The Lost/Animated Interview with Fidel Castro: If the Revolution Fails, Cuba Will be “Hell Itself” (1959)

in Animation, History | July 30th, 2013

“If this Rev­o­lu­tion falls, what we will have here in Cuba is a hell,” Fidel Cas­tro said in Havana in 1959. “Hell itself.”

Cas­tro was 32 when he made the procla­ma­tion dur­ing an inter­view record­ed just weeks after the over­throw of dic­ta­tor Ful­gen­cio Batista. The new Cuba was still tak­ing shape after the rev­o­lu­tion led by the 26th of July Move­ment. Cas­tro spoke exten­sive­ly about his vision for Cuba dur­ing a 35-minute inter­view with an Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist that has nev­er been heard pub­licly until now.

The inter­view was dis­cov­ered a few years ago when Lau­ra Gal­loway found a tape in her late grand­fa­ther’s archives that sim­ply said “Galloway/Castro.” Clark Hewitt Gal­loway was the intra-Amer­i­can affairs edi­tor for U.S. News and World Report. Gal­loway cov­ered Latin and South Amer­i­ca for the mag­a­zine after serv­ing in the same region with the U.S. Army Intel­li­gence corps dur­ing WWII. Blank on Blank’s new episode for its PBS series ani­mates the sto­ry behind the tape and a col­lec­tion of out­takes from the inter­view. Cas­tro talks about: why Che Gue­vara, Raul Cas­tro and the 26th of July Move­ment were not Com­mu­nist; and why Cuba had issues with the Amer­i­can pres­ence in the Guan­tanamo Naval Base and, specif­i­cal­ly, Amer­i­can sailors stir­ring up trou­ble while out on the town in Guan­tanamo.

Blank on Blank has also post­ed the entire 35-minute inter­view in Span­ish with the Eng­lish trans­la­tion by Sebas­t­ian Bet­ti. Dur­ing the full inter­view, Cas­tro goes into great detail about how the Cuban econ­o­my would be rebuilt and how the agrar­i­an reform plan would be put into effect. He dis­putes whether Amer­i­can inter­ests in Cuba would be nation­al­ized. And he down­plays the idea of being asked to be a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date.

The release of this unearthed inter­view comes as Cas­tro’s broth­er, Raul, just gave a lengthy speech about the demise of Cuban cul­ture and con­duct despite what the rev­o­lu­tion has brought to the coun­try.

This post was brought to you by David Ger­lach, the founder of Blank on Blank.

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Now I Know My LSD ABCs: A Trippy Animation of the Alphabet

in Animation, Creativity, Design, English Language, Music | July 29th, 2013

Many inter­ests have spurred cre­ative alpha­bet col­lec­tions: New York City. Geek­dom. Food snob­bery. Child­hood calami­ty. And now?

Actu­al­ly, LSD ABC, defies neat cat­e­go­riza­tion. Beyond the fact that they’re both spelled out using let­ters, what could Dim Sum pos­si­bly have in com­mon with VHS? Not much pri­or serv­ing as inspi­ra­tional prompts for graph­ic design­ers Lau­rent & Françoise (oth­er­wise known as Lau­ra Sicouri and Kadavre Exquis). Now they’re 1/13th of a delight­ful­ly twist­ed ani­mat­ed whole, one of those dead­line-free pet projects that goes on to spawn a lim­it­ed edi­tion vinyl album.

The duo is prone to fetishiz­ing the anachro­nis­tic tech­nolo­gies of the recent past, in a man­ner slight­ly more ele­gant than come­di­ans Tim Hei­deck­er and Eric Ware­heim. They toss in a foot sim­i­lar to the one Ter­ry Gilliam used to such effect on Mon­ty Python. H and S are sub­ject­ed to the sort of indig­ni­ties Wile E. Coy­ote used to suf­fer at the hands of the Road Run­ner. It’s all tied togeth­er with AT&T Lab’s decid­ed­ly unnat­ur­al-sound­ing Nat­ur­al Voice text-to-speech nar­ra­tion.

While it’s dif­fi­cult to pick a favorite from such a mind bend­ing array, I’m going to have to go with P…for Pet Piano, natch. You?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch All of Ter­ry Gilliam’s Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions in a Row

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is stymied by the lack of Ys on cer­tain Euro­pean key­boards. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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The Poetry of Leonard Cohen Illustrated by Two Short Films

in Animation, Film, Literature, Poetry | July 18th, 2013

Look­ing back on the lit­er­ary career of Leonard Cohen—in full flower in the mid-six­ties before his sec­ond life as a folk singer/songwriter—one encoun­ters many com­par­isons to Joyce. For exam­ple, in the Nation­al Film Board of Canada’s descrip­tion of Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen, the 1965 doc­u­men­tary film about the 30-year-old Cana­di­an poet, we find: “it tru­ly is, after Joyce, a por­trait of the artist as a young man.” On the back cov­er of Cohen’s sec­ond and final nov­el, the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry, post­mod­ernist Beau­ti­ful Losers, we find a blurb from the Boston Sun­day Her­ald: “James Joyce is not dead…. He lives in Mon­tre­al under the name of Cohen.”

Beau­ti­ful Losers’ dense sys­tem of his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences does put one in mind of Ulysses, but the lan­guage, the syn­tax, the eagle flights into the holy and dives into the pro­fane, remind me some­what of anoth­er Bud­dhist poet of Cana­di­an extrac­tion, Jack Ker­ouac. Cohen even sounds a bit like Ker­ouac, in the short 1967 film, “Poen” (above), an exper­i­men­tal piece that sets four read­ings of a prose-poem from Beau­ti­ful Losers to a mon­tage of stark­ly provoca­tive images from black-and-white film and pho­tog­ra­phy, Goya, and var­i­ous sur­re­al­ists. Made by Josef Reeve for the Nation­al Film Board, the short reels out four dif­fer­ent record­ed takes of Cohen read­ing the poem. At the end of each read­ing, he says, “cut,” and the film fades to black.

Tak­en from the novel’s con­text, the poem becomes a per­son­al med­i­ta­tion on med­i­ta­tion, or per­haps on writ­ing: “My mind seems to go out on a path, the width of a thread,” begins Cohen and unfolds an image of men­tal dis­cov­ery like that described by Don­ald Barthelme, who once said “writ­ing is a process of deal­ing with not-know­ing…. At best there’s a slen­der intu­ition, not much greater than an itch.”

In the ani­ma­tion above, from the NFB’s 1977 “Poets on Film No. 1,” Cana­di­an actor Paul Hecht reads Cohen’s poem “A Kite is a Vic­tim,” from his 1961 col­lec­tion The Spice-Box of Earth. Like the poem from Beau­ti­ful Losers, “A Kite is a Vic­tim” is also about process, but it’s a for­mal med­i­ta­tion, focused on the image of the kite, which flut­ters through each of the four stan­zas in metaphors of tam­ing, cap­tur­ing and nur­tur­ing lan­guage, then let­ting it go, hop­ing to be made “wor­thy and lyric and pure.” The pace of Hecht’s read­ing, the piano score behind his voice, and the vibrant col­or of the hand-drawn ani­ma­tion makes this a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of Cohen’s writ­ing than “Poen.”

To see Leonard Cohen read­ing his poems as a young man, make sure you vis­it: Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poet­ry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musi­cian Began)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen

Street Artist Plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” With Crys­tal Glass­es

Leonard Cohen and U2 Per­form ‘Tow­er of Song,’ a Med­i­ta­tion on Aging, Loss & Sur­vival

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

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Watch a Whimsical Animation of Italo Calvino’s Short Story “The Distance of the Moon”

in Animation, Literature | July 15th, 2013

“What was Ita­lo Calvi­no?,” asks sci-fi doyenne Ursu­la K. Le Guin in a Guardian review of the Ital­ian author’s col­lec­tion of short sto­ries Cos­mi­comics. “A pre­post­mod­ernist? Maybe it’s time to dis­pense with mod­ernism and all its pre­fix­es.” Calvi­no cer­tain­ly exists in a cat­e­go­ry all of his own. In short nov­els like Invis­i­ble Cities and his numer­ous sto­ry col­lec­tions, the “prepostmodernist”—or whatever—created a voice as won­drous and indi­vid­ual as his con­tem­po­rary, Borges. Calvi­no coined his own genre, which he called “Cos­mi­comics,” and which Le Guin describes as “a sub­species of sci­ence fic­tion [which] con­sists typ­i­cal­ly of the state­ment of a sci­en­tif­ic hypoth­e­sis (most­ly gen­uine, though some­times not cur­rent­ly accept­ed) which sets the stage for a nar­ra­tive, in which the nar­ra­tor is usu­al­ly a per­son called Qfwfq.”

One of the sto­ries from the col­lec­tion, “The Dis­tance of the Moon,” gets an ani­mat­ed treat­ment in the video above, scored by Erik Satie’s “Gnossi­enne No. 1.” The fan­tas­tic sto­ry, nar­rat­ed by the mys­te­ri­ous Qfwfq, also includes char­ac­ters like Cap­tain Vhd Vhd and Xlth­lx, and, like all of Calvino’s work, it com­bines a child-like won­der with his play­ful, myth­ic imag­i­na­tion and sci­en­tif­ic intel­li­gence. The ani­ma­tion, nar­rat­ed in Hebrew with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trates the strange whim­sy of the sto­ry with stop-motion cut-outs. And in the audio above, you can hear actor Liev Schreiber explain the sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry behind Calvino’s sto­ry, then read the sto­ry itself. The read­ing took place at a live event host­ed by Radi­o­lab and orig­i­nal­ly aired on WNYC and PRI’s show “Select­ed Shorts.”

And if this leaves you desir­ing more ani­mat­ed Calvi­no, then don’t miss our pre­vi­ous post: John Tur­tur­ro Reads Ita­lo Calvino’s Ani­mat­ed Fairy Tale, The False Grand­moth­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Piotr Dumala’s Won­der­ful Ani­ma­tions of Lit­er­ary Works by Kaf­ka and Dos­to­evsky

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, Ani­mat­ed in Two Min­utes

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Ani­mat­ed Not Once, But Twice

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

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Alfred Hitchcock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuffin’

in Animation, Film | July 9th, 2013

Alfred Hitch­cock liked to call it the “MacGuf­fin” — the mys­te­ri­ous object in a spy thriller that sets the whole chain of events into motion.

But despite the sup­posed cen­tral­i­ty of the MacGuf­fin, a Hitch­cock movie is always about some­thing else. In The 39 Steps, for exam­ple, the MacGuf­fin turns out to be the cov­et­ed plans for an advanced air­plane engine, stored in the mind of a vaude­ville per­former named “Mr. Mem­o­ry.” But real­ly the film is about a wrong­ful­ly accused man’s des­per­ate strug­gle to solve a mys­tery so he can clear his name and live to see anoth­er day.

The MacGuf­fin is always par­tic­u­lar — often to the point of absur­di­ty — while the hero’s moti­va­tion is uni­ver­sal. Some of the char­ac­ters may care about the MacGuf­fin, but the audi­ence cer­tain­ly does not. In his 1962 inter­view with François Truf­faut, Hitch­cock explains:

The main thing I’ve learned over the years is that the MacGuf­fin is noth­ing. I’m con­vinced of this, but I find it very dif­fi­cult to prove it to oth­ers. My best MacGuf­fin, and by that I mean the emp­ti­est, the most nonex­is­tent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by North­west. The pic­ture is about espi­onage, and the only ques­tion that’s raised in the sto­ry is to find out what the spies are after. Well, dur­ing the scene at the Chica­go air­port, the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence man explains the whole sit­u­a­tion to Cary Grant, and Grant, refer­ring to the James Mason char­ac­ter, asks, “What does he do?”  The coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence man replies, “Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter.” “But what does he sell?” “Oh, just gov­ern­ment secrets!” is the answer. Here, you see, the MacGuf­fin has been boiled down to its purest expres­sion: noth­ing at all!

The term “MacGuf­fin” was coined by a screen­writer Hitch­cock worked with named Angus MacPhail, accord­ing to Don­ald Spo­to in The Art of Alfred Hitch­cock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pic­tures. But the prin­ci­ple goes back at least as far as Rud­yard Kipling, as Hitch­cock explains in this whim­si­cal lit­tle film by Isaac Nie­mand with audio from Hitch­cock­’s June 8, 1972 appear­ance on the Dick Cavett Show. Per­haps the most impor­tant thing to remem­ber about the MacGuf­fin is that it con­tains the word “guff,” which means a load of non­sense. “There’s a lot to look for in Hitch­cock­’s films,” writes Spo­to, “but watch out for the MacGuf­fin. It will lead you nowhere.”

NOTE: The 39 Steps and oth­er Hitch­cock thrillers can be found in our col­lec­tion of 16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online, not to men­tion our big col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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:

Alfred Hitch­cock on the Film­mak­er’s Essen­tial Tool: ‘The Kuleshov Effect’

Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

37 Hitch­cock Cameos over 50 Years: All in One Video

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Watch Franz Kafka, the Wonderful Animated Film by Piotr Dumala

in Animation, Film, Literature | July 3rd, 2013


Let’s sneak in a quick birth­day cel­e­bra­tion before the 4th. Franz Kaf­ka was born on this day (July 3), a good 130 years ago. To com­mem­o­rate the occa­sion, we’re pre­sent­ing Piotr Dumala’s 1992 short ani­mat­ed film called, quite sim­ply, Franz Kaf­ka. Dumala’s ani­ma­tion tech­nique grew out of his train­ing as a sculp­tor, when he start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with scratch­ing images into paint­ed plas­ter. Lat­er he devel­oped a more full blown method known as “destruc­tive ani­ma­tion,” which is on full dis­play in the film. You can learn more about Dumala and his approach here. The 16-minute film is based on The Diaries of Franz Kaf­ka, and now appears in our col­lec­tion of 525 Free Movies Online. Also on our site, you can view Dumala’s adap­ta­tion of Dos­to­evsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

Note: This film/post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2010. Still enam­ored by Dumala’s work, we thought it was time to bring it back.

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:

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

Vladimir Nabokov (Chan­nelled by Christo­pher Plum­mer) Teach­es Kaf­ka at Cor­nell

Nabokov Makes Edi­to­r­i­al Improve­ments to Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis

Find works by Kaf­ka in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions

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A Short, Animated Look at What’s Inside Your Average Cup of Coffee

in Animation, Food & Drink | June 29th, 2013

What’s inside your aver­age cupe of joe? Wired breaks it down for us. Let’s start with the obvi­ous, water and caf­feine. But did you know about the traces of 2‑ethylphenol, which oth­er­wise dou­bles as a cock­roach pheromone?  Or how about dimethyl disul­fide, which has indus­tri­al uses in oil refiner­ies? And acetyl­methyl­carbinol? It gives the cof­fee its pleas­ant, but­tery odor. Want to keep con­tem­plat­ing cof­fee? Check out the relat­ed resources below:

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Cof­fee in Three Min­utes

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Louis Armstrong’s 1964 Interview with a Pair of Intrepid Kid Reporters

in Animation, Music, Radio | June 26th, 2013

In the sum­mer of 1964, two young boys from the North Shore sub­urbs of Chica­go took a tape recorder and set out to inter­view jazz leg­end Louis Arm­strong for their high school radio sta­tion. Arm­strong was play­ing a con­cert at the Ravinia Fes­ti­val in High­land Park, not far from the boys’ school in Win­net­ka. He agreed to an inter­view, and as a group of pro­fes­sion­al reporters from the city’s major news out­lets wait­ed impa­tient­ly out­side his dress­ing room door, Arm­strong spent 20 min­utes answer­ing ques­tions for a lit­tle 10-watt FM radio sta­tion.

The sto­ry is told above, in the lat­est install­ment of PBS’s ongo­ing ani­ma­tion project with Blank on Blank, a group that brings unheard inter­views back to life. Michael Ais­ner, who was 15 when he met Arm­strong, and his friend James R. Stein, who was 14, recount their adven­ture and play a few high­lights from the inter­view. Arm­strong explains how he got the nick­name “Satch­mo” and talks a lit­tle about his Dick­en­sian child­hood and how he learned to play the coro­net in the Home for Col­ored Waifs in New Orleans. He talks about the need for prac­tic­ing hard every day, and about the tal­ent that was his tick­et out of the slums. “You’ve got to be good,” Arm­strong says, “or bad as the dev­il.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Louis Arm­strong and His All Stars Live in Bel­gium, 1959

Watch the Ear­li­est Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong Per­form­ing Live in Con­cert (Copen­hagen, 1933)

Muham­mad Ali Plans to Fight on Mars in Lost 1966 Inter­view with Child Reporter

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