Ricky Gervais Creates Outlandish Comedy with David Bowie

in Comedy, Music | November 7th, 2014

Ricky Ger­vais’s first brush with fame, at least on the oth­er side of the pond, was as the front man of the ‘80s synch pop band Seona Danc­ing. If you watch the music video below of the band’s near-hit “Bit­ter Heart” from 1983, you can see a skin­nier, svel­ter Ger­vais with over-moussed hair croon­ing like he was David Bowie. He indeed does sounds a bit like Bowie. He moves like Bowie. And if you squint your eyes, you can almost con­vince your­self that Ger­vais even looks like Bowie (or the lead singer of A‑ha).

Seona Danc­ing fold­ed in 1984 because they ulti­mate­ly failed to crack the Top 40. So after drift­ing around the music indus­try, Ger­vais turned to com­e­dy. But that didn’t mean that he for­got about Bowie. Before he struck fame and for­tune with The Office, he made a one-off show called Gold­en Years in 1998. He played Clive Mead­ows, an obliv­i­ous, Bowie-obsessed cor­po­rate mid­dle man­ag­er who pre­pares for an appear­ance on the British tal­ent series Stars In Their Eyes by dress­ing up as the rock star dur­ing his Aladdin Sane peri­od, com­plete with satin pants, red wig and light­ning bolt face paint.

Not long after The Office pre­miered, Ger­vais got a chance to meet his idol when the BBC invit­ed him to a con­cert. “David Bowie has been a hero of mine for 25 years,” he told the Dai­ly Mir­ror. “He is quite spe­cial and you meet him and you think he is going to come out of some weird tube and say ‘hel­lo, I’m a space boy’. But he does­n’t, he says ‘hel­lo I’m David’.” Of course, when Ger­vais was intro­duced, Bowie had no idea who he was.

Then a few weeks lat­er, Ger­vais received an email from Bowie, who clear­ly caught up on his TV view­ing. “So I watched that Office. I laughed. What do I do now?”

That sparked a friend­ship between the two. As Ger­vais recount­ed in an inter­view in GQ Mag­a­zine:

I remem­ber, I think, the first time that I knew him when it was his birth­day, I sent him an e‑mail that said “57???? Isn’t it about time that you got a prop­er job? Ricky Ger­vais, 42, come­di­an.” He sent back: “I have a prop­er job. David Bowie, 57, Rock God.”

Their rela­tion­ship cul­mi­nat­ed in a guest appear­ance on Gervais’s HBO series Extras. In the episode, which you can watch above, Ger­vais plays Andy Mill­man, an obliv­i­ous, des­per­ate movie extra look­ing to break into the big time. When he annoys Bowie, play­ing him­self, at a posh bar with his self-absorbed whin­ing, the rock star turns to a piano and starts to toss off a damn­ing, but catchy, lit­tle dit­ty on the spot about Ger­vais called “Lit­tle Fat Man.” (Lyrics include: ““Pathet­ic lit­tle fat man / No one’s bloody laugh­ing / The clown that no one laughs at / They all just wish he’d die”)

While mak­ing the episode, he and Bowie worked togeth­er on mak­ing the song:

“Have you got the lyrics?” and he went, “Yeah.” I said, “Can you do some­thing quite retro, like ‘Life on Mars’?” And he went [dead­pan], “Oh, of course, yeah, sure. I’ll knock off a quick ‘Life on Mars,’ shall I?”

via Net­work Awe­some

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

Ricky Ger­vais Presents “Learn Gui­tar with David Brent”

“Learn Eng­lish With Ricky Ger­vais,” A New Pod­cast Debuts (NSFW)

Sein­feld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Ger­vais Dis­sect the Craft of Com­e­dy (NSFW)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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Simone de Beauvoir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intellectual and a Feminist (1960)

in Gender, Philosophy, Radio | November 7th, 2014

Studs_Terkel_Simone_de_Beauvoir

Before Ira Glass, before Ter­ry Gross, before any num­ber of NPR per­son­al­i­ties and inter­net pod­cast­ers who these days bring us inter­view after fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with the great minds of our time, there was Studs Terkel. In addi­tion to his almost super­hu­man achieve­ments as an oral his­to­ri­an, film and TV actor, and Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author, Terkel pio­neered the radio inter­view with his Chica­go radio show, which ran for over four decades. “With no writ­ten ques­tions,” an NPR eulo­gy tells us, Terkel would “pick up a riff and impro­vise.” In 1960, he brought his jazz-like impro­vi­sa­tion­al style to Paris, to the apart­ment of exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­pher and nov­el­ist Simone de Beau­voir.

You can hear their con­ver­sa­tion, which spans near­ly half-an-hour, just below. De Beau­voir talks about her mid­dle-class upbring­ing, stu­dent days at the Sor­bonne, and devel­op­ment as a teacher and writer. She nar­rates her life his­to­ry in part because the first book of her three-vol­ume auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Mem­oirs of a Duti­ful Daugh­ter, had just been pub­lished, and the sec­ond, The Prime of Life, was near com­ple­tion. Already well-known for her philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal work with her part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre and fel­low exis­ten­tial­ists Mau­rice Mer­leau-Pon­ty and Albert Camus, and her ground­break­ing fem­i­nist study The Sec­ond Sex, de Beau­voir was enter­ing a lat­er phase in her career, a very reflec­tive one. Suit­ably, Terkel opens the inter­view by observ­ing that “lis­ten­ers would very much like to know how you got this way.”


“This way” refers to de Beauvoir’s fierce com­mit­ments to phi­los­o­phy, and to fem­i­nism. Terkel com­pares her to tran­scen­den­tal­ist and fem­i­nist pio­neer Mar­garet Fuller, “of Boston, a cen­tu­ry ago,” who “too trav­eled to var­i­ous parts of the world and saw what she want­ed to see, what she intend­ed to see, the truth.” Accord­ing­ly, their con­ver­sa­tion turns from per­son­al rem­i­nisces to de Beauvoir’s belief that the writer must be “involved,” or—as she clar­i­fies, “committed”—ethically, philo­soph­i­cal­ly, and polit­i­cal­ly. What this means for her is “not ignor­ing the rest of the world.” As she puts it, “there is no pos­si­ble neu­tral­i­ty… you have to com­mit your­self… and not to just be picked by peo­ple, pre­tend­ing you are picked by nobody.” She goes on, in a vein rem­i­nis­cent of Howard Zinn’s remark that one “can’t be neu­tral on a mov­ing train”:

You are always picked one way or anoth­er way. You always help this one or this oth­er: the poor against the wealthy or the wealthy against the poor—you have no choice. And if you pre­tend just to stay and do noth­ing, even stay­ing and doing noth­ing means some­thing and it goes to one of the camp or the oth­er.

Intrigued, Terkel asks “I’m doing noth­ing, this too is a mat­ter of choice, you say?” De Beau­voir explains: “there is only one thing: is to begin to speak your­self, your own way. You have to say ‘I am against it,’ ‘I am for it’ because if you say noth­ing, your silence is used by the one you are for or against.” It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view first because de Beau­voir is such an engag­ing speak­er and sec­ond­ly because Terkel is such an excel­lent lis­ten­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Philosophy’s Pow­er Cou­ple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir, Fea­tured in 1967 TV Inter­view

Pho­tos of Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beau­voir Hang­ing with Che Gue­vara in Cuba (1960)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Albert Camus’ Lessons Learned from Playing Goalie: “What I Know Most Surely about Morality and Obligations, I Owe to Football”

in Philosophy, Sports | November 7th, 2014

soccer camus

Albert Camus, born 101 years ago today, once said, “After many years in which the world has afford­ed me many expe­ri­ences, what I know most sure­ly in the long run about moral­i­ty and oblig­a­tions, I owe to foot­ball.”

He was refer­ring to his col­lege days when he played goalie for the Rac­ing Uni­ver­si­taire Alge­rios (RUA) junior team. Camus was a decent play­er, though not the great play­er that leg­end lat­er made him out to be. For Jim White, author of A Mat­ter of Life and Death: A His­to­ry of Foot­ball in 100 Quo­ta­tions, soc­cer per­haps taught Camus a few things about self­less­ness, coop­er­a­tion, brav­ery and resilience. That’s a sun­ny way of look­ing at things. But per­haps The Tele­graph gets at the deep­er, dark­er life lessons Camus took away from soc­cer:

[T]here is some­thing appro­pri­ate about a philoso­pher like Camus sta­tion­ing him­self between the sticks [that is, in goal]. It is a lone­ly call­ing, an indi­vid­ual iso­lat­ed with­in a team eth­ic, one who plays to dif­fer­ent con­straints. If his team scores, the keep­er knows it is noth­ing to do with him. If the oppo­si­tion score, how­ev­er, it is all his fault. Stand­ing sen­tinel in goal, Camus had plen­ty of time to reflect on the absur­dist nature of his posi­tion.

And per­haps the absur­dist nature of life itself…

Camus — who appears in the pic­ture above, wear­ing the dark col­or jer­sey in the front row — con­tract­ed tuber­cu­lo­sis when he was only 18 years old. His lungs too dam­aged to con­tin­ue play­ing sports, the young man turned to phi­los­o­phy. When Camus moved from Alge­ria to France, he learned that phi­los­o­phy was a rough and tum­ble game too — some­thing his soc­cer days pre­pared him for. He once quipped, “I learned … that a ball nev­er arrives from the direc­tion you expect­ed it. That helped me in lat­er life, espe­cial­ly in main­land France, where nobody plays straight.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges: “Soc­cer is Pop­u­lar Because Stu­pid­i­ty is Pop­u­lar”

Video: The Day Bob Mar­ley Played a Big Soc­cer Match in Brazil, 1980

Albert Camus Writes a Friend­ly Let­ter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Per­son­al and Philo­soph­i­cal Rift

Albert Camus Wins the Nobel Prize & Sends a Let­ter of Grat­i­tude to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher (1957)

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Hear The Clash’s Vanilla Tapes, Demos of Nearly Every Song From London Calling

in Music | November 6th, 2014

Every cre­ative work begins with a draft—or two, or three, or four. Great Amer­i­can nov­el, icon­ic paint­ing, gen­er­a­tion-defin­ing poem, album of the decade… each rep­re­sents a palimpsest of sketch­es, blind alleys, dead ends, demos, and out­takes. So it’s no great sur­prise to learn that Lon­don Call­ing, the Clash’s dou­ble-album mas­ter­piece, exists as an ear­li­er ver­sion, record­ed by the band them­selves on four-track tape machines at their rehearsal space in cen­tral Lon­don. What is maybe sur­pris­ing is how good these ear­ly record­ings are, and that they exist at all. Called The Vanil­la Tapes, after the name of their stu­dio, the tapes—though cer­tain­ly rough—represent what The Guardian calls “a col­lec­tion of demos and rehearsals that still man­age to sound more focused, intel­li­gent and rel­e­vant than most of today’s young pre­tenders.” No need to name names; it’s not much of a stretch to say that no rock and roll band today sounds as inter­est­ing as the Clash did in their prac­tices 35 years ago.

Record­ed in 1979, then lost, it seemed, for­ev­er, the tapes lived only in rumors and sly hints dropped by Joe Strum­mer of a self-record­ed LP. That is until March of 2004, when Mick Jones dis­cov­ered them in a box and “rec­og­nized them instant­ly for what they were.” The tapes, he said, “hadn’t been heard since before the record was made. It was pret­ty amaz­ing.” These ver­sions, writes Pat Gilbert at Mojo, are “clean, bright record­ings that reveal a group who are evi­dent­ly enjoy­ing cre­at­ing some­thing organ­ic and musi­cal.”

Paul’s bass walks, hops and lopes as he feels him­self into jazz, funk and dis­co. Mick plays eco­nom­i­cal­ly, expert­ly and flu­id­ly – intel­li­gent licks and chops. Joe’s rhythm gui­tar cuts through like a man who learned his craft from old Bo Did­dley, Buk­ka White and Chuck Berry records. Top­per is mag­nif­i­cent – light, pre­cise and clever. It’s Lon­don Call­ing stripped bare for com­bo play­ing: no horns, Ham­mond, piano, whistling.

At the top of the post, hear a rough take of “Lon­don Call­ing.” Aside from some hes­i­tan­cy in Strummer’s deliv­ery and a some­what plod­ding open­ing, the record­ing captures—perhaps even more than the stu­dio take—the apoc­a­lyp­tic dread of the song’s lyri­cal imagery. Some of the lines are different—London calls to the “the fools and the clowns” and “the mods on the run.” But this ear­ly ver­sion does have Strummer’s were­wolf howl and can­ny sum­ma­tion of the turn-of-the decade zeit­geist. Above, we have the Vanil­la Tapes ver­sion of “Rudie Can’t Fail” in all its funky ska imme­di­a­cy. (Notice the descend­ing melody in the chorus—which I almost like bet­ter than the album ver­sion’s ascend­ing chorus—and the toast­ing inter­jec­tions.) Just below, hear “Heart and Mind,” one of “five com­plete­ly unknown Clash songs” that appears on the tapes, “a rock­er,” writes Gilbert, “pitched some­where between ‘The Pris­on­er’ and ‘Death or Glo­ry.’”

Why this didn’t make the album, we’ll maybe nev­er know, but the cho­rus is great—“You’ve got a heart / You’ve got a mind / But you can’t / Keep them in time.” The oth­er four unearthed out­takes are “Where You Gonna Go (Sowe­to),” a rock­a­bil­ly tune called “Lone­some Me,” “bluesy instru­men­tal “Walk­ing the Side­walk,” and a reg­gae ver­sion of Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me.” The tapes “includ­ed 37 tracks in total… pared down” for release “to the 21 best ver­sions.” Miss­ing from The Vanil­la Tapes are Lon­don Call­ing tracks “Span­ish Bombs,” “The Card Cheat,” “Wrong ‘Em Boyo,” and “Train in Vain,” con­firm­ing “the received wis­dom that (except “Wrong ‘Em Boyo”), these were writ­ten when The Clash were in Wes­sex record­ing the album prop­er.”

“Mud­dy, raw, and insis­tent­ly vague,” writes Pitch­fork, the tapes see the band “work­ing hard, but also grasp­ing for a muse.” They found a guid­ing cre­ative force in pro­duc­er Guy Stevens, who craft­ed their demos into the more pol­ished, but still rough enough for punk, stu­dio ver­sions we know well. But even with­out the ben­e­fit of com­par­i­son with the bril­liant real­iza­tions on the record, these ear­ly ver­sions stand up on their own as the sound of a band with more rangy cre­ative ener­gy than most groups can muster over their entire careers. The tapes were includ­ed in the 25th anniver­sary lega­cy edi­tion of Lon­don Call­ing, but you can hear them all on Youtube (lis­ten to “Lost in the Super­mar­ket” above). Like some com­menters, you might be sur­prised to find you like some of these raw demos even bet­ter than their cel­e­brat­ed stu­dio ver­sions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sur­viv­ing Mem­bers of The Clash Recount the Mak­ing of “Lon­don Call­ing” & Dis­cuss New Box Set

Watch Audio Ammu­ni­tion: Google’s New Doc­u­men­tary Series on The Clash and Their Five Clas­sic Albums

Doc­u­men­tary Viva Joe Strum­mer: The Sto­ry of the Clash Sur­veys the Career of Rock’s Beloved Front­man

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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50,000 Norman Rockwell Photographs Now Digitized and Available Online

in History, Photography | November 6th, 2014

rfk rockwell

Ref­er­ence pho­to for Nor­man Rockwell’s por­trait of Robert F. Kennedy, c. 1968. Cour­tesy of the Nor­man Rock­well Muse­um Col­lec­tions.

What­ev­er you think of Nor­man Rock­well’s paint­ings and illus­tra­tions, you can’t deny them the sta­tus of endur­ing Amer­i­cana. For my mon­ey, Rock­well’s images cer­tain­ly make for more inter­est­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the cul­ture than those of, say, Thomas Kinkade. But even if you have lit­tle inter­est in the Amer­i­ca Rock­well cre­at­ed on paper and can­vas, you’ll sure­ly find com­pelling the Amer­i­ca he cap­tured in pho­tographs. We now have unprece­dent­ed access to these thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Insti­tute of Muse­um and Library Ser­vices that has enabled the Nor­man Rock­well Muse­um to dig­i­tize what they call the Nor­man Rock­well Pho­to­graph­ic Print Col­lec­tion: approx­i­mate­ly 50,000 images that, accord­ing to archivist Venus Van Ness, “pro­vide a unique win­dow into Mr. Rockwell’s work­ing process, his per­son­al life, and the times in which he lived.”

norman-rockwell-pan-am

Ref­er­ence pho­to for “Por­trait of a Geisha Girl,” Pan Amer­i­can- Japan (1956)

These images include “ref­er­ence pho­tos Rock­well used to com­pose his paint­ings, pho­tos of work in progress, and can­did shots of him work­ing and inter­act­ing with John Wayne, Ann-Mar­gret, Pres­i­dents Dwight D. Eisen­how­er and John F. Kennedy, and many oth­er twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry icons who posed for the artist in his Stock­bridge stu­dio, on loca­tion at a movie set, at the White House, or — as in the case of Kennedy — at his Hyan­nis Port home on Cape Cod.”

You can browse them on this page, which dis­plays the search results for the word “pho­to­graph” in the Nor­man Rock­well Muse­um’s archives. And if you want to dig up those pho­tos of Wayne, Ann-Mar­gret, Kennedy, or oth­er icons of what they call the Amer­i­can cen­tu­ry, you can also add par­tic­u­lar terms to search for spe­cif­ic sub­jects. Or you can even search for spe­cif­ic places, for instance Rock­well’s many ref­er­ence pho­tos for the ads he did for flights to Japan by Pan Am — nat­u­ral­ly, the icon­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can air­line.

Norman Rockwell and Ann-Margret

Ref­er­ence pho­to of Nor­man Rockwell’s Por­trait of Ann-Mar­gret, c. 1965.

“To any­one who saw the exhi­bi­tion Nor­man Rock­well: Behind the Cam­era, which was orga­nized by the Nor­man Rock­well Muse­um and opened at the Brook­lyn Muse­um in Novem­ber 2010,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Ben­jamin Sut­ton, “the impor­tance of pho­tog­ra­phy to Rockwell’s prac­tice is not news. That show jux­ta­posed some of Rockwell’s best known paint­ings like ‘New Kids in the Neigh­bor­hood’ (1967) and ‘Boy in a Din­ing Car’ (1946) with the many, many stu­dio and doc­u­men­tary pho­tos the artist took and spliced togeth­er before putting pen­cil to paper or paint­brush to can­vas.” But now “the pub­lic and art his­to­ri­ans can get a bet­ter sense of the labo­ri­ous pre­lim­i­nary pho­tog­ra­phy work that went into each of Rockwell’s images, and the excep­tion­al lev­el of access he was giv­en to his sub­jects.” And though the process of brows­ing them may remain tricky for the time being, rest assured that, accord­ing to the offi­cial site, “the Museum’s new dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences project is get­ting under­way with sup­port from yet anoth­er IMLS match­ing grant award­ed in Sep­tem­ber.” And so Amer­i­can inno­va­tion con­tin­ues, on a lev­el Rock­well could nev­er have imag­ined.

This post comes via Hyper­al­ler­gic, where you can see more pho­tos in a nice, large for­mat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Pho­tog­ra­phy by Lud­wig Wittgen­stein Dis­played by Archives at Cam­bridge

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Visual Introduction to Soviet Montage Theory: A Revolution in Filmmaking

in Film | November 6th, 2014

Between 1908 and 1913, Amer­i­can film­mak­er D. W. Grif­fith made over 400 movies. Over that time, he, along with his fel­low Hol­ly­wood direc­tors, devel­oped con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing. Using such tools as match­ing eye­lines – cut­ting so that the actors appear to be look­ing at each oth­er across dif­fer­ent shots – and the 180-degree rule – which keeps the actors from switch­ing places on the screen – Grif­fith and his cohorts cre­at­ed a visu­al gram­mar that let audi­ences for­get the film’s arti­fice and dis­ap­pear into the sto­ry. By the time Grif­fith released his huge­ly influ­en­tial (and huge­ly racist) mas­ter­work A Birth of A Nation in 1915, the rules of con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing had more or less been worked out. This form of sto­ry­telling was so suc­cess­ful, and prof­itable, that it has been used for just about every Hol­ly­wood movie that has come out since.

Yet just as these rules were being cod­i­fied, film­mak­ers, most­ly Euro­pean, looked for oth­er ways to tell a sto­ry. Ger­man direc­tors like F. W. Mur­nau and Robert Wiene exper­i­ment­ed with cin­e­mat­ic depic­tions of the sub­con­scious. French film­mak­ers like René Clair used cam­era tricks and odd fram­ing to cre­ate works of for­mal beau­ty. But it was the film­mak­ers in the new­ly formed Sovi­et Union that real­ly con­tributed a new way of think­ing about film – Sovi­et Mon­tage. You can watch a video about it above.

When the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion washed over the coun­try, the num­ber of films in the USSR dried up. One of the few movies avail­able at VGIK, aka The Moscow Film School, was Griffith’s sprawl­ing Intol­er­ance (watch it online here). Lev Kuleshov, a young teacher there, start­ed to take apart the movie and reorder the images. He dis­cov­ered that the mean­ing of a scene was rad­i­cal­ly changed depend­ing on the order of the shots. This led Kuleshov to try an exper­i­ment: he jux­ta­posed the image of a man with a blank expres­sion with a bowl of soup, a young corpse in a cof­fin and a pret­ty girl. You can watch it below.

Invari­ably, audi­ences praised the actor for his sub­tle­ty of per­for­mance. Of course, there was no per­for­mance. The con­nec­tion between the two images was made entire­ly with­in the head of the view­er. This real­iza­tion would for­ev­er be com­mem­o­rat­ed in film schools every­where as the Kuleshov Effect.

Using the French word for assem­ble, Kuleshov called this “mon­tage.” At the school, how­ev­er, there was con­sid­er­able debate over what mon­tage exact­ly was. One of Kuleshov’s stu­dents, Vsevolod Pudovkin envi­sioned each shot as a brick, one small part that togeth­er with oth­er small parts cre­at­ed a cin­e­mat­ic edi­fice.

Anoth­er stu­dent, Sergei Eisen­stein, pro­posed a far more dynam­ic, and rev­o­lu­tion­ary, form of mon­tage. Eisen­stein saw it “as an idea that aris­es from the col­li­sion of inde­pen­dent shots.” An intel­lec­tu­al well versed in the­o­ry, Eisen­stein com­pared mon­tage to Karl Marx’s vision of his­to­ry where a the­sis smash­es into its antithe­sis and togeth­er, from that wreck­age, forms its syn­the­sis.

Eisenstein’s great­est exam­ple of mon­tage, and indeed one of the great­est exam­ples of film­mak­ing ever, is the Odessa Steps scene from his mas­ter­piece Bat­tle­ship Potemkin. In it, Czarist sol­diers mas­sacre a group of pro­tes­tors, most­ly women and chil­dren. You can watch it below.

As you can see, it’s a pow­er­ful piece of pro­pa­gan­da. There is no way to come away from this movie and not feel like the Czarists are any­thing but mur­der­ous vil­lains. (Nev­er­mind that the movie is wild­ly inac­cu­rate, his­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing.) Shots of a griev­ing moth­er jux­ta­posed with images of bay­o­net wield­ing troops result in a sur­pris­ing­ly vis­cer­al feel­ing of injus­tice.

In his writ­ings, Eisen­stein out­lined the vary­ing types of mon­tage – five kinds in all. The most impor­tant, in his eyes, was intel­lec­tu­al mon­tage – a method of plac­ing images togeth­er in a way to evoke intel­lec­tu­al con­cepts. He was inspired by how Japan­ese and Chi­nese can cre­ate abstract ideas from con­crete pic­tograms. For exam­ple, the Japan­ese sym­bol for tree is 木. One char­ac­ter for wall is 囗. Put the two togeth­er, 困, and you have the char­ac­ter for trou­ble, because hav­ing a tree in your wall is cer­tain­ly a huge pain in the ass. You can see an exam­ple of intel­lec­tu­al mon­tage in the end of the Odessa steps sequence when a stone lion seem­ing­ly ris­es to his feet.

Eisen­stein decid­ed to push this idea to the lim­it with his fol­low up, Octo­ber. The movie is deeply strange to watch now. In one famous sequence, Eisen­stein com­pares White Russ­ian gen­er­al Alexan­der Keren­sky to a pea­cock and to a cheap Napoleon fig­urine. It’s proved to be an inter­est­ing intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise but one that left audi­ences, both then and now baf­fled.

And below is anoth­er, slight­ly fun­nier, cer­tain­ly more con­tem­po­rary, exam­ple of intel­lec­tu­al mon­tage.

Many of the land­mark films men­tioned above can be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hitch­cock on the Filmmaker’s Essen­tial Tool: The Kuleshov Effect

Watch Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and Oth­er Free Sergei Eisen­stein Films

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick

Watch Ten of the Great­est Silent Films of All Time — All Free Online

The Film­mak­ing of Susan Son­tag & Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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The Ebola Virus Explained with Animated Video

in Biology | November 6th, 2014

There’s just one small men­tion of the Ebo­la virus on the New York Times home­page right now. And it’s buried halfway down the page — which means that, no longer in pan­ic mode, we can take a cool, calm and col­lect­ed look at this virus called Ebo­la.“What does the Ebo­la virus actu­al­ly do in your body? Why is it so dan­ger­ous and why does it kill so many peo­ple?” Those are the ques­tions explored in a new video by Kurzge­sagt, a Munich-based design stu­dio that spe­cial­izes in cre­at­ing edu­ca­tion­al and sci­en­tif­ic ani­ma­tions. Kurzge­sagt, in case you’re won­der­ing, means “in a nut­shell” in Ger­man. As in, here’s the deal with Ebo­la in a nut­shell.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

How to Dance Your Dis­ser­ta­tion: See the Win­ning Video in the 2014 “Dance Your PhD” Con­test

Sal­vador Dalí Cre­ates a Chill­ing Anti-Vene­re­al Dis­ease Poster Dur­ing World War II

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The Internet Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vintage Video Games in Your Web Browser (Free)

in Internet Archive, Video Games | November 5th, 2014

internet arcade

A year ago, Col­in Mar­shall told you all about the Inter­net Archive’s His­tor­i­cal Soft­ware Archive, which lets nos­tal­gic web users play vin­tage com­put­er games in their web brows­er — games like Namco’s Pac-Man, or a 1982 ver­sion of E.T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al. The Archive has kept nudg­ing along this project, and last week­end they launched the Inter­net Arcade, a web-based library of 900 arcade (coin-oper­at­ed) video games made between the 1970s and 1990s. Dig Dug, Bez­erk, Frog­ger, Tetris, Don­key Kong, Street Fight­er II — they are all there.

The games will run in your web brows­er via a Javascript emu­la­tor. Last year, the Inter­net Archive told us that Fire­fox was best opti­mized to run these free games. If you encounter issues with con­trol, sound, or oth­er tech­ni­cal prob­lems, you can read this entry for some com­mon solu­tions.

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:

Play­ing a Video Game Could Cut the Risk of Demen­tia by 48%, Sug­gests a New Study

Hayao Miyaza­ki Tells Video Game Mak­ers What He Thinks of Their Char­ac­ters Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: “I’m Utter­ly Dis­gust­ed. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Roman­tic Poets: Shel­ley, Byron, Keats

 

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.