How Marcel Marceau Used His Mime Skills to Save Children’s Lives During the Holocaust

in History | August 1st, 2018

In 1972, Jer­ry Lewis made the ill-con­sid­ered deci­sion to write, direct, and star in a film about a Ger­man clown in Auschwitz. The result was so awful that he nev­er allowed its release, and it quick­ly acquired the reputation—along with dis­as­ters like George Lucas’ Star Wars Hol­i­day Spe­cial—as one of the biggest mis­takes in movie his­to­ry. Some­how, this cau­tion­ary tale did not dis­suade the bold Ital­ian come­di­an Rober­to Benig­ni from mak­ing a film with a some­what sim­i­lar premise, 1997’s Life is Beau­ti­ful, in which he plays a father in a con­cen­tra­tion camp who enter­tains chil­dren with com­ic stunts and antics to dis­tract them from the hor­rors all around them.

That film, by con­trast, was a com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess and went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998 and three Acad­e­my Awards the fol­low­ing year, a tes­ta­ment to Benigni’s sen­si­tiv­i­ty to his sub­ject, in a screen­play part­ly based on the mem­oirs of Rubi­no Romeo Salmoni. It’s a won­der that anoth­er real-life sto­ry of a com­ic genius who used his tal­ents not only to enter­tain chil­dren dur­ing WWII, but to save them from the Nazis has some­how nev­er been made into a fea­ture film—and espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing giv­en the stature of the man in ques­tion: Mar­cel Marceau, the most famous mime in his­to­ry.

As we learn in the Great Big Sto­ry video above, Marceau was 16 years old in 1940 when Ger­man sol­diers marched into France. His “child­hood end­ed all at once,” says Shawn Wen, author of a recent book about Marceau. His father died in Auschwitz and both Marceau and his broth­er “were involved in the war effort against the Nazis.” In one sto­ry, Marceau dressed a group of chil­dren from an orphan­age as campers and walked them into Switzer­land, enter­tain­ing them all the way, “to the point where they could pre­tend as if they were going on vaca­tion rather than flee­ing for their lives.”

In anoth­er sto­ry, Marceau some­how con­vinced a group of Ger­man sol­diers to sur­ren­der to him. “It seems as if this nat­ur­al knack for act­ing,” says Wen, “end­ed up becom­ing a part of his involve­ment in the war effort.” Dur­ing the war, Marceau was “mim­ing for his life,” and the lives of oth­ers. Mime has been the butt of many jokes over the years, but Wen sees in Marceau’s silent per­for­mances a means of bring­ing human­i­ty togeth­er with an art that tran­scends lan­guage and nation­al­i­ty. Learn more about how Marceau began his mime career dur­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion at our pre­vi­ous post here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

How Mar­cel Marceau Start­ed Mim­ing to Save Chil­dren from the Holo­caust

Mar­cel Marceau Mimes the Pro­gres­sion of Human Life, From Birth to Death, in 4 Min­utes

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

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

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How Carol Kaye Became the Most Prolific Session Musician in History

in Music | August 1st, 2018

They don’t spend their lives on tour bus­es, per­form­ing for hun­dreds or thou­sands of fans. They don’t make music videos or appear on album cov­ers and late-night TV show couches—all the things musi­cians are sup­posed to do in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. But they con­stant­ly com­pose, play, and record music. And their work may get heard far more than that of most aspir­ing stars, though we may nev­er know their names.

They are ses­sion musi­cians, the sea­soned play­ers that song­writ­ers, singers, and pro­duc­ers call on when it’s time to get into the stu­dio and get seri­ous. And Car­ol Kaye may be the most pro­lif­ic of them all, “with a career span­ning more than half a cen­tu­ry and appear­ances on an esti­mat­ed 10,000 record­ings,” as the Poly­phon­ic video pro­file above notes.

Name a clas­sic rock, pop, R&B, or soul album and there’s a very good chance Kaye’s bass appears on it. The Beach Boys, Neil Young, Frank Zap­pa, Lou Rawls, Ike & Tina Turn­er, Dusty Spring­field, Love, The Mon­kees, Ray Charles, The Right­eous Broth­ers, Wayne New­ton, and on and on.

She start­ed as a gui­tar prodi­gy at the age of 13. Soon, she was teach­ing the instru­ment and play­ing jazz clubs at night. At 25, she caught the atten­tion of band­leader “Bumps” Black­well, who recruit­ed her for her debut ses­sion gig, play­ing on Sam Cooke’s “Sum­mer­time.” Her rhythm gui­tar work can also be heard on Richie Valens’ “La Bam­ba” and sev­er­al Son­ny & Cher hits.

But it’s Kaye’s work on the bass that made her most renowned, the result of a “hap­py acci­dent” when the bass play­er in a record­ing ses­sion failed to show up. Kaye took over and loved it so much that she stuck with the instru­ment, say­ing in one inter­view that she found in the bass “my own lit­tle spot. I knew what to do and what to invent.”

Invent she did, on both gui­tar and bass, con­tribut­ing her taste­ful play­ing to so many clas­sics that the his­to­ry of mod­ern music can­not be told with­out her. She has influ­enced count­less bass play­ers, from Gene Sim­mons to Tina Wey­mouth and writ­ten some of the most icon­ic grooves of all time. How’s that for a musi­cian who nev­er made a video?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Car­ol Kaye, the Unsung Bassist Behind Your Favorite 60s Hits

Car­ol Kaye, 81-Year-Old Pio­neer of Rock, Gives Kiss’ Gene Sim­mons a Bass Les­son

7 Female Bass Play­ers Who Helped Shape Mod­ern Music: Kim Gor­don, Tina Wey­mouth, Kim Deal & More

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

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How Charlie Kaufman Goes Deep into the Human Condition in Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Other Movies

in Film | August 1st, 2018

We all remem­ber our ear­ly encoun­ters with the work of Char­lie Kauf­man, though few of us knew at the time — or even know now — that it was the work of Char­lie Kauf­man. Now acclaimed as a screen­writer and the direc­tor of the films Synec­doche, New York and Anom­al­isa, he brought his pen­chant for the inter­sec­tion of the philo­soph­i­cal and sur­re­al even to the first projects he worked on. These include episodes of tele­vi­sion shows like Get a Life, the ear­ly-1990s sit­com known pri­mar­i­ly for its weird­ness, and the more sub­tly askew Ned and Stacey a few years lat­er. But only at the end of the 1990s did Hol­ly­wood and its audi­ences taste Kauf­man’s writ­ing in its purest form in Being John Malkovich.

Direct­ed by Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich, a film about a pup­peteer who dis­cov­ers a tun­nel into the mind of the tit­u­lar actor, launched a cin­e­mat­ic explo­ration of Kauf­man’s sig­na­ture themes: con­trol, con­nec­tion, iden­ti­ty, mor­tal­i­ty. That explo­ration would con­tin­ue in Kauf­man and Jonze’s next film, Adap­ta­tion, as well as in his col­lab­o­ra­tions with direc­tor Michel Gondry, Human Nature and Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. “Writ­ing with Hon­esty,” the Chan­nel Criswell video essay above, shows us how Kauf­man has approached those themes in the films he has writ­ten for oth­er direc­tors as well as for him­self.

In Kauf­man’s work, says Chan­nel Criswell cre­ator Lewis Bond, “the craft and strug­gle of the writer is ever-present with the raw sin­cer­i­ty with which the angst of every per­son is put on dis­play.” This has required Kauf­man not just to break long-estab­lished rules of screen­writ­ing but to put him­self into his screen­plays in unusu­al­ly direct ways (as evi­denced by Adap­ta­tion’s depic­tion of screen­writ­ing guru Robert McK­ee and use of a screen­writer main char­ac­ter named Char­lie Kauf­man). His “explo­ration of the human con­di­tion” neces­si­tates “plac­ing his own anx­i­eties at the cen­ter of his work. His naked ego is com­plete­ly exposed to the audi­ence, to the point of unbri­dled self-scruti­ny.” In oth­er words, “the fur­ther he probes into his char­ac­ters, the deep­er he actu­al­ly delves into him­self.”

This may sound self-indul­gent — and nobody acknowl­edges that more than Kauf­man him­self — but Bond describes the process as “test­ing his own per­sona as he’s plac­ing him­self in sit­u­a­tions that he does­n’t know how to over­come. He watch­es oth­ers watch­ing him­self, giv­ing him the lib­er­ty to write as he dis­cov­ers.” He dis­cov­ers, as his writ­ing takes him into the realms of the abstract, the metaphor­i­cal, and the sym­bol­ic, that he and his view­ers share an inner self. “Por­tals to the head of John Malkovich, a fake twin broth­er he writes as real, a the­ater the size of a city tak­ing pri­or­i­ty over the end of the world: all these are clear peeks into the soul of Kauf­man, his attempts to rec­on­cile his per­son­al foibles, and through this we rec­og­nize our own frail­ties and anx­i­eties in his.” Hence, per­haps, the mem­o­ra­bil­i­ty of our encoun­ters with Kauf­man’s work: they’re also encoun­ters with our­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

Watch a Video Essay on the Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

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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Prince Plays Guitar for Maria Bartiromo: It’s Awkward (2004)

in Music, Television | August 1st, 2018

This uncom­fort­able scene played out on CNBC in 2004.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Sum­mer­time” in a Can­did, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

Apply to Become an Archivist Over­see­ing Prince’s Arti­facts & Archival Mate­ri­als: Appli­ca­tions Are Being Accept­ed Now

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Discover Hilma af Klint: Pioneering Mystical Painter and Perhaps the First Abstract Artist

in Art | July 31st, 2018

In a post last year, Col­in Mar­shall wrote of the Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint, who “devel­oped abstract imagery,” notes Sweden’s Mod­er­na Museet, “sev­er­al years before” con­tem­po­raries like Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, and Kaz­imir Male­vich. Much like Kandin­sky, who artic­u­lat­ed his the­o­ries in the trea­tise Con­cern­ing the Spir­i­tu­al in Art, af Klint “assumed that there was a spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion to life and aimed at visu­al­iz­ing con­text beyond what the eye can see.” Influ­enced by spir­i­tu­al­ism and theos­o­phy, she “sought to under­stand and com­mu­ni­cate the var­i­ous dimen­sions of human exis­tence.”

Born in 1862 and raised in the Swedish coun­try­side, af Klint began her stud­ies at the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Stock­holm after her fam­i­ly relo­cat­ed to the city. “After grad­u­at­ing and until 1908,” Mod­er­na Museet writes, “she had a stu­dio at Kungsträdgår­den in cen­tral Stock­holm.

She paint­ed and exhib­it­ed por­traits and land­scapes in a nat­u­ral­ist style.” But as a result of her expe­ri­ences in séances in the late 1870s, af Klint became inter­est­ed in “invis­i­ble phe­nom­e­na.”

In 1896, Hilma af Klint and four oth­er women formed the group “De Fem” [The Five]. They made con­tact with “high mas­ters” from anoth­er dimen­sion, and made metic­u­lous notes on their séances. This led to a def­i­nite change in Hilma af Klint’s art. She began prac­tis­ing auto­mat­ic writ­ing, which involves writ­ing with­out con­scious­ly guid­ing the move­ment of the pen on the paper. She devel­oped a form of auto­mat­ic draw­ing, pre­dat­ing the sur­re­al­ists by decades. Grad­u­al­ly, she eschewed her nat­u­ral­ist imagery, in an effort to free her­self from her aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing. She embarked on an inward jour­ney, into a world that is hid­den from most peo­ple.

Dur­ing one such séance, in 1904, af Klint report­ed that she had “received a ‘com­mis­sion,’” Kate Kell­away writes at The Guardian, “from an enti­ty named Amaliel who told her to paint on ‘an astral plane’ and rep­re­sent the ‘immor­tal aspects of man.’” From 1906 to 1915, she pro­duced 193 paint­ings, “an aston­ish­ing out­pour­ing,” which she called “Paint­ings for the Tem­ple.”

Hers is a strange sto­ry. Even in a time when many famous con­tem­po­raries, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, pro­fessed sim­i­lar beliefs and spir­i­tu­al prac­tices, not many claimed to be tak­ing dic­ta­tion direct­ly from spir­its in their work. The ques­tion af Klint rais­es for art his­to­ri­ans is whether she was “a quirky out­sider” or “Europe’s first abstract painter, cen­tral to the his­to­ry of abstract art.” Her mys­ti­cal eccen­tric­i­ties con­sti­tute a large part of the rea­son she has remained obscure for so long. Rather than seek fame and acclaim for her orig­i­nal­i­ty, af Klint stip­u­lat­ed when she died in 1944 at age 81 that “her work—1,200 paint­ings, 100 texts and 26,000 pages of notes—should not be shown until 20 years after her death.”

Still, it took a fur­ther 22 years before her work was seen in pub­lic, at a 1986 Los Ange­les show called “The Spir­i­tu­al in Art.” While her peers devel­oped large fol­low­ings in their life­times and took part in influ­en­tial move­ments, af Klint cul­ti­vat­ed a pri­vate, insu­lar world all her own, not unlike that of William Blake, who also remained most­ly obscure dur­ing his life, though not nec­es­sar­i­ly by choice. Her choice to hide her work came out of an ear­ly encounter, Dan­ger­ous Minds notes, with Rudolf Stein­er, “who was sim­i­lar­ly fol­low­ing a path towards cre­at­ing a syn­the­sis between the sci­en­tif­ic and the spir­i­tu­al” and who told her “these paint­ings must not be seen for fifty years as no one would under­stand them.”

Now that af Klint’s work has been exhib­it­ed in full, most recent­ly by the Mod­er­na Museet, cura­tors like Iris Müller-West­er­mann believe, as Kellawy notes, “that art-his­tor­i­cal wran­gles should not get in the way of work that needs to be seen.” Although af Klint may not have played an inte­gral his­tor­i­cal role in the devel­op­ment of abstract paint­ing, her expan­sive body of work will like­ly inspire artists, schol­ars, and eso­teric seek­ers for cen­turies to come.

Learn more about af Klint’s work at Mod­er­na Museet, the Hilma af Klint Foun­da­tion web­site, The Art Sto­ry and Dan­ger­ous Minds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Who Paint­ed the First Abstract Paint­ing?: Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky? Hilma af Klint? Or Anoth­er Con­tender?

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

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

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

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The Believer Magazine Has Put Its Entire Archive Online for Free

in Magazines, Media | July 31st, 2018

Found­ed in 2003, The Believ­er mag­a­zine gained a rep­u­ta­tion for being an off-beat lit­er­ary mag­a­zine with a com­mit­ment “to jour­nal­ism and essays that are fre­quent­ly very long, book reviews that are not nec­es­sar­i­ly time­ly, and inter­views that are inti­mate, frank and also very long.” Found­ed by authors Vendela Vida, Ed Park and Hei­di Julav­its, and orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s, The Believ­er has fea­tured con­tri­bu­tions by Nick Horn­by, Anne Car­son, William T. Voll­mann; columns by Amy Sedaris and Greil Mar­cus; and also interviews–like this one where direc­tor Errol Mor­ris talks with film­mak­er Wern­er Her­zog.

Now pub­lished by the Black Moun­tain Insti­tute at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Neva­da, Las Vegas, The Believ­er has entered a new era. It has launched a brand new web site and made its 15-year archive freely avail­able online. It’s a first for the pub­li­ca­tion. Enter the archive of the “high­brow but delight­ful­ly bizarre” mag­a­zine here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Enter “The Mag­a­zine Rack,” the Inter­net Archive’s Col­lec­tion of 34,000 Dig­i­tized Mag­a­zines

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Heavy Met­al, the Influ­en­tial “Adult Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine” That Fea­tured the Art of Moe­bius, H.R. Giger & More

Read 1,000 Edi­tions of The Vil­lage Voice: A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Icon­ic New York City Paper

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Eros Mag­a­zine: The Con­tro­ver­sial 1960s Mag­a­zine on the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion

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An Asbestos-Bound, Fireproof Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | July 31st, 2018

Even by the extreme stan­dards of dystopi­an fic­tion, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 can seem a lit­tle absurd. Fire­men whose job is to set fires? A soci­ety that bans all books? Writ­ten less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, which announced its evil inten­tions with book burn­ings, the nov­el explic­it­ly evokes the kind of total­i­tar­i­an­ism that seeks to destroy culture—and whole peoples—with fire. But not even the Nazis banned all books. Not a few aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers sur­vived or thrived in Nazi Ger­many by hew­ing to the ide­o­log­i­cal ortho­doxy (or at least not chal­leng­ing it), which, for all its ter­ri­fy­ing irra­tional­ism, kept up some sem­blance of an intel­lec­tu­al veneer.

The nov­el also recalls the Sovi­et vari­ety of state repres­sion. But the Par­ty appa­ra­tus also allowed a pub­lish­ing indus­try to oper­ate, under its strict con­straints. Nonethe­less, Sovi­et cen­sor­ship is leg­endary, as is the sur­vival of banned lit­er­a­ture through self-pub­lish­ing and mem­o­riza­tion, vivid­ly rep­re­sent­ed by the famous line in Mikhail Bulgokov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, “Man­u­scripts don’t burn.”

Bul­gakov, writes Nathaniel Rich at Guer­ni­ca, is say­ing that “great lit­er­a­ture… is fire­proof. It sur­vives its crit­ics, its cen­sors, and even the pas­sage of time.” Bul­gakov wrote from painful expe­ri­ence. When his diary was dis­cov­ered by the NKVD in 1929, then returned to him, he “prompt­ly burned it.” Some­time after­ward, dur­ing the long com­po­si­tion of his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished nov­el, he burned the man­u­script, then lat­er recon­struct­ed it from mem­o­ry.

These exam­ples bring to mind the exiled intel­lec­tu­als in Bradbury’s nov­el, who have mem­o­rized whole books in order to one day recon­struct lit­er­ary cul­ture. Europe’s total­i­tar­i­an regimes pro­vide essen­tial back­ground for the novel’s plot and imagery, but its key con­text, Brad­bury him­self not­ed in a 1956 radio inter­view, was the anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia of the U.S. in the ear­ly 1950s. “Too many peo­ple were afraid of their shad­ows,” he said, “there was a threat of book burn­ing. Many of the books were being tak­en off the shelves at that time.” Read­ing the nov­el as a chill­ing vision of a future when all books are banned and burned makes the arti­fact pic­tured above par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant—an edi­tion of Fahren­heit 451 bound in fire­proof asbestos.

Released in 1953 by Bal­lan­tine in a lim­it­ed run of two-hun­dred signed copies, the books were “bound in Johns-Manville Qin­ter­ra,” notes Lau­ren Davis at io9, “a chryso­lite asbestos mate­r­i­al.” Now the fire­proof cov­ers, with their “excep­tion­al resis­tance to pyrol­y­sis,” are “much sought after by col­lec­tors” and go for upwards of $20,000. A fire­proof Fahren­heit 451, on the one hand, can seem a lit­tle gim­micky (its pages still burn, after all). But it’s also the per­fect man­i­fes­ta­tion of a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the nov­el as a sto­ry about ban­ning and book burn­ing. All of us who have read the nov­el have like­ly read it this way, as a vision of a repres­sive total­i­tar­i­an night­mare. As such, it feels like a prod­uct of mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry fears.

Rather than fear­ing mass book burn­ings, we seem, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, on the verge of being washed away in a sea of infor­ma­tion (and dis- and mis-infor­ma­tion). We are inun­dat­ed with writing—in print and online—such that some of us despair of ever find­ing time to read the accu­mu­lat­ing piles of books and arti­cles that dai­ly sur­round us, phys­i­cal­ly and vir­tu­al­ly. But although books are still pub­lished in the mil­lions, with sales ris­ing, falling, then ris­ing again, the num­ber of peo­ple who actu­al­ly read seems in dan­ger of rapid­ly dimin­ish­ing. And this, Brad­bury also said, was his real fear. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a cul­ture,” he claimed, “just get peo­ple to stop read­ing them.”

We’ve mis­read Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury told us in his lat­er years. It is an alle­go­ry, a sym­bol­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a gross­ly dumb­ed-down soci­ety, huge­ly oppres­sive and destruc­tive in its own way. The fire­men are not lit­er­al gov­ern­ment agents but sym­bol­ic of the forces of mass dis­trac­tion, which dis­sem­i­nate “fac­toids,” lies, and half-truths as sub­sti­tutes for knowl­edge. The nov­el, he said, is actu­al­ly about peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” Add to this the pro­lif­er­at­ing amuse­ments of the online world, video games, etc. and we can see Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 not as a dat­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 40s fas­cism or 50s repres­sion, but as a too-rel­e­vant warn­ing to a dis­tractible soci­ety that deval­ues and destroys edu­ca­tion and fac­tu­al knowl­edge even as we have more access than ever to lit­er­a­ture of every kind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Ray Brad­bury Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion (in Which Case We Need More Lit­er­a­ture!)

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

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

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Meet Sergei Parajanov, the Filmmaker Persecuted & Imprisoned by the Soviets, and Championed by Tarkovsky, Fellini, Godard, Buñuel, and Others

in Film | July 31st, 2018

“Who­ev­er tries to imi­tate me is lost,” said the Sovi­et film­mak­er Sergei Para­janov. Not so long ago, who­ev­er tried to imi­tate him would also be in deep trou­ble. Per­se­cut­ed by the Sovi­et author­i­ties for the “sub­ver­sive” nature of both his work and his lifestyle, he spent four years of the 1970s in a Siber­ian hard-labor camp. Noth­ing could speak more high­ly to his artistry than the fact that, even before his sen­tenc­ing, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a let­ter in his defense. “Artis­ti­cal­ly, there are few peo­ple in the entire world who could replace Para­janov,” argued the direc­tor of Mir­ror and Stalk­er. “He is guilty – guilty of his soli­tude. We are guilty of not think­ing of him dai­ly and of fail­ing to dis­cov­er the sig­nif­i­cance of a mas­ter.”

Alas, Tarkovsky’s protes­ta­tions fell on deaf ears, as did those of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truf­faut, Luis Buñuel, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, and oth­er cre­ators besides. Para­janov had earned their respect with two fea­tures, 1965’s Shad­ows of For­got­ten Ances­tors and 1969’s The Col­or of Pome­gran­ates, clips of which you can see here.

The pow­ers that be actu­al­ly looked kind­ly on the for­mer, prais­ing its poet­ic adap­ta­tion of a clas­sic nov­el by Ukran­ian writer Mykhai­lo Kot­si­ubyn­sky. But the lat­ter, a life of the 18th-cen­tu­ry Armen­ian singer Say­at-Nova (the Geor­gia-born direc­tor was him­self of Armen­ian her­itage), seems to have gone too far in its break from the state-approved style of Social­ist real­ism in which Para­janov once worked.

“Even when he was released, Para­janov was ‘silenced,’ as he said,” writes Messy Nessy. “He tried to get back on his movie mak­ing, but strug­gled for anoth­er ten years until the Sovi­et Union col­lapsed in the 1980s. When he died in 1990 at only 66, he left his final work unfin­ished, leav­ing the world to won­der what oth­er visions of his were lost to time.” As the world has since slow­ly redis­cov­ered the visions Para­janov did real­ize, his influ­ence has here and there made itself felt. “I believe you have to be born a direc­tor,” he says in the inter­view clip above. “A direc­tor can’t be trained, not even in film school.” Direct­ing, to his mind, “is basi­cal­ly the truth, trans­formed into images: sor­row, hope, love, beau­ty.” And as all those respect­ed auteurs under­stood, no oth­er film­mak­er has ever seen the truth quite like he did.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russ­ian Stu­dio Mos­film: Clas­sic Films, Beloved Come­dies, Tarkovsky, Kuro­sawa & More

Watch Earth, a Land­mark of Sovi­et Cin­e­ma (1930)

The Film Posters of the Russ­ian Avant-Garde

A Crash Course on Sovi­et Mon­tage, the Russ­ian Approach to Film­mak­ing That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

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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