An Introduction to Yasujiro Ozu, “the Most Japanese of All Film Directors”

in Film | November 9th, 2012

“Yasu­jiro Ozu, the man whom his kins­men con­sid­er the most Japan­ese of all film direc­tors, had but one major sub­ject, the Japan­ese fam­i­ly, and but one major theme, its dis­so­lu­tion.” So writes Don­ald Richie in Ozu: His Life and His Films, still the defin­i­tive Eng­lish-lan­guage study of this thor­ough­ly Japan­ese film­mak­er. (Richie, per­haps the most astute and expe­ri­enced liv­ing crit­ic of Japan­ese film, tells more of Ozu in the rel­e­vant seg­ment of Mark Cousins’ series The Sto­ry of Film.) Despite his Japan­ese­ness, or indeed because of it, Ozu con­tin­ues, near­ly fifty years after his pass­ing, to enthrall gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of west­ern cinephiles. Yes­ter­day we fea­tured a clip from Tokyo-Ga, the doc­u­men­tary where­in Wim Wen­ders makes a Tokyo jour­ney out of sheer need to seek out the spir­it of Ozu. Crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed French film­mak­er Claire Denis has also paid trib­ute, and above you’ll find a salute to Ozu as inspi­ra­tion from equal­ly laud­ed but res­olute­ly dead­pan Finnish auteur Aki Kau­ris­mä­ki. “Ozu-san, I’m Aki Kau­ris­mä­ki from Fin­land,” the Le Havre direc­tor explains, ready­ing a cig­a­rette. “I’ve made eleven lousy films, and it’s all your fault.”

What is it about Ozu? The dis­ci­plined econ­o­my of his sto­ries, dia­logue and images accounts for some of it. But he also deliv­ers some­thing less obvi­ous. “Just as there are no heroes in Ozu’s pic­tures,” writes Richie, “so there are no vil­lains. [ … ] In basic Zen texts one accepts and tran­scends the world, and in tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese nar­ra­tive art one cel­e­brates and relin­quish­es it. The aes­thet­ic term mono no aware is often used nowa­days to describe this state of mind.” And, whether in those words or not, Ozu’s fol­low­ers savor the expres­sion of mono no aware in his many films, such as An Autumn After­noon, Tokyo Sto­ry, Late Spring, and Good Morn­ing. This sort of thing being bet­ter expe­ri­enced than described, why not watch Ozu’s 1952 pic­ture The Fla­vor of Green Tea Over Rice? (Or 1941’s The Broth­ers and Sis­ters of the Toda Fam­i­ly, 1948’s A Hen in the Wind, 1950’s The Mureka­ta Sis­ters?) To my mind, noth­ing sums up Ozu’s appeal quite so well as his use of “pil­low shots” — sim­ple, sta­t­ic com­po­si­tions placed in his films for pure­ly rhyth­mic, non-nar­ra­tive pur­pos­es — of which you can watch one fan-made com­pi­la­tion below. How many film­mak­ers, Japan­ese or oth­er­wise, could pull those off?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Intro­duced Japan­ese Cin­e­ma to the West

Wim Wen­ders Vis­its, Mar­vels at a Japan­ese Fake Food Work­shop

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Astronaut Don Pettit Demystifies the Art of Taking Photographs in Space

in Astronomy, Photography, Video - Science | November 9th, 2012

Over the years, we’ve shown you Don Pet­tit’s work — his many time­lapse videos tak­en from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. (Find some below.) By now, we take these videos almost for grant­ed. We watch the breath­tak­ing scenery flow by, and we shrug our shoul­ders a bit. Rarely do we step back and think: holy mack­er­el, this cat is tak­ing art­ful videos in space. Nor do we won­der: how does one take pic­tures in zero grav­i­ty any­how?

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing when you think about it. And, now Don Pet­tit gives you a glimpse inside his cre­ative process. Speak­ing at the Lumi­nance 2012 con­fer­ence in New York City, Pet­tit explains the chal­lenges of pho­tograph­ing on the ISS — the equip­ment required, the quick deci­sions you need to make, the obsta­cles that get in the way, the aes­thet­ic choic­es you need to con­sid­er, etc. And then he gets into some intrigu­ing ques­tions. Like how do you cap­ture the col­ors of the auro­ra bore­alis? or what fab­u­lous pho­tographs can infrared pho­tog­ra­phy yield?

His talk runs 30 min­utes, and it will inter­est the casu­al observ­er or the all-out pho­tog­ra­phy geek.

Don Pet­tit Videos from the ISS:

Ani­mat­ed Auro­ra Bore­alis from Orbit

Great Cities at Night: Views from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

What It Feels Like to Fly Over Plan­et Earth

Star Gaz­ing from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (and Free Astron­o­my Cours­es Online)

via Metafil­ter

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Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education

in Education | November 8th, 2012

E + duc­ere: “To lead or draw out.” The ety­mo­log­i­cal Latin roots of “edu­ca­tion.” Accord­ing to a for­mer Jesuit pro­fes­sor of mine, the fun­da­men­tal sense of the word is to draw oth­ers out of “dark­ness,” into a “more mag­nan­i­mous view” (he’d say, his arms spread wide). As inspi­ra­tional as this speech was to a sem­i­nar group of bud­ding high­er edu­ca­tors, it failed to spec­i­fy the means by which this might be done, or the rea­son. Lack­ing a Jesuit sense of mis­sion, I had to fig­ure out for myself what the “dark­ness” was, what to lead peo­ple towards, and why. It turned out to be sim­pler than I thought, in some respects, since I con­clud­ed that it was­n’t my job to decide these things, but rather to present points of view, a col­lec­tion of methods—an intel­lec­tu­al toolk­it, so to speak—and an enthu­si­as­tic mod­el. Then get out of the way. That’s all an edu­ca­tor can, and should do, in my hum­ble opin­ion. Any­thing more is not edu­ca­tion, it’s indoc­tri­na­tion. Seemed sim­ple enough to me at first. If only it were so. Few things, in fact, are more con­tentious (Google the term “assault on edu­ca­tion,” for exam­ple).

What is the dif­fer­ence between edu­ca­tion and indoc­tri­na­tion? This debate rages back hun­dreds, thou­sands, of years, and will rage thou­sands more into the future. Every major philoso­pher has had one answer or anoth­er, from Pla­to to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey. Con­tin­u­ing in that ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion, lin­guist, polit­i­cal activist, and aca­d­e­m­ic gen­er­al­ist extra­or­di­naire Noam Chom­sky, one of our most con­sis­tent­ly com­pelling pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, has a lot to say in the video above and else­where about edu­ca­tion.

First, Chom­sky defines his view of edu­ca­tion in an Enlight­en­ment sense, in which the “high­est goal in life is to inquire and cre­ate. The pur­pose of edu­ca­tion from that point of view is just to help peo­ple to learn on their own. It’s you the learn­er who is going to achieve in the course of edu­ca­tion and it’s real­ly up to you to deter­mine how you’re going to mas­ter and use it.” An essen­tial part of this kind of edu­ca­tion is fos­ter­ing the impulse to chal­lenge author­i­ty, think crit­i­cal­ly, and cre­ate alter­na­tives to well-worn mod­els. This is the ped­a­gogy I end­ed up adopt­ing, and as a col­lege instruc­tor in the human­i­ties, it’s one I rarely have to jus­ti­fy.

Chom­sky defines the oppos­ing con­cept of edu­ca­tion as indoc­tri­na­tion, under which he sub­sumes voca­tion­al train­ing, per­haps the most benign form. Under this mod­el, “Peo­ple have the idea that, from child­hood, young peo­ple have to be placed into a frame­work where they’re going to fol­low orders. This is often quite explic­it.” (One of the entries in the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary defines edu­ca­tion as “the train­ing of an ani­mal,” a sense per­haps not too dis­tinct from what Chom­sky means). For Chom­sky, this mod­el of edu­ca­tion impos­es “a debt which traps stu­dents, young peo­ple, into a life of con­for­mi­ty. That’s the exact oppo­site of what tra­di­tion­al­ly comes out of the Enlight­en­ment.” In the con­test between these two definitions—Athens vs. Spar­ta, one might say—is the ques­tion that plagues edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers at the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els: “Do you train for pass­ing tests or do you train for cre­ative inquiry?”

Chom­sky goes on to dis­cuss the tech­no­log­i­cal changes in edu­ca­tion occur­ring now, the focus of innu­mer­able dis­cus­sions and debates about not only the pur­pose of edu­ca­tion, but also the prop­er meth­ods (a sub­ject this site is deeply invest­ed in), includ­ing the cur­rent unease over the shift to online over tra­di­tion­al class­room ed or the val­ue of a tra­di­tion­al degree ver­sus a cer­tifi­cate. Chomsky’s view is that tech­nol­o­gy is “basi­cal­ly neu­tral,” like a ham­mer that can build a house or “crush someone’s skull.” The dif­fer­ence is the frame of ref­er­ence under which one uses the tool. Again, mas­sive­ly con­tentious sub­ject, and too much to cov­er here, but I’ll let Chom­sky explain. What­ev­er you think of his pol­i­tics, his eru­di­tion and expe­ri­ence as a researcher and edu­ca­tor make his views on the sub­ject well worth con­sid­er­ing.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Marilyn Monroe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Playground (1955)

in Film, Photography | November 8th, 2012

Dur­ing the 1950s, the pio­neer­ing pho­to­jour­nal­ist Eve Arnold took a series of por­traits of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe. The now icon­ic pho­tos gen­er­al­ly present Mon­roe as a larg­er-than-life celebri­ty and sex sym­bol. Except for one. In 1955, Arnold pho­tographed Mon­roe read­ing a worn copy of James Joyce’s mod­ernist clas­sic, Ulysses. It’s still debat­ed whether this was sim­ply an attempt to recast her image (she often played the “dumb blonde” char­ac­ter in her ’50s films), or whether she actu­al­ly had a pen­sive side. (Her per­son­al library, cat­a­logued at the time of her death, sug­gests the lat­ter.) But, either way, Arnold explained years lat­er how this mem­o­rable pho­to came about:

We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was vis­it­ing Nor­man Ros­ten the poet.… I asked her what she was read­ing when I went to pick her up (I was try­ing to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been read­ing it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to her­self to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it con­sec­u­tive­ly. When we stopped at a local play­ground to pho­to­graph she got out the book and start­ed to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I pho­tographed her. It was always a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort of pho­tog­ra­ph­er and sub­ject where she was con­cerned — but almost more her input.

You can find more images of Mar­i­lyn read­ing Joyce over at The Retro­naut. Of course, you can down­load your own copy of Ulysses from our Free Ebooks col­lec­tion. But we’d rec­om­mend spend­ing time with this fine­ly-read audio ver­sion, which oth­er­wise appears in our list of Free Audio Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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Jean Cocteau’s Avante-Garde Film From 1930, The Blood of a Poet

in Film | November 8th, 2012

In a 1946 essay Jean Cocteau cau­tions against mak­ing a quick inter­pre­ta­tion of his first film, The Blood of a Poet, with a quote from Mon­taigne:

Most of Aesop’s fables have many dif­fer­ent lev­els and mean­ings. There are those who make myths of them by choos­ing some fea­ture that fits in well with the fable. But for most of the fables this is only the first and most super­fi­cial aspect. There are oth­ers that are more vital, more essen­tial and pro­found, that they have not been able to reach.

Cocteau con­ceived The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un Poète) in late 1929, soon after the pub­li­ca­tion of his nov­el Les Enfants Ter­ri­bles. He had just kicked his opi­um habit and was enter­ing one of the most pro­lif­ic peri­ods of his career. The film is often called a sur­re­al­ist work, but Cocteau reject­ed the asso­ci­a­tion, say­ing that he had set out “to avoid the delib­er­ate man­i­fes­ta­tions of the uncon­scious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wan­dered as though in a labyrinth.” He goes on:

The Blood of a Poet draws noth­ing from either dreams or sym­bols. As far as the for­mer are con­cerned, it ini­ti­ates their mech­a­nism, and by let­ting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets mem­o­ries entwine, move and express them­selves freely. As for the lat­ter, it rejects them, and sub­sti­tutes acts, or alle­gories of these acts, that the spec­ta­tor can make sym­bols of if he wish­es.

Many of its first spec­ta­tors saw anti-Chris­t­ian sym­bol­ism in the film. Although pro­duc­tion end­ed in Sep­tem­ber of 1930, Cocteau was not able to get his film shown pub­licly until Jan­u­ary of 1932. The Blood of a Poet fea­tures the only film appear­ance by Lee Miller, a not­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er and mod­el of Man Ray. (She plays a stat­ue.) The film is now con­sid­ered a clas­sic of exper­i­men­tal cin­e­ma and is the first in what came to be known as Cocteau’s “Orphic Tril­o­gy,” which includes Orphée (1950) and Tes­ta­ment of Orpheus (1959). The Blood of a Poet will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Man Ray and the Ciné­ma Pur: Four Sur­re­al­ist Films From the 1920s

Anémic Ciné­ma: Mar­cel Ducham­p’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926)

Bal­let Méchanique: The His­toric Cin­e­mat­ic Col­lab­o­ra­tion Between Fer­nand Legér and George Antheil

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The History of Western Architecture: A Free Online Course Moving from Ancient Greece to Rococo

in Architecture, Online Courses | November 8th, 2012

Image by Arild Vågen, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you have plans to vis­it the Old World any time soon, you should spend a few good min­utes — make that hours — with The His­to­ry of Archi­tec­ture, a free course that recent­ly debuted on YouTube. Taught by Jacque­line Gar­gus at Ohio State, the course fea­tures 39 video lec­tures that col­lec­tive­ly offer a clas­sic sur­vey of West­ern archi­tec­ture. We begin in Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, lay­ing the con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tions for what’s to come. Then we dive head­long into Islam­ic, Byzan­tine and Medieval archi­tec­ture, before spend­ing a good deal of time with Renais­sance, Baroque, and Roco­co styles. Of course, we encounter many great land­marks along the way: the pyra­mids of Egypt, the tem­ples of Ancient Greece, the Hagia Sophia in Con­stan­tino­ple, Chartres in France, Brunelleschi’s Duo­mo of Flo­rence, and the list goes on. The course appears on YouTube. Find the lec­tures below.

The His­to­ry of Archi­tec­ture has been added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. And if/when Prof. Gar­gus posts a sequel that gets us into mod­ern times, we’ll be sure to let you know.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enroll in Harvard’s Free Online Archi­tec­ture Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the His­to­ry & The­o­ry of Archi­tec­ture

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale

Take an Online Course on Design & Archi­tec­ture with Frank Gehry

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Rare Footage of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald From the 1920s

in Books, Literature | November 7th, 2012

The writer F. Scott Fitzger­ald and his flam­boy­ant wife Zel­da are often remem­bered as the embod­i­ment of the boom and bust that con­vulsed Amer­i­ca in the peri­od between the two world wars.

Like char­ac­ters in The Great Gats­by, Scott and Zel­da lived lives of wild aban­don in the Roar­ing Twen­ties, rid­ing on top of taxi cabs and splash­ing in the Plaza Hotel foun­tain. Scott was inspired and prod­ded along in his dis­si­pa­tion by the noto­ri­ous­ly eccen­tric Zel­da. As Ring Lard­ner once put it, “Mr. Fitzger­ald is a nov­el­ist and Mrs. Fitzger­ald is a nov­el­ty.”

But by the time the stock mar­ket crashed in 1929, so too had the Fitzger­alds. Scot­t’s drink­ing caught up with him, and Zel­da’s eccen­tric­i­ty evolved into schiz­o­phre­nia. Their sad down­fall is cap­tured in Fitzger­ald’s 1930 sto­ry, “Baby­lon Revis­it­ed.” Zel­da would live the rest of her life in men­tal insti­tu­tions while Scott spent his final years in Hol­ly­wood, strug­gling to pay for her treat­ment and try­ing to recap­ture his lost glo­ry. Their daugh­ter, Scot­tie, was raised by oth­er peo­ple.

In this video we catch a few glimpses of the Fitzger­alds in their hey­day, before the par­ty came to an end. The film clips are fun to watch but the YouTube video on which they are col­lect­ed should per­haps be tak­en with a grain of salt. We’re not sure, for exam­ple, that the clip pur­port­ing to show Zel­da being “very live­ly in a street” is actu­al­ly of her. It appears to show some­one else. And one of the cap­tions claims that Fitzger­ald is pic­tured writ­ing The Great Gats­by, but accord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na’s Fitzger­ald Web site, the sen­tence he is writ­ing on paper is: “Every­body has been pre­dict­ing a bad end for the flap­per, but I don’t think there is any­thing to wor­ry about.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Win­ter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s Life Remem­bered in a Fine Film

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Recites From Shake­speare’s Oth­el­lo and John Mase­field­’s ‘On Grow­ing Old’

Find F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s works in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

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Carnegie Mellon Takes Online Courses to Another Level with Its Open Learning Initiative

in Education, Online Courses | November 7th, 2012

Open online cours­es—mas­sive or otherwise—are rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing high­er edu­ca­tion by mak­ing learn­ing more and more acces­si­ble.

Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty has tak­en online cours­es to anoth­er lev­el, offer­ing vir­tu­al class­room envi­ron­ments based on deep research into how adults learn.

The cours­es are free. Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive cur­rent­ly offers 15 cours­es through a plat­form that pro­vides tar­get­ed progress feed­back to stu­dents.

The pro­gram doesn’t offer course cred­it or cer­tifi­cates but the cours­es are sophis­ti­cat­ed. CMU spent any­where from $500,000 to $1 mil­lion for each course to write the soft­ware, which includes a course builder pro­gram for instruc­tors and a sys­tem of feed­back loops that send stu­dent learn­ing data to the instruc­tor, the stu­dent and the course design team.

More than 10,000 stu­dents enrolled in OLI cours­es last year. So far CMU pro­motes OLI cours­es as sup­ple­men­tary to tra­di­tion­al class­room instruc­tion. But the cours­es are cer­tain­ly rich enough to be enjoyed by any­one. They’re most­ly in the sci­ences but include a few lan­guage and social sci­ence class­es too.

The list of cur­rent­ly-avail­able cours­es appears below. We also have them list­ed in our com­plete list of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties (many of which hap­pen to offer cer­tifi­cates too):

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work on thenifty.blogspot.com and .

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A Celebration of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cassettes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

in Media, Music, Technology | November 7th, 2012

In going dig­i­tal, we’ve gained some con­ve­nience. That’s unde­ni­able. But we’ve lost much when it comes to aes­thet­ics and qual­i­ty too. (Neil Young makes that point again and again.) Increas­ing­ly, we’re real­iz­ing what we’ve left behind, and there’s a move­ment afoot to recov­er old school media — things you can see, touch and feel and mar­vel over. Vinyl records. Tape cas­settes. VHS tapes. 8mm Film. Polaroid Pho­tos. All of that good stuff gets revis­it­ed in the lat­est short film pro­duced in the PBS Off Book series. Pre­vi­ous install­ments have cov­ered:

Art in the Era of the Inter­net

The Art of Film and TV Title Design

The Art of Glitch

The Cre­ativ­i­ty of Indie Video Games 

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The Drinking Party, 1965 Film Adapts Plato’s Symposium to Modern Times

in Film, Philosophy | November 7th, 2012

The word “sym­po­sium” tends to con­jure images of a for­mal, aca­d­e­m­ic gath­er­ing, which it most often is these days. It’s kind of a stuffy word, but it shouldn’t be. In Plato’s day, it was sim­ply a drink­ing par­ty, the kind you might have with a group of brainy acquain­tances when the last course is cleared, there’s no short­age of wine, and no one has to work the next day. (This being ancient Greece, these were all-male affairs). Plutarch defined a sym­po­sium as “a pass­ing of time over wine, which, guid­ed by gra­cious behav­ior, ends in friend­ship.” Plato’s Sym­po­sium, the best-known of his dia­logues, is much more in the lat­ter vein—a cel­e­bra­tion among accom­plished friends to mark the tri­umph of the poet Agathon’s first tragedy. The dia­logue con­tains sev­en speech­es on love, includ­ing of course, one from Plato’s pri­ma­ry mouth­piece Socrates. But the main draw is com­ic play­wright Aristo­phanes; no under­grad­u­ate who takes a phi­los­o­phy course for­gets his roman­tic ori­gin myth, in which love actu­al­ly is a yearn­ing for one’s miss­ing oth­er half.

When writer and direc­tor Jonathan Miller decid­ed to adapt Plato’s clas­sic text into a film in 1965, he evi­dent­ly decid­ed to com­bine both the mod­ern, aca­d­e­m­ic def­i­n­i­tion of “sym­po­sium” and its clas­si­cal prece­dent. His film is called The Drink­ing Par­ty, and involves its share of that in mod­er­a­tion (as in the orig­i­nal), but it also trans­pos­es Plato’s casu­al gath­er­ing to a group of stu­dents in for­mal attire din­ing on a neo-Clas­si­cal ter­race with an Oxford don, their clas­sics mas­ter. Each char­ac­ter adopts the role of one of Plato’s Sym­po­sium speak­ers. A few things to note here: the excerpt above is of rel­a­tive­ly high qual­i­ty, but the com­plete film itself (below) did not fare near­ly as well: trans­ferred from a well-worn 16mm print from a uni­ver­si­ty archive, the film is mud­dy, scratched and quite dim. This is too bad. Miller’s film, which was shown to col­lege phi­los­o­phy stu­dents in the 60s and 70s, sunk into cul­tur­al obliv­ion for a cou­ple decades, and copies of it are very rare. Nonethe­less, this is well worth watch­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly for stu­dents of phi­los­o­phy. The Drink­ing Par­ty was pro­duced as part of a mid-60s arts doc­u­men­tary series called “Sun­day Night,” which ran from 1965–1968.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Find The Sym­po­sium and oth­er great works in our col­lec­tion of 375 Free eBooks.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Nicolas Cage, Paul Newman & Dennis Hopper Bring Their American Style to Japanese Commercials

in Television | November 7th, 2012

West­ern­ers who grew inter­est­ed in Japan dur­ing the past 30 years will remem­ber one point of ear­ly con­tact with the cul­ture: Japan­ese com­mer­cials. Tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments from the Land of the Ris­ing Sun have long offered the rest of the world a source of uncom­pre­hend­ing aston­ish­ment and mys­ti­fied laugh­ter. What a weird place Japan is, many must think to them­selves as they gaze upon spots involv­ing danc­ing dogs and salty snacks or brush fire and high blood-pres­sure tea. But as for­eign observers tend to dis­cov­er — and as I have had recon­firmed while vis­it­ing the coun­try for the past week — Japan may have many qual­i­ties, but pure weird­ness isn’t among them. Arti­facts that strike the rest of us as weird emerge accord­ing to log­ic, albeit a log­ic of their own. This goes dou­ble for the most prized Japan­ese com­mer­cials of the bunch: those star­ring Amer­i­can celebri­ties.

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve fea­tured Woody Allen for Seibu and James Brown for Nissin. Please enjoy, at the very top of this post, the eccen­tric Nico­las Cage play­ing his Amer­i­can-ness to the very hilt. When pachinko machine man­u­fac­tur­er Sankyo recruit­ed Cage, they went all-out, get­ting him square-danc­ing in the mid­dle of a lone­ly south­west­ern high­way with a pack of met­al ball-head­ed aliens. Right above, we have Paul New­man flash­ing a smile and point­ing his fin­ger not once, but two times, in a 1980 com­mer­cial for Maxwell House. And speak­ing of eccen­tric­i­ty, below you’ll find per­haps the most oblique exam­ple of the Amer­i­can actor-star­ring Japan­ese com­mer­cial I’ve ever come across: Den­nis Hop­per for Tsumu­ra. Sofia Cop­po­la sat­i­rized all of this, of course, in Lost in Trans­la­tion, but the exchange of Japan­ese cor­po­rate mon­ey for a dose of dev­il-may-care Amer­i­can panache could hard­ly make bet­ter busi­ness sense.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick

Ing­mar Bergman’s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

Fellini’s Fan­tas­tic TV Com­mer­cials

Wes Anderson’s New Com­mer­cials Sell the Hyundai Azera

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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