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

in Film | December 6th, 2016

Even though Jean-Luc Godard turned 86 this past Sat­ur­day, cin­e­ma schol­ar David Bor­d­well would no doubt still call him “the youngest film­mak­er at work today” — as he did just two years ago, in an essay on Godard­’s most recent pic­ture Good­bye to Lan­guage. Over his more than 65-year-long career, which began in film crit­i­cism and arguably nev­er left it, the man who direct­ed the likes of Breath­less, Alphav­ille, and Week­end in his very first decade of film­mak­ing has kept his work intel­lec­tu­al­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive when most movies seem resigned, and even con­tent, to explore the same tram­pled patch of cin­e­ma’s cre­ative space over and over again.

“Godard has been the lib­er­a­tor of weird­ness,” wrote New York­er film crit­ic and Godard biog­ra­ph­er Richard Brody on the occa­sion of the auteur’s 82nd birth­day. “He was always ahead of the game in terms of movie-mad­ness, rec­og­niz­ing that the habit of think­ing in terms of images and sounds didn’t detach him from emo­tion­al engage­ment with his sub­jects but added a new dimen­sion to it.”

He secured cre­ative free­dom for him­self from the begin­ning when he “cast ama­teurs along­side pro­fes­sion­als, mixed gen­res and tones, called atten­tion to the arti­fices of movies he loved and of gen­res he reju­ve­nat­ed, over­turned con­ven­tion with an anar­chic fury and an ana­lyt­i­cal pas­sion.”

Godard, Brody con­cludes, “hasn’t just rethought movies; he has recon­ceived the cin­e­ma, as a prac­tice and as an expe­ri­ence.” But what does that look like for the audi­ence? These five video essays plunge into Godard­’s work, iso­lat­ing and cel­e­brat­ing ele­ments that have mer­it­ed our close cinephilic atten­tion. At the top of the post, we have a brief aes­thet­ic overview in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion-spon­sored “Godard in Frag­ments,” where­in video essay­ist kog­o­na­da (cre­ator of pieces pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Wes Ander­son, Alfred Hitch­cock, Stan­ley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and neo­re­al­ism) spends six and a half min­utes mes­mer­iz­ing­ly “high­light­ing the icon­ic director’s sig­na­ture themes and devices,” from cam­eras and hand­guns to wom­en’s faces and bot­toms to the very con­cept of death.

But to under­stand Godard requires first under­stand­ing Breath­less, his 1960 debut fea­ture and, in the words of the Nerd­writer in his video essay on the film, “an extend­ed inves­ti­ga­tion of a French filmic iden­ti­ty in the shad­ow of Hol­ly­wood dom­i­nance — of, indeed, whether an iden­ti­ty informed by anoth­er nation’s cul­ture can exist at all.” Godard and his col­lab­o­ra­tors made the movie a lit­tle more than a decade after the end of World War II, which meant just over a decade after French restric­tions on the screen­ing of Amer­i­can films had van­ished, plung­ing Godard­’s impres­sion­able gen­er­a­tion straight and deep into the sights, sounds, style, and tropes of Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing.

Breath­less, in all its low-bud­get excite­ment and illus­tra­tion of the notion that the sever­est lim­i­ta­tions cre­ate the most favor­able con­di­tions for art, also func­tions as a piece of film crit­i­cism: it inter­prets and repur­pos­es all that Godard and his col­lab­o­ra­tors had learned, con­scious­ly as well as uncon­scious­ly, from and about Amer­i­can movies, and espe­cial­ly Amer­i­ca’s breath­less (as it were) genre pic­tures. “It wants to par­tic­i­pate in the Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing it admires, but it knows that such an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is impos­si­ble, so it deals with this by being self-con­scious, by using jump cuts, awk­ward tran­si­tions, by rob­bing the clas­sic moments of their force or mak­ing the hero’s bloody final steps way longer that it could ever pos­si­bly be, forc­ing you out­side the film’s text — or back into it again.”

Five years lat­er came Alphav­ille, anoth­er simul­ta­ne­ous trib­ute to and assault on genre from Godard and com­pa­ny. In it, accord­ing to Patri­cia Pis­ters’ “Despair Has No Wings: a Trib­ute to Godard­’s Alphav­ille,” he “plays with film noir ele­ments to tell a sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry that unfolds many oth­er lay­ers,” drop­ping the extant pulp-fic­tion detec­tive Lem­my Cau­tion into a new, “strange” con­text. “Pop­u­lar audi­ences were shocked by this worn-out and alien­at­ing ver­sion of their hero,” turned by Godard into a “cos­mo­nau­tic secret agent who trav­els in his Ford Galax­ie” into a futur­is­tic, author­i­tar­i­an Paris of rul­ing super­com­put­ers, seem­ing­ly mechan­i­cal cit­i­zens, “use­less vend­ing machines,” and stark, impos­ing mod­ern archi­tec­ture.

But Godard­’s use of archi­tec­ture start­ed before Alphav­ille and con­tin­ued after it, argues Richard Mar­tin in the British Film Insti­tute video essay “Jean-Luc Godard as Archi­tect.” He uses the term in a broad sense to mean “some­one inter­est­ed in build­ing, cap­tur­ing, and arrang­ing, spaces,” an inter­est man­i­fest in Breath­less’ “almost joy­ful” Paris of “peo­ple run­ning through the Lou­vre, juke­box­es, cafés, din­ers, and bars,” Pier­rot le Fou and Week­end’s pre­sen­ta­tion of “the car crash as a kind of archi­tec­tur­al sce­nario,” and Con­tempt’s jour­ney from the grand­ly “dilap­i­dat­ed lots of the Cinecit­tà film stu­dios on the out­skirts of Rome” to its thir­ty-minute cen­ter­piece in one of that city’s new mod­ern apart­ments to Capri’s Casa Mala­parte, “one of the most thrilling pieces of archi­tec­ture not just in Godard­’s career, but in the whole his­to­ry of cin­e­ma.”

Maybe it makes sense that some­one who first got behind the cam­era to make a con­struc­tion doc­u­men­tary (watch online here) would con­tin­ue to pur­sue an inter­est in the orga­ni­za­tion of space. But as Godard­’s atti­tudes, ideas, tastes, and even pol­i­tics have changed, the oth­er qual­i­ties of his movies have changed along with them. Hav­ing worked in black-and-white, col­or — its use exam­ined in the super­cut “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge” below — and with Good­bye to Lan­guage even in 3D, Godard has long shown a will­ing­ness to enter new visu­al ter­ri­to­ries as well.

Not only will his work past, present, and future con­tin­ue to give video essays a wealth of mate­r­i­al to work with, he him­self, accord­ing to Richard Brody, made the form pos­si­ble, hav­ing under­stood since the 1970s that “home video would be the basis for a new­ly ana­lyt­i­cal under­stand­ing of film his­to­ry, because it would allow for the easy copy­ing of clips and their manip­u­la­tion via video edit­ing with such tech­niques as slow motion, freeze-frame, and super­im­po­si­tions of oth­er images and text.” Thus “every video essay that turns up online owes him a debt of grat­i­tude,” as do many of the oth­er inno­v­a­tive types of visu­al media to which Godard has shown the way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Jean-Luc Godard Takes Cannes’ Rejec­tion of Breath­less in Stride in 1960 Inter­view

The Entire­ty of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less Art­ful­ly Com­pressed Into a 3 Minute Film

Watch Meetin’ WA: Jean-Luc Godard Films Woody Allen in 1986 Short Film

Jean-Luc Godard’s Debut, Opéra­tion béton (1955) — a Con­struc­tion Doc­u­men­tary

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick (1971)

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best Amer­i­can Films Ever Made (1963)

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

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Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment Through Noam Chomsky

in Biology, Philosophy, Science | December 6th, 2016

Dur­ing the 17th and 18th cen­turies, Euro­pean Enlight­en­ment philoso­phers dis­card­ed the ori­gin sto­ries in reli­gious texts as wild­ly implau­si­ble or sim­ply alle­gor­i­cal. But they found them­selves charged with com­ing up with their own, nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions for the ori­gins of life, law, moral­i­ty, etc. And most press­ing­ly for their inquiries into psy­chol­o­gy and cog­ni­tion, many of those thinkers sought to explain the ori­gins of lan­guage.

The Bib­li­cal sto­ry of the Tow­er of Babel had long been wide­ly accept­ed, either lit­er­al­ly or metaphor­i­cal­ly, as indica­tive that all humans once spoke the same lan­guage (The so-called “Adam­ic Lan­guage”). Many com­pet­ing the­o­ries came from philoso­phers like Locke, Rousseau, Condil­lac, Herder, and the Scot­tish jurist and philoso­pher James Bur­nett, known by his hered­i­tary title, Mon­bod­do.

Antic­i­pat­ing Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion as well as com­par­a­tive lin­guis­tics, Mon­bod­do argued that lan­guage arose as a response to a chang­ing envi­ron­ment, and that it came into being, along with human beings, in one place, then diver­si­fied as humans spread across the globe and diverged cul­tur­al­ly. This was known as the the­o­ry of mono­gen­e­sis, or the “sin­gle-ori­gin the­o­ry” of lan­guage.

As the nar­ra­tor in the video above, from lin­guis­tics YouTube chan­nel NativLang, puts it, even after the sto­ry had been naturalized—and the lan­guages of the world mapped into pro­to-evo­lu­tion­ary fam­i­ly trees—“Babel still held one intrigu­ing idea over us; that orig­i­nal lan­guage.” And yet, rather than search for the mys­ti­cal Adam­ic Lan­guage—the rev­e­la­tion of a divinity—as many alchemists and occultists had done, nat­ur­al philoso­phers like Mon­bod­do used emerg­ing com­par­a­tive lin­guis­tics meth­ods to attempt a his­tor­i­cal recon­struc­tion of the first human lan­guage.

They were less than suc­cess­ful. Giv­ing it up as futile, in 1866, the Soci­ety of Lin­guis­tics in Paris banned all dis­cus­sion of the issue. “Enter the late Joseph Green­berg” to begin the search anew, says NativLang. A 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can lin­guist, Green­berg used mass com­par­i­son and typol­o­gy to com­pare “super­fam­i­lies.” Lat­er lin­guists took up the chal­lenge, includ­ing Mer­ritt Ruhlen, who “com­pared vocab­u­lary from across the globe and recon­struct­ed 27 pro­to-words” sup­pos­ed­ly belong­ing to the first human lan­guage, called “Pro­to-World.” Ruhlen’s the­o­ry has since been crit­i­cal­ly sav­aged, says NativLang, and “con­fi­dent­ly tossed… into the bins of fringe lin­guis­tics, pseu­do­science… and yet, Babel’s first, and biggest claim lingers.”

The intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry in this five-minute video is obvi­ous­ly over­sim­pli­fied, but it high­lights some fas­ci­nat­ing fea­tures of the cur­rent debate. As Avi Lif­schitz, his­to­ri­an of Enlight­en­ment the­o­ry of lan­guage, writes, we tend “to assume that our own cog­ni­tive the­o­ries are the lat­est word when com­pared with those of our pre­de­ces­sors. Yet in some areas, the ques­tions we are now ask­ing are not too dif­fer­ent from those posed some two or three cen­turies ago.” In the case of the ori­gins of lan­guage, that is most cer­tain­ly so. Cen­tral to the the­o­ries of Locke and oth­ers, for exam­ple, “the pre­cise role of lan­guage in the brain and in human per­cep­tion” remains “one of the most top­i­cal ques­tions in today’s cog­ni­tive sci­ence.”

Although many schol­ars have giv­en up attempt­ing to recon­struct the orig­i­nal lan­guage, lin­guists, cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists, and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists con­tin­ue to find com­pelling evi­dence for the sin­gle-ori­gin the­o­ry. The NativLang video omits per­haps the most famous mod­ern lin­guist, Noam Chom­sky, who argued that a chance muta­tion occurred some 100,000 years ago, giv­ing rise to lan­guage. Even as lan­guages have diverged into what’s cur­rent­ly esti­mat­ed at around 6,000 dif­fer­ent tongues, Chom­sky claimed, they all retain a com­mon struc­ture, a “uni­ver­sal gram­mar.”

What­ev­er it might have sound­ed like, orig­i­nal lan­guage would like­ly have arisen in Sub-Saha­ran Africa, where mod­ern humans evolved some­where between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago. In 2011, Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land biol­o­gist Quentin Atkin­son used lin­guis­tic tech­niques some­what like Monboddo’s to show that African lan­guages—espe­cial­ly click lan­guages like the South African Xu—have con­sid­er­ably more indi­vid­ual sounds (phonemes) than oth­ers. And that lan­guages around the world have few­er and few­er phonemes the fur­ther they are from south­ern Africa.

Most sci­en­tists agree with the basic evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry of human ori­gins. But like Ruh­len’s “Pro­to-World,” Atkinson’s lin­guis­tic the­o­ry “caused some­thing of a sen­sa­tion,” writes Sci­ence Dai­ly, and has since come in for severe cri­tique. The debate over many of those Enlight­en­ment ques­tions about the ori­gins of lan­guage con­tin­ues. Bar­ring some dra­con­ian ban, “the search for the site of ori­gin of lan­guage,” and for the lan­guage itself and the evo­lu­tion­ary mech­a­nisms that pro­duced it, “remains very much alive.”

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.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

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

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The Genius of Paul McCartney’s Bass Playing in 7 Isolated Tracks

in Music | December 5th, 2016

In many a musi­cal sit­u­a­tion, one can com­mu­ni­cate an entire play­ing style in a name. When it comes to the bass—in pop music, at least—one of the fore­most of those names is Paul McCart­ney, whose soul­ful basslines have giv­en us some of the most mem­o­rable melodies in music his­to­ry.

McCart­ney start­ed out—in the Quar­ry­men, then The Beatles—on rhythm gui­tar and piano, only tak­ing over the bass when Stu­art Sut­cliffe left the band in 1961. And while it’s true that he’s dis­tin­guished him­self in album after album over the past few decades on every instru­ment in the rock and roll arse­nal, as a styl­ist, Sir Paul has always best used the bass to express his instru­men­tal genius.

He became a bassist “some­what reluc­tant­ly,” Joe Bosso of Music Radar notes, but soon “proved to be a nat­ur­al on the instru­ment… The very image of McCart­ney with the vio­lin-shaped Hofn­er 500/1 bass is one that will for­ev­er be burned into the minds of music lovers every­where.”

The hol­low-bod­ied Hofn­er’s res­o­nant, woody sound is as rec­og­niz­able as its look. But in record­ings, McCart­ney also played a Rick­en­backer and Fend­er Jazz bass. (Spec­u­la­tion about which bass he used on which song spans many years, and can get pret­ty con­tentious.) Even so, his tone is ever dis­tinc­tive. Take Abbey Road’s sin­is­ter, seduc­tive “Come Togeth­er,” a song with one of the most rec­og­niz­able basslines in his­to­ry. At the top of the post, you can hear the solo track.

On its own, it car­ries all the ener­gy of the song, as does the iso­lat­ed bass track from “Dear Pru­dence,” just above. McCart­ney begins with one res­olute­ly plucked note that rings out for sev­er­al bars, then launch­es into the song’s famil­iar walk­down. In his base­line, we can hear both the song’s trance-like melodies and har­monies, the boun­cy rise and fall of its play­ful appeal. Here, the rhyth­mic tex­ture of McCartney’s play­ing mod­u­lates from a plucky thump to a mut­ed click.

“Speak­ing of mobile basslines,” writes Zach Blu­men­feld at Con­se­quence of Sound, “McCartney’s con­tri­bu­tions to ‘Some­thing’ are the most under­rat­ed aspect of the song. The bass “sets up a counter-melody” to the vocals and strings, “more like a low­er vocal har­mo­ny than a bass. It’s also one of McCartney’s busiest bass lines, show­cas­ing his dex­ter­i­ty on the instru­ment.”

Many of McCartney’s basslines work this way, cre­at­ing counter-melodies and act­ing like anoth­er voice in the song. But while he can be a busy play­er, he just as often opts for sim­plic­i­ty and gen­er­al­ly avoids what he calls “fid­dly bits” in a recent video les­son. But his restraint is all the more strik­ing when he does rock out, as above in “Hey Bull­dog,” a song that pos­es a chal­lenge to sea­soned bass play­ers. Even such a mon­ster play­er as Ged­dy Lee cred­its McCart­ney as a sem­i­nal influ­ence for his inven­tive­ness and melodies. (As Susan­na Hoffs says, “melodies just tum­ble out of him.”)

McCartney’s bass play­ing reached its apogee in the band’s best-known final albums, in songs like “Come Togeth­er” and “I Want You,” above, where the bass growls, moans, and throbs. But even in ear­li­er hits like “Paper­back Writer,” below, McCartney’s play­ing show­cased explo­sive riffs, con­fi­dent attack, and preg­nant paus­es and sub­tleties.

McCartney’s leg­endary melod­i­cism on the bass, and his sig­na­ture explo­ration of its upper ranges, is per­haps nowhere more evi­dent than on “Rain,” the B‑side to “Paper­back Writer” and, in gen­er­al a high­ly under­rat­ed Bea­t­les tune. While we don’t have the solo bass track from that record­ing, we do have the plea­sure of see­ing musi­cian Wes Mitchell demon­strate the bassline in the video below, play­ing along to a boot­leg ver­sion of the track with­out bass or lead vocal over­dubs.

Mitchell nails McCartney’s tone and style. See him do so again here with the Abbey Road med­ley “Mean Mr. Mustard/Polythene Pam/She Came in Through the Bath­room Win­dow,” a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of McCart­ney styles, tech­niques, and moods.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paul McCart­ney Offers a Short Tuto­r­i­al on How to Play the Bass Gui­tar

John Lennon’s Raw, Soul-Bar­ing Vocals From the Bea­t­les’ ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (1969)

Musi­cian Plays Sig­na­ture Drum Parts of 71 Bea­t­les Songs in 5 Min­utes: A Whirl­wind Trib­ute to Ringo Starr

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

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Tim Robbins’ Improv Classes Transform Prisoners’ Lives & Lower Recidivism Rates

in Comedy, Life, Politics, Psychology, Theatre | December 5th, 2016

If a 20‑something, Yale-edu­cat­ed New York­er reporter feels ner­vous step­ping in to her first ever improv class, imag­ine the stakes for your aver­age inmate, whose sur­vival depends on a suc­cess­ful­ly mono­lith­ic pro­jec­tion of tough­ness and con­trol.

Con­trol is actu­al­ly some­thing the Actors’ Gang Prison Project seeks to cul­ti­vate in its incar­cer­at­ed par­tic­i­pants. The Actors’ Gang’s Artis­tic Direc­tor, Tim Rob­bins, who found­ed the rad­i­cal­ly exper­i­men­tal ensem­ble fresh out of col­lege, notes a well-doc­u­ment­ed con­nec­tion between an inabil­i­ty to con­trol one’s emo­tions and crim­i­nal activ­i­ty.

Unchecked rage may have put these play­ers behind bars, but explor­ing a wide vari­ety of emo­tions behind the safe­ty of the Actors’ Gang’s mask-like white pan­cake make-up has proven lib­er­at­ing.

The dull prison rou­tine leaves pris­on­ers favor­ably inclined toward any divert­ing activ­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that allow for cre­ative expres­sion. Shake­speare has made an impact on this pop­u­la­tion. Why not com­me­dia dell’arte-influenced improv?

It’s a tru­ly ther­a­peu­tic fit, as Actors Gang ensem­ble mem­ber Sabra Williams, the founder of the Prison Project, explains in her TED Talk, below.

Par­tic­i­pants are sub­ject­ed and held to the rig­or­ous phys­i­cal­i­ty and emo­tion­al hon­esty at the core of this group’s aes­thet­ic. Per­son­al con­nec­tion to the vis­i­tors is lim­it­ed to what­ev­er may tran­spire in-the-moment, but with­in the prison pop­u­la­tion, rela­tion­ships blos­som. Both guards and pris­on­ers speak of new­found empa­thy.

The emo­tion­al insights aris­ing from these spon­ta­neous explo­rations teach par­tic­i­pants how to dif­fuse aggres­sive sit­u­a­tions, present a more pos­i­tive face to the world, and inter­act gen­er­ous­ly with oth­ers. In between class­es, par­tic­i­pants write in jour­nals, with a goal of shar­ing aloud.

Gang signs, mimed weapons, and bod­i­ly con­tact are out of bounds. Wild inven­tion often car­ries the day.

Par­tic­i­pants have zero recidi­vism, and a wait­ing list in the hun­dreds attests to the program’s pop­u­lar­i­ty.

You can learn more about the Actors’ Gang ten-year-old Prison Project here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

B.B. King Plays Live at Sing Sing Prison in One of His Great­est Per­for­mances (1972)

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible

in History, Maps | December 5th, 2016

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of an empire where­in “the Art of Car­tog­ra­phy attained such Per­fec­tion that the map of a sin­gle Province occu­pied the entire­ty of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entire­ty of a Province.” Still unsat­is­fied, “the Car­tog­ra­phers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coin­cid­ed point for point with it.” But pos­ter­i­ty, when they lost their ances­tors’ obses­sion for car­tog­ra­phy, judged “that vast Map was Use­less, and not with­out some Piti­less­ness was it, that they deliv­ered it up to the Inclemen­cies of Sun and Win­ters.” With that enor­mous map, in all its sin­gu­lar accu­ra­cy, cast out, small­er, imper­fect ones pre­sum­ably won the day again.

With that well-known sto­ry “On Exac­ti­tude in Sci­ence,” Borges illus­trat­ed the idea that all maps are wrong by imag­in­ing the pre­pos­ter­ous­ness of a tru­ly cor­rect one. The Vox video “Why All World Maps Are Wrong” cov­ers some of the same ter­ri­to­ry, as it were, first illus­trat­ing that idea by slit­ting open an inflat­able globe and try­ing, futile­ly, to get the result­ing plas­tic mess to lie flat.

“That right there is the eter­nal dilem­ma of map­mak­ers,” says the host in voiceover as the strug­gle con­tin­ues onscreen. “The sur­face of a sphere can­not be rep­re­sent­ed as a plane with­out some form of dis­tor­tion.” As a result, all of human­i­ty’s paper maps of the world–which in the task of turn­ing the sur­face of a sphere into a flat plane need to use a tech­nique called “projection”–distort geo­graph­i­cal real­i­ty by def­i­n­i­tion.

The Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion has, since its inven­tion by six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Flem­ish car­tog­ra­ph­er Ger­ar­dus Mer­ca­tor, pro­duced the most wide­ly-seen world maps. (If you grew up in Amer­i­ca, you almost cer­tain­ly spent a lot of time star­ing at Mer­ca­tor maps in the class­room.) But we hard­ly live under the lim­i­ta­tions of his day, nor those of the 1940s when Borges imag­ined his land-sized map. In our 21st cen­tu­ry, the satel­lite-based Glob­al Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem has “wiped out the need for paper maps as a means of nav­i­gat­ing both the sea and the sky,” but even so, “most web map­ping tools, like Google Maps, use the Mer­ca­tor” due to its “abil­i­ty to pre­serve shape and angles,” which “makes close-up views of cities more accu­rate.”

On the scale of a City, in more Bor­ge­sian words — and prob­a­bly on the scale of a Province and even the Empire — Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion still works just fine. “But the fact remains that there’s no right pro­jec­tion. Car­tog­ra­phers and math­e­mati­cians have cre­at­ed a huge library of avail­able pro­jec­tions, each with a new per­spec­tive on the plan­et, and each use­ful for a dif­fer­ent task.” You can com­pare and con­trast a few of them for your­self here, or take a clos­er look of some of the Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion’s size dis­tor­tions (mak­ing Green­land, for exam­ple, look as big as the whole of Africa) here. These chal­lenges and oth­ers have kept the Dis­ci­plines of Geog­ra­phy, unlike in Borges’ world, busy even today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

Browse & Down­load 1,198 Free High Res­o­lu­tion Maps of U.S. Nation­al Parks

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Free: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Lets You Down­load Thou­sands of Maps from the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey

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

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What’s the Fastest Way to Alphabetize Your Bookshelf?

in Books | December 5th, 2016

We’ve told you about the great Japan­ese word “tsun­doku,” which describes the act of buy­ing books and let­ting them pile up unread. It’s an affliction–or state of affairs–I’m sure many of you are per­son­al­ly famil­iar with.

Now let’s say you move that huge pile of unread books to a new home. And you’re won­der­ing what’s the quick­est way to get them in alpha­bet­i­cal order. Above, a handy life­hack to save you time.

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:

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

700 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

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29 Lists of Recommended Books Created by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Patti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

in Books | December 2nd, 2016

bookshelf_prunksaal_oenb_vienna_at_matl00786ch

Cre­ative Com­mons image of Aus­tri­an Nation­al Library by Matl

At any giv­en moment many of us can rec­om­mend a list of books to read. Books that have imprint­ed on us, named emo­tions we did­n’t know we had, carved trails through our brains. Books that stand as a tes­ta­ment to a life lived as a read­er. We may con­struct lists to pass on to a curi­ous niece, nephew, son, daugh­ter, stu­dent, or appren­tice. “Life is per­plex­ing,” we might say, “com­plex, won­drous, curi­ous, painful, open to unimag­in­able pos­si­bil­i­ties. Read these, then go out and find the books that inspire, soothe, guide, chal­lenge, and enlight­en you.”

Of course, as you know from read­ing this site, we fre­quent­ly bring you many such lists, from famous writ­ers, artists, musi­cians, sci­en­tists, and oth­er titans of their respec­tive fields who have inspired mil­lions of young stu­dents and appren­tices. Today, we have com­piled a mas­ter list of rec­om­mend­ed read­ing lists, from writ­ers like Jorge Luis Borges, musi­cian-poets like Pat­ti Smith, sci­en­tists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, futur­ists like Stew­art Brand, and many, many more.

In fact, we have two lists from Borges, both pre­dictably lengthy and eccen­tric. The first con­tains 33 books that could start a fic­tion­al Library of Babel, among which we find Jack Lon­don and Her­man Melville along­side occult Eng­lish writer Arthur Machen and Qing Dynasty Chi­nese writer Pu Songling. Borges’ sec­ond list spans 74 titles, and was intend­ed, before his death, to expand to 100. Pat­ti Smith also rec­om­mends Melville in her list, as well as Mikhail Bul­gakov, Louisa May Alcott, and her hero, Arthur Rim­baud. Tyson’s list is short, only 8 titles, and he sug­gests these books not only for the avid read­er but—in answer to a Redditor’s question—for “every sin­gle intel­li­gent per­son on the plan­et.”

And Stew­art Brand? Well, his list of 76 books is one of many such lists (includ­ing anoth­er one from Bri­an Eno) for his Long Now Foundation’s “Man­u­al for Civ­i­liza­tion,” a library meant to inspire and inform the few intel­li­gent peo­ple left on Earth in the event of cat­a­stroph­ic col­lapse.

Find the com­plete list of lists above. 28 in total. In some cas­es, the titles in each post link to online text or audio books freely avail­able online. And, sep­a­rate­ly, you should not miss our list of 74 essen­tial books rec­om­mend­ed by “a group of inter­na­tion­al women writ­ers, artists and cura­tors.”  Please let us know in the com­ments if there are any espe­cial­ly good lists not men­tioned here–ones you think our read­ers would do well to con­sult.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

74 Essen­tial Books for Your Per­son­al Library: A List Curat­ed by Female Cre­atives

100 Nov­els All Kids Should Read Before Leav­ing High School

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

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Man Ray Designs a Supremely Elegant, Geometric Chess Set in 1920–and It Now Gets Re-Issued

in Art, Games | December 2nd, 2016

Yes­ter­day, Col­in Mar­shall fea­tured Man Ray’s “Sur­re­al­ist Chess­board” from 1934, which paid homage to the lead­ers of the Sur­re­al­ist move­ment. Though artis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, the chess­board had some prac­ti­cal lim­i­ta­tions. Made up of only 20 squares (as com­pared to the tra­di­tion­al 64), the “Sur­re­al­ist Chess­board” would­n’t let you play an actu­al game of chess.

For that, we need to turn to Man Ray’s chess set fash­ioned in 1924. Made of abstract geo­met­ric forms, this set (on dis­play above, jump to the 3:30 mark to real­ly see it) fea­tured some uncon­ven­tion­al chess pieces: the king is a pyra­mid; the queen, a cone; the cas­tle, a cube; the bish­op, a bot­tle; the knight, the head scroll of a vio­lin; and the pawn, an ele­gant sphere.

We said you could actu­al­ly play chess on this board. And indeed you can. In 2012, the Man Ray Trust autho­rized a new edi­tion of this set, mak­ing it avail­able to chess enthu­si­asts look­ing for a hand­some set. Craft­ed in Ger­many, it’s made of sol­id beech wood.

This chess­board you can obtain.

As for the oth­er mod­ern chess­board Man Ray designed in 1945, it may be out of your league. David Bowie owned one of the few exist­ing copies of that 1945 board, and, ear­li­er this month, it sold for $1.3 mil­lion at a Sothe­by’s auc­tion in Lon­don.

For more infor­ma­tion on Man Ray’s chess­boards, read this short arti­cle from Chess Col­lec­tors Inter­na­tion­al (see page 18). Or see The Imagery of Chess Revis­it­ed, which cov­ers Man Ray’s boards and beyond.

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:

Man Ray Cre­ates a “Sur­re­al­ist Chess­board,” Fea­tur­ing Por­traits of Sur­re­al­ist Icons: Dalí, Bre­ton, Picas­so, Magritte, Miró & Oth­ers (1934)

Man Ray’s Por­traits of Ernest Hem­ing­way, Ezra Pound, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­er 1920s Icons

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

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

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Blade Runner Gets Re-Created, Shot for Shot, Using Only Microsoft Paint

in Art, Film, Sci Fi | December 2nd, 2016

msp-blade-runner2

Blade Run­ner came out in June 1982. Microsoft­’s Paint came out in Novem­ber 1985. Lit­tle could the design­ers of that rebrand­ed ver­sion of ZSoft­’s PC Paint­brush pack­aged in with Win­dows 1.0 know that the paths of their hum­ble graph­ics appli­ca­tion and that elab­o­rate sci-fi cin­e­mat­ic vision would cross just over 30 years lat­er. Sure­ly nobody involved in either project could have imag­ined the form the inter­sec­tion would take: MSP Blade Run­ner, a fan’s shot-by-shot Tum­blr “remake” (and gen­tle par­o­dy) of the film using only Microsoft Paint, start­ing with the Ladd Com­pa­ny tree logo.

msp-blade-runner

Why make such a thing? “I like the idea of hav­ing a blog but basi­cal­ly feel as if I have very lit­tle to say about things, at least things that are orig­i­nal or inter­est­ing,” cre­ator David Mac­Gowan told Moth­er­board­’s Rachel Pick. “I grav­i­tat­ed to Tum­blr with some idea of just post­ing pic­tures, but still felt I need­ed to be post­ing some­thing I’d actu­al­ly made myself… [Y]ears ago I used to draw real­ly crap­py basic MS Paint pics for a favourite pop group’s fan site, and they always seemed to raise a smile. The idea of doing some­thing else with MS Paint, a kind of cel­e­bra­tion of my not being deterred by lack of artis­tic tal­ent, nev­er real­ly went away.”

msp-blade-runner-3

The mix­ture of tech­no­log­i­cal and aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties inher­ent in using a severe­ly out­dat­ed but ever-present dig­i­tal tool to re-cre­ate the endur­ing­ly com­pelling ana­log visu­als of a movie from that same era goes well with the orig­i­nal Blade Run­ner’s project of updat­ing the con­ven­tions of film noir to depict a then-new­ly imag­ined future. Even more fit­ting­ly, a work like MSP Blade Run­ner could only make sense in the 2010s, the very decade the movie tried to envi­sion. Will it go all the way to the shot of Deckard and Rachel’s final exit into the ele­va­tor? “I don’t real­ly think about giv­ing up,” McGowan told Pick. “The idea of actu­al­ly com­plet­ing some­thing I start out to do (for once in my life) is very appeal­ing.” Spo­ken like a 21st-cen­tu­ry man indeed.

msp-blade-runner

You can find every frame paint­ed so far, and every new one to come, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Made of 12,597 Water­col­or Paint­ings

What Hap­pens When Blade Run­ner & A Scan­ner Dark­ly Get Remade with an Arti­fi­cial Neur­al Net­work

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

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

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A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miranda Reimagines Hamilton as a Girl on Drunk History

in Comedy, History, Television, Theatre | December 2nd, 2016

Back in July of 1804, when Vice Pres­i­dent Aaron Burr fired a fatal round into the abdomen of for­mer Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury Alexan­der Hamil­ton, I won­der which sce­nario would have seemed more implau­si­ble: that these polit­i­cal rivals would one day be res­ur­rect­ed in the form of a black guy and a Nuy­or­i­can, or as two young women in reveal­ing­ly snug breech­es, above.

Time moves on. These days, your aver­age Hamil­ton-obsessed pre-teen may have trou­ble accept­ing that there was a time—Jan­u­ary 2015, to be exact—when most Amer­i­cans could­n’t say what the guy on the ten dol­lar bill was famous for.

I con­fess, until quite recent­ly, I was far more con­fi­dent in Arrest­ed Devel­op­ment’s fic­tion­al Bluth fam­i­ly’s exploits than any involv­ing Hamil­ton and Burr. This explains, in part, why I’m so drawn to the cast­ing instincts of Derek Waters’, cre­ator of Drunk His­to­ry. 

The most recent episode fea­tures Alia Shawkat, one of my favorite Arrest­ed Devel­op­ment play­ers as a sar­don­ic, pot­ty mouthed Hamil­ton.

No wor­ries that Drunk His­to­ry, which bills itself as a “liquored-up nar­ra­tion of our nation’s his­to­ry,” is the lat­est in a long line of John­ny-Come-Latelys, eager­ly bel­ly­ing up to the Hamil­ton trough.

Before Shawkat imbued him with her trade­mark edge, Drunk History’s Hamil­ton exud­ed the befud­dled sweet­ness of Shawkat’s besot­ted Arrest­ed Devel­op­ment cousin, Michael Cera, who orig­i­nat­ed the part in a video that gave rise to the series, below.

That one’s far slop­pi­er, and not just in terms of pro­duc­tion val­ues. The inau­gur­al nar­ra­tor, Mark Gagliar­di, was ren­dered a good deal more than three sheets to the wind by the bot­tle of scotch he downed on a sag­ging brown velour couch.

Amer­i­ca would not want to see its cur­rent sweet­heart, Hamilton’s play­wright and orig­i­nal lead­ing man, Lin-Manuel Miran­da in such a con­di­tion.

Where­as Gagliar­di seemed dan­ger­ous­ly close to need­ing the buck­et Waters thought­ful­ly posi­tioned near­by, a whiskey-fuelled Miran­da seems mere­ly the tini­est bit buzzed, sit­ting cross legged in his parent’s liv­ing room, flesh­ing out Hamilton’s sto­ry with bits he didn’t man­age to cram into his Pulitzer Prize-win­ning musi­cal, such as a bewigged Tony Hale (aka Buster Bluth) as James Mon­roe.

On the oth­er hand, he does describe the Reynolds Pam­phlet as “Dick 101” (and failed to recall Face­Tim­ing var­i­ous friends post-record­ing) so…

You’ll need a Com­e­dy Cen­tral sub­scrip­tion to view the com­plete episode online, but Shawkat’s ear­li­er Drunk His­to­ry turn as Grover Cleveland’s “It Girl” wife, Frances, is free for all, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Alexan­der Hamil­ton” Per­formed with Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage

Alexan­der Hamil­ton: Hip-Hop Hero at the White House Poet­ry Evening

Watch a Wit­ty, Grit­ty, Hard­boiled Retelling of the Famous Aaron Burr-Alexan­der Hamil­ton Duel

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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

in Film | December 1st, 2016

As each semes­ter in my film course rolls around, it’s more and more appar­ent how time depletes the pop cul­ture cur­ren­cy of those direc­tors who did not make it into the 21st Cen­tu­ry. A knowl­edge of Stan­ley Kubrick used to be a giv­en, as was the under­stand­ing of what “A Stan­ley Kubrick Film” meant to film fans. Now he is a solu­tion to a weird join-the-dots, as I watch stu­dents who know The Shin­ing as a clas­sic hor­ror film grok sud­den­ly that the same direc­tor made the head­trip 2001: A Space Odyssey. And what’s this Bar­ry Lyn­don film? And this Spar­ta­cus that looks like it’s from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent time? It can baf­fle a young cineaste, and it baf­fles them in a dif­fer­ent way, I sup­pose, than how Kubrick baf­fled his con­tem­po­raries from film to film. Yes, there’s more of my stu­dents who have seen Dr. Strange than Dr. Strangelove, but the joy of dis­cov­ery is still there, as is the thrill of being in a spe­cial fan club when you do dis­cov­er Kubrick.

For­tu­nate­ly, we are also hav­ing a renais­sance in film cri­tique in the medi­um of video, as fol­low­ers of this site know. Along with Tony Zhou and Evan Puschak, Lewis Bond (aka Chan­nel Criswell) has cre­at­ed some of the most in depth video essays on YouTube. Hav­ing authored overviews of the work of Hayao Miyaza­ki, Yasu­jiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Tri­er, and David Lynch, Bond offers an excel­lent intro­duc­tion above to Kubrick’s oeu­vre.

Not con­tent to use his knowl­edge of Kubrick’s films, Bond vis­it­ed the Kubrick archives in Lon­don, learn­ing first­hand the metic­u­lous way the direc­tor cre­at­ed a film.

“His work eth­ic bor­dered on the obsessed,” he says. “This expe­ri­ence was how I imag­ined it is to see a great painter’s brush­es. It was a way to gain a brief glimpse into the mind of a mas­ter at work.”

Bond makes the case that Kubrick’s atten­tion to detail through all stages of pro­duc­tion, includ­ing edit­ing, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and even attend­ing screen­ings and check­ing the qual­i­ty of the prints, is exact­ly what makes him one of the best direc­tors. Every choice seen in the films, all the way down to the small­est prop, has Kubrick’s DNA on it. It’s no won­der that peo­ple pore over every frame of The Shin­ing, read­ing into it all sorts of mean­ing.

“He changed the way visu­al sto­ries were told,” says Bond, where Kubrick­’s mise en scene and com­po­si­tion both deliv­er the essen­tial nar­ra­tive and the sym­bol­ism under­neath.

Kubrick could only have reached these heights with the com­plete cre­ative con­trol his fame afford­ed him from the 1960s onward. There was time to plan, time and mon­ey to shoot, and time to edit, some­thing directors–before or since–rarely get. And not all direc­tors have the dis­ci­pline to deliv­er when they get such free­dom.

There’s much more in Bond’s essay so check it out. Side note: Lewis Bond’s girl­friend Luiza Lopes (aka Art Regard) also cre­ates video essays on direc­tors like David Cro­nen­berg, Roman Polan­s­ki, and Ing­mar Bergman. Could this be the first ‘celebri­ty cou­ple’ of the video essay era?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

The Film­mak­ing Craft of David Finch­er Demys­ti­fied in Two Video Essays

The Geo­met­ric Beau­ty of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wes Anderson’s Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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