Trivial Pursuit: The Shakespeare Edition Has Just Been Released: Answer 600 Questions Based on the Life & Works of William Shakespeare

in History, Literature, Theatre | April 26th, 2019

“The stan­dard thing to say is that each age makes a Shake­speare in its own image,” wrote The New York­er’s Adam Gop­nik on the the Bard’s 440th birth­day. But over the cen­turies, the bio­graph­i­cal and crit­i­cal por­tray­al of the play­wright of Ham­let, Romeo and Juli­et, Oth­el­lo, and King Lear has remained remark­ably con­sis­tent: “He was a genius at com­e­dy, a free-flow­ing nat­ur­al who would do any­thing for a joke or a pun, and whom life and abil­i­ty bent toward tragedy.” He evolved “a match­less all-sid­ed­ness and neg­a­tive capa­bil­i­ty, which could probe two ideas at once and nev­er quite come down on the ‘side’ of either: he was a man in whom a tem­pera­men­tal timid­i­ty and cau­tion blos­somed artis­ti­cal­ly into the near­est thing we have to uni­ver­sal­i­ty.”

But today, on Shake­speare’s 455th birth­day, we might still won­der how uni­ver­sal his work real­ly is. As luck would have it, the Shake­speare Birth­day Trust has just come up with a kind of test of that propo­si­tion: an all-Shake­speare edi­tion of the pop­u­lar board game Triv­ial Pur­suit.

“Devised by the Shake­speare Birth­place Trust, the inde­pen­dent and self-sus­tain­ing char­i­ty that cares for the world’s great­est Shake­speare her­itage sites in his home town of Strat­ford-upon-Avon, in part­ner­ship with games com­pa­ny, Win­ning Moves,” Triv­ial Pur­suit: The Shake­speare Edi­tion (which you can buy on the Shake­speare Birth­day Trust’s online shop) offers “600 ques­tions across six cat­e­gories — Come­dies, His­to­ries, Tragedies, Char­ac­ters, Biog­ra­phy and Lega­cy,” all “care­ful­ly craft­ed by Shake­speare schol­ars Dr Nick Wal­ton and Dr Anj­na Chouhan.”

One might assume that Shake­speare buffs and schol­ars will dom­i­nate this game. No doubt they will, but per­haps not as often as expect­ed, since its ques­tions give any­one with gen­er­al cul­tur­al aware­ness a fight­ing chance: “As well as ques­tions about Shakespeare’s life and works, there are oth­ers that link him to pop­u­lar cul­ture such as the Har­ry Pot­ter film series, TV shows Dr. Who and Upstart Crow, as well as actors Sir Patrick Stew­art, Sir Lau­rence Olivi­er, and Keanu Reeves, and the Bard’s less­er known influ­ence on the likes of Elvis Pres­ley and even the clas­sic car­toon Pop­eye.” As Wal­ton puts it, “there are all sorts of paths to Shake­speare,” not least because of his work’s still-unchal­lenged place as the most drawn-upon texts, delib­er­ate­ly or inad­ver­tent­ly, in the whole of the Eng­lish lan­guage. As for Shake­speare him­self, he remains “the reign­ing poet of the lan­guage,” in Gop­nik’s words, as well as “the ordi­nary poet of our com­pa­ny” — and now we have a game to play to keep him in our com­pa­ny.

Pick up your copy of the game here.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 55 Hours of Shakespeare’s Plays: The Tragedies, Come­dies & His­to­ries Per­formed by Vanes­sa Red­grave, Sir John Giel­gud, Ralph Fiennes & Many More

30 Days of Shake­speare: One Read­ing of the Bard Per Day, by The New York Pub­lic Library, on the 400th Anniver­sary of His Death

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe The­atre

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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David Bowie’s Mystical Appearances in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

in Film | April 25th, 2019

Younger fans might find it hard to believe, but David Bowie was not exact­ly at the height of cool­ness when he first appeared in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in 1992. The overblown Glass Spi­der tour was five years ear­li­er, fol­lowed by a Great­est Hits tour in 1990. He had tried to rein­vent him­self with Tin Machine for two albums. In fact, with Ryko rere­leas­ing his cat­a­log on CD, it looked most­ly like Bowie would spend the rest of his career cash­ing in on nos­tal­gia.

The same crit­i­cisms were hurled at Lynch after the Cannes pre­miere of the Twin Peaks “pre­quel”. Quentin Taran­ti­no, who was at that Cannes pre­miere and heard the col­lec­tive boos from the audi­ence, said “David Lynch had dis­ap­peared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see anoth­er David Lynch movie until I hear some­thing dif­fer­ent.”

But whad­dya know? It turns out that the rest of the ‘90s were very good for both artists. Lynch went on to make some of his best work, and Fire Walk With Me is now con­sid­ered a clas­sic. Bowie wound up work­ing with Eno again on the uncom­pro­mis­ing and dense Out­side.

Now Bowie has only one scene in Fire Walk With Me, but god­damn if it isn’t one of the best in the movie. I dis­tinct­ly remem­ber the chill that shot up my spine just before Bowie’s Philip Jeffries–an FBI field agent who escapes the Black Lodge–makes his crazed appear­ance in Philadel­phia. Like a quan­tum par­ti­cle, he is both there and not there, walk­ing through a freeze frame of Agent Coop­er as the FBI’s secu­ri­ty cam­eras lock up.

“I’m not going to talk about Judy,” he says. “In fact we’re not gonna talk about Judy at all.”
The “Miss­ing Pieces” ver­sion on the FWWM DVD shows the entire scene as it plays out as shot, with Jef­fries break­ing down in pain before being tele­port­ed back to a hotel in Buenos Aires. It’s pret­ty straight­for­ward and a bit clunky.

In the offi­cial FWWM cut, Lynch and his edi­tor Mary Sweeney work some spe­cial Black Lodge alche­my.

“Who do you think that is there?” Jef­fries says, point­ing at Coop as blue sta­t­ic fades in over the scene. Two real­i­ties then vie for pow­er: Jef­fries’ gnom­ic warn­ings ver­sus his visions from a vis­it to the Black Lodge, the space above the con­ve­nience store, where all sorts of spir­its live, lurk, and wait. Ange­lo Badalamenti’s score groans and shrieks and runs back­wards. The scene is dense with clues and men­ace, and once things in the FBI office return to “nor­mal,” Jef­fries is gone.

“We live inside a dream,” Jef­fries had warned, and 25 years lat­er in Twin Peaks: The Return, Coop­er him­self would deliv­er a sim­i­lar line inside anoth­er police sta­tion, as two real­i­ties played over each oth­er, dou­ble-exposed.

David Bowie wouldn’t return to Lynch-world as an actor, but the direc­tor used his Out­side song, “I’m Deranged,” as the open­ing and clos­ing music to 1997’s Lost High­way, a track like that FWWM scene teeters on the brink of mad­ness, filled with cut-and-paste lyrics and Mike Garson’s insane piano runs.

When Lynch announced the return of Twin Peaks, and after the pass­ing of Bowie, fans won­dered if by some mir­a­cle Jef­fries would appear on the screen. Had Lynch man­aged to grab footage of the singer, like he had done for Cather­ine Coul­son, so close to their exit?

Instead, when Evil Coop­er final­ly met Jef­fries again, it was as a machine–fans jok­ing­ly called it a gigan­tic tea kettle–that both spoke in Eng­lish and puffed out numbers/clues in a cloud of steam.

Bowie report­ed­ly nev­er liked his 1992 per­for­mance because of his Louisiana accent, so when Lynch informed Bowie through his lawyer about his character’s return, Bowie asked for it to be redubbed by a real actor from Louisiana: Nathan Frizzell. (It may be authen­tic, but it ain’t no Bowie.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dave: The Best Trib­ute to David Bowie That You’re Going to See

Watch All of the Com­mer­cials That David Lynch Has Direct­ed: A Big 30-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

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

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Listen to Last Seen, a True-Crime Podcast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Million Art Heist

in Art, Podcasts | April 25th, 2019

In the ear­ly morn­ing of March 18, 1990, two thieves entered the Isabel­la Stew­art Gard­ner Muse­um in Boston and stole 13 pieces of pre­cious art, includ­ing paint­ings by Ver­meer and Rem­brandt. To this day, those paint­ings, val­ued at $500 mil­lion dol­lars, have nev­er been recov­ered.

The sto­ry of the bold heist and the var­i­ous attempts to recov­er the paintings–they get told in a 10-part series of pod­casts called Last Seen. Cre­at­ed by WBUR and The Boston Globe, the true-crime pod­cast “takes us inside the ongo­ing effort to bring back the jew­els of the Gard­ner col­lec­tion.” You can lis­ten to the engross­ing episodes online, or via iTunes, Stitch­er and Spo­ti­fy. Or sim­ply stream the episodes below. And if you know any­thing that cracks the case, there’s a $5 mil­lion dol­lar reward.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Episode 8

Episode 9

Episode 10

To delve deep­er, you can also read two books on the mys­tery: Mas­ter Thieves: The Boston Gang­sters Who Pulled Off the World’s Great­est Art Heist and The Gard­ner Heist: The True Sto­ry of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft.

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:

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

Enter an Online Inter­ac­tive Doc­u­men­tary on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Learn About the Painting’s Many Hid­den Secrets

See the Com­plete Works of Ver­meer in Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty: Google Makes Them Avail­able on Your Smart­phone

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Animated Maps Reveal the True Size of Countries (and Show How Traditional Maps Distort Our World)

in Maps | April 25th, 2019

The world maps we know all mis­rep­re­sent the world itself: we’ve all heard it many times before, but how well do we under­stand the nature of that mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion? “For many peo­ple, the Earth as they know it is heav­i­ly informed by the Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion – a tool used for nau­ti­cal nav­i­ga­tion that even­tu­al­ly became the world’s most wide­ly rec­og­nized map,” writes Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist’s Nick Rout­ley. But the Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion dates to 1569, and “the vast major­i­ty of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean any­more, so crit­ics of the Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion argue that the con­tin­ued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of coun­tries.”

Some of the geo­graph­i­cal mis­con­cep­tions Ger­ar­dus Mer­ca­tor inad­ver­tent­ly instilled in human­i­ty to this day include exag­ger­a­tions of the size of Europe and North Amer­i­ca. “Visu­al­ly speak­ing, Cana­da and Rus­sia appear to take up approx­i­mate­ly 25% of the Earth’s sur­face” on a Mer­ca­tor map, “when in real­i­ty they occu­py a mere 5%.”

Fig­ures are one thing, but a fair few 21st cen­tu­ry car­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts have also used tech­nol­o­gy unavail­able and indeed unimag­in­able in Mer­ca­tor’s day to show us in a more imme­di­ate­ly leg­i­ble way exact­ly how his pro­jec­tion dis­torts land mass­es. Recent­ly, a cli­mate data sci­en­tist named Neil Kaye has used the form of the ani­mat­ed GIF to show what hap­pens when coun­tries shrink to their actu­al size on a Mer­ca­tor map, and when Mex­i­co and Green­land trade places.

As soon as Mex­i­co goes north and Green­land goes south, it becomes obvi­ous that both are real­ly of a sim­i­lar size, though we might have assumed the lat­ter to be much larg­er than the for­mer. And in fact, Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion makes all coun­tries far­ther from the equa­tor look larg­er in rela­tion to all coun­tries near­er to the equa­tor. We’ve point­ed out the impos­si­bil­i­ty of mak­ing a per­fect­ly faith­ful two-dimen­sion­al world map before here before on Open Cul­ture, an impos­si­bil­i­ty that has­n’t stopped car­tog­ra­phers from try­ing to come up with more and more accu­rate pro­jec­tions. But even they can’t sub­sti­tute for an acute aware­ness of how even the most pop­u­lar maps can be wrong, an aware­ness you can devel­op even more inten­sive­ly by view­ing the many oth­er car­to­graph­ic cre­ations Kaye has post­ed to the “Map Porn” sub­red­dit — anoth­er tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment Mer­ca­tor sure­ly could­n’t have fore­seen.

via Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Coun­try (and Will Change Your Men­tal Pic­ture of the World)

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

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

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans – Not Land – at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

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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The Ten Greatest Films of All Time According to 358 Filmmakers

in Film | April 25th, 2019

Every ten years, film jour­nal Sight and Sound con­ducts a world­wide sur­vey of film crit­ics to decide which films are con­sid­ered the best ever made. Start­ed in 1952, the poll is now wide­ly regard­ed as the most impor­tant and respect­ed out there.

And the crit­i­cal con­sen­sus for a long time was that the mas­ter­piece Cit­i­zen Kane by Orson Welles is the best of the best. The film topped the list for five decades from 1962 until 2002. Then in 2012, per­haps out of Kane fatigue, Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go mus­cled its way to the top.

That’s what the crit­ics think. But what about the film­mak­ers?

Begin­ning in 1992, Sight and Sound start­ed to poll famed direc­tors about their opin­ions. Peo­ple like Mar­tin Scors­ese, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, Mike Leigh and Michael Mann. So what is the best movie ever made accord­ing to 358 direc­tors polled in 2012? Kane? Ver­ti­go? Per­haps Jean Renoir’s bril­liant Rules of the Game, the only movie to appear in the top ten for all sev­en crit­ics polls? No.

Tokyo_Monogatari_1953

Instead, the top prize goes to Yasu­jiro Ozu’s Tokyo Sto­ry.

It’s a sur­pris­ing, an enlight­ened, choice. Ozu’s work is miles away from the flash of Kane and the psy­cho­sex­u­al weird­ness of Ver­ti­go. Tokyo Sto­ry is a gen­tle, nuanced por­trait of a fam­i­ly whose bonds are slow­ly, inex­orably being frayed by the demands of mod­ern­iza­tion. The movie’s emo­tion­al pow­er is restrained and cumu­la­tive; by the final cred­its you’ll be over­whelmed both with a Bud­dhist sense of the imper­ma­nence of all things and a strong urge to call your moth­er.

But per­haps the rea­son film­mak­ers picked Tokyo Sto­ry of all the oth­er cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­pieces out there is because of Ozu’s unique approach to film. Since the days of D. W. Grif­fith, almost every film­mak­er under the sun, even cin­e­mat­ic rebels like Jean-Luc Godard, fol­lowed some basic con­ven­tions of the form like con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing, the 180-degree rule and match­ing eye­lines. Ozu dis­card­ed all of that. Instead, he con­struct­ed a high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage revolv­ing around match cuts and rig­or­ous­ly com­posed shots. His film form was rad­i­cal but his sto­ries were uni­ver­sal. That is the para­dox of Ozu. You can see the trail­er of the movie above.

Cit­i­zen Kane does make num­ber two on the list but the film is tied with anoth­er for­mal­ly rig­or­ous mas­ter­piece – Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Next on the list is per­haps the best movie ever about mak­ing a movie – Fed­eri­co Fellini’s 8 ½. And Ozu’s film might be num­ber one, but Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la is the only film­mak­er to have two movies on the list – The God­fa­ther and Apoc­a­lypse Now. And that’s no mean feat.

You can see the full list below:

1. Tokyo Sto­ry — Yasu­jiro Ozu (1953)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Stan­ley Kubrick (1968)
3. Cit­i­zen Kane – Orson Welles (1941)
4. 8 ½ — Fed­eri­co Felli­ni (1963)
5. Taxi Dri­ver – Mar­tin Scors­ese (1976)
6. Apoc­a­lypse Now – Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1979)
7. The God­fa­ther – Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1972)
8. Ver­ti­go – Alfred Hitch­cock (1958)
9. Mir­ror – Andrei Tarkovsky (1974)
10. Bicy­cle Thieves – Vit­to­rio De Sica (1949)

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

What Makes Yasu­jirō Ozu a Great Film­mak­er? New Video Essay Explains His Long-Admired Cin­e­mat­ic Style

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

60 Free Film Noir Movies

The Top 100 Amer­i­can Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 62 Inter­na­tion­al Film Crit­ics

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

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. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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An Animated Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft and How He Invented a New Gothic Horror

in Literature | April 24th, 2019

Howard Phillips Love­craft died in obscu­ri­ty at the age of 46, but he left behind a body of work for­mi­da­ble enough that even today’s read­ers approach it only with great trep­i­da­tion. They do so not so much because of its size, though Love­craft did man­age to write a fair bit, but because of what it dares to con­tem­plate — or rather, because of its deep roots in the things mere humans dare not con­tem­plate. Born in 1890, Love­craft grew up on hor­ror of the Goth­ic vari­ety. But by the time he began writ­ing his own in the year 1919, “World War I had cast a long shad­ow over the arts. Peo­ple had seen real hor­rors, and were no longer fright­ened of fan­tas­ti­cal folk­lore. Love­craft sought to invent a new kind of ter­ror, one that respond­ed to the rapid sci­en­tif­ic progress of the era.”

Those words come from the TED-Ed les­son above, “Titan of Ter­ror: the Dark Imag­i­na­tion of H.P. Love­craft.” Writ­ten and nar­rat­ed by Sil­via Moreno-Gar­cía, a writer of sci­ence fic­tion and edi­tor of sev­er­al books on Love­craft’s work, the video offers a four-minute primer on how this “weird fic­tion” per­ma­nent­ly upped the ante for all writ­ers who sought to instill fear and dread into the hearts of their read­ers.

“Like then-recent dis­cov­er­ies of sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles or X‑rays,” Moreno-Gar­cía says, “the forces in Love­craft’s fic­tion were pow­er­ful, yet often invis­i­ble and inde­scrib­able. Rather than rec­og­niz­able mon­sters, graph­ic vio­lence, or star­tling shocks, the ter­ror or ‘Love­craft­ian’ hor­ror lies in what’s not direct­ly por­trayed — but instead left to the dark depths of our imag­i­na­tion.”

Hence the cast of unspeak­able “dark mas­ters” beneath the placid New Eng­land sur­face of Love­craft’s sto­ries. Yog-Sothoth, “who froths as pri­mal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nether­most out­posts of space and time”; “the blind, idiot god Aza­thoth, whose destruc­tive impuls­es are stalled only by the ‘mad­den­ing beat­ing of vile drums and the thin monot­o­nous whine of accursed flutes’ ”; and of course Love­craft’s “infa­mous blend of drag­on and octo­pus, Cthul­hu”: even those who have nev­er read Love­craft may well have heard of them. And as any­one who has read Love­craft knows, we who have only heard of them, these beings “who exist beyond our con­cep­tions of real­i­ty, their true forms as inscrutable as their motives,” should count them­selves lucky — far luck­i­er, cer­tain­ly, than the humans Love­craft puts face-to-face with them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

H.P. Love­craft High­lights the 20 “Types of Mis­takes” Young Writ­ers Make

H.P. Love­craft Writes “Waste Paper: A Poem of Pro­found Insignif­i­cance,” a Dev­as­tat­ing Par­o­dy of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1923)

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

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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A Short Animated Film Explores the Fluidity of Gender in the Thought of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler

in Gender, Philosophy | April 24th, 2019

In hind­sight, it seems like a very dif­fer­ent world when I first read Judith Butler’s Gen­der Trou­ble in col­lege in the 90s. (Mash togeth­er all your stereo­types about col­lege cam­pus­es in the 90s and you’ve pret­ty much got the pic­ture.) For one thing, colum­nists in major nation­al news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines weren’t writ­ing con­tro­ver­sial, or sim­ply explana­to­ry, arti­cles about gen­der flu­id­i­ty. The con­cept did not exist in the main­stream press. It seemed both hip and rar­i­fied, con­fined to the­o­ry dis­cus­sion groups, aca­d­e­m­ic sem­i­nars, and punk zines.

As rad­i­cal as Butler’s ideas about gen­der seemed, she acknowl­edged that she did not orig­i­nate the cri­tique. She found it first artic­u­lat­ed in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Sec­ond Sex, in which the French exis­ten­tial­ist fem­i­nist wrote, “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.”

In the short film above, Devenir (To Become), by French film­mak­er Géral­dine Char­p­en­tier-Basille, But­ler describes her reac­tion to read­ing the pas­sage. “I wrote some­thing about this prob­lem of becom­ing. And I want­ed to know: does one ever become one? Or is that to be a woman is a mode of becom­ing… that has no goal…. You could say the same of gen­der more gen­er­al­ly.”

As the images illus­trat­ing this extract from a 2006 inter­view with But­ler show, the goal­posts of fem­i­nine and mas­cu­line iden­ti­ties move all the time, from year to year, from cul­ture to cul­ture. Gen­der is a pas­tiche of rep­re­sen­ta­tions we inhab­it. It is pro­duced, per­for­ma­tive, But­ler thought, but we can nev­er get it “right” because there is no true ref­er­ent. The idea descends from the exis­ten­tial­ist insights of de Beau­voir, who wrote about and dra­ma­tized sim­i­lar prob­lems of the per­son­al and social self.

De Beau­voir extend­ed Sartre’s claim that “exis­tence pre­cedes essence” in her pio­neer­ing fem­i­nist work—we come into the world, then acquire iden­ti­ties through accul­tur­a­tion, social con­di­tion­ing, and coer­cion. But­ler extend­ed the argu­ment fur­ther. “For her, writes Aeon’s Will Frak­er, “gen­der wasn’t pre­de­ter­mined by nature or biol­o­gy, nor was it sim­ply ‘made up’ by cul­ture. Rather, But­ler insist­ed that gen­der resides in repeat­ed words and actions, words and actions that both shape and are shaped by the bod­ies of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. And cru­cial­ly, such rep­e­ti­tions are rarely per­formed freely.”

From our ear­li­est years, we are trained how to behave as a gen­der, just as we are taught to per­form oth­er identities—trained by the expec­ta­tions of par­ents, teach­ers, reli­gious lead­ers, adver­tis­ers, and the bul­ly­ing and social pres­sure of our peers. Hear But­ler explain fur­ther how gen­der, in her the­o­ry, func­tions as “a phe­nom­e­non that is pro­duced and is being repro­duced all the time…. Nobody real­ly is a gen­der from the start. I know it’s con­tro­ver­sial,” she says. “But that’s my claim.” It is one that pos­es com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions more broad­ly, notes Aeon, about “the pur­suit of the ‘authen­tic’ self” as a mean­ing­ful idea—questions West­ern philoso­phers have been ask­ing for well over half a cen­tu­ry.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The­o­rist Judith But­ler Explains How Behav­ior Cre­ates Gen­der: A Short Intro­duc­tion to “Gen­der Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty”

Judy!: 1993 Judith But­ler Fanzine Gives Us An Irrev­er­ent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Struc­tural­ist Gen­der The­o­rist

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

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

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Stream Free Online 200 Films from Tribeca Film Festivals

in Film | April 24th, 2019

FYI: The Tribeca Film Fes­ti­val is get­ting under­way today. And to mark the occa­sion, Kanopy is show­cas­ing a line­up of 200 titles from past fes­ti­vals and let­ting you stream them free online. Kanopy writes:

Kanopy’s selec­tion of Tribeca Film Fes­ti­val titles includes recent fes­ti­val favorites The Lovers, star­ring Debra Winger (An Offi­cer and a Gen­tle­man) & Tra­cy Letts (Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf?), and Back Roads star­ring Alex Pet­tyfer (Storm­break­er) and  Jen­nifer Mor­ri­son (House). A selec­tion of dynam­ic doc­u­men­taries such as Dior and I and Plan­et of Snail is avail­able along­side films with unfor­get­table female per­for­mances includ­ing Woman Walks Ahead, star­ring Jes­si­ca Chas­tain (Zero Dark Thir­ty) and Oscar-award win­ning short film The Phone Call, star­ring Sal­ly Hawkins (The Shape of Water). Sev­er­al Tribeca-win­ning films includ­ing the 2015 Best Direc­tor win­ner About Elly and the 2017 Audi­ence Award for Best Nar­ra­tive Film, The Divine Order are also avail­able.

You can find a com­plete list of Tribeca films here. As you may know, Kanopy offers a large col­lec­tion of award-win­ning films and doc­u­men­taries that are free to mem­bers of par­tic­i­pat­ing libraries. To see if your library is a par­tic­i­pat­ing mem­ber, vis­it this page on the Kanopy web­site.

Beyond the 200 films fea­tured in the Tribeca col­lec­tion, there are cur­rent­ly 30,000 films on the Kanopy ser­vice. Enjoy the shows.

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.

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