Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “produced a series of diagrams reflecting his distinctive understanding of humanity’s past and future. Inspired by Christian revivalism, the drawings depict a timeline from the Flood of Noah to what Dunant believed was an impending Apocalypse. The diagrams fuse mystical references with biblical, historic and scientific events, while also setting up a clear opposition between Geneva, as the centre of the Reformation, and the Catholic Church.”
The image above is the first drawing out of a series of four, made with colored pencils, ink, India ink, wax crayons, and watercolors. Writes Messy Nessy, Dunant “spent considerable time on the drawings, organising the symbolic elements according to a strict logic, making preparatory sketches and painstakingly incorporating drawings and colourings into his chronology.” All along, he was driven by the belief that the Apocalypse was in the offing, just a short time way.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who recognize the phrase “corny dialogue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the former category, your mind is almost certainly filled with images of bleak Midwestern winters, modest trailer homes, hooded figures smashing an already-junkyard-worthy car, and above all, one man trying — and trying, and trying — to put another man’s head through a kitchen cabinet. If you fall into the latter category, it’s high time you watched American Movie, Chris Smith and Sara Price’s documentary about a hapless aspiring Wisconsin horror filmmaker Mark Borchardt that has, in the 25 years since its release, become a minor cultural phenomenon unto itself.
American Movie rightfully occupies the top spot in the new Cinema Cartography video above, which ranks the fifteen greatest documentaries of all time. The list features well-known works by the most acclaimed documentary filmmakers alive today, like Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, which captures a talent show at an institution for the “criminally insane”; Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, which proved instrumental in solving the very murder case it examines; and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, which deals in Herzog’s signature heightened yet matter-of-fact manner with the ironic fate of an eccentric bear enthusiast.
Documentary film has experienced something of a popular renaissance over the past few decades, beginning in 1994 with Steve James’ Academy Award-winning Hoop Dreams (which comes in at number seven). More recent examples of documentaries that have gone relatively mainstream include Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (number three), in which participants in Indonesia’s mass political violence of the nineteen-sixties recall their own brutality in detail, and O.J.: Made in America (number five), which revisits the “trial of the century” now so close and yet so far in our cultural memory. There are also intriguing films of a much lower profile, like William Greaves’ chaotic Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and the late Jonas Mekas’ epically but modestly autobiographical As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty.
If you watch only one of these fifteen documentaries, make it American Movie, which repays repeated viewings over a quarter-century (as I can personally confirm) with not just its comedy — intentional or unintentional — but also its insight — again, intentional or unintentional — into the nature of creation, friendship, and human existence itself. “If ever, in your creations, there’s doubt, or you ever feel like you’ve lost your way, if there was ever a film to watch, to realign yourself, it is AmericanMovie,” says The Cinema Cartography creator Lewis Bond. Even those of us not dedicated to any particular art form could stand to be reminded on occasion that, as Borchardt memorably puts it, “life is kinda cool sometimes.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal History outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edition.
A recreation can be found and closely examined at the David Rumsey Map Collection, which allows you to zoom in on any part of the original timeline, which stretched to 23 feet in length and was designed for schoolhouses as a one-stop shop for all of history.
As Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton describe it in their book Cartographies of Time:
The Synchronological Chart is a great work of outsider thinking and a template for autodidact study; it attempts to rise above the station of a mere historical summary and to draw a picture of history rich enough to serve as a textbook in itself.
Adams was a voracious reader and a good Christian, and in the top half of the chart he attempts to untangle the spaghetti-like genealogy of Adam and Eve’s children from Abel (“The First Martyr”) through to Solomon (whose temple looks very Gothic), all the way through to Jesus and beyond.
At the same time he presents a detailed description of archaeological history “after the flood,” from Stone Age tools through the earliest civilizations, mentioning major battles, inventions, philosophers, and advances in science. Adams’ starting date of all history comes from the Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who, in 1654 declared, after years of study, that the earth was created on “nightfall on 22 October 4004 BC.” (Now that’s certainty!)
The map is colorful and filled with beautiful illustrations from the self-taught Adams, from a drawing of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream to the current world leaders and a list of United States Presidents up to James Garfield. There’s even a section at the far end for “Eminent Men not elsewhere mentioned on the Chart,” the sign of a true completist (except for the part where he leaves out women).
Adams lived far from the epicenters of American education. He grew up in a Presbyterian family in Ohio, and, when he showed a skill for teaching later in life, he made the trek out west, nearly dying on the Oregon Trail. He settled in Salem, Oregon and began teaching while also working on his chart. When it was ready to print, he traveled back to Cincinnati to hire the esteemed lithographers Strobridge & Co., who published Civil War scenes, maps, and circus posters. Initially he sold the chart himself, but its popularity led to several American and British printers producing copies into the 20th century. Even Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft owned a copy.
It remains a riotous work of art, history, religion, and self-determination, and facsimiles can still be purchased online. Adams later left teaching to become president of an insurance company, and died of “la grippe” (i.e. the flu) in 1898.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
The story of Vincent van Gogh’s life tends to be defined by his psychological condition and the not-unrelated manner of his death. (It does if we set aside the episode with the mutilated ear and the brothel, anyway.) The figure of the impoverished, neglected artist whose work would revolutionize his medium, and whose descent into madness ultimately drove him to take his own life, has proven irresistible to modern storytellers. That group includes painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel, who told Van Gogh’s story a few years ago with At Eternity’s Gate, and Vincente Minnelli, who’d earlier given it the full CinemaScope treatment in 1956 with Lust for Life.
It is thanks in large part to Lust for Life that casual Van Gogh fans long regarded Wheatfield with Crowsas his final painting. “The painting’s dark and gloomy subject matter seemed to perfectly encapsulate the last days of Van Gogh, full of foreboding of his eventual death,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above.
Recently, however, the consensus has shifted toward a different, lesser-known work, Tree Roots. Like Wheatfield with Crows, Van Gogh painted it in the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise, to which he moved after checking out of the last asylum in which he’d received treatment. There, in his final weeks, he “worked on a series of landscapes on the hills above Auvers,” all rendered on wide-format canvases he’d never used before.
That this series consists of “vast expanses, totally devoid of any human figures” makes it look “as if he has given up on humanity.” What’s more, Tree Roots is also “devoid of form. It is unfinished, which is extremely unusual for Van Gogh, and a sign it was still being worked on when he died.” Its obscure location only became clear during the time of COVID-19, when Van Gogh specialist Wouter van der Veen was looking through a cache of old French postcards he’d received and happened to spot a highly familiar set of roots. Thanks to this coincidence, we can now visit the very spot in which Van Gogh painted what’s now thought to be his very last work on the morning of July 27th, 1890, the same day he chose to end his own life. This counts as a mystery solved, but surely the art Van Gogh made during his abbreviated but prodigious career still has much to reveal to us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In 1957, Salvador Dalí created a tableware set consisting of 1) a four-tooth fork with a fish handle, 2) an elephant fork with three teeth, 3) a snail knife with tears, 4) a leaf knife, 5) a small artichoke spoon, and 6) an artichoke spoon. When the set went on auction in 2012, it sold for $28,125.
Information on the cutlery set remains hard to find, but we suspect that it sprang from Dalí’s desire to blur the lines between art and everyday life. It’s perhaps the same logic that led him to design a surrealist cookbook—Les Diners de Gala—16 years later. It’s not hard to imagine the utensils above going to work on his oddball recipes, like “Bush of Crawfish in Viking Herbs,” “Thousand-Year-Old Eggs,” and “Veal Cutlets Stuffed with Snails.” If you happen to know more about Dalí’s creation, please add any thoughts to the comments below.
The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray Bradbury declared that he wrote the novel because he was “worried about people being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a certain irony given that the latest adaptation was made for HBO (2018). That project, which one critic likened it to “a GlaxoSmithKline production of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” will probably not be the last Fahrenheit 451 movie. Nor was it the first: that title goes to the one Nouvelle Vague auteur François Truffaut’s film directed in 1966, though many count that as a dubious honor.
A contemporary review in Time magazine memorably called Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 a “weirdly gay little picture that assails with both horror and humor all forms of tyranny over the mind of man,” albeit one that “strongly supports the widely held suspicion that Julie Christie cannot actually act.”
Truffaut boldly cast Christie in a dual role, as both protagonist Guy Montag’s TV-and-pill-addicted wife and the young rebel who eventually lures him over to the pro-book liberation movement. Though some viewers see it as the picture’s fatal flaw, Scott Tobias, writing at The Dissolve, calls it a “masterstroke” that renders the nearly identical characters “the abstract representatives of conformity and non-conformity they had always been in the book.”
It’s easy to imagine what appeal the source material would have held for Truffaut, the most literary-minded leader of the French New Wave; recall the shrine to Balzac kept by young Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s autobiographical debut The 400 Blows. By the time he went to work on Fahrenheit 451, his sixth feature, he’d become what the American behind-the-scenes trailer calls an “internationally famous French director.” But this time, circumstances conspired against him: his increasingly fractious relationship with Jules and Jim star Oskar Werner did the latter’s performance as Montag no favors, and the money having come from the U.K. forced him to work in English, a language of which he had scant command at the time.
Truffaut himself enumerates these and other difficulties in a production diary published over several issues of Cahiers du Cinéma (beginning with number 175). Yet nearly six decades later, his troubled interpretation of Fahrenheit 451 still fascinates. New Yorker critic Richard Brody calls it “one of Truffaut’s wildest films, a coldly flamboyant outpouring of visual invention in the service of literary passion and artistic memory as well as a repudiation of a world of uniform convenience and comfortable conformity.” Today we may wonder why the parasocial relationship Montag’s wife anxiously maintains with her television, which must have seemed fantastical in the mid-sixties, feels discomfitingly familiar — and how long it will be before Fahrenheit 451 gets re-adapted as a binge-ready prestige TV drama.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Construction on the Tower of Pisa first began in the year 1173. By 1178, the architects knew they had a problem on their hands. Built on an unsteady foundation, the tower began to sink under its own weight and soon started to lean. Medieval architects tried to address the tilt. However, it persisted and incrementally worsened over the next eight centuries. Then, in 1990, Italian authorities closed the tower to the public, fearing it might collapse. For the next 11 years, engineers worked to stabilize the structure. How did they put the tower on a better footing, as it were, while still preserving some of its iconic lean? That’s the subject of this intriguing video by the YouTube channel Practical Engineering. Watch it above.
Above, actor Benedict Cumberbatch reads the final letter written by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in a Siberian prison on February 16th. The letter gets at a question many have asked, even from afar. Why, after being poisoned with Novichok in 2020, did Navalny return to Russia, knowing he would face immediate and harsh imprisonment?
The letter, dated January 17, 2024, begins:
Exactly 3 years ago, I returned to Russia after undergoing treatment for poisoning at the airport. I was arrested and here I am three years in. For three years, I’ve been answering the same question. Inmates ask it plainly and directly. Prison administration staff [ask it] cautiously, with the recorders off. Why did you come back?
For a country now used to cynicism and corruption, the answer is dismaying:
It’s actually very simple. I have my country and my convictions and I don’t want to renounce either my country or my convictions.… If your convictions are worth anything, you should be ready to stand up for them and, if necessary, make some sacrifices. And if you’re not ready, then you have no convictions at all. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and
principles, just thoughts in your head.
Navalny ends the letter with a prediction: “Putin’s state is unviable. One day we’ll look at its place and it will be gone. Victory is inevitable but, for now, we must not give up…” Rest in peace Alexei Navalny.
Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced an expansion of access to their digital archive, in that they’ve made nearly 88,000 images free to download on their Open Content database under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). That means “you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.”
The Getty suggests that you “add a print of your favorite Dutch still life to your gallery wall or create a shower curtain using the Irises by Van Gogh.” But if you search the open content in their archive yourself, you can surely get much more creative than that.
The portal’s interface lets you search by creation date (with a timeline graph stretching back to the year 6000 BC), medium (from agate and alabaster to woodcut and zinc), object type (including paintings, photographs, and sculptures, of course, but also akroteria, horse trappings, and tweezers), and culture. The selection reflects the wide mandate of the Getty’s collection, which encompasses as many of the civilizations of the world as it does the eras of human history.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the only person that Bondarchuk was truly excited to meet was Ray Bradbury. Bondarchuk introduced the author to the crowd of bemused A‑listers as “your greatest genius, your greatest writer!”
Ray Bradbury spent a lifetime crafting stories about robots, Martians, space travel and nuclear doom and, in the process, turned the formerly disreputable genre of Sci-Fi/Fantasy into something respectable. He influenced legions of writers and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman to Francois Truffaut, who adapted his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, into a movie.
That film wasn’t the only adaptation of Bradbury’s work, of course. His writings have been turned into feature films, TV movies, radio shows and even a video game for the Commodore 64. During the waning days of the Cold War, a handful of Soviet animators demonstrated their esteem for the author by adapting his short stories.
Vladimir Samsonov directed Bradbury’s Here There Be Tygers, which you can see above. A spaceship lands on an Eden-like planet. The humans inside are on a mission to extract all the natural resources possible from the planet, but they quickly realize that this isn’t your ordinary rock. “This planet is alive,” declares one of the characters. Indeed, not only is it alive but it also has the ability to grant wishes. Want to fly? Fine. Want to make streams flow with wine? Sure. Want to summon a nubile maiden from the earth? No problem. Everyone seems enchanted by the planet except one dark-hearted jerk who seems hell-bent on completing the mission.
Samsonov’s movie is stylized, spooky and rather beautiful – a bit like as if Andrei Tarkovsky had directed Avatar.
Another one of Bradbury’s shorts, There Will Come Soft Rain, has been adapted by Uzbek director Nazim Tyuhladziev (also spelled Nozim To’laho’jayev). The story is about an automated house that continues to cook and clean for a family of four unaware that they all perished in a nuclear explosion. While Bradbury’s version works as a comment on both American consumerism and general Cold War dread, Tyuhladziev’s version goes for a more religious tact. The robot that runs the house looks like a mechanical snake (Garden of Eden, anyone?). The robot and the house become undone by an errant white dove. The animation might not have the polish of a Disney movie, but it is surprisingly creepy and poignant.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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.
Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of us ever stop. According to legend, the earliest such case was a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how much energy his ruminant charges seemed to draw from eating particular red berries. After chewing a few of them himself, he experienced the first caffeine buzz in human history. Despite almost certainly never having existed, Kaldi now lends his name to a variety of coffee shops around the world, everywhere from Addis Ababa to Seoul, where I live.
His story also opens the animated TED-Ed video above, “How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee.” We do know, explains its narrator, that “at some point before the fourteen-hundreds, in what’s now Ethiopia, people began foraging for wild coffee in the forest undergrowth.” Early on, people consumed coffee plants by drinking tea made with their leaves, eating their berries with butter and salt, and — in what proved to be the most enduring method — “drying, roasting, and simmering its cherries into an energizing elixir.” Over the years, demand for this elixir spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, and in the fullness of time made its way outward to both Asia and Europe.
In no European city did coffee catch on as aggressively as it did in London, whose coffee houses proliferated in the mid-seventeenth-century and became “social and intellectual hotbeds.” Later, “Paris’ coffee houses hosted Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Voltaire, who allegedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day.” (In fairness, it was a lot weaker back then.) Producing and transporting the ever-increasing amounts of coffee imbibed in these and other centers of human civilization required world-spanning imperial operations, which were commanded with just the degree of caution and sensitivity one might imagine.
The world’s first commercial espresso machine was showcased in Milan in 1906, a signal moment in the industrialization and mechanization of the coffee experience. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, “about 60 percent of U.S. factories incorporated coffee breaks.” More recent trends have emphasized “specialty coffees with an emphasis on quality beans and brewing methods,” as well as certification for coffee production using “minimum wage and sustainable farming.” Whatever our considerations when buying coffee, many of us have made it an irreplaceable element of our rituals both personal and professional. Not to say what we’re addicted: this is the 3,170th Open Culture post I’ve written, but only the 3,150th or so that I’ve written while drinking coffee.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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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