Kagonada, the video-essayist behind the cinematic supercuts of Kubrick’s “One-Point Perspective” and Ozu’s “Passageways” returns with a look at mirrors in the films of Ingmar Bergman, set to a plaintive Vivaldi work for two mandolins, and a reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror.”
Mirrors and reflections turn up right in the beginning of Bergman’s films as a motif, when Jenny, the middle-aged protagonist of Crisis exclaims to her image, “You can’t see from the outside, but beneath this face … oh, my God!” Mirrors show their viewers a true face behind the mask in his films, mortality, failure, duplicity–everything fake stripped away. It’s a time to take stock and a time to break down.
It’s quite lovely, this cut, with Plath’s description of her wall “pink, with speckles” matching the color shot from Fanny & Alexander; or “Faces and darkness separate us over and over” as Nine-Christine Jönsson draws a frowny face and writes “lonely” on her reflection from Port of Call. The video is also a tribute to Bergman’s favorite actresses, from Harriet Andersson to Liv Ullmann.
Incidentally, Sylvia Plath was not just a fan of the filmmaker, she based her poem “Three Women” on Bergman’s film So Close to Life (aka Brink of Life) which she had seen in a London cinema in either 1961 or 1962.
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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.
In January, we featured series of short animations from BBC Radio 4 addressing the question “How Did Everything Begin?” In February, we featured its follow-up on an equally eternal question, “What Makes Us Human?” Both came scripted by Philosophy Bites co-creator Nigel Warburton and narrated by X‑Files co-star Gillian Anderson (in full British mode). Now that March has come, so has the next installment of these brief, crisp, curiosity-fueled productions: “Has Technology Changed Us?”
In a word: yes. But then, everything we do has always changed us, thanks to the property of the brain we now call “plasticity.” This we learn from the video, “Rewiring the Brain” (right below), which, balancing its heartening neuroscientific evidence with the proverbial old dog’s ability to learn new tricks, also tells of the “attention disorders, screen addictions, and poor social skills” that may have already begun plaguing the younger generation.
The video actually spells out McLuhan’s own explanation of that much-quoted line: “What has been communicated has been less important than the particular medium through which people communicate.” Whether you buy that notion or not, the whole range of proclamations McLuhan had on the subject will certainly get you thinking — in his own words, “You don’t like these ideas? I got others.”
The other two videos in this series, despite their short length, get into other intriguing related concepts: “The Fourth Revolution” that comes as a result of life in a “mass age of information and data,” and the workings of “The Antikythera Mechanism,” the first computer ever built. Our personal technology has certainly come a long way, but we shouldn’t fall into complacency about it, lest, as Anderson says in this series, it all wrecks our attention spans and “education will all have to be delivered in two-minute animations.”
I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic Stalker. It was a long time ago, before the advent of smartphones and tablets. I watched a beat-up VHS copy on a non-“smart” TV, and had no ability to pause every few minutes and swing by Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram for some instant distraction and digital small talk. The almost three-hour film—with its long, languid takes and endless stretches of silence—is a meditative exercise, a test in patience that at times seems like its own reward.
I recall at the time thinking about how didactic Tarkovsky’s work is, in the best possible sense of the word. It teaches its viewers to watch, listen, and wait. It’s a course best taken alone, like the journey into the film’s mysterious “Zone,” since the presence of another, likely perplexed, viewer might break the quiet spell the movie casts. But while watching a Tarkovsky film—whether Stalker, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, or any of his other pensive creations (watch them online here)—may be a solitary activity, it need not at all be a lonely one.
The distinction between healthy solitude and loneliness is one Tarkovsky is particularly interested in. It’s a cinematic theme he pursues, and a pedagogical one as well. In the video above from The Criterion Collection, Tarkovsky offers some thoughtful insights that can only seem all the more relevant to today’s always-on, multi-screen culture. Unfortunately, the subtitles translate his words selectively, but Maria Popova at Brain Pickings has a full translation of the filmmaker’s answer to the question “What would you like to tell young people?” Like some ancient Pan dispensing timeless wisdom, Tarkovsky reclines in an old, gnarled tree—on what may very well be one of his wild, wooded film sets—and says,
I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.
Though I speak as one who grew up in an analogue world free from social media—the only world Tarkovsky ever knew—I don’t think it’s just the cranky old man in me who finds this advice compellingly sound. As a recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon satirically illustrated, our rapid-fire, pressure-cooker public discourse may grant us instant access to information—or misinformation—but it also encourages, nay urges, us to form hasty opinions, ignore nuance and subtleties, and participate in groupthink rather than digesting things slowly and coming to our own conclusions. It’s an environment particularly hostile to mediums like poetry, or the kinds of poetic films Tarkovsky made, which teach us the value of judgment withheld, and immerse us in the kinds of aesthetic experiences the internet and television, with their nonstop chatter, push to the margins.
Beer, that favorite beverage of football fans, frat boys, and other macho stereotypes—at least according to the advertisers—actually has a very long, distinguished heritage. It’s older, in fact, than wine, older than whiskey, older perhaps even than bread (or so some scholars have thought). As soon as humans settled down and learned to cultivate grains, some 13,000 years ago, the possibility for fermentation—a naturally occurring phenomenon—presented itself. But it isn’t until the 5th century, B.C. that we have sources documenting the deliberate production of ale in ancient Sumeria. Nonetheless, beer has been described as the “midwife of civilization” due to its central role in agriculture, trade, urbanization, and medicine.
Beer became so important to ancient Mesopotamian culture that the Sumerians created a goddess of brewing and beer, Ninkasi, and one anonymous poet, smitten with her powers, penned a hymn to her in 1800 B.C.. A daughter of the powerful creator Enki and Ninti, “queen of the sacred lake,” Ninkasi is all the more poignant a deity given the role of women in ancient culture as respected brewers. The “Hymn to Ninkasi,” which you can read below, not only provides insight into the importance of this custom in Sumerian mythology, but it also gives us a recipe for brewing ancient Sumerian beer—the oldest beer recipe we have.
Translated from two clay tablets by Miguel Civil, Professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago, the poem contains instructions precise enough that Fritz Maytag, founder of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, took it upon himself to try them. He presented the results at the annual meeting of the American Association of Micro Brewers in 1991. The brewers, writes Civil, “were able to taste ‘Ninkasi Beer,’ sipping it from large jugs with drinking straws as they did four millennia ago. The beer had an alcohol concentration of 3.5%, very similar to modern beers, and had a ‘dry taste lacking in bitterness,’ ‘similar to hard apple cider.’” A challenge to all you home brewers out there.
Unfortunately, Maytag was unable to bottle and retail the recreation, since ancient Mesopotamian beer “was brewed for immediate consumption” and “did not keep very well.” But what Civil learned from the experiment was that his translation—in the hands of a master brewer “who saw through the difficult terminology and poetic metaphors”—produced results. Below, see the first part of the “Hymn to Ninkasi,” which describes “in poetic terms the step-by-step process of Sumerian beer brewing.” A second part of the hymn “celebrates the containers in which the beer is brewed and served” and “includes the toasts usual in tavern and drinking songs.” You can read that joyful text—which includes the line “With joy in the heat [and] a happy liver”—on page 4 of Professor Civil’s article on the Hymn.
Hymn to Ninkasi (Part I)
Borne of the flowing water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Borne of the flowing water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for you,
Ninkasi, having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished it’s walls for you,
Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.
Ninkasi, your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.
You are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, you are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date] — honey,
You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.
You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,
Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,
You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort,
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine
(You the sweet wort to the vessel)
Ninkasi, (…)(You the sweet wort to the vessel)
The filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a large collector vat.
When you pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.
Humorist James Thurber never tired of subjecting puny male milquetoasts to powerful female bullies.
In his view, members of the fairer sex were never femme fatales or fussy matrons, but rather battle-loving warriors in simple Wilma Flintstone-esque frocks. They are immune to the traditionally feminine concerns of the period—hair, children, the living room drapes… they get their pleasure dominating Walter Mitty and his ilk.
(Was he terrified of Woman? Resentful of her? The story he stuck to was that he’d conceived of his comic portrayal for the sole purpose of “egging her on.”)
There is one memorable instance where the little guy was allowed to come out on top. “The Unicorn in the Garden” is a story first published in The New Yorker on October 31, 1939. No spoilers, but there’s a close resemblance to Harvey, Mary Chase’s much-produced play about a mild-mannered gent whose devotion to a 6’ tall invisible rabbit drives his domineering sister around the bend.
The 1953 cartoon adaptation above brought Thurber’s drawings to life, whilst preserving the dialogue of the original in its entirety. The original story was published with only a single illustration, but director William T. Hurtz’s had hundreds of New Yorker cartoons to draw upon. Legend has it that Hurtz purposefully assigned some of United Productions of America’s least gifted animators to the project, hoping to duplicate Thurber’s ”nice, lumpy look.” The plan was for “The Unicorn in the Garden” to be part of a full-length Thurber feature,but alas, the studio pulled the plug on Men, Women and Dogs before it could be completed. Moral: Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.
If you know of Victor Hugo, you most likely know him as the man of letters who wrote books like Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). If you know something else about him, it probably has to do with his politics: King Louis-Philippe granted him peerage in 1841, and he became a member of the French Parliament in 1848. This position gave him something of a pulpit from which to speak on his pet causes: abolition of the death penalty, freedom of the press, universal suffrage and education, and — lest anyone call the ambitions of his secondary career minor — the end of poverty.
But this sensibility made Hugo no friend of Napoleon III, who took power in 1851, and so the writer went into political exile in Guernsey. That year marked the end of a period, beginning with his election to Parliament, during which Hugo put writing aside in order to devote himself fully to politics — well, almost fully. Even as he laid down his writing pen, he picked up his drawing pen, producing the images you see here and many, many more.
Hugo, writes The Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring, “made some four thousand drawings over the course of his life. He was an adept draftsman, even an experimental one: he sometimes drew with his nondominant hand or when looking away from the page. If pen and ink were not available, he had recourse to soot, coal dust, and coffee grounds.” The Tate’s Christopher Turner writes of rumors “that he used blood pricked from his own veins in his many drawings.” Whatever liquid substance he used, in the drawing at the top we can see “a giant, menacing octopus, fashioned from a single stain [that] contorts its suckered limbs into the initials VH.”
A bold signature indeed, but then, Hugo hardly played the shrinking violet in any domain. And yet, so as not to distract from the rest of his career, he seldom showed his drawings to anyone but family and friends, coming no closer to publishing anything any of his art than the hand-drawn calling cards he handed visitors in his period of exile. No less a painter than Eugène Delacroix, when he saw these drawings, thought that if Hugo hadn’t become a writer, he could have become one of the 19th century’s greatest artists instead. I’d certainly like to see what Andrew Lloyd Webber would have adapted that octopus into.
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.
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.
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 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.
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