remarkable longevity. From late 1938 until the start of the war, he managed to rescue 669 Czech children—most of them Jews.
Winton made no public mention of his heroics, until 1988, when the BBC obtained his rescue scrapbook and used it to coordinate a massive live on-air surprise during the program That’s Life (see above).
I plan on using the 60 Minutes episode below to introduce my teen friends—most of whom stoutly declare they’d have hidden Anne Frank without a second thought—to a man whose actions speak louder than words.
When disco pioneer Giorgio Morodoer released a colorized version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – featuring a soundtrack with Billy Squier, Pat Benatar and Adam Ant, no less – film purists everywhere howled with disbelief at how the film’s moody black and white had been turned into Easter egg pinks and blues. It felt like a gimmick and, worse, it just didn’t look real.
Colorization has come a long way since then. In the hands of the right Photoshop wizard — like artist Dana Keller — a colorized photograph of, say, the Oklahoma dust bowl or turn-of-the-century Coney Island gives viewers the chill of the uncanny. People and things that have long since departed this world suddenly seem vital and alive. It makes that foreign country called the past feel eerily familiar.
Above is a picture of poet Walt Whitman. His trademark long hair and Karl Marx beard would look right at home in certain corners of Portland. Apart from that, there is both a sensitivity and ferociousness about this picture. Whitman definitely looks like he’s capable of delivering a barbaric yawp. You can see what the picture looked like in its original black and white here.
This photograph of Helen Keller drawing a hand over Charlie Chaplin’s face from 1919 looks like it could be a still from an upcoming Oscar bait biopic. In fact the picture was taken in Hollywood while Keller was on one of her speaking tours. (See original here.)
Likewise with this portrait (original here) of Mark Twain. You can almost hear him make some pithy comment like “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.” As you can see from the picture, Twain didn’t take that risk, opting for more of a whiskery scowl.
This picture of Joseph Goebbels (original) staring down a Jewish photographer is simply terrifying. It’s the sort of death stare common among psycho-killers, death row inmates and, apparently, Nazi propaganda ministers.
And this picture of a humble burger flipper from 1938 is so crisp that it looks like it might have been taken yesterday.
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. And check out his art blog Veeptopus.
This week is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 journey to the moon. And while most people will celebrate the event by acknowledging the abilities and courage of Neil Armstrong and company in this landmark of human endeavor, a small, though vocal, group of people will decry the moon landing as a fraud.
In that spirit, French filmmaker William Karel spins an elaborate tale of intrigue in Dark Side of the Moon. (See outtakes above.) The 2002 film posits that the Apollo 11 moon landing was staged by none other than Stanley Kubrick. How else did the director get his hands on a super advanced lens from NASA to shoot those gorgeous candle-lit scenes in Barry Lyndon? The film is slickly produced and features an impressive array of interviewees from Henry Kissinger, to Buzz Aldrin to Christiane Kubrick. Some of the other people interviewed include Jack Torrance and David Bowman. If that’s not a tip off that the whole movie is fake, then the blooper reel at the end drives the point home. Only a lot of people didn’t get the joke. Conspiracy enthusiasts Wayne Green cited the movie as further proof that the moon landing was faked.
Moon hoaxers like to point to The Shining as a confession by Kubrick that he was forced into a Big Lie. In the documentary Room 237, Jay Weidner claims as much. And Michael Wysmierski argues the same in The Shining Code 2.0, a feature length video that you can watch below. Or get right to the meat of things here.
And just in case you get swept up in Wysmierski’s loony logic, filmmaker S. G. Collins makes the very compelling argument that the technology simply didn’t exist to fake the moon landing in 1969. Case closed.
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.
I like old newspaper, smoothing it out to read about what was happening on the day an older relative packed away the good crystal or some other fragile tchotchke.
Traveling in India, I dug how the snacks I purchased to eat on the train came wrapped in old book pages. When my traveling companion realized he had lost his journal, there was comfort in knowing that it would be reincarnated as cones to hold delicious chana jor garam.
Taking a thrift store frame apart, I was thrilled to discover that behind the previous owners kittens in a basket print lurked a homemade Mother’s Day card from the 40’s and a calendar page that noted the date someone named David quit drinking. (I sent it along to Found Magazine.)
Apparently, it’s a rich tradition, putting old pages to good use, once they start feeling like they’ve outlived their intended purpose. The bishop likely didn’t know the specifics on the material that made his hat stand up. I’ll bet the sisters of the German Cistercian convent where the dress above originated were more concerned with the outward appearance of the garments they were stitching for their wooden statues than the not-for-display lining.
As Dutch art historian Erik Kwakkel explains on his medievalfragments blog, the invention of the Gutenberg press demoted scads of handwritten text to more proletarian purpose. Ultimately, it’s not as grim as it sounds:
the dismembered books were to have a second life: they became travelers in time, stowaways… with great and important stories to tell. Indeed, stories that may otherwise not have survived, given that classical and medieval texts frequently only come down to us in fragmentary form. The early history of the Bible as a book could not be written if we were to throw out fragment evidence.
You know you’re doing something right in your life if the Nobel Prize-winning author of 100 Years of Solitude talks to you like a giddy fan boy.
Back in October 1990, Gabriel García Márquez sat down with Akira Kurosawa in Tokyo as the Japanese master director was shooting his penultimate movie Rhapsody in August — the only Kurosawa movie I can think of that features Richard Gere. The six hour interview, which was published in The Los Angeles Times in 1991, spanned a range of topics but the author’s love of the director’s movies was evident all the way through. At one point, while discussing Kurosawa’s 1965 film Red Beard, García Márquez said this: “I have seen it six times in 20 years and I talked about it to my children almost every day until they were able to see it. So not only is it the one among your films best liked by my family and me, but also one of my favorites in the whole history of cinema.”
One natural topic discussed was adapting literature to film. The history of cinema is littered with some truly dreadful adaptations and even more that are simply inert and lifeless. One of the Kurosawa’s true gifts as a filmmaker was turning the written word into a vital, memorable image. In movies like Throne of Blood and Ran, he has proved himself to be arguably the finest adapter of Shakespeare in the history of cinema.
García Márquez: Has your method also been that intuitive when you have adapted Shakespeare or Gorky or Dostoevsky?
Kurosawa: Directors who make films halfway may not realize that it is very difficult to convey literary images to the audience through cinematic images. For instance, in adapting a detective novel in which a body was found next to the railroad tracks, a young director insisted that a certain spot corresponded perfectly with the one in the book. “You are wrong,” I said. “The problem is that you have already read the novel and you know that a body was found next to the tracks. But for the people who have not read it there is nothing special about the place.” That young director was captivated by the magical power of literature without realizing that cinematic images must be expressed in a different way.
García Márquez: Can you remember any image from real life that you consider impossible to express on film?
Kurosawa: Yes. That of a mining town named Ilidachi [sic], where I worked as an assistant director when I was very young. The director had declared at first glance that the atmosphere was magnificent and strange, and that’s the reason we filmed it. But the images showed only a run-of-the-mill town, for they were missing something that was known to us: that the working conditions in (the town) are very dangerous, and that the women and children of the miners live in eternal fear for their safety. When one looks at the village one confuses the landscape with that feeling, and one perceives it as stranger than it actually is. But the camera does not see it with the same eyes.
When Kurosawa and García Márquez talked about Rhapsody in August, the mood of the interview darkened. The film is about one old woman struggling with the horrors of surviving the atomic attack on Nagasaki. When it came out, American critics bristled at the movie because it had the audacity to point out that many Japanese weren’t all that pleased with getting nuked. This is especially the case with Nagasaki. While Hiroshima had numerous factories and therefore could be considered a military target, Nagasaki had none. In fact, on August 9, 1945, the original target for the world’s second nuclear attack was the industrial town of Kita Kyushu. But that town was covered in clouds. So the pilots cast about looking for some place, any place, to bomb. That place proved to Nagasaki.
Below, Kurosawa talks passionately about the legacy of the bombing. Interestingly, García Márquez, who had often been a vociferous critic of American foreign policy, sort of defends America’s actions at the end of the war.
Kurosawa: The full death toll for Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been officially published at 230,000. But in actual fact there were over half a million dead. And even now there are still 2,700 patients at the Atomic Bomb Hospital waiting to die from the after-effects of the radiation after 45 years of agony. In other words, the atomic bomb is still killing Japanese.
García Márquez: The most rational explanation seems to be that the U.S. rushed in to end it with the bomb for fear that the Soviets would take Japan before they did.
Kurosawa: Yes, but why did they do it in a city inhabited only by civilians who had nothing to do with the war? There were military concentrations that were in fact waging war.
García Márquez: Nor did they drop it on the Imperial Palace, which must have been a very vulnerable spot in the heart of Tokyo. And I think that this is all explained by the fact that they wanted to leave the political power and the military power intact in order to carry out a speedy negotiation without having to share the booty with their allies. It’s something no other country has ever experienced in all of human history. Now then: Had Japan surrendered without the atomic bomb, would it be the same Japan it is today?
Kurosawa: It’s hard to say. The people who survived Nagasaki don’t want to remember their experience because the majority of them, in order to survive, had to abandon their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters. They still can’t stop feeling guilty. Afterwards, the U.S. forces that occupied the country for six years influenced by various means the acceleration of forgetfulness, and the Japanese government collaborated with them. I would even be willing to understand all this as part of the inevitable tragedy generated by war. But I think that, at the very least, the country that dropped the bomb should apologize to the Japanese people. Until that happens this drama will not be over.
The whole interview is fascinating. They continue to talk about historical memory, nuclear power and the difficulty of filming rose-eating ants. You can read the entire thing here. It’s well worth you time.
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.
Last Wednesday, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England unveiled the wax sculpture above, which they say is the closest “anyone has come to the real Jane Austen in 200 years.” The figure, The Guardianreports, is the creation of forensic artist Melissa Dring, a “specialist team using forensic techniques which draw on contemporary eye-witness accounts,” and Emmy-winning costume designer Andrea Galer.
Austen often introduced her characters with broad descriptions—Emma Woodhouse is “handsome, clever, and rich,” Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bingley simply “a single man in possession of a good fortune.” But her talent consisted in undermining such stock descriptions, and the societal assumptions they entail. Instead of types, she gave readers complicated individuals squirming uncomfortably inside the bonds of propriety and decorum. But what of Austen herself? Readers initially knew nothing of the author, as her novels were first published anonymously.
Since her death in 1817, biographers have told and retold her personal history, and she has become an almost cult-like figure for fans of her work. Some of the author’s first biographers were family members, including her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1872 (above). In it, Austen-Leigh describes his aunt as “very attractive”: “Her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls round her face.”
Based partly on that description and others from niece Caroline, the wax figure, Dring told the BBC, is “pretty much like her.” Austen “came from a large… family and they all seemed to share the long nose, the bright sparkly eyes and curly brown hair. And these characteristics come through the generations.” Dring used Austen’s sister Cassandra’s famous portrait as a starting point, but noted that the sketch “does make it look like she’s been sucking lemons […] We know from all accounts of her, she was very lively, very great fun to be with and a mischievous and witty person.” All descriptions with which her devoted readers would doubtless agree. See more photos of the Austen wax sculpture here.
The CIA fought most of the Cold War on the cultural front, recruiting operatives and placing agents in every possible sphere of influence, not only abroad but at home as well. As Francis Stoner Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters details, the agency funded intellectuals across the political spectrum as well as producers of radio, TV, and film. A well-financed propaganda campaign aimed at the American public attempted to persuade the populace that their country looked exactly like its leaders wished to see it, a well-run capitalist machine with equal opportunity for all. In addition to the agency’s various forays into jazz and modern art, the CIA also helped finance and consulted on the production of animated films, like the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm we recently featured. We’ve also posted on other animated propaganda films made by government agencies, such as A is for Atom, a PR film for nuclear energy, and Duck and Cover, a short suggesting that cleanliness may help citizens survive a nuclear war.
Today we bring you three short animations funded and commissioned by private interests. These films were made for Arkansas’ Harding College (now Harding University) and financed by longtime General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan. The name probably sounds familiar. Today the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation generously supports public radio and television, as well as medical research and other altruistic projects. In the post-war years, Sloan, widely considered “the father of the modern corporation,” writes Karl Cohen in a two-part essay for Animation World Network, supposedly took a shine to the bootstrapping president of Harding, George S. Benson, a Christian missionary and crusading anti-Communist who used his position to promote God, family, and country. According to Cohen, Sloan donated several hundred thousand dollars to Harding as funding for “educational anti-Communist, pro-free enterprise system films.” Contracted by the college, producer John Sutherland, former Disney writer, made nine films in all. As you’ll see in the title card that opens each short, these were ostensibly made “to create a deeper understanding of what has made America the finest place in the world to live.” At the top, watch 1949’s “Why Play Leap Frog?” and just above, see another of the Harding films, “Meet King Joe,” also from 1949.
Just above, watch a third of the Harding propaganda films, “Make Mine Freedom,” from 1948. Each of these films, calling themselves “Fun and Facts about America,” present simplistic patriotic stories with an authoritative narrator who patiently explains the ins and outs of American exceptionalism. “Why Play Leapfrog?” tells the story of Joe, a disgruntled doll-factory worker who learns some important lessons about the supply chain, wages, and prices. He also learns that he’d better work harder to increase his productivity (and cooperate with management) if he wants to keep up with the rising cost of living. “Meet King Joe” introduces us to the “king of the workers of the world,” so called because he can buy more stuff than the poor schlubs in other countries. Joe, “no smarter” and “no stronger than workers in other lands” has such advantages only because of, you guessed it, the wonders of capitalism. “Make Mine Freedom” reminds viewers of their Constitutional rights before introducing us to a snake oil charlatan selling “ism,” a Commie-like tonic, to a group of U.S. labor disputants—if only they’ll sign over their rights and property. The assembled crowd jumps at the chance, but then along comes John Q. Public, who won’t give up his freedom for “some imported double-talk.”
You can read much more about the relationship between Sloan and Benson and the other films Sutherland produced with Sloan’s money, in Cohen’s essay, which also includes information on Cold War animated propaganda films made by Warner Brothers and Disney.
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