Watch “Don’t Be a Sucker!,” the 1947 US Government Anti-Hatred Film That’s Relevant All Over Again

in Film, History | July 1st, 2016

If you aren’t seriously disturbed, even alarmed, that we in the U.S. have a presidential candidate from a major political party who succeeds by whipping up xenophobic fervor and telling us the country must not only reinstitute torture, but must do “the unthinkable”… well…. I don’t really know what to say to you. Perhaps more symptom than cause of a global turn toward tribal hatred, the GOP candidate has lent his name to a phenomenon characterized by cultish devotion to an authoritarian strongman, serial falsehood, and easy, uncritical scapegoating. We needn’t look far back in time to see the historical analogues, whether in the early 20th century, at the end of the 19th, or during any number of historical moments before and after.

We also needn’t look very far back to find a history of resistance to authoritarian bigotry, and not only from Civil Rights campaigners and leftists, but also, as you can see above, from the U.S. War Department. In 1947, the Department released the short propaganda film, “Don’t Be a Sucker!”, aimed at middle-class American Joes. Shot at Warner Studios, the film opens with some typical noirish crime scenarios, complete with convincingly noir lighting and camera angles, to visually set up the character of the “sucker” who gets taken in by sinister but seductive characters—“people who stay up nights trying to figure out how to take away” what the everyman has. What do naïve potential marks in this analogy have to lose? American plenty: “plenty of food, big factories to make things a man can use, big cities to do the business of a big country, and people, lots of people.”

“People,” the narrator says, working the farms and factories, digging the mines and running the businesses: “all kinds of people. People from different countries with different religions, different colored skins. Free people.” Is this disingenuous? You bet. We’re told this aggregate of people is “free to vote”—and we know this to be largely untrue in practice for many, necessitating the Voting Rights Act almost twenty years later. Free to “pick their own jobs”? Employment discrimination, segregation, and sexism effectively prevented that for millions. But the sentiments are noble, even if the facts don’t fully fit. As our average Joe wanders along, contemplating his advantages, he happens upon a reactionary streetcorner demogague haranguing against foreigners, African-Americans, Catholics, and Freemasons (?) on behalf of “real Americans.” Sounds plenty familiar.

The voice of reason comes from a naturalized Hungarian professor who witnessed the rise of Nazism in Berlin and who explains to our everyman the strategy of fanatics and fascists—divide and rule. “We human beings are not born with prejudices,” says the wise professor, “always they are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody’s going to get something out of it. And it isn’t going to be you.” The remainder of the film mostly consists of the Hungarian professor’s recollections of how the Nazis won over ordinary Germans.

“Don’t Be a Sucker!” uses a clever rhetorical strategy, appealing to the self-interest and vanity of the everyman while couching that appeal in egalitarian values. The very recent historical example of fascist Europe carries significant weight, where too often today that history gets treated like a joke, turned into crude and muddled memes. This film would have had real impact on the viewing audience, who would have seen it before their feature in theaters across the country.

It’s worth noting that this film came out during a period of increasing American prosperity and comparative economic equity. The jobs “Don’t Be a Sucker!” lists with pride have disappeared. Today’s everyman, we might say, has even more reason for susceptibility to the demagogue’s appeals. The Internet Archive notes an irony here “in the light of Cold War anti-Communist politics, which really came into their own in the year this film was made.” The streetcorner populist calls to mind people like Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover (and he looks like George Wallace)—powerful government authorities who cast suspicion on every movement for Civil Rights and social equality.

“Don’t Be a Sucker!” may seem like an outlier, but it’s reminiscent of another piece of patriotic, anti-racist-and-religious-bigotry propaganda—the Superman cartoon above, which first appeared in 1949, distributed to school children as a book cover by something called The Institute for American Democracy. You may have seen versions of a full-color poster, reprinted in subsequent years. Here, Superman expresses the same egalitarian values as “Don’t Be a Sucker!” only instead of calling racism a con-job, he calls it “Un-American,” using the favorite denunciation of HUAC and other anti-Communist groups.

History and the present moment may often prove otherwise—showing us just how very American racism and bigotry can be, but so too are numerous counter-movements on the left and, as these examples show, from more conservative, establishment corners as well.

“Don’t Be a Sucker!” will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

h/t Daniel Buk

Bertolt Brecht Testifies Before the House Un-American Activities Committee (1947)

Did Hollywood Movies Studios “Collaborate” with Hitler During WW II? Historian Makes the Case

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

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Terry Gilliam Explains His Never-Ending Fascination with Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

in Animation, Art, Film | July 1st, 2016

As I recall, if you asked men in the 1990s to describe ideal the woman, a great many would have made references to Uma Thurman, who spent that decade playing high-profile roles in acclaimed movies like Pulp Fiction and Gattaca—as well as less-acclaimed movies like The Avengers and Batman & Robin (but hey, you can’t pick winners all the time). But animator, director, American Monty Python member and all-around visionary Terry Gilliam made use of the powerful appeal of Thurman’s presence even earlier, when—making The Adventures of Baron Munchausen—-he needed just the right young lady for a scene recreating Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance painting The Birth of Venus.

“The casting director in L.A. said, ‘You’ve got to meet this girl,’ ” Gilliam remembers in the clip from this year’s BBC Arts documentary Botticelli’s Venus: The Making on an Icon at the top of the post. “There she was: statuesque, beautiful, intelligent—incredibly intelligent.” He compares the original canvas itself to a “widescreen cinema,” as well as, just as aptly, to a lower art form entirely: “The winds are blowing, her hair starts billowing out, the dressing girl is bringing in the robe — it’s a really funny painting, looking at it again, because she’s there, static, elegant, naked, sexy. The robe wouldn’t look so good if the winds weren’t blowing, nor would her hair look so beautiful. It’s like, this is a commercial for shampoo!”

As Monty Python fans all know, Gilliam had worked with The Birth of Venus before, using his signature cutout animation technique, which defined much of the look and feel of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to make Venus dance. “I like testing how much I like something, or how beautiful something is, by making fun of it,” he says to his BBC interviewer. “If it withstands my silliness, it’s really great art.” Further props to Botticelli come at the end of the clip, when she asks Gilliam if he thinks Venus represents “the ultimate male fantasy.” “Oh, why not?” he immediately replies. “You don’t do much better than that. I think he really cracked that one.”

Terry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Monty Python Animations: A 1974 How-To Guide

Terry Gilliam’s Debut Animated Film, Storytime

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 of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona

in Comedy, Film | June 30th, 2016

“Bill Murray is a national, no, an international, no an intergalactic treasure,” said Jim Jarmusch, who directed him in Coffee and Cigarettes and Broken Flowers, when the actor won this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. But what, exactly, do we find so compelling about the guy? I launched into my own quest to find out after seeing his performance in Rushmore (regarded by most Murray scholars as a revelation of depth at which he’d only hinted between wisecracks before), watching every movie he ever appeared in. Similarly rigorous research must have gone into this new video on the philosophy of Bill Murray.

“Since replacing Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live in 1977,” says narrator Jared Bauer, “Bill Murray has embodied a very particular type of comedy that can best be described as ‘ironic and cooly distant.’ ” Bauer references a New York Times article on Murray’s ascendance to “secular sainthood” which describes him as having had “such a long film career that, in the public mind, there are multiple Bill Murrays. The Bill Murray of Stripes and Ghostbusters is an anti-authoritarian goofball: the kind of smart-aleck who leads a company of soldiers in a coordinated dance routine before a visiting general, or responds to the possible destruction of New York City by saying, ‘Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!’ ”

That memorable line makes it into “The Philosophy of Bill Murray,” as do many others, all of which spring from the actor’s signature persona, which “stands slightly at a distance from everything, enabling him to maintain a dryly humorous commentary about what’s going on around him.” Bauer places this in a tradition of American comedy “dating back at least to the vaudeville days” and continuing through to Groucho Marx’s habitual breakage of the fourth wall. He even connects it to 15th-century Japanese playwright-philosopher Zeami Motokiyo and, in some sense his 20th-century continuation, Bertolt Brecht.

But what influence best explains Murray’s distinctive onscreen and increasingly performance art-like offscreen behavior today? Maybe that of his onetime teacher, the Greco-Armenian Sufi mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, who, as Murray’s Ghostbusters co-star Harold Ramis put it, “used to act really irrationally to his students, almost as if trying to teach them object lessons.” He taught what he called “the fourth way of enlightenment,” or — more fittingly in Murray’s case — “the way of the sly man,” who can “find the truth in everyday life” by remaining simultaneously aware of both the outside world and his inner one while not getting caught up in either. The sly man thus exists between, and uses, “the world, the self, and the self that is observing everything.”

Bauer sums up Murray’s uniqueness thus: “He turns the usual style of American comedic irony against itself, or against himself,” leading us to “identify not with Bill Murray’s character, but with Bill Murray, who distances himself from the stakes of the narrative.” But whether playing a character, playing himself, or something between the two, Murray seems as if he knows something we don’t about the stakes of life itself. “I’d like to be more consistently here,” he once said to Charlie Rose, who’d asked what he wants that he doesn’t already have. “Really in it, really alive. I’d like to just be more here all the time, and I’d like to see what I could get done, what I could do, if I was able to not get distracted, to not change channels in my mind and body.” A universal human longing, perhaps, but one Murray, the ultimate sly man, has come to tap more deeply into than any performer around.

An Animated Bill Murray on the Advantages & Disadvantages of Fame

Bill Murray Reads Poetry at a Construction Site

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

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

Bill Murray Sings the Poetry of Bob Dylan: Shelter From the Storm

Watch Bill Murray Perform a Satirical Anti-Technology Rant (1982)

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 Very First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Thomas Edison Production (1910)

in Film, Literature | June 28th, 2016

The story of humans creating monstrous beings in their image may have perennial relevance, even if it seems specific to our contemporary cultural moment. What, after all, is Oscar Isaac’s AI inventor in Ex Machina but a 21st century update of Victor Frankenstein? And what is Frankenstein’s monster but a Gothic recreation of the Golem, or any number of folkloric automatons in cultures far and wide? It’s an age-old archetypal story that seems to get an update every year.

People have imagined making artificial people, perhaps for as long as people have told stories. But each iteration of that story emerges from a historical matrix of particular technological, philosophical, and metaphysical anxieties. In the case of Ex Machina, we have not only a thinking, feeling humanoid, but one created out of mass data collection and designed to serve the prurient interests of a Nietzschean venture capitalist engineer. How very 2015, no?

In the original Frankenstein, a novel written by a woman, Mary Shelley, we have a very different kind of monster, born out of a Romantic convergence of interest in alchemy and the occult—the original domains of early modern scientists like Isaac Newton—and more modern, industrial scientific methods (hence the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus). Many critics have called the novel the first work of science fiction, and many, like Maurice Hindle in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, have described its main theme as “the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities.”

And yet, writes Ruth Franklin at the New Republic—drawing convincingly on Shelley’s own traumatic experiences with birth, including her own—Frankenstein might “also be a story about pregnancy.” Intriguing as this possibility may be, most interpretations of the novel have seen it as “a fable of masculine reproduction, in which a man creates life asexually.” That tradition continues in the movies with the first film adaptation of Frankenstein, made by Edison studios just over 100 years after the novel’s 1818 publication.

The 1910 short silent film, which you can watch above, bills itself as “a liberal adaptation from Mrs. Shelley’s famous story,” and opens in its first scene with Victor Frankenstein leaving home for college. Two years later, the Faustian mad scientist discovers the mystery of life, uses the knowledge to make his “creature”—a surprisingly grotesque scene—and, appalled at the sight of it, rejects the thing in horror. The rest of the story proceeds along the usual lines, as the monster, in rags and fright wig, seeks recognition from his creator/parent and wreaks havoc when he does not receive it.

This first Frankenstein film, directed by J. Searle Dawley, arrived two years after Edison’s Bronx, New York studios began full and very lucrative operations, and, by this time, writes Rich Drees, motion pictures had begun to receive unwelcome attention from “moral crusaders and reform groups, who decried the new medium as being dangerous and encouraging of immorality.” Edison responded quickly, fearing “a serious threat to his bottom line,” and ordered that his films’ production quality and “moral tone” be improved.

Frankenstein, writes Drees, “was the perfect choice to kick off production under this new moral banner. It’s a story that deals with the extremes of the human condition, life and death, and the dangers of tampering in God’s realm.” Edison released the film with the following disclaimer:

To those familiar with Mrs. Shelly’s story it will be evident that we have carefully omitted anything which might be any possibility shock any portion of the audience. In making the film the Edison Co. has carefully tried to eliminate all actual repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale. Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story it is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience.

Five years after the Edison studio’s short, another silent adaptation, Life Without Soul, appeared. Made by the Ocean Film Corporation, this film is now lost to history, but it qualifies as the first feature-length adaptation at 70 minutes. A review of the film, writes the blog Frankensteinia, “reveals a story that hews fairly close to Mary Shelley’s novel,” making a “bold attempt at capturing the world-spanning sweep of the tale.”

Several dozen film adaptations in the ensuing years have tracked more or less closely to Shelley’s narrative—giving Frankenstein’s monster a bride and having Victor Frankenstein reanimate his dead lover with the mind of a wrongly-executed man. But none of these films, so far as I know, has drawn out the subtext of Frankenstein as a novel about pregnancy and childbirth. Such an adaptation remains to be made, perhaps by the first woman director to take on a Frankenstein film.

You can find Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

The film above will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Mary Shelley’s Handwritten Manuscripts of Frankenstein Now Online for the First Time

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

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Slavoj Žižek Explains the Artistry of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films: Solaris, Stalker & More

in Film | June 27th, 2016

Though a filmmaker of strong personal convictions, artistic and otherwise, Andrei Tarkovsky made films that endure in part because they open themselves to a multiplicity of interpretations. Nothing in the Tarkovsky canon opens itself up to quite such a multiplicity of interpretations as Stalker, which continues to produce fascinating new works derived from their creators’ experience of the film, such as Geoff Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games, and even a segment of the Slavoj Žižek-starring documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which you can watch above.

“We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what they truly are,” declares the philosophical, cultural, and political provocateur over footage of what many consider Tarkovsky’s masterpiece. He describes it as “a film about a ‘Zone,’ a prohibited space where there are debris, remainders of aliens visiting us.” The titular professionals he describes as “people who specialize in smuggling foreigners who want to visit into this space where you get many magical objects.” The ultimate goal of all who make the harrowing journey to the Zone? “The room in the middle of this space, where it is claimed your desires will be realized.”

Not a bad summing-up of the premise of a movie even whose biggest fans struggle to explain. But Žižek, of course, takes his analysis further, bringing in Solaris, Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel about a planet that can read the minds of the humans in orbit around it, “an id machine as an object which realizes your nightmares, desires, fears, even before you ask for it.” With Stalker, Tarkovsky envisions the opposite, “a zone where your desires, your deepest wishes, get realized on condition that you are able to formulate them. Which, of course, you are never able.”

If you subscribe to Žižek’s reading of the films, it actually makes perfect sense that they could continue to find new, enthralled audiences: the human relationship to desire remains as fraught as ever — and perhaps has only gained fraughtness as we find ways to satisfy our desires — and both Solaris and Stalker find artistically striking new ways to dramatize it. And according to Žižek, the respected filmmaker also provides a solution: “religious obscurantism,” a “gesture of self-sacrifice” of the kind we see made in his final films, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice. Tarkovsky also sacrificed himself, but for cinema, and so created some of the most formally remarkable motion pictures ever made, ones in which, in Žižek’s words, “we are made to feel this inertia, drabness of time,” and even “the density of time itself.” If you wonder what he means by that, as ever, you’ve just got to experience Tarkovsky for yourself. A number of his major films you can watch free online.

Watch Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bending Masterpiece Free Online

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Masterpiece Stalker Gets Adapted into a Video Game

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

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection

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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And Now for Some Culinary Weirdness: Christopher Walken Shows You How to Cook Chicken & Pears

in Comedy, Film, Food & Drink | June 27th, 2016

I don’t need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own.

- Christopher Walken

Five years ago, actor Christopher Walken casually shared a simple recipe for roast chicken with pears, above. The lighting was amateur, his implements fairly utilitarian, and, much to my gratification, he couldn’t keep his cat off the counter, either.

His improvised patter was as nonchalant as his handling of his ingredients. Undeterred, legions of fans still found plenty of Walken-esque quotes with which to spice up the video’s comments section.

Chalk it up to the dozens of soft spoken, seriously unhinged characters on which this actor’s reputation rests. It’s painfully easy to imagine a rival gang member or law enforcement official lashed to a chair just off camera, squirming in terror as Walken pauses to appreciate the “little cookies” the caramelized pears leave behind on the bottom of his pan.

Whatever he’s planning to do to this imaginary unfortunate, one hopes it won’t involve flaps of skin and a vertical poultry roaster.

As to the recipe, it’s as delicious as it is innocuous. Try it!

If you’re feeling less than adventurous, you can decrease the creep factor by replicating the shoot with a grandfatherly gent of your choosing prior to serving. (Anyone who’s not Christopher Walken will do.)

If you’re looking for further serving suggestions, the comedy channel Funny or Die revisited the dish in 2012, pairing it with salad, seafood melange, red wine, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star Richard Belzer, and two heavily made up assistants who appear to be on loan from Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video.

Things get cooking with a visit to the Byzantine Stew Leonard’s supermarket, and end with a cell phone pic of Walken’s nose. There’s a live mandolin serenade and the kitchen seems vastly more expensive, but I found myself missing the homey sense of foreboding created by the original.

Still, one can never go wrong with poultry and pears.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price & Christopher Lee

How Cooking Can Change Your Life: A Short Animated Film Featuring the Wisdom of Michael Pollan

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

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Hear the Great Mixtapes Richard Linklater Created to Psych Up the Actors in Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!

in Film, Music | June 22nd, 2016

Richard Linklater’s films have become increasingly sophisticated as the 90s indie breakout writer-director has grown into his auteurhood. From the loose stoner vérité of Slackers (watch it online) to the loose but heady animation of Waking Life to the painstakingly meticulous “model of cinematic realism” of Boyhood, Linklater has a uniquely American vision and the undeniable talent to realize it in full.

But mostly when I think of Linklater, I think—excuse my language—of cock rock.

I think of Dazed and Confused’s super senior Wooderson, leaning against a muscle car, drawling “alright, alright, alright,” and cranking Aerosmith. I think of wild-eyed Jack Black in School of Rock, strapping a Gibson Flying V on an uptight, sweater-vested youth and teaching him Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” riff. And now, I think of a gang of short shorts-wearing college baseball dudes in the “campus bromance” Everybody Wants Some!!, singing along (above) to Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”…. wait…

So, okay, it ain’t all cock rock. But Linklater’s films are often so dude-centric, and so informed by popular music of certain eras, that he titled two of his most personal—Dazed and Confused and its recent “spiritual sequel”—after anthems from the two most archetypically cock rock bands, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen.

Where Dazed and Confused’s high school milieu more or less stayed anchored in 70s hard rock, Everybody Wants Some!!—like its comparatively adventurous college jocks—takes several musical detours from beer-and-babes 80s clichés. The film’s soundtrack, for example, includes “deep cuts” from Brian Eno, obscure local Texas punk rock band The Big Boys, and L.A.-based 80s New Wave/R&B band The Busboys.

It’s true, then, that the songs choices on Everybody Wants Some!!, which you can hear almost in their entirely (sans a few) above, are fairly diverse, genre-wise, compared to the cock-rock-heavy list of songs from Dazed and Confused (further up). And when it comes to Linklater’s musical inspirations for both films, we see that difference as well.

As the Criterion Collection blog documents—bringing us the 1992 letter above (read it here) from Linklater to his cast—the director put together “a thoughtful series of mixtapes to get his cast into the mind-set” of Dazed and Confused. And Criterion put together the Spotify playlist below of the songs Linklater gave his actors. As you’ll see, it’s mostly balls-to-the-wall hard rock, with some obligatory 70s disco and a few cuts from Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Elton John. In his accompanying letter, Linklater admits “a few of the songs are a little cheezy,” but also notes “there are a few places for ironic usage.” For the most part, he says, “this music… is like the movie itself—straightforward, honest and fun.”

When it came time to begin shooting Everybody Wants Some!! (get the official soundtrack here), Linklater again used the same method to get his cast in the mood, circulating the songs in the playlist below (though probably not on cassettes). Here we get a much more diverse, comprehensive musical summary of the decade in question, with Michael Jackson sitting next to Elvis Costello, Pat Benatar and Dire Straits next to Pink Floyd, Sister Sledge, Queen, and Chaka Khan.

It’s an interesting transition that may—musically—signal the move from teenage fandom to the more curious, adventurous listening habits of early adulthood. College, after all, is not only where young Americans of the modern era discover new sexual and chemical pleasures, but also where they acquire new musical tastes. And in the 80s especially, the boundaries of pop music expanded.

“That’s just how it felt to me to be a young person at that time. It was cool to be into everything,” Linklater commented to Cornelia Rowe at Yahoo: “There was a lot of newness in the era. You didn’t really appreciate it at the time – it’s like, there are all these new bands! There’s this new wave, punk, party, R&B – there’s a thing called rap music from New York!”

The athlete bros in Linklater’s latest, very male-oriented piece of cinematic nostalgia “at once embody and upend the stereotype of the shallow, sexually entitled jock,” writes A.O. Scott in his review. Roaming far afield of their comfort zones, they “have a good time wherever they are.” That’s pretty much guaranteed, I think, with the finely-curated 80s gems in these playlists as their soundtrack.

via the Criterion Collection

Scenes from Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s Philosophical, Feature-Length Animated Film (2001)

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Anderson Soundtracks: From Bottle Rocket to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Scenes from Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s Philosophical, Feature-Length Animated Film (2001)

Watch Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the Cult Classic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Documentaries” of All Time

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

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Surrealist Filmmaker Jan Švankmajer Is About to Make His Final Feature Film, and You Can Help Produce It

in Animation, Film | June 22nd, 2016

No filmmaker combines live action with stop-motion quite like Jan Švankmajer, and certainly no filmmaker has used that combination to such imaginative and troubling ends. An avowed surrealist who got his start in animation more than half a century ago in his homeland of the former Czechoslovakia, he’s continued to craft his distinctive cinematic experiences however and whenever possible through the decades. His filmography now includes such enduring trips as Dimensions of Dialogue (see below), which no less a visionary than Terry Gilliam calls one of the best animated films of all time; Alice, his dark interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and Little Otik, a modernization of a folktale about a tree stump that turns into a monstrous baby.

But as well as he brings the bizarre to vivid life on screen, he’s always had higher ambitions than that. “Švankmajer is capable of creating dark yet playful worlds that dissect the very core of our society,” says the Indiegogo page now raising the funds for his latest — and last — feature film, Insects. “The civilization we live in has little interest in authentic artistic creation,” laments the filmmaker. “What it needs is well-working advertisement, the iconographic contemporary art, pushing people towards more and more mass consumption. It gets increasingly difficult to fund independent art that scrutinizes the very core of our society. Who would deliberately support their own critics?”

Now, in this age of crowdfunding, you can support one of its most entertaining critics alive yourself. Insects has already succeeded in raising the first phase of its budget, but still has a way to go before it can assure its esteemed creator and his collaborators full artistic freedom (Švankmajer is looking to raise $400,000 in total), so if you’d like to chip in, you can make yourself eligible for such rewards as the first opportunity to download the film, its Blu-Ray edition with an accompanying art book, or even — if you’ve got $15,000 to put toward the cause — “a dinner with Jan Švankmajer at his mansion in Czech Republic and a commented visit to his Kunstkabinet.” Even now, work on Insects, its I ndiegogo page assures us, is underway, with Švankmajer “very busy visiting entomological auctions, buying various kinds of bugs, doing rehearsal shots with them and so on.”

If you’d like to learn more about the drama that they’ll ultimately act out, watch the promo video at the top of the post. In it, Švankmajer describes it as set in a pub, after hours, where an amateur theater group has gathered to rehearse The Insect Play by the Čapek brothers. But “as the rehearsal progresses, the characters of the play are born and die with no regard to time,” and the actors “experience frightening transformations.” Švankmajer, who has planned not a direct adaptation of The Insect Play but a more complex work that draws inspiration both from it and The Metamorphosis by his other well-known countryman Franz Kafka, puts the appeal of this story where “bugs behave as human beings, and people behave as insects” simply: “The Čapek brothers’ play is very misanthropic. I’ve always liked that.”

Dimensions of Dialogue by Jan Svankmajer (1982)

The Best Animated Films of All Time, According to Terry Gilliam

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

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch “Don’t Be a Sucker!,” the 1947 US Government Anti-Hatred Film That’s Relevant All Over Again

Terry Gilliam Explains His Never-Ending Fascination with Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona

The Very First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Thomas Edison Production (1910)

Slavoj Žižek Explains the Artistry of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films: Solaris, Stalker & More

And Now for Some Culinary Weirdness: Christopher Walken Shows You How to Cook Chicken & Pears

Hear the Great Mixtapes Richard Linklater Created to Psych Up the Actors in Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!

Surrealist Filmmaker Jan Švankmajer Is About to Make His Final Feature Film, and You Can Help Produce It

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