A 1933 Profile of Frida Kahlo: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”

in Art | January 26th, 2025

Kahlo One

Wal­ter Keane—supposed painter of “Big Eyed Chil­dren” and sub­ject of a 2014 Tim Bur­ton film—made a killing, attain­ing almost Thomas Kinkade-like sta­tus in the mid­dle­brow art mar­ket of the 1950s and 60s. As it turns out, his wife, Mar­garet was in fact the artist, “paint­ing 16 hours a day,” accord­ing to a Guardian pro­file. In some part, the sto­ry may illus­trate how easy it was for a man like Wal­ter to get mil­lions of peo­ple to see what they want­ed to see in the pic­ture of success—a charis­mat­ic, tal­ent­ed man in front, his qui­et, duti­ful wife behind. Bur­ton may not have tak­en too much license with the com­mon­place atti­tudes of the day when he has Christoph Waltz’s Wal­ter Keane tell Mar­garet, “Sad­ly, peo­ple don’t buy lady art.”

And yet, far from the Keanes’ San Fran­cis­co, and per­haps as far as a per­son can get from Margaret’s frus­trat­ed acqui­es­cence, we have Fri­da Kahlo cre­at­ing a body of work that would even­tu­al­ly over­shad­ow her husband’s, mural­ist Diego Rivera. Unlike Wal­ter Keane, Rivera was a very good painter who did not attempt to over­shad­ow his wife. Instead of pro­fes­sion­al jeal­ousy, he had plen­ty of the per­son­al vari­ety. Even so, Rivera encour­aged Kahlo’s career and rec­og­nized her for­mi­da­ble tal­ent, and she, in turn, sup­port­ed him. In 1933, when Flo­rence Davies—whom Kahlo biog­ra­ph­er Ger­ry Souter describes as “a local news hen”—caught up with her in Detroit, Kahlo “played the cheeky, but ador­ing wife” of Diego while he labored to fin­ish his famous Detroit mur­al project.

That may be so, but she did not do so at her own expense. Quite the con­trary. Asked if Diego taught her to paint, she replies, “’No, I didn’t study with Diego. I didn’t study with any­one. I just start­ed to paint.’” At which point, writes Davies, “her eyes begin to twin­kle” as she goes on to say, “’Of course, he does pret­ty well for a lit­tle boy, but it is I who am the big artist.’” Davies prais­es Kahlo’s style as “skill­ful and beau­ti­ful” and the artist her­self as “a minia­ture-like lit­tle per­son with her long black braids wound demure­ly about her head and a fool­ish lit­tle ruf­fled apron over her black silk dress.” And yet, despite Kahlo’s con­fi­dence and seri­ous intent, rep­re­sent­ed by a promi­nent pho­to of her at seri­ous work, Davies—or more like­ly her editor—decided to title the arti­cle, “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art,” a move that reminds me of Wal­ter Keane’s patron­iz­ing atti­tude.

Kahlo Two

The belit­tling head­line is quaint and dis­heart­en­ing, speak­ing to us, like the unearthed 1938 let­ter from Dis­ney to an aspir­ing female ani­ma­tor, of the cru­el­ty of casu­al sex­ism. Davies appar­ent­ly filed anoth­er arti­cle on Rivera the year pri­or. This time the head­line doesn’t men­tion Fri­da, though her fierce unflinch­ing gaze, not Rivera’s wrestler’s mug, again adorns the spread. One sen­tence in the arti­cle says it all: “Fre­da [sic], it must be under­stood, is Seno­ra Rivera, who came very near to steal­ing the show.” Davies then goes on to again describe Kahlo’s appear­ance, not­ing of her work only that “she does paint with great charm.” Six years lat­er, Kahlo would indeed steal the show at her first and only solo show in the Unit­ed States, then again in Paris, where sur­re­al­ist mae­stro Andre Bre­ton cham­pi­oned her work and the Lou­vre bought a paint­ing, its first by a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Mex­i­can artist.

And Mar­garet Keane? She even­tu­al­ly sued Wal­ter and now reaps her own rewards. You can buy one of her paint­ings here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Fri­da Kahlo: The Com­plete Paint­ings Col­lects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-For­mat Book

Fri­da Kahlo Writes a Per­son­al Let­ter to Geor­gia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Ner­vous Break­down (1933)

Pho­tos of a Very Young Fri­da Kahlo, Tak­en by Her Dad

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

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

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Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person

in Education, Philosophy, Politics | January 24th, 2025

There may be no more con­tentious an issue at the lev­el of local U.S. gov­ern­ment than edu­ca­tion. All of the socioe­co­nom­ic and cul­tur­al fault lines com­mu­ni­ties would rather paper over become ful­ly exposed in debates over fund­ing, cur­ricu­lum, dis­trict­ing, etc. But we rarely hear dis­cus­sions about edu­ca­tion­al pol­i­cy at the nation­al lev­el these days.

You’ll hear no major polit­i­cal can­di­date deliv­er a speech sole­ly focused on edu­ca­tion. Debate mod­er­a­tors don’t much ask about it. The Unit­ed States founders’ own thoughts on the sub­ject are occa­sion­al­ly cited—but only in pass­ing, on the way to the lat­est round of talks on war and wealth. Aside from pro­pos­als dis­missed as too rad­i­cal, edu­ca­tion is most­ly con­sid­ered a low­er pri­or­i­ty for the nation’s lead­ers, or it’s roped into high­ly charged debates about polit­i­cal and social unrest on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es.

This sit­u­a­tion can seem odd to the stu­dent of polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. Every major polit­i­cal thinker—from Pla­to to John Locke to John Stu­art Mill—has writ­ten let­ters, trea­tis­es, even major works on the cen­tral role of edu­ca­tion. One con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal thinker—linguist, anar­chist, and retired MIT pro­fes­sor Noam Chom­sky—has also devot­ed quite a lot of thought to edu­ca­tion, and has force­ful­ly cri­tiqued what he sees as a cor­po­rate attack on its insti­tu­tions.

Chom­sky, how­ev­er, has no inter­est in har­ness­ing edu­ca­tion to prop up gov­ern­ments or mar­ket economies. Nor does he see edu­ca­tion as a tool for right­ing his­tor­i­cal wrongs, secur­ing mid­dle class jobs, or meet­ing any oth­er agen­da.

Chom­sky, whose thoughts on edu­ca­tion we’ve fea­tured before, tells us in the short video inter­view at the top of the post how he defines what it means to be tru­ly edu­cat­ed. And to do so, he reach­es back to a philoso­pher whose views you won’t hear ref­er­enced often, Wil­helm von Hum­boldt, Ger­man human­ist, friend of Goethe and Schiller, and “founder of the mod­ern high­er edu­ca­tion sys­tem.” Hum­boldt, Chom­sky says, “argued, I think, very plau­si­bly, that the core prin­ci­ple and require­ment of a ful­filled human being is the abil­i­ty to inquire and cre­ate con­struc­tive­ly, inde­pen­dent­ly, with­out exter­nal con­trols.” A true edu­ca­tion, Chom­sky sug­gests, opens a door to human intel­lec­tu­al free­dom and cre­ative auton­o­my.

To clar­i­fy, Chom­sky para­phras­es a “lead­ing physi­cist” and for­mer MIT col­league, who would tell his stu­dents, “it’s not impor­tant what we cov­er in the class; it’s impor­tant what you discov­er.” Giv­en this point of view, to be tru­ly edu­cat­ed means to be resource­ful, to be able to “for­mu­late seri­ous ques­tions” and “ques­tion stan­dard doc­trine, if that’s appro­pri­ate”… It means to “find your own way.” This def­i­n­i­tion sounds sim­i­lar to Nietzsche’s views on the sub­ject, though Niet­zsche had lit­tle hope in very many peo­ple attain­ing a true edu­ca­tion. Chom­sky, as you might expect, pro­ceeds in a much more demo­c­ra­t­ic spir­it.

In the inter­view above from 2013 (see the sec­ond video), you can hear him dis­cuss why he has devot­ed his life to edu­cat­ing not only his pay­ing stu­dents, but also near­ly any­one who asks him a ques­tion. He also talks about his own edu­ca­tion and fur­ther elu­ci­dates his views on the rela­tion­ship between edu­ca­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty, and crit­i­cal inquiry. And, in the very first few min­utes, you’ll find out whether Chom­sky prefers George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (Hint: it’s nei­ther.)

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Niet­zsche Lays Out His Phi­los­o­phy of Edu­ca­tion and a Still-Time­ly Cri­tique of the Mod­ern Uni­ver­si­ty (1872)

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

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Where Do You Put the Camera? Every Frame a Painting Presents Insights from Famous Directors

in Film | January 24th, 2025

Whether or not we believe in auteur­hood, we each have our own men­tal image of what a film direc­tor does. But if we’ve nev­er actu­al­ly seen one at work, we’re liable not to under­stand what the actu­al expe­ri­ence of direct­ing feels like: mak­ing deci­sion after deci­sion after deci­sion, dur­ing the shoot and at all oth­er times besides. (Wes Ander­son made light of that gaunt­let in an Amer­i­can Express com­mer­cial years ago.) Not all of these deci­sions are eas­i­ly made, and it can actu­al­ly be the sim­plest-sound­ing ones that cause the worst headaches. Where, for exam­ple, do you put the cam­era?

That’s the sub­ject of the new video essay above from Tay­lor Ramos and Tony Zhou’s YouTube chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing, which con­sid­ers how the deci­sion of cam­era place­ment has been approached by such famous direc­tors like Steven Soder­bergh, Gre­ta Ger­wig, Guiller­mo del Toro, and Mar­tin Scors­ese, as well as mas­ter cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Roger Deakins.

Tech­nol­o­gy may have mul­ti­plied the choic­es avail­able for any giv­en shot, but that cer­tain­ly has­n’t made the task any eas­i­er. Some film­mak­ers find their way by ask­ing one espe­cial­ly clar­i­fy­ing ques­tion: what is this scene about? The answer can sug­gest what the cam­era should be look­ing at, and even how it should be look­ing at it.

Hav­ing become film­mak­ers them­selves dur­ing Every Frame a Paint­ing’s hia­tus, Ramos and Zhou now under­stand all this as more than an intel­lec­tu­al inquiry. “Some­times, the thing in our way is equip­ment,” says Zhou. “Some­times it’s the weath­er. Some­times it’s a lack of resources. And some­times, the thing in our way is us.” Any direc­tor would do well to bear in mind the brac­ing advice once giv­en by John Ford to a young Steven Spiel­berg, as dra­ma­tized (with a tru­ly aston­ish­ing cast­ing choice) in the lat­ter’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal pic­ture The Fabel­mans: “When the hori­zon’s at the bot­tom, it’s inter­est­ing. When the hori­zon’s at the top, it’s inter­est­ing.” As for what it is when the hori­zon is in the mid­dle, well, you’ll have to watch the movie.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumiere Broth­ers to Google Glass

The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy That Changed Cin­e­ma: Explor­ing Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Stan­ley Kubrick, Peter Green­away & Oth­er Auteurs

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Cam­era Shot That Defined Clas­sic Films by Welles, Hitch­cock, Taran­ti­no & More

Every Acad­e­my Award Win­ner for Best Cin­e­matog­ra­phy in One Super­cut: From 1927’s Sun­rise to 2016’s La La Land

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Every Frame a Paint­ing Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sus­tained Two-Shot Van­ished from Movies

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

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Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture

in Music, Television | January 23rd, 2025

In the eight­ies, peo­ple lament­ed the atten­tion-span-short­en­ing “MTV-iza­tion” of visu­al cul­ture. By the mid-nineties, net­works were try­ing to fig­ure out how to get view­ers to sit through music videos at all. A solu­tion arrived in the form of Pop-Up Video, a pro­gram pitched by cre­ators Woody Thomp­son and Tad Low to VH1 when that much-less-cool MTV clone found itself strug­gling to stay car­ried by cable providers. It had an appeal­ing­ly low-bud­get con­cept: take exist­ing music videos, and spice them up with text bub­bles con­tain­ing facts about the artists, behind-the-scenes anec­dotes, and amus­ing (if semi-rel­e­vant) triv­ia.

“We got a lot of resis­tance from VH1. They owned Block­buster Video at the time, so they knew no one rent­ed for­eign films because no one want­ed to read the TV.” So recalls Low in a Bill­board inter­view about the his­to­ry of the show, which orig­i­nal­ly ran from 1996 to 2002 (with a brief revival in 2011 and 2012). Like many cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na beloved of mil­len­ni­als, Pop-Up Video has received the oral-his­to­ry treat­ment more than once: Uproxx also did one a cou­ple years ear­li­er. These arti­cles are enter­tain­ing in the same way as Pop-Up Video itself, open­ing up the doors of the fac­to­ry and offer­ing a glimpse of how pop-cul­tur­al sausage gets made.

Launched well before the age of Wikipedia, Pop-Up Video required inten­sive research. That meant not just inter­net search­es, but phone calls to direc­tors, pro­duc­tion design­ers, hair­styl­ists, car­pen­ters, cater­ers, and any­one else who might have worked on a par­tic­u­lar music video (if not the musi­cians, few of whom knew how their videos were made, and even few­er of whom were will­ing to dish dirt on them­selves). These often com­pli­cat­ed, rushed, and oth­er­wise trou­bled pro­duc­tions tend­ed to pro­duce mem­o­rable sto­ries, which par­tic­i­pants turned out to be hap­py to tell years lat­er — not that the net­work or the artists’ man­age­ment were always hap­py with the results.

Also like many cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na beloved of mil­len­ni­als, the show was sat­u­rat­ed with the famous­ly irrev­er­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty of Gen­er­a­tion X. Tasked with deliv­er­ing fun facts, its writ­ers did­n’t hes­i­tate to knock celebri­ties off their pedestals while they were at it, and with a sense of humor that came to be rec­og­nized as decep­tive­ly intel­li­gent. (Head writer Alan Cross has spo­ken of being inspired by Hunter S. Thomp­son, and Low by a favorite writer who made “exten­sive use of foot­notes,” which brings anoth­er three-ini­tial name to mind.) You can watch over 100 “popped” music videos on this Youtube playlist, with more at the Inter­net Archive. Alas, many have nev­er come avail­able online, but then, Pop-Up Video did make a virtue of ephemer­al­i­ty.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the Music Video: From the 1890s to Today

The 50 Great­est Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

Revis­it Episodes of Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion, MTV’s 90s Show­case of Fun­ny, Irrev­er­ent & Bizarre Ani­ma­tion

How Rick Astley’s “Nev­er Gonna Give You Up” Went from 80s Pop Smash to Bas­tion of Inter­net Cul­ture: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

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

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The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC)

in Food & Drink, History | January 23rd, 2025

Above, we have the Alu­lu Beer Receipt. Writ­ten in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the 4,000-year-old receipt doc­u­ments a trans­ac­tion. A brew­er, named Alu­lu, deliv­ered “the best” beer to a recip­i­ent named Ur-Amma, who appar­ent­ly also served as the scribe. The Mesopotami­ans drank beer dai­ly. And while they con­sid­ered it a sta­ple of every­day life, they also regard­ed it as a divine gift—something that con­tributed to human hap­pi­ness and well-being.

In our archive, you can find the recipe for Sumer­ian beer and also watch it get made. That’s all free. No receipts will be issued.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

5,000-Year-Old Chi­nese Beer Recipe Gets Recre­at­ed by Stan­ford Stu­dents

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Watch 950 Weather Reports Presented by David Lynch, Straight from His Los Angeles Home

in Film, YouTube | January 22nd, 2025

Los Ange­les is hard­ly a city known for its var­ied weath­er, but if one lives there long enough, one does become high­ly attuned to its many sub­tleties. (Grant­ed, some of the local phe­nom­e­na involved, like the noto­ri­ous San­ta Ana winds, can pro­duce far-from-sub­tle effects.) The late David Lynch, who spent much of his life in Los Ange­les, was more attuned to them than most. For a time, he even post­ed dai­ly YouTube videos in which he talked about noth­ing else. Or rather, he talked about almost noth­ing else: much of the appeal of his weath­er reports, 950 of which you can watch on this playlist, lies in his unpre­dictable asides.

In addi­tion to announc­ing the date (in a slight­ly eccen­tric form, e.g. “June one, two-thou­sand and twen­ty”), read­ing the tem­per­a­ture in both Fahren­heit and Cel­sius, and remark­ing on the pres­ence or absence of “blue skies and gold­en sun­shine,” Lynch would some­times men­tion what was on his mind that day. “Today I’m think­ing about tin cans,” he declared in his weath­er report for Octo­ber 11th, 2020. A cou­ple of months lat­er, he was remem­ber­ing Per­cy Faith’s theme from the San­dra Dee and Troy Don­ahue vehi­cle A Sum­mer Place, which to him encap­su­lat­ed the “roman­tic, won­drous feel­ing of the fifties” at that decade’s very end.

The weath­er-report­ing Lynch showed an aware­ness of his audi­ence as well, occa­sion­al­ly pre­sent­ing them with a hand-drawn Valen­tine’s Day card or expres­sion of thanks for view­ing: “What a great bunch you all are, those of you who come each day to check out the weath­er.” But as Ali Raz writes in the Believ­er, one views Lynch’s weath­er reports “not to learn about the weath­er but to watch Lynch per­form — even though, pre­cise­ly because, he doesn’t per­form in any actor­ly way. Instead, he per­forms him­self.” And he’d been doing it in that form longer than many real­ized, hav­ing begun his reports as a call-in seg­ment on Los Ange­les radio sta­tion Indie 103.1 FM in 2005, then post­ing them as videos to his own web site.

Lynch returned to weath­er reportage on YouTube dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, which made the at-home set­ting fash­ion­able. His videos inspired some of their view­ers, who pre­sum­ably had more time on their hands than usu­al, to do the hard work of exe­ge­sis. One user of the David Lynch sub­red­dit found the weath­er reports key to under­stand­ing Lynch’s work, specif­i­cal­ly through “the idea of aware­ness. What does it mean to look at the world around us?” In his films, “this is accom­plished by sur­re­al­ism, vio­lence, and a gen­er­al sense of the unset­tling or men­ac­ing. But those are vehi­cles for the idea of aware­ness, not its essence.” His Weath­er Reports show that “aware­ness does­n’t have to come through an extreme men­tal state, but could be part of our dai­ly life,” in times of blue skies and gold­en sun­shine or oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wide-Rang­ing Cre­ative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Dis­cov­er His Films, Music Videos, Car­toons, Com­mer­cials, Paint­ings, Pho­tog­ra­phy & More

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

David Lynch Tries to Make a List of the Good Things Hap­pen­ing in the World… and Comes Up Blank

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

Hear the Best of Ange­lo Badala­men­ti (RIP) from 1986–2017: Fea­tures Music from David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet, Twin Peaks & More

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

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Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Ballet in Brilliant Color, First Staged in 1922

in Dance | January 22nd, 2025

We cred­it the Bauhaus school, found­ed by Ger­man archi­tect Wal­ter Gropius in 1919, for the aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ples that have guid­ed so much mod­ern design and archi­tec­ture in the 20th and 21st cen­turies. The school’s rela­tion­ships with artists like Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Las­z­lo Moholy-Nagy, and Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe mean that Bauhaus is close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Expres­sion­ism and Dada in the visu­al and lit­er­ary arts, and, of course, with the mod­ernist indus­tri­al design and glass and steel archi­tec­ture we asso­ciate with Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames, among so many oth­ers.

We tend not to asso­ciate Bauhaus with the art of dance, per­haps because of the school’s found­ing ethos to bring what they saw as ener­vat­ed fine arts and crafts tra­di­tions into the era of mod­ern indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion. The ques­tion of how to meet that demand when it came to per­haps one of the old­est of the per­form­ing arts might have puz­zled many an artist.

But not Oskar Schlem­mer. A poly­math, like so many of the school’s avant-garde fac­ul­ty, Schlem­mer was a painter, sculp­tor, design­er, and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er who, in 1923, was hired as Mas­ter of Form at the Bauhaus the­atre work­shop.

Before tak­ing on that role, Schlem­mer had already con­ceived, designed, and staged his most famous work, Das Tri­adis­che Bal­lett (The Tri­adic Bal­let). “Schlemmer’s main theme,” says schol­ar and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Debra McCall, “is always the abstract ver­sus the fig­u­ra­tive and his work is all about the con­cil­i­a­tion of polarities—what he him­self called the Apol­lon­ian and Dionysian. [He], like oth­ers, felt that mech­a­niza­tion and the abstract were two main themes of the day. But he did not want to reduce the dancers to automa­tons.” These con­cerns were shared by many mod­ernists, who felt that the idio­syn­crasies of the human could eas­i­ly become sub­sumed in the seduc­tive order­li­ness of machines.

Schlem­mer’s inten­tions for The Tri­adic Bal­let translate—in the descrip­tions of Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Amber Frost—to “sets [that] are min­i­mal, empha­siz­ing per­spec­tive and clean lines. The chore­og­ra­phy is lim­it­ed by the bulky, sculp­tur­al, geo­met­ric cos­tumes, the move­ment sti­fling­ly delib­er­ate, incred­i­bly mechan­i­cal and mathy, with a rare hint at any flu­id dance. The whole thing is dar­ing­ly weird and strange­ly mes­mer­iz­ing.” You can see black and white still images from the orig­i­nal 1922 pro­duc­tion above (and see even more at Dan­ger­ous Minds). To view these bizarrely cos­tumed fig­ures in motion, watch the video at the top, a 1970 recre­ation in full, bril­liant col­or.

triadic-ballet-notes

For var­i­ous rea­sons, The Tri­adic Bal­let has rarely been restaged, though its influ­ence on futur­is­tic dance and cos­tum­ing is con­sid­er­able. The Tri­adic Bal­let is “a pio­neer­ing exam­ple of mul­ti-media the­ater,” wrote Jack Ander­son in review of a 1985 New York pro­duc­tion; Schlem­mer “turned to chore­og­ra­phy,” writes Ander­son, “because of his con­cern for the rela­tion­ships of fig­ures in space.” Giv­en that the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of the work is a geo­met­ric one, we do not see much move­ment we asso­ciate with tra­di­tion­al dance. Instead the bal­let looks like pan­tomime or pup­pet show, with fig­ures in awk­ward cos­tumes trac­ing var­i­ous shapes around the stage and each oth­er.

triadic-group-photo-and-eight-scene-photos

As you can see in the images fur­ther up, Schlem­mer left few notes regard­ing the chore­og­ra­phy, but he did sketch out the group­ing and cos­tum­ing of each of the three move­ments. (You can zoom in and get a clos­er look at the sketch­es above at the Bauhaus-archiv Muse­um.) As Ander­son writes of the 1985 revived pro­duc­tion, “unfor­tu­nate­ly, Schlemmer’s chore­og­ra­phy for these fig­ures was for­got­ten long ago, and any new pro­duc­tion must be based upon research and intu­ition.” The basic out­lines are not dif­fi­cult to recov­er. Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s Pier­rot Lunaire, Schlem­mer began to see bal­let and pan­tomime as free from the bag­gage of tra­di­tion­al the­ater and opera. Draw­ing from the styl­iza­tions of pan­tomime, pup­petry, and Com­me­dia dell’Arte, Schlem­mer fur­ther abstract­ed the human form in dis­crete shapes—cylindrical necks, spher­i­cal heads, etc—to cre­ate what he called “fig­urines.” The cos­tum­ing, in a sense, almost dic­tates the jerky, pup­pet-like move­ments of the dancers. (These three cos­tumes below date from the 1970 recre­ation of the piece.)

Schlemmer’s rad­i­cal pro­duc­tion has some­how not achieved the lev­el of recog­ni­tion of oth­er avant-garde bal­lets of the time, includ­ing Schoen­berg’s  Pier­rot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s, Nijin­sky-chore­o­graphed The Rite of Spring. The Tri­adic Bal­let, with music com­posed by Paul Hin­demith, toured between 1922 and 1929, rep­re­sent­ing the ethos of the Bauhaus school, but at the end of that peri­od, Schlem­mer was forced to leave “an increas­ing­ly volatile Ger­many,” writes Frost. Revivals of the piece, such as a 1930 exhi­bi­tion in Paris, tend­ed to focus on the “fig­urines” rather than the dance. Schlem­mer made many sim­i­lar per­for­mance pieces in the 20s (such as a “mechan­i­cal cabaret”) that brought togeth­er indus­tri­al design, dance, and ges­ture. But per­haps his great­est lega­cy is the bizarre cos­tumes, which were worn and copied at var­i­ous Bauhaus cos­tume par­ties and which went on to direct­ly inspire the look of Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis and the glo­ri­ous excess­es of David Bowie’s Zig­gy Star­dust stage show.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Women of the Bauhaus: See Hip, Avant-Garde Pho­tographs of Female Stu­dents & Instruc­tors at the Famous Art School

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Bauhaus Bal­let: A Dance of Geom­e­try

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

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The Story of How Quentin Tarantino Became a Filmmaker and Created Pulp Fiction, as Told by Quentin Tarantino

in Film | January 21st, 2025

For a film, explained a young Quentin Taran­ti­no in one inter­view, “the real test of time isn’t the Fri­day that it opens. It’s how the film is thought of thir­ty years from now.” It just so hap­pens that Pulp Fic­tion, which made Taran­ti­no the most cel­e­brat­ed direc­tor in Amer­i­ca prac­ti­cal­ly on its open­ing day, came out thir­ty years ago last fall. That pro­vid­ed the occa­sion for the video essay from YouTu­ber Dod­ford above, which tells the sto­ry of how Taran­ti­no became a film­mak­er, assem­bled for the most part out of Taran­ti­no’s own words — and in the not-quite-lin­ear chronol­o­gy with which peo­ple still asso­ciate him.

As Taran­ti­no’s body of work has grown, it’s come to seem less defined by such sliced-and-diced time­lines, or even by the obses­sions with pop cul­ture or graph­ic vio­lence the media tend­ed to exag­ger­ate when first he rose to fame. “They thought it was far more vio­lent than it was,” he says of the pub­lic reac­tion to his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in a Char­lie Rose inter­view from which this video draws. He could take that as a tes­ta­ment to his under­stand­ing of cin­e­ma, a form that draws its pow­er just as often from what it does­n’t show as what it does.

Taran­ti­no began cul­ti­vat­ing that under­stand­ing ear­ly, through­out his movie-sat­u­rat­ed child­hood and his stint as a video-store clerk in Man­hat­tan Beach. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, how­ev­er, Video Archives did­n’t make him a movie expert: “I was already a movie expert; that’s how I got hired.” It was dur­ing that peri­od that he com­menced work on My Best Friend’s Birth­day, which he meant to be his first film. Though he nev­er com­plet­ed it even after three years of work, he did notice the artis­tic devel­op­ment evi­dent in a com­par­i­son between its ama­teur­ish ear­ly scenes and its more effec­tive lat­er ones.

That failed project turned out to be “the best film school a per­son could pos­si­bly have,” and it pre­pared him to seize the oppor­tu­ni­ties that would come lat­er. After writ­ing and sell­ing the script for True Romance, he was in a posi­tion to work on Reser­voir Dogs, which even­tu­al­ly made it to pro­duc­tion thanks to the inter­est of Har­vey Kei­t­el, who would play Mr. White. When that pic­ture got atten­tion at Sun­dance and became an indie hit, Taran­ti­no went off on a Euro­pean sojourn, osten­si­bly in order to work on his next script — and to fig­ure out how to beat “the dread­ed sopho­more curse,” some­thing with which he’d had much sec­ond-hand expe­ri­ence as a dis­ap­point­ed movie­go­er.

The fruit of those labors, a crime-sto­ry anthol­o­gy called Pulp Fic­tion, first seemed, incred­i­bly, to promise lit­tle box-office poten­tial. But one sens­es that Taran­ti­no knew exact­ly what he had, because he knew his audi­ence. It’s not that he’d com­mis­sioned inten­sive mar­ket research, but that, as he once put it, “It’s me; I’m the audi­ence.” And so he’s remained over the past three decades, draw­ing ever clos­er to com­plet­ing what, as he’s often said, will ulti­mate­ly con­sti­tute a ten-pic­ture fil­mog­ra­phy. Actu­al­ly stop­ping there would, of course, risk the dis­ap­point­ment of his many fans, who only want more. But when a film­mak­er keeps at it too long, as the cinephile in Taran­ti­no well under­stands, he runs the far more dire risk of dis­ap­point­ing him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

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

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

Quentin Taran­ti­no & Roger Avary Rewatch Cult-Clas­sic Movies on Their New Video Archives Pod­cast

Why Quentin Taran­ti­no Will Only Make 10 Movies

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

 

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Download a 417-Megapixel Panorama of the Andromeda Galaxy—A Decade-Long NASA Project in the Making

in Astronomy | January 21st, 2025

Using the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, astronomers have cre­at­ed a majes­tic 417-megapix­el panora­ma of the Androm­e­da galaxy, locat­ed some 2.5 mil­lion light-years away from our plan­et. Tak­ing more than a decade to com­plete, the pho­to­mo­sa­ic cap­tures 200 mil­lion stars, which is only a frac­tion of Andromeda’s esti­mat­ed one tril­lion stars. Accord­ing to NASA, the 2.5 bil­lion pix­el mosa­ic “will help astronomers piece togeth­er the galaxy’s past his­to­ry that includes merg­ers with small­er satel­lite galax­ies.” On this NASA web­site, you can down­load a copy of the mosa­ic, and learn more about the explo­ration of Androm­e­da.

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!

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent 

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

Sun Ra Applies to NASA’s Art Pro­gram: When the Inven­tor of Space Jazz Applied to Make Space Art

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

Carl Sagan Sent Music & Pho­tos Into Space So That Aliens Could Under­stand Human Civ­i­liza­tion (Even After We’re Gone)

 

 

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Why David Lynch’s Dune Went Wrong: A Comparison with Denis Villeneuve’s Hit Adaptation

in Film, Sci Fi | January 20th, 2025

Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s recent film adap­ta­tion of Dune is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be supe­ri­or to the late David Lynch’s, from 1984 — though even accord­ing to many of Lynch’s fans, it could hard­ly have been worse. In a 1996 piece for Pre­miere mag­a­zine, David Fos­ter Wal­lace described Dune as “unques­tion­ably the worst movie of Lynch’s career,” not least due to the mis­cast­ing of the direc­tor him­self: “Eraser­head had been one of those sell-your-own-plas­ma-to-buy-the-film-stock mas­ter­pieces, with a tiny and large­ly unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the oth­er hand, had one of the biggest bud­gets in Hol­ly­wood his­to­ry,” mar­shaled by super-pro­duc­er Dino De Lau­ren­ti­is. But could even a mas­ter block­buster crafts­man have made cin­e­mat­ic sense of Frank Her­bert’s orig­i­nal sto­ry, “which even in the nov­el is con­vo­lut­ed to the point of pain”?

With its two parts hav­ing been released in the twen­ty-twen­ties, Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune prac­ti­cal­ly cries out for Youtube video essays com­par­ing it to Lynch’s ver­sion. The one above from Archer Green first high­lights their dif­fer­ences through one scene that was mem­o­rable in the nov­el and both films: when, being put to the test by the Rev­erend Moth­er Gaius Helen Mohi­am, the young hero Paul Atrei­des, played in the old Dune by Kyle MacLach­lan and the new one by Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met, inserts his hand into a box that inflicts extreme pain. Super­fi­cial­ly sim­i­lar though they may appear, the two sequences reveal defin­ing qual­i­ties of each pic­ture’s look and feel — Vil­leneu­ve’s is shad­owy and full of ancient-look­ing details, while Lynch’s looks like a piece of retro-futur­is­tic Jacobean the­ater — as well as the con­trast between how they dra­ma­tize the source mate­r­i­al.

The new Dune is “a very mod­ern-look­ing film that goes for a real­is­tic and ground­ed aes­thet­ic, and it feels more like a seri­ous pres­tige sci-fi movie,” says Archer Green, “where­as old Dune is more sur­re­al­ist: it’s elab­o­rate, grungy, and ulti­mate­ly quite over the top.” Their hav­ing been made in dif­fer­ent eras explains some of this, but so does their hav­ing been made at dif­fer­ent scales of time. Viewed back-to-back, Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune movies run just over five and a half hours. Lynch open­ly admit­ted that he’d “sold out” his right to the final cut in exchange for a major Hol­ly­wood project, but he also sel­dom failed to men­tion that the stu­dio demand­ed that the film be “squeezed” to two hours and 17 min­utes in order to guar­an­tee a cer­tain min­i­mum num­ber of dai­ly screen­ings.

This pres­sure to get the run­time down must have moti­vat­ed some of what even in the nine­teen-eight­ies felt old-fash­ioned about Lynch’s Dune, like its extend­ed “expo­si­tion dumps” and its “hav­ing char­ac­ters’ thoughts audi­bi­lized on the sound­track while the cam­era zooms in on the char­ac­ter mak­ing a think­ing face,” as Wal­lace put it. The film’s fail­ure “could eas­i­ly have turned Lynch into an embit­tered hack, doing effects-inten­sive gorefests for com­mer­cial stu­dios” or “sent him scur­ry­ing to the safe­ty of acad­eme, mak­ing obscure, plot­less 16mm’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd.” Instead, he took the pal­try deal sub­se­quent­ly offered him by De Lau­ren­ti­is and made Blue Vel­vet, whose suc­cess he rode to become a major cul­tur­al fig­ure. In a way, Lynch’s Dune fias­co gave Cha­la­met the even­tu­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to become the defin­i­tive Paul Atrei­des — and MacLach­lan, to become Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Com­par­i­son of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune

Hear Bri­an Eno’s Con­tri­bu­tion to the Sound­track of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

The Wide-Rang­ing Cre­ative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Dis­cov­er His Films, Music Videos, Car­toons, Com­mer­cials, Paint­ings, Pho­tog­ra­phy & More

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

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Fred Armisen & Bill Hader’s Comedic Take on the History of Simon and Garfunkel

in Comedy, Random | January 20th, 2025

Dur­ing their days film­ing Doc­u­men­tary Now!, a mock­u­men­tary series that aired on IFC, Fred Armisen and Bill Had­er teamed up and cre­at­ed a fic­tion­al­ized “his­to­ry” of Simon and Gar­funkel, telling the “real” sto­ry behind the mak­ing of “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” and “Mrs. Robinson”–stories you’ve assured­ly nev­er heard before. Have a laugh. Enjoy!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

Fred Armisen Teach­es a Short Sem­i­nar on the His­to­ry of Punk

Paul Simon Decon­structs “Mrs. Robin­son” (1970)

Clas­sic Punk Rock Sketch­es from Sat­ur­day Night Live, Cour­tesy of Fred Armisen

Art Gar­funkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

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