Wes Anderson’s Cinematic Influences: Video Series Reveals His Roots in Truffaut, Welles, Scorsese & More

substance of style
Matt Zoller Seitz is eas­i­ly one of the finest film crit­ics work­ing today. Over the years, he has done quite a lot of work unpack­ing the dense visu­al world of film­mak­er Wes Ander­son, cul­mi­nat­ing in a gor­geous cof­fee table book called, apt­ly, The Wes Ander­son Col­lec­tion. Today you can explore a series of video essays that delve into the filmmaker’s work. Zoller Seitz argues that Anderson’s dis­tinc­tive look is not mere­ly emp­ty aes­thet­ics. Instead, he asserts that there is sub­stance to Anderson’s style.

The first video out­lines three of Anderson’s biggest cin­e­mat­ic influ­ences. The filmmaker’s love of vir­tu­ous cam­era moves and pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with fall­en genius­es can be traced right back to Orson Welles. His focus on young peo­ple strug­gling to find peace in the adult world is influ­enced by Fran­cois Truf­faut, par­tic­u­lar­ly his mas­ter­piece 400 Blows. And the third, and per­haps most sur­pris­ing, influ­ence is Charles Schulz’s com­ic strip Peanuts.

In this sec­ond video, Zoller Seitz notes the styl­is­tic sim­i­lar­i­ties between Ander­son and direc­tors Mike Nichols, Richard Lester, and Mar­tin Scors­ese. It’s not ter­ri­bly hard to see traces of The Grad­u­ate or Hard Day’s Night in Anderson’s movies, but Good­fel­las? Zoller Seitz makes a pret­ty con­vinc­ing argu­ment.

While the pre­vi­ous videos come close to hagiog­ra­phy, the third video com­pares Ander­son with anoth­er obvi­ous influ­ence Hal Ash­by. It’s just about impos­si­ble to imag­ine Anderson’s delight­ful­ly twee world and dead­pan humor with­out Ashby’s Harold and Maude. Like Ander­son, Ash­by too slipped effort­less­ly between dif­fer­ent tones and dif­fer­ent gen­res. But Anderson’s movies focus exclu­sive­ly on upper class white peo­ple, some­thing that he has been fre­quent­ly crit­i­cized for. Ashby’s movies, on the oth­er hand, cast a much wider socio-eco­nom­ic net. After watch­ing this video, you get the sense that Ash­by might be the bet­ter film­mak­er.

The fourth video lays out how Anderson’s ten­den­cy of defin­ing char­ac­ters through their wardrobe goes right back to writer J.D. Salinger.

And with the fifth and final video, Zoller Seitz pulls togeth­er all of his argu­ments by anno­tat­ing the pro­logue to arguably Anderson’s best and most influ­en­tial movie, The Roy­al Tenen­baums.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

A Glimpse Into How Wes Ander­son Cre­ative­ly Remixes/Recycles Scenes in His Dif­fer­ent Films

Watch Wes Anderson’s Charm­ing New Short Film, Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Star­ring Jason Schwartz­man

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rush­moreThe Roy­al Tenen­baums & More

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.

Free eBook: Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave

Freud's Couch

Worth a quick note: Every month, The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press makes avail­able a free ebook, which you can read online. This mon­th’s pick is Freud’s Couch, Scot­t’s But­tocks, Bron­të’s Grave, by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Clas­sics pro­fes­sor Simon Gold­hill, who dou­bles as the direc­tor of the Cam­bridge Vic­to­ri­an Stud­ies group. The press describes the book as fol­lows:

If you have toured the home of a famed writer, seen the desk at which they worked, or vis­it­ed their grave, you are a lit­er­ary pil­grim, par­tak­ing in a form of tourism first pop­u­lar in the Vic­to­ri­an era. In our free e‑book for March, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s But­tocks, Brontë’s Grave, Simon Gold­hill makes a pil­grim­age to Sir Wal­ter Scott’s baro­nial man­sion, Wordsworth’s cot­tage in the Lake Dis­trict, the Bron­të par­son­age, Shakespeare’s birth­place, and Freud’s office in Hamp­stead. He game­ly nego­ti­ates dis­trac­tions rang­ing from bro­ken bicy­cles to a flock of gig­gling Japan­ese school­girls, as he tries to dis­cern what our fore­bears were look­ing for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the mod­ern pil­grim. Take your lit­er­ary pil­grim­age in our free e‑book, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s But­tocks, Brontë’s Grave.

The book, which got a warm review in The Wall Street Jour­nal, can be accessed via The U. Chica­go site.  Count­less more free ebooks (down­load­able ones!) can be found in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

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!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa: A Wonderful Sand Animation of the Classic Kafka Story (1977)

At home I often watch EBS, essen­tial­ly Kore­a’s equiv­a­lent of PBS, which often airs short inter­sti­tial seg­ments drawn in sand to fill the time between pro­grams. Only recent­ly have I learned that sand actu­al­ly has a gen­uine his­to­ry as a medi­um for ani­ma­tion, one that has pro­duced a work as strik­ing as Car­o­line Leaf’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis of Mr. Sam­sa back in 1977. Astute (or even not-very-astute) Kaf­ka fans will rec­og­nize this as an adap­ta­tion of The Meta­mor­pho­sis, far and away the writer’s best-known sto­ry, in which the young sales­man Gre­gor Sam­sa wakes up trans­formed into a giant bug. Find it in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions.

We see this bug writhing his way out of bed before we see any oth­er action in Leaf’s ten-minute sand short, whose (yes) ever-shift­ing visu­al tex­ture lends itself well to the theme of the tale. Not that this con­ver­gence of form and sub­stance came eas­i­ly: “What makes [Leaf’s] work stand out is the con­trol of the mate­r­i­al,” writes John­ny Chew, About Tech’s ani­ma­tion expert. “The Meta­mor­pho­sis of Mr. Sam­sa is an awe­some short film on its own, and a great adap­ta­tion of the Kaf­ka work, but when you con­sid­er the style in which it was made and the con­trol that would have to go into each frame, it’s unbe­liev­able.”

“The medi­um of ani­ma­tion, and specif­i­cal­ly cer­tain ani­mat­ed tech­niques, offer an abil­i­ty to faith­ful­ly repro­duce in part both the con­tent and the per­cep­tu­al expe­ri­ence of a lit­er­ary work,” writes Geof­frey Beat­ty in his paper “The Prob­lem of Adap­ta­tion Solved!.” In it, he quotes the ani­ma­tor on why she chose this par­tic­u­lar sto­ry: “ ‘Kafka’s sto­ries give this kind of room to invent,’ she says. This was an impor­tant val­ue for Leaf as she was estab­lish­ing a body of work based on a unique visu­al approach. The Meta­mor­pho­sis, sug­gest­ed to her by a friend and men­tor, was a good fit, as her own ‘black and white sand images had the poten­tial to have a Kaf­ka-esque feel – dark and mys­te­ri­ous.’ ”

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa

Any worth­while artis­tic medi­um impos­es lim­i­ta­tions — and sand, as you’d imag­ine, impos­es some pret­ty seri­ous ones. Work­ing with it, Leaf “would not be able to cre­ate high­ly detailed images [such as] the fes­ter­ing wound on Gregor’s back or his over­all dete­ri­o­ra­tion and decay. How­ev­er, this lim­i­ta­tion was not nec­es­sar­i­ly a prob­lem. ‘I think that the lim­i­ta­tions of draw­ing in sand, the sim­pli­fi­ca­tions that it requires, made me inven­tive in the sto­ry­telling in the ways I men­tioned above. Sand forced me to adapt the sto­ry to sand, which is inter­est­ing.’ ”

Those read­ers who apply the word “Kafkan” to any point­less­ly dif­fi­cult task (like, say, get­ting out the door to work when you’ve become a giant bug) might also use it to describe Leaf’s labor-inten­sive sand ani­ma­tion process. But unlike a tru­ly Kafkan labor, Leaf’s gen­er­at­ed a result — and a delight­ful one at that. Now if only the next gen­er­a­tion of sand ani­ma­tors would step foward to adapt the rest of Kafka’s oeu­vre. Maybe we could inter­est PBS in air­ing it?

Find more lit­er­ary ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Ani­ma­tions of Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Works: From Pla­to and Dos­to­evsky, to Kaf­ka, Hem­ing­way & Brad­bury

Watch Franz Kaf­ka, the Won­der­ful Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

The Art of Franz Kaf­ka: Draw­ings from 1907–1917

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Won­der­ful Life: The Oscar-Win­ning Film About Kaf­ka Writ­ing The Meta­mor­pho­sis

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma 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.

Hear Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth Rocker, Read From Her New Memoir, Girl in a Band

kim gordon reads

I’ll admit it. I have a thing for lis­ten­ing to rock biogra­phies and auto­bi­ogra­phies on Audi­ble, par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­oirs nar­rat­ed by the author him or her­self. Look in my per­son­al Audi­ble library and you’ll find Pat­ti Smith read­ing Just Kids. Kei­th Richards read­ing sec­tions of his best­seller Life. And Pete Town­shend nar­rat­ing his 18-hour tome Who Am I. That’s just nam­ing a few.

Right now, I’m get­ting start­ed with Girl in a Band, the new mem­oir released by Kim Gor­don, the co-founder of the influ­en­tial indie rock band, Son­ic Youth. And it looks like you can do the same with me. Rough Trade has made avail­able online five audio clips, start­ing with Gor­don read­ing from Chap­ter 1. Togeth­er, they amount to almost an hour of free audio. Find them all below.

Mean­while, if you want to down­load the entire mem­oir for free, you can go here, and then click on the “Try Audi­ble Free” but­ton in the upper right cor­ner. Just real­ize that you’re sign­ing up for Audi­ble’s 30-Day Free Tri­al pro­gram, which lets you down­load two free audio­books and try out the ser­vice for 30 days. If you so choose, you can can­cel before a fee kicks in. Please make sure you read all of the fine print before you sign up.

Chap­ter 1:

Writ­ing About New York Is Hard

The Way The Band Com­posed Songs

First Time See­ing Nir­vana

Fash­ion in New York

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:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Son­ic Youth Gui­tarist Thurston Moore Teach­es a Poet­ry Work­shop at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty: See His Class Notes (2011)

Fear of a Female Plan­et: Kim Gor­don (Son­ic Youth) on Why Rus­sia and the US Need a Pussy Riot

Miles Davis’ Entire Discography Presented in a Stylish Interactive Visualization

Miles Discographic

Peo­ple can, and do, spend life­times track­ing down and cat­a­logu­ing all of the var­i­ous releas­es of their favorite bands—studio, stage, boot­leg, and oth­er­wise. Cer­tain groups—the Grate­ful Dead, nat­u­ral­ly (hear 9,000 Dead shows here)—encour­age this more than oth­ers. And if a rock band can send com­pletists on life­long scav­enger hunts, how much more so a pro­lif­ic jazz artist such as, say, Miles Davis? Like the musi­cal form itself, jazz artists are mer­cu­r­ial by nature, spend­ing years as jour­ney­men for any num­ber of oth­er band­lead­ers before break­ing off to form their own quar­tets, quin­tets, sex­tets, etc. Add to the pro­fu­sion of dif­fer­ent groups the ten­den­cy of jazz play­ers to record the same songs—but nev­er in the same way—dozens, hun­dreds, of times, and you’ve got discogra­phies that num­ber well into dou­ble-dig­it page lengths.

Miles Discographic 1

That’s the sit­u­a­tion with Miles, for sure—even the most stud­ied of his col­lec­tors couldn’t pos­si­bly call to mind all of his immense cat­a­log with­out some handy ref­er­ence guide. Per­haps “Scaled in Miles” can help. Con­dens­ing an incred­i­ble amount of musi­cal his­to­ry into a very con­cise and attrac­tive form, “Scaled in Miles,” as it’s called—a huge online inter­ac­tive discog­ra­phy—“tries to make sense of Davis’s sto­ried career by visu­al­iz­ing each of the 577 artists he col­lab­o­rat­ed with over 405 record­ing ses­sions.” That descrip­tion comes from Fast Com­pa­ny, who fea­ture a few close-ups of the relat­ed “Scaled in Miles” poster, which they describe as resem­bling NASA’s “Gold­en Record.” The inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion allows you to lis­ten to the tunes as you learn the musi­cians who cre­at­ed them and the wheres and whens of their record­ings.

MIles Discographic 2

Some­thing about Miles’ music lends itself par­tic­u­lar­ly well, I have to say, to the very stream­lined, clean design of this impres­sive catalog’s online inter­face. Were some­one enter­pris­ing enough to make one for the Grate­ful Dead, I’m guess­ing it would look less like a gold­en record in space and more like anoth­er, messier kind of spaced-out voy­age. That’s not to sug­gest that Davis and the Dead have lit­tle in com­mon but their vast record­ed out­put. They did, after all, once share a stage at the Fill­more West in 1970. No need to go dig­ging in the vaults to find that one; see the per­son­nel from that night at the top of the post and stream the whole thing right here.

Miles Discographic 3

via Moses Hawk

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Miles Davis Sto­ry, the Defin­i­tive Film Biog­ra­phy of a Jazz Leg­end

Miles Davis Plays Music from Kind of Blue Live in 1959, Intro­duc­ing a Com­plete­ly New Style of Jazz

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

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

The Hedge Maze from The Shining Gets Recreated by Mythbuster’s Adam Savage

Like myself, Adam Sav­age went to the trav­el­ing Stan­ley Kubrick exhi­bi­tion at LACMA last year and stayed sev­er­al hours, just absorb­ing all the genius, from the scripts to the slates to the blue­prints and the cos­tumes to the props. Unlike myself, he went back two more times, that lucky man! Because the Myth­buster noticed that the Hedge Maze prop in The Shin­ing sec­tion did not look like the one in the film in any way. In fact, it looked kin­da cheap. So, being Adam Sav­age, a man for whom prop-mak­ing is one of a series of child­hood obses­sions turned jobs, he set out to accu­rate­ly recre­ate the maze mod­el from the film.

In this fas­ci­nat­ing video (top) from his YouTube series Test­ed, we get a step-by-step walk­through of the process. The LACMA mod­el used plas­tic foam; Sav­age goes for a stur­dy par­ti­cle board, made to look like hedges through spray paint and flock­ing. His atten­tion to detail goes down to the crowns at the tops of the out­er maze wall, a news­pa­per kiosk and minia­ture map of the maze. He even geeks out (in the best way, of course!) about the scale mod­el fig­ures (at $4 a pop) he buys to pop­u­late the maze. (Strange­ly, there’s no rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jack, Wendy, Dan­ny or even Hal­lo­ran to be seen.)
Savage’s ener­gy is infec­tious and if some of us had the time (55 hours total) and income to do this–and an under­stand­ing spouse–wouldn’t a lot of us love to trav­el down this rab­bit hole?

The film ends with a nice sur­prise that I won’t spoil, but let’s just say the uni­verse gets set right for once.

P.S. Does any­body know what is writ­ten on Savage’s work­sheet? Is it his ver­sion of “All Work and No Play…”?

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Saul Bass’ Reject­ed Poster Con­cepts for The Shin­ing (and His Pret­ty Excel­lent Sig­na­ture)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.

The Linguistics Behind Kevin Spacey’s Southern Accent in House of Cards: A Quick Primer

Let’s take Kevin Spacey’s south­ern accent on the Net­flix series House of Cards, and use it as a spring­board for explor­ing the lin­guis­tics of that often times charm­ing region­al accent, shall we? In the video above, cre­at­ed by Vox, we learn all about “ay-unglid­ding.” And “r‑dropping,” that ever dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of the South­ern accent that orig­i­nat­ed in Eng­land.

The clip was made with the help of uni­ver­si­ty lin­guists — Den­nis Pre­ston at Okla­homa State Uni­ver­si­ty; Robin Dodsworth at North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty; and Kirk Hazen at West Vir­ginia Uni­ver­si­ty. To learn more about how well Kevin Spacey mas­ters the accent (and where he falls short), head over to Vox.

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:

Nine Imper­son­ations by Kevin Spacey in Six Min­utes

The Ideas of Noam Chom­sky: An Intro­duc­tion to His The­o­ries on Lan­guage & Knowl­edge (1977)

Phi­los­o­phy with a South­ern Drawl: Rick Rod­er­ick Teach­es Der­ri­da, Fou­cault, Sartre and Oth­ers

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

« Go Back
Quantcast