Coffee — it’s the fuel of the modern world and certainly this site. And, if you believe this video (apparently not made by Starbucks or the American coffee lobby), it’s the greatest, safest addiction around. Take it all with a grain of salt … while you drink your morning (or afternoon) cup of joe.
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“I made my films with a kind of sleepwalking security,” says Fritz Lang. “I did things which I thought were right. Period.” Thus begins this fascinating interview with the great Austrian-born director.
The interview was conducted by William Friedkin, director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, in February of 1975, a little more than a year before Lang’s death. Lang talks about his early life as a runaway. (“Any decent human being should run away from home.”), his entry into theatre and film as a young man, his German masterpieces Metropolis and M, and a chilling encounter in 1933 with the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels that provoked him to flee Germany the same day.
The story of Lang’s escape has all the elements of a cinematic thriller, but biographers have cast doubt on its veracity, citing passport records which indicate that Lang left Germany some time after the meeting with Goebbels, and that he returned on brief trips several times that year. But the anecdote, along with Lang’s reflections on his life and on the nature of fate, provide a fascinating look into the great filmmaker’s character.
The conversation above, which runs 50 minutes, was edited down from a much longer set of interviews. According to the Torino Film Festival website, Friedkin originally intended to use the Lang material for a documentary on horror cinema, to be called A Safe Darkness, but there is no discussion of the horror genre in this version.
As an extra bonus from our collection of Free Movies Online, we present the film Lang most wanted to be remembered for, M. (See below.) The film was made in 1931, and was the first by Lang to incorporate sound. Peter Lorre makes his screen debut as a man guilty of unspeakable crimes. In its introduction to the film, the Criterion Collection writes: “In his harrowing masterwork M, Fritz Lang merges trenchant social commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.”
M, by Fritz Lang:
In 1927, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, one of the first great “talkies” to use synchronized singing and speech, hit American theaters and thrilled audiences. Knowing that change was afoot, Walt Disney spent $4,986 to create his first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Remembering the film many years later, Disney said:
The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!
These technical innovations make Steamboat Willie rather legendary. But the film retains landmark status for another reason. It marked the first public debut of Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend Minnie, two of the most recognized cartoon characters worldwide. Ub Iwerks, the celebrated Disney animator, first brought Mickey to life, and we have been living with him ever since — although, as you will see, his personality has softened over time.
You can see Mickey starring in two other early animations: Plane Crazy (1929) where the Mouse imitates America’s hero at the time, Charles Lindbergh. And The Gallopin’ Gaucho, another 1928 release.
Steamboat Willie appears in the Animation Section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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The search for survivors still goes on near the Tuscan island of Giglio, where the Costa Concordia hit rocks and listed helplessly to the side. The helplessness of the cruise ship has been captured in a remarkable image taken by Digital Globe from outer space. Click here (or above) to see the image in a rather stunning, enlarged format.
via Universe Today
Before pixels there were silver halide crystals, and before memory cards, film. Little yellow boxes cluttered the lives of photographers everywhere, and the Eastman Kodak Company was virtually synonymous with photography.
Things have really changed. With the recent news that Kodak is teetering on the brink of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, many are feeling nostalgia for those little yellow boxes and the rolls of silver gelatin film inside. To indulge this nostalgia–and perhaps learn something new about an old technology–we offer a fascinating 1958 documentary from Kodak entitled How Film is Made.
The documentary is in Dutch, but members of the Analog Photography Users Group launched a project to create English subtitles. You can read more about the project on Dutch member Marco Boeringa’s website. And you can watch the 18-minute film starting above and concluding below.
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Some of the big websites are going black today to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that has been winding its way through Congress. We’re going to handle things in our own way — by illuminating the matter with a little intelligent media.
Backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, SOPA is designed to debilitate and effectively shut down foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music and other goods. That all sounds fine on the face of things. But the legislation, if enacted, would carry with it a series of unexpected consequences that could change the internet as we know it. Among other things, the law could be used to shut down American sites that unwittingly host or link to illegal content — and without giving the sites due process, a real day in court. Big sites like YouTube and Twitter could fall under pressure, and so could countless small sites. Needless to say, that could have a serious chilling effect on the openness of the web and free speech.
To give a quick example: It could conceivably be the case that Stanford might object to my featuring their video above, file a claim, and shut the site down without giving me notice and an opportunity to remove the material (as exists under current law). It’s not likely. But it is possible, and the risk increases with every post we write. If this law passes, the amount of material we could truly safely cover would become ludicrously small, so much so that it wouldn’t be worth running the site and using the web as an educational medium.
The Obama administration has come out against SOPA and PIPA, sidelining the legislation for now. But you can almost guarantee that revisions will be made, and the bills will return soon. So, while other sites go black, we’re going to do what we do best. We’re featuring video of an event held in December by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (SCIS). What’s Wrong with SOPA brings together a series of informed opponents to SOPA, including Stanford law professors and business leaders within Silicon Valley. (Find their bios below the jump.) Some of the most incisive comments are made by Fred von Lohmann, a Google lawyer, starting at the 19:10 mark.
Note: If you’re looking to understand the debate from the perspective of copyright holders, then we’d recommend you spend time watching, Follow the Money: Who Profits from Piracy?, a video that tracks the theft of one movie, making it a microcosm of a larger problem.
With the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the emotional whiplash that followed, the monotheistic religions of the West took a more stridently political turn. It was in this context that Jonathan Miller, the British theatre and opera director, felt compelled to create a three-part documentary tracing the history of religious skepticism and disbelief.
Broadcast by the BBC in 2004 under the title, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, the series wasn’t broadcast by PBS in America until 2007, and only after “Atheism” had been removed from the title and the word “rough” changed to “brief.”
“I’m rather reluctant to call myself an atheist,” Miller says at the outset. “It’s only in the light of such current controversies with regard to belief that I’ve found myself willing to explicitly articulate my disbelief.”
Miller goes on to guide the viewer through the historic evolution of religious doubt, from the skepticism of Greek and Roman philosophers to the Deism of Enlightenment intellectuals and the emergence of explicit atheism in the writings of the 18th century French aristocrat Paul-Henri Thiry, the Baron d’Holbach, who wrote in his Système de la Nature:
If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.
Miller also talks with a number of well-known contemporary atheists, including playwright Arthur Miller, physicist Steven Weinberg and philosopher Colin McGinn. Episode One: Shadows of Doubt appears above, in its entirety, with the other two episodes: “Noughts and Crosses” and “The Final Hour.”
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Editor’s note: The text below discusses the ending of the film. We recommend that you watch “The Monk and the Fish” before reading.
In this charming and visually elegant film from 1994, the Dutch-born animator Michael Dudok de Wit tells the story of a single-minded monk and a very elusive fish. While the setting and symbols are Christian, the story progression is essentially Buddhist.
“The Monk and the Fish is not a story about the solution of a conflict,” Dudok de Wit explained to Sarah Molinoff in a 2009 interview for the Oxonian Review. “It’s more about the rise above the conflict, the rise above duality.” The monk doesn’t catch the fish; he and the fish are united. Dudok de Wit took his inspiration from the Ten Ox Herding Pictures, a series of Zen poems and images from 12th Century China, which illustrate the journey to enlightenment through the story of an oxherd’s struggle with a wayward bull. He said:
The genesis of the film was the ending. It was that sequence I wanted to create, where there is a serene union between the monk and the fish. The ending by itself would be flat, too abstract, to pull the audience in, so I clearly needed to have a build-up, to establish and feel empathy with the character. In contrast to the ending, in the beginning the monk is obsessed, obsessed, obsessed, but in the ending he arrives at a resolution. In a quiet way, not with a big act.
The London-based artist hand-painted each frame in ink and watercolor. Like the story, the visual style was inspired by the Far East. “The Japanese in particular, and also the Chinese and Koreans,” said Dudok de Wit, “have a way of using negative space, of not filling the picture, which is very typical of the Far East and very untypical of the West. We can be inspired by it, but it’s profoundly in their culture–in their genes maybe, and not so much in ours. It’s not just about the brush line, it’s also the space around the line that is inspiring.”
For the music, Dudok de Wit chose a classic from the Western canon, La Folia, a traditional theme that was often adapted or quoted by composers like Bach, Vivaldi, Corelli, Handel and Liszt. The filmmaker selected a few of his favorite variations–mainly from Corelli and Vivaldi–and asked composer Serge Besset to listen to them and create a new version to fit the film.
The Monk and the Fish took six months to create, and was nominated for Best Short Animated Film at both the Academy Awards and the British Academy Film Awards. You will find it listed in our collection of 450 Free Movies Online, along with another moving short by Dudock de Wit, Father and Daughter. They appear in the Animation Section.
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Last fall, we featured a talk by the hot-shot theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, “A Universe from Nothing,” which answered some big enchilada questions: What is our current understanding of the universe? When did the universe begin? What came before it? How could something come from nothing? And what will happen to the universe in the future?
The lecture gave a snapshot of the thinking laid out in Krauss’ newly-released book by the same title: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. The book just hit the stands, and right now it’s #51 on the Amazon bestseller list. Not bad for a text that delves into the complex mysteries of dark matter, quantum mechanics and cosmology.
In case you missed the original lecture, we have posted “A Universe from Nothing” below for your viewing pleasure. (It has racked up over a million views on YouTube.) And you can catch the video trailer for Krauss’ new book right above. Find more great physics videos in our collection of Free Online Courses and Great Science Videos.
Remember Jeff Harris? He’s the photographer who has documented every day of his life with a self-portrait since 1999. Now meet Madeline Schichtel, a young production assistant living in LA. She recorded her daily life in 2011 with a Canon Powershot, then edited each day down to a meaningful one-second shot, creating the video montage “This is What Madeline Did.” Wired writer Steve Silberman (aka @SteveSilberman) found the video unexpectedly charming, and we have to agree. “All My Friends,” by LCD Soundsystem, serves as the soundtrack for this endearing little film.
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annual question to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2012 edition asks the question, “What is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?” And the replies — 190 in total — feature thoughts by Sherry Turkle, Robert Sapolsky, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett, plus the ones excerpted below. If you’re willing to venture down the rabbit hole, you can access the complete collection of responses here.
Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars [that we are all stardust] to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?
Kevin Kelly, Wired co-founderhere and don’t miss Susskind’s complete physics lectures here].
Leonard Susskind, Physics Professor, Stanford.
[T]here is one elegant and deep statement (which, alas, is not quite an “explanation”) … that I find very useful as well as beautifully simple.
I refer to the well-known lines Lord Acton wrote in a letter from Naples in 1887 to the effect that: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” At least one philosopher of science has written that on this sentence an entire science of human beings could be built.
I find that the sentence offers the basis for explaining how a failed painter like Adolph Hitler and a failed seminarian like Joseph Stalin could end up with the blood of millions on their hands; or how the Chinese emperors, the Roman popes, or the French aristocracy failed to resist the allure of power. When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption. [More here].
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Psychologist
You can dive into the full collection at Edge.org. The photo above was taken by Marco Bellucci.
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