All of the Music from Martin Scorsese’s Movies: Listen to a 326-Track, 20-Hour Playlist

in Film, Music | March 7th, 2017

Mar­tin Scors­ese’s cin­e­mat­ic real­i­ty, pop­u­lat­ed by hus­tlers, wise guys, prize fight­ers, vig­i­lantes, law­men, mad­men, and moguls, demands set­tings as vivid as its char­ac­ters. His movies, often peri­od pieces root­ed in par­tic­u­lar parts of 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca (and increas­ing­ly, ear­li­er eras and far­ther-flung lands), evoke their times and places most notably with songs. Among their twen­ty great­est musi­cal moments Indiewire lists War­ren Zevon’s “Were­wolves of Lon­don” in The Col­or of Mon­ey, The Clash’s “Janie Jones” in Bring­ing out the Dead, Mick­ey & Sylvi­a’s “Love Is Strange” in Casi­no, and the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shel­ter” in The Depart­ed (one of its three uses so far in Scors­ese’s fil­mog­ra­phy).

But Scors­ese’s involve­ment with music goes far beyond lay­er­ing it below, or indeed above, the scenes he shoots. In addi­tion to direct­ing his wide­ly acclaimed fea­tures from the “New Hol­ly­wood” 1970s to the present day, he’s also led some­thing of a par­al­lel career mak­ing films whol­ly ded­i­cat­ed to music and musi­cians, includ­ing 1978’s The Last Waltz, which cap­tured The Band’s “farewell con­cert appear­ance”; the 2003 mul­ti-direc­tor doc­u­men­tary series The Blues on that ven­er­a­ble Amer­i­can musi­cal tra­di­tion; 2005’s No Direc­tion Home on Bob Dylan, 2008’s Rolling Stones bio­graph­i­cal con­cert film Shine a Light, and 2011’s Liv­ing in the Mate­r­i­al World on George Har­ri­son.

Some of the pow­er of Scors­ese’s musi­cal selec­tions owes to his long friend­ship with The Band’s gui­tarist Rob­bie Robert­son, which began with The Last Waltz and con­tin­ues to this day. “We’ve always had this rela­tion­ship going back and forth,” a Telegram arti­cle on their qua­si-col­lab­o­ra­tion quotes the direc­tor as say­ing. “We start­ed a kind of rela­tion­ship in which we’d touch base as to every film I was doing and the type of music I was using.”

In his new mem­oir Tes­ti­mo­ny, Robert­son touch­es on a par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant job in Scors­ese’s career that sure­ly did some­thing to shape his friend’s musi­cal-cin­e­mat­ic con­scious­ness: assis­tant-direct­ing and par­tial­ly edit­ing his NYU film school class­mate Michael Wadleigh’s Wood­stock. “We were all, nat­u­ral­ly, pas­sion­ate about film-mak­ing, but Wad­leigh and I were equal­ly pas­sion­ate about rock music,” Scors­ese writes in the fore­word to Wood­stock: Three Days that Rocked the World. “I thought then, and I still think, that it formed the score for many of our lives; we moved through the days to its swag­ger­ing rhythms.”

Now you can move to all the rhythms of Scors­ese’s days, and there­fore of his fil­mog­ra­phy to date, in a 326-Track, 20-Hour Spo­ti­fy playlist. (If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, you can down­load it here.) It comes assem­bled by Thril­list, whose Anna Sil­man writes that, “as might be expect­ed, The Rolling Stones take the crown for most fea­tured artist with a total of 14 appear­ances,” but “Ray Charles, Eric Clap­ton, and Louis Pri­ma all put up some decent num­bers, too.” She sug­gests you enjoy it “on shuf­fle with some egg noo­dles and ketchup,” and if you get the ref­er­ence right away, the playlist will cer­tain­ly bring back some of your most vivid cin­e­mat­ic mem­o­ries — and maybe even a few his­tor­i­cal ones.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mavis Sta­ples and The Band Sing “The Weight” In Mar­tin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978)

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

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

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

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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42 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Blade Runner, Alien, Star Trek and Doctor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

in Film, Random | March 3rd, 2017

Back in 2009, the musi­cian who goes by the name “Cheesy Nir­vosa” began exper­i­ment­ing with ambi­ent music, before even­tu­al­ly launch­ing a YouTube chan­nel where he “com­pos­es long­form space and sci­fi ambi­ence.” Or what he oth­er­wise calls “ambi­ent geek sleep aids.” Click on the video above, and you can get lulled to sleep lis­ten­ing to the ambi­ent dron­ing sound–get ready Blade Run­ner fans!– heard in Rich Deckard’s apart­ment. It runs a good con­tin­u­ous 12 hours.

You’re more a Star Trek fan? Ok, try nod­ding off to the idling engine noise of a ship fea­tured in Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion. Mr. Nir­vosa cleaned up a sam­ple from the show and then looped it for 24 hours. That makes for one long sleep.

Or how about 12 hours of ambi­ent engine noise gen­er­at­ed by the USCSS Nos­tro­mo in Alien?

Final­ly, and per­haps my favorite, Cheesy cre­at­ed a 12 hour clip of the ambi­ent sounds made by the Tardis, the time machine made famous by the British sci-fi TV show, Doc­tor Who. But watch out. You might wake up liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent time and place.

For lots more ambi­ent sci-fi sounds (Star Wars, The Matrix, Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca, etc. ) check out this super long playlist here.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

Music That Helps You Sleep: Min­i­mal­ist Com­pos­er Max Richter, Pop Phe­nom Ed Sheer­an & Your Favorites

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Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will Wasn’t a Cinematic Masterpiece; It Was a Staggeringly Effective Piece of Propaganda

in Film, History | March 3rd, 2017

“Tri­umph of the Will,” says Dan Olson of the ana­lyt­i­cal video series Fold­ing Ideas, “is not a tri­umph of cin­e­ma.” Already the propo­si­tion runs counter to what many of us learned in film stud­ies class­es, whose pro­fes­sors assured us that Leni Riefen­stahl’s 1935 glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Nazi Ger­many, despite its thor­ough­ly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic nature, still counts as a seri­ous achieve­ment in film art. “None of the ideas or tech­niques were new,” Olson explains. “It is sim­ply that no one had pre­vi­ous­ly thrown enough mon­ey and resources at pro­pa­gan­da on this scale before.”

If it has val­ue as noth­ing but sheer spec­ta­cle, does Tri­umph of the Will (watch it below) amount to the Trans­form­ers of its day — and with motives that make Michael Bay block­busters look like noble, altru­is­tic endeav­ors at that? Despite doing noth­ing new with its medi­um, the film does still show­case cer­tain qual­i­ties of pro­pa­gan­da that, more than 70 years after the fall of the Third Reich, we’d all do well to keep in mind and keep an eye on.

Olson quotes “Ur-Fas­cism,” an essay by Umber­to Eco (who spent a cou­ple for­ma­tive years “among the SS, Fas­cists, Repub­li­cans, and par­ti­sans shoot­ing at one anoth­er”) explain­ing that, for fas­cist lead­ers to con­vince peo­ple to fol­low them,

the fol­low­ers must feel humil­i­at­ed by the osten­ta­tious wealth and force of their ene­mies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Eng­lish­men as the five-meal peo­ple. They ate more fre­quent­ly than the poor but sober Ital­ians. Jews are rich and help each oth­er through a secret web of mutu­al assis­tance. How­ev­er, the fol­low­ers must be con­vinced that they can over­whelm the ene­mies. Thus, by a con­tin­u­ous shift­ing of rhetor­i­cal focus, the ene­mies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fas­cist gov­ern­ments are con­demned to lose wars because they are con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly inca­pable of objec­tive­ly eval­u­at­ing the force of the ene­my.

Here we have sum­ma­rized both a mes­sage that Tri­umph of the Will wants to con­vey and the intel­lec­tu­al Achilles’ heel of fas­cist pro­pa­gan­da. It must imply the strength of the ene­mies even as it makes the strength of the regime crush­ing­ly explic­it. “To the mod­ern view­er it may seem aim­less and shod­di­ly paced,” says Olson, “with mon­tages that just go on and on and on long after the point has been made, but that’s the point: it is not mere­ly a demon­stra­tion of pres­ence, but of vol­ume. The indul­gence of it, the con­spic­u­ous cost, is as much a mes­sage of the film as any oth­er.”

The words of Han­nah Arendt, who once called sci­ence “only a sur­ro­gate for pow­er,” also enter into the analy­sis. Olson uses the quote to get into the idea that “one of the main mech­a­nisms of pro­pa­gan­da is to plant the idea of prece­dent, to alter the audi­ence’s own sense of his­to­ry and the world and appeal to the seem­ing­ly objec­tive author­i­ties of god, his­to­ry and sci­ence” in order to, through what Eco called the “cult of tra­di­tion,” make “new insti­tu­tions seem old­er than they real­ly are.”

We might find all this a bit fun­ny, giv­en the high­ly pre­ma­ture ter­mi­na­tion of a reign the Nazis insist­ed could endure for a thou­sand years, but in some sense their pro­pa­gan­dists had the last laugh. What­ev­er its cin­e­mat­ic mer­its or lack there­of, Riefen­stahl’s film remains essen­tial­ly effec­tive. “To this day we con­tin­ue to use Tri­umph of the Will as a ref­er­ence point for our men­tal con­struct of the Nazi regime,” says Olson. “Our idea of the Nazis is deeply informed by a pro­pa­gan­da film pro­duced by the Nazis for the explic­it pur­pose of cre­at­ing that men­tal con­struct.” When we think of the Nazis, in oth­er words, we still think of the images man­u­fac­tured more than eighty years ago by Tri­umph of the Will — “exact­ly the image they want­ed you to think of when you thought of them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Lam­beth Walk—Nazi Style: The Ear­ly Pro­pa­gan­da Mash Up That Enraged Joseph Goebbels

Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Pro­pa­gan­da Film Shows How Fas­cists Are Made

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

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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What Is Apocalypse Now Really About? An Hour-Long Video Analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam Masterpiece

in Film | March 1st, 2017

The dis­tort­ed sounds of heli­copter blades. The drunk­en punch that shat­ters the mir­ror. The “Ride of the Valkyries” attack. “I love the smell of napalm in the morn­ing.” The slaugh­ter­ing of the water buf­fa­lo. “The hor­ror… the hor­ror.” In the near­ly three-hour run­time of its orig­i­nal cut, Apoc­a­lypse Now deliv­ers these and many more of the most vivid cin­e­mat­ic moments of the 1970s, the era of “New Hollywood”—when young auteurs like its direc­tor Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la swept in and demol­ished the bound­aries of main­stream Amer­i­can cinema—and that of the Viet­nam War the film depicts as well.

Yet for all its artis­tic and cul­tur­al impact, the film has­n’t received quite as much scruti­ny as you might imag­ine. Or at least that’s how it looked to pro­fes­sion­al cinephile Lewis Bond, known for his work on Chan­nel Criswell, when he first took stock of Apoc­a­lypse Now’s ana­lyt­i­cal video essay land­scape.

Dis­cus­sions of Cop­po­la’s Viet­nam mas­ter­piece tend to focus on its leg­en­dar­i­ly ardu­ous pro­duc­tion and the one mil­lion feet of film famous­ly shot dur­ing it, a prece­dent per­haps set by the 1991 behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­tary Hearts of Dark­ness: A Film­mak­er’s Apoc­a­lypse.

These appraisals shy away from one seem­ing­ly impor­tant ques­tion in par­tic­u­lar: what is the movie about? On one lev­el, the answer to that ques­tion comes eas­i­ly: a mod­ern adap­ta­tion of Joseph Con­rad’s 1899 nov­el Heart of Dark­ness, Apoc­a­lypse Now trans­plants and trans­forms Con­rad’s sto­ry of a jour­ney up the Con­go Riv­er to the strong­hold of an ivory trad­er into the con­text of 1969 Viet­nam. The riv­er jour­ney remains, now led by a Unit­ed States Army cap­tain charged with the “ter­mi­na­tion with extreme prej­u­dice” of an Army Spe­cial Forces colonel gone rogue, and prob­a­bly insane, in Cam­bo­dia, sur­round­ed by ex-sol­diers and natives who report­ed­ly wor­ship him as a “demigod.”

Bond ref­er­ences the stan­dard inter­pre­ta­tion of Apoc­a­lypse Now’s riv­er jour­ney as “a metaphor for descent into mad­ness,” but in his two-part, hour-long video essay ana­lyz­ing the themes of the film, he posits “a more appro­pri­ate descrip­tion of the riv­er” as “a reflec­tion of the char­ac­ters’ inner jour­ney, show­ing us the indoc­tri­na­tion of evil.” Along the way, Cop­po­la and his col­lab­o­ra­tors offer a sin­gu­lar cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence about not one thing but many: “It’s about the destruc­tion of peo­ple’s morals. It’s about the way Amer­i­ca oper­at­ed dur­ing Viet­nam as well as the con­fused val­ues that Amer­i­ca pushed upon the world. It’s about war. It’s about peo­ple” — and every­thing else before which our inter­pre­tive instincts ulti­mate­ly fall pow­er­less.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Apoc­a­lypse Now’s “Ride of the Valkyries” Attack: The Anato­my of a Clas­sic Scene

The Mak­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now Remixed/Revisited

How Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Sev­en Samu­rai Per­fect­ed the Cin­e­mat­ic Action Scene: A New Video Essay

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made His Mas­ter­pieces: An Intro­duc­tion to His Obses­sive Approach to 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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Arthur C. Clarke Creates a List of His 12 Favorite Science-Fiction Movies (1984)

in Film, Sci Fi | February 28th, 2017

Many thinkers enjoy sci­ence fic­tion, and some even cre­ate it, but Arthur C. Clarke seemed to pos­sess a mind pre­ci­sion-engi­neered for every aspect of it. When not writ­ing such now-clas­sics of the tra­di­tion as Child­hood’s End, Ren­dezvous with Rama, and 2001: a Space Odyssey, he pre­dict­ed such actu­al ele­ments of human­i­ty’s future as 3D print­ers and the inter­net. He must also have pos­sessed quite a dis­cern­ing ear and eye for oth­er works of sci­ence fic­tion — an abil­i­ty, in oth­er words, to sep­a­rate the art and the insight from the non­sense. (A use­ful abil­i­ty indeed, giv­en that, in the words of sci-fi author Theodore Stur­geon, “nine­ty per­cent of every­thing,” his and Clarke’s field not except­ed, “is crap.”)

Asked in 1984 to name his favorite sci­ence-fic­tion films, Clarke came up with this top-twelve:

  1. Metrop­o­lis (1927, watch it above)
  2. Things to Come (1936)
  3. Franken­stein (1931)
  4. King Kong (orig­i­nal ver­sion) (1933)
  5. For­bid­den Plan­et (1956)
  6. The Thing from Anoth­er World (orig­i­nal ver­sion) (1951)
  7. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
  8. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
  9. Star Wars (1977)
  10. Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind (1980)
  11. Alien (1979)
  12. Blade Run­ner (1982)

The request came to him on the set of 2010: The Year We Make Con­tact, Peter Hyams’ sequel to Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appears on Clarke’s list. This selec­tion may at first seem self-serv­ing, giv­en his own involve­ment in the film’s gen­e­sis, but Clarke’s 2001 and Kubrick­’s 2001, par­al­lel projects derived from a col­lab­o­ra­tive idea, end­ed up as very dif­fer­ent works of sci­ence fic­tion.

Clarke’s choic­es, “which include some obvi­ous titles, clas­sics and mod­ern sen­sa­tions, are a well-round­ed group that would serve any neo­phyte well in study­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing the best that Hol­ly­wood has to offer in that cor­ner of cin­e­ma,” writes Syfy­Wire’s Jeff Spry. He adds that Clarke could­n’t quite decide whether to include Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, the pic­ture cred­it­ed with turn­ing Star Trek movies into much more than a one-off propo­si­tion; and, in addi­tion to Star Wars, which had already made his list, he con­sid­ered Return of the Jedi — though not, intrigu­ing­ly, The Empire Strikes Back, now per­haps the most respect­ed Star Wars movie of them all.

This top-twelve list, in any case, shows that Clarke knew a clas­sic when he saw one, and that he must have had a fair­ly expan­sive def­i­n­i­tion of sci­ence fic­tion, one that encom­pass­es even “mon­ster movies” like Franken­stein and King Kong. (Some purists even insist that Star Wars belongs in the fan­ta­sy col­umn.) But he also showed, as always, a cer­tain pre­science, as evi­denced by his selec­tion of Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner, now rec­og­nized as one of the most influ­en­tial films of all time, sci-fi or oth­er­wise, but then still a fresh vic­tim of com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal dis­as­ter. Only Philip K. Dick him­self, author of the nov­el that pro­vid­ed Blade Run­ner its source mate­r­i­al, could see its future more clear­ly. Dick and Clarke’s work may have had lit­tle in com­mon, but great sci­ence-fic­tion­al minds, it seems, think alike.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Inter­net, 3D Print­ers and Trained Mon­key Ser­vants

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Inter­net & PC in 1974

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

The Let­ter Between Stan­ley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke That Sparked the Great­est Sci­Fi Film Ever Made (1964)

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

Metrop­o­lis: Watch Fritz Lang’s 1927 Mas­ter­piece

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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W.B. Yeats’ Classic Poem “When You Are Old” Gets Adapted Into a Beautiful Short Film

in Film, Poetry | February 27th, 2017

W.B. Yeats’ 1891 poem “When You Are Old” is wide­ly con­sid­ered a com­men­tary on his unre­quit­ed life­long pas­sion for actress, Irish Repub­li­can and suf­fragette Maud Gonne.

Yeats first met Gonne in 1889 (a meet­ing which Yeats was lat­er to describe in his mem­oirs as the day ‘the trou­bling of my life began’) and he remained in love with her for much of his life, propos­ing mar­riage at least four times. Gonne became his muse, and he drew on his tor­tured love for her, albeit unnamed, as the inspi­ra­tion for many of his works, includ­ing most notably the poem, “When You Are Old.”

Freely based on a son­net by Pierre de Ron­sard, which first appeared in Le Sec­ond Livre Des Son­nets Pour Hélène in 1578, “When You Are Old” enjoins the object of an unre­turned love to reflect–in years to come–on a love reject­ed, to remem­ber one who ‘loved your moments of glad grace’, and who ‘loved the pil­grim soul in you, And loved the sor­rows of your chang­ing face.’

Although Yeats’s poet­ry is often very dense and rich in allu­sion to mythol­o­gy, the occult and his­to­ry, in “When You Are Old” the pain and bit­ter­sweet nature of a spurned love is all too appar­ent.

Aus­tralian play­wright Jes­si­ca Bel­lamy drew on the poem and her love of W.B. Yeats’ work when writ­ing the the­atre mono­logue “Lit­tle Love,” which she then adapt­ed with direc­tor Damien Pow­er to cre­ate the short film Bat Eyes. Watch it above.

In Bat Eyes, Adam and Jen­ny (‘Bat Eyes’) Bar­rett are brought togeth­er through an inci­dent of class­room bul­ly­ing. Through the metaphor of visu­al impair­ment and an eye exam­i­na­tion under­gone by an adult Adam, Bel­lamy and Pow­er explore the poem’s themes of long­ing, insight, rev­e­la­tion and regret, and poet­ry’s capac­i­ty to pro­vide solace and awak­en empa­thy in every­day life. The script of this beau­ti­ful short film con­sists prin­ci­pal­ly of the text of the poem, with the film’s two young leads repeat­ing Yeats’ words back and forth to each oth­er, as the sto­ry flips back and forth in time, the mean­ing of the lines becom­ing more tan­gi­ble and res­o­nant with each recita­tion.

Says Jes­si­ca Bel­lamy:

‘Yeats writes about ancient mythol­o­gy and the his­to­ry of his time, but you don’t have to under­stand all that to get the feel­ing of what he has to say. There are lines, there are moments that, as a read­er, you just get and you think: I’m not alone in this world and that some­one else has felt these things as well. I hope view­ers will hear the truth of what this poem is say­ing, and that they’ll see the film as an ode to love, rela­tion­ships and to poet­ry itself.

Gonne, who died in 1953, out­lived Yeats by 14 years. She was pho­tographed by Life mag­a­zine in Octo­ber 1948, old and grey, sit­ting by a fire and read­ing Yeats poet­ry.

You can watch the orig­i­nal mono­logue, “Lit­tle Love,” here:

And read and lis­ten to the text of “When You Are Old” here. There’s also a ver­sion read by Col­in Far­rell. Find it below.

Dan Prichard is an online film and web­series pro­duc­er, based in Syd­ney, whose work explores iden­ti­ty, place, and the space between film and per­for­mance in the dig­i­tal are­na. Vis­it his web­site here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems

Aleis­ter Crow­ley & William But­ler Yeats Get into an Occult Bat­tle, Pit­ting White Mag­ic Against Black Mag­ic (1900)

T.S. Eliot’s Clas­sic Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Gets Adapt­ed into a Hip Mod­ern Film

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A Free Short Course on How Pixar Uses Physics to Make Its Effects

in Animation, Film, Technology | February 24th, 2017

A new com­put­er-ani­mat­ed spec­ta­cle that makes us rethink the rela­tion­ship between imag­i­na­tion and tech­nol­o­gy seems, now, to come out every few months. Audi­ences have grown used to var­i­ous com­put­er ani­ma­tion stu­dios all com­pet­ing to wow them, but not so long ago the very notion of enter­tain­ing ani­ma­tion made with com­put­ers sound­ed like sci­ence fic­tion. All that changed in the mid-1980s when a young ani­ma­tor named John Las­seter breathed life into the CGI stars of such now sim­ple-look­ing but then rev­o­lu­tion­ary shorts as The Adven­tures of André and Wal­ly B. and Luxo Jr., the lat­ter being the first inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion by a cer­tain Pixar Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios.

We know Pixar today as the out­fit respon­si­ble for Toy Sto­ry, The Incred­i­bles, WALL‑E, and oth­er ground­break­ing com­put­er-ani­mat­ed fea­tures, each one more impres­sive than the last. How do they do it? Why, with ever-larg­er and more high­ly skilled cre­ative and tech­no­log­i­cal teams, of course, all of whom work atop a basic foun­da­tion laid by Las­seter and his pre­de­ces­sors in the art of com­put­er ani­ma­tion, in the search for answers to one ques­tion: how can we get these dig­i­tal machines to con­vinc­ing­ly sim­u­late our world?

After all, even imag­i­nary char­ac­ters must emote, move around, and bump into one anoth­er with con­vic­tion, and do it in a medi­um of light, wind, water, and much else at that, all ulti­mate­ly under­gird­ed by the laws of physics.

Thanks to Pixar and their com­pe­ti­tion, not a few mem­bers of the past cou­ple gen­er­a­tions have grown up dream­ing of mas­ter­ing com­put­er ani­ma­tion them­selves. Now, in part­ner­ship with online edu­ca­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion Khan Acad­e­my, they have a place to start: Pixar in a Box, a series of short inter­ac­tive cours­es on how to “ani­mate bounc­ing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make vir­tu­al fire­works explode,” which vivid­ly demon­strates that “the sub­jects you learn in school — math, sci­ence, com­put­er sci­ence, and human­i­ties — are used every day to cre­ate amaz­ing movies.” The effects course gets deep­er into the nit­ty-grit­ty of just how com­put­er ani­ma­tors have found ways of tak­ing real phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na and “break­ing them down into mil­lions of tiny par­ti­cles and con­trol­ling them using com­put­er pro­gram­ming.”

It all comes down to devel­op­ing and using par­ti­cle sys­tems, pro­grams designed to repli­cate the motion of the real par­ti­cles that make up the phys­i­cal world. “Using par­ti­cles is a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of real physics,” says Pixar Effects Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor Matt Wong, “but it’s an effec­tive tool for artists. The more par­ti­cles you use, the clos­er you get to real physics. Most of our sim­u­la­tions require mil­lions and mil­lions of par­ti­cles to cre­ate believ­able water,” for instance, which requires a lev­el of com­put­ing pow­er scarce­ly imag­in­able in 1982, when Pixar’s own effects artist Bill Reeves (who appears in the one of these videos) first used a par­ti­cle sys­tem for a visu­al effect in Star Trek II. These effects have indeed come a long way, but as any­one who takes this course will sus­pect, com­put­er ani­ma­tion has only begun to show us the worlds it can real­ize.

For more Pixar/Khan Acad­e­my cours­es, please see the items in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pixar & Khan Acad­e­my Offer a Free Online Course on Sto­ry­telling

Take a Free Online Course on Mak­ing Ani­ma­tions from Pixar & Khan Acad­e­my

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Sto­ry­telling … Makes for an Addic­tive Par­lor Game

Free Online Physics Cours­es

A Rare Look Inside Pixar Stu­dios

The Beau­ty of Pixar

The First 3D Dig­i­tal Film Cre­at­ed by Ed Cat­mull, Co-Founder of Pixar (1970)

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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Watch Earth, a Landmark of Soviet Cinema (1930)

in Film | February 24th, 2017

Today we’re adding to our list of Free Movies a 1930 Sovi­et silent film by direc­tor Alexan­der Dovzhenko. It’s called Earth, and it’s the third install­ment in Dovzhenko’s “Ukraine Tril­o­gy.”

When The Guardian cre­at­ed its list of the Top 10 Silent Movies of all time, it put Earth in the #9 slot. About the film writer Pamela Hutchin­son said:

Earth, capped by that avowed­ly sec­u­lar title, is a lyri­cal, car­nal movie about birth, death, sex and rebel­lion. Offi­cial­ly, this Sovi­et-era Ukrain­ian silent is a paean to col­lec­tive farm­ing, craft­ed around a fam­i­ly dra­ma, but its direc­tor, Alexan­der Dovzhenko, was a born rene­gade, for whom plots were far less impor­tant than poet­ry…

Earth is the final part of Dovzhenko’s silent tril­o­gy (fol­low­ing the nation­al­ist fan­ta­sy Zvenig­o­ra (1928) and the avant-garde anti-war film Arse­nal (1929), and is brim­ming with exu­ber­ant youth, but haunt­ed by the shad­ow of death.…

Sketched as trib­ute to the boons of col­lec­tivi­sa­tion, but released as those schemes were falling out of favour, Earth was con­demned on its home turf on polit­i­cal grounds. It was also snipped by cen­sors who object­ed to the nudi­ty, and the infa­mous scene in which farm­ers uri­nate into their trac­tor’s radi­a­tor. But while there was dis­may and cen­sure in the Sovi­et Union, crit­ics else­where were over­awed…

It’s the lat­ter impres­sion that endures. Dovzhenko’s sym­bol­ism is both rich and auda­cious. His scope com­pris­es vast pas­toral land­scapes, and inti­mate fleshy naked­ness. Per­haps its most cel­e­brat­ed sequence is the mag­nif­i­cent open­ing scene: the painful coun­ter­point between a dying man, his infant grand­chil­dren and the burst­ing fruit of his orchard. This is liv­ing cin­e­ma, as refresh­ing and vital as the film’s own cli­mac­tic down­pour.

You can watch Earth above, and find it list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Silent Films, a sub­set of our meta 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 and BlueSky.

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 Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion (1924): The Most Bizarre Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film You’ll Ever See

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Watch Sovi­et Avant-Garde Com­posers Cre­ate Syn­the­sized Music with Hand-Drawn Ani­ma­tions (1934)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

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