Watch the New Anime Prequel to Blade Runner 2049, by Famed Japanese Animator Shinichiro Watanabe

in Animation, Film | September 27th, 2017

The run-up to Blade Run­ner 2049, befit­ting what now looks like the cin­e­mat­ic event of the decade, has con­sist­ed of not just mar­ket­ing hype (though it does include plen­ty of that) but gen­uine artis­tic mate­r­i­al as well. Last month we fea­tured Nexus: 2036, the first of three short “pre­quels” to Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s upcom­ing Blade Run­ner sequel. That one and its fol­low up 2048: Nowhere to Run, both direct­ed by Luke Scott (son of Blade Run­ner direc­tor Rid­ley Scott), use live action to fill in some of the sto­ry between the 2019 of the first movie and the 2049 of the sec­ond. The just-released third short, Black Out 2022, from Cow­boy Bebop direc­tor Shinichirō Watan­abe, brings the Blade Run­ner uni­verse into the realm of Japan­ese ani­ma­tion.

“Blade Run­ner was def­i­nite­ly the movie that influ­enced me the most as an ani­me direc­tor,” says Watan­abe in the pre­view of his pre­quel down below. He and oth­er Japan­ese view­ers under­stood the film’s pow­er long before most any­one in the West (with the notable excep­tion of Philip K. Dick, author of its source mate­r­i­al), and Japan­ese artists began pay­ing trib­ute to it almost imme­di­ate­ly.

In a sense, Blade Run­ner took ani­me form thir­ty years ago: Kat­suhi­to Akiya­ma’s ani­mat­ed series Bub­blegum Cri­sis, the sto­ry of arti­fi­cial humans (called “booomers” instead of repli­cants) run amok and the advanced police team (called “Knight Sabers” instead of “Blade Run­ners”) who hunt them down in a Tokyo of the future rebuilt after a dis­as­trous earth­quake, could hard­ly wear its influ­ence more open­ly.

Filled with visu­al, son­ic, and the­mat­ic ref­er­ences to the orig­i­nal Blade Run­ner while tak­ing the sto­ry in new direc­tions — and also intro­duc­ing two new repli­cant char­ac­ters — Watan­abe’s Black Out 2022–view­able up top–depicts the events lead­ing up to the det­o­na­tion of an elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse that destroys the elec­tron­ics and machin­ery on which human­i­ty has become so reliant. Human­i­ty blames the repli­cants, and so begins a peri­od of pro­hi­bi­tion on repli­cant pro­duc­tion, only brought to an end by the efforts of Nian­der Wal­lace, the char­ac­ter so eeri­ly played by Jared Leto in Nexus: 2036. Blade Run­ner 2049 will pick things up 26 years after the EMP attack. What shape will Los Ange­les be in then? What shape will the cat-and-mouse game between repli­cants and Blade Run­ners take there? We’ll find out, and sure­ly in no small amount of detail, next month.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jared Leto Stars in a New Pre­quel to Blade Run­ner 2049: Watch It Free Online

Blade Run­ner 2049’s New Mak­ing-Of Fea­turette Gives You a Sneak Peek Inside the Long-Await­ed Sequel

The Offi­cial Trail­er for Rid­ley Scott’s Long-Await­ed Blade Run­ner Sequel Is Final­ly Out

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Made of 12,597 Water­col­or Paint­ings

Watch Tears In the Rain: A Blade Run­ner Short Film–A New, Unof­fi­cial Pre­quel to the Rid­ley Scott Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Marilyn Monroe & Elvis Presley Star in an Action-Packed Pop Art Japanese Monster Movie

in Animation | September 27th, 2017

Designed by Erik Winkows­ki, this wild cut-out ani­ma­tion, called “Scary Prairie,” fea­tures pop icons, an Andy Warhol aes­thet­ic, Japan­ese mon­sters, homages to Wild West films, all in one action-packed minute. What more could you want?

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 and BlueSky.

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!

via Messy n Chic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miyaza­ki Meets Warhol in Campbell’s Soup Cans Reimag­ined by Design­er Hyo Taek Kim

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Recounts Her Har­row­ing Expe­ri­ence in a Psy­chi­atric Ward in a 1961 Let­ter

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs from 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan: 110 Images Cap­ture the Wan­ing Days of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Soci­ety

The Big Ideas Behind Andy Warhol’s Art, and How They Can Help Us Build a Bet­ter World

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Photo Archive Lets You Download 4,300 High-Res Photographs of the Historic Normandy Invasion

in History, Photography | September 26th, 2017

Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death, by Robert F. Sar­gent, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the­o­rists like Roland Barthes and Pierre Bour­dieu explod­ed naive notions of pho­tog­ra­phy as “a per­fect­ly real­is­tic and objec­tive record­ing of the vis­i­ble world… a ‘nat­ur­al lan­guage,’” as Bour­dieu wrote in Pho­tog­ra­phy: A Mid­dle­brow Art. Bour­dieu him­self wield­ed a cam­era dur­ing his ethno­graph­ic work in Alge­ria, tak­ing dozens of con­ven­tion­al and uncon­ven­tion­al pho­tographs of the nation’s strug­gle for inde­pen­dence from France in the 50s. Yet he urged us to see pho­tog­ra­phy as for­mal­ly medi­at­ing social real­i­ty rather than trans­par­ent­ly rep­re­sent­ing the truth.

We have been trained to inter­pret the per­spec­tives most pho­tographs adopt as objec­tive views, when in fact they are “per­fect­ly in keep­ing with the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the world which has dom­i­nat­ed Europe since the Quat­tro­cen­to.” Pho­tog­ra­phy, in oth­er words, tends to give us art imi­tat­ing Renais­sance art. It can be dif­fi­cult to bear this in mind when we look at indi­vid­ual photographs—what Barthes calls “the This.”

Whether they doc­u­ment our own fam­i­ly his­to­ries or such momen­tous events as the Nor­mandy Inva­sion that began on D‑Day, June 6th, 1944, pho­tographs elic­it pow­er­ful emo­tion­al reac­tions that defy aes­thet­ic cat­e­gories.

At the Flickr account Pho­to­sNor­mandie, you can browse and search over 4,300 high res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs from the piv­otal Nor­mandy cam­paign, “From icon­ic images like Into the Jaws of Death by Robert F. Sar­gent,” My Mod­ern Met writes, “to troops inter­act­ing with locals as they lib­er­ate areas of Nor­mandy.” The pho­tos are deeply affect­ing, often awe-inspir­ing. When we look with a crit­i­cal eye, we’ll find our­selves ask­ing cer­tain ques­tions about them.

The skewed per­spec­tive and omi­nous sky in Sargent’s “Into the Jaws of Death,” for exam­ple, at the top of the post, might make us think of the Sturm und Drang of many a dra­mat­ic ship­wreck paint­ing from the Roman­tic peri­od. Was Sar­gent aware of the sim­i­lar­i­ty when he looked through the lens? Did he posi­tion him­self to height­en the effect? In pho­tos like that fur­ther up, of a French home dis­play­ing a pro‑U.S. sign on July 11th, 1944, we might won­der whether the res­i­dents made the sign or whether it was giv­en to them, per­haps for this very pho­to op. As always, we’re jus­ti­fied in ask­ing about the role of the pho­tog­ra­ph­er in stag­ing or fram­ing a par­tic­u­lar scene.

For exam­ple, the pho­to of a Ger­man sol­dier sur­ren­der­ing to Amer­i­can G.I.s, above, looks staged. But what exact­ly these sol­diers are doing remains a mys­tery. How much do these exter­nal details mat­ter? Pho­tog­ra­phy is unique among oth­er visu­al arts in that “the Pho­to­graph,” Barthes writes, “repro­duces to infin­i­ty” what has “occurred only once.” It is the meet­ing of infin­i­ty with “only once” that engages us in more exis­ten­tial explo­rations.  All of these sol­diers and civil­ians, shar­ing their joy and anguish, most of them now passed into his­to­ry. Who were these peo­ple? What did these moments mean to them? What do they mean to us 70 years lat­er?

The bombed-out cathe­drals and defeat­ed tanks make us pon­der the fragili­ty of our own built envi­ron­ment, though the destruc­tive forces threat­en­ing to undo the mod­ern world now seem as like­ly to be nat­ur­al as man-made—or rather some new, fright­en­ing com­bi­na­tion of the two. In the faces of the wound­ed and the dis­placed, we see spe­cif­ic man­i­fes­ta­tions of the same trag­ic inva­sions and migra­tions that reach back to Thucy­dides and for­ward to the present moment in world his­to­ry, in which some 60 mil­lion peo­ple dis­placed by war and hard­ship seek sanc­tu­ary.

The images draw us away into gen­er­al obser­va­tions as they draw us back to the unre­peat­able moment. This project began on the 60th anniver­sary of D‑Day “as a way,” My Mod­ern Met explains, “to crowd­source descrip­tions of images on the now defunct Archives Nor­mandie, 1939–1945. Thus, users are encour­aged to com­ment on pho­tos if they are able to improve descrip­tions, loca­tions, and iden­ti­fi­ca­tions.” His­to­ry may rhyme with the present—as one famous quote attrib­uted to Mark Twain has it—but it nev­er exact­ly repeats. The pho­to­graph, Barthes wrote, “mechan­i­cal­ly repeats what could nev­er be repeat­ed exis­ten­tial­ly.” Moments for­ev­er lost to time, trans­mut­ed into time­less­ness by the cam­er­a’s eye. Enter the Pho­to­sNor­mandie gallery here.

via My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Fran­cis Stewart’s Cen­sored Pho­tographs of a WWII Japan­ese Intern­ment Camp

The Fin­land Wartime Pho­to Archive: 160,000 Images From World War II Now Online

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

200,000 Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

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

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The Strange Story of Dr. James Barry, the Pioneering 19th Century British Doctor Who Was a Woman in Disguise

in Gender, History | September 26th, 2017

The work of many recent his­to­ri­ans has brought more bal­ance to the field, but even with­in heav­i­ly mas­culin­ist, Euro­cen­tric his­to­ries, we find non­white peo­ple who slipped past racial gate­keep­ers to leave their mark, and women who made it past the gen­der police—sometimes under the guise of male pen names, and some­times in dis­guise, as in the case of Dr. James Bar­ry, who, upon his death in 1865, turned out to be “a per­fect female,” as the sur­prised woman who washed the body dis­cov­ered.

What makes Dr. Barry—born in Ire­land as Mar­garet Bulk­ley, niece of the painter James Barry—such a note­wor­thy per­son besides pass­ing for male in the com­pa­ny of peo­ple who did not tol­er­ate gen­der flu­id­i­ty? As the Irish Times writes in a review of a new biog­ra­phy, “her life as James Bar­ry was a suc­ces­sion of auda­cious firsts—the first woman to become a doc­tor; the first to per­form a suc­cess­ful cae­sare­an deliv­ery; a pio­neer in hos­pi­tal reform and hygiene; and the first woman to rise to the rank of gen­er­al in the British Army (Barry’s com­mis­sion, signed by Queen Vic­to­ria, still exists).”

When Bar­ry’s sex was dis­cov­ered, it caused a sen­sa­tion, inspir­ing every­one from muck­rak­ing anony­mous jour­nal­ists to Charles Dick­ens to weigh in on the case. The tale “was explored in nov­els,” notes The Guardian, “and even a play,” but the “true sto­ry is both more pro­sa­ic and infi­nite­ly more strange.” The video at the top of the post walks us through Barry’s career serv­ing the Empire in South Africa, where she treat­ed sol­diers, lep­ers, and ail­ing moth­ers. Mar­garet’s sto­ry as Dr. Bar­ry begins in Cork when, long­ing for adven­ture at 18, she first decid­ed to take on the per­sona of “a hot-tem­pered ladies’ man,” Atlas Obscu­ra writes, “don­ning three-inch heeled shoes, a plumed hat, and sword.” When her wealthy uncle passed away and left the fam­i­ly his for­tune, she also took his name.

Three years lat­er in 1809, with the encour­age­ment of her men­tor and guardian, Venezue­lan gen­er­al Fran­cis­co Miran­da, “she decid­ed to embody a smooth-faced young man in order to attend the men’s‑only Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh and prac­tice medicine—a guise that would last for 56 years.” Margaret’s ear­ly years were marked by hard­ship and tragedy. In her teens she had been raped by a fam­i­ly mem­ber and had born a child. When she became James Bar­ry, a physi­cian attend­ing to preg­nant women, she “had a secret advan­tage,” her biog­ra­phers Michael du Preez and Jere­my Dron­field write. “There was not anoth­er prac­tic­ing physi­cian in the world who knew from per­son­al expe­ri­ence what it was like to bear a child.”

But of course, she did not need to expe­ri­ence lep­rosy or gun­shot wounds to treat the many hun­dreds of patients in her care. Her sex was inci­den­tal to her skill as a physi­cian. Mar­garet Bulk­ley’s trans­for­ma­tion may be “one of the longest decep­tions of gen­der iden­ti­ty ever record­ed,” writes du Preez. Bar­ry “is remem­bered for this sen­sa­tion­al fact rather than for the real con­tri­bu­tions that she made to improve the health and the lot of the British sol­dier as well as civil­ians.” The doctor’s wild per­son­al sto­ry weaves through the lives of com­mon­ers and aris­to­crats, sol­diers and rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, duels and illic­it love affairs, and is sure­ly wor­thy of an HBO minis­eries. Her med­ical accom­plish­ments are wor­thy of pub­lic memo­ri­al­iza­tion, Joan­na Smith argues at CBC News, along with a host of oth­er accom­plished women who changed the world, even as their lega­cies were elbowed aside to make even more room for famous men.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Marie Curie Invent­ed Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wound­ed Sol­diers in World War I

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Pho­tos of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Black Women Activists Dig­i­tized and Put Online by The Library of Con­gress

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

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A Virtual Tour of Japan’s Inflatable Concert Hall

in Architecture, Design, Music | September 26th, 2017

After the mas­sive Fukushi­ma earth­quake in 2011, archi­tect Ara­ta Isoza­ki and artist Anish Kapoor cre­at­ed the Ark Nova, an inflat­able mobile con­cert hall, designed to bring music to dev­as­tat­ed parts of Japan. Made of a stretchy plas­tic mem­brane, the Ark Nova can be inflat­ed with­in two hours. Add air in the after­noon. At night, enjoy a con­cert in a 500-seat per­for­mance hall. After­wards, deflate, pack on truck, and move the gift of music to the next city.

Marc Kush­n­er, author of The Future of Archi­tec­ture in 100 Build­ings, takes us on a vir­tu­al tour of the con­cert hall in the video above. Over on the web­site Dezeen, you can see an array of pho­tos, show­ing both the inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or of this inge­nious struc­ture.

via Swiss Miss

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 and BlueSky.

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:

The World Con­cert Hall: Lis­ten To The Best Live Clas­si­cal Music Con­certs for Free

The His­to­ry of Clas­si­cal Music in 1200 Tracks: From Gre­go­ri­an Chant to Górec­ki (100 Hours of Audio)

Stan­ford Prof Makes Ukule­les from Wood Floor of New Con­cert Hall

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Wes Anderson’s Cinematic Debt to Stanley Kubrick Revealed in a Side-By-Side Comparison

in Film | September 26th, 2017

Most film fans hold the work of Stan­ley Kubrick and Wes Ander­son in high regard, even if they don’t find one, the oth­er, or both to their par­tic­u­lar taste. And at first glance, it might seem hard to under­stand what kind of taste could pos­si­bly encom­pass both Kubrick and Ander­son. The for­mer made most­ly com­plex and emo­tion­al­ly chilled peri­od pieces, visu­al­ly grand yet stark, tinged with grim humor, and pos­sess­ing a dim view of human­i­ty. The lat­ter makes col­or­ful, out­ward­ly high-spir­it­ed come­dies, some­times even ani­mat­ed ones, that seem to delight in their own care­ful­ly cul­ti­vat­ed aes­thet­ics.

But both bod­ies of work reveal direc­to­r­i­al minds that take cin­e­ma itself very seri­ous­ly indeed. “Kubrick is one of my favorites,” says Ander­son in an inter­view clip used in the video essay com­par­ing shots from his films to shots from Kubrick­’s, just above. “Usu­al­ly, by the time I’m mak­ing the movie, I don’t real­ly know where I’m steal­ing every­thing from. By the time it’s a movie, I think it’s my thing, and I for­get where I took it all — but I think I’m always pret­ty influ­enced by Kubrick.” That influ­ence, on a visu­al lev­el, does come through in this com­par­i­son, cer­tain­ly in all those first-per­son per­spec­tives and views through port­holes, but even more so with the cam­era moves, espe­cial­ly in the track­ing shots and zooms.

As Bill Mur­ray said in a 1999 inter­view with Char­lie Rose of Rush­more, the pic­ture that would make Mur­ray an Ander­son reg­u­lar, “Boy, this has got some great moves in it.” By that he meant “the way sto­ries get told in pic­tures.” A film­mak­er needs a script, of course, but “the way you shoot it, too, shows how you want to impact things on an audi­ence.” He describes Ander­son and his col­lab­o­ra­tors as pos­sessed of “an enor­mous film cul­ture,” recall­ing shots from cin­e­ma past and, in their own pro­duc­tions, repur­pos­ing them com­plete­ly. Mur­ray remem­bers Ander­son describ­ing a shot in Rush­more as “one I saw in Bar­ry Lyn­don.” “You remem­ber Bar­ry Lyn­don?” Mur­ray asks Rose. “It was this enor­mous thing. Ours, though, is the inter­mis­sion of the school play.”

That school play, you may recall, appears as one of sev­er­al put on by Rush­more’s pro­tag­o­nist Max Fis­ch­er, whose sen­si­bil­i­ties (and artis­tic abil­i­ties) may dif­fer from Ander­son­’s, but who shows just the same zeal for cre­ative­ly “rip­ping off” from the movies. “I talk to a lot of those guys who come in here, these young direc­tors,” Rose says of Ander­son and his gen­er­a­tion. “They’ve seen every movie. They’re more stu­dents of cin­e­ma than most.” Mur­ray cau­tions that “it always gets per­vert­ed when peo­ple say, ‘Oh, the good ones copy, the great ones steal,’ ” an idea that can lead to emp­ty for­mal trib­utes, but “Wes,” to his mind, was dif­fer­ent. Pos­sessed of both “mind and body,” he “just knows how to get these things togeth­er in one place,” using the lan­guage of cin­e­ma, whether invent­ed or bor­rowed, for max­i­mum impact — as, in a dif­fer­ent yet star­tling­ly sim­i­lar way, did Kubrick.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing Reimag­ined as Wes Ander­son and David Lynch Movies

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

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

Cult Films by Kubrick, Taran­ti­no & Wes Ander­son Re-imag­ined as 8‑Bit Video Games

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published

in Art, Books | September 25th, 2017

Imag­ine you could talk to Hierony­mus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Rev­e­la­tion, or of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script—a bizarre 15th cen­tu­ry text writ­ten in an uncrack­able code; that you could solve cen­turies-old mys­ter­ies by ask­ing them, “what were you think­ing?” You might be dis­ap­point­ed to hear them say, as does Lui­gi Ser­afi­ni, author and illus­tra­tor of the Codex Seraphini­anus, “At the end of the day [it’s] sim­i­lar to the Rorschach inkblot test. You see what you want to see. You might think it’s speak­ing to you, but it’s just your imag­i­na­tion.”

If you were a long­time devo­tee of an intense­ly sym­bol­ic, myth­ic text, you might refuse to believe this. It must mean some­thing, fans of the Codex have insist­ed since the book’s appear­ance in 1981.

It shares many sim­i­lar­i­ties with the Voyn­ich Man­u­script (high­light­ed on our site last week), save its rel­a­tive­ly recent vin­tage and liv­ing author: both the Seraphini­anus and the Voyn­ich seem to be com­pendi­ums of an oth­er­world­ly nat­ur­al sci­ence and art, and both are writ­ten in a whol­ly invent­ed lan­guage.

Ser­afi­ni tells Wired he thinks Voyn­ich is a fake. “The Holy Roman Emper­or Rudulf II loved ancient man­u­scripts; some­body swin­dled him and spread the rumor that it was orig­i­nal. The idea of made-up lan­guages is not new at all.” As for his own made-up lan­guage in the Codex, he avers, “I always said that there is no mean­ing behind the script; it’s just a game.” But it is not a hoax. Though he hasn’t mind­ed the mon­ey from the book’s cult pop­u­lar­i­ty, he cre­at­ed the book, he says, “try­ing to reach out to my fel­low peo­ple, just like blog­gers do.” It is, he says, “the prod­uct of a gen­er­a­tion that chose to con­nect and cre­ate a net­work, rather than kill each oth­er in wars like their fathers did.”

The Codex, writes Abe books, who made the short video review above, is “essen­tial­ly an ency­clo­pe­dia about an alien world that clear­ly reflects our own, each chap­ter appears to deal with key facets of this sur­re­al place, includ­ing flo­ra, fau­na, sci­ence, machines, games and archi­tec­ture.” That’s only a guess giv­en the unin­tel­li­gi­ble lan­guage.

The illus­tra­tions seem to draw from Bosch, Leonar­do da Vin­ci, and the medieval trav­el­ogue as much as from the sur­re­al­ism of con­tem­po­rary Euro­pean artists like Fan­tas­tic Plan­et ani­ma­tor René Laloux. (Justin Tay­lor at The Believ­er points to a num­ber of sim­i­lar 20th cen­tu­ry texts, like Borges’ Book of Imag­i­nary Beings.)

Ser­afi­ni has been delight­ed to see an exten­sive inter­net com­mu­ni­ty coa­lesce around the book, and has had his fun with it. He “now states,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “that a stray white cat that joined him while he cre­at­ed the Codex in Rome in the 1970s was actu­al­ly the real author, tele­path­i­cal­ly guid­ing Ser­afi­ni as he drew and ‘wrote.’” You can now, thanks to a recent, rel­a­tive­ly afford­able edi­tion pub­lished by Riz­zoli, pur­chase your copy of the Codex. Buy now, I’d say. First edi­tions of the book now fetch upwards of $5000, and the its pop­u­lar­i­ty shows no sign of slow­ing. Also check out the more recent Codex Seraphini­anus wall cal­en­dar.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Man­u­script The Red Book: A Whis­pered Intro­duc­tion

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

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Stream Online The Vietnam War, the New Documentary by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

in Film, History | September 25th, 2017

Right now, PBS is in the midst of air­ing The Viet­nam War, a ten-part, 18-hour doc­u­men­tary film series direct­ed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The “immer­sive 360-degree nar­ra­tive” tells “the epic sto­ry of the Viet­nam War,” using nev­er-before-seen footage and inter­views. If you’re not watch­ing the series on the TV, you can also view it on the web and through PBS apps for smart­phones, tablets, Apple TV, Roku and Ama­zon Fire TV. Episode 1 appears above. Find all of them here.

Note: If these videos don’t stream out­side of the US, we apol­o­gize in advance. Some­times PBS geo-restricts their videos. Also, these videos like­ly won’t stay online for­ev­er. If you’re inter­est­ed in watch­ing the series, I’d get going soon­er than lat­er.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

Mick­ey Mouse In Viet­nam: The Under­ground Anti-War Ani­ma­tion from 1968, Co-Cre­at­ed by Mil­ton Glaser

An Aging Louis Arm­strong Sings “What a Won­der­ful World” in 1967, Dur­ing the Viet­nam War & The Civ­il Rights Strug­gle

What Is Apoc­a­lypse Now Real­ly About? An Hour-Long Video Analy­sis of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Viet­nam Mas­ter­piece

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.