You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.”
But the Met has kept adding to their digital trove since then, and, as a result, you can now find there no fewer than 586 art catalogs and other books besides. Those sit alongside the 400,000 free art images the museum put online last year.
Since I haven’t yet turned to art collection — I suppose you need money for that — these books don’t necessarily make me covet the vast sweep of artworks they depict and contextualize. But they do make me wish for something even less probable: a time machine so I could go back and see all these exhibits firsthand.
Note: This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on our site in March 2015.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
The world recently commemorated the 100th anniversary of end of World War I, which came to its close on November 11th, 1918. The last veterans of that unprecedentedly large-scale military conflict, all of them centenarians or supercentenarians, died in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Though historical scholarship on the subject continues, the Great War, as it was widely known at the time, has now well and truly passed out of living memory. No one alive saw World War I for themselves, though we do have photographs, some of them in color; and no one alive heard World War I for themselves, though we do have a little recorded audio: in the clip above, you can hear the sounds of a gas shell bombardment in the war’s final year.
“Just before the end of the Great War, William Gaisberg, a sound recordist of the pre-electric era, took recording equipment to the Western Front in order to capture the sound of British artillery shelling German lines with poison gas,” writes media historian Brian Hanrahan at Sounding Out!. The “Gas Shell Bombardment” record, “a 12-inch HMV shellac disc, just over 2 minutes at 78 rpm,” came out just as the war ended, a few weeks after Gaisberg’s own death (probably of Spanish flu) and just after the end of the war itself. “Initially intended to promote War Bonds,” Hanrahan explains, ultimately the record was used to raise money for disabled veterans.”
Long billed as one of the first “actuality recordings” (the kind “documenting a real location and event beyond the performative space of the studio, imprinted with the audible material trace of an actual moment in space and time”), the record later came under scrutiny, which Hanrahan writes about in detail: “Close listening at slow speeds – just careful attention and notation, nothing more elaborate – revealed inconsistencies and oddities in the firing noises.” These and other qualities suggest layers of sound added after the fact, on top of the initial recording in the field, much like live concert recordings now get “sweetened” with additional layers of instrumentation (and even audience enthusiasm).
But we can hardly expect perfect fidelity from audio recordings of the events of a century ago, a time when audio recording itself was still in its infancy. You can hear another approach to the task of hearing World War I in the clip just above, an “interpretation” of the sound of the armistice causing the guns to fall silent. This realistic minute of sound was based on sound information collected in the field, using a technique called “sound ranging” in which, as Smithsonian’s Jason Daley explains, “technicians set up strings of microphones — actually barrels of oil dug into the ground — a certain distance apart, then used a piece of photographic film to visually record noise intensity,” much as “a seismometer records an earthquake.”
As part of its commemoration of the armistice’s centennial, London’s Imperial War Museum “commissioned the sound production company Coda to Coda to use the film strip of the guns firing away at 10:58 A.M. on November 11, 1918, then going silent when the clock strikes 11, the symbolic moment politicians determined the war would end, to try and recreate what that instant may have sounded like.” Though you can hear the result on the internet, you can also go to the Imperial War Museum exhibition Making a New World in person and more intensely experience it through the “soundbar” installed there, on which “visitors to the exhibit lean their elbows on the bar and place their hands on their ears. The sound is then conducted through their arms to their skulls where they can both hear and feel the moment,” the moment that birthed that “New World” — in not just the political sense but the technological one, and many others besides — in which we still live today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Hieronymus Bosch’s bizarre paintings might have looked perfectly ordinary to his contemporaries, argues Stanley Meisler in “The World of Bosch.” Modern viewers may find this very hard to believe. We approach Bosch through layers of Freudian interpretation and Surrealist appreciation. We cannot help “regarding the scores of bizarre monsters”—allegories for sins and punishments far more legible in 15th-century Netherlands—“as a kind of dark and cruel comic relief.”
While Bosch might have intended his work as serious sermonizing, it is impossible for us to inhabit the medieval consciousness of his time and place. There’s just no getting around the fact that Bosch is really weird—weirder even (or more imaginatively allegorical) than nearly any other artist of his time. In some very important ways, he belongs to a 20th-century aesthetic of post-Freudian dream logic as much as he belonged to peculiar medieval visions of heaven and hell.
Bosch “described terrible, unbearable holocausts crushing mankind for its sins,” writes Meisler, visions that seemed both stranger and more familiar in the wake of so many man-made holocausts whose absurdities defy reason. What modern horrors does famed Japanese animator Yōji Kuri invoke in his psychedelic 1972 film “The Midnight Parasites,” above, a surrealist short set in the world of Bosch?
Here Kuri imagines what would life might be like if we all lived in Bosch’s painting “Garden of Earthly Delights.” It’s a basically shit and death or rather a cycle of life where blue figures live and die; eat shit and shit gold; are skewered, and devoured; are regurgitated and reborn to carry on the cycle once again.
Kuri’s satirical vision, in films long favored by counter-cultural audiences, has “bite,” writes Animation World Network’s Chris Robinson: “he helped lift Japanese animation out of decades of cozy narrative cartoons into a new era of graphic and conceptual experimentation. His films mock and shock, attacking technology, population expansion, monotony of modern society… Witnessing the surrender of Japan during WW2, the devastation of his country followed by the quick rise of Western inspired materialist culture and rampant consumption, Kuri, like many of his colleagues at the time, questioned the state and direction of his society and world.”
His creative appropriation of Bosch, “dark, dirty, oddly beautiful, with a groovy soundtrack,” Gallagher writes, may not, as Meisler worries of many modern takes, get Bosch wrong at all. Though the Dutch artist’s symbolism may never be comprehensible—or anything less than hallucinatory—to us moderns, Kuri’s half-playful reimagining uses Boschian figures for some serious moralizing, showing us a hell world governed by grave lapses and cruelties Bosch could never have imagined.
Does it make sense to call Glenn Gould, that most prodigious and unusual interpreter of classical piano, a composer? While his radio documentary trilogy should earn him the title, his classical performances and recordings remain bound—albeit sometimes maddeningly loosely for certain tastes—to the work of others, whether Mozart, Schoenberg, Strauss, Sibelius, Beethoven, Brahms, or J.S. Bach, who provided Gould with the material that would launch his career, the “Goldberg” Variations, which he first recorded at 22 in 1955 to widespread acclaim and admiration. His debut became one of the best-selling classical albums of all time.
Famously Gould made another recording of the “Goldberg” in 1981, the year before his early death at 50, “leaving the two Bach statements as bookends to his career,” writes Michael Cooper at The New York Times. Gould revered the composers he recorded and expounded on their virtues at length in written, televised, and broadcast commentaries. This was especially the case with Bach, whom he described as “first and last an architect, a constructor of sound, and what makes him so inestimably valuable to us is that he was beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived.”
The Canadian pianist was more than content to devote his life to others’ constructions of sound, rather than trying his hand at writing them himself, but if Bach was an architect of sound, we might compare Gould to a director—a meticulous auteur with a singular and solitary vision. Take his heavily marked up score for the 1981 “Goldberg,” above, recently resurfaced and destined for auction on December 5th at Bonhams in New York. “I would call this the equivalent of a shooting script of a movie,” comments critic and University of Southern California professor Tim Page.
Gould chose the studio over live performance early in his career, finding that the controlled experience of recording—the ability to do multiple takes and edit them together in a kind of narrative dynamic—provided him with maximum creative freedom. His 1981 “Goldberg,” “electrified the classical music world nearly as much as his classic 1955 recording had,” writes pianist Anthony Tommasini. His recordings resonate far outside the classical world, such that a Toronto hip-hop producer has even remixed his work.
There is another case for thinking of Gould himself as something of a modern producer/remixer—of other composers’ works and of his own performances. Page, who knew Gould well, speculates that he would have loved the internet. “I bet, without any interference,” he says, “Glenn would have recorded three or four different versions of the same piece and put them all out there for people to listen to and even chose from.” He took to modern techniques and technologies without reservation.
Gould’s friendliness to modernity, and its enthusiastic embrace of him, makes him seem like so much more than a pianist, and of course, he was. But we should also consider him—and all great classical interpreters—as at least a co-composer, a role as old as classical music itself. As pianist Jeremy Denk writes, each score is “at once a book and a book waiting to be written.” (Tommasini points out that “Bach’s scores leave much to the choices and tastes of performers,” and in the case of “Goldberg,” we have only reconstructions of the original.) The Variations, after all, are not named for Bach, but for virtuoso harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, likely the original performer of the piece.
The particularly idiosyncratic approach of a pianist like Gould, writes Denk, with much ambivalence, “found perversity in the music and teased it out, but mostly he just slathered it on; piece after piece, he made brilliant but deeply unintuitive, ‘unnatural’ choices, and made them work through sheer force of will.” Now, in his 1981 “Goldberg” score, fans and scholars can see for themselves how much deliberation was involved in his apparent willfulness.
In Gould’s interpretations, we cannot separate the player from the work. “He immortalized his phobias,” his passions, and his personal eccentricities, Denk writes, “by grafting them onto Bach,” with the effect that his recordings “erase the distance of centuries; they dissolve the varnish that has piled up, and make Bach one with the anxieties of the present.” See Gould recording his 1981 “Goldberg” Variations further up, and read about the 2015 transcription of the recording by Nicholas Hopkins here.
From Aeon Video comes a short, vividly-animated tribute to Grete Hermann (1901–1984), the German mathematician and philosopher who made important, but often forgotten, contributions to quantum mechanics. Aeon introduces the video with these words:
In the early 20th century, Newtonian physics was upended by experiments that revealed a bizarre subatomic universe riddled with peculiarities and inconsistencies. Why do photons and electrons behave as both particles and waves? Why should the act of observation affect the behaviour of physical systems? More than just a puzzle for scientists to sort out, this quantum strangeness had unsettling implications for our understanding of reality, including the very concept of truth.
The German mathematician and philosopher Grete Hermann offered some intriguing and original answers to these puzzles. In a quantum universe, she argued, the notion of absolute truth must be abandoned in favour of a fragmented view – one in which the way we measure the world affects the slice of it that we can see. She referred to this idea as the ‘splitting of truth’, and believed it extended far beyond the laboratory walls and into everyday life. With a striking visual style inspired by the modern art of Hermann’s era, this Aeon Original video explores one of Hermann’s profound but undervalued contributions to quantum theory – as well as her own split life as an anti-Nazi activist, social justice reformer and educator.
The short was directed and animated by Julie Gratz and Ivo Stoop, and produced by Kellen Quinn.
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Ansel Adams captured many an American landscape as no photographer had before or has since, but in his large catalog you’ll find few pictures as immediately striking as — and none more famous than — Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. Originally taken from the shoulder of a highway passing through the community of Hernandez in 1941, the shot captures the moon rising above a cluster of houses, a church with a graveyard, and a mountain range in the background. All of those might seem like pretty standard elements of a remote part of America in that era, but the sheer visual impact Adams draws from them shows what separates a road-trip snapshot from the work of a dedicated photographer.
Few photographers in the history of the medium have been quite as dedicated as Adams, whose techniques we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. But as much as his deliberateness and patience have become the stuff of photographic legend, Moonrise was very much a seat-of-the-pants achievement.
Adams was driving around the west with his son Michael and friend Cedric Wright at the behest of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who had commissioned Adams to produce large-format photographs for the Department of the Interior’s new museum. Toward the end of one not particularly productive day on the job came the big moment. As Adams himself tells it in Examples: The Making of Forty Photographs:
We were sailing southward along the highway not far from Espanola when I glanced to the left and saw an extraordinary situation — an inevitable photograph! I almost ditched the car and rushed to set up my 8×10 camera. I was yelling to my companions to bring me things from the car as I struggled to change components on my Cooke Triple-Convertible lens. I had a clear visualization of the image I wanted, but when the Wratten No. 15 (G) filter and the film holder were in place, I could not find my Weston exposure meter! The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of the clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses.
While an experienced photographer today probably won’t have used the same gear as Adams, they’ll certainly recognize the dreadful feeling of being about to lose a precious image. What came to the rescue of Moonrise wasn’t any piece of Adams’ equipment — he never did find that light meter — but the fact that he’d already spent so much time immersed so deeply in the practice of photography that he could set up and load his camera as if by pure instinct. Then, when he remembered that he knew the luminosity of the moon (250 foot candles, for the record), he could calculate the proper exposure for the image he’d already visualized in his head: one with a bright moon and just enough light on the ground to make the crosses in the churchyard glow.
You can learn more about the making and nature of Adams’ best-known photograph, prints of which command high prices at auction to this day, in the three videos here: first Adams’ own description of his process making it, then a short by the Ansel Adams Gallery examining a rare “mural-sized” print from the early 1970s, then a look into the picture’s backstory by Swann Auction Galleries. The tale of the picture’s taking, dramatic though it is, doesn’t quite convey the full extent of the photographic work it took to create the image known to everyone familiar with Adams’ work (and many who aren’t familiar with it): he also had to go through quite a bit of trial and error in the development process to imbue the sky with just the right darkness. If any photographer could produce Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, Ansel Adams could. But we might reflect on the fact that even a master like Ansel Adams only had one Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico in his career — and even he almost missed it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 his Critique of JudgmentImmanuel Kant made every attempt to separate the Sublime—the phenomenon that inspires reverence, awe, and imagination—from terror, horror, and monstrosity. But as Barbara Freeman argues, the distinctions fall apart. Nowhere do we see this better dramatized, Freeman writes, than in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which “can be read almost as a parody of the Critique of Judgment, for in it everything Kant identifies with or as sublime… yield precisely what Kant prohibits: terror, monstrosity, passion, and fanaticism.”
Reason, even that as careful as Kant’s, begets monsters, Shelley suggests. It’s a theme that has become so commonplace in writing about Frankensteinand its numerous progeny that it seems hardly worth repeating. And yet, Shelley’s dark vision, like that of her contemporary Francisco Goya, came at a time when electricity was a new force in the world (one that her husband Percy used to conduct experiments on himself)… a time when Kant’s philosophy had seemingly validated empirical realism and the primacy of abstract reason.
Steeped in the latest science and philosophy, and living on the other side of the French Revolution, Shelley saw the return of what Kant had sought to banish. The monster arrives as an ominous portent of atrocity. As Steven J. Kraftchick points out in a recent anthology of Frankenstein essays published for the novel’s 200th anniversary, “the English term ‘monster’ (by way of French) likely derives from the Latin words montrare ‘to demonstrate’ and monere ‘to warn.’” The monster comes to show “the limits of the ordinary… expanding or contracting.”
As a being intended to show us something, it seems apt that Victor Frankenstein’s creation became ubiquitous in film and television, first arriving on screen in 1910 at the dawning of film as a popular medium. The first Frankenstein adaptation predates the technological horrors of the 20th century (themselves, of course, well documented on film). Rather than taking technology to task directly, this original cinematic adaptation, directed by J. Searle Dawley for Thomas Edison’s studios, vaguely illustrates, as Rich Drees writes, “the dangers of tampering in God’s realm.”
It was a trite message tailored for censorious moral reformers who had taken aim at the moving image’s supposedly corrupting effect on impressionable minds. And yet the film does more than inaugurate a cinematic tradition of better Frankenstein adaptations, both faithful and liberally modernized. The creation of the monster in the 13-minute short is somewhat terrifying—and certainly would have unsettled audiences at the time. Significantly, it takes place in giant black box, with a small window through which Victor peers as the special effects unfold.
The scene is not unlike a film director looking through a colossal camera’s lens, further suggesting the dangerous influence of film, its ability to produce and capture monstrosities. The Library of Congress’s Mike Mashon describes the Edison production of Frankenstein as not “all that revelatory.” Maybe with the benefit of 108 years of hindsight, it is not. But as a critique of the very technology that produced it, we can see it updating Shelley’s anxieties, anticipating the ways in which Frankenstein-like stories have come to telegraph fears of computer intelligence, in films increasingly created by intelligent machines.
This 1910 Frankenstein film has been restored by the Library of Congress, and Mashon’s story of how the only nitrate print was acquired by the library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation may be, he writes, “more interesting than the film itself.” Or it may not, depending on your level of interest in the twists and turns of library acquisitions. But the film, which you can see in its restored glory at the top, rewards viewing as more than a cinema-historical artifact. Its effects are crude, its simplified story moralistic, but this truncated version cannily recognizes the horrific creature not as the excluded other but as the monstrous mirror image of its creator.
And yes, there’s a soon-to-be released biopic, Rocketman.
On the other hand, there’s the ridiculously pneumatic two-minute television commercial above, upscale department store John Lewis’s attempt to best rivals Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer in the unofficial British holiday advert bowl.
These annual productions are as hotly anticipated as Superbowl ads, but this year’s entry, in which viewers travel backwards in time nearly 70 years to the three-year-old Elton (née Reginald Dwight) receiving a (SPOILER!) piano from his granny, has proved a bit of a misfire.
Viewers are flocking to social media to lambast the ad for inadvertently suggesting that Elton John is the reason for the season. (Popular subjects from Christmases past include Paddington Bear, penguins, and boxer dogs.)
There’s also a bit of cynicism surrounding the fact that John Lewis hustled to add digital keyboards to its inventory prior to the release of “The Boy And The Piano”…
And then there’s the rumor that Sir Elton took home £5 million for his participation in the four day shoot.
Several of the star’s most outré looks have been faithfully recreated, but, Christmas aside, it’s hard not to feel that this portrait is rather too sanitized. You won’t find any friends rolling ‘round the basement floor here. His dad, an RAF officer with whom he had a thorny relationship is similarly stricken from the record. There’s nary a whisper of drugs or diva-esque behavior.
Elton John isn’t a great pop star because he sings songs about little dancers, crocodiles that rock, and being able to stand up. No, Elton John is a great pop star because he is knotty and complicated and, well, a bit of a dick sometimes.
A number of spoofs have already cropped up, and naturally there’s a Making Of, below—also set to “Your Song”—wherein the young actors who embodied Sir Elton at various stages of his life and career, sometimes with the help of prosthetics, hold forth.
Also… while we don’t dismiss out of hand the possibility that sentimental attachment could have caused Sir Elton to hold on to his childhood piano, we’ll eat our platform boots if that’s what constitutes his Christmas tree.
We tend to take a very special interest in archives and maps on this site—and especially in archives of maps. Yet it is rare, if not unheard of, to discover a map archive in which every single entry repays attention. The PJ Mode Persuasive Cartography Collection at Cornell University Library is such an archive. Each map in the collection, from the most simplified to the most elaborate, tells not only one story, but several, overlapping ones about its creators, their intended audience, their antagonists, the conscious and unconscious processes at work in their political psyches, the geo-political view from where they stood.
Maps drawn as propaganda must be broad and bold, casting aside precision for the pressing matter at hand. Even when finely detailed or laden with statistics, such maps press their meaning upon us with unsubtle force.
One especially resonant example of persuasive cartography, for example, at the top shows us an early version of a widely-used motif—the “Cartographic Land Octopus,” or CLO, as Frank Jacobs dubs it at Big Think. The CLO has never gone out of style since its likely origin in J.J. van Brederode’s “Humorous War Map” of 1870, which depicts Russia as a monstrous mollusk. Later, Caricaturist Fred W. Rose printed a reprise, the “Serio-Comic War Map for the Year 1877.”
A full twenty-seven years later, a Japanese student used the very same design for his satirical map of Russia-as-Octopus, the occasion this time the Russo-Japanese War. Titled “A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia,” the Japanese map cites Rose, or “a certain prominent Englishman,” as its inspiration. Its text reads, in part:
The black octopus is so avaricious, that he stretches out his eight arms in all directions, and seizes up every thing that comes within his reach. But as it sometimes happens he gets wounded seriously even by a small fish, owing to his too much covetousness.
No doubt Russian persuasive cartographers had a different view of who was or wasn’t an octopus. Many years after his octopus map, Fred Rose dropped sea creatures for fishing in another of his serio-comic maps, “Angling in Troubled Waters,” above, this one from 1899, and showing Russia as a massive incarnation of the tsar, his boots posed to walk all over Europe. After the revolution, the Russian octopus returned, bearing different names but no less menacing a beast.
Many maps in the collection show contradictory views of Russia, or Great Britain, or whatever world power at the time threatened to overrun everyone else. It’s interesting to see the continuity of such depictions over decades, and centuries (Jacobs shows examples of Russian octopi from 1938 and 2008). The map above from 1938 reflects “Nazi expansionist goals,” notes Cornell’s digital collections, by showing the supposed “German” populations scattered all over Europe and the need, as Hitler argued in the quoted speech, to protect and liberate “national comrades” by means of annexation, bombing, and invasion.
Where the blood red of the German map represents the “blood” of the volk, in the map above, from 1917, it stands in for the blood of everyone else if the “leaders of German thought” get what they want. Where the Reich map took aim at Europe, the quoted “former generals,” notes Cornell, “and well-known Pangermanists” in the WWI-era map above wanted to colonize most of the world, a particular affront to the British, who were well on their way to doing so, and to a lesser degree, the French, who wanted to. These two world powers had been at it far longer, however, and not without fierce opposition at home as well as in the colonies.
The famous eighteenth century British caricaturist James Gillray’s most famous print, from 1805, shows William Pitt and Napoleon seated at table, carving up the world between them to consume it.
A steaming ‘plum-pudding’ globe, both intent on carving themselves a substantial portion…. Pitt appears calm, meticulous and confident, spearing the pudding with a trident indicative of British naval supremacy. He lays claim to the oceans and the West Indies. In contrast Napoleon Bonaparte reaches from this chair with covetous, twitching eyes fixed on the prize of Europe and cuts away France, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and the Mediterranean.
Gillray’s cartoon hardly counts as a “map” but it deserves inclusion in this fine collection. Other notable maps featured include the 1904 “Distribution of Crime & Drunkenness in England and Wales,”a study in the persuasive use of correlation; the 1856 “Reynold’s Political Map of the United States,” illustrating the “stakes involved in the potential spread of slavery to the Western States” in support of the Republican Presidential candidate John Fremont; and the French Communist Party’s 1951 “Who is the Aggressor?” which shows American military bases around the world, their guns—or big black arrows—pointed at China and the U.S.S.R.
There are hundreds more persuasive maps, illustrating views theological, political, social, mechanical, and otherwise, dating from the 15th century to the 2000s. You can browse the whole collection or by date, creator, subject, repository, and format. All of the maps are annotated with catalog information and collector’s notes explaining their context. And all of them, from the frivolous to the world-historical, tell us far more than they intended with their peculiar ways of spatializing prejudices, fears, desires, beliefs, obsessions, and overt biases.
“Every map has a Who, What, Where and When about it,” as collector PJ Mode writes on the Cornell site. “But these maps had another element: Why? Since they were primarily ‘about’ something other than geography, understanding the map required finding the reasoning behind it.” The most recent entry in the archive, Christopher Neiman’s 2011 “World Map of Useless Stereotypes” from The New York Times Magazine turns the persuasive map in on itself, using its satirical devices to poke fun at propaganda’s reductive effects.
Late last month, Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks announced–much to the chagrin of cinephiles–that it planned to close Filmstruck, a streaming service that specialized in arthouse and classic films. Fans and celebrities–from Christopher Nolan to Guillermo del Toro–quickly got behind a petition to save the streaming service. And today their wish came true, more or less.
The Criterion Collection and WarnerMedia just issued a press release, declaring that “the Criterion Channel will launch as a free-standing streaming service” in the spring of 2019. This will effectively allow the Criterion Channel to “pick up where FilmStruck left off, with thematic programming, regular filmmaker spotlights, and actor retrospectives, featuring major classics and hard-to-find discoveries from Hollywood and around the world, complete with special features like commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage and original documentaries.”
If you want to demonstrate your appreciation and support, you can become a Charter Subscriber and gain the following benefits:
A 30-day free trial.
A reduced subscription fee for as long as you keep your subscription active. The regular fee will be $10.99 a month or $100 a year, but as a Charter Subscriber you’ll pay $9.99 a month or $89.99 a year.
Concierge customer service from the Criterion Collection, including a customer ID and a special e‑mail address.
A holiday gift-certificate present, for use on the Criterion Collection website.
A Charter Subscriber membership card.
The satisfaction of knowing you’re keeping the best of film alive and available.
Hope this helps you have a great weekend.
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“George Washington (with bow and arrow) pictured alongside the Goddess of America”
Though I’m American myself, I always learn the most about America when I look outside it. When I want to hear my homeland described or see it reflected, I seek out the perspective of anyone other than my fellow Americans. Given that I live in Korea, such perspectives aren’t hard to come by, and every day here I learn something new — real or imagined — about the United States. But Japan, the next country over to the east, has a longer and arguably richer tradition of America-describing. And judging by Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi (童絵解万国噺), an 1861 book by writer Kanagaki Robun and artist Utagawa Yoshitora, it certainly has a more fantastical one. “Here is George Washington (with bow and arrow) pictured alongside the Goddess of America,” writes historian of Japan Nick Kapur in a Twitter thread featuring selections from the book.
“George Washington defending his wife ‘Carol’ from a British official”
History does record Washington having practiced archery in his youth, among other popular sports of the day, and the image of the Goddess of America does look like a faintly Japanese version of Columbia, the historical female personification of the United States.
The next image Kaur posts shows Christopher Columbus reporting his discovery of America to Queen Isabella of Spain. “So far, kinda normal,” but then comes a bit of artistic license: a scene from the American Revolution in which we see “George Washington defending his wife ‘Carol’ from a British official named ‘Asura’ (same characters as the Buddhist deity).” Other illustrated events from early American history include “Washington’s “second-in-command” John Adams battling an enormous snake,” “the incredibly jacked Benjamin Franklin firing a cannon that he holds in his bare hands, while John Adams directs him where to fire,” and “George Washington straight-up punching a tiger.”
“George Washington straight-up punching a tiger”
The founding of the United States, as Kanagaki and Utagawa saw it, seems to have required the defeat of many a fearsome beast, including a giant snake that eats Adams’ mother and against which Adams must then team up with an eagle to slay. What truth we can find here may be metaphorical in nature: even in the mid-19th century, the world still saw America as a vast, wild continent just waiting to enrich those brave and strong enough to subdue it. Global interest in the still-new republic also ran particularly high at that time, as evidenced by the popularity of publications like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (which still offers an insightful outsider’s perspective on America), first published in 1835 and 1840.
“Together, John Adams and the eagle kill the enormous snake that ate his Mom. The power of teamwork!!!”
Japan, long a closed country, had also begun to take a keen interest in the outside world: American Commodore Matthew Perry and his warships, filled with technology then unimaginable to the Japanese, had arrived in 1853 with an intent to open Japan’s ports to trade. In 1868 the Meiji Restoration would consolidate imperial rule in the country and open it to the world, but Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi, which you can read in its entirety in digitized form at Waseda Unversity’s web site, came out seven years before that. At that time, the likes of Kanagaki and Utagawa, relying on second-hand sources, could still thrill their countrymen — none of whom had any more direct experience of America than they did — with tales of the grotesque creatures, vile oppressors, heroic rebels, and guiding goddesses to be found just on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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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