To Help Digitize and Preserve the Sound of Stradivarius Violins, a City in Italy Has Gone Silent

in History, Music | January 21st, 2019

Image by Mark Ordonez, via Flickr Com­mons

We all have respect, even awe, for the name Stradi­var­ius, even those of us who have nev­er held a vio­lin, let alone played one. The vio­lins — as well as vio­las, cel­los, and oth­er string instru­ments, includ­ing gui­tars — made by mem­bers of the Stradi­vari fam­i­ly 300 years ago have become sym­bols of pure son­ic qual­i­ty, still not quite replic­a­ble with even 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy, with rar­i­ty and prices to match. But to tru­ly under­stand the pre­cious­ness of the Stradi­var­ius, look not to the auc­tion house but to the north­ern Ital­ian city of Cre­mona, home of the Museo del Vio­li­no and its col­lec­tion of some of the best-pre­served exam­ples of the 650 sur­viv­ing Stradi­var­ius instru­ments in the world.

“Cre­mona is home to the work­shops of some of the world’s finest instru­ment mak­ers, includ­ing Anto­nio Stradi­vari, who in the 17th and 18th cen­turies pro­duced some of the finest vio­lins and cel­los ever made,” writes The New York Times’ Max Par­adiso.

“The city is get­ting behind an ambi­tious project to dig­i­tal­ly record the sounds of the Stradi­var­ius instru­ments for pos­ter­i­ty, as well as oth­ers by Amati and Guarneri del Gesù, two oth­er famous Cre­mona crafts­men. And that means being qui­et.” It’s all to help the ambi­tious record­ing project now cre­at­ing the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank, “a data­base stor­ing all the pos­si­ble tones that four instru­ments select­ed from the Museo del Violino’s col­lec­tion can pro­duce.”

This requires great efforts on the part of the engi­neers and the per­form­ers, the lat­ter of whom have to play hun­dreds of scales and arpeg­gios (exam­ples of which you can hear embed­ded in The New York Times arti­cle) on these stag­ger­ing­ly valu­able instru­ments. But the peo­ple of Cre­mona have to coop­er­ate, too: in the area around the Museo del Vio­li­no’s audi­to­ri­um where the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank is record­ing, “the sound of a car engine, or a woman walk­ing in high heels, pro­duces vibra­tions that run under­ground and rever­ber­ate in the micro­phones, mak­ing the record­ing worth­less.” And so Cre­mon­a’s may­or, also the pres­i­dent of the Stradi­var­ius Foun­da­tion, “allowed the streets around the muse­um to be closed for five weeks, and appealed to peo­ple in the city to keep it down.”

Few of us alive today have heard the sound of a Stradi­var­ius in per­son, but that num­ber will shrink fur­ther still in future gen­er­a­tions. It’s to do with the very nature of these cen­turies-old instru­ments which, no mat­ter what kind of efforts go toward mak­ing them playable, still seem to have a finite lifes­pan. “We pre­serve and restore them,” Par­adiso quotes Museo del Vio­li­no cura­tor Faus­to Cac­cia­tori as say­ing, “but after they reach a cer­tain age, they become too frag­ile to be played and they ‘go to sleep,’ so to speak.” The day will pre­sum­ably come when the last Stradi­var­ius goes to sleep, but by that time the sounds they made will still be wide awake in their dig­i­tized sec­ond life. And we can be cer­tain, at least, that future gen­er­a­tions will think of a musi­cal use for them that we can no more imag­ine now than Anto­nio Stradi­vari could have in his day.

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Stradi­var­ius Vio­lins Are Worth Mil­lions

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Oodles of Classic Doctor Who Episodes Streaming Free Online This Month

in Sci Fi, Television | January 18th, 2019

A quick fyi: This month, Twitch is pre­sent­ing a marathon stream­ing of clas­sic Doc­tor Who episodes. Con­tin­u­ing through Jan­u­ary 25th, they plan to broad­cast “11 to 12 hours of new episodes per day (~27 episodes), repeat­ing once so you can catch Doc­tor Who near­ly 24 hours a day, every day…” Stream the episodes right above, or here on Twitch.

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!

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Hours of Doc­tor Who Audio Dra­mas Now Free to Stream Online

The BBC Cre­ates Step-by-Step Instruc­tions for Knit­ting the Icon­ic Doc­tor Who Scarf: A Doc­u­ment from the Ear­ly 1980s

Vin­cent van Gogh Vis­its a Mod­ern Muse­um & Gets to See His Artis­tic Lega­cy: A Touch­ing Scene from Doc­tor Who

42 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner, Alien, Star Trek and Doc­tor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

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Hear Mary Oliver (RIP) Read Five of Her Poems: “The Summer Day,” “Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night,” “Many Miles” and “Night and the River”

in Audio Books, Poetry | January 18th, 2019

Poets get to have strong opin­ions about what poet­ry should be and do, espe­cial­ly poets as well-loved as Mary Oliv­er, who passed away yes­ter­day at the age of 83. “Poet­ry, to be under­stood, must be clear,” she told NPR in an inter­view, “It mustn’t be fan­cy…. I always feel that what­ev­er isn’t nec­es­sary should not be in the poem.” Oliver’s Zen approach to her art cut right to the heart of things and hon­ored nat­ur­al, unpre­ten­tious expres­sion. “I don’t know exact­ly what a prayer is,” she writes in “The Sum­mer Day,” “I do know how to pay atten­tion.”

For Oliv­er that meant giv­ing care­ful heed to the nat­ur­al world, shear­ing away abstrac­tion and obfus­ca­tion. She grew up in Ohio, and dur­ing a painful child­hood walked through the woods for solace, where she began writ­ing her first poems.

She became an “inde­fati­ga­ble guide to the nat­ur­al world,” as Max­ine Kumin wrote, and at the same time, to the spir­i­tu­al. She has been com­pared to Emer­son and wrote “about old-fash­ioned subjects—nature, beau­ty, and worst of all, God,” Ruth Franklin remarks with irony in a New York­er review of the poet’s last, 2017 book, Devo­tions. But, like Emer­son, Oliv­er was not a writer of any ortho­doxy or creed.

Oliver’s approach to the spir­i­tu­al is always root­ed firm­ly in the nat­ur­al. Spir­it, she writes, “needs the body’s world… to be more than pure light / that burns / where no one is.” She was beloved by mil­lions, by teach­ers, writ­ers, and celebri­ties. (She was once inter­viewed by Maria Shriv­er in an issue of O mag­a­zine; Gwyneth Pal­trow is a big fan). Oliv­er was long the country’s best-sell­ing poet, as Dwight Gar­ner blithe­ly writes at The New York Times. But “she has not been tak­en seri­ous­ly by most poet­ry crit­ics,” Franklin points out. This despite the fact that she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her fifth book, Amer­i­can Prim­i­tive, and a Nation­al Book Award in 1992 for New and Select­ed Poems.

The word “earnest” comes up often as faint praise in reviews of Oliver’s poet­ry (Gar­ner tidi­ly sums up her work as “earnest poems about nature”). The impli­ca­tion is that her poems are slight, sim­ple, unre­fined. This per­haps inevitably hap­pens to acces­si­ble poets who become famous in life, but it is also a seri­ous mis­read­ing. Oliv­er’s work is full of para­dox­es, ambi­gu­i­ties, and the hard wis­dom of a mature moral vision. She is “among the few Amer­i­can poets,” crit­ic Ali­cia Ostrik­er writes, “who can describe and trans­mit ecsta­sy, while retain­ing a prac­ti­cal aware­ness of the world as one of preda­tors and prey.” In her work, she faces suf­fer­ing with “cold, sharp eyes,” con­fronting “steadi­ly,” Ostrik­er goes on, “what she can­not change.”

Her poems have includ­ed “his­tor­i­cal and per­son­al suf­fer­ing,” but more often she engages the life and death going on all around us, which we rarely take notice of at all. She peers into the dark­ness of her­mit crab shells, she feeds a grasshop­per sug­ar from the palm of her hand, watch­ing the creature’s “jaws back and forth instead of up and down.” Oliv­er often wrote about the con­stant reminders of death in life in poems like “Death at a Great Dis­tance” and “When Death Comes.” She wrote just as often about how aston­ish­ing it is to be alive when we make deep con­nec­tions with the nat­ur­al world.

“When it’s over,” Oliv­er writes in “When Death Comes,” ” I want to say all my life / I was a bride mar­ried to amaze­ment.” The cost of not pay­ing atten­tion, she sug­gests, is to be a tourist in one’s own life and to nev­er be at home. “I don’t want to end up sim­ply hav­ing vis­it­ed this world.” In the videos here, see and hear Oliv­er read “The Sum­mer Day,” “Wild Geese,” “Lit­tle Dog’s Rhap­sody in the Night,” “Night and the Riv­er” (above) and “Many Miles.”

Oliv­er was an artist, says Franklin, “inter­est­ed in fol­low­ing her own path, both spir­i­tu­al­ly and poet­i­cal­ly,” and in her work she will con­tin­ue to inspire her read­ers to do the same. These read­ings will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Meryl Streep Read Sylvia Plath’s “Morn­ing Song,” a Poem Writ­ten After the Birth of Her Daugh­ter

An 8‑Hour Marathon Read­ing of 500 Emi­ly Dick­in­son Poems

Hear Dylan Thomas Recite His Clas­sic Poem, “Do Not Go Gen­tle Into That Good Night”

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

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Vintage Geological Maps Get Turned Into 3D Topographical Wonders

in Design, History, K-12, Maps, Technology | January 18th, 2019

What good is an old-fash­ioned map in the age of apps?

One need not be a moun­taineer, geo­sci­en­tist, or civ­il engi­neer to get the topo­graph­i­cal lay of the land with a speed and accu­ra­cy that would have blown Lewis and Clark’s minds’ right through the top of the lynx and otter top­pers they took to wear­ing after their stan­dard issue army lids wore out.

There’s still some­thing to be said for the old ways, though.

Graph­ic design­er Scott Rein­hard has all the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal advances at his dis­pos­al, but it took com­bin­ing them with hun­dred-year-old maps for him to get a tru­ly 3‑D appre­ci­a­tion for loca­tions he has vis­it­ed around the Unit­ed States, as well as his child­hood home.

A son of Indi­ana, Rein­hard told Colossal’s Kate Sierzputows­ki that he found some Grand Teton-type excite­ment in the noto­ri­ous­ly flat Hoosier State once he start­ed mar­ry­ing offi­cial nation­al geospa­tial data to vin­tage map designs:

 When I began ren­der­ing the ele­va­tion data for the state, the sto­ry of the land emerged. The glac­i­ers that reced­ed across the north­ern half of the state after the last ice age scraped and gouged and shaped the land in a way that is spec­tac­u­lar­ly clear…I felt empow­ered by the abil­i­ty to col­lect and process the vast amounts of infor­ma­tion freely avail­able, and cre­ate beau­ti­ful images.

(The gov­ern­ment shut-down has not dam­aged the accu­ra­cy of Reinhard’s maps, but the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Survey’s web­site does warn the pub­lic that the effects of any earth­quakes or oth­er force majeure occur­ring dur­ing this black-out peri­od will not imme­di­ate­ly be reflect­ed in their topos.)

(Nor are they able to respond to any inquiries, which puts a damper on hol­i­day week­end plans for mak­ing salt dough maps, anoth­er Hoosier state fave, at least in 1974…)

As writer Jason Kot­tke notes, the shad­ows the moun­tains cast on the mar­gins of Reinhard’s maps are a par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive opti­cal trick.

You can see more of Reinhard’s dig­i­tal­ly enhanced maps from the late 19th and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry, and order prints in his online shop.

via Kot­tke/Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hear the Sounds of the Actual Instruments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Handel Originally Composed Their Music

in History, Music | January 18th, 2019

When we go to a con­cert of orches­tral music today, we hear most every piece played on the same range of instru­ments — instru­ments we know and love, to be sure, but instru­ments designed and oper­at­ed with­in quite strict para­me­ters. The pleas­ing qual­i­ty of the sounds they pro­duce may make us believe that we’re hear­ing every­thing just as the com­pos­er orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed, but we usu­al­ly aren’t. To hear what the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Han­del, and Haydn would have had in their head as they com­posed back in their day, you’d have to have an orches­tra go so far as to play it not with mod­ern instru­ments, but the same ones orches­tras used back in those com­posers’ life­times.

Enter Lon­don’s Orches­tra of the Age of the Enlight­en­ment, which takes its name from the era of the late 18th cen­tu­ry from which it draws most of its reper­toire — and from which it draws most of its instru­ments, a vital part of its mis­sion to achieve peri­od-accu­rate sound. You can read more about the OAE’s instru­ments on its web site, or bet­ter yet, head over to its Youtube chan­nel to hear those instru­ments demon­strat­ed and their his­tor­i­cal back­grounds explained. Here we have four of the OAE’s videos: on the clar­inet they use for Mozart’s Clar­inet Con­cer­to, on the con­tra­bas­soon they use for Beethoven’s Fifth Sym­pho­ny and Hayd­n’s Cre­ation, the organ they use for Han­del’s Organ Con­cer­to, and an oboe like the one Haydn would have known.

“We love the music we play,” says OAE dou­ble bassist Cecelia Brugge­mey­er, “and we love ask­ing ques­tions about the music we play.” So when you use an instru­ment like the 300-year-old bass she shows off in anoth­er video, “you sud­den­ly find it does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do the things a mod­ern instru­ment will do, and that sets up a whole train of ques­tions.” These include, “What would Bach have heard? How might the play­ers in his day have played? What does that mean for us, play­ing today? What does that mean for live music now, with this his­toric infor­ma­tion? We’re not try­ing to re-cre­ate the past. We’re try­ing to make some­thing that’s excit­ing now but using what was from the past” — not a bad metaphor, come to think of it, for the entire enter­prise of clas­si­cal-music per­for­mance in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Watch a Musi­cian Impro­vise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instru­ment, The Car­il­lon

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Behold Moebius’ Many Psychedelic Illustrations of Jimi Hendrix

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Music | January 17th, 2019


The 1995 release of posthu­mous Jimi Hen­drix com­pi­la­tion Voodoo Soup has divid­ed fans and crit­ics for over two decades now. But what­ev­er its mer­its, its cov­er art should hold an hon­ored place in every Hen­drix fan’s col­lec­tion. Drawn by the leg­endary cult com­ic artist Moe­bius from a pho­to­graph of Hen­drix eat­ing soup in France, it cap­tures the sound Hen­drix was mov­ing toward at the end of his life—his head explod­ing in flames, or mush­room clouds, or pink psy­che­del­ic bronchial tubes, or what­ev­er. The image comes from a larg­er gate­fold, excerpt­ed below, which Moe­bius drew for the French dou­ble LP Are You Experienced/Axis: Bold as Love in 1975.

Jour­nal­ist Jean-Nöel Coghe was sup­pos­ed­ly very upset that he did not even receive men­tion for tak­ing the orig­i­nal pho­to, but in the nineties he and Moe­bius came togeth­er again for a project that would do them both cred­it, a book called Emo­tions élec­triques that Coghe wrote of his expe­ri­ences trav­el­ing through France as Hendrix’s guide dur­ing the Experience’s first tour of the coun­try in 1967.

Moe­bius pro­vid­ed the book’s illus­tra­tions, many of which you can see below, “each of them,” as the pub­lish­er’s descrip­tion has it, “imag­in­ing Hen­drix in a clas­sic Moe­bius land­scape of dreams.”

 

Obvi­ous­ly a huge Hen­drix fan, Moe­bius is in many ways as respon­si­ble for the psy­che­del­ic space race of the 1970s as the gui­tarist him­self. His work in the French com­ic mag­a­zine Métal hurlant—Heavy Met­al in the Amer­i­can version—epitomized the sci-fi and fan­ta­sy ele­ments that came to dom­i­nate heavy rock. His work with Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky on the Chilean vision­ary filmmaker’s abort­ed Dune is the stuff of leg­end.

Moe­bius had illus­trat­ed album cov­ers since the ear­ly sev­en­ties, most­ly those of Euro­pean artists. But his cre­ations as a mag­a­zine and comics illus­tra­tor (and film sce­nar­ist) have the most endur­ing appeal for much the same rea­son as Hendrix’s music. They are both unpar­al­leled mas­ters and nat­ur­al sto­ry­tellers whose imag­ined worlds are so rich­ly detailed and con­sis­tent­ly sur­pris­ing they have birthed entire gen­res. The two may have crossed paths too late to actu­al­ly work togeth­er, but I like to think Moe­bius car­ried on the spir­it of Hen­drix in a visu­al form.

It may not be com­mon knowl­edge that Hen­drix hat­ed his album cov­ers, leav­ing detailed notes about them for his record com­pa­ny, who ignored them. His own choic­es, one must admit, includ­ing a Lin­da McCart­ney pho­to for the cov­er of Elec­tric Lady­land that makes the band look like they’re on the set of a pro­to-Sesame Street, do not exact­ly sell the records’ trea­sures. But Jimi might have loved Moe­bius’ inter­pre­ta­tions of his head­space, a visu­al con­tin­u­a­tion of a promi­nent strand of Hen­drix’s imag­i­na­tion. See all of Moe­bius’ Hen­drix illus­tra­tions here.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Icon­ic Footage of Jimi Hen­drix Play­ing “Hey Joe” Ren­dered in the Style of Moe­bius, with the Help of Neur­al Net­work Tech­nol­o­gy

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view Ani­mat­ed (1970)

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

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A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from Early Japanese Cinema (1926)

in Film | January 17th, 2019

It’s a sad fact that the vast major­i­ty of silent movies in Japan have been lost thanks to human care­less­ness, earth­quakes and the grim effi­cien­cy of the Unit­ed States Air Force. The first films of huge­ly impor­tant fig­ures like Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Yasu­jiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Shimizu have sim­ply van­ished. So we should con­sid­er our­selves for­tu­nate that Teinosuke Kin­u­gasa’s Kuret­ta Ippei — a 1926 film known in the States as A Page of Mad­ness – has some­how man­aged to sur­vive the vagaries of fate. Kin­u­gasa sought to make a Euro­pean-style exper­i­men­tal movie in Japan and, in the process, he made one of the great land­marks of silent cin­e­ma. You can watch it above.

Born in 1896, Kin­u­gasa start­ed his adult life work­ing as an onna­ga­ta, an actor who spe­cial­izes in play­ing female roles. In 1926, after work­ing for a few years behind the cam­era under pio­neer­ing direc­tor Shozo Maki­no, Kin­u­gasa bought a film cam­era and set up a lab in his house in order to cre­ate his own inde­pen­dent­ly financed movies. He then approached mem­bers of the Shinkankaku (new impres­sion­ists) lit­er­ary group to help him come up with a sto­ry. Author Yasunari Kawa­ba­ta wrote a treat­ment that would even­tu­al­ly become the basis for A Page of Mad­ness.

Though the syn­op­sis of the plot doesn’t real­ly do jus­tice to the movie — a retired sailor who works at an insane asy­lum to care after his wife who tried to kill their child — the visu­al audac­i­ty of Page is still star­tling today. The open­ing sequence rhyth­mi­cal­ly cuts between shots of a tor­ren­tial down­pour and gush­ing water before dis­solv­ing into a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ri­ly odd scene of a young woman in a rhom­boid head­dress danc­ing in front of a mas­sive spin­ning ball. The woman is, of course, an inmate at the asy­lum dressed in rags. As her dance becomes more and more fren­zied, the film cuts faster and faster, using super­im­po­si­tions, spin­ning cam­eras and just about every oth­er trick in the book.

While Kin­u­gasa was clear­ly influ­enced by The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, which also visu­al­izes the inner world of the insane, the movie is also rem­i­nis­cent of the works of French avant-garde film­mak­ers like Abel Gance, Russ­ian mon­tage mas­ters like Sergei Eisen­stein and, in par­tic­u­lar, the sub­jec­tive cam­er­a­work of F. W. Mur­nau in Der Let­zte Mann. Kin­u­gasa incor­po­rat­ed all of these influ­ences seam­less­ly, cre­at­ing an exhil­a­rat­ing, dis­turb­ing and ulti­mate­ly sad tour de force of film­mak­ing. The great Japan­ese film crit­ic Aki­ra Iwasa­ki called the movie “the first film-like film born in Japan.”

When A Page of Mad­ness was released, it played at a the­ater in Tokyo that spe­cial­ized in for­eign movies. Page was indeed pret­ty for­eign com­pared to most oth­er Japan­ese films at the time. The movie was regard­ed, film schol­ar Aaron Gerow notes, as “one of the few Japan­ese works to be treat­ed as the ‘equal’ of for­eign motion pic­tures in a cul­ture that still looked down on domes­tic pro­duc­tions.” Yet it didn’t change the course of Japan­ese cin­e­ma, and it was thought of as a curios­i­ty at a time when most films in Japan were kabu­ki adap­ta­tions and samu­rai sto­ries.

Page dis­ap­peared not long after its release and, for over 50 years, was thought lost until Kin­u­gasa found it in his own store­house in 1971. Dur­ing that time Kin­u­gasa received a Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his splashy samu­rai spec­ta­cle The Gate of Hell (1953) and Kawa­ba­ta, who wrote the treat­ment, got a Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture for writ­ing books like Snow Coun­try about a lovelorn geisha.

You can find A Page of Mad­ness on our list of Free Silent Films, which is part of our col­lec­tion,  4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s 100 Favorite Movies

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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An Animated History of Cheese: 10,000 Years in Under Six Minutes

in Food & Drink | January 17th, 2019

We can now eat cheese near­ly any­where in the world, and most world cuisines seem to have found — to vary­ing degrees of suc­cess — ways of work­ing the stuff into their native dish­es. But if cheese has gone and con­tin­ues to go glob­al, from where did its jour­ney begin? The TED-Ed video above can tell you that and more, hav­ing been writ­ten by Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont pro­fes­sor of nutri­tion and food sci­ences Paul Kind­st­edt, author of Cheese and Cul­ture: A His­to­ry of Cheese and its Place in West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion. Titled “A Brie(f) His­to­ry of Cheese,” it begins in 8000 BCE in the Fer­tile Cres­cent and arrives at our avid­ly cheese-eat­ing present in under six min­utes.

Human­i­ty’s dis­cov­ery of cheese hap­pened not long after its imple­men­ta­tion of agri­cul­ture. Left under the sun, the milk of domes­ti­cat­ed ani­mals would sep­a­rate into a liq­uid, which we now call whey, and solids, called curds. These curds, says Kind­st­edt, “became the build­ing blocks of cheese, which would even­tu­al­ly be aged, pressed, ripened, and whizzed into a diverse cor­nu­copia of dairy delights.”

Cheese gained pop­u­lar­i­ty quick­ly enough to become a stan­dard com­mod­i­ty, even a sta­ple, through­out the east­ern Mediter­ranean by the end of the Bronze Age. In the full­ness of time, region­al vari­a­tions devel­oped, from the hard, sun-dried Mon­go­lian byaslag to Egypt­ian goat’s-milk cot­tage cheese to south Asian paneer.

Some pop­u­la­tions, of course, have an eas­i­er time eat­ing cheese than oth­ers, and some indi­vid­u­als sim­ply don’t like it. But exam­ined close­ly, few foods reveal as much about human­i­ty’s long efforts to nour­ish itself with as much effi­cien­cy and vari­ety as pos­si­ble as cheese does. “Today, the world pro­duces rough­ly 22 bil­lion kilo­grams of cheese a year,” says Kind­st­edt, “shipped and pro­duced around the globe. But 10,000 years after its inven­tion, local farms are still fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of their Neolith­ic ances­tors, hand-craft­ing one of human­i­ty’s old­est and favorite foods.” And the more you appre­ci­ate that fact — learn­able in greater depth in the accom­pa­ny­ing TED-Ed les­son, the hard­er time you’ll have, say, turn­ing down the cheese course when next you dine at a French restau­rant. Cheese may be rich, but it’s rich not least in his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Break Open a Big Wheel of Parme­san Cheese: A Delight­ful, 15-Minute Primer

Leo Tolstoy’s Fam­i­ly Recipe for Mac ‘N’ Cheese

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Tea

How to Bake Ancient Roman Bread Dat­ing Back to 79 AD: A Video Primer

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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