Stanley Kubrick Explains the Mysterious Ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a Newly Unearthed Interview

in Film, Sci Fi | July 9th, 2018

Dur­ing the mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “the film’s nar­ra­tive tra­jec­to­ry point­ed inex­orably toward a big end­ing, even a rev­e­la­tion, but Kubrick kept chang­ing his mind about what that end­ing would be — and nobody who saw the film knew quite what to make of the one he final­ly chose.” Those words come from a piece by The New York­er’s Dan Chi­as­son, pub­lished to mark the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the film’s release. Since then, gen­er­a­tions of view­ers have inter­pret­ed 2001, and espe­cial­ly its end­ing, in their own way. But these debates over mean­ing may all change now that Kubrick­’s own inter­pre­ta­tion seems to have sur­faced.

Not only that, it turns out to dif­fer marked­ly from most of the ones in cir­cu­la­tion. “I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the pic­ture came out,” Kubrick tells jour­nal­ist Junichi Yaoi when the lat­ter asks what 2001’s end­ing means.

“When you just say the ideas they sound fool­ish, where­as if they’re dra­ma­tized one feels it, but I’ll try.” He then reveals his view of the con­cept behind it:

The idea was sup­posed to be that he is tak­en in by god-like enti­ties, crea­tures of pure ener­gy and intel­li­gence with no shape or form. They put him in what I sup­pose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life pass­es from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to hap­pen as it does in the film. 

They choose this room, which is a very inac­cu­rate repli­ca of French archi­tec­ture (delib­er­ate­ly so, inac­cu­rate) because one was sug­gest­ing that they had some idea of some­thing that he might think was pret­ty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with ani­mals to try to give them what they think is their nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment.

Any­way, when they get fin­ished with him, as hap­pens in so many myths of all cul­tures in the world, he is trans­formed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, trans­formed and made some kind of super­man. We have to only guess what hap­pens when he goes back. It is the pat­tern of a great deal of mythol­o­gy, and that is what we were try­ing to sug­gest.

This makes sense, or at least as much sense as any of the bet­ter inter­pre­ta­tions of 2001’s end­ing out there. Draw­ing explic­it­ly on ancient mythol­o­gy has become stan­dard prac­tice for big-bud­get spec­ta­cles, espe­cial­ly after Star Wars did it to much greater com­mer­cial suc­cess almost a decade lat­er, but in devel­op­ment the idea must have seemed rad­i­cal. Some will take Kubrick­’s expla­na­tion as defin­i­tive, and oth­ers, sub­scrib­ing to a dif­fer­ent phi­los­o­phy of artis­tic cre­ation, will show no more inter­est in it than they do in Rid­ley Scot­t’s per­son­al views on whether Deckard is a repli­cant.

The mys­te­ri­ous nature of the inter­view clip itself, a piece of the footage gath­ered in 1980 for a nev­er-released Japan­ese doc­u­men­tary, suits the nature of the rev­e­la­tion. We see only Yaoi as he inter­views Kubrick over the phone, but not, accord­ing to Pixar direc­tor and Kubrick super­fan Lee Unkrich, because the direc­tor was­n’t there. Unkrich post­ed to Red­dit that, as the Warn­er Broth­ers pub­li­cist who toured the Japan­ese crew around told him, “Stan­ley was actu­al­ly at the stu­dio that day, but didn’t want to meet with the crew and be inter­viewed on cam­era.” So even though we hear his voice on the phone, “he’s actu­al­ly just in anoth­er office!”

But then, nobody ever accused Kubrick of pos­sess­ing con­ven­tion­al habits, per­son­al or pro­fes­sion­al. Not that a con­ven­tion­al mind could ever have direct­ed the film that 2001: A Space Odyssey turned out to be, one that, in Chi­as­son’s words, “took for grant­ed a broad cul­tur­al tol­er­ance, if not an appetite, for enig­ma, as well as the time and incli­na­tion for pars­ing inter­pre­tive mys­ter­ies.” Kubrick might have com­plet­ed the film with his own ideas about the mean­ing of every­thing in it, but he sure­ly knew, and respect­ed, that every­one who saw it would also come out of the the­ater with their own.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1966 Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

Watch the Open­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Orig­i­nal, Unused Score

What’s the Dif­fer­ence Between Stan­ley Kubrick’s & Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son)

In 1968, Stan­ley Kubrick Makes Pre­dic­tions for 2001: Human­i­ty Will Con­quer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn Ger­man in 20 Min­utes

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

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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Teaching Tolerance to Activists: A Free Course Syllabus & Anthology

in Current Affairs, Education, Life, Politics | July 9th, 2018

The waters of acad­e­mia have grown chop­py of late, and many vet­er­an sailors have found them­selves ill-equipped to nav­i­gate the brave new world stu­dent activists are forg­ing at a break­neck pace.

Trig­ger warn­ings. Safe spaces. Cur­ric­u­la restruc­tured with an eye toward iden­ti­ty. Swift judg­ments for those who fail to com­ply.

Admis­sions brochures and cam­pus tours make fre­quent men­tion of their institution’s com­mit­ment to social jus­tice. They have to—many high school­ers share the under­grads’ beliefs.

Those of us whose col­lege years are but a dis­tant mem­o­ry should­n’t depend on our school’s alum­ni mag to paint an accu­rate pic­ture of the bat­tles that may be rag­ing with­in. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, pre­ferred pro­nouns, and inclu­sive bath­room facil­i­ties may get a men­tion, but the offi­cial organ’s unlike­ly to peek into the abyss where tol­er­ance goes to die.

Cul­tur­al schol­ar Frances Lee, a queer trans per­son of col­or recov­er­ing from a forced con­ver­sion to evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty, took a hard look at the prob­lem of intol­er­ance with­in activist cir­cles as a sec­ond year Mas­ters stu­dent in Cul­tur­al Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton.

Pub­lished exact­ly one year ago, their essay, Kin Aes­thet­ics: Excom­mu­ni­cate Me from the Church of Social Jus­tice, was plain­spo­ken about the neg­a­tive side effects of social progress in activist cir­cles, and by exten­sion, on cam­pus:

Telling peo­ple what to do and how to live out their lives is endem­ic to reli­gious and to dog­mat­ic activism. It’s not that my com­rades are the boss­es of me, but that dog­mat­ic activism cre­ates an envi­ron­ment that encour­ages peo­ple to tell oth­er peo­ple what to do. This is espe­cial­ly promi­nent on Face­book. Scrolling through my news feed some­times feels Iike slid­ing into a pew to be blast­ed by a frag­ment­ed, fren­zied ser­mon. I know that much of the media post­ed there means to dis­ci­pline me to be a bet­ter activist and com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber. But when dic­tates aren’t fol­lowed, a com­mon pro­ce­dure of pun­ish­ment ensues. Pun­ish­ments for saying/doing/believing the wrong thing include sham­ing, scold­ing, call­ing out, iso­lat­ing, or evis­cer­at­ing someone’s social stand­ing. Dis­ci­pline and pun­ish­ment have been used for all of his­to­ry to con­trol and destroy peo­ple. Why is it being used in move­ments meant to lib­er­ate all of us? We all have made seri­ous mis­takes and hurt oth­er peo­ple, inten­tion­al­ly or not. We get a chance to learn from them when those around us respond with kind­ness and patience. Where is our humil­i­ty when exam­in­ing the mis­takes of oth­ers? Why do we posi­tion our­selves as moral­ly supe­ri­or to the low­ly un-woke?

The essay’s viral suc­cess gives extra oomph to “Wok­er Than Thou: Left­ist Activist Iden­ti­ty For­ma­tions,” a com­mu­ni­ty course Lee designed and taught ear­li­er this year.

Intend­ed for com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers, polit­i­cal activists, and orga­niz­ers, Lee wel­comed any­one with any inter­est in the sub­ject, pro­vid­ed they were will­ing “to stay open to dis­sent­ing or unpop­u­lar ideas for the sake of dis­cus­sion, instead of fore­clos­ing cer­tain top­ics or ideas by judg­ing them as not wor­thy of atten­tion.”

The 10-week syl­labus delved into such rel­e­vant top­ics as Call-out Cul­ture, the False Promis­es of Empa­thy, and of course “wok­e­ness,” a term Lee takes care to attribute to Black cul­ture.

While not all of the required read­ings can be found online, Lee pro­vides a wealth of links to those that can.

Titles include Uni­ver­si­ty of San Fran­cis­co Pro­fes­sor Rhon­da Magee’s “Address­ing Social Injus­tice with Com­pas­sion,” author Andrea Smith’s “The Prob­lem with Priv­i­lege,” Trau­ma Stew­ard­ship Insti­tute founder Lau­ra van Der­noot Lipsky’s TEDx Talk on sys­tem­at­ic oppres­sion and lib­er­a­tion the­o­ry.

There’s even a Suf­jan Stevens song that evolved from cheap shots at skater Tonya Harding’s expense to some­thing that con­sid­ered the “whole­ness of the per­son… with dig­ni­ty and grace.”

Fol­low­ing Lee’s course mate­ri­als seems a much more ratio­nal way to con­front the cur­rent social cli­mate than bing­ing on con­fes­sion­al essays by lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors who feel ham­strung by not-unfound­ed fears that their stu­dents could cost them their jobs … and the good rep­u­ta­tion required to secure anoth­er.

For fur­ther read­ing, Lee offers free down­loads of Toward An Ethics of Activism: A Com­mu­ni­ty Inves­ti­ga­tion of Humil­i­ty, Grace and Com­pas­sion in Move­ments for Jus­tice, an anthol­o­gy that “seeks to dis­rupt dog­mat­ic, exclu­sion­ary activist cul­ture with kind­ness and con­nec­tion.”

Find Frances Lee’s “Wok­er Than Thou” syl­labus here.

Down­load a PDF of the anthol­o­gy Toward An Ethics of Activism here. (A screen read­er acces­si­ble ver­sion is also avail­able.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Calls Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness a Form of “Mod­ern Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Dr. Jane Goodall Is Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Con­ser­va­tion, Ani­mal Intel­li­gence & Activism

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Behold the Art-o-Mat: Vintage Cigarette Vending Machines Get Repurposed & Dispense Works of Art

in Art, Creativity, Design, Technology | July 6th, 2018

It’s a well known fact that any­one who’s quit­ting smok­ing will need to find some­thing to occu­py their hands.

Many experts sug­gest hold­ing a pen­cil or anoth­er vague­ly-cig­a­rette-shaped object.

Oth­ers pre­scribe busy work—cracking nuts and peel­ing oranges.

Hard­core cas­es are advised to keep those paws busy with a hob­by such as paint­ing or wood­work­ing.

But from where we sit, the most spir­i­tu­al­ly reward­ing, sym­bol­ic activ­i­ty for some­one in this ten­der sit­u­a­tion would be cre­at­ing a tiny art­work pro­to­type to sell in an Art-o-Mat®, one of over 100 vin­tage cig­a­rette vend­ing machines specif­i­cal­ly repur­posed to dis­pense art.

Locat­ed pri­mar­i­ly in the US, the machines are the brain­child of artist Clark Whit­ting­ton, who loaded the first one with black & white, block-mount­ed pho­tos for a 1997 solo show in a Win­ston-Salem cafe.

These days, there are a hun­dred or so Art-o-Mats, stocked with the work of artists both pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur, who have suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ed the sub­mis­sion process.

A vari­ety of medi­ums is represented—painting, sculp­ture, fine art prints, jew­el­ry, assem­blages, cut paper, and tiny bound books.

Wor­thing­ton encour­ages would-be par­tic­i­pants to avoid the ease of mass pro­duc­tion in favor of unique items that bear evi­dence of the human hand:

The vend­ing process is only the begin­ning of your Art-o-Mat® art. Once pur­chased and two steps away from the machine, your work is sole­ly a reflec­tion of you and your art. Many pieces have been car­ried around the globe. So, think of approach­es that do not con­vey “a Sun­day after­noon at the copy shop” and con­sid­er ways that your art will be appre­ci­at­ed for years to come.

The guide­lines are under­stand­ably strict with regard to dimen­sions. Wouldn’t want to kill the blind box thrill by jam­ming a vin­tage vend­ing machine’s inner work­ings.

Edi­bles, mag­nets, bal­loons, glit­ter, con­fet­ti, and any­thing processed along­side peanuts are ver­boten mate­ri­als.

A cer­tain pop­u­lar decoupage medi­um is anoth­er no-no, as it adheres to the man­dat­ed pro­tec­tive wrap.

And just as cig­a­rettes car­ry stern­ly word­ed warn­ings from the Sur­geon Gen­er­al, artists are advised to include a label if their sub­mis­sion could be con­sid­ered unsuit­able for under­age col­lec­tors.

If you need a hand to walk you through the process, have a look at crafter Shan­non Greene’s video, above.

Greene became enthralled with the Art-o-Mat expe­ri­ence on a heav­i­ly doc­u­ment­ed trip to Las Vegas, when she put $5 in the Cos­mopoli­tan Hotel’s machine, and received a box of string and paint­ed can­vas scrap book­marks cre­at­ed by Kelsey Huck­a­by.

(Wit­ness artist Huck­a­by treat­ing her­self to one of her own cre­ations from an Austin, Texas Art-o-Mat on her birth­day, below, to see a machine in action. Par­tic­u­lar­ly rec­om­mend­ed for those who came of age after these once-stan­dard fix­tures were banned from the lob­bies of bars and din­ers.)

Oth­er repur­posed machines in the Art-o-Mat sta­ble include the zip­py red num­ber in Ocala, Florida’s Apple­ton Muse­um of Art, a cool blue cus­tomer resid­ing in Stan­ford University’s Lan­tana House, and a 6‑knob mod­el that peri­od­i­cal­ly pops up in var­i­ous arts-friend­ly New York City venues.

As the jol­ly and self-dep­re­cat­ing crafter Greene observes, at $5 a “yank,” no one is get­ting rich off this project, though the artists get 50% of the pro­ceeds.

It’s also worth not­ing that these orig­i­nal art­works cost less than a pack of cig­a­rettes in all but six states.

We agree with Greene that the expe­ri­ence more than jus­ti­fies the price. What­ev­er art one winds up with is but added val­ue.

Greene does not regret the con­sid­er­able labor that went into the 100 tiny jour­nals cov­ered in retired bill­board vinyl she was required to crank out after her pro­to­types were green­lit.

To deter­mine whether or not you’re pre­pared to do the time, have a peek at Katharine Miele’s labor-inten­sive process, below. Even though the artist’s con­tact infor­ma­tion is includ­ed along with every Art-o-Mat sur­prise, there’s no guar­an­tee that she’ll hear back from any­one who wound up with one of the geo­met­ric chair linocuts she spent a week mak­ing.

Oth­er Art-o-Mat artists, like Susan Rossiter, have fig­ured out how to play by the rules while also real­iz­ing a bit of return beyond the Pip­pi Long­stock­ing-like sat­is­fac­tion of cre­at­ing a nifty expe­ri­ence for ran­dom strangers. The machines are stocked with orig­i­nals of her tiny mul­ti-media chick­en por­traits, and she sells prints on her web­site.

Or per­haps, you, like monony­mous physi­cist Colleen, find a med­i­ta­tive plea­sure in the act of cre­ation. To date, she’s paint­ed 1150 cig­a­rette-pack-sized blocks for inclu­sion in the machines.

Still game? Get start­ed with an Art-o-Mat pro­to­type kit for $19.99 here.

(As Greene joy­ful­ly points out, it comes with such good­ies as a lit­tle jour­nal, a pen­cil, and an offi­cial Art-o-Mat eras­er.)

Take inspi­ra­tion — or dream about what $5 might get you — in the collector’s show and tell, above.

Feel­ing flush and far from the near­est Art-o-Mat loca­tion?  Sup­port the project by drop­ping a Ben­jamin on an Art-o-Car­ton con­tain­ing 10 tiny art­works, cus­tom select­ed in response to a short, per­son­al­i­ty-based ques­tion­naire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Vend­ing Machine Now Dis­trib­utes Free Short Sto­ries at Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Café Zoetrope

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Nov­els Sold in Pol­ish Vend­ing Machines

Sup­port “Green Reads,” a Pro­gram That Finances Libraries by Dis­trib­ut­ing Used Books in Eco-Friend­ly Vend­ing Machines

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Nick Offerman Explains the Psychological Benefits of Woodworking–and How It Can Help You Achieve Zen in Other Parts of Your Life

in Art, Comedy | July 6th, 2018

The world may know him as an actor and come­di­an, but Nick Offer­man also loves wood­work­ing. And he does­n’t just love it in the evenings-and-week­ends, some­thing-to-do-with-my-hands-while-I-lis­ten-to-pod­casts way: he’s actu­al­ly devot­ed a seri­ous chunk of his life, per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al, to mak­ing things out of trees. As neat­ly as it may dove­tail with the musky, tra­di­tion­al­ly (and some­times buf­foon­ish­ly) mas­cu­line char­ac­ters he plays, the wood­work­ing aspect of Offer­man’s life exists inde­pen­dent­ly of his oth­er craft — not to say, of course, that you’ll find the web site of the Offer­man Wood­shop com­plete­ly devoid of humor.

Though pride in phys­i­cal work well done is its own reward, Offer­man believes that his wood­work­ing also made it pos­si­ble for him to suc­ceed as an enter­tain­er. “Peo­ple often ask me, how can I get my kid involved in show busi­ness?” he says in the Big Think clip above. “And I always say, I would advise that you take up wood­work­ing, because it’s addic­tive,” a “craft that is so sat­is­fy­ing, that doesn’t require the input of any cor­po­rate enti­ties.” This in con­trast to the Hol­ly­wood audi­tions where he always found him­self per­form­ing for “a room full of bankers” and leav­ing bewil­dered, think­ing, “ ‘I have no idea how I did,’ which gives you a lot of stress and a lot of agi­ta.”

This stress and agi­ta sent him straight to his wood­shop, where he would “just start sand­ing a wal­nut table.” Before long, “I would see the tan­gi­ble result of this work that I had done. The thing is, there’s no way to describe the sen­sa­tion. There’s mag­ic in it, whether you’re work­ing with glass or met­als or food or knit­ting or wood.” He cred­its that pow­er­ful and empow­er­ing sen­sa­tion, which he describes, in a per­haps unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly Cal­i­forn­ian man­ner, as hav­ing “an incred­i­ble med­i­ta­tive or Zen qual­i­ty,” with giv­ing him “a mel­low demeanor to the point that I no longer cared as much about the TV shows.” And by car­ing less, he found that he could han­dle all of the per­for­mances show busi­ness demand­ed of him that much bet­ter.

You can get a tour of Offer­man’s Los Ange­les wood­shop in the sec­ond video from the top, a clip from This Old House. Begin­ning with his impres­sive wood stock, it con­tin­ues on to his even more for­mi­da­ble set of inde­struc­tible-look­ing vin­tage tools. “The less elec­tric­i­ty you can use,” he tells the host, “the more plea­sur­able your wood­work­ing will be.” He shares more wood­work­ing advice in the video just above, answer­ing ques­tions from the would-be wood­work­ers of Twit­ter: Is an apron real­ly nec­es­sary? Yes. Does oak require a pre-stain con­di­tion­er? Don’t stain oak at all. When one fel­low request­ing help iden­ti­fy­ing a joint type address­es Offer­man as “Mas­ter Crafter Wood,” Offer­man cor­rects him: “I’m a stu­dent of the form, but I appre­ci­ate your opti­mism.” That sums up what wood­work­ing offers: a con­di­tion of eter­nal stu­dent­hood, and if not opti­mism then at least a help­ful equa­nim­i­ty. “Zen” may be the right word after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Watch the Mak­ing of a Hand-Craft­ed Vio­lin, from Start to Fin­ish, in a Beau­ti­ful­ly-Shot Doc­u­men­tary

Watch “The Woodswim­mer,” a Stop Motion Film Made Entire­ly with Wood, and “Bru­tal­ly Tedious” Tech­niques

Just 45 Straight Min­utes of Nick Offer­man Qui­et­ly Drink­ing Sin­gle Malt Scotch by the Fire

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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How Warner Brothers Resisted a Hollywood Ban on Anti-Nazi Films in the 1930s and Warned Americans of the Dangers of Fascism

in Film, History | July 6th, 2018

“In the cen­tu­ry span­ning the years 1820 to 1924,” writes the Library of Con­gress, “an increas­ing­ly steady flow of Jews made their way to Amer­i­ca, cul­mi­nat­ing in a mas­sive surge of immi­grants towards the begin­nings of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.” Impelled by eco­nom­ic hard­ship and bru­tal per­se­cu­tion, the migrants came from Rus­sia and East­ern Europe and set­tled all over the coun­try. One fam­i­ly, orig­i­nal­ly named Won­sal, or Won­sko­laser, came from the vil­lage of Kras­nosielc in Poland, first set­tling in Bal­ti­more, then, after two years  in Cana­da, in Youngstown, Ohio. It was there that four broth­ers Har­ry, Abe, Sam, and Jack began exhibit­ing films, in small min­ing towns in Ohio and Penn­syl­va­nia. Soon, they began pro­duc­ing their own movies. The enter­prise would become an empire when Warn­er Broth­ers Stu­dio opened in 1918 in Hol­ly­wood.

The his­to­ry of Warn­er Broth­ers Pic­tures sounds like a glit­tery immi­grant suc­cess sto­ry, but it also includes a sig­nif­i­cant episode of resis­tance to the same kind of per­se­cu­tion that the fam­i­ly had once fled, as the anti-Semi­tism of fas­cist Europe estab­lished a foothold in the U.S. and Hol­ly­wood cen­sors start­ed to answer to Joseph Goebbels. “Dri­ven by a per­son­al knowl­edge of anti-Semi­tism,” Jack and Har­ry Warn­er became “deeply con­cerned about the rise of Nazism” in the 1930s, as PBS’s His­to­ry Detec­tives notes, “and they used their stu­dio to speak out against fas­cism.” Theirs was not a pop­u­lar posi­tion. Anti-Jew­ish, pro-fas­cist sen­ti­ments were com­mon in the U.S., stoked by famous fig­ures like Charles Lind­bergh, Father Cough­lin, and Hen­ry Ford.

“The influ­ence of Nazism was felt across the U.S.,” writes Peter Mon­aghan at Mov­ing Image Archive News. “The infat­u­a­tion was suf­fi­cient that, for exam­ple, swastikas could unabashed­ly be dis­played on the streets of Los Ange­les.” An over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans opposed the reset­tling of Jew­ish refugees; hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple were turned away in the 1930s. In 1932, Joseph Breen, soon to become head of the Pro­duc­tion Code Admin­is­tra­tion (PCA), cen­sor­ship arm of the Motion Pic­ture Pro­duc­ers and Dis­trib­u­tors of Amer­i­ca, wrote a let­ter to a Jesuit priest in which he called Jews “the scum of the scum of the earth and “dirty lice.” Breen would soon be charged by his boss Will Hays with enforc­ing a ban on anti-Nazi films in Hol­ly­wood between 1934 and 1941, at the behest of Joseph Goebbels, by way of the Nazi con­sul in Los Ange­les, Georg Gyssling.

“By shap­ing the con­tent of Amer­i­can films,” writes his­to­ri­an Stephen Ross in Hitler in Los Ange­les, “Goebbels hoped to shape the ways in which Amer­i­cans thought about Hitler and his poli­cies.” While most of the stu­dio heads com­plied with the ban, which also strong­ly dis­suad­ed the pro­duc­tion of films about Jew­ish sub­jects or fea­tur­ing Jew­ish actors, the Warn­er broth­ers did their best to fight back. As His­to­ry Detec­tives writes,

The Warn­ers demon­strat­ed their com­mit­ment to fight­ing fas­cism by donat­ing two Spit­fire planes to the British. They also offered the use of the stu­dio to the [US] gov­ern­ment, an offer the gov­ern­ment would­n’t accept until a few years lat­er.

It was Har­ry, the qui­eter, more reli­gious broth­er, who saw the threat Nazism posed ear­ly on. He react­ed by can­cel­ing a pos­si­ble buy of the Ger­man stu­dio, Uni­ver­sum. He also pushed his broth­er Jack to end all rela­tions with Ger­many, which Warn­er Broth­ers did in 1934. They were the first stu­dio to cre­ate anti-Hitler con­tent, as well. In 1933, the ani­mat­ed Bosko’s Pic­ture Show por­trayed Hitler as an incom­pe­tent ruler.

The pre-ban Bosko’s Pic­ture Show incensed the Nazi cen­sors (see an excerpt at the top with Hitler chas­ing come­di­an Jim­my Durante), but the Warn­ers would not be deterred even after the PCA cracked down; they were the only stu­dio heads to sup­port the 1936-cre­at­ed Hol­ly­wood Anti-Nazi-League. “Two fur­ther films, Black Legion and Con­fes­sions of a Nazi Spy” fol­lowed Bosko’s Pic­ture Show, the first a 1937 “doc­u­men­tary style” pro­duc­tion that “shed light on a fas­cist move­ment with­in the U.S.” (see the trail­er fur­ther up). 1939’s Edward G. Robin­son-star­ring Con­fes­sions of a Nazi Spy, whose trail­er you can see below, is wide­ly “con­sid­ered the first film to fea­ture Nazis as the ene­my,” pre­ced­ing oth­er PCA-defi­ant films like Three Stooges’ short You Naz­ty Spy! and Char­lie Chaplin’s The Great Dic­ta­tor, both released in 1940.

“Based on the true sto­ry of a Nazi spy ring in the Unit­ed States,” notes the Nation­al WWII Muse­um, “it was, remark­ably, the first film by a major US stu­dio to direct­ly address the sit­u­a­tion in Ger­many and to emphat­i­cal­ly warn Amer­i­cans against a stark iso­la­tion­ist posi­tion.” The film open­ly chal­lenged Nazism in the U.S., por­tray­ing “the Ger­man Amer­i­can Bund and its leader, an Amer­i­can Hitler played by Paul Lukas, as an arm of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment.” In the year of the film’s release, 20,000 Amer­i­can Nazis held a ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den. Mix­ing “seg­ments of news and scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Tri­umph of the Will” with fic­tion­al­ized accounts of true events, the film pulled no punch­es in char­ac­ter­iz­ing Nazi sym­pa­thies as a direct threat to nation­al secu­ri­ty, despite claims by iso­la­tion­ists like Sen­a­tor Ger­ald Nye that “Hol­ly­wood Jews [were] more of a prob­lem than Hitler,” as PBS puts it.

The stric­tures against anti-Nazi films weak­ened after Con­fes­sions of a Nazi Spy and the events it depict­ed suf­fi­cient­ly alarmed view­ers. The ban offi­cial­ly end­ed in 1941 when the U.S. entered the war. There­after, “the pres­i­dent was quick to state the impor­tance of the film indus­try to America’s suc­cess in the war,” and Warn­er Broth­ers pro­duced patri­ot­ic pro­pa­gan­da films for the dura­tion of World War II.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20,000 Amer­i­cans Hold a Pro-Nazi Ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1939: Chill­ing Video Re-Cap­tures a Lost Chap­ter in US His­to­ry

Fritz Lang Tells the Riv­et­ing Sto­ry of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Ger­many

The 16,000 Art­works the Nazis Cen­sored and Labeled “Degen­er­ate Art”: The Com­plete His­toric Inven­to­ry Is Now Online

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

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The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, “Fountain,” Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

in Art, Gender, History | July 5th, 2018

In the intro­duc­tion to her book Broad Strokes, writer and art his­to­ry schol­ar Brid­get Quinn describes her dis­cov­ery of Lee Kras­ner, accom­plished abstract expres­sion­ist painter who just hap­pened to have been mar­ried to Jack­son Pol­lock. That bio­graph­i­cal detail war­rant­ed Kras­ner a foot­note, but lit­tle more, in the art books Quinn stud­ied in col­lege. Learn­ing of Kras­ner sent Quinn on a quest to find oth­er women left behind by art his­to­ry. “My fix­a­tion with these artists went beyond fem­i­nism,” she writes, “if it had any­thing to do with it at all. I iden­ti­fied with these painters and sculp­tors the way my friends iden­ti­fied with Joy Divi­sion or The Clash or Hüsker Dü.”

Much has changed since 1987, when Quinn’s fan­dom began, but Kras­ner is still one of the few female artists to have ever had a ret­ro­spec­tive show at New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. And one artist every stu­dent of art his­to­ry should know, Baroness Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven, remains almost com­plete­ly obscure. What’s so impor­tant about von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven? She was a pio­neer­ing Dada artist and poet—well-known in the 1910s and 20s. “Her work was cham­pi­oned by Ernest Hem­ing­way and Ezra Pound,” writes John Hig­gs at the Inde­pen­dent (she appears in Pound’s Can­to XCV). She “is now rec­og­nized as the first Amer­i­can Dada artist, but it might be equal­ly true to say she was the first New York punk, 60 years too ear­ly.”

Von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven also deserves the cred­it, it seems, for one of the most ground­break­ing art objects to ever appear in a gallery: Foun­tain, the uri­nal signed “R. Mutt” that Mar­cel Duchamp claimed as his own and which has made him a leg­end in the his­to­ry of art. The sto­ry, I imag­ine, might seem depress­ing­ly famil­iar to every woman who has ever had a male boss pub­lish her work with his name on it. Even more frus­trat­ing­ly, the “glar­ing truth has been known for some time in the art world,” accord­ing to the blog of art mag­a­zine See All This. Yet, “each time it has to be acknowl­edged, it is met with indif­fer­ence and silence.”

The truth first emerged in a let­ter from Duchamp to his sister—discovered in 1982 and dat­ed April 11th, 1917, a few days before the exhib­it in which Foun­tain first appeared—in which he “wrote that a female friend using a male alias had sent it in for the New York exhi­bi­tion.” The name, “Richard Mutt,” was a pseu­do­nym cho­sen by Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven, who was liv­ing in Philadel­phia at the time and whom Duchamp knew well, once pro­nounc­ing that “she is not a Futur­ist. She is the future.” (See her Por­trait of Mar­cel Duchamp, above, in a 1920 pho­to­graph by Charles Sheel­er.)

Why did she nev­er claim Foun­tain as her own? “She nev­er had the chance,” notes See All This. The uri­nal was reject­ed by the exhi­bi­tion orga­niz­ers (Duchamp resigned from their board in protest), and it was prob­a­bly, sub­se­quent­ly thrown away; noth­ing remained but a pho­to­graph by Alfred Stieglitz. Von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven died ten years lat­er in 1927.

It was only in 1935 that sur­re­al­ist André Bre­ton brought atten­tion back to Foun­tain, attribut­ing it to Duchamp, who accept­ed author­ship and began to com­mis­sion repli­cas. The 1917 piece “was des­tined to become one of the most icon­ic works of mod­ern art. In 2004, some five hun­dred artists and art experts her­ald­ed Foun­tain as the most influ­en­tial piece of mod­ern art, even leav­ing Picasso’s Les Demoi­selles d’Avignon behind.”

Duchamp’s let­ter is not the only rea­son his­to­ri­ans have for think­ing of Foun­tain as von Freytag-Loringhoven’s work. “Baroness Elsa had been find­ing objects in the street and declar­ing them to be works of art since before Duchamp hit upon the idea of ‘ready­mades,’” writes Hig­gs. One such work, a “cast-iron plumber’s trap attached to a wood­en box, which she called God” (above), was also mis­at­trib­uted, “assumed to be the work of an artist called Mor­ton Liv­ingston Schaum­berg, although it is now accept­ed that his role in the sculp­ture was lim­it­ed to fix­ing the plumber’s trap to its wood­en base.”

“Foun­tain is base, crude, con­fronta­tion­al and fun­ny,” writes Hig­gs, “Those are not typ­i­cal aspects of Duchamp’s work, but they sum­ma­rize the Baroness and her art per­fect­ly.” Duchamp lat­er claimed to have bought the uri­nal him­self, but lat­er research has shown this to be unlike­ly. Hig­gs’ book Stranger Than We Can Imag­ine explores the issues in more depth, as does an arti­cle in Dutch pub­lished in the See All This sum­mer issue. What would it mean for the art estab­lish­ment to acknowl­edge von Freytag-Loringhoven’s author­ship? “To attribute Foun­tain to a woman and not a man,” the mag­a­zine writes, “has obvi­ous, far-reach­ing con­se­quences: the his­to­ry of mod­ern art has to be rewrit­ten. Mod­ern art did not start with a patri­arch, but with a matri­arch.”

Learn more about Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven at The Art Sto­ry.

via See All This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

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

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All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visualized as a Modern Subway Map

in History, Maps | July 5th, 2018

At its peak around the year 117 AD, the mighty Roman Empire owned five mil­lion square kilo­me­ters of land. It ruled more than 55 mil­lion peo­ple, between a sixth and a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion of the entire world. The empire, as clas­si­cist and his­to­ri­an Christo­pher Kel­ly describes it, “stretched from Hadri­an’s Wall in driz­zle-soaked north­ern Eng­land to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syr­ia; from the great Rhine-Danube riv­er sys­tem, which snaked across the fer­tile, flat lands of Europe from the Low Coun­tries to the Black Sea, to the rich plains of the North African coast and the lux­u­ri­ant gash of the Nile Val­ley in Egypt.” All that pow­er, of course, orig­i­nal­ly emanat­ed from Italy.

The builders of the Roman Empire could­n’t have pulled it off with­out seri­ous infra­struc­tur­al acu­men, includ­ing the skill to make con­crete that lasts longer than even the mod­ern vari­ety as well as the force­ful­ness and sheer man­pow­er to lay more than 400,000 kilo­me­ters of road.

Not long ago, map­mak­er Sasha Tru­bet­skoy took it upon him­self to ren­der Rome’s impe­r­i­al road sys­tem in the style of a mod­ern sub­way map; pop­u­lar demand put him to work on an aes­thet­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar map of Britain’s Roman roads not long after. Now he has turned his skills back toward the land where the Roman Empire all start­ed: above, you can see his “sub­way map” of the Roman roads of Italy.

“It was for­tu­nate enough that Italy’s Roman roads are quite well-stud­ied and doc­u­ment­ed, espe­cial­ly when it comes to their actu­al ancient names,” Tru­bet­skoy writes of this lat­est project. “This meant that I had to do less artis­tic inter­pre­ta­tion in order to make this look like a sen­si­ble, mod­ern chart. That said, there are still some cas­es where I had to cre­ative­ly recon­struct cer­tain roads, and I make it clear in the leg­end which roads those were.” As for the col­or-cod­ed sidelin­ing of Sici­ly and Sar­dinia, “this is a map of Italia (Italy) as the Romans saw it, which did not include those islands. On the oth­er hand, it did include parts of what are today Slove­nia and Croa­t­ia.”

You can buy a high-res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of Tru­bet­skoy’s Viae Ital­i­ae et Suae Vicini­tatis, or Roman Roads of Italy and Its Sur­round­ings, for $9.00 USD at his site. Print­ed at poster qual­i­ty, it could make a suit­able gift indeed for any of the car­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, his­tor­i­cal­ly mind­ed tran­sit fans, Roman Empire his­to­ry buffs, or Ital­ian patri­ots in your life. And in a way, it shows his­to­ry com­ing full cir­cle, since much of our sense of how sub­way maps should look comes from a rev­o­lu­tion­ary 1972 map of the New York sub­way sys­tem. We’ve fea­tured it before here on Open Cul­ture, along­side an inter­view with its design­er, a cer­tain Mas­si­mo Vignel­li. And where do you sup­pose he hailed from?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

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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The Thin White Duke: A Close Study of David Bowie’s Darkest Character

in Music | July 5th, 2018

Good thing social media wasn’t around in 1976 when David Bowie went through one of his dark­est transformations–his career might not have sur­vived it. A few months ago Kanye West start­ed palling around with Trump­ism, MAGA hats, and folks like Can­dace Owens, and Twit­ter went bal­lis­tic and West kind of retreat­ed. But for a moment in 1976, as Polyphonic’s video essay reminds us, David Bowie toyed with actu­al fas­cism, say­ing in one inter­view:

“You’ve got to have an extreme right-wing front come up and sweep every­thing off its feet and tidy every­thing up,” he said in a con­tentious, weird, and most-prob­a­bly coke-addled inter­view in the NME. (You can read the full inter­view here at The Qui­etus, which will pro­vide some need­ed con­text.)

The inter­view came on the heels of Young Amer­i­cans, both his trib­ute to the Philly soul sound and a cri­tique of the “relent­less plas­tic soul” of Amer­i­can cul­ture. At the same time, Bowie was indulging in his inter­est in the occult and the teach­ings of Aleis­ter Crow­ley, a thread that winds its way through many of his songs, from the Space Odd­i­ty album onward. In a Play­boy inter­view he com­pared Hitler to rock stars long before side four of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And in one ill advised moment, he seemed to be giv­ing the Nazi salute when he arrived at London’s Vic­to­ria Sta­tion. (Though Bowie lat­er called this peri­od of his life “ghast­ly,” he always insist­ed it was just the cam­era catch­ing him mid-wave.)

(For an in depth look at Bowie’s fas­cist fascination–with a side look at Eric Clapton’s much worse Enoch Pow­ell-sup­port­ing speech–check out this arti­cle.)

But for the chameleon rock star who seemed con­vinced rock music at the time was mori­bund, this might have all been at the ser­vice of a new Bowie char­ac­ter, the Thin White Duke, the man who dressed in black and white and struck a gaunt fig­ure. The man who once sung about “rock and roll sui­cide” and who broke up the band at the height of their fame, was now div­ing into him­self, run­ning for the shad­ows, as he exist­ed on a diet of milk, pep­pers, and cocaine. This could have been what Jung called the “shad­ow self.”

The whole peri­od would have been sad and pathet­ic if Bowie had deliv­ered up a crap album. But he didn’t. Sta­tion to Sta­tion–an allu­sion to the Kab­bal­ah Tree of Life–is a stone cold clas­sic, and is the pre­am­ble to the Berlin tril­o­gy. Polyphonic’s video essay spends most of its time dis­sect­ing the lyrics to the epic open­ing track, teas­ing out its occult ref­er­ences along with a psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait of Bowie’s mind at the time.

“Sta­tion to Sta­tion” had no equal in Bowie’s cat­a­log for its breadth and obscurity…that is until Black­star, the sim­i­lar­ly long, mul­ti-part open­ing track to Bowie’s final album. He even wears the same blue and sil­ver striped leo­tard in the video for “Lazarus” that he wore in 1976; Bowie had returned to what Sta­tion to Sta­tion start­ed, before depart­ing for des­ti­na­tions beyond.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

How David Bowie Turned His “Ade­quate” Voice into a Pow­er­ful Instru­ment: Hear Iso­lat­ed Vocal Tracks from “Life on Mars,” “Star­man,” “Mod­ern Love” “Under Pres­sure” & More

When David Bowie Became Niko­la Tes­la: Watch His Elec­tric Per­for­mance in The Pres­tige (2006)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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