Beer Archaeology: Yes, It’s a Thing

in Archaeology, Food & Drink | February 22nd, 2017

Travis Rupp is a clas­sics instruc­tor at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado. He’s also a “beer archae­ol­o­gist” who works on a spe­cial projects team at the Avery Brew­ing Com­pa­ny (in Boul­der) where they “brew beers the way that ancient Egyp­tians, Peru­vians and Vikings did.” If you can under­stand the beer an ancient peo­ple drank, you can bet­ter under­stand their over­all cul­ture.  That’s assump­tion at the heart of beer archae­ol­o­gy.

Above, watch a three minute intro­duc­tion to Rup­p’s work. Below, find infor­ma­tion on some of the world’s old­est beer recipes from Ancient Egypt and Chi­na.

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:

5,000-Year-Old Chi­nese Beer Recipe Gets Recre­at­ed by Stan­ford Stu­dents

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

A Hypnotic Look at How Tennis Balls Are Made

in Sports | February 20th, 2017

Over the years, we’ve shown you var­i­ous house­hold objects being made–everything from crayons and ink, to vinyl records, old fash­ioned books and paper. Today, you can get a mes­mer­iz­ing glimpse into how ten­nis balls are made. Cre­at­ed by Bene­dict Red­grove for ESPN, the short film above shows “the man­u­fac­tur­ing process of [Wil­son] ten­nis balls for the US Open.” Com­bined, it takes 24 dif­fer­ent process­es to make the final ball. And it’s fun to watch.

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:

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

How Ink is Made: A Volup­tuous Process Revealed in a Mouth-Water­ing Video

Learn How Crayons Are Made, Cour­tesy of 1980s Videos by Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

The Art of Mak­ing Old-Fash­ioned, Hand-Print­ed Books

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

A Handy, Detailed Map Shows the Hometowns of Characters in the Iliad

in Literature, Maps | February 15th, 2017

Click here to see a larg­er ver­sion of the map.

You’ve adjust­ed to the strange­ness of names like Ascala­phus and Phidip­pus. You’ve more or less fig­ured out who’s on which side in the ancient war between Greece and Troy. But as lit­er­ary epics will do—from the ancient Greeks and Indi­ans to the 19th cen­tu­ry Rus­sians—Homer’s Ili­ad also presents you with sev­er­al logis­ti­cal puz­zles you must either ignore or spend count­less hours try­ing to solve: you are giv­en the names of major and minor char­ac­ters’ home­towns, rang­ing all over the Adri­at­ic, Ion­ian, Cre­tan, and Aegean Seas. Doubt­less you have no idea where most of these places were.

Again and again, place names occur in rapid suc­ces­sion, and you’re told not only who hails from where, but who com­mands and con­quers which city. Just a smat­ter­ing of exam­ples from Book II (in Samuel But­ler’s trans­la­tion):

Ulysses led the brave Cephal­leni­ans, who held Itha­ca, Ner­i­tum with its forests, Cro­cylea, rugged Aegilips, Samos and Zacyn­thus, with the main­land also that was over against the islands. 

Thoas, son of Andrae­mon, com­mand­ed the Aeto­lians, who dwelt in Pleu­ron, Olenus, Pylene, Chal­cis by the sea, and rocky Caly­don, 

And those that held Pher­ae by the Boe­bean lake, with Boebe, Glaphyrae, and the pop­u­lous city of Iol­cus

“Huh,” you say, “Okay, Homer, I’ll take your word for it.” Ques­tions of his­toric­i­ty aside, we can at least say that the hun­dreds of cities and towns men­tioned in this cul­tur­al­ly for­ma­tive text did exist, or con­tin­ue to do so, though it’s debat­able, as Jason Kot­tke writes, whether “that lev­el of mobil­i­ty was accu­rate for the time [some­where in the 11th or 12th cen­tu­ry BC] or if Homer sim­ply pop­u­lat­ed his poem with folks from all over Greece as a way of mak­ing lis­ten­ers from many areas feel con­nect­ed to the sto­ry.”

In any case, you need not despair of ever mak­ing sense of Homer’s bewil­der­ing geo­graph­i­cal lists. The map above (click here to see it in a larg­er for­mat) hand­i­ly illus­trates the world of the Ili­ad, show­ing the places of ori­gins of a few dozen char­ac­ters, with Greeks in green and Tro­jans in yel­low. Kot­tke notes in an adden­dum to his post that “not every char­ac­ter is rep­re­sent­ed… (par­tic­u­lar­ly the women) and… some of the loca­tions and home­towns are incor­rect.” We would wel­come corrections—as would Wikipedia—if an enter­pris­ing clas­sics schol­ar has the time and ener­gy to devote to such an effort.

But for the lay read­er of Homer’s epic, the map more than suf­fices as help­ful visu­al con­text for a very com­pli­cat­ed nar­ra­tive. One defin­ing fea­ture of a war epic well-told, most crit­ics would say, is that the human dra­ma does not get lost in the scale and scope of the action. More than any oth­er form, the epic illus­trates what Tol­stoy described in War and Peace as the “his­tor­i­cal sense” that our con­flicts are “bound up with the whole course of his­to­ry and pre­or­dained from all eter­ni­ty.” But against this kind of deter­min­ism, the great poets par­tic­u­lar­ize, mak­ing their char­ac­ters seem not like props in a cos­mic dra­ma but like actu­al peo­ple from actu­al places on earth. See­ing the Ili­ad mapped above rein­forces our sense of the Greek epics as genuine—if fantastical—accounts of mean­ing­ful human action in the world.

You can find free ver­sions of the Ili­ad and the Odyssey in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

via Kottke.org.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Jour­ney in Homer’s Odyssey

Greek Myth Comix Presents Homer’s Ili­ad & Odyssey Using Stick-Man Draw­ings

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

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

Listen to a Marathon Reading of Elie Wiesel’s Night

in Audio Books, History, K-12, Letters, Life, Literature | February 13th, 2017

A cou­ple of weeks ago on Jan­u­ary 27, Inter­na­tion­al Holo­caust Remem­brance Day, a diverse group gath­ered for a marathon read­ing of Night, Nobel Prize win­ner, Elie Wiesel’s mem­oir of his youth­ful expe­ri­ences as a pris­on­er in Auschwitz and Buchen­wald.

The event was orga­nized in part by the Nation­al Yid­dish The­atre—fit­ting giv­en that Night was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in Yid­dish, though first pub­lished in French. The theater’s artis­tic direc­tor and sev­er­al actors from past pro­duc­tions claimed sev­er­al of the read­ing slots, but left more than six­ty to be filled by par­tic­i­pants from an inten­tion­al­ly broad pool.

There were rab­bis and Broad­way per­form­ers, a New York­er writer, the Con­sul Gen­er­al of Ger­many, and the Hun­gar­i­an Ambas­sador to the UN…

Stu­dents and edu­ca­tors…

A num­ber of Holo­caust sur­vivors…

Dr. Ruth Wes­t­heimer and Wiesel’s grown son, Elisha, who observed:

At a time when this coun­try is feel­ing so divid­ed, when so much neg­a­tiv­i­ty is cir­cu­lat­ing about those who are dif­fer­ent from our­selves — those who have dif­fer­ent eth­nic­i­ties, reli­gions or even dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal lean­ings — my father’s words are an impor­tant reminder of the dan­gers of the ‘us ver­sus them’ men­tal­i­ty.

It took the vol­un­teer read­ers a lit­tle over four hours to get through the slim vol­ume, which shows up on many Amer­i­can high schools’ required read­ing lists.

The free event was co-spon­sored by the Muse­um of Jew­ish Heritage—A Liv­ing Memo­r­i­al to the Holo­caust, whose loca­tion in low­er Man­hat­tan was quite con­ve­nient to anoth­er impor­tant event tak­ing place that day—an inter­faith ral­ly to protest Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s exec­u­tive order ban­ning immi­grants from 7 coun­tries, sus­pend­ing entry for all refugees for a peri­od of four months, and call­ing for “extreme vet­ting” screen­ings.

There may be times when we are pow­er­less to pre­vent injus­tice, but there must nev­er be a time when we fail to protest.

- Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Accep­tance Speech, Decem­ber, 1986

h/t Jeff N.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Elie Wiesel (RIP) Talks About What Hap­pens When We Die

Mem­o­ry of the Camps (1985): The Holo­caust Doc­u­men­tary that Trau­ma­tized Alfred Hitch­cock, and Remained Unseen for 40 Years

Yes, the Holo­caust Hap­pened, Even If a Top Google Search Result Says It Didn’t

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.

A Short Anti-LSD Horror Film Made by the Lockheed Corporation (1969)

in Random | February 10th, 2017

Dur­ing the late 1960s, the defense con­trac­tor Lock­heed Cor­po­ra­tion took a strange detour into film­mak­ing and spon­sored a series of short films, each exam­in­ing the per­ils of a par­tic­u­lar hard­core drug. Above, you can watch “Case Study: LSD,” a three-minute short doc­u­ment­ing a young wom­an’s acid trip. Every­thing seems pret­ty groovy, until the 18-year-old pro­tag­o­nist goes to eat a hot dog. That’s when things go hor­ri­bly wrong: the hot dog springs to life, claims it has a wife and sev­en kids to sup­port, and screams bloody mur­der as it gets mer­ci­less­ly ingest­ed. A hor­ror film, if I’ve ever seen one.

You can watch the three oth­er short films in the series here: Case Study: Hero­in, Case Study: Amphet­a­mines, and Case Study: Bar­bi­tu­rates.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Artist Draws Nine Por­traits on LSD Dur­ing 1950s Research Exper­i­ment

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

David Foster Wallace on What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: A Video Essay

in Current Affairs, Television | February 7th, 2017

“We live in a night­mare that David Fos­ter Wal­lace had in 1994,” said a tweet that put me in stitch­es last sum­mer, but I have a sense that we’ve only sunk deep­er into that hyper­ver­bal, media-obsessed, and deeply fear­ful nov­el­ist’s bad dreams since then. “The Amer­i­can writer in the mid­dle of the 20th cen­tu­ry has his hands full in try­ing to under­stand, and then describe, and then make cred­i­ble much of the Amer­i­can real­i­ty,” Philip Roth argued 55 years ago. “The actu­al­i­ty is con­tin­u­al­ly out­do­ing our tal­ents.” Now, at the begin­ning of the 21st, that actu­al­i­ty out­does not just what the com­par­a­tive­ly tra­di­tion­al Roth could come up with, but even any­thing imag­in­able by Wal­lace’s heirs in the form-break­ing, extrem­i­ty-ori­ent­ed realm of “post­mod­ernism.”

But did Wal­lace con­sid­er him­self post­mod­ernist? Asked by Char­lie Rose in a 1997 inter­view what “post­mod­ernism means in lit­er­a­ture,” he at first replied only that it means “after mod­ernism.” But soon he got into the broad­er cul­tur­al cri­tique for which he’s now remem­bered: “Post­mod­ernism has, to a large extent, run its course,” despite hav­ing made the con­sid­er­able inno­va­tion of pre­sent­ing “the first text that was high­ly self-con­scious, self-con­scious of itself as text, self-con­scious of the writer as per­sona, self-con­scious about the effects that nar­ra­tive had on read­ers and the fact that the read­ers prob­a­bly knew that.” Decades lat­er, Wal­lace saw that “a lot of the schticks of post-mod­ernism — irony, cyn­i­cism, irrev­er­ence — are now part of what­ev­er it is that’s ener­vat­ing in the cul­ture itself.”

“The Prob­lem with Irony,” Will Schoder’s video essay above, draws on Wal­lace’s inter­view with Rose and much oth­er tele­vi­su­al mate­r­i­al besides. That focus may seem slight­ly quaint in the inter­net age, but Wal­lace, a self-con­fessed tele­vi­sion addict who wrote a thou­sand-page nov­el about a video­tape so enter­tain­ing that it kills, looked into the screen and saw a real and pow­er­ful threat. “Irony, pok­er-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are dis­tinc­tive of those fea­tures of con­tem­po­rary U.S. cul­ture (of which cut­ting-edge fic­tion is a part) that enjoy any sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion to the tele­vi­sion whose weird pret­ty hand has my gen­er­a­tion by the throat,” he wrote in the 1993 essay “E Unibus Plu­ram,” blam­ing those qual­i­ties for “a great despair and sta­sis in U.S. cul­ture.”

Even as “a cer­tain sub­genre of pop-con­scious post­mod­ern fic­tion, writ­ten most­ly by young Amer­i­cans, has late­ly arisen and made a real attempt to trans­fig­ure a world of and for appear­ance, mass appeal, and tele­vi­sion [ … ] tele­vi­su­al cul­ture has some­how evolved to a point where it seems invul­ner­a­ble to any such trans­fig­ur­ing assault.” But as that cul­ture moved on from the likes of David Let­ter­man (to Wal­lace’s mind, “the iron­ic eight­ies’ true Angel of Death”) and Sein­feld to those of Jon Stew­art and Com­mu­ni­ty, Schold­er argues, its atti­tudes de-ironized some­what: “The best shows of our age aren’t find­ing humor in the gaps that have devel­oped between peo­ple. They find humor in the absurd and awk­ward attempts by peo­ple try­ing to bridge those gaps. They want to show us that humans can have real con­nec­tions and sin­cer­i­ty for each oth­er.”

And yet human­i­ty’s pas­siv­i­ty remains wor­ri­some. “Today, the aver­age week­ly screen time for an Amer­i­can adult – brace your­self; this is not a typo – is 74 hours (and still going up),” writes Andrew Post­man, son of media the­o­rist and Amus­ing Our­selves to Death author Neil Post­man, in a Guardian piece just last week. “We watch when we want, not when any­one tells us, and usu­al­ly alone, and often while doing sev­er­al oth­er things. The sound­bite has been replaced by viral­i­ty, meme, hot take, tweet.” Post­man includes Wal­lace with his father in the group of observers who “warned of what was com­ing”: a time when few can be shocked by, among oth­er cur­rent phe­nom­e­na, “the rise of a real­i­ty TV star, a man giv­en to loud, inflam­ma­to­ry state­ments, many of which are spec­tac­u­lar­ly untrue but vir­tu­al­ly all of which make for what used to be called ‘good tele­vi­sion.’ ” Stay tuned, if you must.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

David Fos­ter Wal­lace: The Big, Uncut Inter­view (2003)

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Talks About Lit­er­a­ture (and More) in an Inter­net Cha­t­room: Read the 1996 Tran­script

Ani­ma­tions Revive Lost Inter­views with David Fos­ter Wal­lace, Jim Mor­ri­son & Dave Brubeck

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Sub­scribes to the The Believ­er Mag­a­zine with a Lit­tle Humor & Snark (2003)

Noam Chom­sky Calls Post­mod­ern Cri­tiques of Sci­ence Over-Inflat­ed “Poly­syl­lab­ic Tru­isms”

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.

How Animated Cartoons Are Made: A Vintage Primer Filmed Way Back in 1919

in Animation, Comedy, Technology | February 3rd, 2017

Many tech­niques shown in Bray Stu­dios’ 1919 short How Ani­mat­ed Car­toons are Made, above, were ren­dered obso­lete by dig­i­tal advance­ments, but its 21-year-old star, ani­ma­tor Wal­lace Carl­son, seems as if he would fit right in at Cal Arts or Pratt, Class of 2017.

Like many of today’s work­ing ani­ma­tors, the indus­try pio­neer got start­ed ear­ly, get­ting atten­tion (and a dis­tri­b­u­tion deal!) for work made as a young teen.

His com­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties also sug­gest that young Carl­son would’ve found a place among the 21st-century’s ani­ma­tion greats (and soon-to-be-greats).

It doesn’t hurt that he’s cute, in an indie Williams­burg Dandy sort of way.

The vin­tage feel of his lit­tle instruc­tion­al film is pret­ty hip these days. It could be the work of a very par­tic­u­lar kind of mil­len­ni­al, famil­iar to fans of Girls, Search Par­ty, or oth­er shows whose char­ac­ters spend a lot of time in cafes, mak­ing art that will find its great­est audi­ence on the inter­net.

You know, down­load some silent clips from the Prelinger Archives, browse the Free Music Archive for a suit­ably jan­g­ly old time tune, and put it all togeth­er in iMovie, mess­ing around with title fonts until you achieve the desired effect. That’s what Carl­son might have been doing, had he been born a hun­dred years lat­er.

Some of his (silent) obser­va­tions about his craft still ring true.

Unless you’re work­ing on your own thing, it’s a good idea to get the boss’ bless­ing on your script before embark­ing on the painstak­ing ani­ma­tion process.

And char­ac­ter eye­brow move­ments remain an excel­lent sto­ry­telling device.

Ani­ma­tors whose tal­ents are more visu­al than ver­bal could take a les­son from Carlson’s kicky peri­od dia­logue—“Gee I just bust­ed a win­dow! Hope I don’t get pinched.”—though I’d advise against turn­ing a character’s dis­abil­i­ty into a punch­line.

While today’s young ani­ma­tors have lit­tle to no expe­ri­ence with film pro­cess­ing, Carlson’s exhaus­tion after pump­ing out draw­ing after draw­ing may strike a chord. The dev­il is still in the details for any­one seek­ing to pro­duce work of a high­er qual­i­ty than that which can be achieved with pur­chase of an app.

It’s also pret­ty cool to see Carl­son pre­fig­ur­ing white board ani­ma­tion 56 years before the inven­tion of dry erase mark­ers, as he demon­strates how to set a scene using his Lit­tle Ras­cals-esque char­ac­ters Mamie and Dreamy Dud.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters (1914)

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

Win­sor McCay Ani­mates the Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia in a Beau­ti­ful Pro­pa­gan­da Film (1918)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  She used one of the allud­ed-to archives to cre­ate the trail­er for her play, Zam­boni Godot, open­ing in New York City next month. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Stream Marc Maron’s Excellent, Long Interview with The Band’s Robbie Robertson

in Music | February 2nd, 2017

Image of Robert­son (left) and Bob Dylan (right) by Jim Sum­maria, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A quick heads up: Marc Maron released this week a long, prob­ing and quite excel­lent inter­view with The Band’s Rob­bie Robert­son. The con­ver­sa­tion gives you:

the full low­down on the his­to­ry of The Band, from its ori­gins as a back­ing group to its final bow with The Last Waltz. Rob­bie talks about being with Bob Dylan when he went elec­tric and deal­ing with the blow­back of that, and he explains how he came to have such a great work­ing rela­tion­ship with Mar­tin Scors­ese on many of the direc­tor’s films.

You can stream the inter­view below. It’s worth lis­ten­ing to Maron’s impas­sioned mono­logue. But if you want to skip straight to the inter­view itself, then jump to the 15 minute mark.

Robert­son recent­ly pub­lished a new mem­oir called Tes­ti­mo­ny, and I should point out that you can down­load it as a free audio­book if you take part in Audible.com’s 30 day free tri­al pro­gram. Get details on Audi­ble’s free tri­al here.

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:

Watch The Band Play “The Weight,” “Up On Crip­ple Creek” and More in Rare 1970 Con­cert Footage

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cap­tures Lev­on Helm and The Band Per­form­ing “The Weight” in The Last Waltz

Jeff Bridges Nar­rates a Brief His­to­ry of Bob Dylan’s Base­ment Tapes

The Filmmaking of Martin Scorsese Demystified in 6 Video Essays

in Film | February 2nd, 2017

Some film­mak­ers of the 1970s “New Hol­ly­wood” era have passed away, retired, or fad­ed into rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty, but each movie Mar­tin Scors­ese makes still meets with great inter­est from crit­ics and movie­go­ers alike. His lat­est pic­ture Silence, despite its out­ward­ly dry sub­ject mat­ter of 17th-cen­tu­ry Jesuit priests in Japan, has remained a sub­ject of con­ver­sa­tion and indeed debate since its release at the end of last year. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, its title evokes one of the sig­na­ture tech­niques that have kept his work engag­ing over the decades, no mat­ter its sto­ry, set­ting, or theme: his uncon­ven­tion­al and pow­er­ful use of moments with­out sound or music, explored in the Every Frame a Paint­ing video essay “The Art of Silence” above.

One espe­cial­ly effec­tive exam­ple of Scors­ese’s silence comes from Good­fel­las, quite pos­si­bly the most acclaimed of his gang­ster movies — and indeed, one of the most acclaimed works in his robust fil­mog­ra­phy.

The “film break­down” from Film-Drunk Love above gets into what, exact­ly, has already solid­i­fied this quar­ter-cen­tu­ry-old film into a clas­sic, high­light­ing its use of freeze-frames to empha­size par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant moments in the life of its young mob­ster pro­tag­o­nist as well as the impor­tance of that pro­tag­o­nist’s wife and oth­er female char­ac­ters in moti­vat­ing or observ­ing the events of this high­ly male-ori­ent­ed sto­ry, one that fits well among those of Scors­ese’s favorite sub­jects, a list that includes the police, box­ers, invest­ment bankers, Jesus Christ, and the Rolling Stones.

Scors­ese’s movies may depict a man’s world, but as James Brown once sang, it would­n’t be noth­ing with­out a woman — and this film­mak­er cer­tain­ly knows it. The Press Play video essay above exam­ines the indis­pens­able pres­ence of women in his work, who offer feroc­i­ty, temp­ta­tion, manip­u­la­tion, judg­ment, and moti­va­tion, and often a com­bi­na­tion of all of the above and more, but nev­er friend­ship. “Men can’t be friends with women, Howard,” says Cate Blanchet­t’s Katharine Hep­burn to Leonar­do DiCapri­o’s trou­bled mogul in The Avi­a­tor. “They must pos­sess them or leave them be. It’s a prim­i­tive urge from cave­man days. It’s all in Dar­win: hunt the flesh, kill the flesh, eat the flesh. That’s the male sex all over.”

But Scors­ese works in cin­e­ma, after all, and none of these ele­ments would have a frac­tion of their impact if not deliv­ered with the keen visu­al sense on dis­play since his ele­men­tary-school days. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the video essays of Anto­nios Papan­to­niou, which pro­vide tech­ni­cal shot-by-shot break­downs of how mas­ter film­mak­ers assem­ble their most mem­o­rable sequences. Scors­ese’s fil­mog­ra­phy can some­times seem made up of noth­ing oth­er than mem­o­rable sequences, but Papan­to­niou picks one from Cape Fear where Scors­ese’s wide-angle lens­es, “con­stant motion,” “ultra quick shots,” and “unset­tling angles and zooms,” the essay argues, put the view­er in the pro­tag­o­nist’s place “and project to us his pri­vate hor­ror.”

Cape Fear came, of course, as a remake—starring Robert de Niro and Nick Nolte—of the epony­mous 1962 psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller with Robert Mitchum and Gre­go­ry Peck. Scors­ese, per­haps Amer­i­ca’s first open­ly cinephilic big-name direc­tor, has made no secret of his knowl­edge of and enthu­si­asm for this his­to­ry of his cho­sen medi­um. In the Good­fel­las break­down, for exam­ple, he describes that pic­ture as an homage to the decades of gang­ster movies that pre­ced­ed it. “Equipped with ency­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of the medi­um, he draws from its past to inform his work,” argues Steven Bene­dict in his video essay “The Jour­neys of Mar­tin Scors­ese,” a look at how that mas­tery of what has come before allows his own films to not just “explore the human expe­ri­ence” but to “expand cinema’s abil­i­ty to express that expe­ri­ence.”

In 2015 we fea­tured Scors­ese’s list of 85 films every aspir­ing film­mak­er needs to see (this in addi­tion to his 39 essen­tial for­eign films for the young film­mak­er), all of which he men­tioned dur­ing a four-hour inter­view grant­ed to Fast Com­pa­ny. The Fla­vor­wire video essay above illus­trates Scors­ese’s words with clips from the movies he rec­om­mends, mak­ing a crash-course “Mar­tin Scors­ese film school” that encom­pass­es every­thing from Jen­nifer Jones shoot­ing Gre­go­ry Peck in The Duel in the Sun to the “self-con­scious­ness” of Cit­i­zen Kane’s style to the tes­ta­ment to “the pow­er of movies to effect change in the world, to inter­act with life and for­ti­fy the soul” that is neo­re­al­ism. From which cin­e­mat­ic tra­di­tion — or set of tra­di­tions — will Scors­ese draw, and in the process expand and trans­form, next? No doubt this tire­less auteur is just as excit­ed to reveal it as we are to find out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

Revis­it Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hand-Drawn Sto­ry­boards for Taxi Dri­ver

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

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.

Watch “Geometry of Circles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Animation Scored by Philip Glass (1979)

in Animation, Music, Television | January 31st, 2017

Look into the child­hood of any high­ly inno­v­a­tive Amer­i­can artist of the past cou­ple gen­er­a­tions, and you’ll prob­a­bly find at least a trace of Sesame Street. The long-run­ning chil­dren’s pub­lic tele­vi­sion series, though wide­ly regard­ed as a sound source of enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tion for the coun­try’s young­sters, has also done more than its part to expose its quite lit­er­al­ly grow­ing audi­ence to the vast pos­si­bil­i­ties of cre­ation. This has proven espe­cial­ly so in the realm of music, where the show’s per­form­ing guests have includ­ed Her­bie Han­cock, Nina Simone, and Grace Slick — to name just three of the ones we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here.

But Sesame Street, known in its hey­day for a stead­fast refusal to talk down to its view­ers, no mat­ter how small, has also demon­strat­ed a reach far out­side rock, pop, and soul. In 1979 it aired “Geom­e­try of Cir­cles,” a series of four ani­ma­tions with music by min­i­mal­ist, “repet­i­tive structure”-oriented com­pos­er Philip Glass, who turns 80 years old today. Pro­duc­er Cathryn Aison, accord­ing to the Mup­pet Wiki, com­mis­sioned Glass to score her visu­al work, whose sto­ry­boards had already got­ten the go-ahead from Chil­dren’s Tele­vi­sion Work­shop.

The music she received from Glass to accom­pa­ny this show of shape, line, and col­or “under­scores the ani­ma­tion in a style that close­ly resem­bles the ‘Dance’ num­bers and the North Star vignettes writ­ten dur­ing the same time peri­od as his Ein­stein on the Beach opera.”

“Glass has writ­ten scores to The Tru­man Show and Notes on a Scan­dal and his style is much imi­tat­ed,” writes Tele­graph “opera novice” Sameer Rahim by way of back­ground on the com­poser’s wide range of oth­er work in a review of his five-hour for­mal­ist col­lab­o­ra­tion with exper­i­men­tal the­ater direc­tor Robert Wil­son. “Any­one, like me, born in 1981 has absorbed his musi­cal gram­mar with­out real­is­ing.” Though a few years too young to have caught “Geom­e­try of Cir­cles” in its first run (and hav­ing grown up in the wrong coun­try in any case), the will­ing­ness of cre­ators like Glass to work in all kinds of set­tings, and the will­ing­ness of venues like Sesame Street to have them, plant­ed the seeds for count­less careers, both today’s and tomor­row’s, in art, in math­e­mat­ics, and no doubt even in exper­i­men­tal opera.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Min­i­mal Glimpse of Philip Glass

Watch Philip Glass Remix His Own Music—Then Try it Your­self With a New App

‘The Bal­lad of the Skele­tons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney

Watch Jazzy Spies: 1969 Psy­che­del­ic Sesame Street Ani­ma­tion, Fea­tur­ing Grace Slick, Teach­es Kids to Count

Watch Nina Simone Sing the Black Pride Anthem, “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black,” on Sesame Street (1972)

Watch Her­bie Han­cock Rock Out on an Ear­ly Syn­the­siz­er on Sesame Street (1983)

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.