Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling in His New Online Course

in Online Courses, Writing | January 30th, 2019

How has Neil Gaiman, author of fiction in a variety of forms ranging from novels and short stories to comic books, radio plays, and films, managed to win over such a large and devoted fan base? Ask a member of that fan base, and you’ll more than likely hear an explanation along the lines of, “He knows how to tell a story.” That may sound like a simple skill, but telling a story at Gaiman’s level requires a deep-rooted expertise in the essential nature and still-unexplored possibilities of storytelling itself — an expertise that Gaiman himself has lately proven more than willing to share. A few years ago we featured his lecture “How Stories Last” here on Open Culture; now, he’s come out with an online course on the art of storytelling at MasterClass.

“Human beings are storytelling creatures,” Gaiman says in the course’s trailer above. “Stories are vital. We convey truth with stories. That is the magic of fiction.” But even the author of stories like The Sandman, Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and much more besides has certain admissions to make about the practice of writing them: “Writing a novel is like driving through the fog with one headlight out,” for example.

“You can’t see very far ahead of yourself. But every now and again, the mists will clear.” And when it comes time to revise, he explains, “the process of doing your second draft is the process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along.” What do you need most to make it through this harrowing process? The “conviction that you are brilliant.”

Not that you don’t need anything else. The nineteen lessons of Gaiman’s MasterClass cover everything from “using the ‘lie’ of a made-up story to tell a human truth,” to “how to overcome the fear of making mistakes,” to techniques like “cold opens, withholding information, finding emotional weight, and choosing memorable details,” to the art of worldbuilding, which Gaiman describes as “honestly, the joy of getting to play god.” Other lessons provide case studies focusing on his short stories, novels, and comic books, all of which have no doubt inspired many to tell stories themselves. But who, hearing Gaiman talk about storytelling, could possibly resist trying their hand at it?

You can sign up for Gaiman’s course here.

You can take this class by signing up for a MasterClass’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 others for a 12-month period.

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

Neil Gaiman Presents “How Stories Last,” an Insightful Lecture on How Stories Change, Evolve & Endure Through the Centuries

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Enter an Online Interactive Documentary on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Learn About the Painting’s Many Hidden Secrets

in Art | January 30th, 2019

What possessed the man who attacked Rembrandt’s The Night Watch with a bread knife in 1975, “jabbing two-foot-long knife marks into the surface,” as Nina Siegal writes at The New York Times, “cutting a seven-foot-wide hole, and ripping off a section of the canvas”? This was not the first time the painting had been mangled. In 1715, just a little over 70 years after the monumental work’s 1642 completion, the Amsterdam city government decided to move it, and removed a significant part to shrink it down for easier transport. The missing top and left portions have never been recovered.

It survived intact for two centuries then faced its first knife attack in 1911. Then it survived two World Wars only to endure the second attack. Then, in 1990, it was set upon by a man armed with sulphuric acid.

Thanks to the quick thinking of a Rijksmuseum guard, only the painting’s varnish sustained injury. These are just some of the facts we learn in the interactive documentary Experience The Night Watch, a joint creation of NTR TV channel and the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum.

You can read or hear the painting’s history in Dutch or English, learn the names of the historical figures depicted in it, learn about Rembrandt’s command of composition and chiaroscuro, and much more. (Enter the interactive documentary here.) The painter’s masterful, dramatic use of light and shadow to create a sense of depth—probably the most famous example of his use of the technique—is responsible for the painting’s usual title, since most of its viewers have assumed that the assembled volunteer militia depicted in it came together in the dead of night. (The shadows had darkened considerably over the years until a thick layer of varnish was removed in the 1940s.)

But Rembrandt’s masterpiece was originally called Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and it records not a troop of seasoned soldiers but a gentleman’s shooting company, one of the bands of civic guards that had “effectively developed into a social club for well-to-do citizens” who would “turn up mostly as ceremonies or to quell minor riots.” Each of the men memorialized paid to have his likeness included. We may never have known their names except that in 1715 they were added inside a shield painted by an anonymous artist for some reason. The work is full of other such mysteries.

Who is the small girl in white, bathed in angelic light, to whom our eyes are inevitably drawn? “She does not have any traceable identity,” our narrator tells us, “she is Rembrandt’s invention,” a symbol of the company. And yet behind her, almost completely shrouded, is another girl, identity unknown, who most of us would probably never have noticed had she not been pointed out. “In The Night Watch,” we discover, “nothing is what it seems.”

Learn more of the painting’s secrets at the online documentary project here, see similarly interactive art histories from NTR on M.C. Escher and Hieronymus Bosch, and, above, listen to an Artsy podcast featuring Rijksmuseum curator Pieter Roelofs and other Rembrandt experts who explain what makes The Night Watch so wildly famous that more than one person has felt driven to destroy it.

Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 361,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces by Rembrandt Included!

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Masterpiece

Enter an Online Interactive Documentary on M.C. Escher’s Art & Life, Narrated By Peter Greenaway

Take a Virtual Tour of Hieronymus Bosch’s Bewildering Masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

in Sci Fi, Writing | January 29th, 2019

Image by Gorthian, via Wikimedia Commons

“Some of us are Norman Mailer,” said Ursula K. LeGuin in a 1976 interview with science-fiction fanzine Luna Monthly, “but others of us are middle-aged Portland housewives.” And though Le Guin may have thought of herself as one of the latter, “middle-aged Portland housewife” is hardly the way the rest of us would describe her. Over a nearly 60-year-long career, Le Guin produced an enormous body of literary work, including but not limited to the six books in which she created the world of Earthsea and other acclaimed sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven. And somehow she managed to write all of it between 7:15 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. each day.

Or that’s what her ideal writing schedule dictates, anyway. Recently tweeted out by writer Michael J. Seidlinger as “the ideal writing routine,” it first appeared in an interview she gave in 1988 (and more recently reappeared in Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations).

Beginning at the early hour of 5:30 in the morning, the time to “wake up and lie there and think,” it continues on to breakfast — and “lots” of it — at 6:15, and the commencement of the day’s “writing, writing, writing” an hour later, which lasts until lunch at noon. After that, Le Guin considered what we consider her main work to be done, moving on to such pursuits as reading, music, correspondence, “maybe house cleaning,” and dinner. Past 8:15, she said, “I tend to be very stupid,” a state in which nobody could write the sort of books we remember her for.

But however originally she wrote, Le Guin was hardly exceptional in living this way while doing it. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” said Gustave Flaubert, a maxim true for enough writers that we also worked it in when we featured an infographic on the daily routines of famous creative people. In both Flaubert and Le Guin’s case (or in the case of a writer like Haruki Murakami, who rises famously early and runs famously hard when working on a book), their domestic lives, well-ordered to the point that an outside observer would find them boring, facilitated the creation of literature like none that had ever come before. This despite the fact that, on the surface, few novels could seem more dissimilar than Flaubert and Le Guin’s, but each writer would have seen what the other had in common: specifically, that they knew what it took to get the imagination well and truly fired up.

via Michael J. Seidlinger

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Presented in an Interactive Infographic

Ursula Le Guin Gives Insightful Writing Advice in Her Free Online Workshop

Celebrate the Life & Writing of Ursula K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Classic Radio Dramatizations of Her Stories

Ursula K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

Watch the New Trailer for Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, the First Feature Film on the Pioneering Sci-Fi Author

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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The Cleveland Museum of Art Digitizes Its Collection, Putting 30,000 Works Online and Into the Public Domain

in Art | January 29th, 2019

The lines of the descent from the plutocratic wealth and autocratic power of the late 19th century to the worst atrocities of the early 20th might seem apparent to some people. So too can we trace from the Gilded Age an institutional system of monuments to art, culture, and higher learning unique to modern times. Whether by virtue of greed, guilt, or noblesse oblige, or some of all of the above, wealthy industrialists sought to show—as Andrew Carnegie wrote in his “Gospel of Wealth”—that “the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization.”

The treasures of world culture were donated back to the world, but the proud beneficence of their givers lived on in the institutions. In the case of Cleveland telegraph magnate Jeptha Wade, who was himself a daguerreotypist and portrait painter, the memory of the generous gift continues in Wade Park, home of the Fine Arts Garden and the Cleveland Museum of Art, created from his bequest.

Now, over 125 years later, Wade’s patronage lives on online. “Brace yourself for some meme-worthy Egyptian cats and gif-able Renaissance babies,” as Zachary Small jokes at Hyperallergic.

The museum has just announced its digital collection with a poignant quote from its founder declaring it an eternal donation to humankind: “The statement ‘for the benefit of all the people forever’ was written into Jeptha Wade’s 1892 deed of gift for the land on which the museum stands… reflecting its founders’ belief that museums should be places for inspiration and for creating wonder and meaning in people’s lives.”

This may sound like ostentatious rhetoric, but the announcement also tells us that its free digital collection is “using Open Access,” which means “the public now has the ability to share, remix, and reuse images of as many as 30,000 CMA artworks—“nearly half of the museum’s entire collection,” notes Small—are now “in the public domain for commercial as well as scholarly and noncommercial purposes.” Take even a small sampling of their open collections and you may find more than enough inspiration, wonder, and meaning.

Take, for example, Van Gogh’s The Large Plane Trees, J.M.W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, El Greco’s The Holy Family with Mary Magdalen, and Edouard Manet’s Berthe Morisot. Take work from Rembrandt, Velázquez, Monet, Cezanne, Caravaggio, Pissarro, Degas, Rubens, Poussin, Rodin. Take masterful works like ancient Egyptian New Kingdom Head of Amenhotep II Wearing the Blue Crown and Timurid period Iranian Royal Reception in a Landscape—as well as many from central Africa, China, India, Japan and Korea.

The Open Access collection has swelled to over 34,000 images that can be downloaded as jpgs or high-resolution tiffs. These and over 60,000 more online works come with descriptions, citations, exhibition histories, and more. Whatever confluence of historical and contemporary events brought Cleveland’s digital collection into being, it does indeed seem to be for the great benefit of a great number of internet-connected people around the world. Take full advantage of its newly public resources here.

via Hyperallergic

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play

in Literature, Technology, Theatre | January 29th, 2019

Often compared to The Tempest, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame may have as much of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in it, though the author was unwilling to acknowledge the influence to Theodor Adorno. Beckett’s central character, the blind, aged Hamm, spends all of his time in a throne haranguing the other three, in a gloomy place, The New York Times’ Brooks Atkinson wrote, “somewhere between life and death.” Hamm might have been the Danish prince grown old and bitter, left with nothing but what Beckett called Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.”

In any case, Hamlet has long been thought of as a prototype of the absurd, a play where little happens because its protagonist is too haunted to have relationships with the living or make decisions, a condition he complains about in scene after scene. Trauma, existential paralysis, crippling doubt punctuated by fits of rage and violence—these are the makings of the 20th century anti-hero. If the play has a classical hero, a man of action and resolve, it is, absurdly, a dead man, Hamlet’s father, who testily declares his purpose in his final speech, “to whet thy almost blunted purpose.”

Should Hamlet be turned into an immersive VR and augmented reality experience, allowing viewers to inhabit a character’s point of view, they might not opt to see things as the moody, depressive, speechifying prince. In Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, we instead get to inhabit the ghost, who only appears in the play a handful of times but still fills every scene with his glowering presence. The 60-minute VR “modern adaptation” is a co-production of Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and Google.

“Both extremely long by the standards of virtual reality and extremely short by the standards of Hamlet,” writes Elizabeth Harris at The New York Times, the film “can be watched in 3‑D using a V.R. headset or in two dimensions on a desktop or mobile device” (see it above). On a vast, darkened set cluttered with fine but shabby furnishings in heaps, glowing lamps, a bathtub, and a car, actors perform condensed scenes while we, as ghost, freely roam about, viewing the action in three dimensions, a device intended to give the viewer “a sense of agency and urgency as an omniscient observer, guide and participant,” the production notes.

The film’s creators, Harris writes, “hope that beyond the fresh experience it provides, it will also serve as a tool to bring great theater to wider audiences—and bring bigger audiences to theater.” It may have that effect, though one might feel it privileges digital effects over the truly immersive, full experience of Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.” It’s hard to think the “great Shakespearean” Beckett would approve, but he found little to his liking.

Younger, less cantankerous audiences might, however. “Many young people’s first experience of Shakespeare is not all that great,” says director Steven Maler. Hamlet 360 allows the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company to “scale up” their mission to “truly democratize Shakespeare and theater.” Experience it for yourself above or on YouTube and learn more at Boston’s WGBH, who recently premiered the film. The actors “deliver powerful performances,” the PBS station writes, “that bring the play forward to today, making it both current and timeless.”

via The New York Times

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Performing Arts, From the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Paris Opera Ballet

30 Days of Shakespeare: One Reading of the Bard Per Day, by The New York Public Library, on the 400th Anniversary of His Death

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Nick Cave Answers the Hotly Debated Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

in Music, Technology | January 28th, 2019

Photo by Bleddyn Butcher via Wikimedia Commons

Spike Jonze’s AI love story Her offered a sort of an answer to one of the critical questions posed about Artificial Intelligence: Can machines feel love? Maybe, and maybe deeply, in a certain sense, but maybe not for just one person and not for very long before they take off to explore limitless others, which makes them sound like very seductive but also very shallow lovers.

Maybe it helps to keep that metaphor in mind when we read Nick Cave’s answer to a question a Slovenian fan posed in the Birthday Party/Bad Seeds/Grinderman singer’s brutally tender newsletter, The Red Right Hand. “Do you think,” asks Peter from Ljubljana, “AI will ever be able to write a good song?” Cave begins with a concession: AI might “produce a song that makes us feel,” and maybe “more intensely than any human songwriter could do.”

And yet, after listing a number of human examples, from Nirvana to Prince to Iggy Pop to Nina Simone, Cave describes what makes their abilities alien to a machine mind:

We go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.

AI cannot die, at least in the sense we understand it. Nor is it constrained by painful physical limitations, nor privy to fleeting physical pleasures. “Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence.” The holy or harrowing knowledge of finitude and fragility, love and death and grief.

Another way to state the case comes from the most moving of Cave’s fan letter answers, in which he consoles a bereaved fan in Vermont with a description of his own grief over the death of his son.

Maybe AI could write the sentence, “dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake.” But it could not write it from the heart of a bereaved parent who learns that “grief and love are forever intertwined,” or from a place where supernatural beliefs may be untrue yet still have supernatural power. Cave’s description of his grief is also a description of transcendence, of going beyond what is possible to find what is timeless.

Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

In answer to Peter’s question, he concludes with the poetic authority of a writer of great songs: “AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.”

Read Nick Cave’s full response here. And while there, sign up for his free newsletter.

via Austin Kleon

Animated Stories Written by Tom Waits, Nick Cave & Other Artists, Read by Danny Devito, Zach Galifianakis & More

Nick Cave Narrates an Animated Film about the Cat Piano, the Twisted 18th Century Musical Instrument Designed to Treat Mental Illness

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody Compared to Real Life: A 21-Minute Compilation

in Film, Music | January 28th, 2019

Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 bio pic about the British rock band Queen, had its fair share of factual inaccuracies–all well documented by sites like The Wrap and ScreenCrush. But, here and there, the film paid attention to detail. Witness the scenes from Live Aid, and compare them to actual footage from 1985. Or simply start at the 9:20 mark of the lengthy compilation above, which dutifully juxtaposes scenes from the film with the real life events…

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Listen to Freddie Mercury and David Bowie on the Isolated Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pressure,’ 1981

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How Michel Legrand (RIP) Gave the French New Wave a Sound: Revisit the Influential Music He Composed for Jean-Luc Godard & Jacques Demy’s Films

in Film, Music | January 28th, 2019

When he died this past weekend, the prolific composer Michel Legrand left behind a large and varied body of work, one that won him not just five Grammy awards but, for the films he scored, three Oscars as well. Though he composed the music for more than 200 films and television shows, many cinephiles will remember him — and generations of cinephiles to come will know him — as the man who gave the French New Wave a sound. Having appeared on camera as a pianist in Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 in 1961, he went on to score The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the beloved 1964 musical (and a musical without any dialogue spoken at all, only sung) directed by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy.

Legrand also composed the music for Demy’s next film, the also-musical The Young Girls of Rochefort, in 1967. That same decade, without a doubt the headiest for La Nouvelle Vague, he worked with no less a cinematic rule-breaker than Jean-Luc Godard on 1962’s Vivre sa vie and 1964’s Bande à part (also known as Band of Outsiders).

“I can’t help wondering whether, since the music is dubbed in, so are the claps, foot-stamps, and finger-snaps,” writes New Yorker film critic and Godard scholar Richard Brody of the well-known dance scene in the latter, “or whether, for the take used in the film, there was no music playing at all, and the trio” — none of them trained dancers — “did their dance to the time of music playing in their minds.”

Brody names as “the greatest flourish in the sequence” the moment when “the music cuts out, and Godard speaks, in voice-over: ‘Now it’s time to open a second parenthesis, and to describe the emotions of the characters.’ ” The way the director’s words interrupt the motion of the visuals, and of Legrand’s score, “distinguishes the scene from so many scenes in so many films where so many filmmakers are so concerned with bringing out their characters’ emotions solely by means of action,” the reason for the dull fact that “many movies — and many wrongly hailed — give a sense of being constructed as illustrations of script elements, the connections of dots planted in just the right place to yield a particular portrait.”

Legrand did, of course, compose for a few such less artistically adventurous films as well, but that just goes to show how wide a variety of cinematic visions his musical aesthetic could accommodate. He scored such memorable and even influential pictures as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Summer of ’42, as well as Orson Welles’ decades-awaited The Other Side of the Wind, which came out just last year as what Brody calls a “belated masterpiece” and “one of the great last dramatic features by any director.” Legrand’s music could fairly be called romantic, even sentimental, but like few other composers working today, he knew exactly what it took — and exactly whom to work with — to keep those qualities from turning saccharine or banal.

An Introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Innovative Filmmaking Through Five Video Essays

How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers

Jacques Demy’s Lyrical Masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Watch the New Trailer for Orson Welles’ Lost Film, The Other Side of the Wind: A Glimpse of Footage from the Finally Completed Film

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Hear Neil Gaiman Read a Beautiful, Profound Poem by Ursula K. Le Guin to His Cousin on Her 100th Birthday

in Life, Literature, Poetry | January 28th, 2019

It’s quite profound, isn’t it? — Helen Fagin, aged 100

Every time I open my laptop to discover a friend posting a vintage photo of their parent as a beaming bride or saucy sailor boy in lush black and white or gold-tinged Kodachrome, I know the deal.

Another elder has left the building.

With luck, I’ll have at least two or three decades before my kids start sniffing around in my shoe boxes of old snapshots.

In the meantime, I’ll wonder how much of the emotion that’s packed into those memorial postings gets expressed to the subject in the days leading up to their final exit.

Seems like most of us pussyfoot around the obvious until it’s too late.

There are, of course, medical situations that force us to acknowledge in a loved one’s presence the abyss in their immediate future, but otherwise, Western tradition has positioned us to shy away from those sorts of discussions.

Perhaps our loved ones prefer it that way.

Perhaps we do too.

It’s clear that author Neil Gaiman enjoys a special relationship with his 100-year-old cousin, Helen Fagin, a Holocaust survivor and professor of literature.

He has shared memories of her with those attending his public appearances and in honor of World Refugee Day.

His wife, musician Amanda Palmer, included a verse about Helen’s 98th birthday in her song “A Mother’s Confession,” below, fleshing out the lyrics with footnotes on her blog.

In celebration of Helen’s centenary, Palmer asked Brain Picking’s Maria Popova to recommend a poem that Gaiman could read aloud during another in-person birthday visit.

Popova settled on “How It Seems To Me,” a late-in-life poem by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, a close friend of Gaiman’s who died in January of 2018, 12 years shy of her own centenary:

HOW IT SEEMS TO ME

In the vast abyss before time, self

is not, and soul commingles

with mist, and rock, and light. In time,

soul brings the misty self to be.

Then slow time hardens self to stone

while ever lightening the soul,

till soul can loose its hold of self

and both are free and can return

to vastness and dissolve in light,

the long light after time.

It’s a hell of a hundredth birthday gift, though far from a one-size-fits all proposition.

Perhaps when you are a nonagenarian, you’d rather the young people err on the side of tradition with a comfy new robe.

There are octogenarian birthday boys and girls who’d pick an African violet over the misty self, tricky to keep alive though they may be.

As filmed by Palmer, Helen seemed to receive the gift in the spirit it was intended. Life equipped her for it.

via Brain Pickings

18 Stories & Novels by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Readings by Neil Himself

Neil Gaiman Reads “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City in February as host of Theater of the Apes book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Oscar-Nominated Documentary Universe, the Film that Inspired the Visual Effects of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Gave the HAL 9000 Computer Its Voice (1960)

in Film | January 25th, 2019

Before astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission took the Earthrise photo in December 1968, the world had never seen a clear color image of Earth from space. That is if we discount the stunning space photography screened months earlier to the tune of the “Blue Danube” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film “used visual effects and imagination (both to a still-impressive degree),” as Colin Marshall wrote here in a recent post, to make audiences believe that what they saw was indeed our blue marble of a planet and other colorful points of interest in the solar system—on the way to a journey into uncharted, psychedelic territory.

Eight years earlier, filmmakers Roman Kroitor and Colin Low used similar technology, “realistic animation,” writes the National Film Board of Canada, that takes us “into the far regions of space, beyond the reach of the strongest telescope, past Moon, Sun, and Milky Way into galaxies yet unfathomed.”

Their short documentary, Universe, may not be much remembered now—and may have been far outshone by both real and computer-generated footage—but in 1961, it claimed a nomination at the 33rd Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short Subject. “Upon its release in 1960,” notes Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail, “the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ordered 300 copies.”

Another of the film’s admirers also happened to be Kubrick. Biographer Vincent Lobrutto describes the auteur’s first encounter with Universe:

Kubrick watched the screen with rapt attention while a panorama of the galaxies swirled by, achieving the standard of dynamic visionary realism that he was looking for. These images were not flawed by the shoddy matte work, obvious animation and poor miniatures typically found in science fiction films. Universe proved that the camera could be a telescope to the heavens. As the credits rolled, Kubrick studied the names of the magicians who created the images: Colin Low, Sidney Goldsmith, and Wally Gentleman.

The film was in black and white, not the eye-popping technicolor of Kubrick’s masterpiece, but he saw in it exactly what he would need when he began work on 2001. “After studying Universe for much of 1964,” writes Kubrick scholar Michael Benson, “early in the new year Kubrick decided to replicate the film’s techniques.” He tried to hire Low, who declined because of his work on “his own ambitious project: In the Labyrinth,” Lacey writes. He did succeed in hiring Wally Gentleman, the special effects artist who brought Universe’s wizardry to Kubrick’s film.

Kubrick also hired Universe’s narrator, Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who passed away this past November but who will live on indefinitely into the future as the chilling, affectless voice of the HAL 9000 computer, ancestor of Siri, Alexa, and the many voices of GPS systems everywhere. Hear Rain’s cool, detached narration in Universe, above, and see why this extraordinary film—with the Richard Strauss-like pounding tympani of Eldon Rathburn’s score—would have inspired Kubrick to make what may rank as the most mesmerizingly cinematic, dramatically compelling, of science fiction space films to this day.

Universe will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

via Kottke

How Stanley Kubrick Made His Masterpieces: An Introduction to His Obsessive Approach to Filmmaking

Stanley Kubrick Explains the Mysterious Ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a Newly Unearthed Interview

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? A New TED-Ed Animation Explains

in Animation, Books | January 25th, 2019

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 envisions a future where “firemen” are sent out not to put out fires, but to burn up any books they find with flamethrowers. To students assigned to read the novel today, the idea of an America that has outlawed books entirely might seem like an intriguing if far-fetched notion, perhaps more suited to the reality of the 1950s than the reality of today. Even if we’ve never read Fahrenheit 451, nearly all of us know the basic outline of its story by now, so why should we still read it? In less than five minutes, the animated TED-Ed video above by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Iseult Gillespie offers an answer to that question.

“Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world governed by surveillance, robotics, and virtual reality, a vision that proved remarkably prescient, but also spoke to concerns of the time,” says Gillespie. “The novel was published in 1953, at the height of the Cold War. The era kindled widespread paranoia and fear throughout Bradbury’s home country of the United States, amplified by the suppression of information and brutal government investigations. In particular, this witch hunt mentality targeted artists and writers who were suspected of communist sympathies. Bradbury was alarmed at this cultural crackdown. He believed it set a dangerous precedent for further censorship, and was reminded of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the book-burning of fascist regimes.”

These concerns, though relevant to the era in which Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, are essentially timeless. As with all dystopian fiction, the novel “amplifies troubling features of the world around us and imagines the consequences of taking them to an extreme.” Some of the troubling features of the world 65 years ago have diminished, but some have greatly increased, and we would do well to bear in mind that in Fahrenheit 451 “it was the apathy of the masses that gave rise to the current regime. The government merely capitalized on short attention spans and the appetite for mindless entertainment, reducing the circulation of ideas to ash. As culture disappears, imagination and self-expression follow.” Culture may take many more forms now than it did in the 1950s, but without our constant vigilance, all of them could still be extinguished, just as easily as paper goes up in flame.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? A New TED-Ed Animation Explains

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