Writing, casting, shooting — all important parts of the filmmaking process, but the real making of a movie happens, so they say, in the editing room. Though often film editors themselves, “they” have a point: even moviegoers unfamiliar with the mechanics of editing can sense that, when something feels right onscreen, and even more so when something feels wrong, it has to do less with the pieces themselves than how those pieces have been put together.
“There’s an inbuilt relationship between the story itself, how to tell the story, and the rhythm with which you tell it,” says famed editor Walter Murch, known for his work with Francis Ford Coppola on the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, “and editing is seventy percent about rhythm.” Twenty years ago, in his book In the Blink of an Eye, Murch shed light on how an editor works. Now, cinema video essayist Tony Zhou has continued that mission with a new episode of his series Every Frame a Painting, “How Does an Editor Think and Feel?”
Zhou’s chosen medium places him well to address the question, since each video essay must require at least as much time spent editing as thinking about film in the first place. Still, asked by a friend how he knows where to cut, he can come up with only this unsatisfying answer: “Like a lot of editors, I cut based on instinct.” As to what exactly constitutes that editor’s instinct, Zhou spends the bulk of this ten-minute essay searching for answers himself, examining the cuts in pictures like Hannah and Her Sisters, In the Mood for Love, The Empire Strikes Back, Tampopo, Only Angels Have Wings, Pierrot le Fou, and All That Jazz.
He also turns to the words of editors with decades of experience in the game, including frequent Steven Spielberg collaborator Michael Kahn, frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, and even Murch himself. But ultimately, no matter how much wisdom about timing, emotions, tension, and rhythm you collect, you’ve got to sit down in the editing suite and go it alone. “If you watch anything over and over again,” Zhou says, “you eventually feel the moment when the shot wants you to cut.” If this seems like an overwhelming task, especially given hundreds of thousands of hours of footage an editor will work through in a career, do keep Kahn’s simple words in mind: “I see all that film up there — it doesn’t matter. I’m doing one piece at a time. One scene at a time. One cut at a time.”
In 1900, Thomas Edison traveled to Paris to document the many wonders of the Exposition Universelle, and the city itself. Among the sights captured with his kinetoscope cameras were the Expo’s moving sidewalks, the Champs-Élysées, and the previous Exposition Universelle’s crown jewel, the Eiffel Tower, now eleven years old.
It wasn’t all so high-minded. Edison and his kinetoscope also caught a performance by former Moulin Rouge star, Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, above. This elegantly attired gentlemen achieved fame and fortune with a series of impressions, carried out by a rather eccentric orifice. He was not so much artiste as fartiste, a title he wore with pride.
Pujol claimed to have discovered his unusual talent as a child, and soon set about achieving different effects by using his abdominal muscles to expel not gas, but odorless air. By varying the pressure, he was able to play simple tunes. By the time he turned 30, his act had expanded to include impersonations of celebrities, musical instruments, birds, a thunderstorm and such stock characters as a nervous bride. His grand finale included such feats as blowing out candles, smoking cigarettes and playing an ocarina (below), all with the aid of a rubber hose inserted into his anus via a modest trouser slit.
What a tragedy that Edison’s short film is silent! No live piano accompaniment could do justice to this magical artistic fruit, and if there were other recordings of Pujol, they’ve been lost to history.
He lives on in the imaginations of artists who followed him.
Actor Ugo Tognazzi, below, assumed the title role in a 1983 Italian language feature.
Sadly, Pujol was left on the cutting room floor of director Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, but all is not lost. Reportedly, Johnny Depp has indicated interest in bringing this historic figure back to life. (Gentlemen, start your screenplays…)
Then there is the half hour biopic, below, directed by Monty Python alum Ian McNaughton and starring Leonard Rossiter as Pujol. Prepare to hear the opening session of the Congress of Vienna, a toad, and a four-part harmony.
A little more than a year ago, Sheryl Sandberg’s 47-year-old husband, Dave Goldberg, died unexpectedly. The ultimate cause, heart disease. Sandberg has since endured many dark days. And now, for the first time, she’s talking publicly about the whole experience, and particularly about what death has taught her about life.
Sandberg picked the appropriate venue to speak out–the commencement ceremonies at UC-Berkeley this past weekend. Graduation speeches traditionally ask accomplished figures to give life advice to young graduates, and, painful as it might have been, that’s what Sandberg offered. One day or another, you’ll experience howling losses of your own, and what can get you through these experiences–Sandberg wants you to know–is resilience. She remarked:
And when the challenges come, I hope you remember that anchored deep within you is the ability to learn and grow. You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. Like a muscle, you can build it up, draw on it when you need it. In that process you will figure out who you really are—and you just might become the very best version of yourself.
Class of 2016, as you leave Berkeley, build resilience.
Build resilience in yourselves. When tragedy or disappointment strikes, know that you have the ability to get through absolutely anything. I promise you do. As the saying goes, we are more vulnerable than we ever thought, but we are stronger than we ever imagined.
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!
Since the first stirrings of the internet, artists and curators have puzzled over what the fluidity of online space would do to the experience of viewing works of art. At a conference on the subject in 2001, Susan Hazan of the Israel Museum wondered whether there is “space for enchantment in a technological world?” She referred to Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on the “potentially liberating phenomenon” of technologically reproduced art, yet also noted that “what was forfeited in this process were the ‘aura’ and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition.” Evaluating a number of online galleries of the time, Hazan found that “the speed with which we are able to access remote museums and pull them up side by side on the screen is alarmingly immediate.” Perhaps the “accelerated mobility” of the internet, she worried, “causes objects to become disposable and to decline in significance.”
Fifteen years after her essay, the number of museums that have made their collections available online whole, or in part, has grown exponentially and shows no signs of slowing. We may not need to fear losing museums and libraries—important spaces that Michel Foucault called “heterotopias,” where linear, mundane time is interrupted. These spaces will likely always exist. Yet increasingly we need never visit them in person to view most of their contents. Students and academics can conduct nearly all of their research through the internet, never having to travel to the Bodleian, the Beinecke, or the British Library. And lovers of art must no longer shell out for plane tickets and hotels to see the precious contents of the Getty, the Guggenheim, or the Rijksmuseum. For all that may be lost, online galleries have long been “making works of art widely available, introducing new forms of perception in film and photography and allowing art to move from private to public, from the elite to the masses.”
Even more so than when Hazan wrote those words, the online world offers possibilities for “the emergence of new cultural phenomena, the virtual aura.” Over the years we have featured dozens of databases, archives, and online galleries through which you might virtually experience art the world over, an experience once solely reserved for only the very wealthy. And as artists and curators adapt to a digital environment, they find new ways to make virtual galleries enchanting. The vast collections in the virtual galleries listed below await your visit, with close to 2,000,000 paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, and more. See the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum (top), courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute. See Van Gogh’s many self-portraits and vivid, swirling landscapes at The Van Gogh Museum. Visit the Asian art collection at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. Or see Vassily Kandinsky’s dazzling abstract compositions at the Guggenheim.
And below the list of galleries, find links to online collections of several hundred art books to read online or download. Continue to watch this space: We’ll add to both of these lists as more and more collections come online.
I’m sure I speak for many when I say that Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels and stories changed what I thought science fiction could be and do. Raised on H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other mostly-white-male-centered classic sci-fi, I found Le Guin’s literary thought experiments startling and refreshing. Now it seems like almost a matter of course that science fiction and fantasy narratives come from a diversity of peoples and perspectives. But Le Guin remains the first to wake me from a dogmatic slumber about the potential of speculative fiction to imagine not only future technologies, but also expansive future identities.
Novels like The Left Hand of Darkness,The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven reflect Le Guin’s very broad range of interests in politics and the humanities and social sciences. She began her career as an academic studying Renaissance French and Italian literature, and her fiction synthesizes years of careful reading in anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and Eastern and Western philosophy. Likewise, though she has been much influenced by traditional hard science fiction, Le Guin’s literary loves are wide and deep. All that’s to say she’s as admirable and interesting a reader as she is a writer. When she praises a book, I pay attention. Thanks to her genial, loquacious online presence for many years, her fans have had ample opportunity to find out what she’s reading and why.
Le Guin recently made a few lists of books she likes, and made sure to preface each one with a disclaimer: “This list is not ‘my favorite books.’ It’s just a list of books I’ve read or re-read, recently, that I liked and wanted to tell people about.” She leaps from genre to genre, writing mini-reviews of each book and linking each one to Powell’s, the independent bookstore in her beloved city of Portland, Oregon. Below, we’ve excerpted some of Le Guin’s “Books I’ve Liked” from each list, along with her commentary. Click on each date heading to see her complete lists of recommendations.
Seeing, by José Saramago. A sequel to his amazing novel Blindness. Saramago is not easy to read. He punctuates mostly with commas, doesn’t pararaph often, doesn’t set off conversation in quotes —; mannerisms I wouldn’t endure in a lesser writer; but Saramago is worth it. More than worth it. Transcendently worth it. Blindness scared me to death when I started it, but it rises wonderfully out of darkness into the light. Seeing goes the other way and is a very frightening book.
Changing Ones, by Will Roscoe. An examination of how gender has been constructed in Native American societies. Responsibly researched, very well written, generous in spirit, never oversimplifying a complex subject, this is a wonderfully enlightening book.
Age of Bronze: The Story of the Trojan War.I: A Thousand Ships, and II: Sacrifice by Eric Shanower. A graphic novel —; the first two volumes of a projected series. The drawing is excellent, the language lively, and the research awesome. Shanower goes back to the very origins of the war to follow the early careers of the various heroes —; Agamemnon and Menelaus, Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, Paris, Aeneas, and their families, parents, wives, lovers, children… Thus, by the end of Book Two, the actual siege of Troy, which the Iliad tells one part of, is yet to begin. I see a looming problem: the battles (of which there have been a good many already) are visually all alike, and there’s endlessly more to come —; battle scenes in Homer are brutally monotonous and interminable (as war is). But these two volumes are visually and narratively varied, and give a fascinating backgrounding and interpretation to the great stories.
Some young adult books I like — I had to read a lot of them this spring, and these stood out:
The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. This one has already won the Newbery Award and gone to Kiddilit Booksellers Heaven forever, so it doesn’t need my endorsement… but it’s a lovely, funny, sweet book, set in a truly godforsaken desert town in California.
Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata. A novel that goes with its young heroine to one of the prison camps where our government sent all our citizens of Japanese ancestry in 1942 after Pearl Harbor. It’s a beautiful book, understated and strong and tender. If you read it you won’t forget it.
Charles Mann, 1491. A brilliant survey of what we know about the human populations of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans, and a brief, often scathing history of how we’ve handled our knowledge. The author is not an archeologist or anthropologist, but he has done his homework, and is a fine reporter and summarizer, writing with clarity and flair, easy to read but never talking down. Discussing intensely controversial subjects such as dates of settlement and population sizes, he lets you know where he stands, but presents both sides fairly. A fascinating, mind-expanding book.
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I have never eaten an Idaho potato since I read Pollan’s article about what potato fields are “treated” with, in his earlier book The Botany of Desire. This one is scary in a different way. It probably won’t stop you from eating anything, indeed it is a real celebration of (real) food; but the first section is as fine a description of the blind, incalculable power of Growth Capitalism as I ever read. (Did you know that cattle can’t digest corn, and have to be chemically poisoned in order to produce “cornfed beef”? So, there being lots and lots of grass, why feed them corn? Read the book!) There are some depressing bits in the section on “organic” food, too, but the last section, where he hunts and gathers his dinner, is funny and often touching.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed. Ehrenreich tries to get by on minimum wage, in three different towns, working as a waitress, a house cleaner, in a Wal-Mart… Yes, it came out eight years ago, and yes, it’s just as true now, if not truer. (I just read in my hometown paper that 47% of working people in Portland have to rely on food stamps. Not “welfare queens” — people with jobs, working people.) She writes her story with tremendous verve and exactness. It reads like a novel, and leaves you all shook up.
[Le Guin devoted this list to “Some Graphic Novels,” and wrote about her difficulty finding good “grown-up stuff.” Though most of it was not to her taste (“gross-out violence, or horror, or twee, or sexist, or otherwise not down my alley”), she kept “hoping, because the form seems to me such a hugely promising and adventurous one.” Below are two graphic novels she did like. Another, Age of Bronze, she mentioned above in her 2006 list.]
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis I and II, and her other books. (The movie of Persepolis was charming but it really didn’t add much to the book.) I admire her drawing, which is deceptively simple but very subtly designed, using the pure contrast-power of black-and-white. The drawings and the text combine so seamlessly that I’m not aware of looking back and forth between them, I’m just taking it all in at once — Which I think is pretty much my ideal for a graphic narrative?
Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat I and II. Three connected stories in each volume. The first two stories in the first volume are pure delight. They are funny and wise and show you a world you almost certainly never knew existed. The rabbi is a dear, the rabbi’s daughter is a dear, and the rabbi’s cat is all cat, all through, all the way down. (I wondered why Sfar drew him so strangely, until I looked at the photograph of Sfar’s cat on the cover.) The second volume isn’t quite as great, but the first story in it is awfully funny and well drawn, with the most irresistible lion, and it’s all enjoyable. Sfar’s imagination and color are wonderful. His publisher should be pilloried in Times Square for printing the art in Vol II so small that you literally need a magnifying glass to read some of the continuity. — I gather that Sfar and Satrapi are friends. Are we on the way to having a great school of graphic novels by Foreigners Living in Paris?
But no one has solved the mystery of 1900’s Sherlock Holmes Baffled, above, the very first filmed entertainment to feature the character. The director and cinematographer was Arthur W. Marvin, who went on to serve as cameraman for D. W. Griffith’s early silent films. The identity of his starring actor has unfortunately been lost to the ages.
The film itself was believed lost, too, until Michael Pointer, a historian specializing in Sherlock Holmesiana, unearthed a paper copy in a Library of Congress archive. A series of individual cards, it was intended to be viewed by Mutoscope, a single viewer, crank-operated peep show device, common in turn-of-the-century arcades.
No doubt audiences who paid a penny to watch this fairly plotless 30-second adventure were more impressed by the special effects than the anonymous actor playing the iconic detective.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Free – The film is adapted from the 1899 play “Sherlock Holmes” by William Gillette, and stars Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Ida Lupino, George Zucco and Alan Marshal. (1939)
• Dressed to Kill– Free – The last of 14 films starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson. (1941)
• Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon – Free – Sherlock Holmes rescues an inventor of a new bomb site before the Nazis can get him. (1943)
• The Woman in Green – Free – Sherlock Holmes investigates when young women around London turn up murdered, each with a finger severed off. Scotland Yard suspects a madman, but Holmes believes the killings to be part of a diabolical plot. Stars Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. (1945)
• Terror by Night – Free – Sherlock Holmes film, the thirteenth to star Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce and was directed by Roy William Neill. The story revolves around the theft of a famous diamond aboard a train. (1946)
Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam. Bob Dylan is getting ready to release his 37th studio album. And before you can buy it on Amazon, iTunes, and the other usual places, you can stream it free online for a limited time, thanks to NPR. Fallen Angels–much like Shadows in the Nightfrom 2015–features Dylan singing classic American songs, which generally have one thing in common: They were all (save one, “Skylark”) sung by Frank Sinatra back in the day. And now Dylan takes a turn with them in 2016. Enjoy giving them an early listen.
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!
During his childhood in the Japan of the 1930s, Isao Tomita would have barely had the chance to hear Western music. But when the Second World War came to an end, the introduction of local U.S. Army broadcasts must have felt like the opening of a sonic floodgate: “I thought I was listening to music from outer space,” remembered the man that child grew up to become a respected composer as well as a pioneer of electronic music known for his cutting-edge, intergalactically-minded interpretations of the work of such Western predecessors as Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Gustav Holst.
That telling quote comes from Tomita’s New York Times obituary of this past Wednesday, which describes some of the composer’s struggles to not just master but press into a new kind of artistic service the practically experimental analog synthesizers with which he made his best-known albums, like 1974’s Snowflakes Are Dancingand The Planets. Just getting his first Moog synthesizer past Japanese customs proved a struggle (“I told them that it was an instrument, and they didn’t believe me”), let alone figuring out how to use the new device “to even generate something that’s not just noise.”
Tomita had little in the way of precedent besides Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, which had come out in 1968 (and whose cover Tomita had held up before those customs inspectors, trying in vain to provide evidence of his strange imported machine’s nature). He followed suit in 1972 with his own first album Electric Samurai: Switched on Rock, on which he electronically covered songs like “Let It Be,” “Jail House Rock,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Then came his Grammy-nominated bestselling Debussy tribute Snowflakes Are Dancing, which showed the listening world what he could do: specifically, reinterpreting the classical canon with sounds few had ever heard before.
You can discover some of his music by listening to albums available on Spotify, one Tomita’s 1978 album Kosmos and the other a greatest-hits collection. (Find both above. If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, you can download it here.) Or peruse an even wider-ranging Youtube playlist. We have, of course, now had around half a century to get used to electronic music, and the gear has made enormous evolutionary leaps since Tomita first sat down amid his unwieldy “thicket” of filters, oscillators, generators, amplifiers, controllers, modulators, recorders, mixers, echo units, and phasers. But his music still retains its fascination, especially now in our digital world where its analog sounds seem to come from the past, the future, and outer space all at once.
Earlier this month, 1999 members of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a group that meets weekly and sings their hearts out–showed up at Toronto’s Massey Hall and paid tribute to Prince. In a matter of hours, writes Toronto Life, “choir leaders Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman led the crowd through a three-part arrangement of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” And the result is touching. All proceeds went to the Regent Park School of Music and the Share The Music programme. You can see the group’s earlier tributes to David Bowie here, and many other performances on their YouTube channel.
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!
You may never have heard of Oscar Micheaux, but out of his “impoverished consciousness-raising exploitation potboilers,” writes critic Dave Kehr, “the American black cinema was born.” Kehr wrote that in a brief review of Micheaux’s Murder in Harlem, a “1935 mystery tale involving corpses and mysterious letters and flashbacks and Byzantine plot twists, all of which should undoubtedly prove taxing to Micheaux’s meager technical abilities. It hardly matters though, since Micheaux was his own cinematic institution.”
That movie came in the late-middle period of Micheaux’s career, which produced more than 44 pictures and qualified him as the most prolific black independent filmmaker in American cinema history as well as, in the words of Atlas Obscura’s Stephanie Weber, “a pioneer in almost every aspect of film.” Having started out as a writer, he chose for his first motion picture to adapt The Homesteader, his own novel “about a black homesteader in the Dakotas who falls in love with the daughter of a Scottish widower. In 1919, Micheaux raised the money on his own to film and produce The Homesteader in Chicago, becoming the first African American to make a feature film.”
Not only did Micheaux take on a controversial theme right away by hinting at the possibility of interracial romance (though The Homesteader’s love interest turns out, in a plot twist that must have made more sense at the time, not to actually be white), history has remembered him as standing against not just the dominant social phenomena but the dominant cinematic phenomena of his day: his second film Within Our Gatestold the story of a mixed-race schoolteacher whose adoptive father stood up to the family’s white landlord, ostensibly as a response to post-World War I social instability, though some took it as a rebuke to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
“Given the times, his accomplishments in publishing and film are extraordinary,” says NAACP History, “including being the first African-American to produce a film to be shown in ‘white’ movie theaters. In his motion pictures, he moved away from the ‘Negro’ stereotypes being portrayed in film at the time.” In recent years, critics like Kehr and others have directed a bit of attention back toward Micheaux’s path-breaking body of work, and many future leading lights of black American cinema could no doubt benefit from discovering it themselves. But in his confident treatment of sensational material, his creativity-inducing technical and economic limitations, and his learn-on-the-job understanding of the mechanics of cinema, he also foreshadowed the excitement of all the waves of indie film to come.
American Bandstand is best remembered these days not for doing the job it set out to do–presenting safe pop stars in the company of a studio audience to move units–but for when it ran headlong into the changing culture around it. Or at least that’s what Open Culture thinks. We’ve seen the beginnings of the Summer of Love with Jefferson Airplane and chipper Dick Clark trying to figure out why hippies wouldn’t cut their hair. We’ve also seen a bemused Clark attempting to interact with David Byrne when the Talking Heads played the show. But nothing really tops the time Public Image Ltd. brought true chaos to the Bandstand.
Dick Clark called it the worst moment in Bandstand history; Lydon, in his autobiography, said the opposite, saying Clark told him it was one of the best performances in the show’s history. Somewhere in between lies the truth–no doubt Clark knew it was great television.
PIL was on American Bandstand to promote their album Second Edition, their dark dabbling into dub and post-punk. The first song may be called “Poptones” but there’s nothing poppy about it.
According to Cole Coonce in his book Sex & Travel & Vestiges of Metallic Fragments, Lydon told Clark that he had a cold. “He said that because he wasn’t feeling well he was just going to go up there and take the piss out of me. So I said, ‘Go ahead.’ And he did.’”
Lydon’s account is different, saying the show’s producers cut down “Poptones” and “Careering” (a total of 13 some minutes) down to a manageable length.
“I don’t know where the vocals are going to drop. What are we supposed to do?” Lydon thought.
What PIL did is what was broadcast. Adrift from their own song, Lydon starts “Poptones” sitting on the front of the stage, then grabs the microphone and wanders into the audience. He makes no attempt to lip sync. The audience isn’t sure what to do. Lydon isn’t sure. There’s an element of danger and excitement. Lydon grabs audience members and takes them onto the stage to dance. By the end of the first song the audience has taken over the stage and then Dick Clark has to introduce the band. It doesn’t last long, and “Careering” begins.
The danger of punk and post-punk that evening wasn’t in the performance of the band or of a volatile audience. It was in the breaking down of a television show’s artifice and the separation of band and audience. Check it out.
Some great photos of the show can be viewed over at Flashbak.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
