A Stringed Salute to AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses
Russell Fallstad and Adam DeGraff come from Lewisburg, West Virginia. The two fiddlers/violinists have been close friends for 20+ years. They trained together at the same music schools, steeping themselves in classical music. Then, they decided to move in a new direction and explore the brave new world of “violin rock,” where “classical training combines with sizzling energy and a raw improvisational creativity.” Above you can watch the Dueling Fiddlers prepare for their debut concert, performing an AC/DC mashup of “Back in Back” and “Thunderstruck.” Maybe one day you’ll find them on tour with 2Cellos, who perform G ‘n R’s “Welcome to the Jungle” below.
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Read More...Young Robert De Niro Appears in 1969 AMC Car Commercial
In 1969, Robert De Niro hadn’t yet landed a major film role. (That would come four years later.) So, like many young actors, he did commercials, including this fine one. Not much is known about this spot, other than De Niro, then 26 years old, gives a hammed up pitch for the 1969 Ambassador, a boat of a car made by the American Motors Corporation, a company once run by George Romney, father of Mitt.
Enjoy the video, and when you’re done, don’t miss the additional footage. You’ll get more young actors and actresses doing commercials during their salad days.
Farrah Fawcett — Union 76 (1972)
Dustin Hoffman — Volkswagon (1966)
Kim Basinger — Bright Side Shampoo (1972)
Lindsay Wagner — Twice as Nice Shampoo (1967)
John Travolta — US Army (1973)
Cybill Shepherd — Cover Girl (1969)
The Art of Making the Hofner Beatles Bass Guitar
Karl Höfner began making stringed instruments in 1887, in the little town of Schönbach. His company flourished into the 20th century and really took off one fortuitous day in 1961, when Paul McCartney ambled into a Steinway shop in Hamburg, Germany and saw a Hofner bass, otherwise known as the “violin bass.” McCartney later recalled:
Fenders even then seemed to be around £100. All I could afford really was about £30. Always teetering on the edge of not having much — so I didn’t really want to spend that much. So… I found this Hofner violin bass. And to me it seemed like, because I was left-handed, it looked less daft because it was symmetrical. So I got into that. That became my main bass.
As The Beatles Online notes, “The Hofner 500/1 bass became McCartney’s signature instrument,” and was eventually rechristened “the Hofner Beatle Bass.” 50 years later, they’re still making the iconic guitar, and you can watch the whole process unfold in just 16 minutes. It’s not a very styled video, a far cry from other guitar-making videos we’ve featured here before, but it’s worth the watch.
Making Fender Guitars, Then (1959) and Now (2012)
Read More...Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull Singing “As Tears Go By” (1966)
When you want to learn a thing or two about Jean-Luc Godard, you turn to New Yorker film critic Richard Brody. I do, anyway, since the man wrote the book on Godard: namely, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. He followed up our post on Godard’s film of Jefferson Airplane’s 1968 rooftop concert with a tweet linking us to a clip from Godard’s feature Made in U.S.A
That film came out in 1966, two years before the immortal Airplane show but well into Godard’s first major burst of daring creativity, which began with 1959’s Breathless and lasted at least until Sympathy for the Devil, his 1968 documentary on — or, anyway, including — the Rolling Stones. Brody pointed specifically to the clip above, a brief scene where Marianne Faithfull sings “As Tears Go By,” a hit, in separate recordings, for both Faithfull and the Stones.
Brody notes how these two minutes of a cappella performance from the 19-year-old Faithfull depict the “styles of the day.” For a long time since that day, alas, we American filmgoers hadn’t had a chance to fully experience Made in U.S.A. Godard based its script on Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Jugger but never bothered to secure adaptation rights, and the film drifted in legal limbo until 2009. But today, with that red tape cut, crisp new prints circulate freely around the United States. Keep an eye on your local revival house’s listings so you won’t miss your chance to witness Faithfull’s café performance, and other such Godardian moments, in their theatrical glory. The cinephilically intrepid Brody, of course, found a way to see it, after a fashion, nearly thirty years before its legitimate American release: “The Mudd Club (the White Street night spot and music venue) got hold of a 16-mm. print and showed it — with the projector in the room — to a crowd of heavy smokers. It was like watching a movie outdoors in London by night, or as if through the shrouding mists of time.”
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Jean-Luc Godard Films The Rolling Stones Recording “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)
Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Commercial
Jean-Luc Godard Meets Woody Allen
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Kevin Spacey Plays Hapless Ventriloquist in New Series of International Films
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOPJxBjHkgc
If only more liquor companies thought as cinematically as Jameson, we’d never run out of stunt-ish yet carefully crafted short films to watch on the internet. They’ve put on something called the First Shot contest, which teams up-and-coming filmmakers from around the world with no less a luminary of stage and screen than Kevin Spacey. Above, you’ll find The Ventriloquist, fruit of the labors of American writer-director Benjamin Leavitt. Spacey stars as the titular street performer, working every day the same empty L.A. street corner, longing for the same coffee-cart girl, and falling into an ever more combative relationship with Mr. Higgins, his politically incorrect, Charlie McCarthy-era throwback of a dummy. Open Culture readers will, of course, already know that Spacey has what it takes for the role, having seen his nine impressions in six minutes.
Spirit of a Denture, written and directed by South African winner Alan Shelley, casts Spacey as a dentist and frigate enthusiast who one night finds himself alone in his office with an actual sea pirate. Envelope, below, by Russian writer-director Aleksey Nuzhny, dresses Spacey in a blandly garish outfit of Soviet casual wear. The year is 1985. The place sits somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. The character is a collector of international postal cancellation stamps, with only the return of a deliberately mismailed letter to New Zealand standing in the way of his grand project’s completion. Leavitt, Shelley, and Nuzhny know how to draw on Spacey’s peculiar strengths as an actor: his askew-everyman mystique, his distinctively fine command of seemingly bland features, his seamless assumption of voices and mannerisms that few other players could take on with dignity. Even certain A‑list filmmakers, as moviegoers know all to well, can’t quite manage that.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Orson Welles on the Art of Acting: ‘There is a Villain in Each of Us’
An actor, said Orson Welles, creates a truthful performance by looking into his or her own character and selectively taking things away. “There is a villain in each of us, a murderer in each of us, a fascist in each of us, a saint in each of us, and the actor is the man or woman who can eliminate from himself those things which will interfere with that truth.” The comments are from a public talk Welles gave late in his life, and are preserved in this scene from the 1995 documentary by Vassili Silovic and Oja Kodar, Orson Welles: The One-Man Band.
Related Content:
Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was the Genius Behind Citizen Kane
Orson Welles’ Last Interview and Final Moments Captured on Film
Orson Welles Narrates Plato’s Cave Allegory, Kafka’s Parable, and Freedom River
Read More...Michael Lewis Tells Princeton Graduates How Moneyball Rules Apply to Real Life
More and more we see a trend — high caliber schools are asking celebrities to deliver their big commencement speeches. Conan O’Brien at Dartmouth. Stephen Colbert at Northwestern. Denzel Washington at Penn. Tom Hanks at Yale. The list goes on. Admittedly, the talks can be entertaining. But, it’s still a breath of fresh air when schools actually put an author center stage. Witness Neil Gaiman at The University of the Arts and now Michael Lewis at Princeton.
Lewis graduated from Princeton in 1982, and went on to write many bestsellers — Liar’s Poker, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and Moneyball, a book turned into a Hollywood production by Brad Pitt. You probably know the gist of Moneyball. Major league baseball clubs have long overvalued star players, and undervalued versatile ones who fly beneath the radar. That only changed when scrappier, financially-pressed teams started mining baseball data in intelligent ways. Well, it turns out the same logic applies to the working world. Corporations reward executives outrageously, while undervaluing many contributors in an organization, which leads “successful” people to believe they’re extremely talented rather than generally lucky. So here’s Lewis’ message to Princeton grads. When you get rich or famous, don’t get too carried away with yourself. Your success might have to do with “being there,” or being in the right system, more than anything else.
And now for another reality check for graduates — this one from Wellesley High English teacher David McCullough Jr. (son of the famous historian) who tells grads “You are not special. You are not exceptional.” The empirical evidence makes that clear:
Stanley Kubrick’s Rare 1965 Interview with The New Yorker
Stanley Kubrick didn’t like giving long interviews, but he loved playing chess. So when the physicist and writer Jeremy Bernstein paid him a visit to gather material for a piece for The New Yorker about a new film project he was writing with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick was intrigued to learn that Bernstein was a fairly serious chess player. After Bernstein’s brief article on Kubrick and Clarke, “Beyond the Stars,” appeared in the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section in April of 1965, Bernstein proposed doing a full-length New Yorker profile on the filmmaker and his new project. For some reason, Kubrick accepted. So later that year Bernstein flew to England, where Kubrick was getting ready to film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bernstein stayed there for much of the filming, playing chess with Kubrick every day between takes. When the piece eventually ran in The New Yorker it was appropriately titled “How About a Little Game?”
One thing Bernstein learned about Kubrick was that he loved gadgets. He had a special fondness for tape recorders. In the profile, Bernstein quotes the filmmaker’s wife Christiane as saying, “Stanley would be happy with eight tape recorders and one pair of pants.”
So when it came time to do the interviews, Kubrick took control as director and insisted on using one of the devices. “My interviews were done before tape recorders were commonplace,” Bernstein later wrote. “I certainly didn’t have one. Kubrick did. He did all his script writing by talking into it. He said that we should use it for the interviews. Later on, when I used a quote from the tape he didn’t like, he said, ‘I know it’s on the tape, but I will deny saying it anyway.’ ”
Kubrick talked with Bernstein on a range of topics related to his early career. In the nearly 77 minutes of audio preserved in the recording above, Kubrick discusses his bad grades in high school and his good luck in landing a job as a photographer for Look magazine, his earliest film work producing newsreels, and all of his feature films up to that point, including Paths of Glory, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove. He talks about his working relationships with Clarke and Vladimir Nabokov, and his views on space exploration and the threat of nuclear war.
The exact time of the interview is difficult to pin down. Sources across the Internet give the date as November 27, 1966, but that is certainly incorrect. While it’s true that Kubrick gives the date as November 27 at the beginning of the tape, Bernstein’s profile–which includes material from the interview–was published on November 12, 1966, and Kubrick made corrections to the galley proofs as early as April, 1966. The interview was apparently conducted in multiple takes starting on November 27, 1965 and ending sometime in early 1966. Filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey commenced on December 29, 1965 (a month after the taped conversation begins), and near the end of the tape Kubrick mentions having already shot 80,000 feet, or about 14.8 hours, of film.
Related content:
Stanley Kubrick’s Filmography Animated
Stanley Kubrick’s Photographs: Browse Them or Own Them
Stanley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Documentaries
Read More...Kurt Vonnegut: “How To Get A Job Like Mine” (2002)
Kurt Vonnegut had many endearing qualities, one being that he liked to travel to universities where he delivered a talk called “How To Get A Job Like Mine.” The substance, however, was always different, and the conversation often didn’t focus on the writing life, or anything like it. The talk was really a vessel for whatever happened to be on Vonnegut’s mind, and it probably wasn’t uncommon for him to meander through his talk, as he did here, then pause and say, “Now, let’s see what the hell else I’ve got here. Where did I even start? I don’t know.”
The talk will give you a glimpse into the quirky personality that was Vonnegut’s, some non sequiturs on sex & gender, anecdotes about his uncle Alex, and then a few heartfelt thoughts on the life worth living. Eventually, we finally get to writing, or something remotely approaching it. Vonnegut was known for giving a humorous spiel on the “shape” or “blueprint” of the story, explaining what Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cinderella all have in common. If you want to zero in on that famous bit, feel free to jump ahead. But be warned that you’ll be missing a lot of sweet randomness and good fun.
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Writing Tips from Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell
John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech
Read More...Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956–1960
The great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made only seven feature films in his short life. (Find most of them online here.) But before making those, he directed and co-directed three films as a student at the All-Union State Cinema Institute, or VGIK. Those three films, when viewed as a progression, offer insights into Tarkovsky’s early development as an artist and his struggle to overcome the constraints of collectivism and assert his own personal vision.
The Killers, 1956:
Tarkovsky was fortunate to enter the VGIK when he did. As he arrived at the school in 1954 (after first spending a year at the Institute of Eastern Studies and another year on a geological expedition in Siberia) the Soviet Union was entering a period of liberalization known as the “Krushchev Thaw.” Joseph Stalin had died in 1953, and the new Communist Party First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the dead dictator and instituted a series of reforms. As a result the Soviet film industry was entering a boom period, and there was a huge influx of previously banned foreign movies, books and other cultural works to draw inspiration from. One of those newly accessible works was the 1927 Ernest Hemingway short story, “The Killers.”
Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Hemingway’s story (see above) was a project for Mikhail Romm’s directing class. Romm was a famous figure in Soviet cinema. There were some 500 applicants for his directing program at the VGIK in 1954, but only 15 were admitted, including Tarkovsky. In The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie describe the environment in Romm’s class:
Romm’s most important lesson was that it is, in fact, impossible to teach someone to become a director. Tarkovsky’s fellow students–his first wife [Irma Rausch] and his friend, Alexander Gordon–remember that Romm, unlike most other VGIK master teachers, encouraged his students to think for themselves, to develop their individual talents, and even to criticize his work. Tarkovsky flourished in this unconstrained environment, so unusual for the normally stodgy and conservative VGIK.
Tarkovsky worked with a pair of co-directors on The Killers, but by all accounts he was the dominant creative force. There are three scenes in the movie. Scenes one and three, which take place in a diner, were directed by Tarkovsky. Scene two, set in a boarding house, was directed by Gordon. Ostensibly there was another co-director, Marika Beiku, working with Tarkovsky on the diner scenes, but according to Gordon “Andrei was definitely in charge.” In a 1990 essay, Gordon writes:
The story of how we shot Hemingway’s The Killers is a simple one. In the spring Romm told us what we would have to do–shoot only indoors, use just a small group of actors and base the story on some dramatic event. It was Tarkovsky’s idea to produce The Killers. The parts were to be played by fellow students–Nick Adams by Yuli Fait, Ole Andreson the former boxer, of course, by Vasily Shukshin. The murderers were Valentin Vinogradov, a directing student, and Boris Novikov, an acting student. I played the cafe owner.
The filmmakers scavenged various props from the homes of friends and family, collecting bottles with foreign labels for the cafe scenes. The script follows Hemingway’s story very closely. While two short transitional passages are omitted, the film otherwise matches the text almost word-for-word. In the story, two wise-cracking gangsters, Al and Max, show up in a small-town eating house and briefly take several people (including Hemingway’s recurring protagonist Nick Adams) hostage as they set up a trap to ambush a regular customer named Ole Andreson. One notable departure from the source material occurs in a scene were the owner George, played by Gordon, nervously goes to the kitchen to make sandwiches for a customer while the gangsters keep their fingers on the triggers. In the story, Hemingway’s description is matter-of-fact:
Inside the kitchen he saw Al, his derby cap tipped back, sitting on a stool beside the wicket with the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun resting on the ledge. Nick and the cook were back to back in the corner, a towel tied in each of their mouths. George had cooked the sandwich, wrapped it up in oiled paper, put it in a bag, brought it in, and the man had paid for it and gone out.
In Tarkovsky’s hands the scene becomes a cinematic set piece of heightened suspense, as the customer waiting at the counter (played by Tarkovsky himself) whistles a popular American tune, “Lullaby of Birdland,” while the nervous cafe owner makes his sandwiches. Our point of view shifts from that of George, who glances around the kitchen to see what is going on, to that of Nick, who lies on the floor unable to see much of anything. “Tarkovsky was serious about his work,” writes Gordon, “but jolly at the same time. He gave the camera students, Alvarez and Rybin, plenty of time to do the lighting well. He created long pauses, generated lots of tension in those pauses, and demanded that the actors be natural.”
There Will Be No Leave Today, 1958:
Tarkovsky and Gordon again collaborated on There Will Be No Leave Today, which was a joint venture between the VGIK and Soviet Central Television. “The film was no more than a propaganda film, intended to be aired on television on the anniversary day of the World War II victory over the Germans,” said Gordon in a 2003 interview. “At the time, there was only one TV station and it would often screen propaganda material on the greatnesses of the USSR. This particular film was broadcast on TV for at least three consecutive years. But this did not make the film particularly famous, because you could see films like that on TV all day, at the time.”
There Will Be No Leave Today is based on a true story about an incident in a small town where a cache of unexploded shells, left over from the German occupation, was discovered and–after some drama–removed. The production was far more ambitious than that of The Killers, involving a combination of professional and amateur actors, hundreds of extras, and various shooting locations. It was filmed in Kursk over a period of three months, and took another three months to edit. Gordon provided more details:
With respect to the contribution done by the two directors–I and Andrei–I believe that Andrei contributed the majority. We wrote the script together right at the start. There was an additional scriptwriter, who was subsequently replaced by another group of scriptwriters. Collaboration was very good during this first stage. During the second stage, Andrei finished up the script, with the scenes in the hospital and the story of the volunteer who detonates the bomb–these ideas were Andrei’s. It was a jovial atmosphere, we discussed the scenes in the evening. The main storyline was created in the beginning, when we wrote the script, and no great changes were made to it. It was very easy work.
Despite the scope of the story, and occasional comparisons to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear, it’s clear that neither Gordon nor Tarkovsky took the film very seriously. It was simply a learning exercise. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that Tarkovsky, who would later struggle bitterly with Soviet bureaucrats over the artistic integrity of his work, would submit so readily to making a propaganda film. “VGIK proposed that we make a practice film intended for TV audiences, a propaganda piece on the victory of the USSR over the Germans,” said Gordon, “and we just chose an easy, uncomplicated script. We did not set out to do a masterpiece. Our focus was on learning the elementaries of filmmaking, through making a film that was relatively uncomplicated and also easy for the people to consume. Andrei was happy with this. He had no problems with this approach.”
The Steamroller and the Violin, 1960:
Watch the full film here.
Tarkovsky’s first work as sole director, The Steamroller and the Violin, is an artistically ambitious film, one that in many ways foreshadows what was later to come. As Robert Bird writes in Andrei Tarkowski: Elements of Cinema:
When the door opens in the first shot of Steamroller and Violin one senses the curtain going up on Andrei Tarkovsky’s career in cinema. Out of this door will proceed an entire line of characters, from the medieval icon-painter Andrei Rublëv to the post-apocalyptic visionaries Domenico and Alexander. It will open onto native landscapes and alien words, onto scenes of medieval desolation and post-historical apocalypse, and onto the innermost recesses of conscience. Yet, for the moment, the open door reveals only a chubby little schoolboy named Sasha with a violin case and music folder, who awkwardly and tentatively emerges into the familiar, if hostile courtyard of a Stalin-era block of flats.
The young director expressed his plan for The Steamroller and the Violin in an interview with a polish journalist, later translated into English by Trond S. Trondsen and Jan Bielawski at Nostalghia.com:
Although it’s dangerous to admit–because one doesn’t know whether the film will be successful–the intent is to make a poetic film. We are basing practically everything on mood, on atmosphere. In my film there has to be a dramaturgy of image, not of literature.
The project was Tarkovsky’s “diploma film,” a requirement for graduation. He wrote the script with fellow student Andrei Konchalovsky over a period of more than six months. It tells the story of a friendship between a sensitive little boy, who is bullied by other children and stifled by his music teacher, and a man who operates a steamroller at a road construction site near the child’s home. The boy needs a father figure. The man is emotionally troubled by his wartime experiences and finds solace in work. He resists the flirtations of women. When he sees a group of children bullying the boy on his way to a violin lesson, he comes to the child’s aid and they become friends. “Those two people, so different in every respect,” said Tarkovsky, “complement and need one another.”
The film marks the beginning of Tarkovsky’s cinematic obsession with metaphysics. According to Trondsen and Bielawski, “VGIK archive documents reveal that the director’s intention with The Steamroller and the Violin was to chart the attempts at contact between two very different worlds, that of art and labor, or, as he referred to it as, ‘the spiritual and the material.’ ” The inner world of the boy is suggested in prismatic effects of light sparkling through water and glass and images split into multiples. The worker’s world, by contrast, is concrete and earth.
When Tarkovsky finished his film, not everyone at Mosfilm, the government agency that funded the project, liked what they saw. “Surprisingly,” writes Bird, “it was Tarkovsky’s subtle innovation in this seemingly harmless short film that inaugurated the adversarial tone that subsequently came to dominate his relationship with the Soviet cinema authorities. Unlikely as it seems, Steamroller and Violin was hounded from pillar to post by vigilant aesthetic watchdogs and was lucky to have been released at all.” As part of the process of earning his degree, Tarkovsky had to defend his film during a meeting of the artistic council of the Fourth Creative Unit of Mosfilm on January 6, 1961. The criticisms were varied, according to Bird, but much of it came down to resentment over the portrayal of a socially elite rich boy in contrast to a poor worker. Tarkovsky’s response to his critics was captured by a stenographer:
I don’t understand how the idea arose that we see here a rich little violinist and a poor worker. I don’t understand this, and I probably never will be able to in my entire life. If it is based on the fact that everything is rooted in the contrast in the interrelations between the boy and the worker, then the point here is the contrast between art and labor, because these are different things and only at the stage of communism will man find it possible to be spiritually and physically organic. But this is a problem of the future and I will not allow this to be confused. This is what the picture is dedicated to.
Despite the backlash at Mosfilm, the authorities at the VGIK were impressed. Tarkovsky graduated with high marks, and over time the film has acquired the respect and appreciation its maker desired. “The Steamroller and the Violin,” write Trondsen and Bielawski, “must be regarded as an integral part of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, as it is indeed ‘Tarkovskian’ in every sense of the word.”
NOTE: All three student films will now be included in our popular collection of Free Tarkovsky Films Online.
Related content:
Stanley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Documentaries
Martin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imaginative Short Works
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