Filmmaker Wim Wenders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Photography

in Film, Photography, Technology | August 7th, 2018

Smart­phones have made us all pho­tog­ra­phers — or maybe they’ve made it so that none of us is a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. A cen­tu­ry ago, mere­ly pos­sess­ing and know­ing how to use a cam­era count­ed as a fair­ly notable accom­plish­ment; today, near­ly all of us car­ry one at all times whether we want to or not, and its oper­a­tion demands no skill what­so­ev­er. “I do believe that every­body’s a pho­tog­ra­ph­er,” says cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders, direc­tor of movies like The Amer­i­can Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, in the BBC clip above. “We’re all tak­ing bil­lions of pic­tures, so pho­tog­ra­phy is more alive than ever, and at the same time, it’s more dead than ever.”

Wen­ders made this claim at an exhi­bi­tion of his Polaroid pho­tographs, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. In a sense, the Polaroid cam­era — easy to use, near-instant results, and high­ly portable by the stan­dards of its era — was the smart­phone cam­era of the 20th cen­tu­ry, but Wen­ders does­n’t draw the same kind of inspi­ra­tion from phone shots as he did from Polaroids. “The trou­ble with iPhone pic­tures is that nobody sees them,” he says, and one glance at the speed with which Insta­gram users scroll will con­firm it. “Even the peo­ple who take them don’t look at them any­more, and they cer­tain­ly don’t make prints.”

Hav­ing worked in cin­e­ma for around half a cen­tu­ry now (and for a time with the late cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Rob­by Müller, one of the most respect­ed and idio­syn­crat­ic in the indus­try), Wen­ders has seen first­hand how our rela­tion­ship to the image has changed in that time. “I know from expe­ri­ence that the less you have, the more cre­ative you have to become,” he says, asked about the pre­pon­der­ance of pho­to­graph­ic fil­ters and apps. “Maybe it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a sign of cre­ativ­i­ty that you can turn every pic­ture into its oppo­site.” Still, he has no objec­tion to cam­era-phone cul­ture itself, and even admits to tak­ing self­ies him­self — with the caveat that “look­ing into the mir­ror is not an act of pho­tog­ra­phy.”

If self­ie-tak­ing and every­thing else we do with the cam­eras in our smart­phones (to say noth­ing of the image manip­u­la­tions we per­form) isn’t pho­tog­ra­phy, what is it? “I’m in search of a new word for this new activ­i­ty that looks so much like pho­tog­ra­phy, but isn’t pho­tog­ra­phy any­more,” Wen­ders says. “Please, let me know if you have a word for it.” Some com­menters have put forth “faux­tog­ra­phy,” an amus­ing enough sug­ges­tion but not one like­ly to sat­is­fy a cre­ator like Wen­ders who, in work as in life, sel­dom makes the obvi­ous choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wim Wen­ders Explains How Polaroid Pho­tos Ignite His Cre­ative Process and Help Him Cap­ture a Deep­er Kind of Truth

Wim Wen­ders Reveals His Rules of Cin­e­ma Per­fec­tion

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

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 Surprising Pattern Behind the Names of Colors Around the World

in Psychology | August 6th, 2018

Peo­ple in South Korea, where I live, often ask if I don’t find the Kore­an lan­guage awful­ly hard. I reply by ask­ing them what they imag­ine the most dif­fi­cult part might be. Almost every­one has the same answer: “There are so many words for col­ors.” (Many add, with a strange­ly con­sis­tent speci­fici­ty, that there are so many words for yel­low.) Though each new lan­guage one learns presents a unique set of chal­lenges, that set does invari­ably include mem­o­riz­ing the names of the col­ors all over again. And as with any ele­ment of gram­mar or vocab­u­lary, some lan­guages do make this more dif­fi­cult than oth­ers, divid­ing the vis­i­ble spec­trum up with a set of more numer­ous, sub­tler dis­tinc­tions than those made by one’s native tongue.

But then any lan­guage, no mat­ter where it orig­i­nat­ed, ulti­mate­ly has to describe the very same col­ors present in the phys­i­cal world. The Vox video above shows what the ways in which they vary in so doing, and more so the ways in which they don’t, reveal about lan­guage itself. Eng­lish has eleven “basic col­or cat­e­gories,” the video’s nar­ra­tor says, while Russ­ian, for exam­ple, has twelve. But some lan­guages, like Wobé of Côte d’Ivoire, have as few as three.

In those cas­es, lan­guage researchers have found that they can pre­dict what those few col­or cat­e­gories will be. In the late 1960s, UC Berke­ley’s Paul Kay and Brent Berlin found that “if a lan­guage had six basic col­or words, they were always for black or dark, white or light, red, green, yel­low, and blue. If it had four terms, they were for black, white, red, and then either green or yel­low. If it had only three, they were always for black, white, and red.” See their book, Basic Col­or Terms: Their Uni­ver­sal­i­ty and Evo­lu­tion.

So it appears that, though specifics var­ied, lan­guages tend­ed to come up with their col­or terms in the same basic order. But “why would a word for red come before a word for blue? Some have spec­u­lat­ed that the stages cor­re­spond to the salience of the col­or in the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment. Red is in blood and in dirt. Blue, on the oth­er hand, was fair­ly scarce before man­u­fac­tur­ing.” Cog­ni­tive sci­ence and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence research fur­ther sup­port this hier­ar­chy with red at the top, green and yel­low low­er down, and blue low­er still. This tells us that “despite our many dif­fer­ences across cul­tures and soci­eties, there is some­thing uni­ver­sal about how humans try to make sense of the world.” Some­thing uni­ver­sal, cer­tain­ly, but an infini­tude of small dif­fer­ences as well: there­in lies both the chal­lenge and the fas­ci­na­tion of not just lan­guage but human inter­ac­tion itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors: The 1810 Trea­tise That Inspired Kandin­sky & Ear­ly Abstract Paint­ing

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

What It’s Like to Be Col­or Blind and See Art in Col­or for the First Time

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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Hear Freddie Mercury & Queen’s Isolated Vocals on Their Enduring Classic Song, “We Are The Champions”

in Music, Psychology, Technology | August 6th, 2018

In the age of Auto-Tune, it’s a plea­sure to have proof that cer­tain greats had no need of pitch cor­rec­tion.

Queen front man Fred­die Mer­cury’s leg­en­dar­i­ly angel­ic, five octave-range pipes deliv­er extra chills on the iso­lat­ed vocal track for “We Are the Cham­pi­ons.”

Playback.fm, a free online radio app, stripped the beloved Queen hit of every­thing but the vocal wave form, then synched it to footage from four con­cert films and a rare record­ing ses­sion, above.

You’ll also hear back­ing vocals cour­tesy of gui­tarist Bri­an May, drum­mer Roger Tay­lor, and Mer­cury him­self.

Their prac­tice was to record two takes of each back­ground part—high, medi­um and low—in uni­son, yield­ing an eigh­teen voice back­ing choir. Bassist John Dea­con, inven­tor of the Dea­cy amp, left the singing to his band­mates, though he did com­pose sev­er­al of their top ten hits includ­ing “You’re My Best Friend” and “Anoth­er One Bites the Dust.”

Cow­ing though it may be, don’t let these accom­plished musi­cians’ abun­dance of tal­ent keep you from singing along. Remem­ber that in 2011, a team of sci­en­tif­ic researchers vot­ed “We Are the Cham­pi­ons” the catchi­est song in pop music his­to­ry, thanks in part to Mercury’s “high effort” vocals. As par­tic­i­pant and music psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Mül­len­siefen observed:

Every musi­cal hit is reliant on maths, sci­ence, engi­neer­ing and tech­nol­o­gy; from the physics and fre­quen­cies of sound that deter­mine pitch and har­mo­ny, to the hi-tech dig­i­tal proces­sors and syn­the­sis­ers which can add effects to make a song more catch­i­er. We’ve dis­cov­ered that there’s a sci­ence behind the sing-along and a spe­cial com­bi­na­tion of neu­ro­science, math and cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy that can pro­duce the elu­sive elixir of the per­fect sing-along song.

When the audi­ence is allowed in at the three minute mark, you can pre­tend that that thun­der­ous applause is part­ly due to you.

Enjoy more Fred­die Mer­cury iso­lat­ed vocal tracks here and here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made Fred­die Mer­cury the Great­est Vocal­ist in Rock His­to­ry? The Secrets Revealed in a Short Video Essay

Hear Fred­die Mercury’s Vocals Soar in the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for “Some­body to Love”

Fred­die Mer­cury: The Untold Sto­ry of the Singer’s Jour­ney From Zanz­ibar to Star­dom

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

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Meet Grace Hopper, the Pioneering Computer Scientist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the Historic Mark I Computer (1906–1992)

in Computer Science | August 6th, 2018


On a page for its School of Tech­nol­o­gy, Ras­mussen Col­lege lists six “Assump­tions to Avoid” for women who want to enter the field of com­put­er sci­ence. I couldn’t com­ment on whether these “assump­tions” (alleged mis­con­cep­tions like “the work envi­ron­ment is hos­tile to women”) are actu­al­ly dis­proved by the com­men­tary. But I might sug­gest a sev­enth “assump­tion to avoid”—that women haven’t always been com­put­er sci­en­tists, inte­gral to the devel­op­ment of the com­put­er, pro­gram­ming lan­guages, and every oth­er aspect of com­put­ing, even 100 years before com­put­ers exist­ed.

In fact, one of the most notable women in com­put­er sci­ence, Grace Hop­per, served as a mem­ber of the Har­vard team that built the first com­put­er, the room-sized Mark I designed in 1944 by physics pro­fes­sor Howard Aiken. Hop­per also helped devel­op COBOL, the first uni­ver­sal pro­gram­ming lan­guage for busi­ness, still wide­ly in use today, a sys­tem based on writ­ten Eng­lish rather than on sym­bols or num­bers. And she is cred­it­ed with coin­ing the term “com­put­er bug” (and by exten­sion “debug”), when she and her asso­ciates found a moth stuck inside the Mark II in 1947. (“From then on,” she told Time mag­a­zine in 1984, “when any­thing went wrong with a com­put­er, we said it had bugs in it.”)

These are but a few of her achieve­ments in a com­put­er sci­ence career that spanned more than 42 years, dur­ing which time she rose through the ranks of the Naval Reserves, then lat­er active naval duty, retir­ing as the old­est com­mis­sioned offi­cer, a rear admi­ral, at age 79.

In addi­tion to win­ning dis­tin­guished awards and com­men­da­tions over the course of her career—including the first-ever com­put­er sci­ence “Man of the Year” award—Hopper also acquired a few dis­tin­guished nick­names, includ­ing “Amaz­ing Grace” and “Grand­ma COBOL.” She may become known to a new gen­er­a­tion by the nick­name, “Queen of Code,” the title of a recent doc­u­men­tary from FiveThirtyEight’s “Sig­nals” series. Direct­ed by Com­mu­ni­ty star Gillian Jacobs, the short film, which you can watch in full here, tells the sto­ry of her “inim­itable lega­cy as a bril­liant pro­gram­mer and pio­neer­ing woman in a male-dom­i­nat­ed field,” writes Alli­son McCann at FiveThir­tyEight.

Hopper’s name may be “mys­te­ri­ous­ly absent from many his­to­ry books,” as Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls notes, but before her death in 1992, she was intro­duced to mil­lions through TV appear­ances on shows like Late Night with David Let­ter­man (top) and 60 Min­utes, just above. As you’ll see in these clips, Hop­per wasn’t just a crack math­e­mati­cian and pro­gram­mer but also an ace pub­lic speak­er whose dead­pan humor cracked up Let­ter­man and the groups of stu­dents and fel­low sci­en­tists she fre­quent­ly addressed.

The 60 Min­utes seg­ment notes that Hop­per became “one of that small band of broth­ers and sis­ters who ush­ered in the com­put­er rev­o­lu­tion” when she left her professor’s job at Vas­sar at the start of WWII to serve in the Naval Reserve, where she was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Com­pu­ta­tion Project at Har­vard. But she nev­er stopped being an edu­ca­tor and con­sid­ered “train­ing young peo­ple” her sec­ond-most impor­tant accom­plish­ment. In this, her lega­cy lives on as well.

The world’s largest gath­er­ing of women tech­nol­o­gists is called “The Grace Hop­per Cel­e­bra­tion.” And a doc­u­men­tary in pro­duc­tion called Born with Curios­i­ty (see a teas­er above) hopes that “shin­ing a light on and human­iz­ing role mod­els like Grace makes them relat­able in a way that inspires oth­ers to great­ness.” At a time when women make up the low­est enroll­ment in com­put­er sci­ence out of all of the STEM fields, Hopper’s exam­ple and encour­age­ment may be much need­ed.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence and Pro­gram­ming: A Free Course from MIT 

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

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How Steely Dan Went Through Seven Guitarists and Dozens of Hours of Tape to Get the Perfect Guitar Solo on “Peg”

in Music | August 3rd, 2018

It’s easy to call the music of Steely Dan cyn­i­cal ersatz: slick, clin­i­cal jazz-rock, with nary a hair out of place on any of their nine stu­dio albums; soul­less soul music beloved by pre­ten­tious jerks like the duo in Nick Kroll and John Mulaney’s satir­i­cal Broad­way show Oh, Hel­lo, a com­ic play fea­tur­ing two sleazy 70-some­thing Upper West Side bachelors—failed artists, casu­al racists, long­time ben­e­fi­cia­ries of a rent-con­trolled apart­ment, and the two biggest Steely Dan fans you’ll ever meet. But theirs is a pure­ly affec­tion­ate homage.

“There hasn’t been any good music since Steely Dan,” Mulany half-joked in a recent inter­view. “The best music is pre­cise rock-pop-jazz in a stu­dio, on a mul­ti­track.” Every take that calls Steely Dan cal­cu­lat­ing hip­ster pre­tenders and stu­dio per­fec­tion­ists isn’t wrong, exact­ly, it’s only that the band already antic­i­pat­ed and sur­passed it by couch­ing know­ing inau­then­tic­i­ty and sub­ver­sion in the most fine­ly-craft­ed pop ever cre­at­ed. It’s hard­ly an exag­ger­a­tion to say that noth­ing in pop­u­lar music has lived up to their mas­ter­piece, Aja, so arch and shiny that it’s “also kind of punk,” argues Vari­ety’s Chris Mor­ris.

Gui­tarist Wal­ter Beck­er, “the Lar­ry David of Steely Dan,” approached every­thing with irrev­er­ence except the music, writes L.A. Times pop crit­ic Mikael Wood. The same could be said of his band­mate, singer and key­board play­er Don­ald Fagen. If you think you don’t know Steely Dan, you do, from the hun­dreds of songs that have sam­pled and copied them, most nick­ing beats and hooks from Aja. One of those most-sam­pled songs, “Peg,” also serves as a mini-les­son on the duo’s exact­ing work eth­ic and metic­u­lous com­po­si­tion­al meth­ods. (See Fagen explain and demon­strate the song’s com­plex chord voic­ings below.)

In a com­mem­o­ra­tion of Aja’s for­ti­eth anniver­sary last year, Newseek’s Zach Schon­feld described Beck­er and Fagen’s “odd, neu­rot­ic approach” to record­ing “that turned the cre­ative pair into musi­cal auteurs of sorts, but made fin­ish­ing a record near­ly impos­si­ble.” As you’ll hear musi­cians like drum­mer Rick Marot­ta explain in the “Peg” mak­ing-of video at the top, the duo would bring in a crew of top-notch play­ers for a ses­sion, then scrap every per­for­mance and bring an entire­ly new band in the next day, unhap­py with vir­tu­al­ly every take. “Every track, every over­dub,” says engi­neer Elliot Schein­er, “had to be the per­fect over­dub. They didn’t set­tle for any­thing. They were always look­ing for the per­fect.”

The almost unlim­it­ed pow­er grant­ed them by “guar­an­teed sales” may have been a “license for abuse,” as “Peg” rhythm gui­tarist Steve Kahn tells Schon­field, but it also meant they nev­er had to grudg­ing­ly set­tle for “good enough.” They act­ed as cura­tors for the best musi­cians in the busi­ness, fig­ur­ing out whose dis­tinc­tive style best fit which song, a process that involved a lot of tri­al and error. The approach is most evi­dent in the leg­endary sto­ry of “Peg”’s gui­tar solo, per­formed on the record by ses­sion play­er Jay Gray­don, who made the cut after sev­en pre­vi­ous gui­tarists, includ­ing Robben Ford and Beck­er him­self record­ed hours and hours of tape.

“I’m sure that each of us walked away feel­ing real­ly good about it,” remem­bers gui­tarist Elliot Ran­dall, who had played the solo on “Reel­in’ in the Years.” But each time, Fagen and Beck­er knew it wasn’t right. “We felt sil­ly spend­ing all this mon­ey for this one brief blues solo,” Fagen says. When they final­ly recruit­ed Gray­don, he was ecsta­t­ic, as he relates in the inter­view above. “Every stu­dio gui­tar play­er want­ed to be on a Steely Dan record,” he says. Final­ly, it was a match:

For about an hour and a half, I’m play­ing my hip, melod­ic kind of jazz style. Then Don­ald says to me, “Naw, man. Try to play the blues.” I’m think­ing, if I got­ta play blues in this solo, I can’t use a B‑flat. Because B is in that chord. I can’t use an F unless it’s run­ning through the chord… So I can make it be a believ­able sev­enth chord by using the sev­enth in part of the line. I play bluesy for a while. I get melod­ic for a while. I get bluesy again. Then I get melod­ic and bluesy.

The brief solo suits the song per­fect­ly, though we might say the same if they’d cho­sen one of hun­dreds of oth­er takes. We’ll nev­er know, though we do hear a few failed con­tenders at the top, and they’re all clear­ly infe­ri­or. After four or five hours of play­ing, Gray­don him­self left the stu­dio still not know­ing if “it was a keep­er.” Then he “turned the radio on one day, and there it is.” He’s since relearned it sev­er­al times to play for oth­ers, includ­ing a 2016 doc­u­men­tary about top ses­sion play­ers and rock side­men called Hired Gun.

As for all the Youtube videos float­ing around that claim to teach the solo (see one above), Gray­don says none of them get it right. But luck­i­ly for him, some­how, he did, a lucky break, he says, that eas­i­ly could have end­ed up in the bin with the oth­er hun­dreds of hours of tape cut from the Aja ses­sions, vic­tims of the ulti­mate jazz-funk-soul-rock auteurs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

Steely Dan Cre­ates the Deadhead/Danfan Con­ver­sion Chart: A Wit­ty Guide Explain­ing How You Can Go From Lov­ing the Dead to Idol­iz­ing Steely Dan

How Good Are Your Head­phones? This 150-Song Playlist, Fea­tur­ing Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out

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

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Stylish 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

in Fashion, History | August 3rd, 2018

When the Romans pushed their way north into the Ger­man provinces, they built (cir­ca 90 AD) The Saal­burg, a fort that pro­tect­ed the bound­ary between the Roman Empire and the Ger­man­ic trib­al ter­ri­to­ries. At its peak, 2,000 peo­ple lived in the fort and the attached vil­lage. It remained active until around 260 AD.

Some­where dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry, The Saal­burg was redis­cov­ered and exca­vat­ed, then lat­er ful­ly recon­struct­ed. It’s now a UNESCO World Her­itage site and hous­es the Saal­burg Muse­um, which con­tains many Roman relics, includ­ing a 2,000 year old shoe, appar­ent­ly found in a local well.

If you think the Ital­ians have mas­tered the craft of mak­ing shoes, well, they don’t have much on their ances­tors. Accord­ing to the site Romans Across Europe, the Romans  “were the orig­i­na­tors of the entire-foot-encas­ing shoe.” The site con­tin­ues:

There was a wide vari­ety of shoes and san­dals for men and women. Most were con­struct­ed like mil­i­tary cali­gae, with a one-piece upper nailed between lay­ers of the sole. Many had large open-work areas made by cut­ting or punch­ing cir­cles, tri­an­gles, squares, ovals, etc. in rows or grid-like pat­terns. Oth­ers were more enclosed, hav­ing only holes for the laces. Some very dain­ty women’s and children’s shoes still had thick nailed soles.

The image above, which puts all of the Roman’s shoe-mak­ing skill on dis­play, comes to us via Red­dit and imgur.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in July 2016.

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:

A Huge Scale Mod­el Show­ing Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

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

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

Ani­ma­tion Gives You a Glimpse of What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome

The His­to­ry of Rome in 179 Pod­casts

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Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Filmmakers: Bresson, Antonioni, Fellini, and Others

in Film | August 3rd, 2018

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, even more so than those of most revered auteurs, cre­ate a real­i­ty of their own. Watch­ing them, you might even believe that Tarkovsky him­self lived in his own real­i­ty as well, one made only of the sub­lime and the tran­scen­dent, impos­si­bly far from the mun­dan­i­ty of every­day life and com­mer­cial enter­tain­ment. Per­haps he did, to an extent, but the direc­tor of Andrei Rublev, Solaris, and Stalk­er cer­tain­ly did­n’t become and exist as a film­mak­er in iso­la­tion. He had pre­de­ces­sors in cin­e­ma who inspired him as well as col­leagues he admired, and in the clip above from the 1983 doc­u­men­tary Voy­age in Time, shot in Italy dur­ing pre-pro­duc­tion of his film Nos­tal­ghia, he reveals who they are.

“If you had to talk to today’s and yes­ter­day’s great direc­tors,” screen­writer Toni­no Guer­ra asks Tarkovsky, “for what rea­sons would you thank each of them for what you feel they gave you?” Promis­ing he won’t take long to answer the ques­tion, Tarkovsky begins with Sovi­et mon­tage pio­neer Alexan­der Dovzhenko, sin­gling out his 1930 film Earth. He then con­tin­ues on to Robert Bres­son, who “has always aston­ished and attract­ed me with his ascetics. It seems to me that he is the only direc­tor in the world that has achieved absolute sim­plic­i­ty in cin­e­ma. As it was achieved in music by Bach, art by Leonar­do. Tol­stoy achieved it as a writer.” Sim­plic­i­ty, as it emerges over the course of the con­ver­sa­tion, may well rank as Tarkovsky’s most esteemed artis­tic virtue. If that sounds iron­ic, giv­en how aes­thet­i­cal­ly com­plex Tarkovsky’s own work can seem, he also prais­es Fed­eri­co Felli­ni for the same qual­i­ty.

“I like Felli­ni for his kind­ness, for his love of peo­ple,” he says, “for his, let’s say, sim­plic­i­ty and inti­mate into­na­tion.” He describes a Felli­ni pic­ture he calls Pale Moon Tales (by which he may have meant La Dolce Vita) as “astound­ing in its sim­plic­i­ty, ele­gance, and won­der­ful noble­ness of pic­ture and act­ing.” To Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, anoth­er Ital­ian but one pos­sessed of a strik­ing­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty, he cred­its his real­iza­tion that “the mean­ing of action in cin­e­ma is rather con­di­tion­al. There’s prac­ti­cal­ly no action going on in Anto­nioni films, and this is the mean­ing of ‘action” in Anto­nioni films” — or at least in the “Anto­nioni films that I like the most.” Tarkovsky does­n’t neglect French cin­e­ma, nam­ing Jean Vigo, whom he remem­bers “with ten­der­ness and thank­ful­ness” as “the father of mod­ern French cin­e­ma,” the film­mak­er who “found­ed the French movie, and nobody has gone far­ther than him.”

Final­ly, Tarkovsky ends his list as he began it, by pay­ing trib­ute to one of his Sovi­et coun­try­men. Sergei Para­janov, he says, has not just a para­dox­i­cal and poet­ic way of think­ing — words many a crit­ic has sure­ly applied to Tarkovsky him­self — but an “abil­i­ty of lov­ing the beau­ty” and the “skill of being com­plete­ly free inside his own cre­ation.” Para­janov, whom we recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, had in the 1970s endured the per­se­cu­tion of the Sovi­et author­i­ties. Nobody cham­pi­oned the cause of his lib­er­a­tion as stren­u­ous­ly as Tarkovsky, who wrote that, “artis­ti­cal­ly, there are few peo­ple in the entire world who could replace Para­janov.” Now both of these irre­place­able auteurs are gone (as are all the oth­ers named here), but in their cin­e­ma will open the path of artis­tic lib­er­a­tion for gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

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

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respect­ed Film­mak­er of All Time

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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Meet Ellen Rubin (aka The Popuplady) and Her Collection of 9,000 Pop-Up Books

in Art, Books, Design, History | August 2nd, 2018

It’s unusu­al to encounter a pop-up book for sale in a thrift store.

Their enthu­si­as­tic child own­ers tend to work them so hard, that even­tu­al­ly even sen­ti­men­tal val­ue is trashed.

Stuck slid­er bars and torn flaps scotch the ele­ment of sur­prise.

Scenes that once sprang to crisp atten­tion can bare­ly man­age a flac­cid 45° angle.

One good yank and Cinderella’s coach gives way for­ev­er, leav­ing an unsight­ly crust of dried glue.

Their nat­ur­al ten­den­cy toward obso­les­cence only serves to make author Ellen G. K. Rubin’s inter­na­tion­al col­lec­tion of more than 9000 pop-up and move­able books all the more aston­ish­ing.

The Popuplady—an hon­orif­ic she sports with pride—would like to cor­rect three com­mon­ly held beliefs about the objects of her high­ly spe­cial­ized exper­tise:

  1. They are not a recent phe­nom­e­non. One item in her col­lec­tion dates back to 1547.
  2. They were not orig­i­nal­ly designed for use by chil­dren (as a 1933 flip book with pho­to illus­tra­tions on how women can become bet­ter sex­u­al part­ners would seem to indi­cate.)
  3. They were once con­ceived of as excel­lent edu­ca­tion­al tools in such weighty sub­jects as math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my, med­i­cine… and, as men­tioned above, the boudoir.

A Yale trained physician’s assis­tant, she found that her hob­by gen­er­at­ed much warmer inter­est at social events than her dai­ly toil in the area of bone mar­row trans­plants.

And while paper engi­neer­ing may not be not brain surgery, it does require high lev­els of artistry and tech­ni­cal prowess. It galls Rubin that until recent­ly, paper engi­neers went uncred­it­ed on the books they had ani­mat­ed:

Paper engi­neers are the artists who take the illus­tra­tions and make them move. They are pup­pet­mas­ters, but they hand the strings to us, the read­er.

As seen in Atlas Obscu­ra’s video, above, Rubin’s col­lec­tion includes a mov­ing postage stamp, a num­ber of wheel-shaped volvelles, and a one-of-a-kind ele­phant-themed mini-book her friend, paper engi­neer, Edward H. Hutchins, cre­at­ed from ele­phant dung paper she found on safari.

She has curat­ed or served as con­sul­tant for a num­ber of pop-up exhi­bi­tions at venues includ­ing the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library, the Biennes Cen­ter of the Lit­er­ary Arts and the Smithsonian’s Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry. See a few more exam­ples from her col­lec­tion, which were dis­played as part of the latter’s Paper Engi­neer­ing: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn exhi­bi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Super­nat­ur­al Poem to 3D Paper Life

French Book­store Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cov­er Art

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

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