The Bustling Streets of Mumbai, India in 1929: Vintage Footage Captured with Very Early Sound Cameras

in Film | January 8th, 2019

“Though hard­ly a cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­piece,” film crit­ic Andre Soares writes, “or even a good film,” Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer will for­ev­er bear the dis­tinc­tion of “the first time in a fea­ture film that syn­chro­nized sound and voic­es could be heard in musi­cal num­bers and talk­ing seg­ments.” What usu­al­ly goes unre­marked in film his­to­ry is that Indi­an cin­e­ma was nev­er far behind its U.S. coun­ter­part. The country’s first fea­ture sound film appeared just four years after The Jazz Singer. Now lost, the love sto­ry Alam Ara debuted in March of 1931 and ini­ti­at­ed a ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion with its sev­er­al songs, includ­ing the first major fil­mi music hit.

The movie was so pop­u­lar, one his­to­ri­an notes, “police aid had to be sum­moned to con­trol the crowds.” Its direc­tor Ardeshir Irani was inspired by anoth­er ear­ly Hol­ly­wood part-talkie musi­cal, 1929’s Show Boat, which, like his film, used the Movi­etone sys­tem to record sound, rather than the Vita­phone sys­tem used in The Jazz Singer. Movi­etone, or Fox Movi­etone, as it came to be known after William Fox bought the patents in 1926, was also respon­si­ble for anoth­er ear­ly film devel­op­ment, the sound news­reel, a tech­nol­o­gy that made its way to India almost as soon as it debuted in the U.S.

The first sound news­reel, show­ing footage of Charles Lindbergh’s tak­ing off in the “Spir­it of St. Louis,” debuted in 1927 in New York. In Novem­ber 1929, Fox opened the first exclu­sive news­reel the­ater on Broad­way, and in Jan­u­ary of that same year, a Movi­etone cam­era cap­tured the street scenes of Bom­bay (now Mum­bai) that you see above, over 13 min­utes of footage com­plete with live audio record­ing of bustling crowds, busy ven­dors and laun­dry work­ers, honk­ing auto­mo­biles, and clip-clop­ping hors­es.

This incred­i­ble doc­u­ment pre­serves the sights and sounds of a sig­nif­i­cant Indi­an slice of life from 90 years ago, and shows how ear­ly the tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing sound films arrived on the sub­con­ti­nent. When Ardeshir Irani began film­ing his ground­break­ing musi­cal the fol­low­ing year, he would use exact­ly this same tech­nol­o­gy, shoot­ing all of the dia­logue and music live, on a closed set late at night to avoid unwant­ed noise like the street sounds you hear above.

Learn more of the Fox Movi­etone news­reel sto­ry here, and here, learn how Indi­an cin­e­ma began in Mum­bai in 1899 when Indi­an pho­tog­ra­phers, writ­ers, the­ater impre­sar­ios, and entre­pre­neurs like Irani took the new tech­nol­o­gy and used it to build a cul­tur­al empire of their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

India on Film, 1899–1947: An Archive of 90 His­toric Films Now Online

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More

in Art, Books, Maps | January 7th, 2019

“I first took on The Lord of the Rings at the age of eleven or twelve,” writes The New York­er’s Antho­ny Lane. “It was, and remains, not a book that you hap­pen to read, like any oth­er, but a book that hap­pens to you: a chunk bit­ten out of your life.” The pre­teen years may remain the most oppor­tune ones in which to pick up the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, but what­ev­er the peri­od in life at which they find their way in, most read­ers who make the jour­ney through Mid­dle-earth nev­er real­ly leave the place. And it hard­ly requires cov­er­ing much more ground to get from hun­ger­ing to know every­thing about the world of The Lord of the Rings — one rich with its own ter­rain, its own races, its own lan­guages — to hun­ger­ing to know how Tolkien cre­at­ed it.

Now the count­less Lord of the Rings enthu­si­asts in Amer­i­ca have their chance to behold the mate­ri­als first-hand. The exhi­bi­tion Tolkien: Mak­er of Mid­dle-Earth, which runs from Jan­u­ary 25th to May 12th of this year at New York’s Mor­gan Library and Muse­um, will assem­ble “the most exten­sive pub­lic dis­play of orig­i­nal Tolkien mate­r­i­al for sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions,” draw­ing from “the col­lec­tions of the Tolkien Archive at the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Mar­quette Uni­ver­si­ty Libraries (Mil­wau­kee), the Mor­gan, and pri­vate lenders.”

All told, it will include “fam­i­ly pho­tographs and mem­o­ra­bil­ia, Tolkien’s orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions, maps, draft man­u­scripts, and designs relat­ed to The Hob­bit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Sil­mar­il­lion.”

Men­tal Floss’ Emi­ly Pet­sko also high­lights the pres­ence of “orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions of Smaug the drag­on (from The Hob­bit), Sauron’s Dark Tow­er of Barad-dûr (described in The Lord of the Rings and The Sil­mar­il­lion), and oth­er rec­og­niz­able char­ac­ters,” as well as that of Tolkien’s draft man­u­scripts that “pro­vide a win­dow into his cre­ative process, as well as the vivid, expan­sive worlds he cre­at­ed.” You can see more of the things Tolkien­ian that will soon come avail­able for pub­lic view­ing at the Mor­gan in the exhi­bi­tion’s trail­er at the top of the post.

“The Lord of the Rings has remained com­i­cal­ly divi­sive,” Lane writes. “It is either adored, with vary­ing degrees of guilt, or robust­ly despised, often by those who have yet to open it.” But after see­ing an exhi­bi­tion like Tolkien: Mak­er of Mid­dle-Earth, even Tolkien’s harsh­est crit­ics may well find them­selves per­suad­ed to acknowl­edge the scale and depth of the books’ achieve­ment, as well as the ded­i­ca­tion and even brav­ery of its cre­ator. As Lane puts it, “The Lord of the Rings may be the final stab at epic, and there is invari­ably some­thing risky, if not down­right ris­i­ble, in a last gasp.” But “Tolkien believed that he could repro­duce the epic form under mod­ern con­di­tions,” the fruit of that belief con­tin­ues to enrap­ture read­ers of all ages more than 60 years lat­er.

If you can’t wait for the exhi­bi­tion, you might want to have a look at Wayne G. Ham­mond and Christi­na Scul­l’s book, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illus­tra­tor. It’s already pub­lished.

via AM New York and Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 18 ) |

Free: Download Thousands of Ottoman-Era Photographs That Have Been Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, History, Photography | January 7th, 2019

“Turkey is a geo­graph­i­cal and cul­tur­al bridge between the east and the west,” writes Istan­bul University’s Gönül Bakay. This was so long before Con­stan­tino­ple became Istan­bul, but after the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the region took on a par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for Chris­t­ian Europe. “The Turk” became a threat­en­ing and exot­ic fig­ure in the Euro­pean imag­i­na­tion, “shaped by a con­sid­er­able body of lit­er­a­ture, stretch­ing from Christo­pher Mar­lowe to Thomas Car­lyle.” Images of Ottoman Turkey were long drawn from a “mix­ture of fact, fan­ta­sy and fear.”

With the advent of pho­tog­ra­phy in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, those images were sup­ple­ment­ed, illus­trat­ed, and coun­tered by prints depict­ing Turk­ish peo­ple both in every­day life cir­cum­stances and in Ori­en­tal­ist pos­es.

In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, as mod­ern­iza­tion took hold all over Europe, view­ers might encounter pho­tos of women in pos­es rem­i­nis­cent of the Odal­isque and street scenes of bustling, cos­mopoli­tan Con­stan­tino­ple, with signs in Ottoman Turk­ish, Eng­lish, French, Armen­ian, and Greek.

Pho­tos of Enver Pasha—de fac­to ruler of the Ottoman Empire dur­ing World War I and “high­est-rank­ing per­pe­tra­tor of the Armen­ian geno­cide,” writes Isot­ta Pog­gi at the Getty’s blog—cir­cu­lat­ed along­side images like that below, a group of Turk­ish tourists posed near the Sphinx. These and thou­sands more such pho­tographs of Ottoman Turkey at the turn of the cen­tu­ry and into the first years of the Turk­ish Repub­lic—3,750 dig­i­tized images in total—are now avail­able to view and down­load at the Get­ty Research Insti­tute.

The pho­tos come from French col­lec­tor Pierre de Gig­ord, who acquired them dur­ing his many trav­els through Turkey in the 1980s. They were tak­en by pho­tog­ra­phers, some of whose names are lost to his­to­ry, from all over Europe and the Mediter­ranean, includ­ing Armen­ian pho­tog­ra­phers who played a “cen­tral role,” notes Pog­gi, “in shap­ing Turkey’s nation­al cul­tur­al his­to­ry and col­lec­tive mem­o­ry.” (Read artist Hande Sever’s Get­ty essay on this sub­ject here.) The huge col­lec­tion con­tains “land­mark archi­tec­ture, urban and nat­ur­al land­scape, arche­o­log­i­cal sites of mil­len­nia-old civ­i­liza­tions, and the bustling life of the diverse peo­ple who lived over 100 years ago.”

Despite the loss of mate­ri­al­i­ty in the trans­fer to dig­i­tal, a loss of “for­mat­ting, or sense of scale” that changes the way we expe­ri­ence these pho­tos, they “enable us to learn about the past,” writes Pog­gi, “see­ing Turkey’s diverse soci­ety” as photography’s ear­ly view­ers did, and to bet­ter under­stand the present, “observ­ing how cer­tain sites and peo­ple, as well as social or polit­i­cal issues, have evolved yet still remain the same.” Enter the Pierre de Gig­ord col­lec­tion at the Get­ty here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic/The Get­ty

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Archive of Mid­dle East­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy Fea­tures 9,000 Dig­i­tized Images

Venice in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images 125 Years Ago: The Rial­to Bridge, St. Mark’s Basil­i­ca, Doge’s Palace & More

Tsarist Rus­sia Comes to Life in Vivid Col­or Pho­tographs Tak­en Cir­ca 1905–1915

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

The Library of Con­gress Makes Thou­sands of Fab­u­lous Pho­tos, Posters & Images Free to Use & Reuse

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Bill Gates, Book Critic, Names His Top 5 Books of 2018

in Books | January 7th, 2019

Before we get too far into 2019, let’s quick­ly recap the five books that made it to the top of Bill Gates’ read­ing list in 2018. Over on his blog, Gates Notes, the Microsoft co-founder offers up these picks. He writes:

Edu­cat­ed, by Tara West­over. Tara nev­er went to school or vis­it­ed a doc­tor until she left home at 17. I nev­er thought I’d relate to a sto­ry about grow­ing up in a Mor­mon sur­vival­ist house­hold, but she’s such a good writer that she got me to reflect on my own life while read­ing about her extreme child­hood. Melin­da and I loved this mem­oir of a young woman whose thirst for learn­ing was so strong that she end­ed up get­ting a Ph.D. from Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. [More here.]

Army of None, by Paul Scharre. Autonomous weapons aren’t exact­ly top of mind for most around the hol­i­days, but this thought-pro­vok­ing look at A.I. in war­fare is hard to put down. It’s an immense­ly com­pli­cat­ed top­ic, but Scharre offers clear expla­na­tions and presents both the pros and cons of machine-dri­ven war­fare. His flu­en­cy with the sub­ject should come as no sur­prise: he’s a vet­er­an who helped draft the U.S. government’s pol­i­cy on autonomous weapons. [More here.]

Bad Blood, by John Car­rey­rou. A bunch of my friends rec­om­mend­ed this one to me. Car­rey­rou gives you the defin­i­tive insider’s look at the rise and fall of Ther­a­nos. The sto­ry is even cra­zier than I expect­ed, and I found myself unable to put it down once I start­ed. This book has every­thing: elab­o­rate scams, cor­po­rate intrigue, mag­a­zine cov­er sto­ries, ruined fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships, and the demise of a com­pa­ny once val­ued at near­ly $10 bil­lion. [More here.]

21 Lessons for the 21st Cen­tu­ry, by Yuval Noah Harari. I’m a big fan of every­thing Harari has writ­ten, and his lat­est is no excep­tion. While Sapi­ens and Homo Deus cov­ered the past and future respec­tive­ly, this one is all about the present. If 2018 has left you over­whelmed by the state of the world, 21 Lessons offers a help­ful frame­work for pro­cess­ing the news and think­ing about the chal­lenges we face. [More here.]

The Head­space Guide to Med­i­ta­tion and Mind­ful­ness, by Andy Pud­di­combe. I’m sure 25-year-old me would scoff at this one, but Melin­da and I have got­ten real­ly into med­i­ta­tion late­ly. The book starts with Puddicombe’s per­son­al jour­ney from a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent to a Bud­dhist monk and then becomes an enter­tain­ing explain­er on how to med­i­tate. If you’re think­ing about try­ing mind­ful­ness, this is the per­fect intro­duc­tion. [More here.]

Find oth­er Gates picks from pre­vi­ous sea­sons in the Relat­eds below.

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:

Bill Gates Names 5 Books You Should Read This Sum­mer

Bill Gates Rec­om­mends Five Books for Sum­mer 2017

5 Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Sum­mer (2016)

Bill Gates, Book Crit­ic, Names His Top 5 Books of 2015

Sum­mer 2014

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How a Word Enters the Dictionary: A Quick Primer

in Books, Creativity, English Language, History, K-12 | January 7th, 2019

Giv­en that you’re read­ing this on the Inter­net, we pre­sume you’ll be able to define many of the over 800 words that were added to the Mer­ri­am-Web­ster dic­tio­nary in 2018:

bio­hack­ing

bougie

binge­able

guac

hangry

Lat­inx

mock­tail

zoo­dles

But what about some of the humdingers lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er Kory Stam­per, for­mer asso­ciate edi­tor for Mer­ri­am-Web­ster and author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dic­tio­nar­ies, unleash­es in the above video?

pre­scrip­tivism

descrip­tivism

sprachge­fühl

ety­mo­log­i­cal fal­li­cist

(Bonus: bird strike)

And here we thought we were flu­ent in our native tongue. Face palm, to use anoth­er newish entry and an exam­ple of descrip­tivism. (It’s when the dic­tio­nary fol­lows the culture’s lead, accord­ing nov­el­ty its due by offi­cial­ly rec­og­niz­ing words that have entered the par­lance, rather than pre­scrib­ing the way cit­i­zens should be speak­ing.)

To hear Stam­per tell it, dic­tio­nary writ­ing is a dream gig for read­ers as well as word lovers.

Part of every day is spent read­ing, flag­ging any unfa­mil­iar words that may pop up for fur­ther research.

Did teenage slang give rise to it?

Was it born of busi­ness trends or tech indus­try advances?

Stam­per is adamant that lan­guage is not fixed, but rather a liv­ing organ­ism. Words go in and out of fash­ion, and take on mean­ings beyond the ones they sport­ed when first includ­ed in the dic­tio­nary. (Have a look at “extra” to see some evo­lu­tion­ary effects of the Eng­lish lan­guage and back it up with a peek inside the Urban Dic­tio­nary.)

Before a word pass­es dic­tio­nary muster, it must meet three cri­te­ria: it must have crossed into wide­spread use, it seems like­ly to stick around for a while, and it must have some sort of sub­stan­tive mean­ing, as opposed to being known sole­ly for its length (“antidis­es­tab­lish­men­tar­i­an­ism”), or some oth­er struc­tur­al won­der.

“Iouea” con­tains all five reg­u­lar vow­els and no oth­er let­ters. The fact that it exists to describe a genus of sea sponges may seem some­what beside the point to all but marine biol­o­gists.

What new words will enter the lex­i­con in 2019?

Per­haps we should look to the past. We set Merriam-Webster’s Time Trav­el­er dial back 100 years to dis­cov­er the words that debuted in 1919. There’s an abun­dance of good­ies here, some of whose WWI-era con­text has already expand­ed to accom­mo­date mod­ern mean­ing (anti-stress, fan­boy, super­pimp, unbuffered). Read­ers, care to take a stab at fresh­en­ing up some oth­er can­di­dates:

apple-knock­er

buck­shee

cape­skin

culti­gen

game­tophore

inter­ro­gee

micromethod

neu­ro­pro­tec­tive

out­gas

pre­re­turn

putsch

sce­nar­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Largest His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Slang Now Free Online: Cov­ers 500 Years of the “Vul­gar Tongue”

“Lynchi­an,” “Kubrick­ian,” “Taran­ti­noesque” and 100+ Film Words Have Been Added to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now 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 Jan­u­ary 14 as host of The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

11,000 Digitized Books From 1923 Are Now Available Online at the Internet Archive

in Archives, Books | January 4th, 2019

Whether your inter­est is in win­ning argu­ments online or con­sid­er­ably deep­en­ing your knowl­edge of world cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry, you will be very well-served by at least one gov­ern­ment agency from now into the fore­see­able future. Thanks to the expi­ra­tion of the so-called “Micky Mouse Pro­tec­tion Act,” the U.S. Copy­right Office will release a year’s worth of art, lit­er­a­ture, schol­ar­ship, pho­tog­ra­phy, film, etc. into the pub­lic domain, start­ing with 1923 this year then mov­ing through the 20th cen­tu­ry each sub­se­quent year.

And thanks to the ven­er­a­ble online insti­tu­tion the Inter­net Archive, we already have almost 11,000 texts from 1923 in mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal for­mats, just a click or two away.

A cur­so­ry sur­vey pro­duced Wm. A. Haussmann’s trans­la­tion of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Arthur Stan­ley Eddington’s The Math­e­mat­i­cal The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty, Wal­do Lincoln’s His­to­ry of the Lin­coln Fam­i­ly, cov­er­ing the President’s ances­tors and descen­dants from 1637 to 1920…

…Lynn Thorndike’s A His­to­ry of Mag­ic and Exper­i­men­tal Sci­ence, Vol­ume I, Chan­dra Chakraberty’s An Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ancient Hin­du Med­i­cine, Edward McCurdy’s trans­la­tions of Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books, Nan­dal Sinha’s trans­la­tion of The Vais­esi­ka Sutras of Kana­da, Win­ston Churchill’s The World Cri­sis, Hen­ry Adams Bel­lows’ trans­la­tion of The Poet­ic Edda, a col­lec­tion of Mussolini’s polit­i­cal speech­es from 1914–1923, and Thom’s Irish Who’s Who, which cat­a­logues “promi­nent men and women in Irish life at home and abroad,” but telling­ly leaves out James Joyce, who had just pub­lished Ulysses, to some infamy, the pre­vi­ous year. (It does include William But­ler Yeats.)

1923 turns out to have been a par­tic­u­lar­ly rich lit­er­ary year itself, with many of the 20th century’s finest writ­ers pub­lish­ing major and less­er-known works (see here and here, for exam­ple). Brows­ing and focused search­ing through the archive—by top­ic, col­lec­tion, cre­ator, and language—will net many a lit­er­ary clas­sic or over­looked gem by some famous author. But you’ll also find much in this enor­mous col­lec­tion of dig­i­tized books that you would nev­er think to look for, like brows­ing the shelves of a Bor­ge­sian uni­ver­si­ty library with an entire wing devot­ed to the year 1923.

The Inter­net Archive home­page looks as mod­est as it does ded­i­cat­ed, list­ing all of its top col­lec­tions rather than fore­ground­ing the huge tranche of new­ly-avail­able mate­r­i­al (and count­ing) on the 1923 shelves. But founder Brew­ster Kahle does not mince words in describ­ing its incred­i­ble impor­tance. “We have short­changed a gen­er­a­tion,” he says, “The 20th cen­tu­ry is large­ly miss­ing from the inter­net” (in legal­ly avail­able form, that is). Now and in the com­ing years, thou­sands of its sto­ries can be told by teach­ers, schol­ars, artists, and film­mak­ers with ever-broad­en­ing access to doc­u­men­tary his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

An Avalanche of Nov­els, Films and Oth­er Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Pub­lic Domain: Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, William Car­los Williams, Buster Keaton & More

The Library of Con­gress Makes Thou­sands of Fab­u­lous Pho­tos, Posters & Images Free to Use & Reuse

The Pub­lic Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch the Painstaking and Nerve-Racking Process of Restoring a Drawing by Michelangelo

in Architecture, Art, Museums | January 4th, 2019

We live in a dis­pos­able cul­ture, but cer­tain things war­rant the time and effort of mend­ing—good shoes, hearts, Michelan­ge­lo draw­ings…

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s paper con­ser­va­tor Mar­jorie Shel­ley, above, had the nerve-wrack­ing task of tack­ling the lat­ter, in prepa­ra­tion for last year’s Michelan­ge­lo: Divine Drafts­man and Design­er exhi­bi­tion.

The work in ques­tion, a two-sided sketch fea­tur­ing designs for a mon­u­men­tal altar or facade, thought to be San Sil­ve­stro in Capite, Rome, arrived in sad con­di­tion.

The 16th-cen­tu­ry linen and flax paper on which the pre­cious ren­der­ings were made was stained with mold, and bad­ly creased due to a poor­ly repaired tear and two long-ago attempts to mount it for eas­i­er view­ing, one by the artist’s blind nephew and anoth­er by col­lec­tor and biog­ra­ph­er Fil­ip­po Bald­in­uc­ci.

Like many restora­tion experts, Shel­ley exhibits extra­or­di­nary patience and nerves of steel. Iden­ti­fy­ing the dam­age and its cause is just the begin­ning. The hands-on por­tion of her work involves intro­duc­ing sol­vents and mois­ture, both of which have the poten­tial to fur­ther dam­age the del­i­cate draw­ing. Even though she choos­es the least inva­sive of tools—a tiny brush—to loosen the 500-year-old adhe­sive, one slip could spell dis­as­ter. It’s not just the draw­ing that’s of his­tor­i­cal import. The well-intend­ed mount­ings are also part of the nar­ra­tive, and must be pre­served as such.

As she explains above, a bedaz­zling Sis­tine Chapel-like makeover was nei­ther pos­si­ble nor prefer­able.

One won­ders how many of the 702,516 vis­i­tors who attend­ed the exhi­bi­tion dur­ing its 3 month run noticed Shelley’s hand­i­work (or even the draw­ing itself, giv­en the large num­ber of oth­er, sex­i­er works on dis­play).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece, The Night Watch, Will Get Restored and You Can Watch It Hap­pen Live, 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 this Jan­u­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The King and the Mockingbird: The Surreal French Animated Film That Took 30 Years to Complete, and Profoundly Influenced Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata

in Animation, Film | January 4th, 2019

Ani­ma­tion, as any­one who has ever tried their hand at it knows, takes a great deal of time. The King and the Mock­ing­bird (Le Roi et l’Oiseau), for exam­ple, required more than thir­ty years, a jour­ney length­ened by much more than just the labo­ri­ous­ness of bring­ing hand-drawn images to life. But it does that glo­ri­ous­ly, with a style and sen­si­bil­i­ty quite unlike any ani­mat­ed film made before or since — a sig­na­ture of its cre­ators, ani­ma­tor Paul Gri­mault and poet/screenwriter Jacques Prévert. Hav­ing already worked togeth­er on 1947’s Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen adap­ta­tion The Lit­tle Sol­dier (Le Petit sol­dat, not to be con­fused with the Godard pic­ture), they chose for their next col­lab­o­ra­tion to ani­mate Ander­sen’s sto­ry “The Shep­herdess and the Chim­ney Sweep.”

“The pompous King Charles, who hates his sub­jects and is equal­ly hat­ed in return, rules over the amus­ing­ly named land of Taki­car­dia,” writes crit­ic Christy Lemire. The most prized item in his art col­lec­tion is “his por­trait of a beau­ti­ful and inno­cent shep­herdess with whom he’s des­per­ate­ly in love. What he doesn’t know is that when he’s asleep, the shep­herdess and the chim­ney sweep in the adja­cent can­vas have been car­ry­ing on a sweet and ten­der affair.” Still King Charles keeps try­ing to win her, or steal her, for him­self, “but the cou­ple gets help thwart­ing him at every turn from the one char­ac­ter in the king­dom who does not wor­ship the monar­chy: the brash and trash-talk­ing Mr. Bird, a bright­ly-feath­ered racon­teur.” The film’s mood “shifts seam­less­ly from imp­ish, sil­ly adven­tures to grotesque and night­mar­ish suf­fer­ing. And then the giant robot arrives.”

This may sound ambi­tious, even for the only ani­mat­ed fea­ture in pro­duc­tion in Europe at the time. Alas, the com­pa­ny took Gri­mault and Prévert’s increas­ing­ly expen­sive project out of their hands after just a cou­ple of years, and in 1952 its pro­duc­er André Sar­rut sim­ply released it unfin­ished. (You can watch the now-pub­lic-domain Amer­i­can ver­sion of the film, dubbed by a cast head­ed by Peter Usti­nov and titled The Curi­ous Adven­tures of Mr. Won­der­bird, just above.) But Gri­mault and Prévert held fast to their vision, the lat­ter revis­ing the script until his death in 1977 and the for­mer, hav­ing won back the rights to the film, assem­bling a team of ani­ma­tors to pro­duce new scenes and cut out some of the old ones. This com­plete ver­sion of The King and the Mock­ing­bird had its French pre­miere in 1979, though it would­n’t reach Amer­i­ca until just a few years ago.

“I’m sure this all sounds famil­iar,” says Youtube ani­ma­tion video essay­ist Stevem in his analy­sis of The King and the Mock­ing­bird as a sur­re­al­ist film. “The pro­duc­tion was too ambi­tious, the com­pa­ny steps in and pulls it back, and in spite of its issues it’s remem­bered as a cult clas­sic, and inspired some of the big names along the way.” Those names include Stu­dio Ghi­b­li founders Hayao Miyaza­ki and Isao Taka­ha­ta. “We were formed by the films and film­mak­ers of the 1950s,” Miyaza­ki once said. “It was through watch­ing Le Roi et l’Oiseau by Paul Gri­mault that I under­stood how it was nec­es­sary to use space in a ver­ti­cal man­ner.” Taka­ha­ta saw Gri­mault as hav­ing “achieved bet­ter than any­one else a union between lit­er­a­ture and ani­ma­tion.”

Though Stu­dio Ghi­b­li’s fil­mog­ra­phy may offer plen­ty of mem­o­rably sur­re­al moments, The King and the Mock­ing­bird occu­pies a plane of ani­mat­ed sur­re­al­ism all its own. Draw­ing com­par­isons to Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), Stevem quotes the line from Andre Bre­ton’s Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo about “the belief in the supe­ri­or real­i­ty of cer­tain forms of pre­vi­ous­ly neglect­ed asso­ci­a­tions, in the omnipo­tence of dream, in the dis­in­ter­est­ed play of thought.” That’s the sort of expe­ri­ence Gri­mault and Prévert’s film, in its fin­ished state, offers, while also, in the words of Vul­ture’s Bilge Ebiri, draw­ing on “Fritz Lang and per­haps the style of Walt Dis­ney from the great era of Snow White. There are inter­est­ing antic­i­pa­to­ry echoes, not just of ani­me, but Roald Dahl and the Vul­gar­ia of Chit­ty Chit­ty Bang Bang.” Just the sort of mix­ture only pos­si­ble — only even imag­in­able — in ani­ma­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Ani­ma­tion Course from a Renowned French Ani­ma­tion School

French Stu­dent Sets Inter­net on Fire with Ani­ma­tion Inspired by Moe­bius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyaza­ki

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

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

Sal­vador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Ani­mat­ed Film, Des­ti­no, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast