Susan Sontag’s 50 Favorite Films (and Her Own Cinematic Creations)

in Film | December 4th, 2013

Susan Sontag’s fans would each describe her a little differently: many would call her a writer, of course, though some would opt for more specificity, calling her a novelist if they like her fiction or a critic if they don’t. Others, speaking more grandly, might prefer to simply call her an “intellectual.” Under this wide umbrella Sontag produced a variety of works for the page, the stage, and even the screen. Between 1969 and 1983, she made four films: 1969’s Duett för kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals), 1971’s Broder Carl (Brother Carl), 1974’s Promised Lands, and, above, 1983’s Unguided Tour, also known as Letter from Venice. Sontag adapted the Italian-language feature from her story of the same name, originally published in 1977 in the New Yorker. Promised Lands, her only documentary, meditates on Arab-Israeli relations at the end of the Yom Kippur War. The Bergmanesque, symbolism-filled Brother Carl takes place, suitably, at a Swedish island resort.

And her debut Duet for Cannibals, according to Dangerous Minds, embodies — or, if you like, cinematizes — her touted distaste for the interpretation of artworks. Sontag, they say, “sought to liberate art from interpretation (which is a bit ironic, of course, for someone who was essentially an exalted critic). When it came to her own film, she made something that intended to deliberately confound the notion that there was any sort of underlying meaning beyond exactly what the audience was seeing on the screen directly in front of them.”

Sontag’s famous 1966 essay “Against Interpretation” counts here as essential reading, not just before you watch her own films, but also before you watch through her list of favorite films. Richard Brody, posting in the New Yorker, recommends accompanying it with “The Decay of Cinema,” which Sontag wrote three decades later in the New York Times, and in which she declares that “you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious past).”

Reading over the top fifty films she considered the greatest back in 1977 (and published in her volume of journals As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh), we find plenty of evidence Sontag herself, unsurprisingly, had such a cinephilic love of and vast appetite for movies, especially for European filmmakers but also the best-known Japanese ones of the day:

1. Bresson, Pickpocket
2. Kubrick, 2001
3. Vidor, The Big Parade
4. Visconti, Ossessione
5. Kurosawa, High and Low
6. [Hans-Jürgen] Syberberg, Hitler
7. Godard, 2 ou 3 Choses …
8. Rossellini, Louis XIV
9. Renoir, La Règle du Jeu
10. Ozu, Tokyo Story
11. Dreyer, Gertrud
12. Eisenstein, Potemkin
13. Von Sternberg, The Blue Angel
14. Lang, Dr. Mabuse
15. Antonioni, L’Eclisse
16. Bresson, Un Condamné à Mort …
17. Gance, Napoléon
18. Vertov, The Man with the [Movie] Camera
19. [Louis] Feuillade, Judex
20. Anger, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
21. Godard, Vivre Sa Vie
22. Bellocchio, Pugni in Tasca
23. [Marcel] Carné, Les Enfants du Paradis
24. Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai
25. [Jacques] Tati, Playtime
26. Truffaut, L’Enfant Sauvage
27. [Jacques] Rivette, L’Amour Fou
28. Eisenstein, Strike
29. Von Stroheim, Greed
30. Straub, …Anna Magdalena Bach
31. Taviani bro[ther]s, Padre Padrone
32. Resnais, Muriel
33. [Jacques] Becker, Le Trou
34. Cocteau, La Belle et la Bête
35. Bergman, Persona
36. [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder, … Petra von Kant
37. Griffith, Intolerance
38. Godard, Contempt
39. [Chris] Marker, La Jetée
40. Conner, Crossroads
41. Fassbinder, Chinese Roulette
42. Renoir, La Grande Illusion
43. [Max] Ophüls, The Earrings of Madame de …
44. [Iosif] Kheifits, The Lady with the Little Dog
45. Godard, Les Carabiniers
46. Bresson, Lancelot du Lac
47. Ford, The Searchers
48. Bertolucci, Prima della Rivoluzione
49. Pasolini, Teorema
50. [Leontine] Sagan, Mädchen in Uniform

“She was wrong,” Brody writes of Sontag’s epitaph for her kind of enthusiasm for film. “Cinephilia was there, but, for certain practical reasons, it was relatively quiet. It’s not quiet anymore, and great, distinctive movies were issuing from around the world.” As ever, “the narrative of nostalgia for a lost golden age is really one of the writer’s own nostalgia for youth” — but in her youth as well as afterward, Sontag saw some astonishing movies indeed.

Find a wide range of avant-garde films in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via The New Yorker

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

See the Original Magazine Publication of Heart of Darkness and Other Great Works by Joseph Conrad

in History, Literature | December 4th, 2013

Like many other novelists of his era, Joseph Conrad began by publishing his work in serialized magazines. Novel serialization, which had first gained popularity and commercial appeal with Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers in 1836, was commonplace throughout the 19^th century. By the time that Conrad released his first novel in 1895, entitled Almayer’s Folly, publishing serious work within the pages of weekly literary periodicals had become de rigueur. Indeed, Scribner’s Monthly magazine noted that it is the “second and third rate novelist who could not get published in a magazine and is obliged to publish in a volume, and it is in a magazine that the best novelists always appear first.” Although Scribner’s claim doubtless contains an element of self-promotion, one cannot deny that it is precisely through serialized publication that Conrad joined the ranks of literary greats such as Alexandre Dumas, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy.

Through the website Conrad First: The Joseph Conrad Periodical Archive, contemporary readers can enjoy the original, digitized versions of Conrad’s first editions. The database, which holds some 80,000 images and links to over a hundred periodicals, includes the original releases for Conrad’s many novels, including Heart of Darkness (1899, Blackwood’s Magazine), Lord Jim (1899, Blackwood’s Magazine), Nostromo (1904, T.P.‘s Weekly), and The Secret Agent (1906, Ridgway’s Magazine), as well as essays, such as Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism on His Poems and A propos of Alphonse Daudet. For those more interested in household goods of yore than Conrad’s prose, these pages will also prove enjoyable; ads for the Harlene Remedy for Baldness and requests imploring readers to Employ British Labour abound.

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Neil deGrasse Tyson Talks Asteroid Physics & “Non Newtonian Solids” with Inspiring 9‑Year-Old Student

in K-12, Physics | December 4th, 2013

Just this week, some new test results showed that American teens, compared to other students worldwide, “failed to reach the top 20 in math, science or reading,” according to The Guardian. Afterwards, Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, called the results a “picture of educational stagnation.”

The results are deflating. But maybe we shouldn’t lose hope, not when we have kids like Jacob coming of age, and teachers like Neil deGrasse Tyson mentoring him along. Speaking last month at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Tyson fielded a question — the last question of the night — from a nine-year-old elementary school student named Jacob. To paraphrase, Jake wanted to know why we couldn’t shoot a “chunk of random material” at a hypothetical asteroid and stop it from hitting earth. This ends up being the first of a two-part question, which leads Jacob to demonstrate physics concepts with his clipboard and debate whether these flying objects share properties with “non-Newtonian solids.” Yes, I’m feeling a little better about the American educational system, especially since Jake’s dad confirms on YouTube that his son attends “great public schools.”

You can find Neil’s complete GVSU talk here.

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The History of Economics & Economic Theory Explained with Comics, Starting with Adam Smith

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Economics | December 3rd, 2013

“Everyone has questions about the economy. I started looking for the answers in economics. I found enough insights to get me interested, but I couldn’t seem to make the insights add up. I went back to the original sources, the great economists, and started to see a big picture. And while the whole picture was complicated, no one part of it was all that hard to understand. I could see that all this information made a story. But I couldn’t find a book that told the story in an accessible way. So I decided to write one, in the most accessible form I knew: comics.”

Thus begins Michael Goodwin’s new book Economix: How Our Economy Works (and Doesn’t Work) in Words and Pictures.

The book covers two (plus) centuries of economic history. It starts with the Physiocrats, Adam Smith and theoretical development of capitalism, and then steams ahead into the 19th century, covering the Industrial Revolution, the rise of big business and big finance. Next comes the action packed 20th century: the Great Depression, the New Deal, the threat from Communism during the Cold War, the tax reforms of the Reagan era, and eventually the crash of 2008 and Occupy Wall Street. Along the way, Goodwin and the illustrator Dan E. Burr demystify the economic theories of figures like Ricardo, Marx, Malthus, Keynes, Friedman and Hayek — all in a substantive but approachable way.

As with most treatments of modern economics, the book starts with Adam Smith. To get a feel for Goodwin’s approach, you can dive into the first chapter of Economix, which grapples with Smith’s theories about the free market, division of labor and the Invisible Hand. Economix can be purchased online here.

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The Library: A World History Presents a Stunning Visual Survey of The World’s Great Libraries

in Architecture, Art, Books, History | December 3rd, 2013

Voluminously well-read author and amateur librarian Alberto Manguel opens The Library at Night, a compendious treatise on the role of the library in human culture, with a startlingly bleak question. “Why then do we do it?” He asks, why do we “continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf” when “outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose.” Manguel goes on—in beautifully illustrated chapter after themed chapter—to list in fine detail the host of virtues each of his favorite libraries possesses, answering his own question by reference to the beautiful microcosmic orders great libraries manifest.

A new book, The Library: A World History by author James Campbell and photographer Will Pryce, takes a more workmanlike approach to the subject, steering clear of Manguel’s metaphysics. Even so, the book will deeply move lovers of libraries and historians alike, perhaps even to ecstasy. One Amazon reviewer put it simply: “Book Porn at its best.”

Boing Boing calls Pryce’s photographs “the centerpiece of the book,” and you can see why in a couple of selections here. Even without his eyesight, this is a project that would have delighted that rhapsodist of the library, Jorge Luis Borges. At the top, see the Strahov Abbey library in Prague. Halfway across the world, we have the Tripitaka Koreana library in South Korea (above). CNN has a gallery of Pryce’s photographic tributes to the world’s greatest libraries, and find here a critical review of the book by The Guardian’s Tom Lamont, who laments that the book solely “focuses on institutions created for the privileged.”

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch Jean Genet’s Only Film, the Censored A Song of Love (1950)

in Film, Literature | December 3rd, 2013

Petty criminal, outlaw writer, political radical, gay icon—the name Jean Genet means many things to many people, but filmmaker isn’t usually one of them. Yet Genet did direct a short film, A Song of Love (Un chant d’amour), in 1950. Silent and shot in grainy black and white, the film presents a passionate relationship between inmates, separated from each other by the prison walls. The prisoners express their estranged desire for each other in increasingly sensual ways until the frame is filled with writhing bodies. All the while, a lone guard watches, menacing and jealous.

Despite the fact that the film was banned for many years, and that Genet himself disowned it, it’s a foundational work for later gay filmmakers, from Andy Warhol to the early Derek Jarman, whose first feature Sebastiane (1976) surely owes a debt to A Song of Love. Genet’s choice of setting is no mere autobiographical detail; the previous year he faced a life sentence after his tenth conviction, and was only saved by the intervention of his respected supporters Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, who petitioned the president on his behalf. It’s possible to read A Song of Love in many ways, but it’s hard not to see it at least as Genet’s projection of the frustrated (yet hothouse) sexual tension he would know if incarcerated for the rest of his days.

Of course Genet began his writing career in prison, drafting his first novel, the pulpy yet profoundly lyrical Our Lady of the Flowers, while serving out a sentence in the early forties. Genet’s erotically charged, some might say decadent, fiction worked to reclaim and revalue his identity as a homosexual, social outcast, and criminal. In his autobiographical novel, The Thief’s Journal, written in 1949 while his fate was being decided, Genet defined himself thus:

Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.

The quote could almost serve as an epigraph for Genet’s only film, which, writes Fernando Croce, draws its “presiding image… of flesh against stone” from The Thief’s Journal. It’s an image Croce interprets as “metaphor for society-enforced division imposed on gay men, and also of the need for connection which encompasses all human existence.” Like all Genet’s work, A Song of Love takes pleasure from pain and finds arresting intimacy and unabashedly liberating sexual fulfillment in the Parisian sewers, garrets, and jails.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

How Ray Bradbury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

in Film, Literature | December 3rd, 2013

Ray Bradbury, unlike many novelists who choose to reside in Southern California, didn’t support his fiction-writing career by taking screenplay work. With the likes of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 to his name, he didn’t need to, not that it stopped him from adapting certain stories of his own for television and the movies. Only once did the prolific Bradbury undertake to write a screenplay based upon a book he didn’t write. But oh, what a book: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, turned into the John Huston-directed 1956 film of almost the same name. Though ultimately stormy — working with Huston, even in the best of times and for the brightest of writers, tended to become an ordeal — the collaboration began auspiciously, with the writer an avowed fan of the filmmaker, and the filmmaker an avowed fan of the writer. Yet neither, ironically, had much time for the Melville novel to which they had dedicated their efforts.

“Have you tried to read that novel?” Bradbury asks his audience in the clip just above. “Oh my god! John Huston didn’t know any more about it than I did. He wanted to play Ahab. Give him a harpoon, and he would’ve done it.” Working on the script in Ireland, Bradbury spent “eight long months of agonizing work, subconscious work,” all of which prepared him for the next decisive moment in this particular writing process: “I got out of bed one morning in London, looked in the mirror, and said, ‘I am Herman Melville!’ I sat down at the typewriter, and in eight hours of passionate, red-hot writing, I finished the screenplay of Moby Dick, and I ran across London, I threw the script in John Huston’s lap, and said, ‘There! It’s done!’ He read it and said, ‘My god, what happened?’ I said, ‘Behold: Herman Melville.’ ”

You can now read the fruits of this act of artistic channeling in a new edition from Subterranean Press featuring an essay by William Touponce, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Cinephilia and Beyond has more, including a link to a PDF of Bradbury’s original final script.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Learn to Draw Butts with Just Five Simple Lines

in Art, Comedy, K-12 | December 3rd, 2013

You know what I say when someone tells me they “can’t” draw?

Pshaw.

Even those who’ve yet to discover the transformative effects of Lynda Barry’s wonderfully corrective Picture This know how to draw something. Very few children make it to adulthood without picking up some simple geometric formula by which a series of ovals, rectangles and lines can be configured to resemble a doggie head or a brave astride his cantering pony.

A couple thousand renderings later, such magic still satisfies, but you might want to consider branching out. May I recommend the teachings of artist and visual storyteller, Karl Gude? This laid-back former Director of Information Graphics at Newsweek can — and will! — teach you how to draw “great butts” with just five lines.

Gude’s command of posterior essentials is downright heady. (I say this as a former artist’s model whose rear end has been misrepresented on paper more times than I’d care to mention.) Who knew that capturing this part of human anatomy could prove so simple? Gude’s easygoing online instruction style may be traceable to some sort of adult beverage (I’m not casting stones…), but his methods are easy enough for a child to master.

Speaking of which, if you want to make a friend for life, share the above video with an actual child, preferably one who claims he or she “can’t” draw. Put a Sharpie in his or her paw, and within five minutes, Gude will have the little twerp cranking out butts of all shapes and sizes. After which, pride of accomplishment may well lead to some of Gude’s more advanced tutorials, like the detailed human eye seen below.

If that proves too challenging, there’s no shame in sticking with the glutes. To my way of thinking, the mindset that allows the artist to keep going when his pencil snaps mid-demonstration is lesson enough.

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Ayun Halliday’s personal motto is Dare to Be Heinie. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once (Free Online Course)

in How to Learn for Free, Language Lessons, MIT | December 2nd, 2013

At MIT, Dr. Paola Rebusco usually teaches physics to freshmen. But, on behalf of the MIT Experimental Study Group, Rebusco has devised an appealing course — Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full — where she combines teaching two things many people love: learning to speak Italian and cooking Italian food. The course summary reads:

The participants in this seminar will dive into learning basic conversational Italian, Italian culture, and the Mediterranean diet. Each class is based on the preparation of a delicious dish and on the bite-sized acquisition of parts of the Italian language and culture. A good diet is not based on recipes only, it is also rooted in healthy habits and in culture. At the end of the seminar the participants will be able to cook some healthy and tasty recipes and to understand and speak basic Italian.

As Rebusco explains in a short video, this course has the advantage of making the language lessons a little less abstract. It gives students a chance to apply what they’ve learned (new vocabulary words, pronunciations, etc.) in a fun, practical context.

Above, we start you off with the first language lesson in the seminar. It begins where all basic courses start — with how to say your name. Below, you can watch the class learn to cook fresh pasta. Along the way, the course also teaches students how to make espresso, risotto, homemade pizza, bruschetta, and biscotti. Lectures for the course can be found on the MIT web site, YouTube and iTunes. Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full also appears in our collection of Free Foreign Language Lessons and 1200 Free Courses Online. Buon Appetito!

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Maria Callas Performs at Covent Garden in 1962, Toward the End of Her Brief But Spectacular Career

in Music | December 2nd, 2013

Maria Callas’s short and storied opera career first took off in Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. From there, her distinctive voice — some would call it “ugly,” others, magical — carried the soprano to London, Paris and New York. She’s remembered for her performances in La traviata, Norma and Tosca as much as for her rapid personal and professional decline. By the mid 1950s, her voice began to lose its warmth “becoming thin and acidulous,” some would say. At 40, her singing career was basically over. Then, at 53, she died of a heart attack in Paris, alone and unhappy. Above, we have Callas performing at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on November 4, 1962, basically toward the end of her brief but spectacular career. She was a surprise participant in a gala concert broadcast on British television. Callas would have turned 90 today, an occasion marked by this Google doodle.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best American Films Ever Made (1963)

in Film | December 2nd, 2013

Creative Commons image by Gary Stevens

Like most of the Nouvelle Vague directors who remain interesting today, Jean-Luc Godard has played the role of film critic as often as he has the role of film director. While his cinematic compatriot François Truffaut got his start reviewing movies before he decided to make them, Godard never quite underwent the full conversion; his nonfiction works for the screen include the four-and-a-half-hour Histoire(s) du cinéma, a thoroughly idiosyncratic take on exactly the subject you would think it covers, and even most of his feature films turn back on their medium and “interrogate” it — to use, I suppose, an academic term fallen slightly out of fashion. Then agan, Godard himself has also gone somewhat out of style, not that it drains any of the fascination out of his filmography, and certainly not that it makes his opinons less relevant to fellow cinephiles.

You’ll find a collection of these Godardian judgments in the back pages of Cahiers du cinema, the journal that bred the lion’s share of these French New-Wave critics-turned-filmmakers. On a page of critics’ favorites lists maintained by a certain Eric C. Jonshson, you’ll find Godard’s top-ten rankings, as published by Cahiers du cinema for the years 1956 through 1965.

While he does use these lists to give the occasional (and well-deserved) prop to a colleague — Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux Hommes dans Manhattan, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, Truffaut’s Les Quatres cent coups, Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins, and Agnes Varda’s Du cote de la Cote come in for honors in 1959 alone — he also pays his respects to the stolid virtues of American filmmaking, especially of the sensational variety: Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin (#1, 1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (#8, 1960), Samuel Fuller’s Schock Corridor (#5, 1965.) He even put together a list of the Ten Best American Sound Films, which runs as follows:

Scarface (Howard Hawks)
The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Searchers (John Ford)
Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly-Donen)
The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)
Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray)
Angel Face (Otto Preminger)
To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg)

I’ve often thought that it takes someone foreign to most clearly view America, and by the same token, it probably takes an outsider to most clearly view mainstream cinema. In this list, Godard characteristically provides both angles at once.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Susan Sontag’s 50 Favorite Films (and Her Own Cinematic Creations)

See the Original Magazine Publication of Heart of Darkness and Other Great Works by Joseph Conrad

Neil deGrasse Tyson Talks Asteroid Physics & “Non Newtonian Solids” with Inspiring 9‑Year-Old Student

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Watch Jean Genet’s Only Film, the Censored A Song of Love (1950)

How Ray Bradbury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Learn to Draw Butts with Just Five Simple Lines

MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once (Free Online Course)

Maria Callas Performs at Covent Garden in 1962, Toward the End of Her Brief But Spectacular Career

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best American Films Ever Made (1963)

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