Watch the Trippy Screen Projections Used by Pink Floyd During their Dark Side of the Moon Tours

in Film, Music | March 30th, 2017

Even in the ear­ly years of Pink Floyd’s career, the band was exper­i­ment­ing with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the live expe­ri­ence. Already daz­zling audi­ences with boom­ing sound, col­or­ful light shows, and bub­bling translu­cent oil pro­jec­tions, the group called in Abbey Road engi­neers to design a quadro­phon­ic sound sys­tem in 1967 to send Rick Wright’s key­boards around the con­cert hall, along with nature sounds, foot­steps, or mani­a­cal laugh­ter.

By the time of Dark Side of the Moon, the band had even more of a bud­get, and began to screen short films, some ani­mat­ed, dur­ing their world tour con­certs. Not real­ly pro­mo­tion­al videos, these films haven’t been seen out­side their live con­text since. But the Inter­net has a way of find­ing these things.

Ear­li­er this month, sev­er­al YouTube users uploaded the film reels used on Pink Floyd’s 1974 North Amer­i­can Tour, with music from Dark Side of the Moon added back in to give an indi­ca­tion of how it was used in the show. (The mix­es are also quite dif­fer­ent from the album–maybe a fan can tell us from where these come?)

We get some very Kubrick-like trav­el­ing shots down both an emp­ty hos­pi­tal cor­ri­dor and of Heathrow’s arrival lounge, and lat­er a fist punch­ing a bowl of eggs, Zabriskie Point-like explod­ing tele­vi­sions, shots of Nixon and Idi Amin, and final­ly back to open­ing shots of the moon for the finale.

But there’s also moments of ani­ma­tion cre­at­ed then-unknown film­mak­er Ian Emes.

The up-and-com­ing and self-taught artist had already made an ani­ma­tion “French Win­dows” set to the Floyd song “One of these Days,” filled with trip­py land­scapes and roto­scoped dancers. It won awards at ani­ma­tion fes­ti­vals and was shown on British TV. Accord­ing to Emes:

“Hav­ing seen my film French Win­dows on BBC’s The Old Grey Whis­tle Test, the band com­mis­sioned me to make their first-ever ani­mat­ed film, which they sub­se­quent­ly toured the world with. The Time sequence is used to this day. It was a breath­tak­ing expe­ri­ence to see my film pro­ject­ed live at Wem­b­ley Are­na before a huge crowd of tripped out fans.”

The con­cert films dif­fered from coun­try to coun­try, shar­ing 75 per­cent of their footage, which means if you are a true fan, you’ll have to watch the British Tour ver­sion and the French Tour to know what you’re miss­ing. The British ver­sion fea­tures more infor­ma­tion, but it’s not clear if it’s also by Emes.

After Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd con­tin­ued to bring visu­als into their live shows, most notably anoth­er ani­ma­tion for “Wel­come to the Machine,” seen below. This time they used anoth­er up-and-com­ing illus­tra­tor and ani­ma­tor called Ger­ald Scarfe to cre­ate the har­row­ing graph­ics. Scarfe, of course, would lat­er cre­ate many more works for Pink Floy­d’s The Wall, and those ani­ma­tions would be used in con­cert and lat­er in the Alan Park­er film, The Wall.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd Per­forms on US Tele­vi­sion for the First Time: Amer­i­can Band­stand, 1967

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

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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The Origins of Anime: Watch Free Online 64 Animations That Launched the Japanese Anime Tradition

in Animation, Film | March 30th, 2017

Japan­ese ani­ma­tion has a way of seem­ing per­pet­u­al­ly new and dar­ing, but it now goes back at least a cen­tu­ry. Hav­ing carved out its own aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al space in world cul­ture, ani­me (even for­eign­ers who’ve nev­er watched so much as a minute of it know the Japan­ese term) con­tin­ues to gen­er­ate a dis­tinc­tive kind of excite­ment in its view­ers. That goes for rel­a­tive­ly recent fea­tures that have already attained clas­sic sta­tus, like the lush, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly real­is­tic and fan­tas­ti­cal works of Hayao Miyaza­ki, the dark­er, deep­er visions like Mamoru Oshi­i’s Ghost in the Shell, and the diver­si­ty of works in between. But how did those qual­i­ties man­i­fest in the very ear­li­est ani­me? We can now eas­i­ly see for our­selves, thanks to the selec­tion of 64 Japan­ese ani­mat­ed film clas­sics made freely avail­able online, as a cel­e­bra­tion of the cen­te­nary of the form, by Japan’s Nation­al Film Archive.

“The most excit­ing of these are the two ear­li­est extant ani­me The Dull Sword (Namaku­ra Gatana, 1917) and Urashima Tarō (1918),” writes Nishika­ta Film Review’s Cathy Munroe Hotes, “films which were con­sid­ered lost until copies were mirac­u­lous­ly dis­cov­ered in an antique shop in Osa­ka in 2008.  As the vast major­i­ty of pre-war films have been lost due to nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, war, and gen­er­al neglect, each of these 64 films is an impor­tant glimpse into ear­ly ani­me his­to­ry and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese cul­ture.”

You can also browse the Nation­al Film Archive’s online col­lec­tion of ear­ly ani­ma­tion by direc­tor. Watch­ing the works of cer­tain espe­cial­ly pro­lif­ic ones like Noburō Ōfu­ji and Yasu­ji Mura­ta (whose 1929 The Old Man’s Lump Removed, not avail­able in the col­lec­tion, appears above), you might come away con­vinced that, even in its first decades, Japan­ese ani­ma­tion had devel­oped its auteur cul­ture.

The move­ment (which some­times bare­ly qual­i­fies as such) and sound (if any) in some of these shorts could hard­ly impress today, at least on a tech­ni­cal lev­el. Nev­er­the­less, those of us who’ve felt the excite­ment of the best of ani­me will rec­og­nize in the pre­sen­ta­tion of the images them­selves — in its dynamism, its humor, its cre­ativ­i­ty — the spe­cial ani­mat­ing spir­it, as it were, that first sparked our inter­est. Whether the some­times slap­dash likes of Speed Rac­er, Robot­ech, or Kim­ba the White Lion, which intro­duced gen­er­a­tions of West­ern­ers to ani­me in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, real­ly marked that much of an improve­ment on crude pro­duc­tion of, say, Murata’s My Ski Trip from 1930 remains open to debate, but through them all we can trace the devel­op­ment of the style and sen­si­bil­i­ty that, to this day, no ani­ma­tion but the Japan­ese vari­ety has tru­ly mas­tered.

Enter the Nation­al Film Archive ani­me col­lec­tion here.

(NOTE: the Nation­al Film Archive assures us that the Eng­lish ver­sion of the site “will be avail­able in a month or two,” but you can find Eng­lish-sub­ti­tled films there even now.)

via coudal.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Philosophy, Storytelling & Visual Creativity of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Anime Film, Explained in Video Essays

in Animation, Film | March 29th, 2017

“Ghost in the Shell is not in any sense an ani­mat­ed film for chil­dren,” wrote Roger Ebert twen­ty years ago. “Filled with sex, vio­lence and nudi­ty (although all rather styl­ized), it’s anoth­er exam­ple of ani­me, ani­ma­tion from Japan aimed at adults.” Now, when no crit­ic any longer needs to explain the term ani­me to West­ern read­ers, we look back on Ghost in the Shell (1995) as one of the true mas­ter­pieces among Japan­ese ani­mat­ed fea­ture films, mature not just in its con­tent but in its form. Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, takes a look at how it express­es its philo­soph­i­cal themes through its still-strik­ing cyber­punk set­ting in his video essay “Iden­ti­ty in Space.”

Puschak first high­lights the pres­ence (in the mid­dle of this “sci-fi action thriller” about the hunt for a want­ed hack­er turned self-aware arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence) of an action-free inter­lude: a “three minute and twen­ty-ish sec­ond-long scene” con­sist­ing of noth­ing but “34 gor­geous, exquis­ite­ly detailed atmos­pher­ic shots of a future city in Japan that’s mod­eled after Hong Kong.”

Its plot-sus­pend­ing visu­al explo­ration of the film’s Blade Run­ner-esque urban space of “a chaot­ic mul­ti­cul­tur­al future city dom­i­nat­ed by the inter­sec­tions of old and new struc­tures, con­nect­ed by roads, canals, and tech­nol­o­gy,” empha­sizes that “spaces, like iden­ti­ties, are con­struct­ed. Though space often feels neu­tral or giv­en, like we could move any­where with­in it, our move­ments, our activ­i­ties, our life, is always lim­it­ed by the way space is pro­duced.”

Just as all of Ghost in the Shell’s char­ac­ters exist in space, the main ones also exist in cyber­net­ic bod­ies, regard­ing their iden­ti­ties as stored in their effec­tive­ly trans­plantable brains all con­nect­ed over a vast infor­ma­tion net­work. The half-hour-long analy­sis from Ani­meEv­ery­day just above gets into the philo­soph­i­cal dilem­ma this presents to the film’s pro­tag­o­nist, the cyborg police offi­cer Motoko Kusana­gi, exam­in­ing in depth sev­er­al of the scenes that — through dia­logue, imagery, sym­bol­ism, or sub­tle com­bi­na­tions of the three that view­ers might not catch the first time around — illu­mi­nate the sto­ry’s cen­tral ques­tions about the nature of man, the nature of machine, and the nature of what emerges when the two inter­sect.

Film Her­ald’s briefer expla­na­tion of Ghost in the Shell (which con­tains poten­tial­ly NSFW images) points to three main themes: iden­ti­ty, Carte­sian dual­ism, and evo­lu­tion, all con­cepts that come into ques­tion — or at least demand a thor­ough revi­sion — when the bound­ary between the nat­ur­al and the syn­thet­ic blurs to the film’s imag­ined extent. “My intu­ition told me that this sto­ry about a futur­is­tic world car­ried an imme­di­ate mes­sage for our present world,” said direc­tor Mamoru Oshii, and now, more than two decades lat­er, Hol­ly­wood has even got around to remak­ing it in a live-action ver­sion star­ring Scar­lett Johans­son in the Kusana­gi role. That does pro­vides a chance to update some of the now-dat­ed-look­ing tech­nol­o­gy seen in the ani­mat­ed orig­i­nal, but there’s no improv­ing on its artistry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Blade Run­ner Spoofed in Three Japan­ese Com­mer­cials (and Gen­er­al­ly Loved in Japan)

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

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

The Matrix: What Went Into The Mix

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Great Filmmakers Offer Advice to Young Directors: Tarantino, Herzog, Coppola, Scorsese, Anderson, Fellini & More

in Film | March 29th, 2017

One-to-one rela­tion­ships do not exist between the medieval Euro­pean Guild sys­tem and con­tem­po­rary labor unions or pro­tec­tion­ist rack­ets…. Nev­er­the­less, guilds were very much like both those things in some ways. They were also voca­tion­al schools, where young aspir­ing arti­sans could, with the right skills and con­nec­tions, appren­tice them­selves to mas­ter crafts­men, hope to receive decent train­ing, and look for­ward to becom­ing guild mas­ters them­selves should they per­sist.

Few orga­ni­za­tions like that exist today. But there is per­haps one indus­try in which—with the right con­nec­tions, skill, and persistence—a lucky and tal­ent­ed few rise through the ranks to mas­tery: the film indus­try, where a video store clerk, Quentin Taran­ti­no, can achieve last­ing fame and for­tune, as can for­mer part-time pro­jec­tion­ist, Wes Ander­son. Many direc­tors who came of age in the six­ties and sev­en­ties went the tra­di­tion­al route of film school, but one, Wern­er Her­zog, took a bandit’s way into the craft, steal­ing a cam­era from the Munich Film School, feel­ing that he “had some sort of nat­ur­al right for a cam­era, a tool to work with.”

Her­zog has cre­at­ed his own guild sys­tem, of a sort, with the Rogue Film School, a rough, infor­mal course, among oth­er things, in “guer­ril­la film­mak­ing.” Steal­ing cam­eras is not ruled out. But you’ll have to learn the tech­ni­cal stuff on your own. What mat­ters, most, Her­zog says, is that film­mak­ers “read, read, read, read, read.” These are direc­tors who have bor­rowed from oth­er direc­tors and films, and also from books, music, paint­ing, etc., dri­ven by an obses­sive and per­sis­tent desire to learn. And you’ll find them all in the super­cut above, in which Taran­ti­no, Ander­son, Her­zog, and oth­er “mas­ter film­mak­ers” like Scors­ese, Cop­po­la, Felli­ni, Welles, and more offer short, yet pro­found pieces of advice to aspi­rants.

We begin with Taran­ti­no, who argues that pas­sion is all you need to make a great film. “You don’t need to go to school” or know any of the tech­ni­cal stuff, but you do need to appren­tice your­self, with pure devo­tion and tenac­i­ty, to cin­e­ma. You won’t hear this from many of the oth­ers, but Ter­ry Gilliam also rec­om­mends a sec­ondary trade, maybe as a plumber, anoth­er pro­fes­sion that involves appren­tices and jour­ney­men work­ing their way up. It’s cer­tain­ly a trade that involves great skill, but to hear these direc­to­r­i­al guild mas­ters tell it, no oth­er pro­fes­sion asks for as much dri­ve and pas­sion as the movies, and appar­ent­ly you don’t even need to know what you’re doing at first. See the com­plete list of inter­vie­wees below.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: 00:00
JERRY LEWIS: 00:40
TERRY GILLIAM: 01:15
JOHN CARPENTER: 01:40
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: 02:30
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: 03:54
FEDERICO FELLINI: 04:52
WERNER HERZOG: 05:56
WES ANDERSON: 07:22
SIDNEY LUMET: 07:50
JOHN LANDIS: 08:58
MARTIN SCORSESE: 10:15
GUILLERMO DEL TORO 11:38
ORSON WELLES 14:55

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing & Life Advice

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

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

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A Short Video Introduction to Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), the First Female Film Director & Studio Mogul

in Film, History | March 24th, 2017

This year’s Women’s His­to­ry Month theme is “Hon­or­ing Trail­blaz­ing Women in Labor and Busi­ness.” Before these lioness­es are hus­tled off­stage in order for us to refo­cus our atten­tions on Asian/Pacific Amer­i­cans, Jew­ish-Amer­i­cans, Autism Aware­ness, Mul­ti­ple Births, Sex­u­al­ly Trans­mit­ted Dis­ease Edu­ca­tion, pecans and the myr­i­ad oth­er cal­en­dar girls and boys that April brings, let’s join video essay­ist Cather­ine Strat­ton in cel­e­brat­ing the achieve­ments of film­mak­er Alice Guy-Blaché, above.

While not an offi­cial­ly rec­og­nized hon­oree, Guy-Blaché, who made over 1,000 films over two decades, def­i­nite­ly qual­i­fies as a trail­blaz­ing woman.

At age 21, she became the first female direc­tor in cin­e­ma his­to­ry with The Cab­bage Fairy, below, a whim­si­cal, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly accu­rate vision of where babies come from. (It was shot in 1896, long before rules lim­it­ing the amount of time a new­born actor can spend on set, but only a hand­ful of years before nurse Mar­garet Sanger took up the cause of women’s repro­duc­tive health.)

She tack­led the Life of Christ with a pas­sel of ani­mals, spe­cial effects, and 300 extras.

She popped view­ers eyes with can­dy-col­ored hand tint­ing.

She built a state-of-the-art film stu­dio in Fort Lee, New Jer­sey, prun­ing the ter­rain to serve as a vari­ety of land­scapes.

Viewed from the lens of 2017, one of her most star­tling achieve­ments is 1912’s A Fool and His Mon­ey, an excerpt of which is below. The tale itself is an unre­mark­able crowd­pleas­er: a poor guy falls in love with a wealthy young woman. He goes to great lengths to woo her, out­fit­ting him­self with fan­cy duds and throw­ing a huge par­ty, only to be best­ed by a flashy rival.

What is remark­able is that Guy-Blaché was white and the film’s cast is entire­ly African-Amer­i­can. Accord­ing to essay­ist Strat­ton, the char­ac­ters are por­trayed with none of the explic­it racism DW Grif­fith brought to The Birth of a Nation three years lat­er.

As Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls site reports, Guy-Blaché passed from the pub­lic view after an expen­sive divorce from her phi­lan­der­ing hus­band forced her to sell her stu­dio. She strug­gled to gain pub­lic recog­ni­tion for her pio­neer­ing con­tri­bu­tions to film his­to­ry with lit­tle suc­cess. A Fool and His Mon­ey was redis­cov­ered when a flea mar­ket shop­per bought a musty chest of old, unmarked reels.

Like that film, her rep­u­ta­tion is slow­ly being restored to its for­mer glo­ry. She was award­ed France’s Legion of Hon­or in 1955 and a Director’s Guild of Amer­i­ca Life­time Achieve­ment Award in 2012.

Give this trail­blaz­ing woman anoth­er look!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100 Over­looked Films Direct­ed by Women: See Selec­tions from Sight & Sound Magazine’s New List

85 Com­pelling Films Star­ring and/or Direct­ed By Women of Col­or: A List Cre­at­ed by Direc­tor Ava DuVer­nay & Friends on Twit­ter

245 Films by Female Direc­tors You Can Stream Right Now on Net­flix

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

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

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How Orson Welles’ F for Fake Teaches Us How to Make the Perfect Video Essay

in Film | March 23rd, 2017

If you don’t under­stand what makes Cit­i­zen Kane so impor­tant, just watch a few movies made before it. In his first out­ing as a film­mak­er, Orson Welles, whether by igno­rance or oth­er virtues, pio­neered so many aes­thet­ic and nar­ra­tive tech­niques that we can now hard­ly imag­ine how the medi­um ever did with­out. If you don’t under­stand what makes Welles’ last pic­ture, the qua­si-doc­u­men­tary on fact and false­hood F for Fake so impor­tant, just com­pare it to all the video essays pro­lif­er­at­ing on the inter­net today.

If Cit­i­zen Kane was just slight­ly ahead of its time in 1940, F for Fake, which came out in 1973, now looks more than three decades ahead of the curve. Nobody knows that bet­ter than Tony Zhou, cre­ator of the pop­u­lar cin­e­ma-focused video essay series Every Frame a Paint­ing.

“I’ve stolen more ideas from this film than from any oth­er,” he admits at the begin­ning of his trib­ute to F for Fake. “Every­thing I know about edit­ing” — and he knows a lot — “I’ve learned from this film.”

The first les­son it teach­es has to do with how to struc­ture, or rather, how not to struc­ture: instead of mak­ing cuts that feel like a repet­i­tive series of “and then“s, make cuts that, in the words of South Park co-cre­ator Trey Park­er, stands for “either the word there­fore or but.” In oth­er words, whether mak­ing a video essay, a fea­ture film, or any­thing in between, build the struc­ture not out of sim­ple, unordered list-like sequences, but out of caus­es, effects, and con­tra­dic­tions.  Through­out F for Fake, “Orson Welles does the exact same thing, except he does­n’t con­nect scenes; he con­nects thoughts. Even though this movie is an essay, each moment has the con­nec­tive log­ic of a South Park episode.”

This leads into the sec­ond les­son: “Have more than one sto­ry mov­ing in par­al­lel,” so that when­ev­er one “reach­es peak inter­est,” you can oscil­late to the oth­er. (No less an edit­ing mas­ter than Alfred Hitch­cock also sub­scribed to this prin­ci­ple, describ­ing it with the phrase “Mean­while, back at the ranch…”) Welles’ bravu­ra per­for­mance, how­ev­er, rotates between no few­er than six sto­ries: of art forg­er Elmyr de Hory, of “hoax-biog­ra­ph­er” Clif­ford Irv­ing, of Irv­ing’s sub­ject Howard Hugh­es, of Welles’ girl­friend Oja Kodar, of Welles him­self (and his infa­mous War of the Worlds broad­cast), and even of the mak­ing of F for Fake itself.

Tech­ni­cal points aside, Zhou draws from all this a per­spec­tive on his work: “It’s not about what you get. It’s about how you cut it, and what comes out the oth­er end. Remem­ber, video essays aren’t essays, they’re films, so you want to struc­ture and pace them like a film­mak­er would.” And in this final major work that he him­self describes as a “film about trick­ery and fraud,” Welles presents that and every­thing else he’d learned about film­mak­ing over the past forty years doing it. Even if some say we live a “post-fact” era — a term that would have end­less­ly amused Welles, or at least the “char­la­tan” ver­sion of him­self he plays in F for Fake — the laws of cin­e­ma retain their truth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Provides a Soundtrack for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Film, Music | March 22nd, 2017

What hap­pens when you cue up The Wiz­ard of Oz (1939) and Pink Floy­d’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and play them togeth­er? You get some­thing mag­i­cal. Or, to be more pre­cise, you get “Dark Side of the Rain­bow,” a mashup that first began cir­cu­lat­ing in 1995, back when the inter­net first went com­mer­cial. Watch “Dark Side of the Rain­bow” (here) and you could believe that Floyd wrote Dark Side as a stealth Wiz­ard of Oz soundtrack–though that’s some­thing the band firm­ly denies. And, we believe them.

But bury one rumor, and anoth­er takes its place. The Vimeo cap­tion accom­pa­ny­ing the oth­er mashup above reads as fol­lows:

It has long been rumoured that Pink Floyd set ‘Echoes’ to the final sequence of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Two years before pro­duc­ing their album ‘Med­dle’, fea­tur­ing the 23 minute piece ‘Echoes’, Pink Floyd worked on the ‘More’ French film sound­track, where they worked with film syn­chro­ni­sa­tion equip­ment. From there the rumours blos­somed, with Roger Waters being mis­quot­ed as say­ing the band were orig­i­nal­ly offered to do the sound­track (they in fact turned down an offer to fea­ture the ‘Atom Heart Moth­er’ suite in ‘A Clock­work Orange’). Whether or not the rumours have any basis in fact, there is an unde­ni­able beau­ty when watch­ing the com­bi­na­tion of Kubrick­’s intri­cate stop-motion uni­verse, cou­pled with the psy­che­del­ic won­ders of Pink Floyd.

This last thought is sec­ond­ed by phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Joe Steiff, who, writ­ing in the edit­ed col­lec­tion, Pink Floyd and Phi­los­o­phy, adds this:

A less­er-known mashup is the sync­ing of “Echoes” (from Med­dle) with the final twen­ty min­utes of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (begin­ning with “Jupiter and Beyond the Infi­nite”)… [T]he mashup is coher­ent and cohe­sive. The emo­tion­al tone of the music and the images work in near-har­mo­ny, result­ing in a mashup that stands up to repeat­ed view­ings.… Both the movie and the music feed into and expand the sense of mys­tery and unknowa­bil­i­ty that each explores inde­pen­dent­ly.

Watch “Echoes Odyssey” above and see for your­self.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

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Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russian Studio Mosfilm: Classic Films, Beloved Comedies, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa & More

in Film | March 20th, 2017

To most inter­na­tion­al cinephiles, the word Mos­film imme­di­ate­ly brings to mind two tow­er­ing names in Russ­ian motion pic­tures: Sergei Eisen­stein and Andrei Tarkovsky. Both direc­tors made not just impor­tant movies but took major steps to devel­op the visu­al lan­guage of film itself, and both worked for Mos­film, one of Rus­si­a’s largest and old­est film stu­dios. First estab­lished in 1923, it went on to pro­duce more than 3,000 films dur­ing the Sovi­et era, some of which now define the cin­e­ma of that peri­od. Now view­ers around the world can enjoy their aes­thet­ic lush­ness, his­tor­i­cal inter­est, and pure enter­tain­ment val­ue more eas­i­ly than ever on Mos­film’s Youtube chan­nel, which offers among its many freely view­able pic­tures a selec­tion of 70 films in high def­i­n­i­tion.

You’ll want to start, of course, with Eisen­stein and Tarkovsky. Mos­film has made avail­able in HD the for­mer’s Alexan­der Nevsky (1938) and much of the lat­ter’s fil­mog­ra­phy: Ivan’s Child­hood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mir­ror (1975), and Stalk­er (1979).

For all their high artis­tic achieve­ment, how­ev­er, they may admit­ted­ly rein­force the West­’s Cold War-era image of Rus­sians as ter­ri­bly seri­ous peo­ple who sel­dom even crack a smile, let alone laugh. So why not fol­low those up with a dive into Mos­film’s con­sid­er­able HD selec­tion of beloved, light-heart­ed Sovi­et come­dies?

Of all Sovi­et com­e­dy direc­tors, Leonid Gaidai stands as by far the most suc­cess­ful. You can watch a fair few of his works, long and short, on Mos­film’s HD playlist, includ­ing Oper­a­tion Y and Shurik’s Oth­er Adven­tures (1965); the intrigu­ing­ly titled Kid­nap­ping, Cau­casian Style (1967); The Dia­mond Arm (1969), the most pop­u­lar soci­ety com­e­dy ever; The Twelve Chairs (1971); Ivan Vasilievich Changes Pro­fes­sion (1973), based on a play by Mikhail Bul­gakov; and It Can’t Be! (1975). It also offers sev­er­al films from Gaidai’s con­tem­po­rary Eldar Ryazanov, who worked in a more satir­i­cal vein (and showed a sur­pris­ing will­ing­ness to poke fun at the absur­di­ties of Sovi­et life): Car­ni­val Night (1956), the beloved musi­cal Hus­sar Bal­lad (1962), Beware of the Car (1966), Office Romance (1977), Sta­tion for Two (1982), and A Cru­el Romance (1984).

You may also notice the con­spic­u­ous pres­ence of a cer­tain high­ly notable non-Russ­ian film­mak­er: Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, who in 1975 worked with Mos­film to make Der­su Uza­la, an adap­ta­tion of the mem­oirs of a trap­per in Rus­si­a’s far east­ern wilder­ness. It came as just one of Mos­film’s many lit­er­ary adap­ta­tions, the most famous per­haps being Sergei Bon­darchuk’s 1969 vision of Leo Tol­stoy’s War and Peace. On Mos­film’s HD playlist you’ll also find two fea­tures draw­ing on the work of Anton Chekhov: Andrei Kon­chalovsky’s Uncle Vanya (1971), and Emil Loteanu’s My Ten­der and Affec­tion­ate Beast, or a Hunt­ing Acci­dent (1978), a fea­ture-length adap­ta­tion of A Hunt­ing Par­ty.

Mos­film’s Youtube chan­nel fea­tures not just Sovi­et-era movies, but those from more recent years as well: the mighty film stu­dio sur­vived the dis­so­lu­tion of the Sovi­et Union itself, con­tin­u­ing to con­tribute to cin­e­ma as a qua­si-pri­vate fed­er­a­tion of inde­pen­dent stu­dios. Its cur­rent Direc­tor Gen­er­al, Karen Shakhnazarov, boasts an impres­sive fil­mog­ra­phy of his own. You can get an HD taste of his work by watch­ing Jazzmen (1983), Win­ter Evening in Gagra (1985), Couri­er (1986),  Zero­grad (1989), The Assas­sin of the Tsar (1991), Dreams (1993), Poi­sons, or the World His­to­ry of Poi­son­ing (2001), and The Van­ished Empire (2008), all of which weave togeth­er the threads — the vision­ary, the his­tor­i­cal, the every­day, the absurd — run­ning through Mos­film’s long his­to­ry.

NOTE: Though many of the titles on Mos­film’s HD playlist appear only in Russ­ian, most of the films them­selves come with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles. Make sure to click the “CC” icon on the low­er right of the Youtube play­er to turn them on.

Some of the films men­tioned above will be added to our meta col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch War and Peace: The Splen­did, Epic Film Adap­ta­tion of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Nov­el (1969)

Free Films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisen­stein & Oth­er Russ­ian Greats

When Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Watched Solaris with Andrei Tarkovsky: I Was “Very Hap­py to Find Myself Liv­ing on Earth”

Watch Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and Oth­er Free Sergei Eisen­stein Films

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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