David Byrne Gives Us the Lowdown on How Music Works (with Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin)

in Music | September 20th, 2012

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“I had an extreme­ly slow-dawn­ing insight about cre­ation,” writes eclec­ti­cal­ly mind­ed musi­cian David Byrne in the open­ing chap­ter of his new book How Music Works. “That insight is that con­text large­ly deter­mines what is writ­ten, paint­ed, sculpt­ed, sung, or per­formed.” This comes as only the first in a series of illu­mi­nat­ing ideas Byrne lays out in the text, a far-reach­ing med­i­ta­tion on artis­tic cre­ation through the field that hap­pens to be his spe­cial­ty. Approach­ing music — you know, the stuff he made at the front of the Talk­ing Heads and con­tin­ues to make in solo albums and col­lab­o­ra­tions with the likes of Bri­an Eno and St. Vin­cent —  from as many angles as he can, he writes about its tech­nol­o­gy, the busi­ness of it, its social ele­ments, its role in his life, and what sci­ence and nature have to teach us about its mechan­ics. For more on that last bit, watch the above con­ver­sa­tion from Seed mag­a­zine, which sits Byrne down with Dan Lev­itin, neu­ro­sci­en­tist, musi­cian, and author of This is Your Brain on Music. Though it pre­cedes the pub­li­ca­tion of How Music Works by about five years, the chat cov­ers great stretch­es of high­ly rel­e­vant ground.

Watch­ing this back-and-forth, I could swear to see­ing some of the con­cepts devel­oped in How Music Works tak­ing ear­ly shape in Byrne’s head. He and Lev­itin dis­cuss the wide­spread sus­pi­cion of delib­er­ate craft in an osten­si­bly emo­tion­al form like rock and roll; the way music gen­er­ates plea­sure by tak­ing detours and dis­rupt­ing pat­terns; the rela­tion­ship between under­stand­ing songs and acquir­ing lan­guages; the sen­so­ry sim­i­lar­i­ties between lis­ten­ing to music and drink­ing wine; the nature of trance states; and the long-stand­ing yet seem­ing­ly now chang­ing social func­tion of music. Byrne admits that music actu­al­ly helped him change his own behav­ior: “I used music as a real tool to find my way into engag­ing social­ly,” he says, and this ties in with every­thing the two have spent the past hour talk­ing about. Intel­lec­tu­al though their musi­cophil­ia may seem, they nev­er for­get about the pre-ratio­nal ele­ments of the musi­cal expe­ri­ence. The guid­ing notion of their con­ver­sa­tion might have been summed up by Carl Sagan: “It is some­times said that sci­en­tists are unro­man­tic,” he wrote in anoth­er con­text, “but is it not stir­ring to under­stand how the world actu­al­ly works? It does no harm to the romance of the sun­set to know a lit­tle bit about it.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stew­art

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

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

Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing Traditional American Folk Song “Mule on the Mount” (1939)

in Literature, Music | September 20th, 2012

Two years before the 1937 pub­li­ca­tion of her nov­el Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God, Zora Neale Hurston pub­lished a col­lec­tion of African-Amer­i­can folk­lore called Of Mules and Men. She did so as an author­i­ty on the sub­ject and a trained anthro­pol­o­gist who had stud­ied under the most well-regard­ed fig­ure in the dis­ci­pline at the time, Franz Boas. Her study was both a per­son­al and a pro­fes­sion­al under­tak­ing for her; although Hurston had grown up in the Deep South—in Eatonville, Florida—she cred­it­ed her aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing with giv­ing her the crit­i­cal dis­tance to real­ly see the cul­ture on its own terms. As she puts it in the Intro­duc­tion to Of Mules and Men, she had known black South­ern cul­ture “from the ear­li­est rock­ing of my cra­dle… but it was fit­ting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wear­ing it…. I had to have the spy-glass of Anthro­pol­o­gy to look through at that.”

After receiv­ing her B.A. from Barnard, Hurston trav­eled exten­sive­ly in the South and the Caribbean in the 1930s to doc­u­ment local cul­tures and con­duct field research. Her work was part­ly spon­sored by a Guggen­heim fel­low­ship and part­ly by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion, whose Fed­er­al Writ­ers Project spon­sored sev­er­al oth­er black writ­ers like Ralph Elli­son, Claude McK­ay, and Richard Wright. Work­ing at times with cel­e­brat­ed folk­lorists Stet­son Kennedy and Alan Lomax, Hurston col­lect­ed record­ings of South­ern and Caribbean sto­ries and folk songs, often telling or singing them her­self. In the clip above, from June 18, 1939, Hurston sings a song she calls “Mule on the Mount.” In the first minute and a half of the record­ing, you can hear Hurston describe the song’s ori­gins and many vari­a­tions to some­one (pos­si­bly Lomax) in the back­ground. She explains how she came to know the song, first hear­ing it in her home­town of Eatonville. Then she begins to sing, in a high, sweet voice, with all the into­na­tion of a true blues singer, punc­tu­at­ing the vers­es with snorts and grunts, as many folk songs—often work songs—would be, though in this case, the snorts may be mule snorts. The record­ing reveals Hurston as a tal­ent­ed inter­preter of her mate­r­i­al, to say the least.

The songs and sto­ries Hurston col­lect­ed, in addi­tion to her child­hood expe­ri­ences, pro­vid­ed her with much of the mate­r­i­al for her nov­els, sto­ries, and plays. Sev­er­al more of her WPA record­ings, also sung by her, are online as mp3s at the Flori­da Depart­ment of State’s “Flori­da Mem­o­ry” project. The orig­i­nals are housed at the Library of Congress’s “Flori­da Folk­life” col­lec­tion. Hurston’s crit­i­cal and cre­ative work brought her renown in her life­time not only as a writer, but as a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al and folk­lorist as well—hear her talk, some­what reluc­tant­ly, about Hait­ian zom­bies in a 1943 radio inter­view on the pop­u­lar Mary Mar­garet McBride show. Sad­ly, Hurston passed her final years in obscu­ri­ty and her work was neglect­ed for a cou­ple decades until a revival in the 70s lead by Alice Walk­er. She’s nev­er been known as a singer, but after lis­ten­ing to the above record­ing, you might agree she should be.

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

The Big List of 530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities (New Additions)

in Online Courses | September 20th, 2012

While you were sun­ning your­self on the beach this sum­mer — or just tak­ing a nice stay­ca­tion at home — we were busy track­ing down new cours­es to add to our list of 530 Free Online Cours­es. Avail­able via YouTube, iTunes or the web, these cours­es were taped on the cam­pus­es of top uni­ver­si­ties like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and UC Berke­ley. They range across diverse dis­ci­plines — Phi­los­o­phy, His­to­ry, Com­put­er Sci­ence, and Physics, to name a few — and you can access them all for free. Below we’re high­light­ing some of the most recent addi­tions to the big mas­ter list, and also throw­ing in a few inter­est­ing bonus picks. Hope you enjoy:

• Aes­thet­ics & Phi­los­o­phy of Art – iTunes – Web — James Grant, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty
• Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture – YouTube – Aysha Iqbal Viswamo­han, IIT Madras
• Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners - iTunes Video – iTunes Audio – Web Video & Audio — Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford
• Dar­win and Design – Web Site – James Par­adis, MIT
• Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture and Film — RSS Feed — Sean Dor­rance Kel­ly, Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.
• Expos­ing Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy – iTunes Video — Web Site — RSS Feed — Dan Armen­dariz, Har­vard
• Life in the Uni­verse – iTune­sU – Web – Richard Pogge, Ohio State
• Kant’s Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son – iTunes Video – iTunes Audio — Video/Audio on Web – Dan Robin­son, Oxford
• Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion — iTunes — Web — T. J. Maw­son, Oxford
• Sci­ence Fic­tion and Pol­i­tics — iTunes Audio — Web –  Court­ney Brown, Emory Uni­ver­si­ty
• Shake­speare After All: The Lat­er Plays – Mul­ti­ple For­mats – Mar­jorie Gar­ber, Har­vard
• The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse – PBS Video – Cal Tech
• The His­to­ry of West­ern Social The­o­ry – YouTube - Alan Mac­Far­lane, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Bonus — A Few Uncon­ven­tion­al Cours­es:

• Hegel: The Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry — Web Site — Leo Strauss, U Chica­go
• Jack Ker­ouac – Web 1 and Web 2 – Allen Gins­berg, Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty
• Plato’s Apol­o­gy of Socrates – YouTube – Allan Bloom, UChica­go
• The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law – Web — YouTube – Richard Feyn­man, Cor­nell
• This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Nor­ton Lec­tures – Web Audio – Jorge Luis Borges, Har­vard
• The Unan­swered Ques­tion: 6 Lec­tures on Music - YouTube – Leonard Bern­stein, Har­vard

Look­ing for free text­books? Don’t miss our meta col­lec­tion of 160 Free Text­books avail­able on the web.

The Oldest Color Movies Bring Sunflowers, Exotic Birds and Goldfish Back to Life (1902)

in Film, History, Photography | September 20th, 2012

Long before Tech­ni­col­or came along, the British pho­tog­ra­ph­er and inven­tor Edward Turn­er devel­oped a three-col­or motion pic­ture sys­tem in 1899. It was based on the mid-19th cen­tu­ry dis­cov­ery that all col­ors could be pro­duced through com­bi­na­tions of the three pri­ma­ry col­ors — red, green and blue. And Turn­er’s genius was find­ing a way to bring this notion to mov­ing pic­tures. Work­ing with the financier Fred­er­ick Mar­shall Lee, Turn­er man­aged to shoot col­or films of chil­dren play­ing with sun­flow­ers (above), a macaw perched in a cage, and gold­fish swim­ming in a bowl. But then his films and pro­jec­tors were lost … for a good cen­tu­ry … and only recent­ly did the Nation­al Media Muse­um in the UK recov­er the footage and then build a spe­cial pro­jec­tor capa­ble of bring­ing the films back to the screen. To learn how they pulled it off, watch the video below. It’s pret­ty inter­est­ing:

What’s Next for the Large Hadron Collider? PhD Comics Introduces the Search for Extra Dimensions

in Physics | September 19th, 2012

With the announce­ment this sum­mer that sci­en­tists at CERN believe they’ve found the long-sought-after sub­atom­ic par­ti­cle called the Hig­gs boson, the ques­tion aris­es: What’s next for the Large Hadron Col­lid­er? In this new ani­mat­ed dis­cus­sion from Jorge Cham at PhD Comics, physi­cists Daniel White­son and Jonathan Feng of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Irvine, explain how the work at the LHC isn’t even remote­ly fin­ished yet. Some of the most inter­est­ing exper­i­ments will involve the search for evi­dence of extra dimen­sions, a con­cept that may hold the key to a num­ber of mys­ter­ies. As White­son and Feng explain, a par­ti­cle mov­ing in anoth­er dimen­sion would have a greater mass than oth­er­wise expect­ed, as a con­se­quence of Ein­stein’s spe­cial the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. The LHC might be used to find evi­dence of these heav­ier ver­sions of par­ti­cles. “So what we’re look­ing for,” says White­son, “is nor­mal mat­ter, but heav­ier ver­sions of it.” For more ani­mat­ed physics from PhD Comics you can see our ear­li­er posts on the Hig­gs boson and dark mat­ter. And to learn more about physics, see our long list of Free Physics Cours­es in our col­lec­tion of over 500 Free Cours­es Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Lawrence Krauss on the Mys­te­ri­ous Allure of Extra Dimen­sions

“Single Sentence Animations” Visualize the Short Stories of Contemporary Writers

in Animation, Books, Literature | September 19th, 2012

Lit­er­ary jour­nal Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture has a mis­sion, to “use new media and inno­v­a­tive dis­tri­b­u­tion to return the short sto­ry to a place of promi­nence in pop­u­lar cul­ture.” In so doing, they promise to deliv­er their quar­ter­ly, 5‑story anthol­o­gy “in every viable medi­um”: paper­back, enhanced pdf, Kin­dle, and ePub.  One clever way they pro­mote short fic­tion is with a free, week­ly sin­gle-sto­ry fea­ture called “Rec­om­mend­ed Read­ing.” And with the help of an ani­ma­tor and a musi­cian, Elec­tric Jour­nal pro­duces what it calls a “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion” of each week’s rec­om­mend­ed sto­ry.

As the jour­nal describes these short videos, “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tions are cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tions. The writer selects a favorite sen­tence from his or her work and the ani­ma­tor cre­ates a short film in response.” The Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion above draws from from A.M. Homes’ “Hel­lo Every­body,” as imag­ined by artist Gret­ta John­son and with music by Michael Asif. The ani­ma­tion cap­tures some­thing of Homes’ “par­tic­u­lar blend of log­ic and unre­al­i­ty” as well as her strange and often unnerv­ing twists of lan­guage.  Homes chose the ser­pen­tine sen­tence:

They are mak­ing their bod­ies their own—renovating, redec­o­rat­ing, the body not just as cor­pus but as object of self-expres­sion, a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion between imag­i­na­tion and real­i­ty.

Johnson’s ani­ma­tion imag­ines the body as Play-doh, a mal­leable sub­stance, unre­strict­ed by fixed forms.

In anoth­er “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion,” Ben Marcus’s intri­cate “Watch­ing Mys­ter­ies with My Moth­er” gets inter­pret­ed by Edwin Ros­tron, with music by Supreme Vagabond Crafts­man. The sen­tence Mar­cus chose is:

We speak of hav­ing one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of hav­ing both feet and both legs and then one’s entire tor­so, arms, and head in the grave, inside a cof­fin, which is cov­ered in dirt, upon which is plant­ed a pret­ty lit­tle stone.

As Marcus’s sen­tence drills through clichéd euphemism into the mor­bid and mun­dane, Rostron’s ani­ma­tion peels back lay­ers of dead metaphor to encounter the pro­sa­ic.

Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture’s Rec­om­mend­ed Read­ing series also fea­tures free online sto­ries from Mary Gait­skill, Clarice Lispec­tor, Peter Stamm, and many oth­ers, in HTML, Kin­dle, or ePub. You can watch all of the Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tions here.

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

Classic Films and Filmmakers, Rendered in Woodcut By a Los Angeles Artist-Cinephile

in Art, Film | September 19th, 2012

A great many indus­tri­ous cinephiles live in Los Ange­les. It’s no mis­take, for instance, that those rock-and-roll auteur shirts you see around come from there. In fact, I write you from that very town, to which I moved for a vari­ety of rea­sons relat­ed to my film habit. While I may not count myself as par­tic­u­lar­ly indus­tri­ous, I do count myself as a cinephile, and I can thus appre­ci­ate a project of gen­uine film-lov­ing indus­try like Loren Kan­tor’s clas­sic movie wood­cuts and linocuts.

Tak­ing Hol­ly­wood and its fringes as inspi­ra­tion, Kan­tor cre­ates strik­ing, high-con­trast black-and-white images that bring icons of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture into a far old­er aes­thet­ic realm. And who counts as more of an icon of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture — at least, I sense, in the minds of most Open Cul­ture read­ers — than David Lynch? Kan­tor’s wood­cut, seen above, cap­tures the air of simul­ta­ne­ous unflag­ging whole­some­ness and infi­nite dark­ness that swirls about the direc­tor and his films.

Or per­haps you con­sid­er Steve Busce­mi more rel­e­vant to our times; in that case, Kan­tor has cre­at­ed a wood­cut of him as well, one that evokes the actor’s alter­nat­ing lay­ers of worn-down malaise and pecu­liar alert­ness. Just above, you’ll see Kan­tor going in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion with a ren­di­tion of the poster for Man­hat­tan, one of Woody Allen’s most beloved New York pic­tures. “I fell in love with wood­cuts in the 80’s when I attend­ed a Ger­man Expres­sion­ist art show at LA Coun­ty Muse­um,” Kan­tor tells Open Cul­ture. “The stark lines and brusque images remind­ed me of film noir clas­sics.”  Should you ever find your­self in Los Ange­les with time to take in a movie screen­ing at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art, pay a vis­it down­stairs, to the floor below the the­ater. There, through­out the hall­way, the muse­um dis­plays the posters for all its Ger­man Expres­sion­ist art shows — includ­ing the one that inspired these wood­cuts in the first place.

To view more of Kan­tor’s work, vis­it Wood Cut­ting Fool: Jour­ney of a Carv­ing Enthu­si­ast or this recent spread on Brain­Pick­ings.

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

Exquisite Paper Craft Animations Tell the Stories of Words

in Animation, Art | September 19th, 2012

The beau­ti­ful Mys­ter­ies of Ver­nac­u­lar is a word-nerd’s delight, a series of ani­ma­tions delv­ing into the ori­gin of words, using exquis­ite paper craft ani­ma­tion to spin an ety­mo­log­i­cal yarn.

The ani­ma­tions are nar­rat­ed in author­i­ta­tive British, giv­ing each sto­ry the feel of the 1970s show, Con­nec­tions, in which sci­ence his­to­ri­an James Burke unwound the links between small moments in his­to­ry and mod­ern life. In this way, Mys­ter­ies of Ver­nac­u­lar, cre­at­ed by Myr­i­a­pod Pro­duc­tions, lays out the con­nec­tions between an ancient word for wolf, a tri­an­gu­lar rake, a frame that held can­dles in funer­als and, final­ly, a car­riage (or car) that con­veys coffins. All of these things come togeth­er to bring us the mod­ern-day word hearse. Watch above.

The words cov­ered so far are not in alpha­bet­i­cal order: assas­sin, clue, hearse and pants. Click on one of the videos for a beau­ti­ful­ly non-lin­ear sto­ry about how words shift and change as human soci­eties do. There are con­nec­tions, of course, between the ear­ly spelling and mean­ing of a word and its cur­rent use, but the jour­ney from one iter­a­tion to anoth­er is the fun part—dotted with side trips through his­to­ry.

The word clue, for exam­ple, was also spelled clew in ancient times and meant, of all things, a ball of yarn. If you know the sto­ry of The­seus, who was deter­mined to slay the Mino­taur at the cen­ter of the labyrinth, you might be able to fig­ure out how a ball of yarn came to refer, more gen­er­al­ly, to some­thing used to solve a rid­dle or prob­lem.

It may inter­est a few of you that the word ver­nac­u­lar has a shad­owy sto­ry of its own to tell. Com­ing from the Latin word for a house slave born in their house of servi­tude, ver­nac­u­lar has come to mean native espe­cial­ly in the con­text of describ­ing a lan­guage. Lin­guis­tic anthro­pol­o­gists, how­ev­er, find the term offen­sive and pre­fer the phrase dialect. 

Accord­ing to Myr­i­a­pod Pro­duc­tions, the Mys­ter­ies of Ver­nac­u­lar “will [ulti­mate­ly] con­tain 26 ety­mo­log­i­cal install­ments, one for each let­ter of the alpha­bet. Each episode takes more than 80 hours to cre­ate between the research, con­struc­tion of the book, and ani­ma­tion.”

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based writer. See more of her work at .

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

in Music | September 18th, 2012

“We’re spon­sor­ing a new band,” announced Andy Warhol at the end of the 1966 doc­u­men­tary post­ed here yes­ter­day. “It’s called the Vel­vet Under­ground.” Bri­an Eno would much lat­er call it the band that inspired every sin­gle one of its lis­ten­ers to start bands of their own, but that same year, Warhol pro­duced The Vel­vet Under­ground: A Sym­pho­ny of Sound. The film shows the group, which fea­tures young but now much-dis­cussed rock icon­o­clasts like John Cale, Lou Reed, and (on tam­bourine) the Ger­man singer Nico, per­form­ing a 67-minute instru­men­tal impro­vi­sa­tion.

Shoot­ing at his New York stu­dio the Fac­to­ry, Warhol and crew intend­ed this not as a con­cert film but as a bit of enter­tain­ment to be screened before actu­al live Vel­vet Under­ground shows. It and oth­er short films could be screened, so the idea devel­oped, their sound­tracks and visu­als inter­min­gling accord­ing to the deci­sions of those at the pro­jec­tors and mix­er.

“I thought of record­ing the Vel­vets just mak­ing up sounds as they went along to have on film so I could turn both sound­tracks up at the same time along with the oth­er three silent films being pro­ject­ed,” said direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy and Fac­to­ry mem­ber Paul Mor­ris­sey, best known as the direc­tor of Flesh, Trash, and Heat.  “The cacoph­o­nous noise added a lot of ener­gy to these bor­ing sec­tions and sound­ed a lot like the group itself. The show put on for the group was cer­tain­ly the first mixed media show of its kind, was extreme­ly effec­tive and I have nev­er since seen such an inter­est­ing one even in this age of super-colos­sal rock con­certs.” Alas, some­one’s noise com­plaint puts an end to the Sym­pho­ny of Sound expe­ri­ence: one police­man arrives to turn down the ampli­fi­er, and Warhol tries to explain the sit­u­a­tion to the oth­ers. But the bus­tle of the Fac­to­ry con­tin­ues apace.

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:

Warhol’s Screen Tests: Lou Reed, Den­nis Hop­per, Nico, and More

Andy Warhol Quits Paint­ing, Man­ages The Vel­vet Under­ground (1965)

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

Martin Scorsese Brings “Lost” Hitchcock Film to Screen in Short Faux Documentary

in Film, Television | September 18th, 2012

Alfred Hitch­cock fans should enjoy this 2007 com­mer­cial by Mar­tin Scors­ese. It was com­mis­sioned by the Cata­lan sparkling wine mak­er Freix­enet for the com­pa­ny’s annu­al Christ­mas cam­paign, with the con­cept of mak­ing a short film that would some­how weave the Freix­enet brand into the plot. Scors­ese respond­ed with a nine-minute homage to the mas­ter of sus­pense.  “Hitch­cock is one of my guid­ing lights,” he told El País at the film’s Decem­ber 2007 pre­mier in Madrid. “It’s a satire of my own movie mania. It has to do with my love of cin­e­ma, and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of pos­sess­ing it.”

The com­mer­cial is struc­tured as a faux doc­u­men­tary, with Scors­ese appear­ing as him­self. With amus­ing­ly frac­tured log­ic, he explains to an inter­view­er his dis­cov­ery of a three-and-a-half minute frag­ment from an unpro­duced Hitch­cock script and his obses­sion with bring­ing it to the screen. “It’s one thing to pre­serve a film that has been made,” Scors­ese says. “It’s anoth­er to pre­serve a film that has not been made.”

The “pre­served” frag­ment, The Key to Reser­va, is pre­sent­ed as a film with­in the film. Bernard Her­man­n’s omi­nous music from North By North­west sets the tone. The roman­tic leads look some­thing like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. Hitch­cock afi­ciana­dos will spot ref­er­ences to a num­ber of the mas­ter’s clas­sic films from the 1950s, includ­ing Rear Win­dow, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Ver­ti­go. The Key to Reser­va was filmed by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Har­ris Savides and edit­ed by Scors­ese’s long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er. The sto­ry is set in Carnegie Hall but the crew was unable to film there, so the his­toric con­cert hall had to be cre­at­ed dig­i­tal­ly from pho­tographs. Ben Gross­mann of The Syn­di­cate won a Gold Clio award for visu­al effects.

If you’re won­der­ing whether Hitch­cock would have been pleased by any of this, be sure to stay with the film until it’s amus­ing con­clu­sion. For more of Scors­ese pok­ing fun at his own movie mania, see our fea­ture from yes­ter­day, “Always the Direc­tor: Mar­tin Scors­ese Spoofs Him­self in Two Com­mer­cials.” And if you want to see some real Hitch­cock films, don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 20 Free Alfred Hitch­cock Films Online.