An AI Generated, Never-Ending Discussion Between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

in Philosophy | November 3rd, 2022

From the site Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion comes an AI gen­er­at­ed, nev­er-end­ing dis­cus­sion between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek. What’s the point of this AI gen­er­at­ed con­ver­sa­tion? The cre­ator explains:

As of late 2022, it’s cheap and easy to pro­duce AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent that is super­fi­cial­ly good and sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar to “the real thing”. This applies to videos resem­bling celebri­ties (com­mon­ly known as Deep­fakes) or, as in the case of the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion, speech.

This project aims to raise aware­ness about the ease of using tools for syn­the­siz­ing a real voice. Right now, any moti­vat­ed fool can do this with a lap­top in their bed­room. This changes our rela­tion­ship with the media we con­sume online and rais­es ques­tions about the impor­tance of author­i­ta­tive sources, breach of trust and gulli­bil­i­ty.

Will this tech­nol­o­gy lead to a mas­sive pro­lif­er­a­tion of sub-opti­mal-qual­i­ty con­tent? Should we sim­ply dis­trust any­thing we see online? As new tools are devel­oped to help iden­ti­fy gen­er­at­ed con­tent, I rec­om­mend main­tain­ing a skep­ti­cal stance, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the source/channel of infor­ma­tion does­n’t seem reli­able and when the claims seem pre­pos­ter­ous or out­ra­geous.

Ulti­mate­ly, I don’t see this as a tech­ni­cal prob­lem, but as a human one. We all share a duty to edu­cate the com­ing gen­er­a­tions about the new par­a­digm while focus­ing on form­ing com­pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­als who would not mis­use these awe­some pow­ers.

As an AI opti­mist, I remain hope­ful that we will be able to reg­u­late our­selves, and that we will take exper­i­ments such as the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion for what they are: a play­ful way to help us imag­ine what our favorite peo­ple would do, if we had unlim­it­ed access to their minds. Art and Phi­los­o­phy, here exem­pli­fied by Bavar­i­an direc­tor Wern­er Her­zog and Sloven­ian philoso­pher Slavoj Žižek, can guide us while nav­i­gat­ing these treach­er­ous waters.

Lis­ten to the end­less Her­zog-Žižek con­ver­sa­tion here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Slavoj Žižek: What Ful­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates the Touch­ing, Exis­ten­tial Jour­ney of a Plas­tic Bag

 

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Bruce Springsteen Performs Moving Acoustic Versions of “Thunder Road,” “The Rising” & “Land of Hope & Dreams” on the Howard Stern Show

in Music | November 2nd, 2022

After try­ing for 35 years, the Howard Stern Show final­ly land­ed an inter­view with Bruce Springsteen–an inter­view that last­ed 2 hours and 15 min­utes and cov­ered a tremen­dous amount of ground. Along the way, Spring­steen talked about his song-writ­ing process and the ori­gins of his clas­sic songs, and then per­formed some acoustic ver­sions, alter­nat­ing between gui­tar and piano. Above and below, you can watch stir­ring per­for­mances of  “Thun­der Road,” “The Ris­ing,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Born to Run, and “Tougher Than the Rest.”

Those who have the Sir­ius XM app can watch the entire per­for­mance online. For those who don’t, you can always sign up for a free tri­al to the ser­vice.

Land of Hope and Dreams

The Ris­ing


Tougher Than the Rest

Born to Run

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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

Bruce Spring­steen and the E Street Band Impro­vis­es and Plays, Com­plete­ly Unre­hearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Nev­er Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Bruce Spring­steen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Gov­ern­ment. I’ve Come to Play Rock

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Michael Pollan, Sam Harris & Others Explain How Psychedelics Can Change Your Mind

in Psychology | November 2nd, 2022

You may nev­er have tried psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. You may nev­er have had an inter­est in try­ing psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. But if you’re read­ing this, you do have a mind, and you’ve almost cer­tain­ly felt some curios­i­ty about how that mind works. As any engi­neer knows, one of the short­est routes to under­stand­ing how a machine works is to dis­rupt its nor­mal oper­a­tions. Psy­che­delics do just that for your brain, shift­ing your con­scious­ness into a new per­spec­tive that can offer insights into your very per­cep­tions of real­i­ty. Or at least they do it in the view of Michael Pol­lan, Sam Har­ris, Jacob Sil­va, Ben Goertzel, and Matthew John­son.

The more famil­iar you are with cur­rent psy­che­delics research, the more of those names you’ll know. Pol­lan, who made his name writ­ing about food, stars in the Big Think video above about the sci­en­tif­ic renais­sance of mind-alter­ing drugs. “The brain is a hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tem, and the default mode net­work appears to be at the top,” he explains. That net­work is “the orches­tra con­duc­tor or cor­po­rate exec­u­tive. You take that out of the pic­ture, and sud­den­ly you have this upris­ing from oth­er parts of the brain and you have net­works that don’t ordi­nar­i­ly com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er sud­den­ly strik­ing up con­ver­sa­tions.”

Psy­che­del­ic sub­stances do this, mean­ing that when they’re in use, “you might have the visu­al cor­tex talk­ing to the audi­to­ry sys­tem, and sud­den­ly you’re see­ing music.” Any music-lover would feel at least some desire for the same expe­ri­ence. And even those with­out any inter­est in music would sure­ly like to enjoy for them­selves what Sam Har­ris describes feel­ing dur­ing one of his own psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ences: “There was a whole veneer of fear, frankly, that I did­n’t know was there that got stripped away,” leav­ing a “naked aware­ness of the present moment.”

This may sound sim­i­lar to the kind of state com­mon­ly ascribed to inten­sive med­i­ta­tion, and indeed, Har­ris — him­self a prac­ti­tion­er and advo­cate of med­i­ta­tive prac­tice — acknowl­edges it as anoth­er path to the same des­ti­na­tion. But for some peo­ple, Har­ris says, “tak­ing a drug is the only way they’re going to notice that it’s pos­si­ble to have a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of the world.” Even if we’re not so “lumpen and un-inquis­i­tive,” we still may not have seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered the range of ben­e­fits psy­che­delics could offer human­i­ty. “Many of the dis­or­ders that psy­che­delics appear to treat well are man­i­fes­ta­tions of a stuck brain,” Pol­lan says, “a mind that’s telling itself destruc­tive sto­ries like, ‘I can’t get through the day with­out a cig­a­rette,’ ‘I’m unwor­thy of love,’ ‘My work is shit.’ ”

The Unit­ed States was actu­al­ly con­duct­ing research into psy­che­del­ic drugs up until the ear­ly 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s admin­is­tra­tion made them ille­gal due to their poten­tial to sap the will of the men who were sup­posed to fight the Viet­nam War. (“He may well have been right,” Pol­lan acknowl­edges.) But now our soci­ety has found itself in a “men­tal health cri­sis,” as John­son, a psy­che­del­ic-sub­stance researcher at Johns Hop­kins, puts it in the brief explain­er just above, we’ll have to explore all pos­si­ble avenues — even pre­vi­ous­ly closed ones — in order to change our minds.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Use Psy­che­del­ic Drugs to Improve Men­tal Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

New LSD Research Pro­vides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Poten­tial to Pro­mote Cre­ativ­i­ty

Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Pro­gram That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Con­trol (1953–1973)

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

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

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How Pink Floyd Built The Wall: The Album, Tour & Film

in Music | November 2nd, 2022

The mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is rife with the kind of rock star ironies exploit­ed a few years lat­er by This Is Spinal Tap. Their fall into frac­tious­ness and bloat began when Roger Waters firm­ly estab­lished him­self as cap­tain on 1977’s Ani­mals, his trib­ute album for George Orwell. Stage shows became even more grandiose, lead­ing key­boardist Richard Wright to wor­ry they were “in dan­ger of becom­ing slaves to our equip­ment.” Cer­tain moments dur­ing the 1977 In the Flesh tour in sup­port of the album seem right out of a Christo­pher Guest brain­storm.

One night in Frank­furt, “the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost com­plete­ly obscured,” Mark Blake writes in Com­fort­ably Numb. Fans threw bot­tles. Crowds felt fur­ther alien­at­ed when Waters start­ed wear­ing head­phones onstage, try­ing to sync the music and visu­als. Dur­ing a five-night run at London’s Wem­b­ley Empire Pool, “offi­cials from the Greater Lon­don Coun­cil descend­ed on the venue to check that the band’s inflat­able pig had been equipped with a safe­ty line” (due to a minor pan­ic caused by an ear­li­er escaped pig). “Roger Waters over­saw the inspec­tion, bark­ing orders to the pig’s oper­a­tors… “ ‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!’ ”

Moments like these could have added lev­i­ty to Alan Parker’s 1982 film of The Wall, star­ring Bob Geld­of as the main char­ac­ter, dis­af­fect­ed rock star Pink. Waters hat­ed the movie at the time, though lat­er said, “I’ve actu­al­ly grown quite fond of it, though I very much regret there’s no humour in it, but that’s my fault. I don’t think I was in a par­tic­u­lar­ly jol­ly state.” A pris­on­er of his own suc­cess, Waters resent­ed ine­bri­at­ed fans who were (under­stand­ably) dis­tract­ed by stage shows that threat­ened to over­whelm the music. See­ing fans singing along in the front row instead of lis­ten­ing intent­ly sent him into a rage, lead­ing to the infa­mous spit­ting inci­dent, as recalled by tour­ing gui­tarist Snowy White: “It was a fun­ny gig. It was a real­ly weird vibe… to look across the stage and see Roger spit­ting at this guy at the front… It was a very strange gig. Not very good vibes.”

This is still only back­sto­ry for the album and tour to come — the mak­ing of which you can learn all about in the three-part Vinyl Rewind video series here. Waters based the jad­ed Pink on him­self and for­mer Pink Floyd front­man Syd Bar­rett, who did not return from his own onstage melt­down. Waters found him­self wish­ing he could build a wall between him­self and the fans. The band liked his demo ideas and vot­ed to move for­ward with the project. Then things real­ly went sour. Pink Floyd began to fall apart dur­ing the record­ing ses­sions. As engi­neer James Guthrie remem­bers, at the start, “they were still play­ing togeth­er, rather than one guy at a time, which is the way we end­ed up record­ing in France.” Frac­tures between Waters and Richard Wright would even­tu­al­ly lead to Wright’s fir­ing from the band.

Most of the per­son­al dis­putes were already estab­lished before The Wall. Cer­tain­ly Roger’s rela­tion­ship with Rick, but things did dete­ri­o­rate fur­ther on that lev­el dur­ing the mak­ing of the album. There were some very dif­fi­cult moments, but I don’t think there was ever a ques­tion of Roger not fin­ish­ing the album. He’s a very strong per­son. Not eas­i­ly deterred from his path. If every­one else had walked out, he would still have fin­ished it.

Waters would have toured the album by him­self as well — as he did after he left the band fol­low­ing 1983’s The Final Cut, a Pink Floyd album in name only. As it was, The Wall tour end­ed up send­ing the band into debt. Only Richard Wright made a prof­it, play­ing with the band as a salaried musi­cian. For all the stage mishaps and inter­per­son­al feuds — despite it all — Pink Floyd did what they set out to do. “We knew when we were mak­ing it,” says David Gilmour, in rec­ol­lec­tions mel­lowed by time and age, “that it was a good record.” It still stands, some forty-three years lat­er, as one of the greats. Learn how it earned the dis­tinc­tion, and what that great­ness cost the band that made it.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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: 

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm into Their 1977 Con­cept Album, Ani­mals (a Cri­tique of Late Cap­i­tal­ism, Not Stal­in)

Pink Floyd’s First Mas­ter­piece: An Audio/Video Explo­ration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

Pink Floyd’s Entire Stu­dio Discog­ra­phy is Now on YouTube: Stream the Stu­dio & Live Albums

Pink Floyd Releas­es Its First New Song in 28 Years to Help Sup­port Ukraine

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

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Making Sense of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal with Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #136

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | November 2nd, 2022

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Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Bak­er con­vene an emer­gency pod­cast record­ing to react to this mind-bend­ing, pos­si­bly immoral HBO com­e­dy docuseries, where­in Field­er helps ordi­nary peo­ple rehearse dif­fi­cult per­son­al con­fronta­tions, but this plan goes off the rails after 1.5 episodes out of the six that made up its first sea­son.

This series builds upon Fielder’s pre­vi­ous show where he comed­ical­ly tried to help busi­ness­es, Nathan for You, whose ground-break­ing finale (“Find­ing Frances”) dis­cov­ered The Rehearsal‘s for­mat. Is Nathan him­self the main butt of the joke, or is he punch­ing down? Are there bet­ter ways to show the fail­ings of real­i­ty TV? How does this kind of embar­rass­ment humor dif­fer from Borat and its ilk? Maybe the show is not as much about these peo­ple going through their rehearsals as an exam­i­na­tion of the process of rehears­ing itself that Field­er has devised.

Feel free to lis­ten to us to find out what it’s all about, but you will be best served by watch­ing this inde­scrib­able show your­self before expe­ri­enc­ing this episode.

A few rel­e­vant arti­cles also con­sid­er­ing the show include:

Fol­low us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Kierkegaard on Why We All Misunderstand the True Meaning of Love: An Animated Explanation

in Life, Philosophy | November 1st, 2022

Søren Kierkegaard died in 1855, but if he’d glimpsed our mod­ern-day land­scape of dat­ing apps, he prob­a­bly would’ve under­stood it. “Peo­ple who oth­er­wise pride them­selves on their lack of prej­u­dice will apply ter­ri­fy­ing­ly strict cri­te­ria to their choice of part­ner,” says Alain de Bot­ton in the ani­mat­ed School of Life video above. “They want some­one with just a cer­tain sort of face or income or sense of humor. They think of them­selves as kind and tol­er­ant, but when it comes to love, they have all the broad-mind­ed­ness of a believ­er in ‘a caste sys­tem where­by men are inhu­man­ly sep­a­rat­ed through the dis­tinc­tions of earth­ly life.’ ”

Kierkegaard noticed these human ten­den­cies even in his day, and to his mind, they had noth­ing at all to do with love — true Chris­t­ian love, that is, which he spent a good bit of his philo­soph­i­cal career try­ing to elu­ci­date. He insist­ed, de Bot­ton explains, “that most of us have no idea what love is, even though we refer to the term inces­sant­ly.”

Whether in Europe of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry or most any­where in the world today, we believe in roman­tic love, which involves “the ven­er­a­tion and wor­ship of one very spe­cial per­son with whose soul and body we hope to unite our own.” But this, Kierkegaard argued, results in “a nar­row and impov­er­ished sense of love should actu­al­ly be.”

The ver­sion of Chris­t­ian love for which Kierkegaard advo­cat­ed “com­mands us to love every­one, start­ing, most ardu­ous­ly, with all those who we by instinct con­sid­er to be unwor­thy of love.” In this con­cep­tion, those we believe are “mis­tak­en, ugly, irri­tat­ing, venal, wrong-head­ed, or ridicu­lous” are exact­ly the peo­ple to whom we should “extend our com­pas­sion,” iden­ti­fy­ing and under­stand­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties that made them what they are and offer­ing our kind­ness and for­give­ness accord­ing­ly. The ulti­mate goal, accord­ing to Kierkegaard, is to “love every­one with­out excep­tion,” which may well sound like an unrea­son­able demand. But how much less rea­son­able is it than the check­lists with which so many of us screen our poten­tial match­es?

To delve deep­er, read Kierkegaard’s book, Works of Love.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed, Mon­ty Python-Style Intro­duc­tion to the Søren Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist

Søren Kierkegaard: A Free Online Course on the “Father of Exis­ten­tial­ism”

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

What is Love? BBC Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture Sartre, Freud, Aristo­phanes, Dawkins & More

Dear Immanuel — Kant Gives Love Advice to a Heart­bro­ken Young Woman (1791)

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

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

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Watch World War II Unfold Day by Day: An Animated Map

in History | November 1st, 2022

In the sto­ry of World War II we all know, a hand­ful of mur­der­ous vil­lains and flawed yet capa­ble defend­ers of democ­ra­cy dri­ve the nar­ra­tive. The authors of a Kings Col­lege Lon­don project argue that this con­ven­tion­al his­to­ry shows “a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of states­men.…. Above all else, the debate about war in 1939 revolves around per­son­al­i­ties.” But there is anoth­er way to see the caus­es of war: through the esca­lat­ing arms race of the 1930s, despite the glob­al push for dis­ar­ma­ment fol­low­ing World War I’s dev­as­ta­tion.

The lead­ers of Ger­many, Italy and Japan want­ed war, yet their abil­i­ty to wage it, and the ways in which that war played out, came down to logis­ti­cal con­tests between war machines. “First in Berlin, then in Rome and final­ly in Tokyo,” writes his­to­ri­an Joseph Maio­lo, “the ebb and flow of arms com­pe­ti­tion com­pelled lead­ers to make now-or-nev­er deci­sions about war.” Such deci­sions pro­duced a wealth of unin­tend­ed con­se­quences, and led to cat­a­stroph­ic loss­es of life. Air, sea, and land pow­er cre­at­ed at an unheard-of indus­tri­al scale turned war into an assem­bly line-like process that “would see humans as no more than pieces of a larg­er mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al machine,” as the­o­rist of war Manuel De Lan­da writes.

Thus, we see the enor­mi­ty of the casu­al­ties of WWII. Mil­lions of sol­diers were fed to the front lines in “the need to pre­pare for future total wars that would demand sweep­ing mobi­liza­tion,” writes Maio­lo. Wars for glob­al suprema­cy demand­ed all of the state’s cap­i­tal, espe­cial­ly its human resources. The ani­mat­ed map above tells that sto­ry in raw num­bers: “WWII Every Day with Army Sizes.” Begin­ning with Ger­many’s dec­la­ra­tion of war on Poland on Sep­tem­ber 1st, 1939, the map cov­ers the entire­ty of the war, show­ing num­bers — some­times in the tens of mil­lions — fluc­tu­at­ing wild­ly along the front lines of every the­ater.

1939 may be the only log­i­cal start­ing point for this pre­sen­ta­tion. Yet when it comes to under­stand­ing why World War II claimed more lives than any oth­er war in his­to­ry, the expla­na­tion must begin sev­er­al years ear­li­er with arms deal­ers and gen­er­als seek­ing big­ger and big­ger bud­gets for more sophis­ti­cat­ed weapon­ry. As tech­ni­cal prob­lems increased so too did the human costs, until the strug­gle for glob­al suprema­cy dur­ing WWII became a pro­lif­er­at­ing race toward mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion after the war’s end.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

The Stag­ger­ing Human Cost of World War II Visu­al­ized in a Cre­ative, New Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

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

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Watch the First Horror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunted Castle (1896)

in Film | October 31st, 2022

In lit­er­a­ture, graph­ic descrip­tions of men­ace and dis­mem­ber­ment by mon­sters are as old as Beowulf and much, much old­er still, though it wasn’t until Horace Walpole’s 18th cen­tu­ry nov­el The Cas­tle of Otran­to inspired the goth­ic romance nov­el that hor­ror-qua-hor­ror came into fash­ion. With­out Wal­pole, and bet­ter-known goth­ic inno­va­tors like Mary Shel­ley and Bram Stok­er, we’d like­ly nev­er have had Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Love­craft, or Stephen King. But nowa­days when we think of hor­ror, we usu­al­ly think of film—and all of its var­i­ous con­tem­po­rary sub­gen­res, includ­ing creepy psy­cho­log­i­cal twists on good-old-fash­ion mon­ster movies, like The Babadook.

But from whence came the hor­ror film? Was it 1931, a ban­ner hor­ror year in which audi­ences saw both Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Franken­stein and Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Drac­u­la? Cer­tain­ly clas­sic films by mas­ters of the genre, but they did not orig­i­nate the hor­ror movie. There is, of course, F.W. Murnau’s ter­ri­fy­ing silent Nos­fer­atu from 1922 (and the real life hor­ror of its deceased director’s miss­ing head).

And what about Ger­man expres­sion­ism? “A case can be made,” argued Roger Ebert, that Robert Weine’s 1920 The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari “was the first true hor­ror film”—a “sub­jec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­ta­sy” in which “unspeak­able hor­ror becomes pos­si­ble.” Per­haps. But even before Weine’s still-effec­tive­ly-dis­ori­ent­ing cin­e­mat­ic work dis­turbed audi­ences world­wide, there was Paul Wegener’s first, 1915 ver­sion of The Golem, a char­ac­ter, writes Penn State’s Kevin Jack Hagopi­an, that served as “one of the most sig­nif­i­cant ances­tors to the cin­e­mat­ic Franken­stein of James Whale and Boris Karloff.“ Even ear­li­er, in 1910, Thomas Edi­son pro­duced an adap­ta­tion of Mary Shelley’s mon­ster sto­ry.

So how far back do we have to go to find the first hor­ror movie? Almost as far back as the very ori­gins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French spe­cial-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Dia­ble (The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, or the Manor of the Dev­il). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fan­ta­sy A Trip to the Moon—and for the trib­ute paid to him in Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his inno­v­a­tive meth­ods to tell a sto­ry, writes Mau­rice Bab­bis at Emer­son Uni­ver­si­ty jour­nal Latent Image, of “a large bat that flies into a room and trans­forms into Mephistophe­les. He then stands over a caul­dron and con­jures up a girl along with some phan­toms and skele­tons and witch­es, but then one of them pulls out a cru­ci­fix and the demon dis­ap­pears.” Not much of a sto­ry, grant­ed, and it’s not par­tic­u­lar­ly scary, but it is an excel­lent exam­ple of a tech­nique Méliès sup­pos­ed­ly dis­cov­ered that very year. Accord­ing to Earlycinema.com,

In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folk­lore and changed the way Méliès looked at film­mak­ing. Whilst film­ing a sim­ple street scene, Méliès cam­era jammed and it took him a few sec­onds to rec­ti­fy the prob­lem. Think­ing no more about the inci­dent, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a inci­dent had on the scene — objects sud­den­ly appeared, dis­ap­peared or were trans­formed into oth­er objects.

Thus was born The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, tech­ni­cal­ly the first hor­ror film, and one of the first movies—likely the very first—to delib­er­ate­ly use spe­cial effects to fright­en its view­ers.

The Haunt­ed Cas­tle has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Watch 10 Clas­sic Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Fritz Lang’s M to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

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

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How a Mondrian Painting Has Accidentally Hung Upside-Down for 75 Years

in Art | October 31st, 2022

Piet Mon­dri­an’s New York City I was recent­ly dis­cov­ered to have been hang­ing upside-down on dis­play for the past 75 years, which made for a cul­tur­al sto­ry prac­ti­cal­ly designed to go viral. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, some of those keep­ing it in cir­cu­la­tion have read it as proof pos­i­tive of the fraud­u­lence of “mod­ern art.” How good could Mon­dri­an be, after all, if nobody else over the past three-quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry could tell that his paint­ing was­n’t right-side-up? That isn’t a cogent crit­i­cism, of course: New York City I dates from 1941, by which time Mon­dri­an’s work had long since become aus­tere even by the stan­dards of abstract art, employ­ing only lines and blocks of col­or.

“The way the pic­ture is cur­rent­ly hung shows the mul­ti­col­ored lines thick­en­ing at the bot­tom, sug­gest­ing an extreme­ly sim­pli­fied ver­sion of a sky­line,” writes the Guardian’s Philip Olter­mann.

But “the sim­i­lar­ly named and same-sized oil paint­ing, New York City, which is on dis­play in Paris at the Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou, has the thick­en­ing of lines at the top,” and “a pho­to­graph of Mondrian’s stu­dio, tak­en a few days after the artist’s death and pub­lished in Amer­i­can lifestyle mag­a­zine Town and Coun­try in June 1944, also shows the same pic­ture sit­ting on an easel the oth­er way up.” It was just such clues that Susanne Mey­er-Büs­er, cura­tor of the art col­lec­tion of North Rhine-West­phalia, put togeth­er to diag­nose its cur­rent mis-ori­en­ta­tion.

Regard­less, New York City I will remain as it is. The eight-decade-old strips of paint­ed tape with which Mon­dri­an assem­bled its black, yel­low, red, and blue grid “are already extreme­ly loose and hang­ing by a thread,” said Mey­er-Büs­er. “If you were to turn it upside down now, grav­i­ty would pull it into anoth­er direc­tion.” The artist’s sig­na­ture would nor­mal­ly be a dis­trac­tion in an invert­ed work, but since he did­n’t con­sid­er this par­tic­u­lar work fin­ished, he nev­er actu­al­ly signed it — and if he had, of course, it would have been hung cor­rect­ly in the first place. In any case, it’s hard­ly a stretch to imag­ine hav­ing a rich aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence with an upside-down Mon­dri­an; could we say the same about, for instance, an upside-down Last Sup­per?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Dutch Paint “the Largest Mon­dri­an Paint­ing in the World”

Japan­ese Com­put­er Artist Makes “Dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans” in 1964: When Giant Main­frame Com­put­ers Were First Used to Cre­ate Art

Philoso­pher Por­traits: Famous Philoso­phers Paint­ed in the Style of Influ­en­tial Artists

What Hap­pens When a Cheap Ikea Print Gets Pre­sent­ed as Fine Art in a Muse­um

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

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FAMOUS ARTIST DIES PENNILESS AND ALL ALONE: The Met Museum’s Fascinating Archive of Artists’ Death Notices

in Art, History, Life, Museums | October 31st, 2022

Oh to go behind the scenes at a world class muse­um, to dis­cov­er trea­sures that the pub­lic nev­er sees.

Among the most com­pelling — and unex­pect­ed —  at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art in New York City are a pair of crumb­ing scrap­books, their pages thick with yel­low­ing obit­u­ar­ies and death notices for a wide array of late 19th and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry painters, sculp­tors, and pho­tog­ra­phers.

Some names, like Auguste Rodin or Jules Bre­ton, are still famil­iar to many 21st-cen­tu­ry art lovers.

Oth­ers, like Fran­cis Davis Mil­let, who served as a Union Army drum­mer boy dur­ing the Civ­il War and per­ished on the Titan­ic, were much admired in their day, but have large­ly fad­ed from mem­o­ry.

The vast major­i­ty are requiems of a sort for those who toiled in obscu­ri­ty. They may not have received much atten­tion in life, but the cir­cum­stances of their deaths by sui­cide, mur­der, or bizarre acci­dent had the whiff of the pen­ny dread­ful, a qual­i­ty that could move a lot of news­pa­pers. The deceased’s address­es were pub­lished, along with their names. Any trag­ic detail was sure to be height­ened for effect, the taw­dri­er the bet­ter.

As the Met’s Man­ag­ing Archivist, Jim Moske, who unearthed the scrap­books four years ago while prowl­ing for his­toric mate­r­i­al for the museum’s 150th anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion, writes in Lit Hub:

Typ­i­cal of the era’s crass tabloid jour­nal­ism, they were craft­ed to wring max­i­mum dra­ma out of mis­for­tune, and to excite and fix the atten­tion of read­ers sus­cep­ti­ble to raw emo­tion­al appeal and voyeurism. Their authors drew upon and rein­forced stereo­types of artists as indi­gent, debauched, obsessed with great­ness, eccen­tric, or suf­fer­ing from men­tal ill­ness.

It took Moske a fair amount of dig­ging to iden­ti­fy the cre­ator of these scrap­books, one Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly.

D’Hervilly spent a decade work­ing in var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tive capac­i­ties before being pro­mot­ed to Assis­tant Cura­tor of Paint­ings.  A ded­i­cat­ed employ­ee and tal­ent­ed artist him­self, D’Hervilly put his cal­li­graph­ic skills to work craft­ing illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script-style keep­sakes for the fam­i­lies of recent­ly deceased trustees and lock­er room signs.

In a recent lec­ture host­ed by the Vic­to­ri­an Soci­ety of New York, Moske not­ed that D’Hervilly under­stood that the muse­um could use news­pa­pers for self-doc­u­men­ta­tion as well pro­mo­tion.

To that end, the Met main­tained accounts with a num­ber of clip­pings bureaus, media mon­i­tor­ing ser­vices whose young female work­ers pored over hun­dreds of dai­ly news­pa­pers in search of tar­get phras­es and names.

Think of them as an ana­log, paid pre­cur­sor to Google Alerts.

Many of the clip­pings in the scrap­book bear the ini­tials “D’H” or D’Hervilly’s sur­name, scrawled in the same blue cray­on the Nation­al Press Intel­li­gence Com­pa­ny and oth­er clip­pings bureaus used to under­line the tar­get phrase.

Moske the­o­rizes that D’Hervilly may have been using the Met’s account to pur­sue a per­son­al inter­est in col­lect­ing these types of notices:

New­ly pro­mot­ed to curate mas­ter­piece paint­ings, had he giv­en up for good his own artis­tic ambi­tion? Was the com­po­si­tion of these mor­bid tomes a veiled acknowl­edge­ment of the pass­ing away of his cre­ative aspi­ra­tion? Did he iden­ti­fy with the hun­dreds of uncel­e­brat­ed artists whose fates the news clip­pings record­ed in grim detail? Per­haps, instead, his intent was more mun­dane, and com­pil­ing them was an expe­di­ent for col­lect­ing use­ful bio­graph­i­cal data as he cat­a­logued pic­tures in the Met col­lec­tion that were made by recent­ly deceased artists.

Many of the hun­dreds of clip­pings he pre­served appear to be the only traces remain­ing of these artists’ cre­ative exis­tence on this earth.

After D’Hervilly suf­fered a fatal heart attack while get­ting ready to leave for work on the morn­ing April 7, 1919, his col­leagues took over his pet project, adding to the scrap­books for anoth­er next ten years.

In research­ing the scrap­books’ author’s life, Moske was able to truf­fle up scant evi­dence of D’Hervilly’s extracur­ric­u­lar cre­ative out­put — just one paint­ing in a cat­a­logue of an 1887 Nation­al Acad­e­my of Design exhi­bi­tion — but a 1919 clip­ping, duti­ful­ly past­ed (posthu­mous­ly, of course) into one of the scrap­books, iden­ti­fied the long­time Met employ­ee as a “SLAVE OF DUTY AT ART MUSEUM”, who nev­er took time off for hol­i­days or even lun­cheon, pre­fer­ring to eat at his desk.

via Lit Hub

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Take a New Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

An Unbe­liev­ably Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map Lets You Explore the Rich Col­lec­tions of the Met Muse­um

Down­load 584 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Free Cult Films by Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Streaming Service

in Film | October 31st, 2022

For many Open Cul­ture read­ers, the Hal­loween sea­son offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty — not to say an excuse — to re-expe­ri­ence clas­sic hor­ror films: F.W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we sug­gest a home screen­ing of the for­mi­da­ble work of vin­tage cin­e­ma that is 1968’s The Astro Zom­bies? Writ­ten, pro­duced, and direct­ed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Dev­ils — it fea­tures not just “a mad astro-sci­en­tist” played by John Car­ra­dine and “two gore-crazed, solar-pow­ered killer robot zom­bies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door vic­tims; Chi­nese com­mu­nist spies; dead­ly Mex­i­can secret agents led by the insane­ly volup­tuous Tura Satana” and an “intre­pid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zom­bies for free, and new­ly remas­tered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new stream­ing site from film and video dis­trib­u­tor Kino Lor­ber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treat­ed to a wealth of tit­il­lat­ing view­ing options of a vari­ety of eras and sub­gen­res: “Dri­ve-in favorites” like Ape and Beware! The Blob; “gold­en age exploita­tion” like Reefer Mad­ness and She Shoul­da Said ‘No’!; and even clas­sics like Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis and Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Fear and Desire.

True cult-film enthu­si­asts, of course, may well go straight to the avail­able selec­tions, thought­ful­ly grouped togeth­er, from “Mas­ter of Ital­ian Hor­ror” Mario Bava and pro­lif­ic Span­ish “B‑movie” king­pin Jesús Fran­co. Those look­ing to throw a fright night might con­sid­er Kino Cult’s offer­ings filed under “hard­boiled hor­ror”: Kill­bil­lies, The House with 100 Eyes, Bun­ny: The Killer Thing.

Few of these pic­tures skimp on the grotesque; few­er still skimp on the humor, a nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent in even the most har­row­ing hor­ror movies. Far from a pile of cyn­i­cal hack­work, Kino Cult’s library has clear­ly been curat­ed with an eye toward films that, although for the most part pro­duced inex­pen­sive­ly and with unre­lent­ing intent to pro­voke vis­cer­al reac­tions in their audi­ences, are hard­ly with­out inter­est to seri­ous cinephiles. The site even includes an “art­sploita­tion” sec­tion con­tain­ing such taboo-breach­ing works as Cur­tis Burz’s Sum­mer House. Among its gen­er­al recent addi­tions you’ll also find Dog­tooth by Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, per­haps the most dar­ing high-pro­file provo­ca­teur cur­rent­ly at work in the medi­um. Since Kino Cult has made all these films and more avail­able to stream at no charge, none of us, no mat­ter our par­tic­u­lar cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties, has an excuse to pass this Hal­loween un-enter­tained — and more to the point, undis­turbed. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

The First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: Full of Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

What Scares Us, and How Does this Man­i­fest in Film? A Hal­loween Pret­ty Much Pop Cul­ture Pod­cast (#66)

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

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