How Much Would It Cost to Build the Colosseum Today?

in Architecture, History | May 25th, 2022

Last year we told you about the plan to install a retractable floor in the Colos­se­um, thus restor­ing a fea­ture it boast­ed in its ancient glo­ry days. Though the state pledged €10 mil­lion, the bud­get of an ambi­tious ren­o­va­tion will sure­ly come to many times that — but still, we may imag­ine, only a frac­tion of the mon­ey it took to build the Colos­se­um in the first place. In fact we have to imag­ine it, since we have no records of what that icon of Rome actu­al­ly cost. In the video above, his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan, cre­ator of the chan­nel Told in Stone, does so by not just mar­shal­ing all his knowl­edge of the ancient world but also crowd­sourc­ing oth­ers’ knowl­edge of mod­ern con­struc­tion tech­niques and expens­es.

First, Ryan must reck­on the cost of the Colos­se­um in ses­ter­tii, the “big brass coins” com­mon in Rome of the first cen­tu­ry AD. “At the time the Colos­se­um was built,” he says, “one ses­ter­tius could buy two loaves of bread, four cups of cheap wine, or a sin­gle cup of good wine.”

The aver­age unskilled labor­er could expect to earn around four ses­ter­tii per day, and this project need­ed thou­sands of such labor­ers to exca­vate its foun­da­tion trench alone. Then came the lay­ing of the foun­da­tion itself, fol­lowed by the build­ing of the super­struc­ture, which remains for­mi­da­ble even in the ruined state we know today. Its mate­ri­als includ­ed 100,000 cubic meters of traver­tine — “rough­ly one-fifti­eth, inci­den­tal­ly, of all traver­tine ever quar­ried by the Romans.”

A good deal of traver­tine also went into the Get­ty Cen­ter, per­haps the clos­est thing to a Colos­se­um-scale con­struc­tion project in mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca. The Get­ty’s total cost came to $733 mil­lion, a price tag befit­ting the wealth syn­ony­mous with its name. But it still came cheap­er than the Colos­se­um by Ryan’s esti­mate, or at least by most of the esti­mates at which he arrives. Con­sult­ing with sev­er­al of his view­ers expe­ri­enced in archi­tec­ture and con­struc­tion, he cal­cu­lates that build­ing an exact repli­ca of the Colos­se­um in today’s Unit­ed States — tak­ing into account the much greater effi­cien­cy of cur­rent tools, as well as the much greater cost of labor — rough­ly equiv­a­lent to $150,000,000 to more than $1 bil­lion. That amount of mon­ey obvi­ous­ly exists in our world; whether we pos­sess the nec­es­sary ambi­tion is less clear. Then again, ancient Rome did­n’t have Lego.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Build­ing The Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

When the Colos­se­um in Rome Became the Home of Hun­dreds of Exot­ic Plant Species

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Roman Colos­se­um Has a Twin in Tunisia: Dis­cov­er the Amphithe­ater of El Jem, One of the Best-Pre­served Roman Ruins in the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

How Korean Things Are Made: Watch Mesmerizing Videos Showing the Making of Traditional Clothes, Teapots, Buddhist Instruments & More

in History, Technology | May 25th, 2022

It would be awful­ly clichéd to call Seoul, where I live, a place of con­trasts between old and new. And yet that tex­ture real­ly does man­i­fest every­where in Kore­an life, most pal­pa­bly on the streets of the cap­i­tal. In my favorite neigh­bor­hoods, one pass­es through a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent eras walk­ing down a sin­gle alley. “Third-wave” cof­fee shops and “newtro” bars coex­ist with fam­i­ly restau­rants unchanged for decades and even small indus­tri­al work­shops. Those work­shops pro­duce cloth­ing, plumb­ing fix­tures, print­ed mat­ter, elec­tron­ics, and much else besides, in many cas­es late into the night. For all its rep­u­ta­tion as a high-tech “Asian Tiger,” this remains, clear­ly and present­ly, a coun­try that makes things.

You can see just how Korea makes things on the Youtube chan­nel All Process of World, which has drawn tens of mil­lions of views with its videos of fac­to­ries: fac­to­ries mak­ing forks, bricks, sliced tuna, sheep­skin jack­ets, bowl­ing balls, humanoid robots. The scale of these Kore­an indus­tri­al oper­a­tions ranges from the mas­sive to the arti­sanal; some prod­ucts are unique to twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry life, and oth­ers have been in use for cen­turies.

On the tra­di­tion­al side, All Process of World has pro­vid­ed close-up views of the mak­ing of ceram­ic teapots, wood­en win­dow frames (as you would see in a clas­si­cal Kore­an hanok), hand­held per­cus­sive mok­tak to aid Bud­dhist monks in their chants, and even jeogori, the dis­tinc­tive jack­ets worn with han­bok dress­es.

Judg­ing by the com­ments, All Process of World’s many view­ers hail from around the globe. This should­n’t come as a sur­prise, giv­en Kore­a’s new­found world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty. But that so-called “Kore­an wave” owes less to the appeal of Kore­a’s tra­di­tion­al cul­ture than its mod­ern one, less to its rus­tic yet ele­gant pot­tery and bril­liant­ly col­or­ful for­mal­wear than to BTS and “Gang­nam Style,” Par­a­site and Squid Game — whose “robot girl” appears on a rug made in one All Process of World video. Anoth­er shows us the pro­duc­tion of an equal­ly mod­ern item, the face masks seen every­where in Korea dur­ing the past two years. Just a few weeks ago, the gov­ern­ment gave us the okay to take those masks off out­doors. While hop­ing for the arrival of ful­ly post-COVID era, we’d do well to keep in mind how the past always seems to find its way into the present.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch a Kore­an Mas­ter Crafts­man Make a Kim­chi Pot by Hand, All Accord­ing to Ancient Tra­di­tion

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

How a Kore­an Pot­ter Found a “Beau­ti­ful Life” Through His Art: A Short, Life-Affirm­ing Doc­u­men­tary

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

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Three Pink Floyd Songs Played on the Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Gayageum: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Behold the Augsburg Book of Miracles, a Brilliantly-Illuminated Manuscript of Supernatural Phenomena from Renaissance Germany

in Books, History | May 24th, 2022

When we speak of a “lost art,” we do not always mean that humans have for­got­ten cer­tain pro­duc­tion meth­ods. Mod­ern crafts­peo­ple can recov­er or rea­son­ably approx­i­mate old tech­niques and mate­ri­als, and pro­duce arti­facts that can be passed off as authen­tic by the unscrupu­lous. The spir­it of the thing, how­ev­er, can nev­er be recov­ered. Try as they might, schol­ars and con­ser­va­tors will nev­er be able to enter the mind of a Medieval scribe or man­u­script illu­mi­na­tor. Their social world has dis­ap­peared into a dis­tant mist; we can only dim­ly guess at what their lives were like.

Thus, for many years, the recep­tion of Hierony­mus Bosch — the bizarre fan­ta­sist from the Nether­lands whose visions of Earth, Heav­en, and Hell have amused and ter­ri­fied view­ers — stressed the pro­to-Sur­re­al­ism of his work, assum­ing he must have had oth­er inten­tions than pros­e­ly­tiz­ing.

Most recent inter­pre­ta­tion, how­ev­er, has pulled in the oth­er direc­tion, stress­ing the degree to which Bosch and his con­tem­po­raries believed in a uni­verse that was exact­ly as weird as he depict­ed it, no exag­ger­a­tion nec­es­sary; empha­siz­ing how Bosch felt an urgent need to spare view­ers of his work from the fates he showed in his art.

What passed through the mind of the illu­mi­na­tor of the man­u­script shown here, the Augs­burg Book of Mirac­u­lous Signs? We can nev­er know. At best, schol­ars have set­tled on a name — artist and print­mak­er Hans Burgk­mair the Younger — though lit­tle is known about him And we have a date, 1552, when this “curi­ous and lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed man­u­script appeared in the Swabi­an Impe­r­i­al Free city of Augs­burg, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire, locat­ed in present-day Ger­many,” Maria Popo­va writes at the Mar­gin­a­lian. In the video at the top from Hochela­ga, you can learn more about the “bizarre text” and the “mean­ing behind its unique con­tents” and “scenes of calami­ty and chaos.”

The strange book presents “in remark­able detail and wild­ly imag­i­na­tive art­work, Medieval Europe’s grow­ing obses­sions with signs sent from ‘God,’ ” Popo­va writes, “a tes­ta­ment to the basic human propen­si­ty for mag­i­cal think­ing.” More specif­i­cal­ly, The Book of Mir­a­cles recounts a host of Bib­li­cal signs and won­ders in chrono­log­i­cal order: from the first book of the Old Tes­ta­ment to the spec­tac­u­lar end of the New. In-between are “hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry accounts of clas­si­cal and con­tem­po­rary celes­tial phe­nom­e­na,” Tim Smith-Laing writes at Apol­lo. “The man­u­script com­pris­es noth­ing less than a pic­ture chron­i­cle of the world’s past, present and future, in 192 mir­a­cles.”

While Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty con­demned Medieval mag­ic, “the recur­rence of mir­a­cles in the Bible meant that the Protes­tant reform­ers of the six­teenth cen­tu­ry could not reject such won­ders as super­sti­tions in the way they scorned Catholic beliefs,” Mari­na Warn­er writes at The New York Review of Books. Ger­man reform­ers were on high alert for the mirac­u­lous and omi­nous: “The six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Zwinglian cler­gy­man Johann Jakob Wick filled twen­ty-four albums with reports of such won­ders in broad­sheets and pam­phlets,” see­ing signs in the birth of a two-head­ed calf or “an unfor­tu­nate, flip­per-hand­ed infant.”

All of which is to say that we have lit­tle rea­son to doubt that the cre­ator of The Book of Mir­a­cles meant the work as an earnest warn­ing to its read­ers, although its won­drous images might look to us like pro­to-fan­ta­sy or sci-fi illus­tra­tion. The book illus­trates 1533 reports of fly­ing drag­ons in Bohemia, an event, notes The Guardian, that “went on for sev­er­al days, with over four hun­dred of them, both big and small, fly­ing togeth­er.” It shows a comet appear­ing in 1506, one that stayed for sev­er­al days and nights “and turned its tail towards Spain.” There­by fol­lowed “a lot of fruit,” which was then “com­plete­ly destroyed by cater­pil­lars or rats,” then a vio­lent earth­quake in Con­stan­tino­ple.

The very ten­u­ous con­nec­tion between dis­parate nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na, the hearsay reports of mag­i­cal hap­pen­ings, you can read about all of these signs and won­ders in a repub­lished ver­sion by Taschen, in Eng­lish, French, and Ger­man. It is, Popo­va writes, “a sin­gu­lar shrine to some of the most eter­nal of human hopes and fears, and, above all, our immutable long­ing for grace, for mer­cy, for the mirac­u­lous.” See more images from The Book of Mir­a­cles at The Guardian.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Has Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

The Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts of Medieval Europe: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado

160,000+ Medieval Man­u­scripts Online: Where to Find Them

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

Martin Scorsese Foundation Launches Virtual Screening Room, Letting You Watch Restored Classic Films for Free

in Film | May 24th, 2022

Since 1990, Mar­tin Scors­ese has devot­ed the non-film­mak­ing part of his career to film preser­va­tion, whether that means the clas­sics of Hol­ly­wood or world cin­e­ma. The over 900 restora­tions that he’s helped fund through the Film Foun­da­tion non-prof­it have been the sub­ject of Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion box sets, spe­cial anniver­sary screen­ings and fes­ti­val show­ings, and now a spe­cial month­ly online screen­ing room will give view­ers a chance to see some famil­iar and not-so-famil­iar films that have been saved from destruc­tion.

Accord­ing to the wel­come mes­sage at the Restora­tion Screen­ing Room, “Pre­sen­ta­tions will take place with­in a 24-hour win­dow on the sec­ond Mon­day of each month, along with Spe­cial Fea­tures about the films and their restora­tion process. Month­ly pro­gram­ming will encom­pass a broad array of restora­tions, includ­ing clas­sic and inde­pen­dent films, doc­u­men­taries, and silent films from around the world.’”

As of this writ­ing, the win­dow has closed for its inau­gur­al film, Pow­ell and Pressburger’s 1945 I Know Where I’m Going! but you can still click through to see the extras that come with the film: an Intro­duc­tion by Scors­ese; an inter­view with Scorsese’s long-time edi­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er (who was also Powell’s spouse for six years until 1990 and who worked on the restora­tion); Kent Jones inter­view­ing Kevin Mac­don­ald, the grand­son of Press­burg­er and his biog­ra­ph­er; the Film Foundation’s Mar­garet Bodde inter­view­ing Til­da Swin­ton, a huge fan of the film; direc­tors Joan­na Hogg and Scors­ese talk­ing about the film; a before and after look at the restora­tion; an image gallery; and final­ly a links page called “explore” that is quite over­whelm­ing in its thor­ough­ness.

The 4K restoration’s next stop is the Cri­te­ri­on Chan­nel, so if you sub­scribe to that paid ser­vice, find it there. But the Film Foundation’s pre­mieres are com­plete­ly free and fea­ture a live chat on the screen­ing night.

In the com­ing months look for­ward to Fellini’s La Stra­da (June 13), Govin­dan Aravindan’s Kum­mat­ty (July 11), a dou­ble fea­ture of The Chase (d. Arthur Rip­ley) and Detour (d. Edgar G. Ulmer) (August 8); Sarah Maldoror’s Sam­bizan­ga (Sep. 12), Mar­lon Brando’s One Eyed Jacks (Octo­ber 10); John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (Novem­ber 14); and Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost on Decem­ber 12.

The site has no trail­ers, but we’ve got you cov­ered:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Restor­ing Clas­sic Films: Cri­te­ri­on Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitch­cock Movies

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

The Joy of Watch­ing Old, Dam­aged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Cap­ti­vat­ed by Restora­tion Videos

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The Scream Explained: What’s Really Happening in Edvard Munch’s World-Famous Painting

in Art, History | May 23rd, 2022

The Scream is not scream­ing. “One of the famous in the images of art,” Edvard Munch’s most wide­ly seen paint­ing “has become, for us, a uni­ver­sal sym­bol of angst and anx­i­ety.” Munch paint­ed it in 1893, when “Europe was at the birth of the mod­ern era, and the image reflects the anx­i­eties that trou­bled the world.” How­ev­er many fin-de-siè­cle Euro­peans felt like scream­ing for one rea­son or anoth­er, the cen­tral fig­ure of The Scream isn’t one of them: “rather, it is hold­ing its hands over its ears, to block out the scream.” So gal­lerist and Youtu­ber James Payne reveals on the lat­est episode of his series Great Art Explained, which does­n’t just exam­ine Munch’s icon­ic work of art, but places it in the con­text of his career and his time.

Dur­ing most of Munch’s life, “Euro­pean cities were going through tru­ly excep­tion­al changes. Indus­tri­al­iza­tion and eco­nom­ic shifts brought fear, obses­sions, dis­eases, polit­i­cal unrest, and rad­i­cal­ism. Ques­tions were being raised about soci­ety, and the chang­ing role of man with­in it: about our psy­che, our social respon­si­bil­i­ties, and most rad­i­cal of all, about the exis­tence of God.” It was hard­ly the most suit­able time or place for the men­tal­ly trou­bled, but then, Munch seems to have pos­sessed more psy­cho­log­i­cal for­ti­tude than he let the pub­lic know. A savvy self-pro­mot­er, he under­stood the val­ue of liv­ing like some­one whose ter­ri­ble per­cep­tions keep him on the brink of total break­down.

But then, Munch nev­er did have it easy. “His moth­er and his sis­ter both died of tuber­cu­lo­sis. His father and grand­fa­ther suf­fered from depres­sion, and anoth­er sis­ter, Lau­ra, from pneu­mo­nia. His only broth­er would lat­er die of pneu­mo­nia.” He found solace in art, a pur­suit strong­ly opposed by his reli­gious father, and even­tu­al­ly joined the bohemi­an world, a milieu that encour­aged him to let his inner world shape his aes­thet­ic. Draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from the French Impres­sion­ists and the dra­ma of August Strind­berg, Munch even­tu­al­ly found his way to start­ing a cycle of paint­ings called The Frieze of Life.

It was dur­ing his work on The Frieze of Life that, accord­ing to a diary entry of Jan­u­ary 22nd, 1892, Munch found him­self walk­ing along a fjord. “I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord — the sun was set­ting, and the clouds turn­ing blood red. I sensed a scream pass­ing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I paint­ed this pic­ture, paint­ed the clouds as actu­al blood. The col­or shrieked.” The fjord was on the way back from the asy­lum to which his beloved younger sis­ter had recent­ly been con­fined; Payne imag­ines that her “screams of ter­ror must have haunt­ed him as he walked away.” From these grim ori­gins, The Scream emerged to become an oft-ref­er­enced and high­ly relat­able image — even to those who see in it noth­ing more than their own frus­tra­tion at receiv­ing too much e‑mail.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Edvard Munch Sig­naled His Bohemi­an Rebel­lion with Cig­a­rettes (1895): A Video Essay

Explore 7,600 Works of Art by Edvard Munch: They’re Now Dig­i­tized and Free Online

The Life & Work of Edvard Munch, Explored by Pat­ti Smith and Char­lotte Gains­bourg

Edvard Munch’s Famous Paint­ing “The Scream” Ani­mat­ed to Pink Floyd’s Pri­mal Music

The Edvard Munch Scream Action Fig­ure

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

R.I.P. Vangelis: The Composer Who Created the Future Noir Soundtrack for Blade Runner Dies at 79

in Film, Music | May 20th, 2022

It would be dif­fi­cult to over­state the promi­nence, in the late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, of the theme from Hugh Hud­son’s Char­i­ots of Fire. Most any­one under the age of 60 will have heard it many times as par­o­dy before ever see­ing it in its orig­i­nal, Acad­e­my Award-win­ning con­text. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, encoun­ter­ing the piece in near­ly every humor­ous slow-motion run­ning scene for two or three decades straight has a way of damp­en­ing its impact. But back in 1981, to score a nine­teen-twen­ties peri­od dra­ma with brand-new dig­i­tal syn­the­siz­ers marked a brazen depar­ture from con­ven­tion, as well as the begin­ning of a trend of musi­cal anachro­nism in cin­e­ma (which would man­i­fest even in the likes of Dirty Danc­ing).

The Char­i­ots of Fire theme has sure­ly returned to many of our playlists after the death this week of its com­pos­er, Van­ge­lis. Even before that film, he’d col­lab­o­rat­ed with Hud­son on doc­u­men­taries and com­mer­cials; imme­di­ate­ly there­after, he found him­self in great demand as a com­pos­er for fea­tures.

The very next year, in fact, saw Van­ge­lis craft­ing a score that has, per­haps, remained even more respect­ed over time than the one he did for Char­i­ots of Fire. Set in the far-flung year of 2019, Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner need­ed a high-tech sound that also reflect­ed its “future noir” sen­si­bil­i­ty. This neat­ly suit­ed Van­ge­lis’ proven abil­i­ty to com­bine cut­ting-edge elec­tron­ic instru­ments with tra­di­tion­al acoustic ones in a high­ly evoca­tive fash­ion.

Blade Run­ner’s for­mi­da­ble influ­ence owes pri­mar­i­ly to its visu­als, to the “look and feel” of its imag­ined future. But I defy fans of the film to remem­ber any of its most strik­ing images — the infer­nal sky­line of 2019 Los Ange­les, the cars fly­ing between video-illu­mi­nat­ed sky­scrap­ers, Deckard’s first meet­ing with Rachael — with­out also hear­ing Van­ge­lis’ music in their heads. Though it took audi­ences decades to catch up with Blade Run­ner, it’s now more or less set­tled that each ele­ment of the film com­ple­ments all the oth­ers in cre­at­ing a dystopi­an vision still, in many ways, unsur­pass­able. Van­ge­lis’ own expe­ri­ences across gen­res and tech­nolo­gies, which you can learn more about in the doc­u­men­tary Van­ge­lis and the Jour­ney to Itha­ka, placed him ide­al­ly to imbue that vision with musi­cal life.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Expe­ri­ence Blade Run­ner Like You Nev­er Have Before Through a Fea­ture-Length Remas­tered Sound­track

How Blade Run­ner Cap­tured the Imag­i­na­tion of a Gen­er­a­tion of Elec­tron­ic Musi­cians

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

Stream 72 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopi­an Future

Sean Con­nery (RIP) Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Itha­ca,” Set to the Music of Van­ge­lis

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus: Their Friendship and the Bitter Feud That Ended It

in History, Philosophy | May 20th, 2022

At the end of World War II, as Europe lay in ruins, so too did its “intel­lec­tu­al land­scape,” notes the Liv­ing Phi­los­o­phy video above. In the midst of this “intel­lec­tu­al crater” a num­ber of great thinkers debat­ed “the blue­print for the future.” Fem­i­nist philoso­pher and nov­el­ist Simone de Beau­voir put it blunt­ly: “We were to pro­vide the post­war era with its ide­ol­o­gy.” Two names — De Beau­voir’s part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre and his friend Albert Camus — came to define that ide­ol­o­gy in the phi­los­o­phy broad­ly known as Exis­ten­tial­ism.

The two first met in Paris in 1943 dur­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion. They were already “deeply acquaint­ed” with one another’s work and shared a mutu­al respect and admi­ra­tion as crit­ics and review­ers of each oth­er and as fel­low resis­tance mem­bers. Both “intel­lec­tu­al giants” were tar­get­ed by the FBI, and both would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture (though Sartre reject­ed his). Their fame would con­tin­ue into the post­war years, despite Camus’ retreat from philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing after the pub­li­ca­tion of The Rebel.

While we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly brought you sto­ries of their friend­ship, and its bit­ter end, the video above digs deep­er into the Sartre-Camus rival­ry, with crit­i­cal his­tor­i­cal con­text for their think­ing. Their ini­tial falling out took place over The Rebel, which cham­pi­oned an eth­i­cal indi­vid­u­al­ism and cri­tiqued the moral­i­ty of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence. Instead of explor­ing sui­cide, as he had done in The Myth of Sisy­phus, here Camus explores the prob­lem of mur­der, con­clud­ing that — out­side of extreme cir­cum­stances like a Nazi inva­sion — vio­lent polit­i­cal means do not jus­ti­fy their ends.

The book pro­voked Sartre, a doc­tri­naire Marx­ist, who had issued what Camus con­sid­ered fee­ble defens­es for Joseph Stal­in’s purges and gulags. A series of scathing reviews and angry ripostes fol­lowed. The per­son­al tone of these attacks chilled what lit­tle warmth remained between them. When the Alger­ian war for inde­pen­dence erupt­ed a few years lat­er, the staunch­ly anti-colo­nial­ist Sartre took the side of Alge­ri­a’s Nation­al Lib­er­a­tion Front (FLN), excus­ing acts of vio­lence against civil­ians and rival fac­tions as jus­ti­fied by French oppres­sion. Such events “were beyond jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in the mind of Camus.”

While Sartre belit­tled Camus as “a crook,” the “acute­ness of the sit­u­a­tion was all the stronger for Camus since Alge­ria was his home­land. He could not see it in the ide­o­log­i­cal warped black and white of Sartre’s cir­cle or the con­ser­v­a­tive French gov­ern­ment.” The state­ment might sum up all of Camus’ thought. As Sartre final­ly con­ced­ed in a posthu­mous trib­ute; he “rep­re­sent­ed in our time the lat­est exam­ple of that long line of moral­istes whose works con­sti­tute per­haps the most orig­i­nal ele­ment in French let­ters.… he reaf­firmed… against the Machi­avel­lians and against the Idol of real­ism, the exis­tence of the moral issue,” in all its com­plex ambi­gu­i­ty and uncer­tain­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sartre Writes a Trib­ute to Camus After His Friend-Turned-Rival Dies in a Trag­ic Car Crash: “There Is an Unbear­able Absur­di­ty in His Death”

The Exis­ten­tial­ism Files: How the FBI Tar­get­ed Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assas­si­na­tion

Albert Camus Writes a Friend­ly Let­ter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Per­son­al and Philo­soph­i­cal Rift

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

Meet the Variophone, the Early Soviet Synthesizer that Made Music with a Film Projector (1932)

in History, Music | May 19th, 2022

The ear­ly days of elec­tron­ic instru­ments lacked com­mon­ly accept­ed ideas about what an elec­tron­ic instru­ment was, much less how it should be used. No one asso­ci­at­ed elec­tron­ics with tech­no or new wave or hip hop or pop, giv­en that none of these exist­ed. Every sound made by exper­i­ments in syn­the­sis in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry was by its nature exper­i­men­tal, and most elec­tron­ic instru­ments were one of a kind. It did not even seem obvi­ous that elec­tron­ic instru­ments had to be machines that were pur­pose built for sound.

In 1930, at the very dawn of sound on film, Evge­ny Sholpo invent­ed the Var­io­phone — or “Auto­mat­ed Paper Sound with sound­tracks in both trans­ver­sal and inten­sive form.” It was, in sim­pler terms, a pho­to­elec­tric audio syn­the­siz­er that made use of a film pro­jec­tor and spin­ning card­board discs with sound waves cut into them in var­i­ous pat­terns. When ampli­fied, the device could turn the pat­terns into sounds. It also cre­at­ed “abstract spi­ral ani­ma­tion,” notes Boing Boing. Both “were way ahead of their time.”

If you’re think­ing such a machine might be used to make film sound­tracks, it was. But it was also “a con­tin­u­a­tion of research that Sholpo had been con­duct­ing since the 1910s,” the blog Beyond the Coda writes, “when he was work­ing on per­former­less music.”

Sholpo want­ed a device that would replace musi­cians and allow com­posers to turn com­plex musi­cal ideas into record­ed sounds them­selves. He was aid­ed in the endeav­or by Geor­gy Rim­sky-Kor­sakov (grand­son of Russ­ian com­pos­er Niko­lai Rim­sky-Kor­sakov), who helped him build the pro­to­type at Lenfilm Stu­dios in 1931.

The two pro­duced their first film sound­track for the pro­pa­gan­da film The Year 1905 in Bour­geoisie Satire, in 1931, and then the fol­low­ing year cre­at­ed “a syn­the­sized sound­track for A Sym­pho­ny of Peace and many oth­er sound­tracks for films and car­toons through­out the thir­ties,” notes 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music. The Var­io­phone was destroyed dur­ing the Siege of Leningrad, but Sholpo built two more, con­tin­u­ing to record sound­tracks through the for­ties. Unlike the first mono­phon­ic ana­logue syn­the­siz­ers built a cou­ple of decades lat­er, the Var­io­phone could cre­ate and repli­cate poly­phon­ic com­po­si­tions, since tones could be lay­ered atop each oth­er, as in mul­ti­track record­ing.

You can hear sev­er­al exam­ples of the Var­io­phone here, and see it synched to ani­ma­tion — both from its own sound waves and from hand-drawn films like “The Dance of the Crow,” below. What does it sound like? The tones and tim­bres vary some­what among record­ings. There’s clear­ly been some degra­da­tion in qual­i­ty over time, and the tech­nol­o­gy of record­ing sound on film was only in its infan­cy at the time, in any case. But, in cer­tain moments, the Var­io­phone can sound like the ear­ly Moog that Wendy Car­los used to syn­the­size clas­si­cal music and record film scores almost 40 years after Sholpo patent­ed his machine.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Monk Invent­ed the First Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment

Leon Theremin Adver­tis­es the First Com­mer­cial Pro­duc­tion Run of His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment (1930)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

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

David Cronenberg Visits a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

in Film | May 19th, 2022

The excite­ment over Crimes of the Future, set to pre­miere next week at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, sug­gests that David Cro­nen­berg retains a strong fan base more than half a cen­tu­ry into his film­mak­ing career. But many of us who con­sid­er our­selves part of that fan base did­n’t dis­cov­er his work in the the­ater, much less at Cannes. Rather, we found it at the video store, ide­al­ly one that devot­ed a sec­tion specif­i­cal­ly to his work — or at least to his sig­na­ture genre of “body hor­ror,” which his films would in any case have dom­i­nat­ed. Fit­ting, then, that the new Cro­nen­berg inter­view above takes place among shelves packed with, if not the VHS tapes and Laserdiscs we grew up with, then at least DVDs and Blu-Rays.

This video comes from Kon­bi­ni, a French Youtube chan­nel whose Video Club series has brought such auteurs as Claire Denis, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ter­ry Gilliam into the hal­lowed halls of Paris’ JM Vidéo.

“They have 50,000 movies, I think,” says the inter­view­er. “That’s too many,” replies Cro­nen­berg, “so you need to give me a few.” The direc­tor of Video­drome, The Fly, and Crash turns out to have no trou­ble spot­ting and dis­cussing movies of inter­est, and the list of his picks from the stock at JM Vidéo is as fol­lows:

• Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, La Stra­da (“the begin­ning of my entrance­ment with moviemak­ing”)
• Ing­mar Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf  (“a beau­ti­ful movie; very much a night­mare”)
• Roger Vadim, And God Cre­at­ed Woman (Brigitte Bar­dot “was incred­i­bly sex­u­al, beau­ti­ful — I was total­ly in love with her”)
• Jean-Pierre and Luc Dar­d­enne, Roset­ta (which the Cro­nen­berg-led 1999 Cannes jury select­ed in “the fastest vote for the Palme d’Or ever in the his­to­ry of Cannes”)
• Rid­ley Scott, Alien (some of whose ele­ments “are exact­ly like my very low-bud­get film Shiv­ers”)
• Paul Ver­ho­even, Total Recall (a project for which he wrote twelve screen­play drafts, reject­ed for being “the Philip K. Dick ver­sion” rather than “Raiders of the Lost Ark go to Mars”)
• Ken Rus­sell, Altered States (which “com­bined a strange group of peo­ple who, nor­mal­ly, you would­n’t think would make a sci­ence-fic­tion movie”)
• Abdel­latif Kechiche, Blue Is the Warmest Col­or (“a beau­ti­ful, sexy, inter­est­ing, intense movie with young actress­es who are real­ly very good, and giv­ing every­thing,” includ­ing Crimes of the Future’s own Léa Sey­doux)
• Olivi­er Assayas, Per­son­al Shop­per (“one of the movies that con­vinced me to ask Kris­ten Stew­art to be in Crimes of the Future”)
• Matthieu Kasso­vitz, La Haine (his intro­duc­tion to the “fan­tas­tic emo­tion­al depth” and “intel­lect” of Vin­cent Cas­sel)
• Julia Ducour­nau, Titane (a “very dan­ger­ous” genre pic­ture that nev­er­the­less won a Palme d’Or)
• Richard Mar­quand, Return of the Jedi (when asked to direct it, he said, “ ‘Well, I don’t usu­al­ly direct oth­er peo­ple’s mate­r­i­al,’ and they said, ‘Good­bye‘”)
• Bran­don Cro­nen­berg, Pos­ses­sor (“my son’s movie,” the prod­uct of “a strug­gle that remind­ed me of all the dif­fi­cul­ties I ever had mak­ing a movie”)
• Ed Emsh­willer, Rel­a­tiv­i­ty (the kind of film that showed him “you did­n’t have to go to film school, which I nev­er did, you did­n’t have to work in the film indus­try, you could make a movie your­self just because you want­ed to make a movie”)
• Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days (“one of the movies that con­vinced me I should work with Ralph Fiennes”)
• Nico­las Roeg, Don’t Look Now (“a very, very strong movie, very strange, very much about death, but at first you’re not aware that that’s real­ly the sub­ject mat­ter”)

As not just a film fan but a film­mak­er, Cro­nen­berg has plen­ty of relat­ed sto­ries to tell about his own pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ences in cin­e­ma. Not all of them have to do with the pic­tures that inspired him when he was com­ing of age in the nine­teen-fifties and nine­teen-six­ties. In fact, even as he approach­es his ninth decade, he clear­ly con­tin­ues to find new ideas and col­lab­o­ra­tors in the work of emerg­ing direc­tors. Per­haps that’s one rea­son he seems uncan­ni­ly undi­min­ished here, much like this sur­vivor of a video store whose shelves he brows­es. Vive JM Vidéo, et vive Cro­nen­berg.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Last Video Store: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on How the World’s Old­est Video Store Still Sur­vives Today

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Type­writ­ers in Film & Tele­vi­sion: A Super­cut

John Lan­dis Decon­structs Trail­ers of Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Films: Cit­i­zen Kane, Sun­set Boule­vard, 2001 & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Hans Zimmer Was in the First-Ever Video Aired on MTV, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”

in Music, Television | May 18th, 2022

More than four decades after its release, The Bug­gles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” is usu­al­ly cred­it­ed with more pop-cul­tur­al impor­tance than musi­cal influ­ence. Per­haps that befits the song whose video was the first-ever aired on MTV. But if you lis­ten close­ly to the song itself in The Bug­gles’ record­ing (as opposed to the con­cur­rent­ly pro­duced ver­sion by Bruce Wool­ley and the Cam­era Club, which also has its cham­pi­ons), you’ll hear an unex­pect­ed degree of both com­po­si­tion­al and instru­men­tal com­plex­i­ty. You’ll also have a sense of a fair­ly wide vari­ety of inspi­ra­tions, one that Bug­gles co-founder Trevor Horn has since described as includ­ing not just oth­er music but lit­er­a­ture as well.

“I’d read J. G. Bal­lard and had this vision of the future where record com­pa­nies would have com­put­ers in the base­ment and man­u­fac­ture artists,” said Horn in a 2018 Guardian inter­view. “I’d heard Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine and video was com­ing. You could feel things chang­ing.” The Bug­gles, Horn and col­lab­o­ra­tor Geoff Downes employed all the tech­nol­o­gy they could mar­shal. And by his reck­on­ing, “Video Killed the Radio Star” would take 26 play­ers to re-cre­ate live. Pay­ing prop­er homage to Kraftwerk requires not just using machin­ery, but get­ting at least a lit­tle Teu­ton­ic; hence, per­haps, the brief appear­ance of Hans Zim­mer at 2:50 in the song’s video.

“‘Hey, I like this idea of com­bin­ing visu­als and music,” Zim­mer recent­ly recalled hav­ing thought at the time. “This is going to be where I want to go.” And so he did: today, of course, we know Zim­mer as per­haps the most famous film com­pos­er alive, sought after by some of the pre­em­i­nent film­mak­ers of our time. He and Horn would actu­al­ly col­lab­o­rate again in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties on the sound­track to Bar­ry Levin­son’s Toys (whose oth­er con­trib­u­tors includ­ed no less an eight­ies video icon than Thomas Dol­by, who’d played key­boards on the Bruce Wool­ley “Video Killed the Radio Star”). By that time Horn had put per­form­ing behind him and turned super-pro­duc­er for artists like Yes, Seal, and the Pet Shop Boys. The Bug­gles burnt out quick­ly, but one doubts that Horn or Zim­mer lose much sleep over it today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

How Hans Zim­mer Cre­at­ed the Oth­er­world­ly Sound­track for Dune

The 120 Min­utes Archive Com­piles Clips & Playlists from 956 Episodes of MTV’s Alter­na­tive Music Show (1986–2013)

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.