New Yorker Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff Reveals the Secret of a Successful New Yorker Cartoon

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Life | July 1st, 2013

A friend of mine rails against the New York­er’s week­ly car­toon cap­tion con­test, insist­ing that while the read­er-sub­mit­ted entries are uni­ver­sal­ly bad, the win­ner is always the weak­est of the lot.

I dis­agree, agog at peo­ple’s clev­er­ness. Any line I come up with feels too obvi­ous or too obscure. Unlike my friend, I nev­er feel I could do bet­ter.

Car­toon edi­tor Bob Mankof­f’s recent TED Talk offers some key insights into what the mag­a­zine is look­ing for (incon­gruity, dis­po­si­tion­al humor, cog­ni­tive mash ups), as well as what it’s not inter­est­ed in (gross-out jokes, mild child-cen­tered can­ni­bal­ism) He also cites for­mer con­trib­u­tor and author of my father’s favorite New York­er car­toon, E.B. White on the futil­i­ty of ana­lyz­ing humor.

Fre­quent con­trib­u­tor Matthew Dif­fee’s short  satir­i­cal film Being Bob sug­gests Mankoff edi­to­r­i­al selec­tions owe much to gut response (and a jerk­ing knee). Such intu­ition is hard won. Mankoff glee­ful­ly alludes to the 2000 rejec­tion let­ters he him­self received between 1974 and 1977, fol­low­ing an uncer­e­mo­ni­ous dis­missal from psy­chol­o­gy school. Then, final­ly, he got his first accep­tance.

That accep­tance let­ter is some­thing to see.

Ayun Hal­l­i­day used Charles Bar­sotti’s New York­er car­toon of a danc­ing bird as her high­school year­book’s senior say­ing. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New Yorker’s Fic­tion Pod­cast: Where Great Writ­ers Read Sto­ries by Great Writ­ers

Improv with New York­er Car­toon­ists

Einstein’s Rel­a­tiv­i­ty: An Ani­mat­ed New York­er Car­toon

How to Keep Following Open Culture After the Demise of Google Reader

in Technology | July 1st, 2013

For years, many read­ers have fol­lowed our dai­ly posts through Google Read­er. Well, after today, Google Read­er will be no more. It’s get­ting pow­ered down. Before that hap­pens, we want to tell you how to keep fol­low­ing the posts that flow through our RSS feed. Your best bet is Feed­ly. Feed­ly has a nice cus­tomiz­able inter­face. And it gives you the abil­i­ty to import every­thing from Google Read­er in one quick click. You can find tips for migrat­ing to Feed­ly right here. But, if Feed­ly isn’t your cup of tea, Life­hack­er has a bunch of oth­er options for you. Or, as oth­ers have, feel free to add your sug­ges­tions below.

Of course, you can also fol­low our posts via social media plat­forms. You can find us on Face­book, Twit­ter, and Google Plus. If you opt for Face­book, please note this: You most­ly like­ly won’t see every post from Open Cul­ture. But the odds of see­ing our posts on Face­book will sup­pos­ed­ly increase if you click “Like” on our posts when they do appear in your FB news feed.

If you’re a com­mit­ted RSS fan, Feed­ly is prob­a­bly your best bet. So please import your feeds today and start fol­low­ing us there tomor­row.

Just for the record, here is the address for our feed: http://www.openculture.com/rss

John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy

in Philosophy | July 1st, 2013

It is some­times noted–typically with admiration–that France is a place where a philoso­pher can still be a celebri­ty. It sounds laud­able. But celebri­ty cul­ture can be cor­ro­sive, both to the cul­ture at large and to the celebri­ties them­selves. So it’s worth ask­ing:  What price have French phi­los­o­phy and its devo­tees (on the Euro­pean con­ti­nent and else­where) paid for the glam­our?

Per­haps one casu­al­ty is clar­i­ty. The writ­ings of the French post­mod­ernist philoso­phers (and those inspired by them) are noto­ri­ous­ly abstruse. In a scathing cri­tique of the­o­rist Judith But­ler, an Amer­i­can who writes in the French post­struc­tural­ist style, philoso­pher Martha Nuss­baum of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go sug­gests that the abstruse­ness is cal­cu­lat­ed to inspire admi­ra­tion:

Some precincts of the con­ti­nen­tal philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion, though sure­ly not all of them, have an unfor­tu­nate ten­den­cy to regard the philoso­pher as a star who fas­ci­nates, and fre­quent­ly by obscu­ri­ty, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stat­ed clear­ly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pur­sue them on one’s own. When they remain mys­te­ri­ous (indeed, when they are not quite assert­ed), one remains depen­dent on the orig­i­nat­ing author­i­ty. The thinker is heed­ed only for his or her turgid charis­ma.

On Fri­day we post­ed an excerpt from an inter­view in which lin­guist Noam Chom­sky (some­thing of a polit­i­cal celebri­ty him­self) exco­ri­ates Jacques Der­ri­da and Jacques Lacan, along with Lacan’s super­star dis­ci­ple, Sloven­ian the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek, for using inten­tion­al­ly obscure and inflat­ed lan­guage to pull the wool over their admir­ers’ eyes and make triv­ial “the­o­ries” seem pro­found. He calls Lacan a “total char­la­tan.”

Lacan had a pen­chant for using trendy math­e­mat­i­cal terms in curi­ous ways. In a pas­sage on cas­tra­tion anx­i­ety, for exam­ple, he equates the phal­lus with the square root of minus one:

The erec­tile organ can be equat­ed with the √-1, the sym­bol of the sig­ni­fi­ca­tion pro­duced above, of the jouis­sance [ecsta­sy] it restores–by the coef­fi­cient of its statement–to the func­tion of a miss­ing sig­ni­fi­er: (-1).

Chom­sky’s crit­i­cism of Lacan and the oth­ers pro­voked a wide range of com­ments from our read­ers. Today we thought we would keep the con­ver­sa­tion going with a fas­ci­nat­ing audio clip (above) of philoso­pher John Sear­le of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, describ­ing how Michel Fou­cault and Pierre Bour­dieu–two emi­nent French thinkers whose abil­i­ties Sear­le obvi­ous­ly respected–told him that if they wrote clear­ly they would­n’t be tak­en seri­ous­ly in France.

Sear­le begins by recit­ing Paul Grice’s four Max­ims of Man­ner: be clear, be brief, be order­ly, and avoid obscu­ri­ty of expres­sion. These are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly vio­lat­ed in France, Sear­le says, part­ly due to the influ­ence of Ger­man phi­los­o­phy. Sear­le trans­lates Fou­cault’s admis­sion to him this way: “In France, you got­ta have ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble, oth­er­wise peo­ple won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a pro­found thinker.”

Sear­le has been care­ful to sep­a­rate Fou­cault from Der­ri­da, with whom Sear­le had an unfriend­ly debate in the 1970s over Speech Act the­o­ry. “Fou­cault was often lumped with Der­ri­da,” Sear­le says in a 2000 inter­view with Rea­son mag­a­zine. “That’s very unfair to Fou­cault. He was a dif­fer­ent cal­iber of thinker alto­geth­er.” Else­where in the inter­view, Sear­le says:

With Der­ri­da, you can hard­ly mis­read him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You mis­un­der­stood me.” But if you try to fig­ure out the cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Fou­cault, who was more hos­tile to Der­ri­da even than I am, and Fou­cault said that Der­ri­da prac­ticed the method of obscu­ran­tisme ter­ror­iste (ter­ror­ism of obscu­ran­tism). We were speak­ing in French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscure­ly you can’t tell what he’s say­ing. That’s the obscu­ran­tism part. And then when you crit­i­cize him, he can always say, ‘You did­n’t under­stand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the ter­ror­ism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an arti­cle about Der­ri­da. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quot­ed that pas­sage, and he said yes.

NOTE: For more on John Sear­le, includ­ing links to his full Berke­ley lec­tures on the phi­los­o­phy of mind, lan­guage and soci­ety, see our post, “Phi­los­o­phy with John Sear­le: Three Free Cours­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

Watch “The Secret Tournament” & “The Rematch,” Terry Gilliam’s Star-Studded Soccer Ads for Nike

in Film, Sports, Television | July 1st, 2013

We’ve nev­er known footwear giant Nike to spare the adver­tis­ing dol­lars, just as we’ve nev­er known film­mak­er Ter­ry Gilliam to com­pro­mise his vision. Only nat­ur­al, then, that the two would cross cre­ative and finan­cial paths. Shot in late 2001 and ear­ly 2002, the 12 Mon­keys direc­tor’s pair of Nike spots, meant to coin­cide with the 2002 World Cup, brought togeth­er some of the era’s finest foot­ballers for a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly grim, dystopi­an, but visu­al­ly rich and smirk­ing­ly humor­ous tour­na­ment to end all tour­na­ments.  “Hid­den from the world,” announces Nike’s orig­i­nal press release about the first com­mer­cial, “24 elite play­ers hold a secret tour­na­ment, with eight teams, and only one rule… ‘First goal wins!’ ”

“Con­trol­ling the action is Eric Can­tona,” the text con­tin­ues, “who over­sees every three-on-three match noir that takes place in a huge con­tain­er ship docked in an unknown har­bor. With Mon­sieur Can­tona at the helm, you can be assured there will be no whin­ing, no judg­ment calls, and no mer­cy.” The teams assem­bled include “Triple Espres­so” (Francesco Tot­ti, Hidetoshi Naka­ta, and Thier­ry Hen­ry), “Equipo del Fuego” (Her­nan Cre­spo, Clau­dio Lopez, and Gaiz­ka Mendi­eta), and the “Funk Seoul Broth­ers” (Deníl­son de Oliveira Araújo, Ki Hyeon Seol, and Ronald­in­ho). You’ll see quite a lot of action between them on this bro­ken-down futur­is­tic prison of a pitch in the three min­utes of “The Secret Tour­na­ment,” but things inten­si­fy fur­ther in “The Rematch” just above. You can find more behind-the-scenes mate­r­i­al at Dreams: The Ter­ry Gilliam Fanzine.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ter­ry Gilliam’s Debut Ani­mat­ed Film, Sto­ry­time

A Very Ter­ry Gilliam Christ­mas: Season’s Greet­ings, 1968 and 2011

Lost In La Man­cha: Ter­ry Gilliam and the “Curse of Quixote”

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

In “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” Artist John Koenig Names Feelings that Leave Us Speechless

in Creativity, English Language, Life | June 30th, 2013

It may be a mis­con­cep­tion, it may be a cliché: I’m not a Ger­man speaker—but read­ing translator’s intro­duc­tions to, say, Kant, Hegel or Goethe has con­vinced me that their lan­guage does a much bet­ter job than Eng­lish at cap­tur­ing those odd­ly spe­cif­ic twi­light moods and com­pound feel­ings that so often escape def­i­n­i­tion. Then again, Eng­lish absorbs, can­ni­bal­izes, appro­pri­ates, steals, and bas­tardizes words wher­ev­er it can find them, dri­ving lex­i­cog­ra­phers and gram­mar purists mad.

Graph­ic design­er and film­mak­er John Koenig does all of these things in his “Dic­tio­nary of Obscure Sor­rows,” a blog project in which he names emo­tions that oth­er­wise leave us speech­less. In his short video above, he illus­trates one of his words, “Son­der,” or “the real­iza­tion that each ran­dom passer­by is liv­ing a life as vivid and com­plex as your own…”—something like the shock of sud­den empa­thy that shakes us out of navel-gaz­ing. It’s an emo­tion I’ve expe­ri­enced, with­out know­ing what to call it.

This being an “obscure sor­row,” there’s more to it than empathy—in Koenig’s poet­ic video, “son­der” relates to the infi­nite num­ber of over­lap­ping sto­ries, in which each of us feels we are the hero, oth­ers sup­port­ing cast or extras. In a state of “son­der,” we sud­den­ly occu­py all of those roles at once, our screen time dimin­ish­ing as oth­ers take the lead. After watch­ing Koenig’s film, I’m think­ing “son­der” is a port­man­teau of “sub­lime” and “won­der.” It’s a mys­ti­cal phi­los­o­phy con­tained with­in a sin­gle made-up word.

Some oth­er Koenig coinages: “Ruck­kehrun­ruhe,” “nodus tol­lens,” “adroni­tis,” “rig­or sam­sa”.…. I leave it to you to vis­it Koenig’s Dic­tio­nary and learn what these words mean. It’s an expe­ri­ence well worth your time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Atlas of True Names Restores Mod­ern Cities to Their Mid­dle Earth-ish Roots

The His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Oxford Schol­ars Name Top Ten Irri­tat­ing Phras­es

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

Revealed: The Visual Effects Behind The Great Gatsby

in Film | June 30th, 2013

Sev­er­al days ago, Chris God­frey, the VFX super­vi­sor on the lat­est film adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by, post­ed a remark­able “before and after” film on Vimeo.  Run­ning four min­utes, the short com­pi­la­tion reveals the many sets and scenes cre­at­ed with com­put­er gen­er­at­ed images. It’s all pret­ty impres­sive from a tech­ni­cal point of view. No doubt. And yet this wiz­ardry con­tributed to mak­ing what’s wide­ly con­sid­ered a mediocre film. In The New York­er, film crit­ic David Den­by writes:

Luhrmann’s ver­sion is mere­ly a fran­tic jum­ble. The pic­ture is filled with an indis­crim­i­nate swirling motion, a thrash­ing impress of “style” (Art Deco turned to dig­i­tized glitz), thrown at us with whoosh­ing cam­era sweeps and surges and rapid changes of per­spec­tive exag­ger­at­ed by 3‑D.… Luhrmann’s vul­gar­i­ty is designed to win over the young audi­ence, and it sug­gests that he’s less a film­mak­er than a music-video direc­tor with end­less resources and a stun­ning absence of taste.

Some­times, as they say, less is more.…

via Richard Brody

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Known Footage of the 1926 Film Adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by (Which F. Scott Fitzger­ald Hat­ed)

Sev­en Tips From F. Scott Fitzger­ald on How to Write Fic­tion

F. Scott Fitzger­ald in Drag (1916)

A Short, Animated Look at What’s Inside Your Average Cup of Coffee

in Animation, Food & Drink | June 29th, 2013

What’s inside your aver­age cupe of joe? Wired breaks it down for us. Let’s start with the obvi­ous, water and caf­feine. But did you know about the traces of 2‑ethylphenol, which oth­er­wise dou­bles as a cock­roach pheromone?  Or how about dimethyl disul­fide, which has indus­tri­al uses in oil refiner­ies? And acetyl­methyl­carbinol? It gives the cof­fee its pleas­ant, but­tery odor. Want to keep con­tem­plat­ing cof­fee? Check out the relat­ed resources below:

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Cof­fee in Three Min­utes

Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing’

in Philosophy | June 28th, 2013

Noam Chom­sky’s well-known polit­i­cal views have tend­ed to over­shad­ow his ground­break­ing work as a lin­guist and ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher. As a result, peo­ple some­times assume that because Chom­sky is a left­ist, he would find com­mon intel­lec­tu­al ground with the post­mod­ernist philoso­phers of the Euro­pean Left.

Big mis­take.

In this brief excerpt from a Decem­ber, 2012 inter­view with Vet­er­ans Unplugged, Chom­sky is asked about the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Der­ri­da. The M.I.T. schol­ar, who else­where has described some of those fig­ures and their fol­low­ers as “cults,” does­n’t mince words:

What you’re refer­ring to is what’s called “the­o­ry.” And when I said I’m not inter­est­ed in the­o­ry, what I meant is, I’m not inter­est­ed in posturing–using fan­cy terms like poly­syl­la­bles and pre­tend­ing you have a the­o­ry when you have no the­o­ry what­so­ev­er. So there’s no the­o­ry in any of this stuff, not in the sense of the­o­ry that any­one is famil­iar with in the sci­ences or any oth­er seri­ous field. Try to find in all of the work you men­tioned some prin­ci­ples from which you can deduce con­clu­sions, empir­i­cal­ly testable propo­si­tions where it all goes beyond the lev­el of some­thing you can explain in five min­utes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fan­cy words are decod­ed. I can’t. So I’m not inter­est­ed in that kind of pos­tur­ing. Žižek is an extreme exam­ple of it. I don’t see any­thing to what he’s say­ing. Jacques Lacan I actu­al­ly knew. I kind of liked him. We had meet­ings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total char­la­tan. He was just pos­tur­ing for the tele­vi­sion cam­eras in the way many Paris intel­lec­tu­als do. Why this is influ­en­tial, I haven’t the slight­est idea. I don’t see any­thing there that should be influ­en­tial.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky and Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature and Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psy­cho­analy­sis with Panache (1973)

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Two Drawings by Jorge Luis Borges Illustrate the Author’s Obsessions

in Literature | June 28th, 2013

Jorge Luis Borges had many fascinations—detective nov­els, gau­chos, libraries, and labyrinths. Two promi­nent fig­ures that occu­pied his mind, the tan­go and myth­i­cal mon­sters, appear in draw­ings Borges made in his man­u­scripts. Of the tan­go, Borges did much to spread the idea that the sen­su­al Argen­tine dance orig­i­nat­ed in broth­els. In his draw­ing above of a tan­go-ing cou­ple, he writes at the top (in Span­ish): “The tan­go is a broth­el dance. Of this I have no doubt.”

Borges would repeat this claim on many occa­sions. In his 1930 biog­ra­phy of Evaris­to Car­reiego, he writes, “my infor­mants con­cur on one essen­tial fact: the tan­go orig­i­nat­ed in the broth­els.”

Why this his­to­ry so intrigued Borges I do not know, but I do know that he once col­lab­o­rat­ed with Argen­tine com­pos­er Astor Piaz­zo­la on an album of tan­gos in 1965. The draw­ing comes from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame’s spe­cial col­lec­tions (you can read a Span­ish tran­scrip­tion of the rest of the text at their site).

Above, see anoth­er of Borges’ sketch­es, this one from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Virginia’s exten­sive Borges col­lec­tion. The draw­ing appears in a man­u­script titled “The Old Argen­tine Habit,” penned in 1946 and pub­lished (as “Our Poor Indi­vid­u­al­ism”) in Borges’ 1952 essay col­lec­tion Oth­er Inqui­si­tions. Accord­ing to C. Jared Lowen­stein, the draw­ing is titled in Ger­man, “Die Hydra der Dik­ta­tor” (“The Hydra of the Dic­ta­tors”) and depicts Rosas, Per­on, Mus­soli­ni, Hitler, and Marx and is signed “Jorge Luis Borges 46.” Lowen­stein writes:

The theme of the art­work is a stun­ning polit­i­cal state­ment by a writer who has often been deemed apo­lit­i­cal. It is also a remark­ably detailed draw­ing, espe­cial­ly for some­one who was los­ing his eye­sight as Borges was at this time. This mar­velous depic­tion sup­ple­ments Borges’s dec­la­ra­tion in his text that Argen­tineans see them­selves as indi­vid­u­als, not as cit­i­zens of a spe­cif­ic nation.

It is indeed a remark­ably detailed work. I only wish Borges had sup­plied illus­tra­tions for his Book of Imag­i­nary Beings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Borges: Pro­file of a Writer Presents the Life and Writ­ings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Two Child­hood Draw­ings from Poet E.E. Cum­mings Show the Young Artist’s Play­ful Seri­ous­ness

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

Jean-Luc Godard’s Debut, Opération béton (1955) — a Construction Documentary

in Film | June 28th, 2013

“A 2500 m. d’alti­tude, dans le Val des Dix, un mil­li­er d’homme dresse un mur de béton aus­si haut que la Tour Eif­fel: le bar­rage de la ‘GRANDE-DIXENCE’.” So begins Jean-Luc Godard­’s very first film, Opéra­tion béton. You Fran­coph­o­nes will have gath­ered that, for the debut that would begin his long, pas­sion­ate career in film­mak­ing, Godard chose to shoot the con­struc­tion of “a wall as high as the Eif­fel Tow­er” by a thou­sand men and out of con­crete — a great deal of con­crete indeed. Valais’ Grande Dix­ence dam not only pro­vid­ed Godard the direc­tor the sub­ject of his first movie, but the funds to make it as well. Despite hav­ing already gained some momen­tum writ­ing crit­i­cal pieces for Cahiers du ciné­ma, the 23-year-old Godard took hard man­u­al work on the dam’s job site, join­ing his friend Jean-Pierre Laub­sch­er already employed there. Then the idea came to him: why not shoot a doc­u­men­tary about all of this?

Arrang­ing a trans­fer through Laub­sch­er to a less tax­ing place on the dam as a switch­board oper­a­tor, Godard then bor­rowed a 35-mil­lime­ter cam­era from a friend of a friend and got to work — his real work, that of cin­e­ma. “The orig­i­nal com­men­tary for La Cam­pagne du beton (The Cam­paign of Con­crete or The Con­crete Coun­try­side), writ­ten by Laub­sch­er and dat­ed Octo­ber 17, 1954, was two pages long and con­cise; it mere­ly labeled the action,” writes crit­ic Richard Brody in Every­thing is Cin­e­ma: The Work­ing Life of Jean-Luc Godard. “But Godard gave the film a rhyming title instead, Opéra­tion béton (Oper­a­tion Con­crete) and rewrote the com­men­tary. Though he kept sev­er­al of Laub­scher’s felic­i­tous turns of phrase, Godard­’s ver­sion, which he record­ed in his own voice, great­ly ampli­fied the ver­biage and resem­bled, instead of a series of pho­to cap­tions, a per­son­’s enthu­si­as­tic, digres­sive account of his expe­ri­ence at work.” Cer­tain die-hard Godard-heads may also iden­ti­fy hints of the auteur’s favorite themes: labor, cap­i­tal, nation­al­ism, the machine-like sys­tems that sur­round human­i­ty. Cer­tain­ly the indus­try-admir­ing tone seems suit­ably, er, breath­less.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Luc Godard Films The Rolling Stones Record­ing “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il” (1968)

Jef­fer­son Air­plane Wakes Up New York; Jean-Luc Godard Cap­tures It (1968)

Meetin’ WA: Jean-Luc Godard Meets Woody Allen in 26 Minute Film

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick

525 Free Movies Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.