Havas Worlwide Paris, a global design agency, reawakened fond memories of my days living in Paris. They did it by creating this artistic video that captures the character of Parisian neighborhoods/metro stops through typography. The Marais, Latin Quarter, Montmartre, Père Lachaise, Bastille — they all get a creative nod.
The video was originally created as a New Years Greeting card, and it comes to us via Pret-a-Porter.
Five years ago Polaroid announced that they would no longer make analog instamatic film. At that moment, if one listened carefully, one could almost hear some of the 20th century’s most famous artists wail in despair, even from the grave. Ansel Adams loved Polaroid and shot some of his famous Yosemite images in that format first.
But a technique with that kind of following doesn’t die off easily. Two ardent Polaroid fans—ardent enough to actually attend the closure of a Polaroid factory in the Netherlands—met and came up with a plan to save the factory and Polaroid instant film. They called their plan the Impossible Project. They leased one of the Dutch factory buildings and eventually fired up the machines again, turning out new instant film.
Lucky for us. Artists like David Hockney have long made beautiful use of Polaroid instant photos to construct cubist collages. One of the best at this is the Italian photographer Maurizio Galimberti who creates terrific celebrity portraits using a Polaroid.
Young movie fans often discover the existence of auteurs through one auteur in particular: Stanley Kubrick. Often, they discover him through one film in particular: The Shining. Adapted — loosely adapted, to the point of reinvention — from Stephen King’s novel, Kubrick’s first picture of the eighties found itself marketed as a straight-on horror movie. Kids savor few experiences so richly as getting scared by a story, but when they sit down to get scared by The Shining, they don’t feel quite what they expected to. The movie may fill them with fear (I’ve personally experienced no greater disturbance than the stare of that 1920s fellow in the dog costume toward the end), but it also fills them with the sense that it doesn’t quite align with all the horror movies they’ve watched before. Some of these kids want to find out why. Sooner or later, they stumble upon Bill Blakemore’s well-known essay “The Family of Man,” which examines The Shining and finds it brimming with symbolism pertaining to Native American dispossession and slaughter. These kids surely all grow up to become cinephiles, but I like to think that some grew up to become the subjects of Room 237, Rodney Ascher’s new documentary about Shining obsessives, whose trailer you can watch above.
“In 1980 Stanley Kubrick released his masterpiece of modern horror The Shining,” reads the trailer’s crawl. “Over 30 years later, we’re still struggling to understand its hidden meanings.” John Powers’ NPR piece on the documentary can tell you more. “Where you may think it’s merely a horror story — remember that blood flooding out of the elevator? — these devotees argue that Kubrick’s movie is really about more than a writer going homicidally bonkers,” Powers says. “For one, it’s about the genocide against Native Americans; for another, it’s about the Holocaust; yet another says the film is Kubrick’s admission that he helped fake footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. By way of evidence, these folks point to all sorts of ‘clues,’ from the presence in several shots of the Calumet Baking Powder logo — with its distinctive tribal chief in a feathered headdress — to apparent continuity errors involving misplaced chairs that, this being Kubrick, can’t possibly be mere errors.” Whether you credit Shining theories or not, you might consider prefacing your own Room 237 screening with a watch of The Shining Code, an hour-long video essay on Kubrick’s film that puts this mindset on display. Just promise us you won’t get involved with any moon hoax people.
Everyone’s getting ready for the release of The Great Gatsby, the new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic novel. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, this version stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Isla Fisher and others. It has been shot in 3D.
Undoubtedly, critics will be quick to compare the 2013 adaptation to the 1974 production, which had its own strengths — a screenplay written by Francis Ford Coppola and Vladimir Nabokov for starters. And then a cast with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston in starring roles. See the original trailer above.
Fewer comparisons will be made to the less star-studded adaptation of 1949, which came into theaters and then fell into deep obscurity. And nary a word will be said about how Luhrmann’s film stacks up against the first appearance of The Great Gatsby on celluloid. That’s because the 1926 silent film hasn’t been seen in decades. It’s simply lost. All that remains of the original 80 minute film is the one minute trailer above. And the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald isn’t complaining. According to Anne Margaret Daniel’s post in HuffPo, when Scott and Zelda saw the film in Hollywood, they gave the Paramount production one big thumbs down. (That’s for you Roger.) Zelda wrote in a letter: “We saw ‘The Great Gatsby’ in the movies. It’s ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.” Hemingway couldn’t have said it better.
The European banking sector may still be on shaky footing. But it’s not stopping European banks from putting together a good flashmob. Last year, the Spanish bank, Banco Sabadell, brought together 100 professional musicians and singers to perform the anthem of the European Union — Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from his Symphony No. 9. And movingly so. It all happened in the Plaça de Sant Roc in Sabadell, Spain, a little north of Barcelona.
This year, we travel north to the city of Breda in Holland, where the Dutch multinational bank ING paid performers to recreate Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Night Watch, in a shopping center. The occasion? The re-opening of The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on April 13 after a long 10-year renovation.
In his short life, John Coltrane continually pushed the boundaries of music. From swing to bebop to hard bop to free jazz, Coltrane was a restless seeker of new sounds. Inspired by the hypnotic, trance-inducing traditional music of North Africa and Asia, Coltrane created a new kind of music that fused jazz and Eastern spirituality.
The World According to John Coltrane tells the story of Coltrane’s quest, from his childhood in a deeply religious household in North Carolina to his early days playing saxophone in the Navy, to his apprenticeship with Miles Davis in the 1950s and his emergence as a bandleader and innovator in the 1960s. Most of the one-hour film is devoted to Coltrane’s later period, when he came into his own. The film is not a biography, in the traditional sense. There is very little about Coltrane’s personal life — his marriages, children, drug problems and declining health. Director Robert Palmer focuses instead on Coltrane’s journey as a musician.
The World According to John Coltrane was made in 1990, and includes interviews with Coltrane’s second wife, pianist Alice Coltrane, and a number of other musicians who knew Coltrane and played with him, including saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Rashied Ali and Pianist Tommy Flanagan. It provides some excellent insights into one of the 20th century’s greatest musicians.
These days any yahoo with a cell phone and access to the Internet fancies him or herself a Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ruth Orkin or Helen Levitt, but true street photography involves more than just being in the right place at the right time. Brandon Stanton, the self-taught creator of the wildly popular Humans of New York blog, has the dedication as well as the eye and the technical mastery. His curiosity and compassion are abundant, but what really sets his work apart is its 21st century immediacy.
Daily, Stanton wanders the streets of New York, approaches strangers and asks if he can take some pictures. A few hours later, those photos light up Facebook, with captions drawn from the brief collaboration between subject and photographer. In short order, each post garners hundreds of likes and comments. Nasty feedback is a rarity. Stanton’s fans seem content to follow his lead, finding much to celebrate in straightforward poses of parents with children, festively attired seniors, and proud oddballs.
Certain interactions beg longer narratives, which Stanton relates in the “Stories” section of his website. These pieces offer character insights, and often document how the photograph came to be.
His gift for empathy is best exemplified in his portrait of Black Wolf, The Dragonmaster. I’ve run into this dude everywhere from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade to Central Park, but confess that I found his visual presentation off putting. Unlike me, Stanton looked until he found something universal in the deliberate freakishness.
…we all need to feel important. Not New York important, necessarily, but important. We all need to know that there’s a place in this world that only we can fill. Some people need bigger places than others, but everyone needs a place—a hole in the universe that only they can fill. This need is so deep and food-like and so human that we will do anything to fill it. We’ll go crazy to feel important. A protective, evolutionary sort of crazy. When the body has no food, it will break down muscle to feed itself. When the ego has no food, it will break down the mind to feed itself. If we have no place in this world, we’ll withdraw from this world, and inhabit one where we have a place.
Stanton’s lens provides the import, yielding images so arresting, they stop us in our tracks. Appreciate his collection of extraordinary humans, then challenge yourself to notice such specimens in the wild on a daily basis.
In Imelda Marcos, widow of controversial former president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos, the twentieth century had one of its most colorful first ladies. Or at least, to make the most obvious possible joke, it had its first lady with the most colorful collection of shoes. In fact, given her country’s history of poverty and corruption, Marcos’ reportedly vast and ostentatious wardrobe made her a controversial figure in herself. Yet she has never seemed wholly unconcerned with her legacy, and in fact remains a member of the Philippine House of Representatives today. She has wished aloud that her tombstone read, simply, “Here lies love,” and that epitaph gives a title to the disco musical that Talking Heads mastermind David Byrne and DJ/nineties electronic phenomenon Fatboy Slim have crafted to tell the story of Marcos’ life. “Probably the first thing you need to know,” writes Allan Kozinn in the New York Times, “is that although it is about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, her famous collection of shoes is neither mentioned nor shown.” At the top of the post, you can watch a short clip of Byrne discussing the inspirations for and long gestation process of Here Lies Love, not to mention his efforts to break down the audience’s preconceptions, shoe-related and otherwise.
“Imelda, who was this flamboyant, notorious kind of person on the scene, loved going to discos,” he says. “She loved going to Studio 54. She turned the top floor of the palace in Manila into a club. She had a mirror ball installed in her New York townhouse. [ … ] Maybe there’s a connection between the euphoria you feel in a dance club and the euphoria a person in power has. ” Just above, you can listen to the musical’s title number. Despite having several times listened to and enjoyed the entire Here Lies Love album, I understand it can’t compare to the live version, because the live version makes you dance — literally. Kozinn describes Byrne’s latest venue as “transformed into an ’80s-style disco, and the audience is meant to stand, mill around or, if the spirit moves, dance through the entire 85-minute show.” Byrne has also written about the development of Here Lies Love on his diary, and promisingly. “The staging and the concept work,” he assures his fans. “It works so well that I sort of cried at every performance. [ … ] In the end, I’d say it’s the best thing I’ve done since the Stop Making Sense tour—which I guess is saying something.”
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.
