Master of Light: A Close Look at the Paintings of Johannes Vermeer Narrated by Meryl Streep

in Art, Film | August 8th, 2013

We all thrilled to Johannes Vermeer painting his best-known portrait as dramatized in Peter Webber’s 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring. But for every heightened, scintillating feature film built around a well-known artist, there exists — or should exist, anyway — a documentary that examines the work itself in greater detail. For such a counterpart to the aforementioned Colin Firth/Scarlett Johansson vehicle, I nominate Joe Krakora’s 2001 Vermeer: Master of Light, a rich look at the paintings of the well-known visual chronicler of seventeenth-century middle-class Dutch life, whose use of color could reach pretty formidable heights of scintillation itself. Providing its narration, we have a certain Meryl Streep.

Click each image for a larger version

Streep’s words and those of the documentary’s expert interviewees must of necessity focus on Vermeer’s actual paintings, since we know little of the painter’s life. And we don’t even have very many paintings to talk about: living from 1632 to 1672, Vermeer turned out fewer than 40 canvases. But what canvases: Master of Light goes into detail on his particular mastery not only of light and color, but of textures, perspectives, and seemingly minor but nonetheless painstaking touches. We do, however, offer a viewing tip: unless you particularly enjoy shots of light through windows, you may want to begin the video at 5:22 or so. The analysis of Vermeer takes its time coming, but when it begins, it offers a wealth of surprising detail — just as do the paintings themselves. But don’t believe me; find out for yourself by viewing fifteen of them up close at the Google Art Project, including Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman just above, or, below, The Love Letter.

Flashmob Recreates Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in a Dutch Shopping Mall

The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online

Vermeer with a BiC

Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paintings & Museums to You

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Steven Pinker: “Dear Humanists, Science is Not Your Enemy”

in Education | August 7th, 2013

Humanists are feeling a bit beleaguered these days. And who can blame them? Enrollments in humanities courses are in steady decline nationwide, and everyone’s looking for a cause. Some blame the decline on the tough economy and the relentlessly vocational focus of students. Others attribute it to the “anti-intellectual moment” in which we’re now living. Still others place the blame right in the laps of humanists who have “lost faith in their own enterprise.” They’re committing their own form of career suicide. And then some fault the ever-increasing encroachment of science. For nowadays science tries to answer all questions, including what’s good, beautiful and true.

But if you listen to Steven Pinker, he’ll tell you that science is not the problem. Earlier today, the eminent Harvard psychologist published a piece in The New Republic called Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians. And he offered these assurances:

[Science doesn’t have] an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

If you’re a humanist trying to figure out whether you can take comfort in Pinker’s argument, you can read the rest of his piece here.

Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

Read The Harvard Classics: A Free DIY Education in the Liberal Arts

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Trip to the Moon (and Five Other Free Films) by Georges Méliès, the Father of Special Effects

in Film | August 7th, 2013

If you’ve taken a film studies course, you’ve almost certainly seen the work of Georges Méliès. His 1902 short A Trip to the Moon, at the top, which some cinema scholars cite as the picture where special effects as we know them began, has a particularly important place in cinema history. Nobody who watches that fourteen-minute production ever forgets the image of the moon’s consternation after the protagonists’ spacecraft crashes into it. And the rest of the movie, if narratively shaky, still has an impressive visual power. If anybody had both sufficient imagination and sufficient know-how to commit such a voyage to that cutting-edge medium known as motion film over a century ago, the theater owner and seasoned illusionist Méliès did. Charged by the cinematic pioneering of his countrymen the Lumière brothers, he began doing it in 1896, and continued until 1913, which makes A Trip to the Moon a mid-career highlight.

A mid-career highlight, that is, alongside 1904’s The Impossible Voyage (just above), which continues in the same vein of Jules Verne-style fantastical science fiction. This time, in fact, Méliès took not just the sensibility from Verne but, in part, a story, drawing inspiration from Verne’s play Journey Through the Impossible about a young Danish baron tempted to travel to far-off lands, planets, and realities. He wrote into this sequel, of sorts, a natural destination: the sun. MUBI.com’s “public domain greats” page offers a list of these and other Méliès films available free to watch online, the likes of which inspired Martin Scorsese to adapt Brian Selznick’s Méliès-centric novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret into Hugo, a film visually inventive by the early 21st century’s standards just as A Voyage to the Moon excelled by the early 20th century’s. Those films currently available include:

They will all be added to our collection of 550 Free Movies Online.

The Birth of Film: 11 Firsts in Cinema

The Early Days of Animation Preserved in UCLA’s Video Archive

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Francis Ford Coppola’s Handwritten Casting Notes for The Godfather

in Film | August 7th, 2013

Laurence Olivier as Vito Corleone? Dustin Hoffman as Michael? Those are two of the intriguing options director Francis Ford Coppola was apparently mulling over when he jotted down these notes while preparing to make his classic 1972 film The Godfather.

The casting of The Godfather was a notoriously contentious affair. Executives at Paramount Pictures thought Marlon Brando — Coppola’s first choice to play Mafia “Godfather” Vito — was too difficult to work with. They thought Al Pacino was too short to play his son Michael.

“The war over casting the family Corleone was more volatile than the war the Corleone family fought on screen,” writes former Paramount head of production Robert Evans in his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture. At one point the studio wanted Danny Thomas to play Vito and Warren Beatty to play Michael. A long list of leading Hollywood actors were considered for the role of Michael, including Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neal and Jack Nicholson.

Coppola eventually settled on Pacino as the cerebral Michael and the little-known Carmine Caridi as Michael’s tough-guy older brother, Sonny. Evans told the director he could have one but not both. In a passage from the book, quoted in Mark Seal’s 2009 Vanity Fair piece, “The Godfather Wars,” Evans describes a tense meeting with Coppola:

“You’ve got Pacino on one condition, Francis.”

“What’s that?”

“Jimmy Caan plays Sonny.”

“Carmine Caridi’s signed. He’s right for the role. Anyway, Caan’s a Jew. He’s not Italian.”

“Yeah, but he’s not six five, he’s five ten. This aint Mutt and Jeff. This kid Pacino’s five five, and that’s in heels.”

“I’m not using Caan.”

“I’m not using Pacino.”

Slam went the door. Ten minutes later, the door opened. “You win.”

For more on the casting of The Godfather, including excerpts from screen tests and remembrances from Coppola and others, see our earlier post “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Casting of The Godfather with Coppola, De Niro & Caan.”

via A.V. Club

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

1922 Photo: Claude Monet Stands on the Japanese Footbridge He Painted Through the Years

in Art | August 7th, 2013

The late-1800’s European fascination with things Japanese sometimes bordered on the collection of Orientalist kitsch. At the height of French impressionism, so called Japonisme was everywhere, but rarely were Far East designs integrated into Western landscapes with such skill and sensitivity as in the work of Claude Monet. Next to his water lilies and haystacks, one of the most recognizable features in the painter’s work is a Japanese-style footbridge, which, like the lilies, was part of his garden at Giverny (see the aged Monet on the bridge in the 1922 New York Times photo above).

We’re familiar with the bridge as it appears in an 1899 painting Waterlily pond, green harmony, a symmetrical gray structure hovering in a lush, reflective sea of greens, lavenders, and pinks. As Monet’s eyesight further failed him, his paintings became harder to parse, turning to deep, Van Gogh-like swirls of color that are beautiful but sometimes completely abstract. Try and make out the bridge, for instance, in The Japanese Footbridge (above), painted between 1920 and 1922. Monet’s fascination with the bridge is particularly poignant when we consider that, as Australia’s National Gallery of Art says of Waterlily Pond, “not only did Monet create this painting, he made everything depicted in it,” meaning that Monet curated the landscape and supervised the footbridge’s construction.

Monet had it built in 1893, deliberately choosing a Japanese style, but employing local craftsman in the construction. And while the bridge had to be rebuilt in 1970, as you can see from French Impressionist travel guide Thomas Dowson’s 2011 photo of Monet’s real Normandy landscape (above), the painter’s gardens seem little changed from their nineteenth century character as a carefully balanced synthesis of East and West aesthetics.

A special thanks goes to @stevesilberman for sharing this with us.

Impressionist Painter Edgar Degas Takes a Stroll in Paris, 1915

Watch Iconic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet, Pollock & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Historic Meeting Between Dickens and Dostoevsky Revealed as a Great Literary Hoax

in Literature | August 7th, 2013

Given the way nineteenth-century literature is sometimes conceived—as the special province of a few great, hairy celebrity novelists—one might imagine that a meeting between Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky would not be an unusual occurrence. Maybe it was even routine, like Jay Z and Kanye bumping elbows at a party! So when I read that the two had once met, in London in 1862, my first thought was, “well, sure. And then Herman Melville and Gustave Flaubert stopped by, and they got into a brawl over the check.” Alright, that’s ridiculous. Melville didn’t achieve any degree of fame until after his death, after all, and while the other three were respected, even wildly famous (in Dickens’ case), it is unlikely they read much of each other, much less traveled hundreds of miles for personal visits.

And yet, the story of Dickens and Dostoevsky—since revealed to be as much a fabrication as the image above—was plausible enough to find purchase in two recent Dickens biographies. Though the two men had vastly different sensibilities, their shared experiences of the seamier side of life, and their sprawling serialized novels cataloguing their time’s social ills in great detail, would seem likely to draw them together. New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani seemed to think so when she repeated the story as told in Claire Tomalin’s 2011 Charles Dickens, A Life. Tomalin—who found the story in the Dickensian, the journal of the Dickens Fellowship, and reported it in good faith—recounts how the Russian novelist intentionally sought out his English counterpart in London, and, upon finding him, heard Dickens bare his soul, confessing that he longed to be like his honest, simple characters, but used his own personal failings to construct his villains.

The story might still have currency had not several Russian literature scholars read Kakutani’s review and found it far too credulous: Why would Dostoevsky have only mentioned the encounter in a letter written sixteen years after the fact, a letter no scholar has seen? What language would the two men have in common—and if they had one, probably French, would they be fluent enough to have a heart to heart? And even if Dostoevsky visited London in 1862, as it seems, he did, would he have intentionally sought out Charles Dickens? Eric Naiman, professor of Slavic Language and Literatures at UC Berkeley, doubted all of this, and, in undertaking some research, found it to be the elaborate production of a man named A.D. Harvey, who has created for himself a coterie of fictional academic identities so thorough as to constitute what Naiman calls a “community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticise each other’s work.”

As far as literary hoaxers go, Harvey is quite accomplished. You may find his story—driven, as such things often are, by wounded ego, misplaced talent, vanity, and frustrated ambition—much more interesting than any supposed tête-à-tête between the Russian and British novelists. A recent Guardian piece profiles the “man behind the great Dickens and Dostoevsky hoax,” and Eric Naiman’s exhaustive Times Literary Supplement expose of the hoax shows us just how deeply embedded such spurious lore can become in a literary community before it can be rooted out by skeptical scholars. The lesson here is trite, I guess. Don’t believe everything you read. But when we’re inclined—mostly for good reasons—to trust the word of those who pose as experts and authorities, this can be a hard lesson to heed.

Related Content:

Find works by Dostoevsky and Dickens in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Albert Camus Talks About Adapting Dostoyevsky for the Theatre, 1959

Watch Piotr Dumala’s Wonderful Animations of Literary Works by Kafka and Dostoevsky

Celebrate the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens with Free Movies, eBooks and Audio Books

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English

in Food & Drink | August 7th, 2013

Cookpad bills itself as having the “Best Japanese recipes from the largest cooking community in Japan.” And that’s not just your usual web site hyperbole. Established back in 1997, Cookpad houses 1.5 million recipes created by a base of 20 million users. And it’s now a publicly-traded company on the Tokyo stock exchange. This week, Cookpad did everyone in the Anglophone world a favor by releasing an English-language version of its site. Right now, you can navigate your way through 1,500 recipes and find dishes like Udon with Thick Egg Soup, Very Delicious Stir-fried Tofu with Shimeji Mushrooms, and Pan-Fried Autumn Salmon with Ginger Sauce. And if you’re patient, you’ll soon find another 30,000 recipes added to the site. It’s worth noting that all recipes are translated by humans, not computers, and the translators are apparently compensated for their efforts.

via The Next Web

Al Jazeera Travel Show Explores World Cities Through Their Street Food

Wim Wenders Visits, Marvels at a Japanese Fake Food Workshop

Learn Japanese Free

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

10 Tips From Billy Wilder on How to Write a Good Screenplay

in Film, Writing | August 6th, 2013

There’s an old story — Orson Welles called it “the greatest Hollywood one-liner ever made” — that when someone attending the 1958 funeral of Harry Cohn, the fearsome president of Columbia Pictures, asked how it was possible that such a huge crowd would show up for Cohn’s funeral, Billy Wilder quipped: “Well, give the people what they want.”

The story is almost certainly apocryphal. The line may have been spoken by someone else, at a different Hollywood mogul’s funeral. But the fact that it is so often attributed to Wilder says something about his reputation as a man with a razor-sharp wit and a firm grasp of the imperatives of popular movie-making. In films like Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, Double Indemnity and Sabrina, Wilder used his formidable craft as a director to tell stories in a clear and efficient way. It was an ethic he picked up as a screenwriter.

Wilder was born in Austria-Hungary and moved as a young man to Germany, where he worked as a newspaper reporter. In the late 1920s he began writing screenplays for the German film industry, but he fled the country soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Wilder made his way to Hollywood, where he continued to write screenplays. He co-wrote a number of successful films in the 30s, including Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire. In the early 40s he got his first chance to direct a Hollywood movie, and a long string of hits followed. In 1960 he won three Academy Awards for producing, writing and directing The Apartment.

Wilder was 90 years old when the young director Cameron Crowe approached him in 1996 about playing a small role in Jerry Maguire. Wilder said no, but the two men formed a friendship. Over the next several years they talked extensively about filmmaking, and in 1999 Crowe published Conversations with Wilder. One of the book’s highlights is a list of ten screenwriting tips by Wilder. “I know a lot of people that have already Xeroxed that list and put it by their typewriter,” Crowe said in a 1999 NPR interview. “And, you know, there’s no better film school really than listening to what Billy Wilder says.”

Here are Wilder’s ten rules of good filmmaking:

1: The audience is fickle.
2: Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.
3: Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4: Know where you’re going.
5: The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6: If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7: A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8: In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9: The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10: The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Note: Readers might also be interested in Wilder’s 1996 Paris Review interview. It’s called The Art of of Screenwriting.

Don’t miss anything from Open Culture. Sign up for our Daily Email or RSS Feed. And we’ll send quality culture your way, every day.

via Gotham Writers’ Workshop

Watch Raymond Chandler’s Long-Unnoticed Cameo in Double Indemnity

Filmmaking Advice from Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi (NSFW)

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

The 10-Minute, Never-Released, Experimental Demo of The Beatles’ “Revolution” (1968)

in Music | August 6th, 2013

What is a “Revolution”? The question might precede a lengthy disquisition on political philosophy; it might presage a manifesto redefining an old, worn-out term; it might open up a vinyl-era flight of theoretical fancy over the qualitative dimension of Revolutions Per Minute. As an opening gambit to a discussion of The Beatles’ “Revolution” (and “Revolution 9”), perhaps the question ventures on the truth of versions, alternates, “takes,” as much a part of history as toppling regimes and mass movements.

How does all of this heaviness get into pop music? Ask John Lennon. Well, no, ask his music. Ask the history of his music, the alternates, the hidden intentions, false starts, discarded revolutionary movements. Ask, “Revolution Take 20,” the alternate take of “Revolution” that you hear above. “Revolution 20” has a lot to say. It tells us about how a noisy, upbeat shooby-doo-wop blues proclaiming the power of love over violence did not originally do so with such starry-eyed optimism and comforting pop brevity (the kind of thing that sells Nikes, for instance). “Revolution” had other intentions, which we only glimpse in the song’s severed vestigial tail “Revolution 9,” and which we may have had quite enough of, thank you, in the arty weirdness of Yoko Ono’s most experimental work.

You see, “Revolution” and non-Nike-worthy “Revolution 9” once belonged to the same animal, a creature that evolved from Lennon’s (and Ono’s) fascination with musique concrète, and with deconstructing rock music into something unrecognizable. The kind of revolution “Revolution 20” stages isn’t the dichotomous option between peace & love theatrics or reactionary violence—it’s a revolution of form, which is what Lennon seems to be after here, a new way of being that dissolves contradictions in the silly Freudian shtick of Paul McCartney and George Harrison singing “Mama… Dada…” over and over as the classical tropes of rock and roll warp and wobble around them in disintegrating pitch shifts, radio noise, and spoken word non-sequiturs.

At over ten minutes in length, “Revolution Take 20”—which appeared as a mono mix on a 2009 bootleg CD called Revolution: Take… Your Knickers Off (after a piece of Lennon humor at the intro)—is more than an alternate take. It’s an alternate history, one in which Lennon doesn’t just lay in bed for peace; he lays down on the studio floor to record his vocals, and all the while his mind actively disassembles rock and roll. As the recording engineer Brian Gibson remembers the session: “John decided he would feel more comfortable on the floor so I had to rig up a microphone which would be suspended on a boom above his mouth. It struck me as somewhat odd, a little eccentric, but they were always looking for a different sound; something new.”

That Lennon ultimately decided to divide this monster into Revolutions 1 & 9 does not mean that he’d given up on making “something new.” Perhaps it was a marketing decision; maybe he realized that he had a hit on his hands. Less, cynically, perhaps he felt that pop music could not contain the weight of his desire to move beyond, or to dissolve, the seeming false choices on offer.

Deconstructing The Master Track of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”

Meet the Dr. Who Composer Who Almost Turned The Beatles’ “Yesterday” Into Early Electronica

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 26 ) |

Jurassic Park Tells You Everything You Need to Know About the Dangers of Global Capitalism

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Economics, Film, Philosophy | August 6th, 2013

Forget putting a bird on it. Put on a dinosaur on it for a surefire hit in our market-driven economy. Director Stephen Spielberg certainly didn’t skimp on the “terrible lizards” when adapting Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the screen, and things turned out pretty well for him.

Mike Rugnetta, the fast-talking host of PBS’s Idea Channel, theorizes that the 20-year-old film is a great, possibly inadvertent commentary on the dangers of global market capitalism. His merry spoiler-packed video touches on such phenomena as risky investments, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the havoc that can be wreaked by a disgruntled employee. He hales both Richard Attenborough’s park owner character and Director Spielberg as egotistical madmen chasing monstrous profits. His kitchen sink approach inevitably leads to appearances by both Barney and Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek.

Rugnetta is quick (of course) to point out that he could come up with similar hypotheses for such comparatively fresh releases as World War Z (wage slavery), Iron Man (glory be to the world-saving entrepreneur), and Pacific Rim (the global market will unite us all)… but why, when Jurassic Park’s got enduring, market-tested crowd-pleasers?

Henry Rollins: Education is the Cure to “Disaster Capitalism”

Intelligent YouTube Channels

Ayun Halliday finally got around to seeing this movie last spring. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Andy Warhol Shoots “Screen Tests” of Nico, Bob Dylan & Salvador Dalí

in Art, Film | August 6th, 2013

Just the other day, I had a chat with a well-known poet who laid out for me his theory that Andy Warhol invented our conception of modern America. When we think about this country, the poet explained, we think about this country broadly in the way that Warhol (and thus his disciples) envisioned it. We here at Open Culture have covered several of the forms in which the artist promulgated his distinctive brand of Americana, and today, for the 85th anniversary of his birth, we’ve rounded up a few of his famous “screen tests,” the short films he made between 1963 and 1968 that offer portraits of hundreds of figures, famous and otherwise, who happened to pass through his studio/social club/subcultural hot zone, The Factory. Just above, you can watch Warhol’s screen test with Nico, the German singer who would become an integral part of the Factory-formed band the Velvet Underground.

Little-heard at the time but ultimately highly influential, the Velvet Underground’s sound shaped much American popular music — and given popular music’s centrality back then, much of American culture to come. You may not necessarily buy that argument, but surely you can’t argue against the influence of a certain singer-songwriter by the name of Bob Dylan, Warhol’s screen test with whom appears just above.

Coming from a Polish immigrant family, and seemingly dedicated to the cultivation of his own outsider status his entire life, Warhol understood the importance of foreigners to the vitality of American culture. Naturally, he didn’t miss his chance to shoot a screen test with Salvador Dalí, below, when the Spanish surrealist came to the Factory.

See also our previous post on Warhol’s screen tests with Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, and others. When you’ve watched them all, consider continuing your celebration of life in Andy Warhol’s 85th birthday with the EarthCam and The Warhol Museum’s collaboration Figment. It offers live camera feeds of not only his grave but the church where he was baptized. Comparisons to the viewing experience of Empire are encouraged.

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!

Andy Warhol’s One Minute of Professional Wrestling Fame (1985)

Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol Demystify Their Pop Art in Vintage 1966 Film

A Symphony of Sound (1966): Velvet Underground Improvises, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

The film Andy Warhol: A Mirror of the Sixties has been added to our list of 550 Free Movies Online.

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Master of Light: A Close Look at the Paintings of Johannes Vermeer Narrated by Meryl Streep

Steven Pinker: “Dear Humanists, Science is Not Your Enemy”

A Trip to the Moon (and Five Other Free Films) by Georges Méliès, the Father of Special Effects

Francis Ford Coppola’s Handwritten Casting Notes for The Godfather

1922 Photo: Claude Monet Stands on the Japanese Footbridge He Painted Through the Years

The Historic Meeting Between Dickens and Dostoevsky Revealed as a Great Literary Hoax

Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English

10 Tips From Billy Wilder on How to Write a Good Screenplay

The 10-Minute, Never-Released, Experimental Demo of The Beatles’ “Revolution” (1968)

Jurassic Park Tells You Everything You Need to Know About the Dangers of Global Capitalism

Andy Warhol Shoots “Screen Tests” of Nico, Bob Dylan & Salvador Dalí

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search