Watch the Trailer for a “Fully Painted” Van Gogh Film: Features 12 Oil Paintings Per Second by 100+ Painters

in Animation, Art, Film | February 27th, 2016

Lov­ing Vin­cent, an homage to Vin­cent van Gogh, promis­es to be “the first ful­ly paint­ed fea­ture film in the world.” What does that mean exact­ly? Accord­ing to film­mak­ers Doro­ta Kobiela and Hugh Welch­man, every frame of Lov­ing Vin­cent will be an oil paint­ing on can­vas, cre­at­ed with the same tech­niques Van Gogh used over a cen­tu­ry ago. To make these frames, Kobiela and Welch­man plan to hire skilled painters and put them through a 3‑week inten­sive train­ing course, teach­ing each to paint like Van Gogh him­self. Or so that’s how they explained things dur­ing their Kick­starter cam­paign sev­er­al years ago.

Although pro­duc­tion is still ongo­ing, you can see the first fruits of their labors. Above, watch a trail­er for Lov­ing Vin­cent, which fea­tures (accord­ing to the Youtube blurb accom­pa­ny­ing the video) “12 oil paint­ings per sec­ond, all done by over 100 painters trained in the same style.”

If you’re a tal­ent­ed painter and want to con­tribute to mak­ing this orig­i­nal film (you can get an idea of what that looks like below), please vis­it the Lov­ing Vin­cent web­site and scroll down to the recruit­ment sec­tion. The site also includes oth­er mate­r­i­al that takes you inside the mak­ing of this inno­v­a­tive film.

Enjoy…

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

Gershwin Plays Gershwin: Hear the Original Recording of Rhapsody in Blue, with the Composer Himself at the Piano (1924)

in Music | February 26th, 2016

There are a great many com­po­si­tions I can nev­er hear again the way I did the first time around. Aaron Copland’s Amer­i­can sym­phonies, for example—sentimental child­hood favorites that once evoked mem­o­ries of land­scapes I knew well—have since become insep­a­ra­ble from adver­tise­ments for the meat indus­try and oth­er dis­agree­able things. Many oth­er icon­ic pieces of music from major com­posers have become woven into the fab­ric of mar­ket­ing that blan­kets our lives, in part because many of those pieces don’t require expen­sive per­mis­sions for their use. Anoth­er unfor­get­table exam­ple: George Gershwin’s Rhap­sody in Blue, the jazz con­cer­to from 1924 that I can­not hear with­out think­ing of “spa­cious seat­ing options and thought­ful inflight ameni­ties,” care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed for my com­fort and con­ve­nience.

But if there is some way to recov­er the puri­ty of hear­ing Gershwin’s piece for the first time, no bet­ter one exists than the abridged record­ings we have here, which rep­re­sent some of what the very first audi­ences of Rhap­sody in Blue heard in 1924, includ­ing Gersh­win him­self play­ing the piano.

They also rep­re­sent exact­ly what the first lis­ten­ers of Gershwin’s piece on record heard—the rather thin sound we’ve come to asso­ciate with ear­ly audio tech­nol­o­gy, which did not fea­ture any elec­tron­ics until 1925. Up until then, small clas­si­cal ensem­bles, opera singers, and jazz and rag­time bands would stand around a horn, with engi­neers plac­ing them for­ward or back depend­ing on their empha­sis. (Some jazz record­ings with mul­ti­ple soloists were made on rotat­ing plat­forms for this pur­pose). As the musi­cians played, a vibrat­ing diaphragm moved the sty­lus, mechan­i­cal­ly etch­ing the per­for­mance onto the record. At the top of the post, you can hear a mod­ern remas­ter that removes most of the noise of the orig­i­nal, which is in two parts above and below.

In addi­tion to Gersh­win, the record­ing also fea­tures the orig­i­nal clar­inetist, Ross Gor­man, who played that famous open­ing glis­san­do at the debut of Rhap­sody in Blue on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1924, at New York’s Aeo­lian Hall. Gersh­win’s piece was the cap­stone of an event billed as an “Exper­i­ment in Mod­ern Music,” orga­nized by Paul White­man, who con­duct­ed the orches­tra onstage and record. The pur­pose of the event, writes History.com, was to “demon­strate that the rel­a­tive­ly new form of music called jazz deserved to be regard­ed as a seri­ous and sophis­ti­cat­ed art form.” It sounds con­de­scend­ing, to say the least, but it brought us Gershwin’s won­der­ful com­po­si­tion and helped him “tran­scend the cat­e­go­ry of pop­u­lar music” and become a well-regard­ed com­pos­er. New York Times crit­ic Olin Downes wrote of Rhap­sody in Blue, with its “out­ra­geous caden­za of the clar­inet,” that the “com­po­si­tion shows extra­or­di­nary tal­ent, just as it also shows a young com­pos­er with aims that go far beyond those of his ilk.”

Cer­tain­ly those of Gershwin’s “ilk” made their own extra­or­di­nary con­tri­bu­tions to mod­ern Amer­i­can music, as did Gersh­win him­self in Broad­way show after show. But Gershwin’s inter­est in bring­ing jazz to the clas­si­cal world has been shared by oth­er famous jazz com­posers, from Duke Elling­ton to Charles Min­gus. The results may not “tran­scend” more straight-ahead jazz in some hier­ar­chi­cal sense, but they inno­vate in the way that the very best “exper­i­ments in mod­ern music” do, by bold­ly putting two or more forms in con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er. In Gershwin’s piece, we hear jazz and clas­si­cal fig­ures argue and come to terms, jostling against each oth­er as they come together—the laugh­ing clar­inet, pompous brass, roman­tic piano—producing the kind of gen­teel ten­sion that… dammit, I guess is pret­ty well rep­re­sent­ed by reclin­ing in an air­plane seat, 30,000 feet above the ground.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ella Fitzger­ald Sings ‘Sum­mer­time’ by George Gersh­win, Berlin 1968

Such Sweet Thun­der: Duke Elling­ton & Bil­ly Strayhorn’s Musi­cal Trib­ute to Shake­speare (1957)

Charles Min­gus Explains in His Gram­my-Win­ning Essay “What is a Jazz Com­pos­er?”

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

How Chris Marker’s Radical SciFi Film, La Jetée, Changed the Life of Cyberpunk Prophet, William Gibson

in Film, Sci Fi | February 26th, 2016

Every­one remem­bers the first time they saw La Jetée. For cyber­space- and cyber­punk-defin­ing writer William Gib­son, author of such sui gener­is sci­ence-fic­tion nov­els as Neu­ro­mancer, Vir­tu­al Light, and Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion, that life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence came in the ear­ly 1970s, dur­ing a film his­to­ry course at the Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia. “Noth­ing I had read or seen had pre­pared me for it,” he tells The Guardian in a reflec­tion on the lega­cy of Chris Mark­er’s “thrilling and prophet­ic” 1962 short film, a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic time-trav­el love sto­ry told almost entire­ly with still pho­tos. (You can get a taste of it from the short clip above and a longer one here.) “Or per­haps every­thing had, which is essen­tial­ly the same thing.”

I can’t remem­ber anoth­er sin­gle work of art ever hav­ing had that imme­di­ate and pow­er­ful an impact, which of course makes the expe­ri­ence quite impos­si­ble to describe. As I expe­ri­enced it, I think, it drove me, as RD Laing had it, out of my wretched mind. I left the lec­ture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, pro­found­ly alone. I do know that I knew imme­di­ate­ly that my sense of what sci­ence fic­tion could be had been per­ma­nent­ly altered.

Part of what I find remark­able about this mem­o­ry today was the tem­po­ral­ly her­met­ic nature of the expe­ri­ence. I saw it, yet was effec­tive­ly unable to see it again. It would be over a decade before I would hap­pen to see it again, on tele­vi­sion, its screen­ing a rare event. See­ing a short for­eign film, then, could be the equiv­a­lent of see­ing a UFO, the expe­ri­ence sur­viv­ing only as mem­o­ry. The world of cul­tur­al arte­facts was only atem­po­ral in the­o­ry then, not yet lit­er­al­ly and instant­ly atem­po­ral. Car­ry­ing the mem­o­ry of that screen­ing’s inten­si­ty for a decade after has become a touch­stone for me. What would have hap­pened had I been able to rewind? Had been able to rent or oth­er­wise access a copy? It was as though I had wit­nessed a Mys­tery, and I could only remem­ber that when some­thing final­ly moved – and I realised that I had been breath­less­ly watch­ing a sequence of still images – I very near­ly screamed.

You’d think that would count as enough Chris Mark­er-grant­ed aston­ish­ment for one life­time — and what­ev­er inspi­ra­tion Gib­son drew from La Jetée, he’s cer­tain­ly put to good use — but the film­mak­er, ever-curi­ous tech­nol­o­gy and media enthu­si­ast, and “pro­to­type of the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry man” had anoth­er shock in store. Two years after Mark­er’s death, and about thir­ty after Gib­son’s first view­ing of La Jetée, the lat­ter found that he had actu­al­ly appeared, unbe­knownst to him­self, in one of the for­mer’s oth­er movies.

“I was in a Chris Mark­er film and I nev­er knew until today,” tweet­ed Gib­son, append­ing the entire­ly under­stand­able tag #gob­s­macked. His image pops up at the begin­ning of Lev­el Five, Mark­er’s sto­ry of a com­put­er pro­gram­mer’s search for a way to vir­tu­al­ly recre­ate the Sec­ond World War’s Bat­tle of Oki­nawa, released in 1997 in France but not until 2014 in the Unit­ed States. As a work con­cerned with real­i­ty’s rela­tion­ship to its recon­struc­tion by human mem­o­ry — a fas­ci­na­tion of Mark­er’s all the way through his career — as well as with real­i­ty’s rela­tion­ship to its only-just-begin­ning recon­struc­tion by com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, it makes sense that its nar­ra­tion, which takes the form of the pro­tag­o­nist’s video diary, would ref­er­ence Gib­son’s con­cep­tion of cyber­space.

Always mak­ing max­i­mal­ly cre­ative use of the rela­tion­ship between their words and their images, Mark­er does­n’t hes­i­tate to flash the author’s face onscreen between bursts of gray sta­t­ic (an ele­ment famous­ly evoked in Neu­ro­mancer’s open­ing) and footage of Japan (anoth­er site of deep inter­est for both cre­ators). Gib­son him­self always comes off as calm and reflec­tive in per­son, espe­cial­ly for a crafts­man of such stim­u­lat­ing­ly real­ized, infor­ma­tion-over­loaded, sweep­ing­ly influ­en­tial visions of the inten­si­fied present. But could any­one ever ful­ly recov­er from the aston­ish­ment of see­ing them­selves pass­ing through one of Chris Mark­er’s?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Gib­son Reads Neu­ro­mancer, His Cyber­punk-Defin­ing Nov­el (1994)

Take a Road Trip with Cyber­space Vision­ary William Gib­son, Watch No Maps for These Ter­ri­to­ries (2000)

The Owl’s Lega­cy: Chris Marker’s 13-Part Search for West­ern Culture’s Foun­da­tions in Ancient Greece

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

Hear Harold Bloom Read From Three Sublime American Authors: Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson & Hart Crane

in Literature | February 26th, 2016

Before Shake­speare, lit­er­ary char­ac­ters most­ly remained sta­t­ic, rep­re­sent­ing types rather than psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly real human beings. At least accord­ing to crit­ic and Yale aca­d­e­m­ic Harold Bloom, who pub­lished a gar­gan­tu­an book—Shake­speare: The Inven­tion of the Human—to prove that “in Shake­speare, char­ac­ters devel­op rather than unfold, and they devel­op because they recon­ceive them­selves.” Shake­speare, in oth­er words, invent­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ism: that dynamism of char­ac­ter we rec­og­nize as one of the hall­marks of lit­er­a­ture. Great books give us fic­tion­al peo­ple we believe in, suf­fer with, feel we know inti­mate­ly when we’ve lived long with their sto­ries.

For Bloom, Shake­speare’s char­ac­ters often change because “they over­hear them­selves talk­ing, whether to them­selves or to oth­ers. Self-over­hear­ing is their roy­al road to indi­vid­u­al­ism.” When we look for­ward a cou­ple hun­dred years, we find Her­man Melville reach­ing for Shake­speare­an heights of tragedy and bom­bast in Moby Dick, his Ahab as out­sized and unfor­get­table a char­ac­ter as Lear, Mac­beth, or Richard II.

But does Ahab change? Per­haps only in that he grows more vehe­ment­ly sin­gle-mind­ed (and unsta­ble) as the nov­el pro­gress­es, though his pur­pose nev­er wavers from begin­ning to fate­ful end.

We can see Ahab’s inten­si­fi­ca­tion guid­ed by the self-over­hear­ing of his many crazed speeches—to his crew, him­self, the whale, no one in par­tic­u­lar. In the speech Bloom reads at the top of the post, Ahab address­es the pure­ly elemental—St. Elmo’s fire—in Chap­ter 119, “The Can­dles,” assert­ing his self­hood against the sub­lime indif­fer­ence of nature. “In the midst of the per­son­i­fied imper­son­al,” Ahab shouts at the lumi­nous phe­nom­e­non, “a per­son­al­i­ty stands here.” In his crit­i­cal book on Melville, Bloom inter­prets this speech as a Gnos­tic ser­mon, but we can just as well see it as a man­i­fest refin­ing of Ahab’s con­scious sense of him­self as an avatar of vengeance, ani­mat­ed against the world, though it seems not to rec­og­nize in him or any­one else the spe­cial­ness of per­son­al­i­ty and its many lists of griev­ances.

The Melville read­ing, and the two above—from Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Emi­ly Dick­in­son’s “There’s a Cer­tain Slant of Light”—come to us from Ran­dom House, pub­lish­er of Bloom’s lat­est crit­i­cal opus, The Dae­mon Knows, a study, as his sub­ti­tle states, of “Lit­er­ary Great­ness and the Amer­i­can Sub­lime.” As in near­ly all of his pop­u­lar crit­i­cal books, in this most recent one, Bloom traces lit­er­ary genealo­gies. And while all three of these Amer­i­can greats dis­tant­ly descend from Shake­speare, “here,” writes Cyn­thia Ozick in her New York Times review, Bloom “invokes the pri­ma­cy of Emer­son as ger­mi­nat­ing ances­tor.”

Emer­son, writes Bloom, “is the foun­tain of the Amer­i­can will to know the self and its dri­ve for sub­lim­i­ty.” As Bloom has inter­pret­ed the West­ern Canon for over half a century—serving as its self-appoint­ed spokesman time and again—the great dri­ve of lit­er­a­ture since the Renais­sance accords with the ancient com­mand to know thy­self… or, fail­ing that, invent thy­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Harold Bloom Cre­ates a Mas­sive List of Works in The “West­ern Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

Harold Bloom Recites ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ by Wal­lace Stevens

Harold Bloom on the Ghast­ly Decline of the Human­i­ties (and on Obama’s Poet­ry)

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

Hear the Declassified, Eerie “Space Music” Heard During the Apollo 10 Mission (1969)

in History | February 26th, 2016

The above video is a breath­less exam­ple of Amer­i­can cable tele­vi­sion, and how we love a good sto­ry and seri­ous­ly want some­thing to be more fan­tas­tic than bor­ing ol’ sci­en­tif­ic fact. It also ties into our culture’s per­pet­u­al love and nos­tal­gia for the space pro­gram of the 1960s.

The anec­dote takes place in 1969 dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 mis­sion, when the astro­nauts on board were in lunar orbit and fly­ing around the dark side of the moon. Hav­ing tem­porar­i­ly lost radio con­tact with earth, they begin to hear “weird music.” Eugene Cer­nan and John Young can be heard on the record­ings ask­ing “You hear that? That whistling sound?” Anoth­er astro­naut agrees:  “That sure is weird music.” The sound last­ed for about 60 min­utes.

These record­ings were only declas­si­fied in 2008 by NASA, which only adds to their mys­tery, along with the fact that the astro­nauts nev­er spoke on the mat­ter after­wards because they thought nobody would believe them, accord­ing to this BBC arti­cle.

So what could it have been? A Star Wars can­ti­na on the moon? Mar­t­ian ham radio oper­a­tors? The mono­lith from 2001?

Well, cut through the inter­net inter­fer­ence and it seems to be radio inter­fer­ence. This thread on Metafil­ter has some great non-click­bait‑y dis­cus­sion, includ­ing this:

The oth­er like­ly expla­na­tion is that radio noise from the uni­verse res­onat­ed with var­i­ous com­po­nents in Apol­lo, and ulti­mate­ly induced enough cur­rent on the radio anten­na to gen­er­ate a sig­nal. On the dark side of the moon, earth-based sig­nals fine tuned for human lis­ten­ers are absent. Back­ground noise and its impact on Apol­lo’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems would be promi­nent on the audio sig­nal.

But maybe this com­ment offers a bet­ter expla­na­tion:

Space whales.

Mean­while, you can cut through all that by lis­ten­ing to the full archive of Apol­lo 10 record­ings that NASA post­ed on archive.org on 2012. You can find the “music” on track 7, 10–030702_5-OF‑6, start­ing at 44 min­utes in, in all its static‑y glo­ry.

And for those who dig the music of sine waves, you could just lis­ten to this:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

Down­load Free NASA Soft­ware and Help Pro­tect the Earth from Aster­oids!

Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘How Much Would You Pay for the Uni­verse?’

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

13 Van Gogh’s Paintings Painstakingly Brought to Life with 3D Animation & Visual Mapping

in Animation, Art | February 25th, 2016

Ear­li­er this month, we told you how you can down­load hun­dreds of Van Gogh paint­ings in high res­o­lu­tion, cour­tesy of the Van Gogh Muse­um in Ams­ter­dam. Now, the ques­tion is, what will you do with those images? You’re a lit­tle tech savvy? Maybe make your­self a nice screen­saver. You’ve got some more seri­ous tech chops? Even bet­ter. You can put those Van Gogh images in motion. Last year, Mac Cauley ani­mat­ed Van Gogh’s 1888 paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” using Ocu­lus vir­tu­al real­i­ty Soft­ware. It’s a sight to behold. And above, we have 3D ani­ma­tions of thir­teen Van Gogh paint­ings, all cre­at­ed by Luca Agnani, an Ital­ian artist who spe­cial­izes in visu­al map­ping and design pro­jec­tions. 

Agnani’s ani­ma­tions are painstak­ing and pre­cise. Explain­ing the pre­ci­sion of his method, he told the The Cre­ators Project, “To cal­cu­late the exact shad­ows, I tried to under­stand the posi­tion of the sun rel­a­tive to Arles at dif­fer­ent times of the day.” And he added: “If the video [above] was pro­ject­ed over [Van Gogh’s] paint­ings, my inter­pre­ta­tions would super­im­pose per­fect­ly, like a map­ping of a frame­work.” To cre­ate sim­i­lar ani­ma­tions you will want to get com­fort­able using soft­ware pack­ages like Pre­miere and 3D Stu­dio Max.

The Van Gogh paint­ings appear­ing in the video are as fol­lows:

1. Fish­ing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries
2. Lan­glois Bridge at Arles, The
3. Farm­house in Provence
4. White House at Night, The
5. Still Life
6. Evening The Watch (after Mil­let)
7. View of Saintes-Maries
8. Bed­room
9. Fac­to­ries at Asnieres Seen
10. White House at Night, The
11. Restau­rant
12. First Steps (after Mil­let)
13. Self-Por­trait

h/t Kim L.

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 as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Night”

Take a Multimedia Tour of the Buttock Song in Hieronymus Bosch’s Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

in Art, Music | February 25th, 2016

“Not a bum note in sight!” goes the head­line, in all the Dai­ly Mail’s trade­mark sub­tle­ty. Mark Prig­g’s straight-to-the-point arti­cle tells us of “a musi­cal score dis­creet­ly writ­ten on the butt of a fig­ure in Gar­den Of Earth­ly Delights, the famous paint­ing by Hierony­mus Bosch,” which, thanks to the labor of love of Okla­homa Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent Amelia Ham­rick, “has become an online hit.” The title of her ren­di­tion: “The 600-Year-Old Butt Song from Hell.”

Going a bit upmar­ket to Sean Michaels in the Guardian, we find the details that, “post­ing on her Tum­blr, a self-described ‘huge nerd’ called Amelia explained that she and a friend had been exam­in­ing a copy of Bosch’s famous trip­tych, which was paint­ed around the year 1500. “[We] dis­cov­ered, much to our amuse­ment,” she wrote, “[a] 600-years-old butt song from Hell.” You can read about it on her viral post, which describes her project of tran­scrib­ing Bosch’s pos­te­ri­or-writ­ten score “into mod­ern nota­tion, assum­ing the sec­ond line of the staff is C, as is com­mon for chants of this era.”

You can actu­al­ly hear a ren­di­tion of this hero­ical­ly recov­ered com­po­si­tion by click­ing on the video above. Some fine soul — pre­sum­ably a fel­low named Jim Spalink — took Ham­rick­’s nota­tion and turned it into music. When you’re done, you can then give the But­tock song a close visu­al inves­ti­ga­tion by div­ing into the vir­tu­al tour of The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, fea­tured here ear­li­er this month. Look for the 13th stop on the guid­ed tour, and you can see the musi­cal nota­tion in incred­i­bly fine detail–finer detail than you could have ever hoped or imag­ined.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Lis­ten to the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

Wes Anderson Movie Sets Recreated in Cute, Miniature Dioramas

in Art, Film | February 25th, 2016

Wes Anderson’s per­fec­tion­ist films often look like doll­hous­es enlarged to fit in human actors, but Barcelona-based illus­tra­tor Mar Cerdà has one-upped the direc­tor and cre­at­ed her own minia­ture dio­ra­mas repli­cat­ing sets from sev­er­al of his films.

This is metic­u­lous work done in water­col­or, then pre­cise­ly cut and com­bined into scenes both two- and three-dimen­sion­al. For any­one who has tried to cut some­thing very small and fid­dly with an x‑acto knife, you’ll appre­ci­ate her skill. (The artist in me is com­plete jel­ly, as they say.) So far she has recre­at­ed the concierge desk from The Grand Budapest Hotel, the berth from The Dar­jeel­ing Lim­it­ed, and the bath­room from The Roy­al Tenen­baums, com­plete with Mar­got and her mom Ethe­line. (If you look deep­er, you will also find this mini Mar­got box.)

Her love of Ander­son is no sur­prise if you look at the oth­er work in her port­fo­lio. Her book Famil­iari is a series of fig­ures that can be flipped to make “80,000 dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies,” all of which give off the Tenen­baum group shot vibe. And her lov­ing­ly detailed recre­ation of an entry in a Menor­ca-locat­ed house shares a love of cute and col­or­ful with the director’s art direc­tion.

Dio­ra­mas aside, by the way, her water­col­or tech­nique as well as her fig­u­ra­tive work is on point.

Cur­rent­ly, Cerdà is work­ing on a Star Wars-themed dio­ra­ma because, hey why not? Most every­body in the world loves that uni­verse. And she also just fin­ished a recre­ation of a scene from Zoolan­der. Fol­low her on Insta­gram, because there’s sure to be more to come.

via AV Club

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Books in the Films of Wes Ander­son: A Super­cut for Bib­lio­philes

What’s the Big Deal About Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel? Matt Zoller Seitz’s Video Essay Explains

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

See The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Played on the Oldest Martin Guitar in Existence (1834)

in Music | February 24th, 2016

You may have heard the recent hub­bub over an antique Mar­tin gui­tar from the 1870s that end­ed up smashed to bits on the set of Quentin Taran­ti­no’s ultra­vi­o­lent West­ern The Hate­ful Eight. Maybe you saw peo­ple gnash their teeth online and said, “so what? It’s just a gui­tar!” Fair enough, and a Stradi­var­ius is just a vio­lin. I exag­ger­ate a lit­tle, but many gui­tar lovers who watched the clip of Kurt Rus­sell destroy­ing the price­less arti­fact (unwit­ting­ly, it seems) felt the impact for days after­ward. As Col­in Mar­shall wrote in a post fea­tur­ing that footage, “You can still go out and buy a ser­vice­able gui­tar from the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry with­out com­plete­ly wip­ing out your sav­ings, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Mar­tin made a few decades earlier—such as the one smashed in The Hate­ful Eight—at any price at all; less than ten may exist any­where.”

You can see one of those relics above; the old­est known Mar­tin in exis­tence, in fact, made decades ear­li­er than the wrecked gui­tar from Taran­ti­no’s set—made, in fact, in 1834, just one year after cab­i­net mak­er C.F. Mar­tin moved to New York City from his native Ger­many, where he had run into trou­ble with the Vio­lin Mak­er’s Guild who claimed exclu­sive rights over instru­ment man­u­fac­tur­ing. Mar­tin imme­di­ate­ly began pro­duc­ing gui­tars, like the small-bod­ied Stauf­fer-style instru­ment above, before mov­ing his fac­to­ry to its cur­rent loca­tion of Nazareth, Penn­syl­va­nia, where the Mar­tin Muse­um is locat­ed. In the video, folk gui­tarist Ste­vie Coyle has the plea­sure of pick­ing out The Bea­t­les’ “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and an orig­i­nal tune called “Salt­flat Rhap­sody” on the aged instru­ment, which sounds just a lit­tle bit like a Medieval lute.

Just above, see Chris Mar­tin IV, great-great-great-grand­son of the famed gui­tar mak­er and cur­rent CEO of the com­pa­ny give a tour of the muse­um, point­ing out what gui­tar his­to­ri­ans believe is the ear­li­est gui­tar with X‑bracing, the inno­v­a­tive inner archi­tec­ture C.F. Mar­tin sup­pos­ed­ly invent­ed when com­ing up with his own designs and mov­ing away from those of his men­tor, Johann Stauf­fer. After the pain of watch­ing a beau­ti­ful vin­tage Mar­tin smashed to bits in Taran­ti­no’s film, it’s a great consolation—for gui­tar nerds at least—to see how well the Mar­tin Muse­um has pre­served so much of the com­pa­ny’s his­to­ry and kept such ear­ly mod­els in playable con­di­tion.

Relat­ed Con­di­tion:

Price­less 145-Year-Old Mar­tin Gui­tar Acci­den­tal­ly Gets Smashed to Smithereens in Tarantino’s The Hate­ful Eight

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

How Fend­er Gui­tars Are Made, Then (1959) and Nowa­days (2012)

The Sto­ry of the Gui­tar: The Com­plete Three-Part Doc­u­men­tary

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

Orson Welles Narrates the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World (1967)

in Film, History | February 24th, 2016

“St. Peters­burg, cap­i­tal of Rus­sia. Octo­ber the 25th, 1917. The time: twen­ty-one min­utes to ten in the evening. At anchor in the riv­er Neva, the cruis­er Auro­ra waits to take her place in his­to­ry. In pre­cise­ly one min­ute’s time, the crew, led by Bol­she­viks, will fire a shot to sig­nal the attack on the win­ter palace.” So begins Ten Days That Shook the World — not John Reed’s 1919 book of reportage on the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion, nor Sergei Eisen­stein’s 1928 film based on it, but a 1967 doc­u­men­tary by Grana­da Tele­vi­sion. And who speaks those words? You won’t have to hear any­thing more than “St. Peters­burg” to rec­og­nize the voice of the one and only Orson Welles.

Welles could tell the sto­ry of any­thing, of course, and he does the expect­ed good job recount­ing that of the fall of Nico­las II, the Keren­sky regime, the Bol­she­vik takeover, and the Rus­sia that rose there­after, work­ing from a script by the Sovi­et film­mak­er Grig­ori Alexsan­drov, who co-direct­ed Eisen­stein’s film. As we lis­ten to Welles speak, we see imagery drawn from a vari­ety of sources: pho­tographs and news­pa­per clip­pings, inter­view footage, con­tem­po­rary news­reels, and even scenes from his­tor­i­cal fea­ture films about the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, espe­cial­ly Eisen­stein and Alexan­drov’s pic­ture.

I like to think that Welles appre­ci­at­ed this method of doc­u­men­tary con­struc­tion, which com­bines an over­all adher­ence to fact with occa­sion­al visu­al depar­tures from it — though the pro­duc­tion tight­ly inte­grates the “fic­tion­al” footage with the “fac­tu­al” footage, and the for­mer has in many cas­es shaped our col­lec­tive men­tal image of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion more than the lat­ter has. He would step deep into this are­na him­self less than a decade lat­er with F for Fake, his final, sui gener­is piece of film­mak­ing osten­si­bly about art forgery but real­ly, in both its form and sub­stance, about the line between the true and the false.

Watch­ing Ten Days That Shook the World here almost a half-cen­tu­ry into 1967’s future — itself a half-cen­tu­ry into 1917’s future — makes it impos­si­ble not to think about the con­tin­u­um of his­to­ry, and the shift­ing ways in which we’ve told and retold the sto­ries of those who came before us all along it. “Who dare say where the road they began to trav­el in 1917 will final­ly lead them,” asks Orson Welles of the Rus­sians at the doc­u­men­tary’s end, “and us?” The ques­tion holds up today just as it did fifty years ago — or indeed a hun­dred.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Red Men­ace: A Strik­ing Gallery of Anti-Com­mu­nist Posters, Ads, Com­ic Books, Mag­a­zines & Films

War & Peace: An Epic of Sovi­et Cin­e­ma

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.