How Marcel Marceau Used Mime to Save Children During the Holocaust

in History | January 9th, 2025

In 1972, Jer­ry Lewis made the ill-con­sid­ered deci­sion to write, direct, and star in a film about a Ger­man clown in Auschwitz. The result was so awful that he nev­er allowed its release, and it quick­ly acquired the reputation—along with dis­as­ters like George Lucas’ Star Wars Hol­i­day Spe­cial—as one of the biggest mis­takes in movie his­to­ry. Some­how, this cau­tion­ary tale did not dis­suade the bold Ital­ian come­di­an Rober­to Benig­ni from mak­ing a film with a some­what sim­i­lar premise, 1997’s Life Is Beau­ti­ful, in which he plays a father in a con­cen­tra­tion camp who enter­tains chil­dren with com­ic stunts and antics to dis­tract them from the hor­rors all around them.

That film, by con­trast, was a com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess and went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998 and three Acad­e­my Awards the fol­low­ing year, a tes­ta­ment to Benigni’s sen­si­tiv­i­ty to his sub­ject, in a screen­play part­ly based on the mem­oirs of Rubi­no Romeo Salmoni. It’s a won­der that anoth­er real-life sto­ry of a com­ic genius who used his tal­ents not only to enter­tain chil­dren dur­ing WWII, but to save them from the Nazis has some­how nev­er been made into a fea­ture film—and espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing giv­en the stature of the man in ques­tion: Mar­cel Marceau, the most famous mime in his­to­ry.

As we learn in the Great Big Sto­ry video above, Marceau was 16 years old in 1940 when Ger­man sol­diers marched into France. His “child­hood end­ed all at once,” says Shawn Wen, author of a recent book about Marceau. His father died in Auschwitz and both Marceau and his broth­er “were involved in the war effort against the Nazis.” In one sto­ry, Marceau dressed a group of chil­dren from an orphan­age as campers and walked them into Switzer­land, enter­tain­ing them all the way, “to the point where they could pre­tend as if they were going on vaca­tion rather than flee­ing for their lives.”

In anoth­er sto­ry, Marceau some­how con­vinced a group of Ger­man sol­diers to sur­ren­der to him. “It seems as if this nat­ur­al knack for act­ing,” says Wen, “end­ed up becom­ing a part of his involve­ment in the war effort.” Dur­ing the war, Marceau was “mim­ing for his life,” and the lives of oth­ers. Mime has been the butt of many jokes over the years, but Wen sees in Marceau’s silent per­for­mances a means of bring­ing human­i­ty togeth­er with an art that tran­scends lan­guage and nation­al­i­ty. Learn more about how Marceau began his mime career dur­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion at our pre­vi­ous post here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

How Mar­cel Marceau Start­ed Mim­ing to Save Chil­dren from the Holo­caust

Watch Mar­cel Marceau Mime The Mask Mak­er, a Sto­ry Cre­at­ed for Him by Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky (1959)

Mar­cel Marceau Mimes the Pro­gres­sion of Human Life, From Birth to Death, in 4 Min­utes

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

Explore the Newly-Launched Public Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free Historical Images

in Archives, History | January 9th, 2025

We’ve often fea­tured the work of the Pub­lic Domain Review here on Open Cul­ture, and also var­i­ous search­able copy­right-free image data­bas­es that have arisen over the years. It makes sense that those two worlds would col­lide, and now they’ve done so in the form of the just-launched Pub­lic Domain Image Archive (PDIA). The Pub­lic Domain Review invites us to use the site to “explore our hand-picked col­lec­tion of 10,046 out-of-copy­right works, free for all to browse, down­load, and reuse” — and note that the num­ber will grow, giv­en that “this is a liv­ing data­base with new images added every week.”

As with any por­tal of this kind, you can browse by cat­e­go­ry tags, the selec­tion of which includes every­thing from archi­tec­ture to dec­o­ra­tions to occultism to war. But if you’d like to get a sense of the sheer for­mal, aes­thet­ic, cul­tur­al, and his­tor­i­cal vari­ety of the PDIA, you might con­sid­er tak­ing a first look through its “infi­nite view,” which allows you to scroll in all direc­tions through a lim­it­less labyrinth of copy­right-free won­ders: adver­tise­ments, Bib­li­cal scenes, old-time sports­men, out­er-space pho­tos, mush­rooms, medieval musi­cal crea­tures, let­ter­forms, and, well, labyrinths.

You might also rec­og­nize items you’ve seen here on Open Cul­ture before, like the nature draw­ings of Ernst Haeck­el, the mod­ern art-lam­poon­ing chil­dren’s book The Cubies’ ABC, or the ghosts and mon­sters illus­trat­ed by ukiyo‑e mas­ter Hoku­sai. The PDIA pro­vides more con­text than some pub­lic-domain image archives, even link­ing to rel­e­vant Pub­lic Domain Review posts, where you can read about such top­ics as Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s col­or analy­sis charts (which also inspired a post of ours), the end of books (as pre­dict­ed in 1894), and even “Cats and Cap­tions before the Inter­net Age.” Hav­ing fall­en into the pub­lic domain, all this mate­r­i­al is, of course, avail­able to use for any pur­pose you like — includ­ing just sat­is­fy­ing your own curios­i­ty.

Relat­ed com­ments:

The New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 860,000 His­tor­i­cal Images: Down­load Medieval Man­u­scripts, Japan­ese Prints, William Blake Illus­tra­tions & More

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

Public.Work: A Smooth­ly Search­able Archive of 100,000+ “Copy­right-Free” Images

Sea-Ser­pents, Vam­pires, Pirates & More: The Pub­lic Domain Review’s Sec­ond Book of Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead (1970)

in Music | January 8th, 2025

What’s that, you ask? Did Miles Davis open for the Grate­ful Dead at the Fill­more West? In what world could such a thing hap­pen? In the world of the late sixties/early sev­en­ties, when jazz fused with acid rock, acid rock with coun­try, and pop cul­ture took a long strange trip. The “inspired pair­ing” of the Dead with Davis’ elec­tric band on April 9–12, 1970, “rep­re­sent­ed one of [pro­mot­er] Bill Graham’s most leg­endary book­ings,” writes the blog Cryp­ti­cal Devel­op­ments. I’ll say. Davis had just released the ground­break­ing dou­ble-LP Bitch­es Brew and was “at some­what of an artis­tic and com­mer­cial cross­roads,” exper­i­ment­ing with new, more flu­id com­po­si­tions.

Aggres­sive and dom­i­nat­ed by rock rhythms and elec­tric instru­ments, the album became Davis’ best sell­er and brought him before young, white audi­ences in a way his ear­li­er work had not.  The band that Davis brought into the Fill­more West, com­pris­ing [Chick] Corea, [Dave] Hol­land, sopra­no sax play­er Steve Gross­man, drum­mer Jack Dejohnette, and per­cus­sion­ist Air­to Mor­eira, was ful­ly versed in this new music, and stood the Fill­more West audi­ences on their ears.

I can only imag­ine what it would have been like to see that per­for­mance live. But we don’t have to imag­ine what it sound­ed like. You can hear Davis’s set below.

In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Davis described it as “an eye-open­ing con­cert for me.” “The place was packed with these real spa­cy, high white peo­ple,” he wrote, “and when we first start­ed play­ing, peo­ple were walk­ing around and talk­ing.” Once the band got into the Bitch­es Brew mate­r­i­al, though, “that real­ly blew them out. After that con­cert, every time I would play out there in San Fran­cis­co, a lot of young white peo­ple showed up at the gigs.”

Did the Dead become a crossover hit with jazz fans? Not exact­ly, but Davis real­ly hit it off with them, espe­cial­ly with Jer­ry Gar­cia. “I think we all learned some­thing,” Davis wrote: “Jer­ry Gar­cia loved jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been lis­ten­ing to it for a long time.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the Dead’s Phil Lesh remem­bered hav­ing his mind blown by Davis and band: “As I lis­tened, lean­ing over the amps with my jaw hang­ing agape, try­ing to com­pre­hend the forces that Miles was unleash­ing onstage, I was think­ing What’s the use. How can we pos­si­bly play after this? […] With this band, Miles lit­er­al­ly invent­ed fusion music. In some ways it was sim­i­lar to what we were try­ing to do in our free jam­ming, but ever so much more dense with ideas – and seem­ing­ly con­trolled with an iron fist, even at its most alarm­ing­ly intense moments.” You can stream the Dead­’s full per­for­mance from that night below. Think what must have been run­ning through their minds as they took the stage after watch­ing Miles Davis invent a new form of music right before their eyes.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

Miles Davis Plays Music from Kind of Blue Live in 1959, Intro­duc­ing a Com­plete­ly New Style of Jazz

Jer­ry Gar­cia Talks About the Birth of the Grate­ful Dead & Play­ing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Ani­mat­ed Video

When the Grate­ful Dead Played at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hen­drix Invites Paul McCart­ney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

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

Compare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Complete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Performance at the Newport Folk Festival

in Film, History, Music | January 8th, 2025

A Com­plete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties and sub­se­quent elec­tri­fied break with it, has been praised for not tak­ing exces­sive lib­er­ties, at least by the stan­dards of pop­u­lar music biopics. Its con­ver­sion of a real chap­ter of cul­tur­al his­to­ry has entailed var­i­ous con­fla­tions, com­pres­sions, and rearrange­ments, but you’d expect that from a Hol­ly­wood direc­tor like James Man­gold. What many view­ers’ judg­ment will come down to is less his­tor­i­cal verac­i­ty than whether they believe Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met as the young Bob Dylan — or rather, as the young Bob Dylan they’ve always imag­ined.

Still, much depends on the rest of the cast, who por­tray a host of major folk- and folk-adja­cent fig­ures includ­ing Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, John­ny Cash, Alan Lomax, and the late Peter Yarrow. No per­for­mance apart from Cha­la­met’s has received as much atten­tion as Mon­i­ca Bar­baro’s Joan Baez. In those char­ac­ters’ key scene togeth­er they take the stage at the 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val and sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” a Dylan song that Baez also record­ed. Their ren­di­tion con­veys the depth of their roman­tic and artis­tic con­nec­tion not just to the audi­ence, but also to Dylan’s girl­friend, played by Elle Fan­ning, watch­ing just off­stage.

“That idea of the secret is real­ly what I need­ed to dri­ve the scene,” says Man­gold, using the lan­guage of his trade, in the Vari­ety video at the top of the post. “Ulti­mate­ly, I’ve got to get it to where Elle is dri­ven away by what­ev­er she’s seen on stage. But it would­n’t have worked as well if Cha­la­met and Bar­baro had­n’t nailed the per­for­mance, just one of many in the film shot 100 per­cent live. If you’d like to com­pare them to the real thing, have a look at the footage of Dylan and Baez singing “It Ain’t Me Babe” at the actu­al 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val just above. After that, you may want to go back to the pre­vi­ous year’s fes­ti­val and watch their per­for­mance of “With God on Our Side” — and, while you’re at it, lis­ten to Dylan’s entire cat­a­log all over again.

Relat­ed con­tent

Joan Baez Live in 1965: Full Con­cert

Bob Dylan’s His­toric New­port Folk Fes­ti­val Per­for­mances, 1963–1965

Watch Joan Baez Endear­ing­ly Imi­tate Bob Dylan (1972)

The Moment When Bob Dylan Went Elec­tric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1965

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Why the Tavern Scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds Is a Master Class in Filmmaking

in Film | January 7th, 2025

Ide­al­ly, a view­er should be able to iden­ti­fy the work of a par­tic­u­lar auteur from any one scene that the auteur has direct­ed. In real­i­ty, it’s not always pos­si­ble to do so, even in the work of film­mak­ers with high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic styles. But in the case of Quentin Taran­ti­no, it would prob­a­bly be more dif­fi­cult not to rec­og­nize his scenes. Some of them have prop­a­gat­ed so far through pop­u­lar cul­ture that they have a life apart from the films them­selves: the dance in Pulp Fic­tion, say, or more recent­ly, the open­ing of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds, a pic­ture that, to video essay­ists look­ing to expli­cate Taran­ti­no’s dis­tinc­tive genius, offers a par­tic­u­lar abun­dance of mate­r­i­al.

In the new video above, YouTu­ber Lan­cel­loti selects a dif­fer­ent scene from Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds to declare a “mod­ern mas­ter­piece” in itself. It takes place in a base­ment tav­ern in Nazi-occu­pied north­ern France, where three of the tit­u­lar black-ops “Bas­ter­ds,” dis­guised as Ger­man offi­cers, meet Brid­get von Ham­mers­mark, a Ger­man movie star turned under­cov­er Allied agent.

As one might expect, the ten­sion starts high, gets high­er, and even­tu­al­ly explodes in a chaot­ic blood­bath: not an easy sequence to pull off effec­tive­ly, but one that Taran­ti­no and his col­lab­o­ra­tors arrange with con­sum­mate skill, using a host of tech­niques not nec­es­sar­i­ly vis­i­ble on the first view­ing — or even the first few view­ings.

Lan­cel­loti high­lights how the scene grad­u­al­ly reveals its tight space and the many fig­ures who occu­py it; uses dia­logue to reflect core themes of iden­ti­ty and nation­al­i­ty; cre­ates sym­pa­thy even for vil­lain-cod­ed Ger­man sol­diers; keeps shift­ing the bal­ance of pow­er; injects unpre­dictabil­i­ty into the action; fore­shad­ows the ways in which events will even­tu­al­ly go wrong; and hints in many ways at the pres­ence of the char­ac­ter who will light up the tin­der box. Of course, no direc­tor could make all this hap­pen sin­gle-hand­ed­ly, and few direc­tors would be con­scious of all these ele­ments at work in the first place. But giv­en all we’ve learned about Taran­ti­no over the years, he’s sure­ly one of them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Deep Study of the Open­ing Scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Cre­ates Sus­pense in His Favorite Scene, the Ten­sion-Filled Open­ing Moments of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Remix­es His­to­ry: A Brief Study of Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood

Quentin Tarantino’s World War II Read­ing List

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Radio Caroline, the Pirate Radio Ship That Rocked the British Music World (1965)

in Music | January 6th, 2025

Nowa­days musi­cians can reach hun­dreds, thou­sands, some­times mil­lions of lis­ten­ers with a few, usu­al­ly free, online ser­vices and a min­i­mal grasp of tech­nol­o­gy. That’s not to say there aren’t still eco­nom­ic bar­ri­ers aplen­ty for the strug­gling artist, but true inde­pen­dence is not an impos­si­ble prospect.

In the 1950s and 60s, on the oth­er hand, as pop­u­lar music attained new­found com­mer­cial val­ue, musi­cians found them­selves com­plete­ly behold­en to record com­pa­nies and radio sta­tions in order to have their music heard by near­ly any­one. And those enti­ties schemed togeth­er to pro­mote cer­tain record­ings and ignore or mar­gin­al­ize oth­ers. Pay­ola, in a word, ruled the day.

In the UK, a dif­fer­ent but no less impreg­nable order pre­sent­ed itself to the aspir­ing obscu­ri­ty. Rather than cor­po­rate inter­ests and well-bribed DJs, the BBC and British gov­ern­ment, writes the Modesto Radio Muse­um, “were increas­ing­ly hos­tile toward any com­pe­ti­tion for their radio monop­oly.” (After WWII, the British Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice main­tained a monop­oly on radio, and lat­er tele­vi­sion, broad­cast­ing in the UK.) Enter the pirates.

While the phrase now denotes a class of free­boot­ers who work from their ter­mi­nals, the orig­i­nal music pirates actu­al­ly took to the seas. The first, Radio Mer­cur, “estab­lished by a group of Dan­ish busi­ness­men” in 1958, “trans­mit­ted from a small ship anchored off Copen­hagen, Den­mark.” Mer­cur inspired Radio Nord in 1960, anchored off the Swedish Coast, then the Dutch Radio Veron­i­ca that same year.

Then, in 1962, Irish man­ag­er Ronan O’Rahilly met Aus­tralian busi­ness­man Allan Craw­ford. O’Rahilly had pre­vi­ous­ly attempt­ed to launch the career of musi­cian Georgie Fame, but to no avail. Record com­pa­nies would­n’t record him, and when O’Rahilly fund­ed an album, the BBC refused to play it—he wasn’t on their favored labels, EMI and Dec­ca. So O’Rahilly and Craw­ford con­spired to cre­ate their own pirate sta­tion, Radio Car­o­line (named after the daugh­ter of John F. Kennedy).

They pur­chased their first ship, the MV Mi Ami­go, in 1963, then set about secur­ing funds and rig­ging up the ves­sel with two 10 Kilo­watt AM trans­mit­ters and a 13-ton, 165 foot anten­na mast. Broad­cast­ing from 6am to 6pm dai­ly, Radio Car­o­line man­aged to break the BBC monop­oly (and launch Georgie Fame to… well actu­al, chart-top­ping fame). In 1965, a British Pathé film crew vis­it­ed the ship, not­ing in their nar­ra­tion that “for over a year,” Radio Car­o­line had “giv­en pop music to some­thing like 20 mil­lion lis­ten­ers,” chang­ing British pop cul­ture “with the con­nivance of almost every teenag­er in South­east Eng­land.”

The sta­tion kicked off their first broad­cast, which you can hear above, on East­er Sun­day, March 1964, with the announce­ment, “This is Radio Car­o­line on 199, your all day music sta­tion.” The very first tune they played was the Rolling Stones’ cov­er of Bud­dy Hol­ly’s “Not Fade Away” (one of the band’s first major hits). In the mid-60s pirate radio, par­tic­u­lar­ly Radio Car­o­line, helped break a num­ber of bands, intro­duc­ing eager young lis­ten­ers to The Who’s first four sin­gles, for exam­ple. (The band returned the favor by attempt­ing to give 1967’s The Who Sell Out the raw sound and feel of a pirate radio broad­cast.)

Learn more about Radio Caroline’s long and sto­ried exis­tence in the doc­u­men­tary seg­ment fur­ther up, Part 6 of DMC World’s com­pre­hen­sive The His­to­ry of DJ. The Modesto Radio Museum’s thor­ough, mul­ti­part essay series, com­plete with pho­tographs, offers a rich his­to­ry, as does Ray Clark’s book, Radio Car­o­line: The True Sto­ry of the Boat that Rocked. “The world’s most famous off­shore radio sta­tion,” is still on the air today (even though the orig­i­nal ship sank in 1980) or rather, on the web, with stream­ing pro­grams and “gad­gets and wid­gets” for Android devices, iPhones, iPads, and browsers.

It’s some­thing of an irony that they’ve end­ed up just one of hun­dreds of online stream­ing sta­tions vying for lis­ten­ers’ atten­tion, but it’s safe to say that with­out their exploits in the 60s and beyond, pop music as we know it—with all its legal and not-so-legal means of dissemination—may nev­er have spread and evolved into the myr­i­ad forms we now take for grant­ed.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Lis­ten to the Radio: The BBC’s 1930 Man­u­al for Using a New Tech­nol­o­gy

David Bowie Becomes a DJ on BBC Radio in 1979; Intro­duces Lis­ten­ers to The Vel­vet Under­ground, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie & More

“Joe Strummer’s Lon­don Call­ing”: All 8 Episodes of Strummer’s UK Radio Show Free Online

Jimi Hen­drix Wreaks Hav­oc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC (1969)

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

The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

in Animation, History | January 6th, 2025

The July 17, 1929 issue of Vari­ety car­ried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the peak of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton plays the spine of anoth­er in xylo­phone fash­ion, using a pair of thigh bones as ham­mers.” The final lines of this strong rec­om­men­da­tion add that “all takes place in a grave­yard. Don’t bring your chil­dren.” The review amus­ing­ly reflects shifts in pub­lic taste over the past near-cen­tu­ry — unless the sight of skele­tons play­ing each oth­er like xylo­phones is more com­i­cal­ly endur­ing than I imag­ine — but those final words add a note of breath­tak­ing irony, for the short under review is The Skele­ton Dance, pro­duced and direct­ed by Walt Dis­ney.

Despite the pow­er of Dis­ney’s name, this par­tic­u­lar film is bet­ter under­stood as the work of Ub Iwerks, who ani­mat­ed most of it by him­self in about six weeks. He and Dis­ney had been work­ing togeth­er since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties, when they launched the short-lived Laugh-O-Gram Stu­dio in Kansas City.

It was Iwerks, in fact, who refined a rough sketch by Dis­ney into the fig­ure we now know as Mick­ey Mouse — but whom audi­ences in the twen­ties first came to know as Steam­boat Willie, whose epony­mous car­toon debut entered the pub­lic domain last year. The Skele­ton Dance, the first of Dis­ney’s “Sil­ly Sym­phonies,” was sim­i­lar­ly lib­er­at­ed from copy­right on this year’s Pub­lic Domain Day, along with a vari­ety of oth­er 1929 Dis­ney shorts (many of them fea­tur­ing Mick­ey Mouse).

The great tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion on dis­play isn’t syn­chro­nized sound itself, which had been used even before Steam­boat Willie, but the rela­tion­ship between the images and the sound. Accord­ing to ani­ma­tion his­to­ri­an Charles Solomon, “hav­ing to under­score the action in the first Mick­ey Mouse pic­ture,” com­pos­er Carl Stalling “sug­gest­ed that the reverse could be done: adding ani­mat­ed action to a musi­cal score,” per­haps fea­tur­ing skele­tons, trees, and such­like mov­ing around in rhythm. There we have the gen­e­sis of this car­toon danse macabre, which was a leap for­ward in the ever-clos­er union of ani­ma­tion and music as well as a rev­e­la­tion to its audi­ences, who would­n’t have expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it before. Even today, the most nat­ur­al response to a suf­fi­cient­ly mirac­u­lous-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is, per­haps, laugh­ter.

The Skele­ton Dance was vot­ed the 18th best car­toon of all time by 1,000 ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als in a 1994 book called The 50 Great­est Car­toons. Find a copy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ear­ly Hitch­cock Films, Tintin and Pop­eye Car­toons & More

The Evo­lu­tion of Ani­ma­tion, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistis­cope to Pixar

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made: 1939 Doc­u­men­tary Gives an Inside Look

Cel­e­brate The Day of the Dead with The Clas­sic Skele­ton Art of José Guadalupe Posa­da

An Ear­ly Ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse Enters the Pub­lic Domain on Jan­u­ary 1, 2024

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer 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 and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Bertrand Russell’s Message to People Living in the Year 2959: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish”

in Life, Philosophy | January 5th, 2025

Bertrand Rus­sell, the great British philoso­pher and social crit­ic, appeared on the BBC pro­gram Face-to-Face in 1959 and was asked a clos­ing ques­tion: What would you tell a gen­er­a­tion liv­ing 1,000 years from now about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned? His answer is short, but pithy. You can read a tran­script below:

I should like to say two things, one intel­lec­tu­al and one moral:

The intel­lec­tu­al thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed, but look only and sole­ly at what are the facts. That is the intel­lec­tu­al thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more close­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way, and if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er we must learn a kind of char­i­ty and a kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

No truer words have been spo­ken. You can watch the com­plete 1959 episode below.

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:

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Let­ter of Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing in the Year 2088

Bertrand Rus­sell: The Every­day Ben­e­fit of Phi­los­o­phy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncer­tain­ty

Bertrand Russell’s Improb­a­ble Appear­ance in a Bol­ly­wood Film (1967)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Oth­er Big Thinkers in BBC Lec­ture Series (Free)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

Laurie Anderson’s Mind-Blowing Performance of C. P. Cavafy’s Poems “Waiting for the Barbarians” & “Ithaca”

in Music, Poetry | January 3rd, 2025

In the video above, Lau­rie Ander­son describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion, giv­en that it con­tains an emper­or, sen­a­tors, and ora­tors, though Cavafy him­self said that none of them are nec­es­sar­i­ly Roman. The uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion the poem describes, in which a state’s elite turn out in their fin­ery despite hav­ing noth­ing to do but await the tit­u­lar bar­bar­ian inva­sion, cer­tain­ly has­n’t been lost on its inter­preters. J. M. Coet­zee, for exam­ple, set his nov­el Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians on the edge of an unnamed “Empire.”

Ander­son also men­tions think­ing, while con­sid­er­ing the poem’s evo­ca­tion of gov­ern­ment dead­lock, “Hang on, this sounds famil­iar” — and none can deny that com­par­isons between the Unit­ed States and the declin­ing Roman Empire have been in the air late­ly. That, in part, inspired the per­for­mance that fol­lows, in which Ander­son and a ver­i­ta­ble Greek cho­rus inter­pret both “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians,” which Cavafy wrote in 1904, and the Odyssey-based “Itha­ca” (which you can also hear read by Sean Con­nery with a Van­ge­lis score) from sev­en years lat­er. “Itha­ca” is Cavafy’s best-known work, thanks not least to its being read at the funer­al of for­mer first lady of the Unit­ed States Jacque­line Kennedy Onas­sis.

It was, in fact, the Alexan­der S. Onas­sis Foun­da­tion, estab­lished by Aris­to­tle Onas­sis in the name of his late son, that spon­sored this event, which took place in New York City’s Saint Thomas Church in Novem­ber of 2023. The occa­sion was the open­ing of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, on whose web­site clas­si­cist Gre­go­ry Jus­da­nis declares that the poet­’s “great­ness lies in his tal­ent to pre­dict our own world one hun­dred years ago.” Cavafy might well have under­stood that some polit­i­cal con­di­tions are inevitable, but he could­n’t have known how Ander­son­’s per­for­mance of his words, in Eng­lish trans­la­tion with the right instru­men­tal and elec­tron­ic back­ing, would sound like some­thing right out of her Big Sci­ence era.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear Lau­rie Ander­son Read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bar­do

Watch Lau­rie Anderson’s Hyp­not­ic Har­vard Lec­ture Series on Poet­ry, Med­i­ta­tion, Death, New York & More

Lau­rie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

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

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” Performed by a Choir of 4,000 Singers

in Music | January 3rd, 2025

Through­out the years, we’ve fea­tured per­for­mances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large ama­teur choir from Toron­to that meets week­ly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgar­den’s “Black Hole Sun” (to hon­or Chris Cor­nell), and Pat­ti Smith’s “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er.” In their lat­est video, they revis­it an old favorite: Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah,” a song released on the 1984 album Var­i­ous Posi­tions. Orig­i­nal­ly over­looked, Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” has since become deeply woven into our cul­tur­al fab­ric. Over the past 40 years, some 300 musi­cians have cov­ered “Hal­lelu­jah,” with Jeff Buck­ley offer­ing per­haps the most cel­e­brat­ed ver­sion. Above, you can watch 4,000 singers come togeth­er and pay their own trib­ute to the song. This per­for­mance took place last year at the Nation­al Arts Cen­tre in Ottawa, Cana­da. Enjoy!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” Played on Kore­an Instru­ment Dat­ing Back to 6th Cen­tu­ry

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Street Artist Plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” With Crys­tal Glass­es

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Trib­ute to Sinéad O’Connor & Per­forms “Noth­ing Com­pares 2 U”