Infinity Minus Infinity Equals Pi: This Video Proves It

It sounds impos­si­ble. But it turns out that infin­i­ty minus infin­i­ty does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly equal zero. It can equal Pi, or 3.14159265359. Or so demon­strates the “Math­ologer” in the video fea­tured above.

In real life the Math­ologer goes by the name of Burkard Pol­ster, and he’s a math pro­fes­sor at Monash Uni­ver­si­ty in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. You can check out more of his videos on YouTube here.

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.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es 

Free Math Text­books

Cit­i­zen Maths: A Free Online Course That Teach­es Adults the Math They Missed in High School

The Math in Good Will Hunt­ing is Easy: How Do You Like Them Apples?

 

 

 

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The Velvet Underground & Andy Warhol Stage Proto-Punk Performance Art: Discover the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966)

Punk rock, an art­less pro­le­tar­i­an sneer, a work­ing-class revolt against bour­geois tastes, good man­ners, and cor­rupt sys­tems of con­sump­tion. Right? Sure… and also pure per­for­mance art. Or do we for­get that its fore­bears were avant-garde fringe artists: whether Iggy Pop onstage fight­ing a vac­u­um clean­er and blender and smear­ing peanut but­ter on him­self, or Pat­ti Smith read­ing her Rim­baud-inspired poet­ry at CBGB’s. And before rock crit­ic Dave Marsh first used the word “Punk” (to describe Ques­tion Mark and the Mysterians)—before even Sgt. Pepper’s and the death of Jimi Hendrix—there came the Vel­vet Under­ground, pro­tégés of Andy Warhol and dark psy­che­del­ic pio­neers whose ear­ly songs were as punk rock as it gets.

Some evi­dence: a dog-eared copy of Please Kill Me, the “uncen­sored oral his­to­ry of punk,” which begins with the Vel­vets and, specif­i­cal­ly John Cale remem­ber­ing 1965: “I couldn’t give a shit about folk music… The first time Lou Played ‘Hero­in’ for me it total­ly knocked me out. The words and music were so raunchy and dev­as­tat­ing.… Lou had these songs where there was an ele­ment of char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion going on.” Now these days, every­one from the may­or of Lon­don to Shake­speare has been asso­ci­at­ed with punk, but maybe Lou Reed first defined its raunch­i­ness and dev­as­ta­tion back in the mid-six­ties. And the per­for­mances of those songs were sheer art-rock spec­ta­cle, thanks to Andy Warhol’s Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable, or EPI.

Crit­ic Wayne McGuire described these Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable per­for­mances, orga­nized in 1966 and 1967, as “elec­tron­ic: inter­me­dia: total scale.” The Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable enveloped the Vel­vets in a dark, hazy, strobe-lit cir­cus. Writer Bran­den Joseph describes it in detail:

… the Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable includ­ed three to five film pro­jec­tors, often show­ing dif­fer­ent reels of the same film simul­ta­ne­ous­ly: a sim­i­lar num­ber of slide pro­jec­tors, mov­able by hand so that their images swept the audi­to­ri­um; four vari­able-speed strobe lights; three mov­ing spots with an assort­ment of coloured gels; sev­er­al pis­tol lights; a mir­ror ball hung from the ceil­ing and anoth­er on the floor; as many as three loud­speak­ers blar­ing dif­fer­ent pop records at once; one or two sets by the Vel­vet Under­ground and Nico…

… and so on. “It doesn’t go togeth­er,” wrote Lar­ry McCombs in a 1966 review, “But some­times it does.” Warhol had attempt­ed to stage sim­i­lar events since 1963, with a short-lived band called the Druids, which includ­ed New York avant-garde com­pos­er La Monte Young (“the best drug con­nec­tion in New York,” remem­bered Bil­ly Name). Then Warhol met the Vel­vet Under­ground at the Café Bizarre, forced the broody Nico on them, and it sud­den­ly came togeth­er. The new, Warhol-man­aged band first launched at film­mak­er Jonas Mekas’ Ciné­math­èque the­ater. “Andy would show his movies on us,” remem­bers Reed, “We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wear­ing black any­way.”

As you can see in the 1966 film at the top of an EPI/Velvets per­for­mance, Reed’s pro­to-punk odes to intra­venous drugs and sado­masochism pro­vid­ed the ide­al sound­track to Warhol’s cel­e­bra­tions of the trag­i­cal­ly hip and pret­ty. The expe­ri­ence (at least as recre­at­ed by the Warhol Muse­um) put art stu­dent Karen Lue in mind of “Wagner’s gesamtkunst­werk, or a total work of art.” The film we expe­ri­ence here was shot by direc­tor Ronald Nameth at an EPI hap­pen­ing at Poor Richards in Chica­go.

The over­dubbed sound­track blends record­ings of “I’ll Be Your Mir­ror” and “Euro­pean Son,” “It Was a Plea­sure” from Nico’s Chelsea Girl, and live ver­sions of “Hero­in” and “Venus in Furs,” with John Cale on vocals. This par­tic­u­lar hap­pen­ing fea­tured nei­ther Reed nor Nico, so Cale took the lead. Nonethe­less, as Ubuweb writes, Nameth’s film “is an expe­ri­ence” ful­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of “Warhol’s hell­ish sen­so­ri­um… the most unique and effec­tive dis­cotheque envi­ron­ment pri­or to the Fillmore/Electric Cir­cus era.” The short “ris­es above a mere graph­ic exer­cise,” mak­ing “kinet­ic empa­thy a new kind of poet­ry” and a visu­al record of how punk arose as much from art-house the­aters and gal­leries as it did from dive bars and garages.

Relat­ed Con­tent:    

A Sym­pho­ny of Sound (1966): Vel­vet Under­ground Impro­vis­es, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

Nico, Lou Reed & John Cale Sing the Clas­sic Vel­vet Under­ground Song ‘Femme Fatale’ (Paris, 1972)

Pat­ti Smith Plays at CBGB In One of Her First Record­ed Con­certs, Joined by Sem­i­nal Punk Band Tele­vi­sion (1975)

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

500+William S. Burroughs Book Covers from Across the Globe: 1950s Through the 2010s

burroughs-hungary

William S. Bur­roughs has shown gen­er­a­tions of read­ers that the writ­ten word can pro­vide expe­ri­ences they’d nev­er before imag­ined. But to get to Bur­roughs’ writ­ten words, most of those read­ers have entered through his covers—or rather, through the cov­ers that a host of pub­lish­ers, all over the world and for over six­ty years now—have con­sid­ered suf­fi­cient­ly appeal­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Bur­roughs’ dar­ing, exper­i­men­tal, and not-espe­cial­ly-rep­re­sentable lit­er­ary work. You can see over 500 of these efforts at the Bur­roughs page of beatbookcovers.com.

burroughs-covers-2

As mild-man­nered as he could seem in per­son, Bur­roughs’ life and work, what with the drugs, the acquain­tance with the homo­sex­u­al under­world, and the reck­less gun­play, has always attract­ed an air of the sor­did and sen­sa­tion­al. Pub­lish­ers did­n’t hes­i­tate to exploit that, as we can see in the first edi­tion of Bur­roughs’ first pub­lished work Junkie just above. Not only did it come out as a 35-cent mass-mar­ket two-in-one paper­back, it promised the “con­fes­sions of an unre­deemed drug addict,” and with that lurid illus­tra­tion implied so much more besides. No mat­ter how much read­er­ly curios­i­ty it piqued, how much of an artis­tic future could some­one impulse-buy­ing it at the drug­store have imag­ined for this “William Lee” fel­low?

burroughs-covers-3

More curi­ous read­ers have prob­a­bly become Bur­roughs fans by pick­ing up The Naked Lunch, his best-known nov­el but a more con­tro­ver­sial and much less con­ven­tion­al­ly com­posed one than Junkie. This sto­ry of William Lee (now just the name of the pro­tag­o­nist, not an autho­r­i­al pseu­do­nym) and his sub­stance-fueled odyssey through Amer­i­ca, Mex­i­co, Moroc­co, the fic­tion­al Annex­ia and far beyond has had many and var­ied visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions, all of which try to con­vey how stren­u­ous­ly the text strug­gles against the stric­tures of tra­di­tion­al forms of writ­ing. Some­times, as in the 1986 U.K. edi­tion from Pal­adin above, they resort to telling rather than just show­ing you that you hold in your hands “the book that blew ‘lit­er­a­ture’ apart.”

burroughs-covers-4

Those of us who get deep into Bur­roughs’ work often do so because it tran­scends genre. Still, that has­n’t stopped mar­ket­ing depart­ments from try­ing to place him in one genre or anoth­er, or at least to sell cer­tain of his books as if they belonged in one genre or anoth­er. The “Nova tril­o­gy” with which Bur­roughs fol­lowed up Naked Lunch, has tend­ed to appear on the sci­ence-fic­tion shelves of book­stores around the world, not com­plete­ly with­out rea­son. Still, the sen­si­bil­i­ties of the sci-fi world and Bur­roughs’ mind do clash some­what, pro­duc­ing such intrigu­ing results as the 1978 Japan­ese edi­tion of Nova Express above.

burroughs-covers-5

Ulti­mate­ly, the only image that reli­ably con­veys the work of William S. Bur­roughs is the image of William S. Bur­roughs, which appears on the cov­er of this 1982 Pic­a­dor William Bur­roughs Read­er as well as many oth­er books besides. As any­one who’s gone deep into his bib­li­og­ra­phy knows, the work and the man don’t come sep­a­rate­ly, but they’ll sure­ly always remem­ber the cov­er that led them into his world in the first place, whether it bore images sub­dued or sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic, a design grim­ly real or for­bid­ding­ly abstract, or a prop­er warn­ing about just what it was they were get­ting into.

Vis­it all 500+ William S. Bur­roughs books cov­ers here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Visu­al Art of William S. Bur­roughs: Book Cov­ers, Por­traits, Col­lage, Shot­gun Art & More

Loli­ta Book Cov­ers: 100+ Designs From 37 Coun­tries (Plus Nabokov’s Favorite Design)

Hear a Great Radio Doc­u­men­tary on William S. Bur­roughs Nar­rat­ed by Iggy Pop

83 Years of Great Gats­by Book Cov­er Designs: A Pho­to Gallery

600+ Cov­ers of Philip K. Dick Nov­els from Around the World: Greece, Japan, Poland & Beyond

Down­load 650 Sovi­et Book Cov­ers, Many Sport­ing Won­der­ful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

The Art of the Book Cov­er Explained at TED

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

George Orwell Tries to Identify Who Is Really a “Fascist” and Define the Meaning of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

via Wikimedia Commons

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two neol­o­gisms, “Post-truth” and “Alt-right,” have entered polit­i­cal dis­course in this year of tur­moil and upheaval, words so noto­ri­ous they were cho­sen as the win­ner and run­ner-up, respec­tive­ly, for Oxford Dic­tio­nar­ies’ word of the year. These “Orwellian euphemisms,” argues Noah Berlatsky “con­ceal old evils” and “white­wash fas­cism,” recall­ing “in form and con­tent… Orwell’s old words—specifically some of the newspeak from 1984. ‘Crime­think,’ ‘thought­crime,’ and ‘unper­son’.… They even sound the same, with their sim­ple, thunk-thunk con­struc­tion of sin­gle syl­la­bles mashed togeth­er.”

“The sheer ugly clum­si­ness is sup­posed to make the lan­guage seem futur­is­tic and cut­ting edge,” Berlatsky writes, “The world to come will be util­i­tar­i­an, slangy, and up-to-the-minute in its inel­e­gance. So the future was in Orwell’s day; so it is in 2016.” As in Orwell’s day, our cur­rent jar­gon gets mobi­lized in “defense of the indefensible”—as the nov­el­ist, jour­nal­ist, and rev­o­lu­tion­ary fight­er wrote in his 1946 essay “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage.” And just as in his day, the euphemisms pret­ty up con­stant, bla­tant lying and racist ide­olo­gies. We can also draw anoth­er lin­guis­tic com­par­i­son to Orwell’s time: the wide­spread use of the word “fas­cism.”

Berlatsky uses the word with­out defin­ing it (when he talks about “white­wash­ing fas­cism”), except to say that “fas­cism thrives on false­hoods.” That may well be the case, but is it enough of a cri­te­ri­on for an entire polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic sys­tem? The word begs for a cogent analy­sis. Even Umber­to Eco, who grew up under Mussolini’s rule, felt the need for clar­i­ty, giv­en that “Amer­i­can rad­i­cals,” he wrote in 1995, abused the phrase “fas­cist pig” as a pejo­ra­tive for any author­i­ty, such that the word hard­ly meant any­thing thir­ty years after World War II.

But sure­ly Orwell—who fought fas­cism in Spain in 1936, and whose omi­nous post­war dystopi­an nov­els have done more than any lit­er­ary work to illus­trate its menace—could define the word with con­fi­dence? Alas, when we look to his work, even before the war had end­ed, we find him writ­ing, “‘Fas­cism,’ is almost entire­ly mean­ing­less.” His short 1944 essay, “What is Fas­cism?” does not, how­ev­er, push to abol­ish the word. He calls instead for “a clear and gen­er­al­ly accept­ed def­i­n­i­tion of it” against the ten­den­cy to “degrade it to the lev­el of a swear­word.”

But Orwell (being Orwell) is not opti­mistic. One rea­son a def­i­n­i­tion had been so dif­fi­cult to come by, he writes, is that any group to whom it is applied would have to make “admis­sions” most of them are not “will­ing to make”—admissions as to the real nature of their ide­ol­o­gy and objec­tives, behind the euphemisms, lies, and dou­ble-speak. If no one is a fas­cist, then every­one poten­tial­ly is. Even in the 40s, Orwell wrote, “if you exam­ine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people—certainly no polit­i­cal par­ty or orga­nized body of any kind—which has not been denounced as Fas­cist.”

He enu­mer­ates those so accused: “Con­ser­v­a­tives, Social­ists, Com­mu­nists, Trot­sky­ists, Catholics, War Resisters, Sup­port­ers of the war, Nation­al­ists.…” What of the text­book exam­ples just on the oth­er side of the front lines? “When we apply the term ‘Fas­cism’ to Ger­many or Japan or Mussolini’s Italy,” Orwell con­cedes, “we know broad­ly what we mean.” But appeal­ing to these extreme gov­ern­ments does lit­tle good, “because even the major Fas­cist states dif­fer from one anoth­er a good deal in struc­ture and ide­ol­o­gy.” Umber­to Eco is con­tent to say that fas­cism adopts the cul­tur­al trap­pings of the nations in which it aris­es, yet still shares sev­er­al con­stant, if con­tra­dic­to­ry, ide­o­log­i­cal traits. Orwell isn’t so sure he knows what those are.

So what can Orwell say about the word, one he is eager to hold on to but at a loss to pin down? Though he believes it must name a “polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic” sys­tem as well, Orwell final­ly opts for an ordi­nary lan­guage def­i­n­i­tion, to which we “attach at any rate an emo­tion­al sig­nif­i­cance.” Whether we “reck­less­ly fling” the word “in every direc­tion” or use it in more pre­cise ways, we always mean “rough­ly speak­ing, some­thing cru­el, unscrupu­lous, arro­gant, obscu­ran­tist, anti-lib­er­al, and anti-work­ing class. Except for the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of Fas­cist sym­pa­thiz­ers, almost any Eng­lish per­son would accept ‘bul­ly’ as a syn­onym for ‘Fas­cist.’” Those today who are not bullies—or unapolo­getic fas­cist sympathizers—and who don’t need euphemisms for these words, would like­ly agree.

You can read “What is Fas­cism?here. You can find the short essay pub­lished in this vol­ume, The Col­lect­ed Essays, Jour­nal­ism and Let­ters of George Orwell.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

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

Bruce Springsteen Narrates Audiobook Version of His New Memoir (and How to Download It for Free)

In Sep­tem­ber, Bruce Spring­steen pub­lished his new auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Born to Run. Patient­ly I’ve been await­ing the audio­book ver­sion, which came out today. And, to my sur­prise, I dis­cov­ered that it’s nar­rat­ed by Spring­steen him­self. All 18 hours of it.

You can hear him read Chap­ter 41 (called “Hitsville”) above. Plus Chap­ter 53 below. And if you want to hear the whole she­bang, you can pur­chase it online. Or down­load the audio­book for free by sign­ing up for Audi­ble’s 30-day free tri­al. As I’ve men­tioned before, if you reg­is­ter for Audi­ble’s free tri­al pro­gram, they let you down­load two free audio­books. At the end of 30 days, you can decide whether you want to become an Audi­ble sub­scriber (as I have) or not. No mat­ter what you decide, you get to keep the two free audio­books. Spring­steen’s mem­oir can be one of them.

Learn more about Audi­ble’s free tri­al pro­gram here.

NB: Audi­ble is an Amazon.com sub­sidiary, and we’re a mem­ber of their affil­i­ate pro­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Down­load a Free Course from “The Great Cours­es” Through Audible.com’s Free Tri­al Pro­gram

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Bruce Spring­steen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Gov­ern­ment. I’ve Come to Play Rock

Heat Map­ping the Rise of Bruce Spring­steen: How the Boss Went Viral in a Pre-Inter­net Era

Bruce Spring­steen Picks His Top 5 Favorite Spring­steen Songs

The Map of Physics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Physics Fit Together

From Newton’s mechan­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions to Einstein’s gen­er­al and spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty to the baf­fling inde­ter­mi­na­cy of quan­tum mechan­ics, the dis­ci­pline of physics has become increas­ing­ly arcane and com­plex, and less and less gov­erned by order­ly laws. This presents a prob­lem for the layper­son, who strug­gles to under­stand how New­ton­ian physics, with its pre­dictable obser­va­tions of phys­i­cal forces, relates to the par­al­lax and para­dox of lat­er dis­cov­er­ies. “If you don’t already know physics,” says physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man in the video above, it’s dif­fi­cult some­times to see how all of these dif­fer­ent sub­jects are relat­ed to each oth­er.” So Wal­li­man has pro­vid­ed a help­ful visu­al aid: an ani­mat­ed video map show­ing the con­nec­tions between clas­si­cal physics, quan­tum physics, and rel­a­tiv­i­ty.

Newton’s laws of motion and grav­i­ta­tion and his inven­tion of cal­cu­lus best rep­re­sent the first domain. Here we see the insep­a­ra­ble rela­tion­ship between physics and math, “the bedrock that the world of physics is built from.” When we come to one of Newton’s less well-known pur­suits, optics, we see how his inter­est in light waves antic­i­pat­ed James Clerk Maxwell’s work on elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields. After this ini­tial con­nec­tion, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of sub­dis­ci­plines inten­si­fies: flu­id mechan­ics, chaos the­o­ry, ther­mo­dy­nam­ics… the guid­ing force of them all is the study of ener­gy in var­i­ous states. The heuris­tics of clas­si­cal physics pre­vailed, and worked per­fect­ly well, until about 1900, when the clock­work uni­verse of New­ton­ian mechan­ics explod­ed with new prob­lems, both at very large and very small lev­els of descrip­tion.

It is here that physics branch­es into rel­a­tiv­i­ty and quan­tum mechan­ics, which Wal­li­man explains in brief. While we are like­ly famil­iar with the very basics of Einstein’s rel­a­tiv­i­ty, quan­tum physics tends to get a lit­tle less cov­er­age in the typ­i­cal course of a gen­er­al edu­ca­tion, due to its com­plex­i­ty, per­haps, as well as the fact that at their edges, quan­tum expla­na­tions fail. While quan­tum field the­o­ry, says Wal­li­man, is “the best descrip­tion of the uni­verse we have,” once we come to quan­tum grav­i­ta­tion, we reach “the giant Chasm of Igno­rance” that spec­u­la­tive and con­tro­ver­sial ideas like string the­o­ry and loop quan­tum grav­i­ty attempt to bridge.

map-of-physics

At the “Chasm of Igno­rance,” our jour­ney through the domains of physics ends, and we end up back in the airy realm where it all began, phi­los­o­phy. Those of us with a typ­i­cal gen­er­al edu­ca­tion in the sci­ences may find that we have a much bet­ter under­stand­ing of the field’s intel­lec­tu­al geog­ra­phy. As a handy reminder, you might even wish to pur­chase a poster copy of Walliman’s Map of Physics, which you can see en minia­ture above. (It’s also avail­able as a dig­i­tal down­load here.) Just below, the charm­ing, laid-back physi­cist takes the stage in a TEDx talk to demon­strate effec­tive sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion, explain­ing “quan­tum physics for 7 year olds,” or, as it were, 37, 57, or 77-year olds. To learn more about physics, please don’t miss these essen­tial resources in our archive: Free Online Physics Cours­es and Free Physics Text­books

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Physics & Caf­feine: Stop Motion Film Uses a Cup of Cof­fee to Explain Key Con­cepts in Physics

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

Quan­tum Physics Made Rel­a­tive­ly Sim­ple: A Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Win­ning Physi­cist Hans Bethe

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

The Science of Why We Laugh

Laugh­ter is uni­ver­sal. And yet strange when you think about it. One moment we’re doing noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly note­wor­thy. The next moment we’re con­vuls­ing and mak­ing these loud stac­ca­to guf­faws. Odd that.

So why do we laugh? It’s a ques­tion that Robert Provine, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land, Bal­ti­more, has been study­ing for 20+ years, try­ing to under­stand laugh­ter’s social, neu­ro­log­i­cal, and evo­lu­tion­ary roots. In the video above, he gives you a sense of the “side­walk” research he con­ducts, and some of the con­clu­sions he has drawn–e.g., laugh­ter is often not a reac­tion to some­thing fun­ny per se; it’s some­thing that helps build social rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. And it’s a reac­tion that’s hard­wired in the brain.

At the video’s end, Provine tells us that the study of laugh­ter has just begun. But, if you’re inter­est­ed in what we know so far, see his two books: Laugh­ter: A Sci­en­tif­ic Inves­ti­ga­tion and Behav­ior: Yawn­ing, Laugh­ing, Hic­cup­ping, and Beyond, an explo­ration of neglect­ed human instincts.

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:

John Cleese Explores the Health Ben­e­fits of Laugh­ter

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Chris Rock Cre­ates a List of His 13 Favorite Standup Com­e­dy Spe­cials

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An Introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Innovative Filmmaking Through Five Video Essays

Even though Jean-Luc Godard turned 86 this past Sat­ur­day, cin­e­ma schol­ar David Bor­d­well would no doubt still call him “the youngest film­mak­er at work today” — as he did just two years ago, in an essay on Godard­’s most recent pic­ture Good­bye to Lan­guage. Over his more than 65-year-long career, which began in film crit­i­cism and arguably nev­er left it, the man who direct­ed the likes of Breath­less, Alphav­ille, and Week­end in his very first decade of film­mak­ing has kept his work intel­lec­tu­al­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive when most movies seem resigned, and even con­tent, to explore the same tram­pled patch of cin­e­ma’s cre­ative space over and over again.

“Godard has been the lib­er­a­tor of weird­ness,” wrote New York­er film crit­ic and Godard biog­ra­ph­er Richard Brody on the occa­sion of the auteur’s 82nd birth­day. “He was always ahead of the game in terms of movie-mad­ness, rec­og­niz­ing that the habit of think­ing in terms of images and sounds didn’t detach him from emo­tion­al engage­ment with his sub­jects but added a new dimen­sion to it.”

He secured cre­ative free­dom for him­self from the begin­ning when he “cast ama­teurs along­side pro­fes­sion­als, mixed gen­res and tones, called atten­tion to the arti­fices of movies he loved and of gen­res he reju­ve­nat­ed, over­turned con­ven­tion with an anar­chic fury and an ana­lyt­i­cal pas­sion.”

Godard, Brody con­cludes, “hasn’t just rethought movies; he has recon­ceived the cin­e­ma, as a prac­tice and as an expe­ri­ence.” But what does that look like for the audi­ence? These five video essays plunge into Godard­’s work, iso­lat­ing and cel­e­brat­ing ele­ments that have mer­it­ed our close cinephilic atten­tion. At the top of the post, we have a brief aes­thet­ic overview in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion-spon­sored “Godard in Frag­ments,” where­in video essay­ist kog­o­na­da (cre­ator of pieces pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Wes Ander­son, Alfred Hitch­cock, Stan­ley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and neo­re­al­ism) spends six and a half min­utes mes­mer­iz­ing­ly “high­light­ing the icon­ic director’s sig­na­ture themes and devices,” from cam­eras and hand­guns to wom­en’s faces and bot­toms to the very con­cept of death.

But to under­stand Godard requires first under­stand­ing Breath­less, his 1960 debut fea­ture and, in the words of the Nerd­writer in his video essay on the film, “an extend­ed inves­ti­ga­tion of a French filmic iden­ti­ty in the shad­ow of Hol­ly­wood dom­i­nance — of, indeed, whether an iden­ti­ty informed by anoth­er nation’s cul­ture can exist at all.” Godard and his col­lab­o­ra­tors made the movie a lit­tle more than a decade after the end of World War II, which meant just over a decade after French restric­tions on the screen­ing of Amer­i­can films had van­ished, plung­ing Godard­’s impres­sion­able gen­er­a­tion straight and deep into the sights, sounds, style, and tropes of Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing.

Breath­less, in all its low-bud­get excite­ment and illus­tra­tion of the notion that the sever­est lim­i­ta­tions cre­ate the most favor­able con­di­tions for art, also func­tions as a piece of film crit­i­cism: it inter­prets and repur­pos­es all that Godard and his col­lab­o­ra­tors had learned, con­scious­ly as well as uncon­scious­ly, from and about Amer­i­can movies, and espe­cial­ly Amer­i­ca’s breath­less (as it were) genre pic­tures. “It wants to par­tic­i­pate in the Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing it admires, but it knows that such an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is impos­si­ble, so it deals with this by being self-con­scious, by using jump cuts, awk­ward tran­si­tions, by rob­bing the clas­sic moments of their force or mak­ing the hero’s bloody final steps way longer that it could ever pos­si­bly be, forc­ing you out­side the film’s text — or back into it again.”

Five years lat­er came Alphav­ille, anoth­er simul­ta­ne­ous trib­ute to and assault on genre from Godard and com­pa­ny. In it, accord­ing to Patri­cia Pis­ters’ “Despair Has No Wings: a Trib­ute to Godard­’s Alphav­ille,” he “plays with film noir ele­ments to tell a sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry that unfolds many oth­er lay­ers,” drop­ping the extant pulp-fic­tion detec­tive Lem­my Cau­tion into a new, “strange” con­text. “Pop­u­lar audi­ences were shocked by this worn-out and alien­at­ing ver­sion of their hero,” turned by Godard into a “cos­mo­nau­tic secret agent who trav­els in his Ford Galax­ie” into a futur­is­tic, author­i­tar­i­an Paris of rul­ing super­com­put­ers, seem­ing­ly mechan­i­cal cit­i­zens, “use­less vend­ing machines,” and stark, impos­ing mod­ern archi­tec­ture.

But Godard­’s use of archi­tec­ture start­ed before Alphav­ille and con­tin­ued after it, argues Richard Mar­tin in the British Film Insti­tute video essay “Jean-Luc Godard as Archi­tect.” He uses the term in a broad sense to mean “some­one inter­est­ed in build­ing, cap­tur­ing, and arrang­ing, spaces,” an inter­est man­i­fest in Breath­less’ “almost joy­ful” Paris of “peo­ple run­ning through the Lou­vre, juke­box­es, cafés, din­ers, and bars,” Pier­rot le Fou and Week­end’s pre­sen­ta­tion of “the car crash as a kind of archi­tec­tur­al sce­nario,” and Con­tempt’s jour­ney from the grand­ly “dilap­i­dat­ed lots of the Cinecit­tà film stu­dios on the out­skirts of Rome” to its thir­ty-minute cen­ter­piece in one of that city’s new mod­ern apart­ments to Capri’s Casa Mala­parte, “one of the most thrilling pieces of archi­tec­ture not just in Godard­’s career, but in the whole his­to­ry of cin­e­ma.”

Maybe it makes sense that some­one who first got behind the cam­era to make a con­struc­tion doc­u­men­tary (watch online here) would con­tin­ue to pur­sue an inter­est in the orga­ni­za­tion of space. But as Godard­’s atti­tudes, ideas, tastes, and even pol­i­tics have changed, the oth­er qual­i­ties of his movies have changed along with them. Hav­ing worked in black-and-white, col­or — its use exam­ined in the super­cut “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge” below — and with Good­bye to Lan­guage even in 3D, Godard has long shown a will­ing­ness to enter new visu­al ter­ri­to­ries as well.

Not only will his work past, present, and future con­tin­ue to give video essays a wealth of mate­r­i­al to work with, he him­self, accord­ing to Richard Brody, made the form pos­si­ble, hav­ing under­stood since the 1970s that “home video would be the basis for a new­ly ana­lyt­i­cal under­stand­ing of film his­to­ry, because it would allow for the easy copy­ing of clips and their manip­u­la­tion via video edit­ing with such tech­niques as slow motion, freeze-frame, and super­im­po­si­tions of oth­er images and text.” Thus “every video essay that turns up online owes him a debt of grat­i­tude,” as do many of the oth­er inno­v­a­tive types of visu­al media to which Godard has shown the way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Jean-Luc Godard Takes Cannes’ Rejec­tion of Breath­less in Stride in 1960 Inter­view

The Entire­ty of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less Art­ful­ly Com­pressed Into a 3 Minute Film

Watch Meetin’ WA: Jean-Luc Godard Films Woody Allen in 1986 Short Film

Jean-Luc Godard’s Debut, Opéra­tion béton (1955) — a Con­struc­tion Doc­u­men­tary

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick (1971)

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best Amer­i­can Films Ever Made (1963)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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