During the 1950s, when a hula hoop craze swept across America, the Carlon Products Corp. (a company that specialized in making lightweight plastic pipes), managed to produce some 50,000 hula hoops per day. That got other companies thinking. How could they capitalize on this mania, if not directly, then indirectly? When a second hula hooping craze gripped the country during the mid-1960s, Transogram Games introduced the “Swing Wing,” possibly the worst idea for a kids’ toy until Bag O’ Glass (who here remembers that classic SNL skit?). It’s a dizzying toy, backed by a dizzying — but you have to admit catchy — commercial. Buyer beware, there’s a Swing Wing on ebay. Never opened and ready to go for 53 clams.
In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the dominant nation of Europe and a real rival to that global superpower Great Britain. Then it hit the buzzsaw of World War I. After the German government collapsed in 1918 from the economic and emotional toll of a half-decade of senseless carnage, the Allies forced it to accept draconian terms for surrender. The entire German culture was sent reeling, searching for answers to what happened and why.
German Expressionism came about to articulate these lacerating questions roiling in the nation’s collective unconscious. The first such film was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920), about a malevolent traveling magician who has his servant do his murderous bidding in the dark of the night. The storyline is all about the Freudian terror of hidden subconscious drives, but what really makes the movie memorable is its completely unhinged look. Marked by stylized acting, deep shadows painted onto the walls, and sets filled with twisted architectural impossibilities — there might not be a single right angle in the film – Caligari’s look perfectly meshes with the narrator’s demented state of mind.
Subsequent German Expressionist movies retreated from the extreme aesthetics of Caligari but were still filled with a mood of violence, frustration and unease. F. W. Murnau’s brilliantly depressing The Last Laugh (1924) is about a proud doorman at a high-end hotel who is unceremoniously stripped of his position and demoted to a lowly bathroom attendant. When he hands over his uniform, his posture collapses as if the jacket were his exoskeleton. You don’t need to be a semiologist to figure out that the doorman’s loss of status parallels Germany’s. Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a landmark of early sound film, is the first serial killer movie ever made. But what starts out as a police procedural turns into something even more unsettling when a gang of distinctly Nazi-like criminals decide to mete out some justice of their own.
German Expressionism ended in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. They weren’t interested in asking uncomfortable questions and viewed such dark tales of cinematic angst as unpatriotic. Instead, they preferred bright, cheerful tales of Aryan youths climbing mountains. By that time, the movement’s most talented directors — Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau — had fled to America. And it was in America where German Expressionism found its biggest impact. Its stark lighting, grotesque shadows and bleak worldview would go on on to profoundly influence film noir in the late 1940s after another horrific, disillusioning war. See our collection of Free Noir Films here.
You watch can 10 German Expressionist movies – including Caligari, Last Laugh and M — for free below.
Nosferatu — Free — German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (1922)
The Student of Prague — Free — A classic of German expressionist film. German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and Danish director Stellan Rye bring to life a 19th-century horror story. Some call it the first indie film. (1913)
Nerves — Free — Directed by Robert Reinert, Nerves tells of “the political disputes of an ultraconservative factory owner Herr Roloff and Teacher John, who feels a compulsive but secret love for Roloff’s sister, a left-wing radical.” (1919)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — Free — This silent film directed by Robert Wiene is considered one of the most influential German Expressionist films and perhaps one of the greatest horror movies of all time. (1920)
Metropolis — Free — Fritz Lang’s fable of good and evil fighting it out in a futuristic urban dystopia. An important classic. An alternate version can be found here. (1927)
The Golem: How He Came Into the World — Free — A follow-up to Paul Wegener’s earlier film, “The Golem,” about a monstrous creature brought to life by a learned rabbi to protect the Jews from persecution in medieval Prague. Based on the classic folk tale, and co-directed by Carl Boese. (1920)
The Golem: How He Came Into the World — Free — The same film as the one listed immediately above, but this one has a score created by Pixies frontman Black Francis. (2008)
The Last Laugh - Free — F.W. Murnau’s classic chamber drama about a hotel doorman who falls on hard times. A masterpiece of the silent era, the story is told almost entirely in pictures. (1924)
Faust — Free- German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau directs a film version of Goethe’s classic tale. This was Murnau’s last German movie. (1926)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans — Free — Made by the German expressionist director F.W. Murnau. Voted in 2012, the 5th greatest film of all time. (1927)
M — Free — Classic film directed by Fritz Lang, with Peter Lorre. About the search for a child murderer in Berlin. (1931)
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Related Content:
Metropolis Restored: Watch a New Version of Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece
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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
If ever you find yourself looking down on the Christmas card as a bland, mainstream art form, remember that John Waters makes them. So did Andy Warhol. But we’ve told you about those two countercultural creators’ appreciation for the imagery of Christmas before. This holiday season, we submit for your approval a series of Christmas cards from the hand of none other than Salvador Dalí. They came our way via Spanish literature professor Rebecca M. Bender, who writes that the surrealist painter “designed 19 unique Christmas cards between 1958–1976 for the Barcelona-based company Hoechst Ibérica,” a chapter in a commercial career that also included “artwork for advertisements (Bryan’s Hosiery) and magazine covers during the mid-20th century.”
Bender, a Dalí enthusiast who teaches at Grinnell, has assembled an impressive collection of images that give Christmas the surreal touch that I think we can all agree the holiday has always needed. The sketch for a 1948 Vogue magazine cover just above “exhibits tell-tale characteristics of Dalí’s surrealist style, including the barren, expansive landscape and the incorporation of double-images (which also characterize his depiction of the Spanish Civil War).” While that image has today become a specialty Christmas card, the art he created specifically for cards “did not incorporate traditional Mediterranean, Catholic Christmas imagery such as the Nativity scene or the Reyes magos (Wise men), but rather they appropriated more American and Central European elements, such as the Christmas Tree,” which he sometimes used as “an allegorical depiction of the year’s events” or infused “with distinctive elements of Spanish culture.”
When Dalí did try his hand at more traditional Christmas iconography, he did it for American greeting-card titan Hallmark. You can see one fruit of this commission in the 1959 nativity scene at the top of the post. Bender cites Patrick Regan’s book Hallmark: A Century of Caring as describing Dalí’s “take on Christmas [being] a bit too avant garde for the average greeting card buyer.” But tastes, even mainstream tastes, seem to have broadened quite a bit over the past 55 years. The time may have come where every man, woman, and child in America could do with a little surrealism stirred into their Christmas spirit. If you agree, make sure to read and see everything else Bender has gathered from Dalí’s Christmas-card career, all of which will inspire you to make the Yuletide more aesthetically daring.
In 1966, Jimi Hendrix released his first single, “Hey Joe,” a cover song, and, in a certain sense, reclaimed American rock ‘n’ roll from the British invasion. Eight years later in ‘74, it may have seemed like rock ‘n’ roll was dead and gone. Nostalgia set in; Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” hit the charts again thanks to American Graffiti and Happy Days. And then, a skinny poet from New Jersey and four kids from Queens more or less invented punk and resurrected the moldering corpse of rock. The Ramones appeared at CBGB’s for the first time in August. (See one of their earliest recorded performances here.) That same month saw the release of Patti Smith’s first single—“Hey Joe”—arguably the first punk release in history, though she sings it like a torch song. (The B‑side, the spoken word “Piss Factory,” set the tone for punk rock naming practices for decades to come).
At the top, hear Smith’s version of “Hey Joe,” which she introduces with an original piece of transgressive poetry about Patty Hearst, then still a captive member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In the still image, Smith wears a t‑shirt that seems to answer the echo of Bill Haley’s ghost: “F*ck the Clock. “ Just above, see Smith and band play “Hey Joe” live on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1976, just after an abridged version of “Horses.”
One of Smith’s biggest hits, “Gloria,” was also a cover, of a song by Van Morrison’s former band Them. She memorably made that song her own as well with the opening line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” She went on to cover a host of artists—Dylan, The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, U2. In fact her 10th studio album, 2007’s Twelve, consists entirely of covers. Just above from that record, hear her folky take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” recorded with stand-up bass and banjo. And below, she delivers a spooky rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”
While her stage persona may have mellowed with age, Smith’s voice has remained as powerful and captivating as ever. Below she belts out the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” live on the BBC’s Later… with Jool Holland, a song she also covers on Twelve.
Her tastes are eclectic, her range wide, and though she’ll always get the credit as the “Godmother of Punk,” she’s able to work in almost any style, even a kind of adult contemporary that doesn’t seem very Patti Smith at all. But she owns it in her cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” below, from her two-disc compilation album Land (1975–2002). It’s a long way from “Piss Factory,” but it’s still Smith doing what she’s always done—paying homage to the artists who inspire her. Whether it’s Smokey Robinson, Bruce Springsteen, or Virginia Woolf, she’s able to channel the genius of her influences while infusing their work with her own passionate sexual energy and poetic intensity.
In 2004, John Waters narrated Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea, a humorous documentary on the accidental lake created in the desert of Southern California. You can now find the film hosted on the YouTube channel of KQED, the public television outfit in San Francisco (where we’re getting heavy, heavy rains today). They lay the foundation for watching the film as follows:
Once known as the “California Riviera,” the Salton Sea is now considered one of America’s worst ecological disasters: a fetid, stagnant, salty lake, coughing up dead fish and birds by the thousands. Narrated by cult-movie legend John Waters, Plagues & Pleasures is an epic western tale of real estate ventures and failed boomtowns.
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Film noir isn’t really a genre. It’s a mood. Its elements are so well known that they border on self-parody. Neon lights. Inky black shadows. An empty bottle of whiskey. A gun. A dame with a past. A desperate, doomed man.
Like German Expressionism during the 1930s, it was a cultural processing of a historic trauma. Like French Poetic Realism during that same decade, film noir is fixed in a particular culture during a particular time. In this case, the culture was the inherently optimistic one of the United States. The time was just after World War II when the foundations of that optimism were severely tested. A generation of men returned from Europe and the Pacific scarred and dazed by the mind-boggling carnage of the war only to discover that their women were doing just fine working in factories and offices. Is it any wonder then that perhaps the most frequent trope in noir is of a man, seemingly tough but riven with weakness, undone by a powerful, sexually-dominating femme fatale?
Though those gender roles were quickly reshuffled and women were, for a time, banished back to the realm of domesticity, cracks remained in the brittle veneer of American masculinity. Add to that existential anxieties over the bomb and the Red Scare’s corrosive paranoia and you have a whole toxic stew of cultural fears burbling out of the American collective unconscious. And film noir articulated those fears better than just about anything else.
Of course, the reason film noir has proved to be so enduring is because of its look. The spare lighting, the canted angles, the grotesque shadows. It’s German Expressionism cast through the lens of Orson Welles. Its stark style melded perfectly with noir’s bleak cynicism. It should come as no surprise that some of the best noir directors – Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and especially Billy Wilder – fled Germany for the warmer climes of Hollywood. The style was also cheap — lots of shadows means less money spent on lights. It was a boon for the scores of independent producers who made noirs on a shoestring.
If you want get into that film noir mood, Open Culture has 50, count ‘em, 50 film noir movies that you can watch right now for free. They include:
DetourFree – Edgar Ulmer’s cult classic noir film shot in 6 days. (1945)
D.O.A. — Free — Rudolph Maté’s classic noir film. Called “one of the most accomplished, innovative, and downright twisted entrants to the film noir genre.” (1950)
The Hitch-Hiker — Free – The first noir film made by a woman noir director, Ida Lupino. It appears above. (1953)
The Naked Kiss — Free -Constance Towers is a prostitute trying to start new life in a small town. Directed by Sam Fuller. (1964)
The Stranger — Free – Directed by Orson Welles with Edward G. Robinson. One of Welles’s major commercial successes. (1946)
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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
I once asked a friend based in Seoul, South Korea who used to write for a prestigious news magazine what that magazine wanted to hear from the Korea beat. “Let’s see… North Korea, North Korea, and more North Korea,” he replied. “Oh, and did I mention North Korea?” Since the creation of two Koreas after the Second World War, North Korea, the far less populated and infinitely more secretive sibling of the land of all-you-can-eat barbecue and “Gangnam Style,” has inspired deep and fearful fascination in its observers. This has held truer and truer as time goes on; South and North Korea looked surprisingly similar in the twenty years or so right after they put the Korean War on pause, but now they’ve diverged so far that one can scarcely believe that so little time, and even less distance, separates the two.
The world’s interest in North Korea has run especially strong in the 21st century, during the reigns of the late (and cinephilic) Kim Jong-Il and now his son, the even higher-profile (and seemingly unappreciative of the upcoming North Korea-themed James Franco-Seth Rogen comedy The Interview) Kim Jong-Un. Vice catered straight to it when they produced the documentary The Vice Guide to North Koreaat the top, which provides a wisecracking first-person perspective on what you get when you sign up for a tour of the place. (Shooting pool with a lonely tea-shop girl ranks not lowest among the attractions.) If you sign up for one yourself, you’ll probably go with Koryo Tours, the firm with whose aid city-brander JT Singh and videographer Rob Whitworth put together “Enter Pyongyang,” the time-bending composite flight through the North Korean capital just above.
Pyongang shows up on illumination maps as the sole point of light in an otherwise dark country. So what goes on in the rest of it? According to One Free Korea, “the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds as many as 120,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps, and that 400,000 people have died in these camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution.” On that page, they’ve assembled Google Earth satellite images documenting the probable locations and elements of these camps. For more on these least-known parts of this least-known nation, see also Vice’s 40-minute program on North Korean Labor Camps below:
If all this doesn’t satiate your curiosity about North Korea — and what amount of information ever could? — have a look at National Geographic’s Inside North Korea, a slow-motion film of an intensely choreographed North Korean military parade, and of course, our guide to the five best North Korean movies, all free to watch online.
In the pantheon of Great Russian Writers, two heads appear to tower above all others—at least for us English-language readers. Leo Tolstoy, aristocrat-turned-mystic, whose detailed realism feels like a fictionalized documentary of 19th century Russian life; and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, the once-condemned-to-death, epileptic former gambler, whose fever-dream novels read like psychological case studies of people barely clinging to the jagged edges of that same society. Both novelists are read with similar reverence and devotion by their fans, and they are often pitted against each other, writes Kevin Hartnett at The Millions, like “Williams vs. DiMaggio and Bird vs. Magic,” even as people who have these kinds arguments acknowledge them both as “irreducibly great.”
I’ve had the Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky back and forth a time or two, and I have to say I usually give the edge to Dostoevsky. It’s the high-stakes desperation of his characters, the tragic irony of their un-self-awareness, or the gnawing obsession of those who know a little bit too much, about themselves and everyone else. Dostoyevsky has long been described as a psychological novelist. Nietzsche famously called him “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.” Henry Miller’s praise of the writer of particularly Russian forms of misery and trespass is a little more colorful: “Dostoevsky,” he wrote, “is chaos and fecundity. Humanity, with him, is but a vortex in the bubbling maelstrom.”
Perhaps the most succinct statement on the Russian novelist’s work comes from Scottish poet and novelist Edwin Muir, who said, “Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem ‘pathological,’ while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature.” Joseph Conrad may have found him “too Russian,” but even with the cultural gulf that separates him from us, and the well over one hundred years of social, political, and technological change, we still read Dostoevsky and see our own inner darkness reflected back at us—our hypocrisies, neuroses, obsessions, terrors, doubts, and even the paranoia and narcissism we think unique to our internet age.
This kind of thing can be unsettling. Although, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky embraced a fiercely uncompromising Christianity—one more wracked with painful doubt, perhaps, but no less sincere—his willingness to descend into the lowest depths of the human psyche made him seem to Turgenev like “the nastiest Christian I’ve ever met.” I’m not sure if that was meant as a compliment, but it’s perhaps a fitting description of the creator of such expressly vicious characters as Crime and Punishment’s sociopathic Arkady Svidrigailov, Demons’ cruel rapist Nikolai Stavrogin, and The Brothers Karamazov’s psychopathic creep Pavel Smerdyakov (a character so nasty he inspired a Marvel comics villain).
Next to these devils, Dostoevsky places saints: Crime and Punishment’s Sonya, Karamazov brother Alyosha the monk, and holy fool Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. His characters frequently murder and redeem each other, but they also work out existential crises, have lengthy theological arguments, and illustrate the author’s philosophical ideas about faith and its lack. The genius of Dostoevsky lies in his ability to explore such heady abstractions while rarely becoming didactic or turning his characters into puppets. On the contrary—no figures in modern literature seem so alive and three-dimensional as his anguished collection of unforgettable anarchists, aristocrats, poor folks, criminals, flaneurs, and underground men.
Should you have missed out on the pleasure, if it can so be called, of fully immersing yourself in Dostoevsky’s world of fear, belief, and madness—or should you desire to refresh your knowledge of his dense and multifaceted work—you can find all of his major novels and novellas online in a variety of formats. We’ve done you the favor of compiling them below in ebook format. Where possible, we’ve also included audio books too. (Note: they all permanently reside in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.)
Find more of Dostoevsky’s work—including his sketches of prison life in Siberia and many of his short stories—at Project Gutenberg. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Dostoevsky’s novels were serialized in periodicals, and their plots (and character names) can be winding, convoluted, and difficult to follow. For a comprehensive guide through the life and work of the Russian psychological realist, see Christiaan Stange’s “Dostoevsky Research Station,” an online database with full text of the author’s work and links to artwork, critical essays, bibliographies, quotations, study guides and outlines, and museums and “historically important places.” And for even more resources, see FyodorDostoevsky.com, a huge archive of texts, essays, links, pictures and more. Enjoy!
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