Sadly, despite great strides since the 1970s, Hollywood (and filmmaking in general) is still a boys’ club, especially when it comes to those behind the camera. Until Kathryn Bigelow won her 2010 Oscar for The Hurt Locker, no female director had claimed the prize. And not a single woman has even been nominated for Best Cinematography.
But as somebody on this Metafilter thread suggests, if we want to support female directors, we need to watch more films by female directors. This Google Doc lists 245 films directed by women that are currently available on Netflix. It’s a mix of art house and popcorn fare, and all worth checking out…and no doubt many Open Culture readers have seen quite a few already. Here’s our Top Ten suggestions from that list, with four more thrown in for good measure. And yes, we know that Netflix is a paid service, but, not to worry, you can sign up for a month-long free trial.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been riding a wave so high these past few years that most honest writers would confess to at least some small degree of envy. And yet anyone—writer or reader—who appreciates Coates’ rigorous scholarship, stylistic mastery, and enthralling personal voice must also admit that the accolades are well-earned. Winner of the National Book Award for his second autobiographical work, Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Coates is frequently called on to discuss the seemingly intractable racism in the U.S., both its long, gritty history and continuation into the present. (On top of these credentials, Coates, an unabashed comic book nerd, is now penning the revived Black Panther title for Marvel, currently the year’s best-selling comic.)
As a senior editor at The Atlantic, Coates became a national voice for black America with articles on the paradoxes of Barack Obama’s presidency and the bootstraps conservatism of Bill Cosby (published before the comedian’s prosecution). His article “The Case for Reparations,” a lengthy, historical examination of Redlining, brought him further into national prominence. So high was Coates’ profile after his second book that Toni Morrison declared him the heir to James Baldwin’s legacy, a mantle that has weighed heavily and sparked some backlash, though Coates courted the comparison himself by styling Between the World and Me after Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. In doing so, writes Michael Eric Dyson, “Coates did a daring thing… waged a bet that the American public could absorb even more of the epistolary device, and wrote a book-length essay to his son.”
Not only did America “absorb” the device; the nation’s readers marveled at Coates’ deft mixture of existential toughness and emotional vulnerability; his intense, unsentimental take on U.S. racist animus and his moving, loving portraits of his close friends and family. As a letter from a father to his son, the book also works as a teaching tool, and Coates liberally salts his personal narrative with the sources of his own education in African American history and politics from his father and his years at Howard University. In the wake of the fame the book has brought him, he has continued what he seems to view as a public mission to educate, and interviews and discussions with the writer frequently involve digressions on his sources of information, as well as the books that move and motivate him.
So it was when Coates sat down with New York Times Magazine and ProPublica reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture last year. You can watch the full interview at the top of the post. During the course of the hour-long talk, Coates mentioned the books below, in the hopes, he says, that “folks who read” Between the World and Me “will read this book, and then go read a ton of other books.” He both began and ended his recommendations with Baldwin.
Finally, Coates references the famous debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965, which you can read about and watch in full here.
A few weeks ago, I took my kids to see Paul McCartney launch his One on One Tour in Fresno, California. The highlight? Seeing him play “Hard Day’s Night” and “Love Me Do” live for the first time since the 1960s? Not really. Watching Sir Paul wave at my kids when they held up a “Cheerio Paul” sign? Yeah, that was worth the price of the tickets alone.
But none of that compares to the scene that played out earlier this week in Buenos Aires. Above, watch little Leila sweetly ask Paul to play a little bass, get her wish granted, and rock to some “Get Back.” It’s pretty adorable.
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!
If you ever find yourself in Zadar, Croatia, pay a visit to The Sea Organ, the experimental musical instrument created by the architect Nikola Bašić. Unveiled in 2005, the organ–made of 35 polyethylene pipes tucked under white marble steps–turns the wind and the waves into a never-ending stream of avant-garde sounds. In 2006, the Sea Organ won the 2006 European Prize for Urban Public Space. Hear it make its music above.
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!
Image courtesy of National Burial Database of Enslaved Americans
The stories are infrequent but deeply compelling: one recent news item in the AP’s The Big Story describes the bones of 14 people from the 18th or early 19th century, discovered in Albany, NY, “wrapped in shrouds, buried in pine boxes and—over centuries—forgotten.” Seven adults, five infants, and two children, soon to be “publically memorialized and [re]buried in personalized boxes beside prominent families in old Albany.”
Over the 11 years since the bones’ discovery by construction workers, scientists have been able to piece together clues about what these lives were like: marked by constant toil and physical hardship. Genetic markers, and broken bones, notched and missing teeth, and arthritic joints offer the only means of identifying the remains. A granite headstone donated to the new gravesite will read, “Here lies the remains of 14 souls known only to God. Enslaved in life, they are slaves no more.”
Memorials like this one and the recent Albany burial site do not change the facts or right the wrongs of history, but they do make visible lives and histories long buried and forgotten. “Among the scars left by the heritage of slavery,” writes Edward Rothstein at The New York Times, “one of the greatest is an absence: where are the memorials, cemeteries, architectural structures or sturdy sanctuaries that typically provide the ground for a people’s memory?” This is precisely the question Sandra Arnold is now asking, in a very literal sense, for a project called The National Burial Database of Enslaved Americans (NBDEA).
A Graduate Fellow at Brown University, Arnold founded the Periwinkle Initiative, “a public humanities and education initiative dedicated to preserving cultural heritage associated with enslaved Americans.” The NBDEA—Periwinkle’s core project in collaboration with Fordham University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 1772 Foundation—aims, writes Arnold at The New York Times, to “be the first national repository of information on the grave sites of individuals who died while enslaved or after they were emancipated.”
The grave sites The NBDEA compiles will depend in some part on the public: “Anyone who comes to the website will eventually be able to submit information about these places and conduct searches.” Currently, the site remains in development, unavailable for public searches, but users can make preliminary submissions. Arnold describes the process of sifting through the submissions she has received as “painful.”
Burial grounds that should be revered spaces… instead are covered by playgrounds and apartment complexes. I have learned that many grave sites of formerly enslaved Americans are abandoned, undocumented, desecrated by the asphalt of “development,” and lack any type of memorialization or recognition. The burial grounds are often found incidentally by developers under parks and office buildings, and for many of the sites, oral history is their only source of documentation.
Just such an oral history preserved the unmarked gravesite of one of Arnold’s ancestors in her hometown in West Tennessee. Allison Meier at Hyperallergic points to some specifically troubled sites like those Arnold describes, including “a slave cemetery… bulldozed in Houston,” another “covered with asphalt in Atlanta,” and a third “found below a Harlem bus depot.”
Arnold hopes that recording and memorializing these “sacred spaces… can contribute to healing, understanding and potentially even reconciliation.” Additionally, she cites a “pragmatic” rationale for the project, since “burial grounds are valuable resources for scholars and historians, serving as road maps for genealogical and historical research.”
The project presents a tremendous opportunity for the many thousands of citizen historians scattered across the country to come together and fill in the absences in our historical memory; and the centralized database will also draw more attention to the few memorials that do exist, many of which, writes Meier, “are often staggeringly small in relation to the number of lives they remember.” She refers to the example of a “miniature mass grave monument” in Memphis’ Elmwood Cemetary (above), a “single stone [that] memorializes over 300 slaves who died between 1852 and 1865.”
Like The Freedman’s Bureau Project, a recent online database of 1.5 million historical documents related to slavery, The NBDEA will further historicize and humanize “overlooked lives,” writes Arnold, that “are an inextricable part of the historical narrative of our country.”
Sure, I know ice truckers and snow crab fishermen have it rough, but I’ve always thought the hardest job in the world is to be a comedian. You walk out on stage, night after night, throwing yourself on the mercy of the fickle crowd, with nothing but your wits to keep you afloat. It’s never been any wonder to me that so many comedians turn to various substances to cope with the heckling, chilly silences, and disinterested, half-empty rooms. Even successful, beloved comics face tremendous performance pressures. Some of them crack. And some, like John Belushi, hop onstage during a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theatre, cartwheel over to a microphone before the chorus of “U.S. Blues,” and join in on backing vocals.
Belushi’s impromptu 1980 prank performance with the Dead was not, initially, welcomed. He had, reports Live for Live Music, “met with some resistance from the band” when he asked to join in during the encore, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann “had to nix Belushi’s wishes.”
So Belushi, true to form, took matters into his own anarchic hands, staging what Kreutzmann called in his 2015 autobiography a “comedic ambush.”
He had on a sport coat with small American flags stuffed into both of his breast pockets and he landed his last cartwheel just in time to grab a microphone and join in on the chorus. The audience and everyone in the band—except for Phil—ate it up. It couldn’t have been rehearsed better. Belushi had impeccable comedic timing, musicality, balls, the works. And apparently, he didn’t take no for an answer.
Sadly, no video of the stunt seems to exist, but you can see Kreutzmann tell the Belushi story in the interview at the top of the post and, just above, hear that night’s encore performance of “U.S. Blues.” Listen closely at around the 1:50 mark and you’ll hear Belushi join in on the chorus. We’ll have to imagine the cartwheels, but it probably looked something like this.
We all know the rules of art museums: look, but don’t touch. This doesn’t bother most of us most of the time, but for art-lovers who happen to be blind and thus use feeling as a substitute for seeing, it presents a problem indeed — but it also opens up an artistic opportunity. “Cantor Fine Art, a just-launched gallery by father and son team Larry and Sam Cantor, offers a story of a different kind of physical interaction with art in their project, Please Touch the Art,” writes The Creator’s Project’s Gabrielle Bruney. “They partnered with artist Andrew Myers to create a tactile painting that is appreciable by both sighted and blind art lovers.”
In the five-minute video above, you can see — or if visually impaired, hear — Myers discussing the beginnings of his “screw pieces,” images made by driving countless screws into a piece of wood, each one ultimately acting as a kind of physical, three-dimensional pixel. Though Myers didn’t begin these works with the blind in mind, one such gallery-goer’s visit to his show, and the “huge smile on his face” when he put his hand to the screw pieces, got him thinking of the possibilities in that direction. Thanks to his art, “there was a blind man who could almost see for a second.”
We also meet the blind woodworker George Wurtzel, currently at work on “converting an old grape crushing barn into a Tactile Art Center” which combines a woodworking shop with a “tactile gallery space where the visually impaired can experience and sell artwork.” Discovering their shared passion for tactile art, Myers decides to make a surprise for Wurtzel, “the first portrait of himself he can actually feel,” the first new piece for his tactile art gallery. The video captures the big reveal, which converts Wurtzel from his skepticism about the screw-piece form. Still, even as he runs his fingers over his own metallicized features, he has his objections: “My nose is not that big. I’m sorry. I like the beard, though. The beard is good. The beard is really good.”
From the figureheads of ships to cigar store statues to the caricature mascots of various sports teams…. Unfortunate or denigrating images of Native American peoples have persisted in popular culture, folk symbols of what Elisabeth W. Russell refers to in her history of the cigar store Indian as “The Vanishing American.” The phrase comes from the title of a Zane Grey novel, which then became a 1925 silent film dealing, wrote the New York Times that year, “with the passing of the American Indian.” Although both the novel and film attempt to protest the treatment of Native people by the U.S. government, both underwrite a common, troubling assumption—that Native Americans, like the Buffalo and the wild Mustang, were a threatened (and threatening) separate species, whose “vanishing” from the picaresque West (as they had “vanished” from the East) was a lamentable, but perhaps unavoidable, side effect of the march of Euro-American progress.
Each symbolic memorializing of Native Americans in U.S. iconography, however solemn or offensively cartoonish, gestures toward some meager recognition of a tragic loss, while erasing the circumstances that occasioned it. Of course Native Americans didn’t vanish, but were slowly killed or hounded into poverty and dispossession, and out of sight of white America—their dress, religions, and cultures made to disappear through forced assimilation, only to reappear in romanticized images of tragically conquered, but admirably warlike, primitives.
Those images proliferated during the mid-to-late 19th century, the period of intense Western settlement and expansion and the so-called Indian Wars. “It is a given today,” writes historian Brian Dipple, “that the idea of the American Indian has been historically significant. It shaped the attitudes of those in the nineteenth century who shaped Indian policy. Indian policy—be it removal of the Eastern tribes in the 1830s, reservation isolationism beginning in the 1850s, or allotment of reservation lands and assimilation in the 1880s—cannot be understood without an awareness of the ideas behind it. Literature and the visual arts provide revealing guides to nineteenth century assumptions about the Indian.”
Native historian Vine Deloria describes the cultural situation with more incisive wit in his “Indian Manifesto,” Custer Died for Your Sins: “The American public feels most comfortable with the mythical Indians of stereotype-land who were always THERE. These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us don’t fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating, which is seldom.” By the early 20th century, “mythical Indians” had become firmly embedded in popular culture, thanks to art and entertainment like the presumably serious attempts of Zane Grey and Frederic Remington, and J.M. Barrie’s deeply unserious Peter Pan. It is in this cultural atmosphere that photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis’ huge, 20-volume ethnographic project, The North American Indian emerged.
Beginning in 1904, and with the eventual backing of J.P. Morgan, writes Mashable, Curtis “spent more than 20 years crisscrossing North America, creating over 40,000 images of more than 80 different tribes. He made thousands of wax cylinder recordings of native songs and language, and wrote down oral histories, legends and biographies.” You can view and download more than 1,000 of these photographs at the Library of Congress. Curtis thought of his work as documenting “what he saw as a vanishing way of life.” Motivated by assumptions about Native people as semi-mythic remnants from the past, the photographer “sometimes meddled with the documentary authenticity of his images. He posed his subjects in romanticized settings stripped of Western civilization, more representative of an imagined pre-Colombian existence than the subjects’ actual lives in the present.”
The photographs are beautiful, their subjects ennobled by the dramatic lighting and stylized poses, and the breadth and scope of the entire project is nothing less than breathtaking. It set the stage for the significant work of later photographers and ethnographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the Lomaxes. Curtis has even been credited with producing the first documentary film. The images, histories, traditions, and biographies Curtis preserved constitute an invaluable historical record. That said, we should bear in mind that The North American Indian comes to us framed by Curtis’ assumptions about Native American cultures, formed by a climate in which myth vied with, and usually supplanted, fact. What do we see in these staged images, and what do we not see?
One of Curtis’ enthusiastic early backers, Theodore Roosevelt—who authored the introduction to Volume One—was, “like many of Curtis’ eventual supporters,” writes Valerie Daniels, “more interested in obtaining a record of vanishing Native American cultures as a testament to the superiority of his own civilization than out of any concern over their situation or recognition of his own role in the process.” Though Curtis did not necessarily share these views, and later became “radical in his admonition of government policies toward Native Americans,” he also had to please his financiers and his audience, most of whom would have felt the way Roosevelt did. We should bear this cultural context in mind as we take in Curtis’ work, and ask how it shaped the creation and reception of this truly impressive record of both American history and American myth. Enter the archive of images here.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
