Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Is “the Greatest Acting Achievement Ever Committed to the Screen”: A Video Essay

in Television | September 28th, 2020

The ongo­ing “gold­en age” of pres­tige tele­vi­sion dra­ma began more than twen­ty years ago, but how many shows have tru­ly sur­passed The Sopra­nos, the one that start­ed it all? How­ev­er many series come and go, rais­ing large and often obses­sive fan bases with their vary­ing mix­tures of crime, his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, sci­ence fic­tion, fan­ta­sy, and intrigue, none have shown the cul­tur­al stay­ing pow­er of this six-sea­son tale of a mob boss in turn-of-the-21st-cen­tu­ry New Jer­sey. That The Sopra­nos remains rel­e­vant owes in part to the vision of cre­ator David Chase as well as to the tour de force per­for­mance of star James Gan­dolfi­ni.

Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, has stronger words of appro­ba­tion: Gan­dolfini’s is “prob­a­bly the great­est act­ing achieve­ment ever com­mit­ted to the screen, small or big.” In the video essay “How James Gan­dolfi­ni Nav­i­gates Emo­tion” he mar­shals in sup­port of this claim just one scene, but a scene that fea­tures Gan­dolfi­ni at the height of his dra­mat­ic pow­ers.

Tak­en from the fifth-sea­son episode “Uniden­ti­fied Black Males,” orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2004 (and co-writ­ten by Matthew Wein­er, lat­er to cre­ate the pres­tige-TV fran­chise Mad Men), this selec­tion takes place in the office of Tony’s psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Jen­nifer Melfi, played by Lor­raine Brac­co. (When The Sopra­nos debuted, two months before the pre­miere of Harold Ramis’ Ana­lyze This, a mob­ster in ther­a­py was very much a nov­el idea.)

“Tony Sopra­no is going to have a pan­ic attack in this ther­a­py ses­sion,” says Puschak, and “the way James Gan­dolfi­ni builds to that attack” demon­strates “how he car­ries us with him through a com­plex sequence of emo­tions.” Here Gan­dolfi­ni ris­es to the for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of lying con­vinc­ing­ly: not con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that Dr. Melfi believes him, but con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that we believe the grap­ple with con­flict­ing truths and untruths that char­ac­ter­izes Tony’s life. Tony must pin his recent spate of pan­ic attacks on some­thing oth­er than his cousin Tony B, who com­mit­ted a hit he should­n’t have. That Tony does­n’t quite believe his own words Gan­dolfi­ni trans­mits with “his tone, his eyes, and the tilt of his head.” He uses the musi­cal­i­ty of Tony’s speech, “some com­bi­na­tion of left­over Ital­ian rhythms and a New York-inflect­ed North Jer­sey accent,” to build to “larg­er and larg­er crescen­does.”

As it fore­shad­ows the approach­ing emo­tion­al tur­moil, his “rhyth­mic anger, like waves crash­ing on the shore, is hyp­not­ic, draw­ing you deep­er into his men­tal and emo­tion­al space with each new cycle.” Tony then dou­bles down on his lie, try­ing to cov­er for his cousin by invent­ing on the spot a sto­ry about hav­ing been beat­en up by a gang of shoe thieves in 1986. Only lat­er in the scene does the truth come out, or at least par­tial­ly leak out, even as Gan­dolfi­ni por­trays Tony strug­gling to fight back the pan­ic attack that has emerged as a result of telling these sto­ries. For all the tech­nique it show­cas­es, the scene ends in a clas­si­cal­ly dra­mat­ic fash­ion, with a kind of cathar­sis — which, if you know The Sopra­nos, you know is hard­ly the word Tony has for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopra­nos

David Chase Reveals the Philo­soph­i­cal Mean­ing of The Sopra­no’s Final Scene

James Gan­dolfi­ni Reads from Mau­rice Sendak’s Children’s Sto­ry In The Night Kitchen

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopra­nos with the Talk­ing Sopra­nos Pod­cast, Host­ed by Michael Impe­ri­oli & Steve Schirri­pa

How Humphrey Bog­a­rt Became an Icon: A Video Essay

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Discovered: The User Manual for the Oldest Surviving Computer in the World

in Computer Science | September 28th, 2020

Image by Clemens Pfeif­fer via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The first com­put­er I ever sat before, the 1983 Apple IIe, had a man­u­al the size of a text­book, which includ­ed a primer on pro­gram­ming lan­guages and a chap­ter enti­tled “Get­ting Down to Busi­ness and Plea­sure.” By “plea­sure,” Apple most­ly meant “elec­tron­ic work­sheets,” “word proces­sors,” and “data­base man­age­ment.” (They hadn’t ful­ly estab­lished them­selves as the fun one yet.) Get­ting these pro­grams run­ning took real effort and patience, espe­cial­ly com­pared to the Mac­Book Air on which I’m typ­ing now.

All those old tedious process­es are auto­mat­ed, and no more do we need manuals—we’ve got the inter­net, which also hap­pens to be the only way I could oper­ate an Apple IIe, whether that means track­ing down a man­u­al on eBay or find­ing a scanned copy some­where online. Luck­i­ly, for vin­tage Apple enthu­si­asts, this isn’t dif­fi­cult, and some­one with rudi­men­ta­ry knowl­edge of Apple DOS could mud­dle through with­out one.

When we go fur­ther back into com­put­er his­to­ry, we find machines that became incom­pre­hen­si­ble over time with­out their oper­at­ing instruc­tions. Such was the case with the Zuse Z4, “con­sid­ered the old­est pre­served dig­i­tal com­put­er in the world,” notes Vice. “The Z4 is one of those machines that takes up a whole room, runs on mag­net­ic tapes, and needs mul­ti­ple peo­ple to oper­ate. Today it sits in the Deutsches Muse­um in Munich, unused. Until now, his­to­ri­ans and cura­tors only had a lim­it­ed knowl­edge of its secrets because the man­u­al was lost long ago.”

The computer’s inven­tor, Kon­rad Zuse, first began build­ing it for the Nazis in 1942, then refused its use in the VI and V2 rock­et pro­gram. Instead, he fled to a small town in Bavaria and stowed the com­put­er in a barn until the end of the war. It wouldn’t see oper­a­tion until 1950. The Z4 proved to be “a very reli­able and impres­sive com­put­er for its time,” Sarah Felice writes. “With its large instruc­tion set it was able to cal­cu­late com­pli­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic pro­grams and was able to work dur­ing the night with­out super­vi­sion, which was unheard of for this time.”

These qual­i­ties made the Zuse Z4 par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful to the Insti­tute of Applied Math­e­mat­ics at the Swiss Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (ETH), where the com­put­er per­formed advanced cal­cu­la­tions for Swiss engi­neers in the ear­ly 50s. “Around 100 jobs were car­ried out with the Z4 between 1950 and 1955,” writes Her­bert Brud­er­er, retired ETH lec­tur­er. “These includ­ed cal­cu­la­tions on the tra­jec­to­ry of rock­ets… on air­craft wings…” and “on flut­ter vibra­tions,” an oper­a­tion requir­ing “800 hours machine time.”

René Boesch, one of the air­plane researchers work­ing on the Z4 in the 50s kept a copy of the man­u­al among his papers, and it was there that his daugh­ter, Eve­lyn Boesch, also an ETH researcher, dis­cov­ered it. (View it online here.) Brud­er­er tells the full sto­ry of the computer’s devel­op­ment, oper­a­tion, and the redis­cov­ery of its only known copy of oper­at­ing instruc­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the First Record­ing of Com­put­er Gen­er­at­ed Music: Researchers Restore Music Pro­grammed on Alan Turing’s Com­put­er (1951)

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

The First Piz­za Ordered by Com­put­er, 1974

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

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The Beastie Boys’ Final Concert Streaming Free Online This Weekend

in Music | September 26th, 2020

Until Mon­day, the Beast­ie Boys’ final concert–captured at Bon­na­roo on June 12, 2009–will stream free on YouTube. (Watch it above.) Just five weeks after the show, Adam “MCA” Yauch would announce that he had been diag­nosed with sali­vary gland can­cer. Orig­i­nal­ly opti­mistic, Yauch said “I just need to take a lit­tle time to get this in check, and then we’ll release the record and play some shows.” “It’s a pain in the neck (sor­ry had to say it) because I was real­ly look­ing for­ward to play­ing these shows, but the doc­tors have made it clear that this is not the kind of thing that can be put aside to deal with lat­er.” Sad­ly, the can­cer proved aggres­sive and took MCA’s life in May, 2012, leav­ing the show above as the Beast­ie Boys’ final live doc­u­ment. Find the setlist for the final show 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:

Watch 36 Beast­ie Boys Videos Now Remas­tered in HD

The Beast­ie Boys Release a New Free­wheel­ing Mem­oir, and a Star-Stud­ded 13-Hour Audio­book Fea­tur­ing Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costel­lo, Bette Midler, John Stew­art & Dozens More

The Beast­ie Boys & Rick Rubin Reunite and Revis­it Their For­ma­tive Time Togeth­er in 1980s NYC

Look How Young They Are!: The Beast­ie Boys Per­form­ing Live Their Very First Hit, “Cooky Puss” (1983)

 

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Frida Kahlo’s Venomous Love Letter to Diego Rivera: “I’m Amputating You. Be Happy and Never Seek Me Again”

in Art, Letters, Life | September 25th, 2020

Painter Diego Rivera set the bar awful­ly high for oth­er lovers when he—allegedly—ate a hand­ful of his ex-wife Fri­da Kahlo’s cre­mains, fresh from the oven.

Per­haps he was hedg­ing his bets. The Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment opt­ed not to hon­or his express wish that their ash­es should be co-min­gled upon his death. Kahlo’s remains were placed in Mex­i­co City’s Rotun­da of Illus­tri­ous Men, and have since been trans­ferred to their home, now the Museo Fri­da Kahlo.

Rivera lies in the Pan­teón Civ­il de Dolores.

Oth­er cre­ative expres­sions of the grief that dogged him til his own death, three years lat­er:

His final paint­ing, The Water­mel­ons, a very Mex­i­can sub­ject that’s also a trib­ute to Kahlo’s last work, Viva La Vida…

And a locked bath­room in which he decreed 6,000 pho­tographs, 300 of Kahlo’s gar­ments and per­son­al items, and 12,000 doc­u­ments were to be housed until 15 years after his death.

Among the many rev­e­la­tions when this cham­ber was belat­ed­ly unsealed in 2004, her cloth­ing caused the biggest stir, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ways in which the col­or­ful gar­ments were adapt­ed to and informed by her phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties.

Her pros­thet­ic leg, shod in an eye-catch­ing red boot was giv­en a place of hon­or in an exhib­it at the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um.,

These trea­sures might have come to light ear­li­er save for a judg­ment call on the part of Dolores Olme­do, Rivera’s patron, for­mer mod­el, and friend. Dur­ing ren­o­va­tions to turn the couple’s home into a muse­um, she had a peek and decid­ed the lip­stick-imprint­ed love let­ters from some famous men Fri­da had bed­ded could dam­age Rivera’s rep­u­ta­tion.

In what way, it’s dif­fi­cult to parse.

The couple’s his­to­ry of extra­mar­i­tal rela­tions (includ­ing Rivera’s dal­liance with Kahlo’s sis­ter, Christi­na) weren’t exact­ly secret, and both of the play­ers had left the build­ing.

One thing that’s tak­en for grant­ed is Kahlo’s pas­sion for Rivera, whom she met as girl of 15. Tempt­ing as it might be to view the rela­tion­ship with 2020 gog­gles, it would be a dis­ser­vice to Kahlo’s sense of her own nar­ra­tive. Self-exam­i­na­tion was cen­tral to her work. She was char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly avid in let­ters and diary entries, detail­ing her phys­i­cal attrac­tion to every aspect of Rivera’s body, includ­ing his giant bel­ly “drawn tight and smooth as a sphere.” Dit­to her obses­sion with his many con­quests.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, she was capa­ble of pen­ning a pret­ty spicy love let­ter her­self, and the major­i­ty were aimed at her hus­band:

Noth­ing com­pares to your hands, noth­ing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mir­ror of the night. the vio­lent flash of light­ning. The damp­ness of the earth. The hol­low of your armpits is my shel­ter. my fin­gers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-foun­tain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

Her most noto­ri­ous love let­ter does not appear to be one at first.

Bedrid­den, and fac­ing the ampu­ta­tion of a gan­grenous right leg that had already sac­ri­ficed some toes 20 years ear­li­er, she direct­ed the full force of her emo­tions at Rivera.

The lover she’d ten­der­ly pegged as “a boy frog stand­ing on his hind legs” now appeared to her an “ugly son of a bitch,” mad­den­ing­ly pos­sessed of the pow­er to seduce women (as he had seduced her).

You have to read all the way to the twist:

Mex­i­co,
1953

My dear Mr. Diego,

I’m writ­ing this let­ter from a hos­pi­tal room before I am admit­ted into the oper­at­ing the­atre. They want me to hur­ry, but I am deter­mined to fin­ish writ­ing first, as I don’t want to leave any­thing unfin­ished. Espe­cial­ly now that I know what they are up to. They want to hurt my pride by cut­ting a leg off. When they told me it would be nec­es­sary to ampu­tate, the news didn’t affect me the way every­body expect­ed. No, I was already a maimed woman when I lost you, again, for the umpteenth time maybe, and still I sur­vived.

I am not afraid of pain and you know it. It is almost inher­ent to my being, although I con­fess that I suf­fered, and a great deal, when you cheat­ed on me, every time you did it, not just with my sis­ter but with so many oth­er women. How did they let them­selves be fooled by you? You believe I was furi­ous about Cristi­na, but today I con­fess that it wasn’t because of her. It was because of me and you. First of all because of me, since I’ve nev­er been able to under­stand what you looked and look for, what they give you that I couldn’t. Let’s not fool our­selves, Diego, I gave you every­thing that is human­ly pos­si­ble to offer and we both know that. But still, how the hell do you man­age to seduce so many women when you’re such an ugly son of a bitch?

The rea­son why I’m writ­ing is not to accuse you of any­thing more than we’ve already accused each oth­er of in this and how­ev­er many more bloody lives. It’s because I’m hav­ing a leg cut off (damned thing, it got what it want­ed in the end). I told you I’ve count­ed myself as incom­plete for a long time, but why the fuck does every­body else need to know about it too? Now my frag­men­ta­tion will be obvi­ous for every­one to see, for you to see… That’s why I’m telling you before you hear it on the grapevine. For­give my not going to your house to say this in per­son, but giv­en the cir­cum­stances and my con­di­tion, I’m not allowed to leave the room, not even to use the bath­room. It’s not my inten­tion to make you or any­one else feel pity, and I don’t want you to feel guilty. I’m writ­ing to let you know I’m releas­ing you, I’m ampu­tat­ing you. Be hap­py and nev­er seek me again. I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want you to hear from me. If there is any­thing I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not hav­ing to see your fuck­ing hor­ri­ble bas­tard face wan­der­ing around my gar­den.

That is all, I can now go to be chopped up in peace.

Good bye from some­body who is crazy and vehe­ment­ly in love with you,

Your Fri­da

This is a love let­ter mas­querad­ing as a doozy of a break up let­ter. The ref­er­ences to ampu­ta­tion are both lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal:

No doubt, she was sin­cere, but this cou­ple, rather than hold­ing them­selves account­able, excelled at rever­sals. In the end the letter’s threat proved idle. Short­ly before her death,  the two appeared togeth­er in pub­lic, at a demon­stra­tion to protest the C.I.A.’s efforts to over­throw the left­ist Guatemalan regime.

Image via Brook­lyn Muse­um

Once Fri­da was safe­ly laid to rest, by which we mean rumored to have sat bolt upright as her cas­ket was slid into the incer­a­tor, Rivera mused in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy:

Too late now I real­ized the most won­der­ful part of my life had been my love for Fri­da. But I could not real­ly say that giv­en “anoth­er chance” I would have behaved toward her any dif­fer­ent­ly than I had. Every man is the prod­uct of the social atmos­phere in which he grows up and I am what I am…I had nev­er had any morals at all and had lived only for plea­sure where I found it. I was not good. I could dis­cern oth­er peo­ple’s weak­ness­es eas­i­ly, espe­cial­ly men’s, and then I would play upon them for no worth­while rea­son. If I loved a woman, the more I want­ed to hurt her. Fri­da was only the most obvi­ous vic­tim of this dis­gust­ing trait.

via Let­ters of Note and the book, Let­ters of Note: Love.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Fri­da Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

What the Icon­ic Paint­ing, “The Two Fridas,” Actu­al­ly Tells Us About Fri­da Kahlo

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

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

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Understanding Chris Marker’s Radical Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Distributed to High Schools in the 1970s

in Education, Film | September 25th, 2020

Pop quiz, hot shot. World War III has dev­as­tat­ed civ­i­liza­tion. As a pris­on­er of sur­vivors liv­ing beneath the ruins of Paris, you’re made to go trav­el back in time, to the era of your own child­hood, in order to secure aid for the present from the past. What do you do? You prob­a­bly nev­er faced this ques­tion in school — unless you were in one of the class­rooms of the 1970s that received the study guide for Chris Mark­er’s La Jetée. Like the inno­v­a­tive 1962 sci­ence-fic­tion short itself, this edu­ca­tion­al pam­phlet was dis­trib­uted (and recent­ly tweet­ed out again) by Janus Films, the com­pa­ny that first brought to Amer­i­can audi­ences the work of auteurs like Ing­mar Bergman, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa.

Writ­ten by Con­necti­cut prep-school teacher Tom Andrews, this study guide describes La Jetée as “a bril­liant mix­ture of fan­ta­sy and pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic romance” that “explores new dra­mat­ic ter­ri­to­ry and forms, and rush­es with a stun­ning log­ic and a pow­er­ful impact to its shock­ing cli­max.”

The film does all this “almost entire­ly in still pho­tographs, their sta­t­ic state cor­re­spond­ing to the strat­i­fi­ca­tion of mem­o­ry.” More prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, at “twen­ty-sev­en min­utes in length, La Jetée is an ide­al class-peri­od vehi­cle” that “can help stu­dents spec­u­late on the awe­some poten­tial of life as it may exist after a third world war” as well as “man’s inhu­man­i­ty to man, not only as it may occur in the future, but as it already has occurred in our past.”

“Why do you sup­pose Mark­er filmed La Jetée in still pho­tographs? What sig­nif­i­cance does the one moment of live action have?” “How does Mark­er’s con­cept of time and space com­pare with that of H.G. Wells in the lat­ter’s nov­el, The Time Machine?” “If the man of this sto­ry has helped his cap­tors to per­fect the tech­nique of time trav­el, why do they wish to liq­ui­date him?” These and oth­er sug­gest­ed dis­cus­sion ques­tions appear at the end of the study guide, all of whose pages you can read at Socks. It was pro­duced for Films for Now and The Human Con­di­tion, “two reper­to­ries for high school assem­blies and group dis­cus­sions” based on Janus’ for­mi­da­ble cin­e­ma library. (François Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows also looks to have been among their edu­ca­tion­al offer­ings.) You can see fur­ther analy­sis of La Jetée in A.O. Scot­t’s New York Times Crit­ics’ Picks video, as well as the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion video essay Echo Cham­ber: Lis­ten­ing to La Jetée.

Much lat­er, in the mid-1990s, Ter­ry Gilliam would pay trib­ute with his Hol­ly­wood homage 12 Mon­keys, and Mark­er him­self still had many films to make, includ­ing his sec­ond mas­ter­piece, the equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al Sans Soleil. But at time of this study guide’s pub­li­ca­tion, La Jetée’s con­sid­er­able influ­ence had only just begun to man­i­fest. It was around then that pio­neer­ing cyber­punk nov­el­ist William Gib­son viewed the film in col­lege. “I left the lec­ture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, pro­found­ly alone,” he lat­er remem­bered. “My sense of what sci­ence fic­tion could be had been per­ma­nent­ly altered.” Per­haps his instruc­tor heed­ed Andrews’ advice that “teach­ers would prob­a­bly do bet­ter not to ‘pre­pare’ their stu­dents for view­ing this film.” Not that any­one, in the 58 years of the film’s exis­tence, has any­one ever tru­ly been pre­pared for their first view­ing of La Jetée.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci­Fi Film, La Jetée, Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet, William Gib­son

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Studio Ghibli Puts Online 400 Images from Eight Classic Films, and Lets You Download Them for Free

in Animation, Art | September 24th, 2020

Japan’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li has long been pro­tec­tive of their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, with Hayao Miyaza­ki and his team over­see­ing how their char­ac­ters are mer­chan­dized, as well as care­ful­ly mak­ing sure for­eign dis­tri­b­u­tion of their films stay faith­ful to the orig­i­nal. (Miyaza­ki famous­ly–although apoc­ryphal­ly–sent Miramax’s Har­vey Wein­stein a katana sword along with a note read­ing “No Cuts,” because the mogul and all-around bad per­son was noto­ri­ous for recut­ting Asian films for west­ern audi­ences).

It’s not that you can’t get tons of Ghi­b­li mer­chan­dise—there’s a Totoro beer if you’re inter­est­ed—it’s that Stu­dio Ghi­b­li likes con­trol. Which makes this huge hi-res image dump from the stu­dio a sur­pris­ing gift. Ear­li­er this year they released a series of back­grounds to spice up your Zoom meet­ings. And now they’ve just released 400 images from eight of their films, with plen­ty more to come.

You can do what you want with these 1920x1080 jpgs, with one caveat from pro­duc­er Toshi Suzu­ki: “Please use them freely with­in the scope of com­mon sense.”

The stu­dio is not releas­ing all their clas­sics in one go, how­ev­er. Among the famous Spir­it­ed Away and Ponyo, there’s art from films that bare­ly got screen­ings in the States: Tales from Earth­sea (2006), From Up on Pop­py Hill (2011), and When Marnie Was There (2014).

Look, they can’t all be Totoros, and Stu­dio Ghi­b­li has deliv­ered plen­ty of sweet roman­tic dra­mas along with its more fan­tas­tic films. If you are curi­ous, Net­flix and HBO­Max are stream­ing pret­ty much the whole cat­a­log.

Which is a sur­prise, as Miyaza­ki has long banned Ghibli’s films from stream­ing. As Suzu­ki told reporters in a March announce­ment:

“First of all, Hayao Miyaza­ki doesn’t know exact­ly what video stream­ing ser­vices like Net­flix are. He doesn’t use per­son­al com­put­ers, he doesn’t use smart­phones. So when you men­tion dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion to him, he just doesn’t get it.”

He added:

“Hayao Miyaza­ki is cur­rent­ly mak­ing a movie but it’s tak­ing a real­ly long time. When that hap­pens, it’s only nat­ur­al that it will require a lot of mon­ey too. I told him this can cov­er the pro­duc­tion costs for that movie. When I said that, he said “Well, there’s noth­ing I can do then.”

As long as we enjoy the films “with­in the scope of com­mon sense,” I hope Miyaza­ki will have noth­ing to wor­ry about. Enter the image archive here.

via Nerdist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Tour Inside the Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Muse­um

For the First Time, Stu­dio Ghibli’s Entire Cat­a­log Will Soon Be Avail­able for Dig­i­tal Pur­chase

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

in Literature, Philosophy | September 24th, 2020

“Voltaire’s goal in writ­ing [his 1759 satire Can­dide] was to destroy the opti­mism of his times,” says Alain de Bot­ton in the School of Life video above, “an opti­mism that cen­tered around sci­ence, love, tech­ni­cal progress, and a faith in rea­son.” These beliefs were fol­ly, Voltaire thought: the trans­fer of faith from a prov­i­den­tial God to a per­fect, clock­work uni­verse. Can­dide sat­i­rizes this hap­py ratio­nal­ism in Doc­tor Pan­gloss, whose belief that ours is the best of pos­si­ble worlds comes direct­ly from the philo­soph­i­cal opti­mism of Got­tfried Leib­niz.

The pre­pon­der­ance of the evi­dence, Voltaire made abun­dant­ly clear in the novel’s series of increas­ing­ly hor­rif­ic episodes, points toward a blind, indif­fer­ent uni­verse full of need­less cru­el­ty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a dis­ease,” de Bot­ton says, and “it was Voltaire’s gen­er­ous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as every­one who has read Can­dide (or read a sum­ma­ry or brief notes on Can­dide) knows, the nov­el does not end with despair, but on a “Sto­ic note.”

After endur­ing immense suf­fer­ing on their many trav­els, Can­dide and his com­pan­ions set­tle in Turkey, where they meet an old man sit­ting qui­et­ly under a tree. He tells them about his phi­los­o­phy, how he abstains from pol­i­tics and sim­ply cul­ti­vates the fruits of his gar­den for mar­ket as his sole con­cern. Invit­ed to feast with the man and his fam­i­ly, they remark upon the lux­u­ri­ous ease in which they live and learn that they do so on a fair­ly small plot of land.

Voltaire loved to goose his large­ly Chris­t­ian read­ers and delight­ed in putting the novel’s part­ing wis­dom, “arguably the most impor­tant adage in mod­ern phi­los­o­phy,” in the mouth of an Islam­ic char­ac­ter: Il faut cul­tiv­er notre jardin, “we must cul­ti­vate our gar­den.” What does this mean? De Bot­ton inter­prets the line in the lit­er­al spir­it with which the char­ac­ter known only as “the Turk” deliv­ers it: we should keep a “safe dis­tance between our­selves and the world.”

We should not, that is, become over­ly engaged in pol­i­tics, and should devote our­selves to tend­ing our own liveli­hood and wel­fare, not tak­ing more than we need. We should leave our neigh­bors alone and not both­er about what they do in their gar­dens. To be at peace in the world, Voltaire argued, we must accept the world as it is, not as we want it to be, and give up utopi­an ideas of soci­eties per­fect­ed by sci­ence and rea­son. In short, to “tie our per­son­al moods” to human affairs writ large is to invite end­less mis­ery.

The phi­los­o­phy of Can­dide is not pes­simistic or nihilis­tic. A hap­py, ful­filled human life is entire­ly pos­si­ble, Voltaire sug­gests, if not human hap­pi­ness in gen­er­al. Can­dide has much in com­mon with the ancient Roman out­look. But it might also express what could be seen as an ear­ly attempt at a sec­u­lar Bud­dhist point of view. Voltaire was famil­iar with Bud­dhism, though it did not go by that name. Bud­dhists were lumped in, Don­ald S. Lopez, pro­fes­sor of Bud­dhist and Tibetan Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, writes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, with the mass of “idol­aters” who were not Chris­t­ian, Jew­ish, or Mus­lim.

Yet the many Jesuit accounts of East­ern reli­gion reach­ing Europe at the time cir­cu­lat­ed wide­ly among intel­lec­tu­als, includ­ing Voltaire, who wrote approv­ing­ly, though crit­i­cal­ly, of Bud­dhist tenets in his 1764 Dic­tio­n­naire philosophique. As the sec­u­lar mind­ful­ness move­ment has done in the 21st cen­tu­ry, Lopez argues, Voltaire sought in the age of Enlight­en­ment to sep­a­rate mirac­u­lous leg­end from prac­ti­cal teach­ing. But like the Bud­dha, whose sup­posed biog­ra­phy Voltaire knew well, Can­dide begins his life in a cas­tle. And the sto­ry ends with a man sit­ting qui­et­ly under a tree, more or less advis­ing Can­dide to do what Voltaire had heard of in the “reli­gion of the Siamese…. Med­i­tate in pri­vate, and reflect often on the fragili­ty of human affairs.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Voltaire: Enlight­en­ment Philoso­pher of Plu­ral­ism & Tol­er­ance

Voltaire: “Those Who Can Make You Believe Absur­di­ties, Can Make You Com­mit Atroc­i­ties”

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

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

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Watch Chilling Footage of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Bombings in Restored Color

in Film, History | September 24th, 2020

“You saw noth­ing in Hiroshi­ma. Noth­ing,” says Eiji Oka­da in the open­ing of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshi­ma mon amour. “I saw every­thing,” replies Emmanuelle Riva. “Every­thing.” The film goes on to show the effects of the Amer­i­can atom­ic-bomb attack that dev­as­tat­ed the tit­u­lar city near­ly fif­teen years before. This was the first many view­ers had seen of the lega­cy of that unprece­dent­ed act of destruc­tion, and now, six decades lat­er, the cul­tur­al image of Hiroshi­ma has con­flat­ed Resnais’ stark French New Wave vision with actu­al wartime doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als. By now, we’ve all seen con­tem­po­rary pho­tographs (and even film clips) of the fate of Hiroshi­ma and sub­se­quent­ly atom­ic-bombed Nagasa­ki. Can we regard this world-his­toric destruc­tion with fresh eyes?

A Youtu­ber known as Rick88888888 offers one way of poten­tial­ly doing so: almost half an hour of col­orized (as well as motion-sta­bi­lized, de-noised, and oth­er­wise enhanced) footage of not just the explo­sions them­selves, but the ruined Japan­ese cities and their strug­gling sur­vivors, the air­planes that per­formed the bomb­ing, and the Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent who ordered it. “The Japan­ese began the war from the air at Pearl Har­bor,” says Har­ry Tru­man in a broad­cast on August 6, 1945, the day of the attack on Hiroshi­ma. “They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet.” From the Pres­i­dent, the Amer­i­can pub­lic first learned of the devel­op­ment of an atom­ic bomb, “a har­ness­ing of the basic pow­er of the uni­verse. The force from which the sun draws its pow­er has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

As we know now, this was the fruit of the Man­hat­tan Project, the secret U.S.-led research-and-devel­op­ment effort that cre­at­ed the first nuclear weapons. Its suc­cess, Tru­man says, pre­pared the Allies to “oblit­er­ate more rapid­ly and com­plete­ly every pro­duc­tive enter­prise the Japan­ese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their fac­to­ries, and their com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Let there be no mis­take; we shall com­plete­ly destroy Japan’s pow­er to make war.” That they did, although mil­i­tary his­to­ri­ans argue about about the jus­ti­fi­a­bil­i­ty of drop­ping “the bomb” as well as the exact extent it played in the ulti­mate Allied vic­to­ry. But nobody can argue with the strik­ing vivid­ness of these “col­or” motion pic­tures of the event itself and its after­math, which reminds us that the era of poten­tial nuclear anni­hi­la­tion does­n’t belong to the dis­tant past — rather, it’s a chap­ter of his­to­ry that has only just begun.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J. Robert Oppen­heimer Explains How He Recit­ed a Line from Bha­gavad Gita–“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroy­er of Worlds”–Upon Wit­ness­ing the First Nuclear Explo­sion

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

The “Shad­ow” of a Hiroshi­ma Vic­tim, Etched into Stone Steps, Is All That Remains After 1945 Atom­ic Blast

Hiroshi­ma After the Atom­ic Bomb in 360 Degrees

Way of Life: Rare Footage of the Hiroshi­ma After­math, 1946

Pho­tos of Hiroshi­ma by Hiroshi­ma Mon Amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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