A Cinematic Journey Through Paris, As Seen Through the Lens of Legendary Filmmaker Éric Rohmer: Watch Rohmer in Paris

in Film | April 25th, 2018

Note: The film starts around the 30 sec­ond mark.

Site of so many his­toric screen­ings, cra­dle of so many inno­v­a­tive auteurs, set­ting of so many mem­o­rable scenes: does any city have a more cen­tral place in the cinephile’s con­scious­ness than Paris? Film­mak­er-pro­fes­sor Richard Mis­ek calls it “the city where cinephil­ia itself began.” It cer­tain­ly has a place in his own cinephilic jour­ney, begin­ning with a chance encounter, 24 years ago in the dis­trict of Mont­martre, with one of the lumi­nar­ies of French New Wave film: Éric Rohmer, who was then in the mid­dle of shoot­ing his pic­ture Ren­dezvous in Paris. “I only real­ized this four­teen years lat­er, when I saw the film late one night on tele­vi­sion,” Mis­ek says. “It was the first Rohmer film I’d ever seen — and I was in it.”

He tells this sto­ry ear­ly in Rohmer in Paris, his hour-long video essay on all the ways the auteur used the city in the course of his pro­lif­ic, more than fifty-year-long film­mak­ing career. Mis­ek describes Rohmer’s char­ac­ters, “always glanc­ing at each oth­er: on trains, on streets, in parks, in the two-way shop win­dows of cafes where they can see and be seen,” as flâneurs, those obser­vant strollers through the city whose type has its ori­gins in the Paris of the 19th cen­tu­ry. “But their walks are restrict­ed to lunch hours and evenings out. They form detours from less leisure­ly tra­jec­to­ries: the lines of a dai­ly com­mute.” With ever-increas­ing rig­or, the direc­tor “traces every step of his char­ac­ters’ jour­neys through the city with topo­graph­ic pre­ci­sion. His char­ac­ters fol­low actu­al paths through Paris, paths that can be drawn as lines on the city’s map.”

Though Rohmer did have his dif­fer­ences, aes­thet­i­cal­ly as well as polit­i­cal­ly, with his col­leagues in the French New Wave, “in one way, at least, he always stayed faith­ful to the spir­it of the nou­velle vague: through­out his life, Rohmer did­n’t just film Paris, he doc­u­ment­ed it.” Cut­ting up and delib­er­ate­ly re-arrang­ing thou­sands of pieces of image and sound in Rohmer’s dozens of shorts and fea­tures, plac­ing side-by-side shots of the same Parisian spaces years and even decades apart, Mis­ek shows us how Rohmer cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly illus­trates “one of the basic truths about urban exis­tence: in cities, humans’ lives inter­sect every day. But most of these inter­sec­tions are tran­si­to­ry, crossed paths between two peo­ple fol­low­ing dif­fer­ent tra­jec­to­ries.”

Rohmer did­n’t always film in Paris. As his career went on, he told more sto­ries that depart from the city, but then, those sto­ries also usu­al­ly return to it: ulti­mate­ly, almost all of his char­ac­ters find that “Paris can­not be tran­scend­ed.” Watch just one of Rohmer’s films, and you’ll see how lit­tle inter­est he has in roman­ti­ciz­ing the City of Light, yet the words of one char­ac­ter in Full Moon in Paris might also be his own: “The air is foul, but I can breathe,” he declares. “I need to be at the cen­ter, in the cen­ter of a coun­try, in a city cen­ter that’s almost the cen­ter of the world.”

Just as Rohmer demon­strates the inex­haustibil­i­ty of Paris with his fil­mog­ra­phy, Mis­ek demon­strates the inex­haustibil­i­ty of that fil­mog­ra­phy with Rohmer in Paris, which he has recent­ly released into the pub­lic domain and made free to watch online. It pro­vides real insight into the work of Éric Rohmer, the city in which he became a cinephile and then a film­mak­er, and how the two repeat­ed­ly inter­sect with one anoth­er over the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of the 21st. But it also implies an answer, in the affir­ma­tive, to anoth­er, more gen­er­al propo­si­tion that Mis­ek rais­es ear­ly in the essay: “I can’t help but won­der if cinephil­ia is a jour­ney with­out end.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tui­leries: The Coen Broth­ers’ Short Film About Steve Buscemi’s Very Bad Day in the Paris Metro

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Port­land, the City in Cin­e­ma: See the City of Ros­es as it Appears in 20 Dif­fer­ent Films

Van­cou­ver Nev­er Plays Itself

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

Igor Stravinsky Remembers the “Riotous” Premiere of His Rite of Spring in 1913: “They Were Very Shocked. They Were Naive and Stupid People.”

in Dance, Music | April 25th, 2018

It can be a lit­tle hard to take the word “riot” seri­ous­ly when applied to a con­tentious bal­let per­for­mance, giv­en how reg­u­lar­ly we now see police with machine guns, shields, and tanks rolling down city streets to over­pow­er protest­ing cit­i­zens. But that is the word that has come down to us for the fra­cas that greet­ed the debut of Serge Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913. The idea of a riot seems all the more incon­gru­ous, and fun­ny, when con­sid­ered in the light of Jean Cocteau’s descrip­tion of the crowd:

The smart audi­ence in tails and tulle, dia­monds and ospreys, was inter­spersed with the suits and ban­deaux of the aes­thet­ic crowd. The lat­ter would applaud nov­el­ty sim­ply to show their con­tempt for the peo­ple in the box­es… Innu­mer­able shades of snob­bery, super-snob­bery and invert­ed snob­bery were rep­re­sent­ed.

This Parisian smart set came togeth­er on that evening of May 29th expect­ing “some­thing poten­tial­ly out­ra­geous,” writes The Tele­graph’s clas­si­cal crit­ic Ivan Hewett. Diaghilev’s Bal­let Russ­es had pre­vi­ous­ly “entranced and shocked Paris.”

Stravin­sky was acquir­ing a rep­u­ta­tion as a musi­cal provo­ca­teur, hav­ing built his score for 1910’s The Fire­bird around the dis­so­nant “Devil’s Inter­val.” Nonethe­less, as the Rock­et­boom video below, “The Riot of Spring,” explains, audi­ences packed into the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées had no prepa­ra­tion for what they would see, and hear, when the cur­tain arose.

And what was that? A “high, almost stran­gled bas­soon melody,” Hewett writes, “soon draped with flut­ter­ing, twit­ter­ing wood­wind sounds” set to “pul­sat­ing rhythms.” Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Vaslav Nijinsky’s dancers “seemed pulled down to earth. Their strange, jerky move­ments and awk­ward pos­es defied every canon of grace­ful­ness.” The audi­ence react­ed imme­di­ate­ly, shout­ing and attack­ing one anoth­er: “canes were bran­dished like men­ac­ing imple­ments of com­bat all over the the­ater.” Stravin­sky him­self remem­bers the the­ater­go­ers reac­tions with dis­dain in a short inter­view excerpt at the top.

“The storm broke,” he says, once the cur­tain opened on a group of “knock-kneed… Loli­tas jump­ing up and down.” The audi­ence “came for Scheherazade or Cleopa­tra, and they saw Le Sacre du Print­emps. They were very shocked. They were very naïve and stu­pid peo­ple.” Did Stravin­sky real­ly not antic­i­pate the degree of unrest his weird, dis­so­nant bal­let might pro­voke? It seems not. He hoped it would be a big­ger hit than his wide­ly-praised Petrush­ka of three years ear­li­er. “From all indi­ca­tions,” he had writ­ten to set design­er Nicholas Roerich, “I can see that this piece is bound to ‘emerge’ in a way that rarely hap­pens.” This proved true, but not at all in the way he meant it.

For his part, writes Hewett, Diaghilev “was hop­ing for some­thing more than an emer­gence. He want­ed a scan­dal.” James Wol­cott, in his account of the evening, Wild in the Seats, argues that the Russ­ian impre­sario had “a genius for pub­lic­i­ty that wouldn’t be matched until the advent of Andy Warhol and the pop cult of celebri­ty.” He knew he need­ed to rat­tle the “jad­ed ele­gants,” who “weren’t going to be stim­u­lat­ed by the same melt­ing, yearn­ing pan­tomime in pointe shoes.” The Rite of Spring pre­miere remains the most infa­mous scan­dal in the his­to­ry of bal­let to this day.

But while the sophis­ti­cates bat­tled it out in the aisles, scream­ing over the orches­tra, pulling down each other’s top hats, it’s said, and chal­leng­ing each oth­er to duels, a few spec­ta­tors, Cocteau includ­ed, sat entranced by the per­for­mance. The work, he lat­er wrote, “is, and will remain, a mas­ter­piece: a sym­pho­ny impreg­nat­ed with wild pathos, with earth in the throes of birth, nois­es of farm and camp, lit­tle melodies that come to us out of the depths of the cen­turies, the pant­i­ng of cat­tle, pro­found con­vul­sions of nature, pre­his­toric geor­gics.”

See the open­ing move­ments per­formed above by the Jof­frey Bal­let in 1987, and imag­ine your­self in the midst of Paris’s high­est soci­ety con­vuls­ing in a riotous out­cry. What was so upset­ting? “Per­haps the riot was a sign of dis­qui­et,” Hewett spec­u­lates, “a feel­ing that that the world had lost its moor­ings, and that bar­barism was about to be let loose in the streets.” Accord­ing to eye­wit­ness­es, some dis­turbed spec­ta­tors even called in the police. You can learn much more about this fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry at the free Har­vard edX course, “Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: Mod­ernism, Bal­let, and Riots.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion

Stravinsky’s “Ille­gal” Arrange­ment of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” (1944)

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

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

Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov Relives His Four Most Memorable Games

in Games | April 25th, 2018

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Many con­sid­er Gar­ry Kas­parov one of the great­est chess play­ers of all time. And for good rea­son. In 1985, at the age of 22, Kas­parov defeat­ed the reign­ing cham­pi­on Ana­toly Kar­pov. From that moment, until his retire­ment in 2005, he dom­i­nat­ed. For the next 225 out of 228 months, he was the #1 ranked play­er in the game. Above, in a video cre­at­ed by The New York­er, Kas­parov “replays some of his most unfor­get­table games,” and “relives the hap­pi­est and the most painful moments of his career,” includ­ing:

• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Ana­toly Kar­pov: World Cham­pi­onship Match 1985
• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Ana­toly Kar­pov: World Cham­pi­onship Match 1987
• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Viswanathan Anand: PCA-GP Cred­it Suisse Rapid Final Blitz Play­off 1996
• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Deep Blue: I.B.M. Man vs. Machine 1997

In recent months, Kas­parov has also cre­at­ed an online course for Mas­ter­class, Gar­ry Kas­parov Teach­es Chess, which–in 29 video lessons–offers a deep­er explo­ration of his chess the­o­ry, tac­tics, and strat­e­gy.

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:

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Plain Eng­lish

Clay­ma­tion Film Recre­ates His­toric Chess Match Immor­tal­ized in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920 (and It’s Now Re-Issued for the Rest of Us)

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Mar­cel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

Watch Bill Gates Lose a Chess Match in 79 Sec­onds to the New World Chess Cham­pi­on Mag­nus Carlsen

The Science of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promises to Enhance Your Appreciation of the Timeless Beverage

in Food & Drink, MOOCs, Online Courses | April 25th, 2018

The brew­ing of beer is as old as agri­cul­ture, which is to say as old as set­tled civ­i­liza­tion. The old­est recipe we know of dates to 1800 B.C. Over cen­turies, beer moved up and down the class lad­der depend­ing on its pri­ma­ry con­sumers. Medieval monks brewed many fine vari­eties and were renowned for their tech­nique. Beer descend­ed into pubs and row­dy beer halls, whet­ting the whis­tles not only of farm­ers, sol­diers, sailors, and pil­grims, but also of burghers and a bud­ding indus­tri­al work­force. Dur­ing the age of mod­ern empire, beer became, on both sides of the Atlantic, the bev­er­age of work­ing-class sports fans in bleach­ers and La-Z-Boys.

A craft beer Renais­sance at the end of last cen­tu­ry brought back a monk­ish mys­tique to this most ancient bev­er­age, turn­ing beer into wine, so to speak, with com­pa­ra­ble lev­els of con­nois­seur­ship. Beer bars became gal­leries of fine pol­ished brass, pun­gent, fruity aro­mas, dark and seri­ous wood appoint­ments. Craft beer is fun—with its quirky names and labels—it is also intim­i­dat­ing, in the breadth of com­pli­cat­ed con­coc­tions on offer. (Hip­sters and penu­ri­ous rev­el­ers revolt­ed, made a fetish of Pab­st Blue Rib­bon, Milwaukee’s Best, and ye olde malt liquor.)

“Has craft beer peaked?” won­ders The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Rachel Siegel. You can prob­a­bly guess from the ques­tion that most trends point to “yes.” But as long as there is wheat, bar­ley, and hops, we will have beer, no mat­ter who is drink­ing it and where. One last­ing effect of beer’s high­brow few decades remains: a pop­u­lar schol­ar­ly appre­ci­a­tion for its cul­ture and com­po­si­tion. You can study the typog­ra­phy of beer, for exam­ple, as Print mag­a­zine has done in recent years. A new online course applies the tools of empir­i­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal research to beer drink­ing.

“The Sci­ence of Beer,” taught by a cadre of stu­dent teach­ers from Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty in Hol­land, explores “how [beer is] made, the raw mate­ri­als used, its sup­ply chain, how it’s mar­ket­ed and the effect of beer con­sump­tion on your body.” (This last point—in a world turned against sug­ar, carbs, and gluten—being part­ly the rea­son for craft beer’s decline.) Should your voice qua­ver when you approach the upscale reclaimed wal­nut bar and sur­vey unfa­mil­iar lagers, ales, stouts, bocks, porters, and hefeweizens… should you hes­i­tate at Whole Foods when faced with a wall of bev­er­ages with names like incan­ta­tions, this free class may set you at ease.

Not only will you learn about the dif­fer­ent types of beer, but “after this course, tast­ing a beer will be an entire­ly new sen­sa­tion: you will enjoy it even more since you will bet­ter under­stand what’s inside your drink.” Enroll­ment for the 5‑week course began this past Mon­day and the class is cur­rent­ly open and free. (Make sure you select the “Audit” option for the free ver­sion of the course.) You should expect to devote 2 to 4 hours per week to “The Sci­ence of Beer.” Please, study respon­si­bly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

The Art and Sci­ence of Beer

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

200+ Films by Indigenous Directors Now Free to View Online: A New Archive Launched by the National Film Board of Canada

in Film | April 24th, 2018

The strug­gles of First Nations peo­ples in Cana­da have loomed large in the news, show­ing a far harsh­er side of a coun­try Amer­i­cans tend to car­i­ca­ture as a land of bland nice­ness, hock­ey fan­dom, and social­ized med­i­cine. Huge num­bers of miss­ing and mur­dered indige­nous women, high rates of sui­cide, a mul­ti­tude of health crises, and—as in the U.S.—the ongo­ing encroach­ment onto Indige­nous lands by tox­ic pipelines and oil­sands devel­op­ment…..

As with issues affect­ing oth­er belea­guered com­mu­ni­ties across the globe, suf­fer­ing from the con­tin­ued depre­da­tions of colo­nial­ism and cap­i­tal­ism, these prob­lems can seem so over­whelm­ing that we don’t know how to begin to under­stand them. As always, the arts offer a way in—through human­iz­ing por­traits and inti­mate rev­e­la­tions, through detailed and com­pas­sion­ate sto­ries, through cre­ativ­i­ty, humor, and beau­ty.

In March of this year, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da launched an “exten­sive online library of over 200 films by Indige­nous direc­tors,” reports the CBC, “part of a three-year Indige­nous Action Plan to ‘rede­fine’ the NFB’s rela­tion­ship with Indige­nous peo­ples.” You can read the NFB’s plan here, a response to “the work and rec­om­men­da­tions of the Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion of Cana­da.”

Their free online film col­lec­tion is search­able by sub­ject, direc­tor, or Indige­nous peo­ple or nation, writes Native News Online, and “many of the films in this col­lec­tion are cur­rent­ly being screened in com­mu­ni­ties right across Cana­da as part of the #Aabizi­ing­washi (#WideAwake) Indige­nous cin­e­ma screen­ing series.”

Some of the high­lights of the col­lec­tion include Ala­nis Obomsawin’s The Peo­ple of the Kat­tawapiskak Riv­er (top), a 2012 doc­u­men­tary that Judith Schuyler, of the Toron­to-based Imag­i­ne­NA­TIVE film orga­ni­za­tion, describes as “high­light­ing the gov­ern­ment, the dia­mond mines and the sky­rock­et­ing freight costs as the con­tribut­ing fac­tors keep­ing the [Kat­tawapiskak] com­mu­ni­ty in impov­er­ished third world con­di­tions.” Below it, see Lumaa­ju­uq, a beau­ti­ful­ly-ani­mat­ed short 2010 film by Alethea Arnaquq-Bar­il that tells the Inu­it sto­ry of “The Blind Man and the Loon.”

Fur­ther up, see First Stories—Two Spir­it­ed, a 2007 film by Sharon A. Des­jar­lais that film­mak­er Bret­ten Han­nam describes as “a mes­sage of hope and heal­ing not only for two-spir­it peo­ple, but for all indige­nous peo­ple,” and, just above, Den­nis Allen’s CBQM, a doc­u­men­tary about a radio sta­tion in Fort McPher­son, North­west Ter­ri­to­ries, which ImagineNative’s Jason Ryle describes as “a ten­der, inti­mate por­trait of a north­ern com­mu­ni­ty.”

Native News Online and the CBC list sev­er­al oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions from the col­lec­tion, or you can sim­ply dive in and start watch­ing here. Also, check out this crash course on ris­ing Indige­nous film­mak­ers. And if at any point you feel inspired to don the garb of a First Nations peo­ple and hit the clubs or music fes­ti­vals, well, maybe heed the ultra-short pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment, “Naked Island—Hipster Head­dress,” below, and “Just Don’t Do It.”

via @sheerly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

265 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online 

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc. 

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czecho­slo­va­kia (1930–1989)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ate a List of 38 Essen­tial Films About Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy

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

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Recorded in 1913: Caught Between the Traditional and the Modern

in Film, History | April 24th, 2018

What cities have, over the past cen­tu­ry, defined in our imag­i­na­tions the very con­cept of the city? Obvi­ous choic­es include New York and Lon­don, and here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured his­toric street-lev­el footage of both (New York in 1911, Lon­don between 1890 and 1920) that vivid­ly reveals how, even over a hun­dred years ago, they’d already matured as com­mer­cial­ly, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, and demo­graph­i­cal­ly impres­sive metrop­o­lis­es. At the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, the 6.5 mil­lion-strong Lon­don ranked as the most pop­u­lous city on Earth, and New York had over­tak­en it with­in a few decades. But by the mid-1960s, a new con­tender had sud­den­ly risen to the top spot: Tokyo.

His­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, of course, the word “new” does­n’t quite apply to the Japan­ese cap­i­tal, since as a set­tled area it goes back to the third mil­len­ni­um BC. But Tokyo did­n’t become the cap­i­tal, effec­tive­ly, until 1869 (not that even today’s denizens of Kyoto, the coun­try’s pre­vi­ous cap­i­tal, seem ever to have ced­ed the dis­tinc­tion in their own minds), around the same time that the pre­vi­ous­ly closed-off island nation opened up to the rest of the world. Pro­vid­ed by Ams­ter­dam’s EYE Film­mu­se­um, the footage at the top of the post dates from less than half a cen­tu­ry there­after and con­veys some­thing of what it must have felt like to live in not just a coun­try zeal­ous­ly engaged in the project of mod­ern­iza­tion, but in the very cen­ter of that project.

These clips were shot on the streets of Tokyo in 1913 and 1915, just after the death of Emper­or Mei­ji, who since 1868 had presided over the so-called Mei­ji Restora­tion. That peri­od saw not just a re-con­sol­i­da­tion of pow­er under the Emper­or, but an assim­i­la­tion of all things West­ern — or at least an assim­i­la­tion of all things West­ern that offi­cial Japan saw as advan­ta­geous in its mis­sion to “catch up” with the exist­ing world pow­ers. For the cit­i­zens of Tokyo, these, most benign­ly, includ­ed urban parks: “Japan­ese enjoy to the fullest the plea­sures afford­ed by the numer­ous parks of the Empire,” says one of the film’s title cards. “Uyeno Park, Tokio, is a very pop­u­lar place, espe­cial­ly on Sun­day after­noons.” But then, going by what we see in the footage, every place in Tokyo seems pop­u­lar.

On the brink of thor­ough­go­ing urban­iza­tion, the cityscape includes shrines, wood­block prints, signs and ban­ners filled to burst­ing with text (and pre­sum­ably col­or), and hand-paint­ed adver­tise­ments for the then-nov­el­ty of the motion pic­ture. The Toky­oites inhab­it­ing it wear tra­di­tion­al kimono as well as the occa­sion­al West­ern suit and hat. Young men pull rick­shaws and ride bicy­cles (those lat­ter hav­ing grown much more numer­ous since). Peri­patet­ic mer­chants sell their wares from enor­mous wood­en frames strapped to their backs. Count­less chil­dren, both in and out of school uni­form, stare curi­ous­ly at the cam­era. None, sure­ly, could imag­ine the destruc­tion soon to come with the 1923 Kan­to Earth­quake, let alone the fire­bomb­ing of World War II — nor the aston­ish­ing­ly fast devel­op­ment there­after that would, by the time of the reborn city’s 1964 Olympic Games, make it the largest in the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

Enter an Online Interactive Documentary on M.C. Escher’s Art & Life, Narrated By Peter Greenaway

in Art | April 23rd, 2018

Despite their enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty, the enig­mat­ic works of Dutch artist M.C. Esch­er have not, per­haps, received their due in the high art world. But he is beloved by col­lege-dorm-room-dec­o­ra­tors, Haight-Ash­bury hip­pies, math­e­mati­cians, doc­tors, and den­tists, who put his art on their walls, says Micky Pil­lar, for­mer cura­tor of the Esch­er Muse­um in The Hague, because “they think it’s a great way of get­ting peo­ple engaged and for­get­ting about real­i­ty.” Math­e­mat­i­cal giants Roger Pen­rose and HSM Cox­eter “were daz­zled by Escher’s work as stu­dents in 1954,” notes The Guardian’s Maev Kennedy. Mick Jag­ger was a huge fan, though Esch­er turned him down when asked to draw an album cov­er, annoyed at being addressed by his first name (Mau­rits).

Esch­er, says Ian Dejardin—director of the Dul­wich Pic­ture Gallery in London—“may have been the only per­son in the world who had nev­er heard of the Rolling Stones.” It wasn’t that he ignored the world around him, but that he focused his career on invent­ing anoth­er one, tak­ing inspi­ra­tion first from the Ital­ian coun­try­side and cityscapes, after set­tling in Rome, and lat­er turn­ing to what he called “men­tal imagery”: the para­dox­i­cal por­traits, fan­tas­ti­cal shift­ing shapes, and mind-bend­ing pat­terns, so absorb­ing that peo­ple in wait­ing rooms for­get their dis­com­fort and anx­i­ety when look­ing at them.

One of the most famous of such works, 1939’s Meta­mor­pho­sis II, owes its cre­ation to the his­tor­i­cal pres­sures of Ital­ian fas­cism and the geo­met­ric fas­ci­na­tions of Islam­ic art. After leav­ing Rome in 1935 as polit­i­cal ten­sions rose, Esch­er found him­self inspired by his sec­ond vis­it to The Alham­bra in Spain. Its “lav­ish tile work,” as the Nation­al Gallery of Art writes, “sug­gest­ed new direc­tions in the use of col­or and the flat­tened pat­tern­ing of inter­lock­ing forms.” So intri­cate and tech­ni­cal­ly daz­zling is the four-meter-long print that it mer­its an in-depth look at its con­text and com­po­si­tion.

That’s exact­ly what you’ll find at a new “inter­ac­tive doc­u­men­tary” on Meta­mor­pho­sis II, by the mak­ers of a sim­i­lar fea­ture on Hierony­mus Bosch’s Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights. The online resource lets users scroll across the print, zoom­ing in to an extra­or­di­nary lev­el of detail, or zoom­ing out to see how it tran­si­tions sec­tion by sec­tion, from the word “meta­mor­phose,” to a checker­board pat­tern, to lizards, hon­ey­combs, bees, hum­ming­birds, fish, etc.. Along the way, you can click on lit­tle col­ored hexa­gons (that trans­form into cubes) and bring up short arti­cles on Escher’s life and aspects of the work at hand. Each of these fea­turettes is nar­rat­ed (in the Eng­lish ver­sion) by British film­mak­er and artist Peter Green­away. Once you open one of these explana­to­ry win­dows, a nav­i­ga­tion tool (above) appears at the bot­tom of the screen.

We see how the var­i­ous ani­mals in Escher’s “sys­tem­at­ic tes­sel­la­tions,” as he called them, were cho­sen by virtue of their shape as well as Escher’s inter­est in their life cycles and meth­ods of orga­ni­za­tion. “Nature was a source of won­drous beau­ty for Esch­er,” the doc­u­men­tary explains. “In his jour­nals and let­ters, he often wrote about what sur­prised, amazed or moved him” in the nat­ur­al world. Some of the Meta­mor­pho­sis II sec­tions appeared in lat­er works like 1943’s Rep­tiles. Esch­er drew atten­tion both to the nat­ur­al world’s vari­ety and its genius for repeat­ed pat­terns. But the move­ment from one ani­mal to the next has noth­ing to do with zool­o­gy.

Esch­er delight­ed in play­ing “mind asso­ci­a­tion games.” We learn that as a child, “he would lie in bed and think of two sub­jects for which he had to cre­ate a log­i­cal con­nec­tion.” In one exam­ple he gave, he would attempt to find his way from “a tram con­duc­tor to a kitchen chair.” Meta­mor­pho­sis II gives us a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of such games, men­tal leaps that chal­lenge our sense of the order of things. The doc­u­men­tary sit­u­ates this fas­ci­nat­ing work in a his­tor­i­cal and aes­thet­ic con­text that allows us to make sense of it while adding to our appre­ci­a­tion for its strange­ness, offer­ing sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ways of approach­ing the work, as well as an invi­ta­tion to make your own.

One fea­ture, the “Meta­mor­pho­sis Machine,” lets you choose from a selec­tion of start­ing and end­ing pat­terns. Then it fills in the trans­for­ma­tion in the mid­dle. The results are hard­ly Esch­er-qual­i­ty, but they are a fun and acces­si­ble way of under­stand­ing the work of an artist whose vision can seem for­bid­ding, with its impos­si­ble spaces and dis­ori­ent­ing trans­for­ma­tions. Enter the Meta­mor­pho­sis II inter­ac­tive doc­u­men­tary here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

M.C. Esch­er Cov­er Art for Great Books by Ita­lo Calvi­no, George Orwell & Jorge Luis Borges

Watch M.C. Esch­er Make His Final Artis­tic Cre­ation in the 1971 Doc­u­men­tary Adven­tures in Per­cep­tion

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

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

Watch the Trailer for a Stunning New 70-Millimeter Print of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Released by Christopher Nolan on the Film’s 50th Anniversary

in Film | April 23rd, 2018

Sure, you’ve prob­a­bly seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. But have you expe­ri­enced 2001: A Space Odyssey? That par­tic­u­lar verb no doubt implies dif­fer­ent con­di­tions to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Maybe it means hav­ing seen the film dur­ing its ini­tial 1968 release. Maybe it means hav­ing seen it at a cer­tain… height of con­scious­ness. Maybe it means hav­ing seen it in the large-for­mat Cin­era­ma screen­ings that hap­pened again when it was re-released dur­ing the actu­al year 2001 — as I did, not hav­ing been born yet in 1968. Nei­ther was Christo­pher Nolan, who, per­haps for that rea­son, has struck a brand new 70-mil­lime­ter print of Stan­ley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s sin­gu­lar vision of a human­i­ty thrust into pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­in­able encoun­ters with intel­li­gences both extrater­res­tri­al and arti­fi­cial.

“The film took for grant­ed a broad cul­tur­al tol­er­ance, if not an appetite, for enig­ma, as well as the time and incli­na­tion for pars­ing inter­pre­tive mys­ter­ies,” writes Dan Chi­as­son in a recent New York­er piece on 2001’s 50th anniver­sary. “If the first wave of audi­ences was baf­fled, it might have been because 2001 had not yet cre­at­ed the taste it required to be appre­ci­at­ed. Like Ulysses, or The Waste Land, or count­less oth­er dif­fi­cult, ambigu­ous mod­ernist land­marks, 2001 forged its own con­text. You didn’t solve it by watch­ing it a sec­ond time, but you did set­tle into its mys­ter­ies.”

Half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, 2001 stands as one of the most firm­ly dri­ven pil­lars of cin­e­mat­ic cul­ture — a mono­lith, you might say — and one of the most suc­cess­ful film direc­tors alive has invit­ed us all to share in his wor­ship at its base.

“One of my ear­li­est mem­o­ries of cin­e­ma is see­ing Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in 70mm, at the Leices­ter Square The­atre in Lon­don with my father,” Nolan says in the press mate­ri­als for the release of the new print. “This is a true pho­to­chem­i­cal film recre­ation. There are no dig­i­tal tricks, remas­tered effects, or revi­sion­ist edits. This is the unre­stored film — that recre­ates the cin­e­mat­ic event that audi­ences expe­ri­enced fifty years ago. ” You can see its trail­er at the top of the post, and if you’ll hap­pen to be at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val next month, you might con­sid­er catch­ing its pre­miere screen­ing on May 12th. If not, its wider release begins in Amer­i­can the­aters on May 18th, so do keep an eye on your local art-house list­ings, espe­cial­ly for those art hous­es equipped to screen in 70-mil­lime­ter, a for­mat that makes “the ulti­mate trip,” as 2001’s late-60s posters hasti­ly re-brand­ed it, that much more so.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Gets a Brand New Trail­er to Cel­e­brate Its Dig­i­tal Re-Release

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

The Salvador Dalí Action Figure

in Art | April 23rd, 2018

First came the Fri­da Kahlo Action Fig­ure, the Edvard Munch Scream Action Fig­ure, and the Vin­cent Van Gogh Action Fig­ure, Com­plete with Detach­able Ear. And soon they can all pal around with the Sal­vador Dalí Action Fig­ure.

With six days to go, 693 back­ers have pledged $15,676 to a Kick­starter cam­paign that’s hop­ing to raise a total of $26,158. Should they reach that goal, a com­pa­ny called Today Is Art Day will put into pro­duc­tion a charm­ing Dali fig­ure. Stand­ing five inch­es tall, the fig­ure “comes with 3 sets of wacky inter­change­able mus­tach­es” and “deluxe mus­tach­es made of stain­less steel.” The Dalí fig­ure “holds his sig­na­ture melt­ing clock,” and there are five Dalí mas­ter­pieces to dis­play on a minia­ture easel. Appar­ent­ly endorsed by the Gala-Sal­vador Dalí Foun­da­tion, the fig­ure should go into pro­duc­tion this August. Help Kick­start things here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing the Librar­i­an Action Fig­ure: The Caped Cru­sad­er Who Fights Against Anti-Intel­lec­tu­al­ism, Igno­rance & Cen­sor­ship Every­where

The Edvard Munch Scream Action Fig­ure

The Fri­da Kahlo Action Fig­ure

The Vin­cent Van Gogh Action Fig­ure, Com­plete with Detach­able Ear

Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911

in Film, History | April 20th, 2018

Oth­er than one or two of the world’s super­cente­nar­i­ans, nobody remem­bers New York in 1911. Plen­ty of liv­ing his­to­ri­ans and enthu­si­asts of the city have paid inten­sive atten­tion to that boom­ing time peri­od when the city’s pop­u­la­tion fast approached five mil­lion, but none expe­ri­enced it first-hand. They, and we, can get no clos­er to it than watch­ing the footage above, orig­i­nal­ly shot by a Swedish doc­u­men­tary team which set out to cap­ture the most cel­e­brat­ed places in the world at the time, a list also includ­ing Nia­gara Falls, Paris, Monte Car­lo, and Venice. The prac­ti­cal­ly immac­u­late con­di­tion of the film high­lights both the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between the street life of New York over a cen­tu­ry ago and of New York today.

Take a look at the tai­lored or tai­lored-look­ing cloth­ing on near­ly every­one, even the one-legged man mak­ing his delib­er­ate way past the Chi­nese gro­cery. Then as now, most New York­ers got around on foot, and since the city’s first sub­way line had opened just sev­en years before, the dom­i­nant pub­lic tran­sit options remained street­cars and ele­vat­ed trains.

In the realm of pri­vate vehi­cles, horse-drawn car­riages had only just begun to give way to motor­cars. (Since 1911 was still the age of silent film, the ambi­ent sound of all this was added lat­er.) “Take note of the sur­pris­ing and remark­ably time­less expres­sion of bore­dom exhib­it­ed by a young girl filmed as she was chauf­feured along Broad­way in the front seat of a con­vert­ible lim­ou­sine,” says the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s notes.

MoMA, which exhib­it­ed the footage last year, also points out famil­iar land­marks: “Open­ing and clos­ing with shots of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, the film also includes New York Har­bor; Bat­tery Park and the John Eric­s­son stat­ue; the ele­vat­ed rail­ways at Bow­ery and Worth Streets; Broad­way sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flat­iron Build­ing on Fifth Avenue; and Madi­son Avenue.” Any mod­ern New York­er halfway inter­est­ed in the city will know all those places, and even if the city has changed in count­less oth­er ways, they’ll sense the very same char­ac­ter­is­tic vital­i­ty in these clips that they feel there today. Will New York­ers of the future have the same reac­tion, to, say, the Japan­ese high-def­i­n­i­tion video demo footage shot on those very same streets in the 1990s? It’ll take about eighty years to find out. We prob­a­bly won’t be here by then, but New York cer­tain­ly will.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1905 Video Shows New York City Sub­way Trav­el­ing From 14th St. to 42nd Street

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.