George Orwell published his satirical allegory Animal Farmin 1945 at the tail end of World War II. While Orwell claimed his inspiration for the farm setting was a bucolic village scene, it’s tempting to imagine that he also drew some of his ideas from American propaganda cartoons made during WWII by Disney (see below) and Warner Brothers. One particularly striking example from 1942 is Loony Tunes’ “The Ducktators,” set on a farm that becomes Europe under a newly-hatched Adolf Hitler duckling, sporting the forelock and mustache and shouting “sieg heil” as soon as he emerges from his jet-black egg. Hitler-duck’s posturing appeals to a strutting, broadly stereotypical Italian goose (Mussolini), and many of the ducks and geese on the farm, who line to up salute and, um… goosestep. There are plenty of little gags thrown in—it’s all played for comedy—but of course, there is a message (or two) here.
First, cut to the simpering “Dove of Peace,” an androgynous creature who wrings its hands and says, “Have they forgot? ‘Tis love that’s right, and naught is gained by show of might.” This is clearly a caricature of Neville Chamberlain, whose ineffectual policies enabled and emboldened Hitler.
Chamberlain is remembered for prematurely declaring that his appeasement of Hitler in the 1938 Munich Pact (here represented by a barnyard “Peace Conference”) had secured “peace for our time.” The reference is an interesting example of a wartime dig at the U.S.’s British allies.
Hitler-duck tears up the “Peace Conference” treaty and beats up the British and French ducks. Then a (painfully racist) Japanese duck rows ashore singing “I’m a Japanese Sandman”—a stand in for Tojo Hideki or Emperor Hirohito. The three “Ducktators” rule the roost and trample the Dove of Peace underfoot. Historical allegory gives way to slapstick, and the wimpy Dove morphs into a pudgy, victorious Churchill with the Ducktators’ heads mounted on his wall. Then, message number two appears with fanfare: “If you’d like to make this true, here’s all you have to do: For Victory Buy United States Savings Bonds and Stamps.” Overall, The Ducktators is a fascinating example of wartime advertising, and of contemporary U.S. feelings towards its European allies. You can download The Ducktatorshere.
The past decade has seen filmmaker Werner Herzog rise up on a new, seemingly sudden burst of international fame. Cinephiles have paid great respect to his work, or at least felt great admiration toward his work’s audacity, since the seventies. But Herzog himself has been at his craft since the sixties, and you can see photographic evidence of it in the autobiographical documentary above, Portrait Werner Herzog. In it, he reveals that he turned to filmmaking after a friend’s serious injury convinced him to abandon his previous dream of becoming a champion ski jumper. But Herzog’s fans know he didn’t stop feeling the visceral impact of the sport, since he went on to make 1974’s The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, perhaps the definitive visual study of that particular thrill. We hear him say this over clips from that film, as we hear him recount other formative moments over images from other Herzog favorites, including Fata Morgana, Heart of Glass, and Fitzcarraldo.
A 1986 German production directed by Herzog himself, Portrait Werner Herzog shows him at a time and from a cultural angle that countless more recent interviews and profiles don’t. We see his footage of Munich’s elaborately boisterous Oktoberfest; we see him in the green Bavarian valley of his youth. “I’m the kind of person who travels on foot,” he explains, “even for long distances.” This leads to the story of his walk from Munich to Paris to visit the ailing film critic Lotte Eisner (whom Herzog calls “the consciousness of the new German cinema”), which became his book Of Walking In Ice. He speaks of hypnotizing an entire cast for Heart of Glass, of fighting the aggressively filmmaking-unfriendly Peruvian jungle to shoot Fitzcarraldo, and of planning a never-realized Himalayan film starring frequent (and frequently volatile) collaborator Klaus Kinski. “Here we can truly see how hard it is to make a film,” so Herzog sums up his struggle, “but this is my life, and I don’t want to live it in any other way.” In that respect, nothing has changed in 25 years.
Portrait Werner Herzog will be added to our list of 500 Free Movies.
NASA’s Mars rover, Curiosity, landed just minutes ago. If you didn’t catch the action live online, you can watch a screen capture of the moments before and after the landing. The landing itself takes place around the 5:40 mark, but the tension in the mission control room begins in the minutes before that, when the rover passed through The Seven Minutes of Terror. The joy, the tears, the great sense of accomplishment, the first images from Mars (around 7:30 mark) — they all follow. A job well done. A great pleasure to watch.
If you want to focus on the pride in the mission control room, you can simply watch the video below.
Some years ago, a writer for Publisher’s Weekly said, “Salvador Dalí’s swan-dive from Surrealist visionary to pathetic self-parody surely constitutes one of this century’s great case studies in career suicide.”
Fair enough. But Salvador Dalí doing a swan dive is a fun thing to watch, as these three television commercials from his later years demonstrate. The artist appeared in TV ads for a number of clients, including Lanvin Chocolates, Alka-Seltzer and Veterano brandy.
In the 1968 Lanvin commercial, the wild-eyed artist takes a bite of chocolate and it curls his mustache. He looks at the camera and says, “I’m crazy about Lanvin Chocolates,” with the emphasis on “crazy.”
Of course, there was method in Dalí’s madness. According to his biographer Meryle Secrest, Dalí’s minimum price for a minute of film was $10,000. The artist’s love of money is legendary. In 1939 André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, gave Dalí the nickname “Avida Dollars,” an anagram for “Salvador Dali” based on the French avide à dollars. It means“eager for dollars.”
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Twenty-five years ago a group of friends gathered in a San Francisco apartment to memorialize companions who had died of AIDS. They used one of the oldest techniques around to honor their loved ones: they made a quilt, the now-famous AIDS Memorial Quilt, with unique panels for each person felled by the disease. Now including some 48,000 panels, the quilt has grown into a massive, public expression of grief. Its panels come from around the world. It was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. (Find more on the history of the quilt here.)
Like any good archive—and the quilt is an archive of life and loss—the AIDS Memorial Quilt serves as a historical repository, a storehouse of sentimental information for scores of people. But beyond that the quilt is a piece of political folk art. AIDS, after all, is a uniquely political disease, at least in the United States. The idea for the quilt was conceived during a candlelight march for assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Efforts to lift the stigma of AIDS are closely linked to gay rights activism.
While the quilt is on view in Washington, D.C. this summer, Microsoft offers the world up close and personal access. Even if the Mall is too small to hold the entire quilt, the Internet isn’t. All 48,000 panels are newly digitized through a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Iowa, the University of Southern California and the Names Quilt Foundation.
You can fly like a bird over the whole, beautiful piece. You can zoom in to read the thousands of names—some in block letters, others stitched in cursive. You can count the rainbows, too.
You can also search the quilt by name or, if you know it, by the block number of a particular panel through the AIDS Quilt Touch interface. The site allows unique searches for each time the quilt has been displayed. This is important because the quilt is so massive that the Mall in Washington can’t hold it all. It’s always displayed in sections, so if you want to know where a special panel has been on view, recently, it’s now possible to find out.
Kate Rix is a freelance writer based in Oakland. See more of her work at .
After seeing it mentioned in Monday’s post on the “Strawberry Fields Forever” demos, any curious aficionado of Beatles-related ephemera will want to know more about Richard Lester’s How I Won the War, in which John Lennon made his only non-musical acting appearance. The trailer above gives you an idea of the sensibility of the film, whose desert shoot in Spain allowed Lennon the time and got him into the headspace to conceive of that beloved song. Ever shifting between tones, genres, and looks, the movie follows the attempt of the British Army’s “3rd Troop, the 4th Musketeers” to build a cricket pitch behind enemy lines in WW II Tunisia. In the small part of Musketeer Gripweed, Lester cast the 26-year-old, bespectacled Lennon. The two had already established a working relationship, with Lester having directed all of the Fab Four in their musical films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
An enterprising fan assembled the video just above by stringing together all of Lennon’s scenes, which come to just under eight minutes out of the full film’s 109. Watching all these gags decontextualized adds a layer of absurdity, and How I Won the War’s humor is pretty absurd to begin with. You’d perhaps do best to approach the movie as an absurdist black comedy that both uses and parodies countless traditions in British film.
Not that it worked for a 25-year-old Roger Ebert, who waxed sarcastic at the time about the ballyhooing of Lennon’s eight minutes: “By now we have seen John Lennon’s bloody picture on the cover of Ramparts, and read the advertisements in which critics are pounded over the head with each other’s reviews, and we know this a film the old fogeys and fascist baby-eaters will hate and the young, pure, enlightened liberals will find Truth in.” Brave and hilarious anti-war statement featuring a colossal cultural figure, or nonsensical piece of slapstick that happens to include a Beatle? Copies of How I Won the War can be purchased on DVD.
Next to “celebrated” (or “celebrity”) the description I’ve most seen applied to the late Gore Vidal is “acerbic,” or some such synonym—“scathing,” “disdainful”… I’m sure he would relish the compliment. One of the most fitting adjectives, perhaps, is “Wilde-like” (as in Oscar Wilde), deployed by Hilton Als in the New Yorker. The adjective fits especially well considering one of Vidal’s most-tweeted quotes from his treasury of Wilde-like aphorisms: “Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.” It’s clever and morbid and naughty and devil-may-care, and almost entirely fatuous. Unlike several writers recently featured here—Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Henry Miller, George Orwell, et al.—who helpfully compiled numbered lists of writing advice, Vidal’s pronouncements on his craft were rather unsystematic. But, like many of those named above, what Vidal did leave in the form of advice was sometimes facetious, and sometimes profound. Despite his evident contempt for neat little lists, one writer in the UK has helpfully compiled one anyway. The “suicide note” quote above is number 4:
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
Writer’s Digest gives us ten additional quotes of Gore Vidal on writing (unnumbered this time):
“You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.”
“I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.”
“The reason my early books are so bad is because I never had the time or the money to afford constant revisions.”
“That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.”
“Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I would do if I were 20 and wanted to be a good writer. I would study maintenance, preferably plumbing. … So that I could command my own hours and make a good living on my own time.”
“If a writer has any sense of what journalism is all about he does not get into the minds of the characters he is writing about. That is something, shall we say, Capote-esque—who thought he had discovered a new art form but, as I pointed out, all he had discovered was lying.”
“A book exists on many different levels. Half the work of a book is done by the reader—the more he can bring to it the better the book will be for him, the better it will be in its own terms.”
[When asked which genre he enjoys the most, and which genre comes easiest:]
“Are you happier eating a potato than a bowl of rice? I don’t know. It’s all the same. … Writing is writing. Writing is order in sentences and order in sentences is always the same in that it is always different, which is why it is so interesting to do it. I never get bored with writing sentences, and you never master it and it is always a surprise—you never know what’s going to come next.”
[When asked how he would like to be remembered:]
“I suppose as the person who wrote the best sentences in his time.”
A series of snippets of Gore Vidal’s wit from Esquire provides the biting (for its non-sequitur jab at rival Norman Mailer): “For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it’s wrong or not, I’m beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, “It’s existential.” He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.”
Vidal returns to the theme of memory in a 1974 interview with The Paris Review, in which he admits to placing the ultimate faith in his memory: “I am not a camera… I don’t consciously watch anything and I don’t take notes, though I briefly kept a diary. What I remember I remember—by no means the same thing as remembering what you would like to.”
While Vidal is memorialized this week as a celebrity and Wilde-like provocateur, it’s also worth noting that he had quite a lot to say about the work of writing itself, some of it witty but useless, some of it well worth remembering.
The Kennedy Space Center in Florida turns 50 this year. To celebrate the occasion, NASA and Google Street View have teamed up to give the public unprecedented access to this center of space innovation. Starting today, you can explore 6,000 panoramic views of the Space Center. Some of the highlights touted by Google include:
In November of 1966, the great jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus was forcibly evicted from his apartment in New York City. Thomas Reichman’s documentary Mingus (above) captures the sad moment when the musician, with his five-year-old daughter Carolyn at his side, looks through his scattered belongings the night before city officials arrive to cart everything away.
With the camera rolling, Mingus plays a few notes on a piano and then picks up a rifle and shoots a bullet into the ceiling. He finds a bottle of wine and gives a sip to his daughter. He recites his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to the flag–the white flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of America. When they say “black” or “negro,” it means you’re not an American. I pledge allegiance to your flag. Not that I have to, but just for the hell of it I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. The white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.
Scenes from the apartment are intercut with footage of Mingus and his sextet performing at a little club in Peabody, Massachusetts called Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike. The combo features Mingus on bass, Dannie Richmond on drums, Charles McPherson on alto saxophone, John Gilmore on tenor saxophone, Lonnie Hillyer on trumpet and Walter Bishop, Jr., on piano. The music includes parts of “All the Things You Are,” Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Secret Love.”
But the film is more about the man than the music. It records an especially painful moment in Mingus’s life. He had hoped to use the loft at 5 Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village as a music school. In the final sequence, a crowd of reporters and cameramen jostle for position to record the humiliating scene as Mingus’s belongings, including his musical instruments, are hauled out to the curb and loaded onto a truck. Tears appear in Mingus’s eyes when the police block him from going back into the building. When the cops find hypodermic needles among his things, Mingus himself is loaded into a police car and taken away.
When Amazon launched Amazon Prime in 2005, it didn’t offer that much in the way of benefits — just free shipping on Amazon goods. Now if you pony up $79 per year, you get some good cultural perks: You can borrow over 145,000 e‑books and read them on your Kindle and devices with Kindle apps. What’s more, you can stream thousands of movies and TV shows through your computer, select blu-ray players and now … drum roll please .… the iPad. Just yesterday, Amazon released its free iPad app, which means that Prime members can start streaming movies on their tablets right away. If you’re not a member, you can always try out a one month Free Trial to Amazon Prime. And if that doesn’t move you, you can simply dive into our collection of 500 Free Movies Online. Ars Technica has more details on the pros and cons of the app here.
Look at the filmography of documentarian Errol Morris, and two themes jump right out: first, the extent to which we humans can obsess, and second, the intellectual, legal, and mechanical apparatuses we build around death. Gates of Heaven gave us a tale of dueling pet cemeteries. The Thin Blue Line painstakingly investigated an investigation — a botched one, of a murder. A Brief History of Time and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control offered the thoughts and theories of men bent on taming lions, trimming hedges to perfection, building small robots, studying naked mole-rats, and knowing the nature of the universe. Mr. Death, a fortuitous intersection of subjects if ever a filmmaker had one, follows a man whose devotion to building a more humane execution system brought him to the wrong side of — which is to say, into the favor of — a pack of Holocaust deniers. Though released under the auspices of ESPN and the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, Morris’ latest short, Team Spirit, looks at a slice of humanity practically made for his feature-length documentaries: sports fans so obsessed that they arrange to express their team affiliation even in death.
One fan had his body not laid in a casket, but propped up in a recliner and draped in a Steelers blanket, as if asleep — in front of a television playing a Steelers game. Another went buried entirely in Cowboys attire, and requested that all her funeral’s attendees, priest included, wear the jersey as well. A NASCAR fan who never got to drive on the track did, ultimately, ride a few laps on it, albeit as an urn of ashes. A funeral home director remembers a fan who requested everything at his ceremony be Ravens purple. “That’s my first memory of any sort of sports-related funeral we did,” he explains. “Until we got this Orioles casket.” As a merely casual viewer of sports, I’ve never quite grasped the process by which one picks a team to follow, to root for, to love; clearly, none of these departed faced such doubts. With its first-person Interrotron interviews and Philip Glass-esque score, Team Spirit feels of a piece with the rest of the Morris canon, a body of work that has over and over again found the thoroughly human currents in subcultures that seemed unreachably out on the fringe.
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