“Single Sentence Animations” Visualize the Short Stories of Contemporary Writers

in Animation, Books, Literature | September 19th, 2012

Lit­er­ary jour­nal Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture has a mis­sion, to “use new media and inno­v­a­tive dis­tri­b­u­tion to return the short sto­ry to a place of promi­nence in pop­u­lar cul­ture.” In so doing, they promise to deliv­er their quar­ter­ly, 5‑story anthol­o­gy “in every viable medi­um”: paper­back, enhanced pdf, Kin­dle, and ePub.  One clever way they pro­mote short fic­tion is with a free, week­ly sin­gle-sto­ry fea­ture called “Rec­om­mend­ed Read­ing.” And with the help of an ani­ma­tor and a musi­cian, Elec­tric Jour­nal pro­duces what it calls a “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion” of each week’s rec­om­mend­ed sto­ry.

As the jour­nal describes these short videos, “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tions are cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tions. The writer selects a favorite sen­tence from his or her work and the ani­ma­tor cre­ates a short film in response.” The Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion above draws from from A.M. Homes’ “Hel­lo Every­body,” as imag­ined by artist Gret­ta John­son and with music by Michael Asif. The ani­ma­tion cap­tures some­thing of Homes’ “par­tic­u­lar blend of log­ic and unre­al­i­ty” as well as her strange and often unnerv­ing twists of lan­guage.  Homes chose the ser­pen­tine sen­tence:

They are mak­ing their bod­ies their own—renovating, redec­o­rat­ing, the body not just as cor­pus but as object of self-expres­sion, a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion between imag­i­na­tion and real­i­ty.

Johnson’s ani­ma­tion imag­ines the body as Play-doh, a mal­leable sub­stance, unre­strict­ed by fixed forms.

In anoth­er “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion,” Ben Marcus’s intri­cate “Watch­ing Mys­ter­ies with My Moth­er” gets inter­pret­ed by Edwin Ros­tron, with music by Supreme Vagabond Crafts­man. The sen­tence Mar­cus chose is:

We speak of hav­ing one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of hav­ing both feet and both legs and then one’s entire tor­so, arms, and head in the grave, inside a cof­fin, which is cov­ered in dirt, upon which is plant­ed a pret­ty lit­tle stone.

As Marcus’s sen­tence drills through clichéd euphemism into the mor­bid and mun­dane, Rostron’s ani­ma­tion peels back lay­ers of dead metaphor to encounter the pro­sa­ic.

Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture’s Rec­om­mend­ed Read­ing series also fea­tures free online sto­ries from Mary Gait­skill, Clarice Lispec­tor, Peter Stamm, and many oth­ers, in HTML, Kin­dle, or ePub. You can watch all of the Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tions here.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Classic Films and Filmmakers, Rendered in Woodcut By a Los Angeles Artist-Cinephile

in Art, Film | September 19th, 2012

A great many indus­tri­ous cinephiles live in Los Ange­les. It’s no mis­take, for instance, that those rock-and-roll auteur shirts you see around come from there. In fact, I write you from that very town, to which I moved for a vari­ety of rea­sons relat­ed to my film habit. While I may not count myself as par­tic­u­lar­ly indus­tri­ous, I do count myself as a cinephile, and I can thus appre­ci­ate a project of gen­uine film-lov­ing indus­try like Loren Kan­tor’s clas­sic movie wood­cuts and linocuts.

Tak­ing Hol­ly­wood and its fringes as inspi­ra­tion, Kan­tor cre­ates strik­ing, high-con­trast black-and-white images that bring icons of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture into a far old­er aes­thet­ic realm. And who counts as more of an icon of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture — at least, I sense, in the minds of most Open Cul­ture read­ers — than David Lynch? Kan­tor’s wood­cut, seen above, cap­tures the air of simul­ta­ne­ous unflag­ging whole­some­ness and infi­nite dark­ness that swirls about the direc­tor and his films.

Or per­haps you con­sid­er Steve Busce­mi more rel­e­vant to our times; in that case, Kan­tor has cre­at­ed a wood­cut of him as well, one that evokes the actor’s alter­nat­ing lay­ers of worn-down malaise and pecu­liar alert­ness. Just above, you’ll see Kan­tor going in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion with a ren­di­tion of the poster for Man­hat­tan, one of Woody Allen’s most beloved New York pic­tures. “I fell in love with wood­cuts in the 80’s when I attend­ed a Ger­man Expres­sion­ist art show at LA Coun­ty Muse­um,” Kan­tor tells Open Cul­ture. “The stark lines and brusque images remind­ed me of film noir clas­sics.”  Should you ever find your­self in Los Ange­les with time to take in a movie screen­ing at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art, pay a vis­it down­stairs, to the floor below the the­ater. There, through­out the hall­way, the muse­um dis­plays the posters for all its Ger­man Expres­sion­ist art shows — includ­ing the one that inspired these wood­cuts in the first place.

To view more of Kan­tor’s work, vis­it Wood Cut­ting Fool: Jour­ney of a Carv­ing Enthu­si­ast or this recent spread on Brain­Pick­ings.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Exquisite Paper Craft Animations Tell the Stories of Words

in Animation, Art | September 19th, 2012

The beau­ti­ful Mys­ter­ies of Ver­nac­u­lar is a word-nerd’s delight, a series of ani­ma­tions delv­ing into the ori­gin of words, using exquis­ite paper craft ani­ma­tion to spin an ety­mo­log­i­cal yarn.

The ani­ma­tions are nar­rat­ed in author­i­ta­tive British, giv­ing each sto­ry the feel of the 1970s show, Con­nec­tions, in which sci­ence his­to­ri­an James Burke unwound the links between small moments in his­to­ry and mod­ern life. In this way, Mys­ter­ies of Ver­nac­u­lar, cre­at­ed by Myr­i­a­pod Pro­duc­tions, lays out the con­nec­tions between an ancient word for wolf, a tri­an­gu­lar rake, a frame that held can­dles in funer­als and, final­ly, a car­riage (or car) that con­veys coffins. All of these things come togeth­er to bring us the mod­ern-day word hearse. Watch above.

The words cov­ered so far are not in alpha­bet­i­cal order: assas­sin, clue, hearse and pants. Click on one of the videos for a beau­ti­ful­ly non-lin­ear sto­ry about how words shift and change as human soci­eties do. There are con­nec­tions, of course, between the ear­ly spelling and mean­ing of a word and its cur­rent use, but the jour­ney from one iter­a­tion to anoth­er is the fun part—dotted with side trips through his­to­ry.

The word clue, for exam­ple, was also spelled clew in ancient times and meant, of all things, a ball of yarn. If you know the sto­ry of The­seus, who was deter­mined to slay the Mino­taur at the cen­ter of the labyrinth, you might be able to fig­ure out how a ball of yarn came to refer, more gen­er­al­ly, to some­thing used to solve a rid­dle or prob­lem.

It may inter­est a few of you that the word ver­nac­u­lar has a shad­owy sto­ry of its own to tell. Com­ing from the Latin word for a house slave born in their house of servi­tude, ver­nac­u­lar has come to mean native espe­cial­ly in the con­text of describ­ing a lan­guage. Lin­guis­tic anthro­pol­o­gists, how­ev­er, find the term offen­sive and pre­fer the phrase dialect. 

Accord­ing to Myr­i­a­pod Pro­duc­tions, the Mys­ter­ies of Ver­nac­u­lar “will [ulti­mate­ly] con­tain 26 ety­mo­log­i­cal install­ments, one for each let­ter of the alpha­bet. Each episode takes more than 80 hours to cre­ate between the research, con­struc­tion of the book, and ani­ma­tion.”

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based writer. See more of her work at .

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A Symphony of Sound (1966): Velvet Underground Improvises, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

in Music | September 18th, 2012

“We’re spon­sor­ing a new band,” announced Andy Warhol at the end of the 1966 doc­u­men­tary post­ed here yes­ter­day. “It’s called the Vel­vet Under­ground.” Bri­an Eno would much lat­er call it the band that inspired every sin­gle one of its lis­ten­ers to start bands of their own, but that same year, Warhol pro­duced The Vel­vet Under­ground: A Sym­pho­ny of Sound. The film shows the group, which fea­tures young but now much-dis­cussed rock icon­o­clasts like John Cale, Lou Reed, and (on tam­bourine) the Ger­man singer Nico, per­form­ing a 67-minute instru­men­tal impro­vi­sa­tion.

Shoot­ing at his New York stu­dio the Fac­to­ry, Warhol and crew intend­ed this not as a con­cert film but as a bit of enter­tain­ment to be screened before actu­al live Vel­vet Under­ground shows. It and oth­er short films could be screened, so the idea devel­oped, their sound­tracks and visu­als inter­min­gling accord­ing to the deci­sions of those at the pro­jec­tors and mix­er.

“I thought of record­ing the Vel­vets just mak­ing up sounds as they went along to have on film so I could turn both sound­tracks up at the same time along with the oth­er three silent films being pro­ject­ed,” said direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy and Fac­to­ry mem­ber Paul Mor­ris­sey, best known as the direc­tor of Flesh, Trash, and Heat.  “The cacoph­o­nous noise added a lot of ener­gy to these bor­ing sec­tions and sound­ed a lot like the group itself. The show put on for the group was cer­tain­ly the first mixed media show of its kind, was extreme­ly effec­tive and I have nev­er since seen such an inter­est­ing one even in this age of super-colos­sal rock con­certs.” Alas, some­one’s noise com­plaint puts an end to the Sym­pho­ny of Sound expe­ri­ence: one police­man arrives to turn down the ampli­fi­er, and Warhol tries to explain the sit­u­a­tion to the oth­ers. But the bus­tle of the Fac­to­ry con­tin­ues apace.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed con­tent:

Warhol’s Screen Tests: Lou Reed, Den­nis Hop­per, Nico, and More

Andy Warhol Quits Paint­ing, Man­ages The Vel­vet Under­ground (1965)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Martin Scorsese Brings “Lost” Hitchcock Film to Screen in Short Faux Documentary

in Film, Television | September 18th, 2012

Alfred Hitch­cock fans should enjoy this 2007 com­mer­cial by Mar­tin Scors­ese. It was com­mis­sioned by the Cata­lan sparkling wine mak­er Freix­enet for the com­pa­ny’s annu­al Christ­mas cam­paign, with the con­cept of mak­ing a short film that would some­how weave the Freix­enet brand into the plot. Scors­ese respond­ed with a nine-minute homage to the mas­ter of sus­pense.  “Hitch­cock is one of my guid­ing lights,” he told El País at the film’s Decem­ber 2007 pre­mier in Madrid. “It’s a satire of my own movie mania. It has to do with my love of cin­e­ma, and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of pos­sess­ing it.”

The com­mer­cial is struc­tured as a faux doc­u­men­tary, with Scors­ese appear­ing as him­self. With amus­ing­ly frac­tured log­ic, he explains to an inter­view­er his dis­cov­ery of a three-and-a-half minute frag­ment from an unpro­duced Hitch­cock script and his obses­sion with bring­ing it to the screen. “It’s one thing to pre­serve a film that has been made,” Scors­ese says. “It’s anoth­er to pre­serve a film that has not been made.”

The “pre­served” frag­ment, The Key to Reser­va, is pre­sent­ed as a film with­in the film. Bernard Her­man­n’s omi­nous music from North By North­west sets the tone. The roman­tic leads look some­thing like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. Hitch­cock afi­ciana­dos will spot ref­er­ences to a num­ber of the mas­ter’s clas­sic films from the 1950s, includ­ing Rear Win­dow, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Ver­ti­go. The Key to Reser­va was filmed by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Har­ris Savides and edit­ed by Scors­ese’s long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er. The sto­ry is set in Carnegie Hall but the crew was unable to film there, so the his­toric con­cert hall had to be cre­at­ed dig­i­tal­ly from pho­tographs. Ben Gross­mann of The Syn­di­cate won a Gold Clio award for visu­al effects.

If you’re won­der­ing whether Hitch­cock would have been pleased by any of this, be sure to stay with the film until it’s amus­ing con­clu­sion. For more of Scors­ese pok­ing fun at his own movie mania, see our fea­ture from yes­ter­day, “Always the Direc­tor: Mar­tin Scors­ese Spoofs Him­self in Two Com­mer­cials.” And if you want to see some real Hitch­cock films, don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 20 Free Alfred Hitch­cock Films Online.

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An Annotated Charlie Chaplin Filmography — 82 Films with Links to Videos

in Film | September 18th, 2012

Last year we pub­lished a handy list of 20 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Avail­able Online. And it looked pret­ty good … until yes­ter­day. That’s when Metafil­ter post­ed an Anno­tat­ed Fil­mog­ra­phy of Char­lie Chap­lin fea­tur­ing a list of Chap­lin’s 82 “offi­cial short and fea­ture films in chrono­log­i­cal order … with links to where you can watch them [online].” Above, we’ll start you off above with a short Char­lie Chap­lin Film Fes­ti­val which includes four works in one col­lec­tion — The Adven­tur­er, The Cure, Easy Street and The Immi­grant.

For a broad­er selec­tion of films, don’t miss our meta list of 700 Free Movies Online, where you’ll find great Hitch­cock films and noir clas­sics; West­ern films, includ­ing many with John Wayne; ani­mat­ed gems; doc­u­men­taries and much more. Or, if you want to nar­row down your list, check out our list of 33 Free Oscar-Win­ning Films on the Web.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus.

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Thomas Edison’s Boxing Cats (1894), or Where the LOLCats All Began

in Film, Random, Technology | September 18th, 2012

I’m will­ing to bet a lot of some­one else’s mon­ey that there are thou­sands more lol­cat lovers than cat lovers in the world. Since I hap­pen to be unashamed­ly both, I was suck­ered by the lit­tle 1894 film above from Thomas Edison’s Black Maria stu­dios fea­tur­ing “Pro­fes­sor Welton’s Box­ing Cats.” Now, grant­ed, there is no dis­claimer telling us no ani­mals were harmed, but it looks to me like good clean cat-box­ing fun. As the Smith­son­ian page that post­ed this lit­tle gem declares, Edi­son is per­haps the “mogul who start­ed lol­cats.”

Edi­son is giv­en cred­it for invent­ing a lot of things, many of which he sim­ply appro­pri­at­ed, made his own, and mar­ket­ed heav­i­ly. In this way, he exem­pli­fies a par­tic­u­lar brand of Amer­i­can entre­pre­neur skilled not so much in mak­ing things as in patent­ing them. The so-called “Wiz­ard of Men­lo Park” patent­ed 1,093 inven­tions, among them his motion pic­ture cam­era, or “kine­to­graph.” But as the Library of Con­gress reports, it is like­ly that Edison’s awk­ward­ly-named assis­tant William Kennedy Lau­rie Dick­son did the actu­al work of turn­ing Edis­on’s con­cept (which he took from Ead­weard Muy­bridge) into a real­i­ty.

Com­plex­i­ties of due cred­it aside, we can at least thank Edi­son for man­ag­ing an effi­cient oper­a­tion and also, for bet­ter or worse, pio­neer­ing lit­i­ga­tion against his com­peti­tors (putting many of them out of busi­ness). His Black Maria Stu­dios amassed quite an archive of ear­ly “actu­al­i­ty” films and silent fic­tion­al films of the Nick­elodeon era, the most famous of which, The Great Train Rob­bery, you can watch below (with dubbed-in score).

The Library of Congress’s Edi­son page is an excel­lent resource for infor­ma­tion on the his­to­ry of film in gen­er­al and Edison’s con­tri­bu­tions in par­tic­u­lar, and it fea­tures dozens of his short films avail­able for down­load in Real­Me­dia, Quick Time, or as MPEGs.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto

in Art, History, Technology | September 17th, 2012

It’s strange what can make an impact. Some­times a mes­sage needs to be loud and over-the-top to come across, like punk rock or the films of Oliv­er Stone. In oth­er cas­es, cool and qui­et works much bet­ter.

Take the new time lapse map cre­at­ed by Japan­ese artist Isao Hashimo­to. It is beau­ti­ful in a sim­ple way and eerie as it doc­u­ments the 2,053 nuclear explo­sions that took place between 1945 and 1998.

It looks like a war room map of the world, black land­mass­es sur­round­ed by deep blue ocean. It starts out slow, in July of 1945, with a blue blip and an explo­sion sound in the Amer­i­can southwest—the Man­hat­tan Project’s “Trin­i­ty” test near Los Alam­os. Just one month lat­er come the explo­sions at Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki.

From there the months click by—condensed down to seconds—on a dig­i­tal clock. Each nation that has explod­ed a nuclear bomb gets a blip and a flash­ing dot when they det­o­nate a weapon, with a run­ning tal­ly kept on the screen.

Eeri­est of all is that each nation gets its own elec­tron­ic sound pitch: low tones for the Unit­ed States, high­er for the Sovi­et Union—beeping to the metronome of the months tick­ing by.

What starts out slow picks up by 1960 or so, when all the cold neu­tral beeps and flash­es become over­whelm­ing.

If you’re like me, you had no idea just how many det­o­na­tions the Unit­ed States is respon­si­ble for (1,032—more than the rest of the coun­tries put togeth­er). The sequence ends with the Pak­istani nuclear tests of May 1998.

Hashimo­to worked for many years as a for­eign exchange deal­er but is now an art cura­tor. He says the piece express­es “the fear and fol­ly of nuclear weapons.”

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

63 Haunt­ing Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

Kurt Von­negut Gives a Ser­mon on the Fool­ish­ness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Time­ly Again (Cathe­dral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Sur­vive the Atom­ic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

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