“More people died in World War II than any other war in history,” explains Neil Halloran in The Fallen of World War II. In his 15-minute film, Halloran uses innovative data visualization techniques to put the human cost of WW II into perspective, showing how some 70 million lives were lost within civilian and military populations across Europe and Asia, from 1939 to 1945. As one commenter put it, “One million, six million, seventy million. Spoken or written, these numbers become … incomprehensible. Presented graphically, they hit closer to the heart. As the Soviet losses climbed, I thought my browser had become frozen. Surely the top of the column must have been reached by now, I thought.” He’s referring to the staggering number of Soviets who died fighting the Nazis. If you fast forward to the 6‑minute mark above, you can see what he means.
The video comes accompanied by an interactive website, where users can “pause during key moments to interact with the charts and dig deeper into the numbers.” To use this interactive website, you will need a fairly new computer and a modern browser.
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Cities as we know them came into being when they industrialized in the 19th century. Film as we know it came into being when its own industry developed in the 20th. And so film came into its own in an era when cities around the world had become the most fascinating places going. It makes sense, then, that early motion pictures — even the very earliest, in the form of the Lumière brothers’ shots of the streets of 1980s Lyon — often took cities as their subjects.
“The 1920swere a key decade in the development of cities,” writes urban cartographer and explorer Eric Brightwell. Not only did that era see the beginning of the preservation movement, “built around the notion that architecture and history were sometimes as worth preserving as wilderness and nature,” but “the 1920 census revealed that for the first time more Americans lived in cities than the country. Le Corbusier began writing his series, ‘1925 Expo: Arts Déco,’ and Art Deco soon became one of the architectural styles most closely associated with high-rises.”
Brightwell adds that “the 1920s also gave rise to the city symphony.” They’ve been loosely defined “as a poetic, experimental documentary that presents a portrait of daily life within a city while attempting to capture something of the city’s spirit.”
These films, each of a slightly different and sometimes more than slightly experimental form, do indeed capture the sense of possibility that only a city can give off. Alas, the next eighty years of the 20th century—a time when even some of the greatest metropolises would suffer population exodus, freeway-building, and “urban renewal” in all its forms—wouldn’t treat cities very well. But they’ve now made a comeback, signaled by the much-discussed fact that, in the 21st century, more human beings everywhere live in cities than not. Maybe this new era of cities will bring about a new era of city symphonies. If so, its filmmakers will certainly have a rich tradition to work with.
“The Franz Kafka Rock Opera” comes from Season 1 of a 1999 video series called Home Movies. In this episode, we find the character Dwayne writing a rock opera based on Kafka’s famous novella The Metamorphosis. It’s not Tommy or Quadrophenia — two of the greatest rock operas ever made. But it does, true to form, feature lyrics and song. You can watch a segment of the rock opera above.
· Kafka Song #1: Introduction He is Franz Kafka!
Franz Kafka!
Be careful if you get him pissed…
Franz! Franz Kafka!
He’ll smite you with metaphor fists!
Writing all he can, he’s just a man
A warrior of words taking a stand
He is Franz Kafka!
Spoken: Oh look, but there he is, what will he say?
I’m a lonely German…a lonely German from Prague!
Kafka! Kafka! Kafka!
· Kafka Song #2: Turning into a bug I don’t know what’s wrong with me I think I’m turning into a bug
I see double what I see I think I’m turning into a bug
I ain’t got no self-esteem I think I’m turning into a bug
Bet you fifty dollars I’m a man, I’m a scholar and I’m turning into a bug
Momma like a daddy like a baby like a baby like I’ll turn into a bug
Yeah! Yeah!
He is Franz Kafka!
· Kafka Song #3: Living like a bug ain’t easy Living like a bug ain’t easy
My old clothes don’t seem to fit me
I got little tiny bug feet
I don’t really know what bugs eat
Don’t want no one stepping on me
Now I’m sympathizing with fleas
Living like a bug ain’t easy…
· Kafka Song #4: Ending
Spoken: Welcome to heaven Franz! My name is God! I think you’re going to like it here! He is Franz Kafka!
· Louis, Louis End Rap Well, I’m, curing disease
Helping blind people read
Don’t drink that milk without talking to me (Oh yeah!)
I’m saving those who can’t see with their eyes
Don’t mess with me you’ll get pasteurized!
Yeah! Come on! Come on! Louis Louis in the house! Break it down!
(Jason does a human beatbox)
· Kafka End Song Right now he can
He’s just a man
A warrior of words
Taking a stand
He grew up very poor
He’s steel, it’s to the core
Born in 1883 died in 1924
He is Franz Kafka!
These days, most of our pop stars seem to come pre-printed from child-star factories, their looks and sound carefully crafted for maximum appeal. But every generation has its child stars, especially since the advent of radio and television, and many greats of the past got their start as kids, even if they made their way in a more individualized fashion. Elvis made his first public appearance onstage at a state fair at ten years of age, followed by a local radio appearance when he was twelve. Stevie Wonder made his public debut on TV at age twelve, showing off his harmonica skills at the Apollo theater and on the Ed Sullivan Show. And Jimmy Page—he of Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin fame—first caught the public’s eye as the thirteen-year old member of a skiffle band on the BBC’s All Your Own in 1957. See the shy, fresh-faced young “James Page” above.
Page discusses with the show’s host Huw Wheldon not just his musical ambitions, but his academic ones, specifically his interest in finding a cure for cancer, “if it isn’t covered by then.” Page stuck with his biological research, for a while, then went to art school for two years. But through it all there was the guitar, his true passion and life’s work. By 1963, Page was working full time as a session guitarist and seemed eager to discuss his new career in the recently re-discovered television interview above. It was at this point, as he recounted to journalist Steven Rosen in 1977, that he reached a “crossroads,” as he called it: “is it an art career or is it going to be music?”
Page obviously sorted out it out quickly. He may not have cured cancer, but he did re-invent rock and roll. Last year saw the publication of Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page, a 512-page autobiography in photographs, each one chosen by Page himself. His early teenage skiffle and session years are covered, all the way through his 2012 reception at the White House, and everything in-between. In November of 2014, Page sat down with superstar pop artist Jeff Koons at New York’s 92nd Street Y to discuss the book and his lifelong love of the guitar, including that “very embarrassing” 1957 TV appearance. “When you’ve had a whole lifetime full of music,” Page says, “there are certain things that sort of come up and haunt you, and that is one of them… but it’s got a charm about it.” Indeed it does, and there are certainly worse things that could haunt an artist of Page’s stature. See Page and Koons’ full conversation above, and watch Page discuss his “autobiography with photographs” below.
Czech cinema gained international acclaim in the 1960s with films like Closely Watched Trains (1966) and The Fireman’s Ball(1967) – movies that conflated the political with the sexual in ways that were as innovative as they were subversive. Much of the fuel of this New Wave of Czech film was the utter absurdity of the Communist rule and the horrors inflicted by the Nazis. Yet beneath that, there’s something within Czech culture that seems naturally skeptical of authority. Franz Kafka was a native of Prague, after all. And one of the most beloved books in the Czech language is Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923), a frequently hilarious satire on the idiocy of war.
The works of Czech filmmaker Gustav Machatý weren’t overtly political yet they were still very subversive. At a time when the battles for universal suffrage was still a recent memory, Machatý had the audacity to show women as sexually autonomous beings.
Born in Prague in 1901, Machatý went to Hollywood at a young age and reportedly apprenticed under D. W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim. When he returned to his home country, he started making movies.
Machatý’s third feature and final silent movie was Erotikon (1929), a story about a country girl seduced by an upper-class cad only to get pregnant and ostracized by her village. The film recalls F.W. Murnau in his emphasis on faces and his expressionistic use of the camera. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the scene above where the girl surrenders to her slick paramour and discovers sexual bliss. The camera spins around as she writhes on the bed. Showing female sexuality frankly was daring at that time. Women in movies by D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin were chaste and pure. They received male appetites, perhaps, but were not subject to animalistic urges themselves.
Four years later, Machatý went even further with his movie Ekstase (1933). Early in the movie, we see the luminously beautiful Hedy Lamarr skinny-dipping in a pond. When her horse runs off with her clothes, she run naked over hill and dale to catch it. A bit later in the movie, in a scene that recalls Erotikon, she has an earth-shattering orgasm thanks to the strapping young worker who finds her horse. Ekstase might not be the first non-pornographic film to have nude scenes but it was certainly one of the first. And it was definitely the first film to clearly show a female orgasm.
The movie was an international sensation. It received raves at the Venice Film Festival only to be denied a prize because the Vatican objected. Worse, it couldn’t get a proper release in the US. First Ekstase was seized by U.S. Customs as pornography. Then, when it finally cleared that hurdle, the movie ran afoul of Hollywood’s self-censoring Hays Code. Ekstase only managed to screen in a handful of independent theaters in 1940, seven years after it first came out.
Nonetheless, the notoriety of the movie turned Hedy Lamarr into a star and soon she was starring opposite Hollywood icons like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable. (And just in case you thought that Lamarr was just a pretty face, she also co-invented and patented technology during WWII that laid the groundwork for things like Wi-Fi.)
Machatý had less success. As the threat of Nazism loomed, he fled back to Hollywood and ended up being an uncredited director for such studio films as The Good Earth and Madame X. He spent the last part of his life teaching film at the Munich Film School before dying in 1963.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
We’ve posted plenty here from David Bowie the singer, which stands to reason, given his prominence in the set of all possible David Bowies. But rock-and-roll’s best-known shapeshifter has worked in other fields as well: a huge number of people love Bowie the singer, of course, but Bowie the actor has also accrued devoted fans of his own. Many continue to discover him through such “cult classic” films as Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earthand Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Here, we’ve previously featured his turns alongside Ricky Gervais and as Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. Plenty of successful musicians start up high-profile side careers as actors, but Bowie the actor got his break before Bowie the singer did.
“With hindsight, you can see where his career was going,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, “but by 1967, the teenager’s first recording career had come to a halt after the release of his oddment Laughing Gnome after which, Bowie didn’t release a record for another two years.” Having studied under Lindsay Kemp, Bowie placed himself well to appear in the famed English mime’s 1967 production of Pierrot in Turquoise or, The Looking Glass Murders. Bowie didn’t just act in it, but also wrote and performed its music. You can watch several clips of a 1969 production of the show captured by Scottish television, including the songs “Columbine,”“The Mirror,” and “Threepenny Pierrot.” (This Youtube playlist rounds up all the Bowie music from the show available.)
As much work as the young Bowie took on for Pierrot in Turquoise, he didn’t star in it. The title role of the Commedia dell’Arte’s beloved sad clown went to Kemp himself, though in 1976, Bowie declared himself as playing it in his career as a whole, through all his various personae: “I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre. What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time.” So we perhaps can’t speak of “Bowie the singer” and “Bowie the actor” after all — if they were inseparable back then, surely they’ve always been. And if Ziggy Stardust (in whose concerts Kemp performed) doesn’t count as theatre, what does?
There’s an old axiom that mediocre books make great movies and great books make for lousy movies. Mario Puzo’s bestseller The Godfather is a straightforward potboiler but Francis Ford Coppola spun it into one of the best films ever made. In contrast, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has beguiled multiple ambitious, misguided filmmakers into making cinematic duds.
Hollywood’s 1956 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s famously massive tome War and Peace proved that axiom to be true. Director King Vidor, who generally speaking is no slouch when it comes to directing epics, just couldn’t translate the novel’s sweep and depth. Moreover, the film’s leads, Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda, just seemed miscast. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther described the movie as “oddly mechanical and emotionally sterile.”
The movie was also an affront to Russian nationalism. After all, Tolstoy’s novel is not just another historical epic; it is a cultural lodestone for what is “Russian-ness.” It is, as Rosemary Edmonds, a translator of the 1963 edition of the book called, the “Iliad and the Odyssey of Russia.” The Soviet film industry couldn’t let some half-baked Hollywood flick end up being the sole cinematic adaptation of the book. Making an adaptation was, as a bunch of Soviet filmmakers wrote in an open letter, “a matter of honor for the Soviet cinema industry.”
After decades of making stolid propaganda pieces that more often than not involved tractors, the Soviet film industry was fired up to make a work that was faithful to Tolstoy and yet have artistic merit as a movie – a tall order. As the director and star of the Russian version of War and Peace, Sergei Bondarchuk, put it: “Our duty is to introduce the future viewer to the origins of sublime art, to make the innermost mysteries of the novel, War and Peace, visually tangible, to inform a feeling of fullness of life, of the joy of human experience.”
The Soviet government marshaled a staggering amount of effort and expense to realize this film. Never underestimate the will of a totalitarian dictatorship with an axe to grind. Production started in 1961 and lasted six years. More than forty different museums contributed costumes and set dressing to the production, including things like chandeliers, silverware and furniture. The Department of Agriculture contributed 900 horses. The Red Army had 12,000 troops play as extras during the climactic Battle of Borodino sequence. Bondarchuk suffered two near-fatal heart attacks during production.
All that money and effort paid off. The resulting movie was one of the most lavish, spectacular films ever made. And at 451 minutes, it’s also one of the longest. (It was released in the USSR as four separate movies.)
Along the way, Bondarchuk pulled off the impossible – the movie is actually good, mirroring the breadth and depth of the novel. War and Peace won all sorts of awards including an Oscar for Best Foreign language movie. As a young Roger Ebert raved back in 1969:
“War and Peace” is the definitive epic of all time. It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and — yes — splendid movie. Perhaps that’s just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph.
You can watch the film above, thanks to Mosfilm. It comes complete with subtitles.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Since her first novel, 1970’s The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison has dazzled readers with her commanding language—colloquial, magical, magisterial, even fanciful at times, but held firm to the earth by a commitment to history and an unsparing exploration of racism, sexual abuse, and violence. Reading Morrison can be an exhilarating experience, and a harrowing one. We never know where she is going to take us. But the journey for Morrison has never been one of escapism or art for art’s sake. In a 1981 interview, she once said, “the books I wanted to write could not be only, even merely, literary or I would defeat my purposes, defeat my audience.” As she put it then, “my work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why.”
She has sustained such a weighty mission not only with a love of language, but also with a critical understanding of its power—to seduce, to manipulate, confound, wound, twist, and kill. Which brings us to the recorded speech above, delivered in 1993 at her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature. After briefly thanking the Swedish Academy and her audience, she begins, “Fiction has never been entertainment for me.” Winding her speech around a parable of “an old woman, blind but wise,” Morrison illustrates the ways in which “oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
Another kind of language takes flight, “surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.” In the folktale at the center of her speech, language is a bird, and the blind seer to whom it is presented gives us a choice: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”
Language, she suggests, is in fact our only human power, and our responsibility. The consequences of its misuse we know all too well, and Morrison does not hesitate to name them. But she ends with a challenge for her audience, and for all of us, to take our own meager literary resources and put them to use in healing the damage done. You should listen to, and read, her entire speech, with its maze-like turns and folds. Near its end, the discursiveness flowers into exhortation, and—though she has said she dislikes having her work described thus—poetry. “Make up a story,” she says, “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”
We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly — once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation
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Yesterday we discovered, thanks to one of our readers, Ishizaka’s follow-up to The Open Goldberg Variations — The Open Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Also Kickstarter-funded and released under a Creative Commons license, her new production puts 48 Preludes and Fugues into the commons. Explaining the importance of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Alexandre Prokoudine writes over at Libre Graphics World:
Among classical music connoisseurs, the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 (WTC, or “the 48” for short) is widely regarded as one of the most influential works by J.S. Bach. Here is why.
For a long time instruments used to be tuned in such intervals between notes that transposition (playing a melody in a key different from the originally intended one) usually produced a melody that was clearly out of tune. Finding the right intervals was an interesting mathematical problem to solve, and it was done in the 17th century by Andreas Werckmeister.
So while J.S. Bach didn’t invent well-tempered tuning, the 48 was his major, if not defining contribution to making it popular, as the 48 was pretty much The Music Theory Bible for generations of composers…
Historical value aside, the 48 is simply beautiful and elegantly sophisticated music (with score laid out in up to four voices, yet played by a single musician). If this is the first time you are listening to WTC, I officially envy you, because are about to discover something very special.
You can get the Open Well-Tempered Clavier as a free download here (please read the instructions on the page), or stream it above. You can also support the artist and purchase the download for a fee of your choice, or buy a CD version over on Amazon.
Perform an internet search on the phrase “David Bowie Paper Doll” and what do you get? Hint: it’s not a cover of the Mills Brothers hit. David Bowie paper dolls are proliferating in astonishing numbers.
Elusive designer Vodka Caramel’s Amazing 70’s Bowie Paper Doll celebrates some of our hero’s most glamorous looks, but saddles him with the crotch of a Ken doll and no fewer than four interchangeable heads! And we thought the Thin White Paper Doll’s crew socks were an indignity.
A Spanish fan observed Bowie’s 65th birthday by updating the abbreviated tighty whities of a notorious 1973 photo shoot to a modest pair of standard issue Y‑fronts. Interestingly, this paper doll’s suspendered Halloween Jack suit arrives with bulge intact.
Points to Serge Baeken above for recognizing the paper doll possibilities in the Pierrot costume Bowie sported in the video for 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes.” (Fun fact: Bowie made his theatrical debut—and wrote the music for—a bizarre 1968 pantomime about Pierrot.… His character’s name was “Cloud”)
Artist Claudia Varosio’s entry in the Bowie paper doll stakes could pass as illustrations for a 1970’s children’s book. Title? Boys Keep Swinging, after a cut from Bowie’s 1979 Lodger album. Chaste young girls would love the t‑shirted, non-threatening Bowie.
The comparatively conservative, full-faced Bowie above comes to us via Swedish family magazine Året Runt. I may never learn another word of Swedish, but thanks to David Bowie, I can now say paper doll (klippdockor). In appreciation, allow me to share another example of David Bowie klippdockor…
If it all starts seeming a bit rote, mix things up by having artist Mel Elliot’s paper doll Bowie swap duds with fellow pop star / style icon paper dolls, Beyonce, Debbie Harry, and Rihanna.
“The best proof we have that life is good is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach,” writes J.M. Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year. “It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free.” While the respected novelist voiced that thought, as he often does, through a highly opinionated protagonist, I can’t help but suspect that author and character to some extent agree on this. Some of us discover Bach right away, in childhood; others do it much later. And whether or not we’ve earned or merited his music, it now comes to us more freely than ever.
Take, for example, Bach’s complete organ works, which you can download at no cost from Block M Records. Performing them all, we have University of Michigan’s Dr. James Kibbie — “on original baroque organs in Germany,” no less.
They’ve organized the collections, released under a Creative Commons license, into a complete catalog (that you can also search)—with downloadable groups (from trio sonatas and concerti to the Schübler Chorales and the Orgelbüchlein), as well as a list of evergreen familiar masterworks (such as the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and the Passacaglia in C Minor). They’ve made it easy to access and enjoy an important part of Bach’s wide, hugely influential, and endlessly enduring body of work. The question of whether life is ultimately good you’ll have to settle for yourself, but you can easily start gathering the evidence right here.
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