Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Creative Inspiration

in Creativity, Film, Life | October 11th, 2016

The prac­tice of car­toman­cy, or div­ina­tion with cards, dates back sev­er­al hun­dred years to at least 14th cen­tu­ry Europe, per­haps by way of Turkey. But the spe­cif­ic form we know of, the tarot, like­ly emerged in the 17th cen­tu­ry, and the deck we’re all most famil­iar with—the Rid­er-Waite Tarot—didn’t appear until 1909. Pop­u­lar main­ly with occultists like Aleis­ter Crow­ley and Madame Blavatsky in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the tarot explod­ed into pop­u­lar cul­ture in the new age 70s with books like Stu­art Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and For­tune Telling, and by way of cult film­mak­ers like Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky.

Since its rel­a­tive­ly recent pop­u­lar­iza­tion, “fun” and “for­tune telling” have more or less defined most people’s atti­tude to the tarot, whether they approve or dis­ap­prove of either one. But for artists and poets like William But­ler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and sur­re­al­ist direc­tor Jodorowsky—whose film nar­ra­tion is per­haps the most poet­ic in mod­ern cinema—the tarot has always meant some­thing much more mys­te­ri­ous and inspir­ing. “The tarot,” says Jodor­owsky in the short film above, “will teach you how to cre­ate a soul.”

After study­ing the Major and Minor Arcana and the suits, and puz­zling over the sym­bols on each card, Jodor­owsky dis­cov­ered that “all 78 cards could be joined in a man­dala, in just one image.” Learn­ing to see the deck thus, “You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a lan­guage that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a con­man.” Like oth­er mys­ti­cal poets, Jodorowsky’s study of the tarot did not lead him to the super­nat­ur­al but to the cre­ative act.

And like many a poet before him, Jodor­owsky explored the jour­ney of the Fool in his 1973 film The Holy Moun­tain, a “daz­zling, ram­bling, often inco­her­ent satire,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz, that “unfurls like a hal­lu­cino­genic day­dream.” Jodorowsky’s cin­e­mat­ic dream log­ic comes not only from his work as a “shaman­ic psy­chother­a­pist.” He also cred­its the tarot for his psy­chomag­i­cal real­ism. “For me,” says Jodor­owsky in the video at the top, “the tarot was some­thing more seri­ous. It was a deep psy­cho­log­i­cal search.” The result of that search—Jodorowsky’s sin­gu­lar and total­ly unfor­get­table body of work—speaks to us of the val­ue of such an under­tak­ing, what­ev­er means one uses to get there.

Or as Jodor­owsky says in one of his mys­ti­cal pro­nounce­ments, “If you set your spir­it to some­thing, that phe­nom­e­non will hap­pen.” If that sounds like mag­i­cal think­ing, that’s exact­ly what it is. Jodor­owsky shows us how to read the tarot as he does, for psy­cho­log­i­cal insight and cre­ative inspi­ra­tion, in the video above, addressed to a fan named John Bish­op. Span­ish speak­ers will have no trou­ble under­stand­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion, as he quick­ly slides almost ful­ly into his native lan­guage through lack of con­fi­dence in his facil­i­ty with Eng­lish. (The video belongs to a series on Jodorowsky’s YouTube chan­nel, most of them ful­ly in Span­ish with­out sub­ti­tles.) Select­ing a trans­la­tion on YouTube yields rather gar­bled results.

Nev­er­the­less, for Eng­lish speak­ers, the sub­ti­tled video at the top offers a sur­pris­ing­ly dense les­son on the Chilean mystic’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the tarot’s sup­posed wis­dom as a sym­bol­ic sys­tem, and a way of telling the present.

Should you wish to know more, you can find it in Jodorowsky’s book The Way of Tarot: The Spir­i­tu­al Teacher in the Cards, and prac­tice on your very own deck of Jodor­owsky-designed tarot cards.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s 82 Com­mand­ments For Liv­ing

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

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

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

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The Incredibly Strange Film Show: Revisit 1980s Documentaries on David Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Other Filmmakers

in Film | October 11th, 2016

Every film­mak­er, no mat­ter how main­stream or under­ground, has to get the inspi­ra­tion to become a film­mak­er some­where. “I used to watch the pro­gramme Jonathan Ross did in the late 80s called The Incred­i­bly Strange Film Show and they did a whole hour on Sam Rai­mi,” remem­bers Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pil­grim vs. the World direc­tor Edgar Wright, who in those days could­n’t imag­ine what it took to enter the impos­si­bly dis­tant world known as Hol­ly­wood. “I def­i­nite­ly hadn’t seen The Evil Dead as it was banned on video at the time – but I saw the Jonathan Ross doc­u­men­tary and I was stag­gered. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”

Although the show only ran 12 episodes, The Incred­i­bly Strange Film Show fea­tured doc­u­men­taries on not just Sam Rai­mi but David Lynch, John Waters, Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, and oth­er direc­tors with fil­mo­gra­phies as dis­tinc­tive as their per­son­al­i­ties. (You’ll find oth­er episodes on this Youtube playlist.) Ross and his team go all out, inter­view­ing not just the auteurs behind Eraser­head, Pink Flamin­gos, and The Holy Moun­tain them­selves but their friends, fam­i­ly mem­bers, and col­lab­o­ra­tors in var­i­ous loca­tions impor­tant to their work and their lives. (Ross even takes the step of dress­ing like his sub­jects, but­ton­ing his shirt all the way up in the Lynch episode and so on.)

The Incred­i­bly Strange Film Show orig­i­nal­ly aired in 1988 and 1989, but after decades of cel­e­bra­tion in cin­e­ma cul­ture, does the work of the likes of Lynch, Waters, and Jodor­owsky still count as “incred­i­bly strange”? Their movies cer­tain­ly do endure, but not by sheer odd­i­ty alone. We’ve seen plen­ty of stranger or more extreme images than theirs com­mit­ted to cel­lu­loid in the years since, but we’ve arguably seen far few­er equal­ly coher­ent and per­son­al visions suc­cess­ful­ly make the tran­si­tion from obscu­ri­ty to influ­ence. These elder states­men of famous fringe film, in oth­er words, each in his own way made the zeit­geist itself a lit­tle more incred­i­bly strange. Long may that achieve­ment inspire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moviedrome: Film­mak­er Alex Cox Pro­vides Video Intro­duc­tions to 100+ Clas­sic Cult Films

John Lan­dis Decon­structs Trail­ers of Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Films: Cit­i­zen Kane, Sun­set Boule­vard, 2001 & More

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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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Hear Bill Murray’s Favorite Poems Read Aloud by Murray Himself & Their Authors

in Film, Literature, Magazines, Poetry | October 10th, 2016

I’d be wary of any movie star who invites me to his hotel room to “read poet­ry” unless said star was doc­u­ment­ed poet­ry nut, Bill Mur­ray.

Ear­li­er this year, Leigh Haber, book edi­tor of O, The Oprah Mag­a­zine, reached out to Mur­ray to see if he’d share some of his favorite poems in cel­e­bra­tion of Nation­al Poet­ry Month. In true Mur­ray-esque fash­ion, he wait­ed until dead­line to return her call, sug­gest­ing that they meet in his room at the Car­lyle, where he would recite his choic­es in per­son.

Such celebri­ty shenani­gans are unheard of at the Chateau Mar­mont!

Murray’s favorite poems:

“What the Mir­ror Said” by Lucille Clifton

At the top of the page, Mur­ray reads the poem at a ben­e­fit for New York’s Poets House, adopt­ing a light accent sug­gest­ed by the dialect of the nar­ra­tor, a mir­ror full of appre­ci­a­tion for the poet’s wom­an­ly body. Clifton said that the “germ” of the poem was vis­it­ing her hus­band at Har­vard, and feel­ing out of place among all the slim young coeds. Thus­ly does Mur­ray posi­tion him­self as a hero to every female above the age of … you decide.

“Oat­meal” by Gal­way Kin­nell

Kin­nell, who sought to enliv­en a drea­ry bowl of oat­meal with such din­ing com­pan­ions as Keats, Spenser and Mil­ton, shared Murray’s play­ful sen­si­bil­i­ty. In an inter­view con­duct­ed as part of Michele Root-Bernstein’s World­play Project he remarked:

… it doesn’t seem like play at the time of doing it, but part of the whole con­struct of the work, and even though the work might be extreme­ly seri­ous and even morose, still there’s that ele­ment of play that is just an insep­a­ra­ble part of it.

“I Love You Sweat­h­eart” by Thomas Lux

Mur­ray told O, which incor­rect­ly report­ed the poem’s title as “I Love You Sweet­heart” that he expe­ri­enced this one as a vibra­tion on the inside of his ribs “where the meat is most ten­der.” It would make a ter­rif­ic scene in a movie, and who bet­ter to play the lover risk­ing his life to mis­spell a term of endear­ment on a bridge than Bill Mur­ray?

“Famous” by Nao­mi Shi­hab Nye

Alas, we could find no footage of Nye read­ing her love­ly poem aloud, but you can read it in full over at The Poet­ry Foun­da­tion. It’s easy to see why it speaks to Mur­ray.

via O, The Oprah Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site: Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins & More

Bill Mur­ray Reads Great Poet­ry by Bil­ly Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Man­gu­so

Bill Mur­ray Gives a Delight­ful Read­ing of Twain’s Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1996)

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site: Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defying Stunts Captured in Animated Gifs

in Film | October 6th, 2016

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In the days of silent com­e­dy, jokes by neces­si­ty con­sist­ed of phys­i­cal rou­tines. Char­lie Chaplin’s mourn­ful expres­sions, slumped shoul­ders, and fun­ny walks imme­di­ate­ly come to mind, as well as his slap­stick bits and prat­falls. Just as mem­o­rable are the dare­dev­il, death-defy­ing stunts of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, who com­pet­ed with each oth­er through­out their careers. The stone­faced Keaton “suf­fered most when the talkies arrived,” notes Jana Prikryl in The New York Review of Books, and “nev­er com­mand­ed the wealth or pop­u­lar­i­ty” of Chap­lin or Lloyd in his day.

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Nonethe­less, as Tony Zhou demon­strat­ed recent­ly in his video essay series Every Frame a Paint­ing, Keaton has since become one of those film­mak­ers who are “so influ­en­tial that no mat­ter where you look, you see traces of them every­where.” His fram­ing crops up in Wes Anderson’s care­ful set-pieces; his “acro­bat­ics and stunts” in Jack­ie Chan’s action sequences; and his dead­pan demeanor in Bill Murray’s endear­ing sad-sack per­for­mances. Keaton was, said Orson Welles, “the great­est of all the clowns in the his­to­ry of the cin­e­ma.” In the silent era, that also meant he was the great­est of all the stunt­men.

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“No silent star did more dan­ger­ous stunts than Buster Keaton,” Roger Ebert wrote with deep admi­ra­tion. Even Harold Lloyd’s ver­ti­go-induc­ing clock scenes in 1923’s Safe­ty Last used trick sets to lessen the risks. Keaton not only took on the full risk him­self in his most famous stunt scenes—many of which you can see in gif form here—he also “dou­bled for some of his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own.” In Steam­boat Bill, Jr. (1928, top), Keaton stands in the exact spot of an upper win­dow of the façade of a house that comes down around him. In his 1926 clas­sic The Gen­er­al, fur­ther down, he per­forms a jaw-drop­ping feat—using one rail­road tie to push aside anoth­er while rid­ing on the cow catch­er of a mov­ing loco­mo­tive.

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Fur­ther up, in 1923’s Three Ages—the first film Keaton wrote, direct­ed, and starred in—he per­forms an authen­ti­cal­ly ter­ri­fy­ing stunt that gives acro­pho­bic view­ers instant chills. Just above, from the fol­low­ing year’s Sher­lock Jr., we see a sim­i­lar­ly heart-rac­ing feat as Keaton clutch­es a road­block gate and falls two sto­ries into a speed­ing car. And in 1928’s The Cam­era­man, below, he goes down with a tall col­laps­ing plat­form. Keaton’s visu­al com­e­dy was superb; “he’s air­i­ly nim­ble,” Char­lie Fox writes in a Cab­i­net essay on the silent star’s fall into alco­holism after the talkies left his career strand­ed; “Nobody else’s body yield­ed so smooth­ly to the sub­lime mind­less­ness that the best phys­i­cal com­e­dy requires.”

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In just these few key scenes, we see how Keaton’s stunts stripped away what Prikryl calls the “sap­py, bla­tant slap­stick [he] dis­dained” in oth­er actors’ work (“I didn’t like over­act­ing,” he remarked). But part of the dry­ness of Keaton’s high-wire visu­al com­e­dy came from the fact that many of these scenes were unre­hearsed first takes, which “gave the action sequences a doc­u­men­tary fla­vor… because what was cap­tured on film was a bold attempt at some­thing real­ly dan­ger­ous or dif­fi­cult, not a prac­ticed slam dunk.”

In his lat­er years, Keaton’s career saw some­thing of a resur­gence after he beat his chron­ic drink­ing. “His job,” late in life, Fox writes, “became mak­ing quick appear­ances in unex­pect­ed places”—a Smirnoff Vod­ka ad in 1957, a brief role in Sun­set Boule­vard. “Always, in these lat­er per­for­mances, he arrives from and returns to a becalmed region of the past.” Per­haps nowhere was Keaton’s phys­i­cal expres­sive­ness put to more use in this peri­od than in a role which, in many ways, he found at least as chal­leng­ing as his ear­ly silent-era stunt­work: a 1965 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Samuel Beck­ett in the mod­ernist writer’s only for­ay into film (excerpt above): a short trib­ute to the silent era that is unsur­pris­ing­ly, “far more com­plex” con­cep­tu­al­ly than its fore­bears, but no less evoca­tive of the exis­ten­tial plight embod­ied by Keaton’s lone­ly, embat­tled-yet-sto­ic char­ac­ters.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Gen­er­al, “Per­haps the Great­est Film Ever Made,” and 20 Oth­er Buster Keaton Clas­sics Free Online

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics 

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

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

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion not only rad­i­cal­ly reshaped social and polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions in the soon-to-be Sovi­et Union, but it also rad­i­cal­ized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Rus­sia for 300 years,” com­ments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “cul­ture as an instru­ment of polit­i­cal con­trol.” As the Bol­she­viks swept away lum­ber­ing czarist elit­ism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be pop­ulist and proletarian—spearheaded by such exper­i­men­tal artists as film­mak­er Dzi­ga Ver­tov, poet, futur­ist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “supre­ma­tist” painter Kaz­imir Male­vich. While many of these artists were denounced as bour­geois obscu­ran­tists when the dog­mas of social­ist real­ism became their own instru­ments of polit­i­cal con­trol, for sev­er­al years, the nascent Com­mu­nist state pro­duced some of the most for­ward-think­ing art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first ful­ly syn­thet­ic music ever made, cre­at­ed by inno­v­a­tive meth­ods that pre­dat­ed syn­the­siz­ers by sev­er­al decades. We’ve like­ly all heard of the Theremin, for exam­ple, invent­ed in 1919 by Sovi­et engi­neer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, oth­er inven­tive tech­nol­o­gists and com­posers had begun to exper­i­ment with oscil­lo­scopes and mag­net­ic tape, cut­ting or draw­ing wave­forms by hand to cre­ate syn­thet­ic sounds.

One avant-garde Sovi­et com­pos­er, Arse­ny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound record­ing tech­nol­o­gy in film. The process of opti­cal sound uses an audio track record­ed on a sep­a­rate neg­a­tive that runs par­al­lel with the film (see it explained above). After the devel­op­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy, writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Bauhaus artist Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy sug­gest­ed that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be cre­at­ed from exper­i­men­ta­tion with the opti­cal film sound track.”

Tak­ing up the chal­lenge after the first Russ­ian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “pro­duced (pos­si­bly) the first short film with a hand-drawn syn­thet­ic sound­track.” One very short exam­ple of his tech­nique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it pre­serves a fas­ci­nat­ing tech­nique and a look at what might have been had this tech­nique, and oth­ers like it, borne more fruit. Mono­skop describes Avraamov as “a com­pos­er, music the­o­rist, per­for­mance insti­ga­tor, expert in Cau­cu­sian folk music, [and] out­spo­ken crit­ic of the clas­si­cal twelve-tone sys­tem.” He was also the com­mis­sar of a min­istry set up to encour­age “the devel­op­ment of a dis­tinct­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art and lit­er­a­ture.” It’s not entire­ly clear how what he called “orna­men­tal sound” tech­niques fit that pur­pose. But along with inno­va­tors like Evge­ny Sholpo and Niko­lai Voinov—whose fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that tech­nolo­gies gen­er­al­ly used to deliv­er enter­tain­ment and pro­pa­gan­da to pas­sive mass audi­ences could be manip­u­lat­ed by hand to cre­ate some­thing entire­ly unique.

The exper­i­ments of these sound pio­neers per­haps held lit­tle appeal for the aver­age Russ­ian, but they were enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly writ­ten up in a 1936 issue of Amer­i­can mag­a­zine Mod­ern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gal­lagher, “briefly formed a research insti­tute in Moscow, where they hoped to cre­ate syn­thet­ic voic­es and under­stand the musi­cal lan­guage of geo­met­ric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed with­in a year.”

via @WFMU/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

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

Watch Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Sur­viv­ing Film, The Lady and the Hooli­gan (1918)

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

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H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Silliest Film”

in Film, Sci Fi | October 3rd, 2016

metropolis-wells

When we watch Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis now, we see an aes­thet­i­cal­ly dar­ing land­mark work of sci­ence-fic­tion cin­e­ma. When H.G. Wells watched Metrop­o­lis back in 1927, the year of its release, he saw some­thing very dif­fer­ent indeed. “I have recent­ly seen the sil­li­est film,” wrote the author of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine as an open­er for his New York Times review. “I do not believe it would be pos­si­ble to make one sil­li­er.”

Despite its giant bud­get, Metrop­o­lis gives “in one eddy­ing con­cen­tra­tion almost every pos­si­ble fool­ish­ness, cliché, plat­i­tude, and mud­dle­ment about mechan­i­cal progress and progress in gen­er­al, served up with a sauce of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty that is all its own.” His­to­ry remem­bers Lang and Wells both as vision­ar­ies who looked, often with lit­tle opti­mism, to the future, but clear­ly they had a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion as to how that future would actu­al­ly play out.

The sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-mind­ed Wells took the impres­sion­is­tic Metrop­o­lis lit­er­al­ly, tak­ing issue with — among oth­er things — how its air­planes “show no advance on con­tem­po­rary types”; its “motor cars are 1926 mod­els or ear­li­er”; its vision of a ver­ti­cal­ly strat­i­fied city look, “to put it mild­ly, high­ly improb­a­ble”; the appar­ent con­di­tion that the city’s “machines are engaged quite furi­ous­ly in the mass pro­duc­tion of noth­ing that is ever used”; and the sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty of its mak­ers, “who are all on the side of soul and love and such like.”

Metrop­o­lis opened to mixed reviews at first (some of which you can read here), but no con­tem­po­rary crit­ic could match Wells for sheer dis­dain. “Nev­er for a moment does one believe any of this fool­ish sto­ry; nev­er for a moment is there any­thing amus­ing or con­vinc­ing in its drea­ry series of strained events,” he wrote, steer­ing his point-by-point take­down to its con­clu­sion. “It is immense­ly and strange­ly dull. It is not even to be laughed at.”

Strong stuff, but the high­est form of film crit­i­cism, as the French New Wave would lat­er artic­u­late, is film­mak­ing. And so, in 1936, came Things to Come, anoth­er cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle of the future, this one built to the osten­si­bly more plau­si­ble spec­i­fi­ca­tions Wells laid out as its screen­writer — that film itself just one more pre­de­ces­sor to the unend­ing series of dystopias, utopias, and every kind of future in-between to appear on the screen over the next eight decades.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten by H.G. Wells, Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts the World’s Very Dark Future

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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A Complete List of the 533 Movies & TV Shows Watched on the International Space Station

in Film, Television | September 30th, 2016

nasa-movies

Image cour­tesy of NASA

To keep some mea­sure of san­i­ty, the astro­nauts liv­ing aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (ISS), some 220 miles above our plan­et Earth, make a point of unwind­ing. Accord­ing to NASA, the astro­nauts get week­ends off. And, “on any giv­en day, crew mem­bers can watch movies, play music, read books, play cards and talk to their fam­i­lies.” Ear­li­er this year, Pale­o­Fu­ture gave us a fur­ther glimpse into what astro­naut down­time looks like, when its edi­tor, Matt Novak, print­ed a Com­plete List of Movies and TV Shows On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. Acquired through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion request, the list is a cat­a­logue of every film and TV show in the ISS media library. As Matt notes, there are many clas­sics (e.g. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by North­west), “plen­ty of space-themed and dystopi­an sci-fi movies” (2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Blade Run­ner), and a help­ful serv­ing of com­e­dy (Air­plane). Below, you can find the first 100 items on the list. Get the com­plete list–all 533 movies and TV shows–at Pale­o­fu­ture.

  1. 1941
  2. 12 Mon­keys
  3. 12 Years a Slave
  4. 2 Fast 2 Furi­ous
  5. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  7. 21 Jump Street
  8. 24 (Sea­sons 1–8)
  9. 48 Hours
  10. 8 Mile
  11. A Christ­mas Car­ol
  12. A Christ­mas Sto­ry
  13. A Knights Tale
  14. A Man and a Woman
  15. A Night at the Opera
  16. A Night at the Rox­bury
  17. A Per­fect Mur­der
  18. A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion
  19. A Room with a View
  20. Absolute­ly Fab­u­lous (Series 1–3)
  21. Air Force One
  22. Air­plane
  23. Alias Sea­son 1
  24. Alien
  25. Alien 3
  26. Alien Res­ur­rec­tion
  27. Aliens
  28. All Good Things
  29. Along Came Pol­ly
  30. Always
  31. Amer­i­can Gang­ster
  32. Amer­i­can Sniper
  33. Amer­i­can Wed­ding
  34. An Amer­i­can in Paris
  35. An Arti­cle of Hope
  36. Ana­lyze This
  37. Anchor­man
  38. Anchor­man 2
  39. Ani­mal House (1978)
  40. Argo
  41. Armaged­don
  42. Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
  43. Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
  44. Arrow Sea­son 1
  45. Arsenic and Old Lace
  46. As Good as it Gets
  47. Austin Pow­ers Inter­na­tion­al Man of Mys­tery
  48. Austin Pow­ers The Spy Who Shagged Me
  49. Aus­tralia
  50. Avatar
  51. Baby Mama
  52. Back to Bataan
  53. Back to the Future
  54. Back to the Future Part II
  55. Back to the Future Part III
  56. Back­draft
  57. Band of Broth­ers Sea­son 1
  58. Bataan
  59. Bat­man For­ev­er
  60. Bat­man Returns
  61. Bat­tle for the Plan­et of the Apes
  62. Bat­tle of Britain
  63. Bat­tle­ship
  64. Beneath the Plan­et of the Apes
  65. Ben-Hur
  66. Bet­ter Call Saul Sea­son 1
  67. Bev­er­ly Hills Cop II
  68. Bev­er­ly Hills Cop III
  69. Big Bang The­o­ry (Sea­sons 1–8)
  70. Big Eyes
  71. Big Jake
  72. Bil­ly Jack
  73. Bird­man, or the Unex­pect­ed Virtue of Igno­rance
  74. Black Hawk Down
  75. Black Mask
  76. Black Swan
  77. Blade Run­ner
  78. Blaz­ing Sad­dles Blend­ed
  79. Blue Plan­et Frozen Seas
  80. Blue Plan­et Ocean World
  81. Blues Broth­ers
  82. Bob Newhart But­ton-Down Con­cert
  83. Body of Lies
  84. Brave­heart
  85. Break­ing Bad Sea­sons 1–6
  86. Brides­maids
  87. Bull Durham
  88. Cad­dyshack
  89. Cahill Unit­ed States Mar­shal
  90. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The First Avenger
  91. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The Win­ter Sol­dier Cap­tain Phillips
  92. Casablan­ca
  93. Cast Away
  94. Catch-22
  95. Celtic Woman Songs from the Heart
  96. Chance Are
  97. Char­i­ots of Fire
  98. Char­lie St Cloud
  99. Chil­dren of Men
  100. Chisum

Find the com­plete list of 533 films and TV shows 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 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:

Astro­naut Chris Had­field Sings David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Going to the Bath­room in Space But Were Afraid to Ask

If Astro­nauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

William Shat­ner Puts in a Long Dis­tance Call to Astro­naut Aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

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How the Coen Brothers Storyboarded Blood Simple Down to a Tee (1984)

in Film | September 30th, 2016

Sel­dom, in the films of the Joel and Ethan Coen, do char­ac­ters’ schemes go accord­ing to plan. You can watch it hap­pen all across their fil­mog­ra­phy: the baby theft in Rais­ing Ari­zona, the own-wife kid­nap­ping and ran­som in Far­go, the casi­no-vault tun­nel heist in The Ladykillers, the Com­mu­nist con­ver­sion of a screen idol in Hail, Cae­sar! But they’ve earned their enor­mous cin­e­mat­ic rep­u­ta­tion not just for their themes, but for the pre­ci­sion with which they con­struct movies around them; it some­times seems that the more dis­solute the char­ac­ters and ulti­mate­ly dis­as­trous the plot they fall into, the more care­ful­ly-made the pic­ture.

This pat­tern began in 1984 with their first fea­ture, the Texas neo-noir Blood Sim­ple. Despite its rel­a­tive­ly small-scale pro­duc­tion (espe­cial­ly by the stan­dards of their peri­od piece-heavy recent work), it show­cas­es every ele­ment their fans love: the sense of place, the sharp dia­logue, the fas­ci­na­tion with “low” life, the dark humor, the atten­tion to detail.

No won­der, then, that it has now arrived in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, in an edi­tion which includes sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als like the com­par­i­son between the sto­ry­board and fin­ished scene above, fea­tur­ing com­men­tary from the Coens Joel and Ethan both, as well as direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Bar­ry Son­nen­feld and actor Frances McDor­mand.

“There are direc­tors who are com­plete­ly com­fort­able extem­po­riz­ing on the set, and oth­ers who are not,” say Joel and Ethan, trad­ing off obser­va­tions. “Some direc­tors want to throw every­thing up in the air and just see where it lands; that’s real­ly how they work, fun­da­men­tal­ly, and get great results. We’re kind of the… oth­er end of the spec­trum. We’re more com­fort­able if we have a plan, even if we stray quite a dis­tance from that plan while we’re shoot­ing.” They seem not to have strayed at all in the par­tic­u­lar scene in this video, but their fil­mog­ra­phy boasts more than enough vital­i­ty to rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of com­plete, con­trol-freak­ish rigid­i­ty. All of it shows us how the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry — but only because the Coen Broth­ers lay even bet­ter plans first.

via No Film School

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Coen Broth­ers Put Their Remark­able Stamp on the “Shot Reverse Shot,” the Fun­da­men­tal Cin­e­mat­ic Tech­nique

Watch the Coen Broth­ers’ TV Com­mer­cials: Swiss Cig­a­rettes, Gap Jeans, Tax­es & Clean Coal

Tui­leries: A Short, Slight­ly Twist­ed Film by Joel and Ethan Coen

World Cin­e­ma: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Play­ful Homage to Cin­e­ma His­to­ry

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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