Watch a Shot-by-Shot Remake of Kubrick’s The Shining, a 48-Minute Music Video Accompanying the New Album by Aesop Rock

in Film, Music | April 28th, 2016

In this increasingly atomized world of music, how does one get a new record release noticed above the hum of the internet? If you’re Beyoncé, you just drop the whole thing unannounced and watch the media play catch up. If you’re not Beyoncé you might consider rapper Aesop Rock’s tactic.

This week, the wordsmithiest of hip hop artists and animator Rob Shaw released a shot-by-shot remake of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, created with miniatures and made with what looks like spare change as a budget. All of which plays as background video to a full stream of The Impossible Kid, Aesop Rock’s seventh album and his first in four years.

Rob Shaw created the hipster rats skits for Portlandia as well as videos for They Might Be Giants and previous Aesop Rock tracks, but this Shining remake is something else. First you notice the gleeful cheapness of the production, but then as Aesop Rock’s rap lyrics flow over the visuals, memory starts to fill in the gaps of the images. Shaw’s handiwork is literally in the video: we can see his hand in the bathtub scene, or his body’s shadow as he moves the wooden Jack Torrance down the Overlook’s halls. And the tiny camera replicates the film’s Steadicam shots well, creating a work that is like a delirium of the actual movie.

Now, does this have anything to do with The Impossible Kid, really? Well, the rapper did go to live in a Portland barn after divorce and the death of a friend, and instead of writing “All Work and No Play…” over and over wrote this album, and nobody got hurt. Either way, by the time you’ve finished watching you’ll have heard the album, and that’s just one way to play the new music game.

via Noisey

Related Content:

Download & Play The Shining Board Game

Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The 100 Most Memorable Shots in Cinema Over the Past 100 Years

in Film | April 18th, 2016

Harold Lloyd hanging high above the city on the hands of a skyscraper’s clock. A shot through the eye on the Odessa steps. Another eye, this one readied for the razor blade. King Kong roaring atop a skyscraper of his own. Snow White offering a perch to the bluebird. Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow skipping off toward the distant Emerald City. Charles Foster Kane orating before his own enormous portrait. Norma Desmond’s unsettling approach through ever-softer focus.

Roger Thornhill pursued by the biplane. Patton saluting before the enormous American flag. Alex DeLarge staring, in his bowler and past his prosthetic eyelashes, straight into the camera. Rocky jogging up the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps. A camouflage-painted Willard rising out of the swamp. The slow-motion march of Messrs. Blonde, Blue, Brown, Orange, Pink, and White. The opening-night reception dance after Max Fischer’s Heaven and Earth. Leonidas kicking the messenger into the hole. The young Mason Evans, Jr. flat on the grass, staring up at the skies.

Oh, and Charlie Chaplin using Scraps the dog as a pillow. I could have described more of the most memorable shots of the past century of cinema history, but in the video above, which presents one hundred years of film with one shot selected from each year, they all speak for themselves. “While many of these shots are the most recognizable in film history, others are equally iconic in their own right,” writes the video’s creator Jacob T. Swinney, “For example, some shots pioneered a style or defined a genre, while others tested the boundaries of censorship and filmgoer expectations.”

While the earliest pictures here, a group starting in 1915 with D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, have had plenty of time to establish themselves in our visual lexicon — even for those of us who’ve never actually sat down and watched the movies in full — the more recent selections clearly require some guesswork: Swinney’s memorable shots from the past decade come from sources as varied as There Will Be Blood and The Tree of Life, Avatar, and The Avengers.

And some cinema purists, as opposed to structural purists, will regret that, with these strictly single shots, the famous cuts (in both senses, when it comes to Un Chien Andalou’s eyeball) don’t come across. Me, I’d have bent the rules to pay proper tribute to Lawrence blowing out the match, but that’s just one cinephile’s opinion. Besides, you’ve got to see it in context, projected in 70-millimeter, to really feel why it can stand for all of 1962 in film — and then some.

Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective

The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies

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 ( 5 ) |

Spike Lee Directs, “Wake Up,” a Five-Minute Campaign Film for Bernie Sanders

in Current Affairs, Film, Politics | April 17th, 2016

Earlier this month Spike Lee and Bernie Sanders, two Brooklyn natives, sat down and talked about politics and the state of our nation. Now, with the New York primary right around the corner, Spike drew on his filmmaking talents and directed a five-minute political campaign film for Bernie. It’s called simply “Wake Up,” and it features cameos by Dr. Cornel West, Susan Sarandon, and Harry Belafonte.

I can’t recall another instance where a major filmmaker shot an ad for a presidential candidate. If we’re overlooking something obvious (or less obvious), let us know in the comments and we’ll maybe feature it during this campaign season.

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!

Bernie Sanders: I Will Be an Arts President

Spike Lee’s List of 95 Essential Movies – Now with Women Filmmakers

Bernie Sanders Sings “This Land is Your Land” on the Endearingly Bad Spoken Word Album, We Shall Overcome

Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burlington Snow” (1986)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch 50+ Documentaries on Famous Architects & Buildings: Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Hadid & Many More

in Architecture, Film | April 13th, 2016

At its best, architecture can show us a way out of the rigid, routinized thinking that keeps us pacing the same social and cultural mazes decade after decade. A radical redesign of the way we use space can herald a re-imagining of our interrelations, hierarchies, and political dynamics. Consider the inspiring work, for example, of visionary futurist Buckminster Fuller. (Or consider the very different career of recently departed Zaha Hadid, who “built the unbuildable,” writes one former student, and “defied gravity.”) At its worst, architecture imprisons us, literally and otherwise, mindlessly populating the built environment with drab, prefabricated boxes, and reproducing conditions of repression, poverty, and mediocrity. The way we build determines in great degree the way we live.

But the influence of an individual architect or school will always exceed the designers’ intentions. Perhaps the most famous of 20th century modern architecture and design movements, Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus school, contributed a vocabulary of simplified geometrical designs and primary color schemes that pushed European aesthetics out of a stifling traditionalism.

And yet, their modernist insistence on boxiness, on materials like steel, concrete, and glass, and on a near total lack of ornament, helped bring into being the strip mall and the office park. Likewise, the urban utopian architect Le Corbusier deliberately sought to engineer social improvement through building design, and also helped birth a depressingly bleak landscape of housing projects and “structures that reinforce deteriorating social effects.”

So what distinguishes good architecture from bad? And where did the postmodern mélange of styles that make up the typical urban environment come from? Ask 100 architects the first question, and you might get 100 different answers. But you can go a long way toward answering the second question by learning the history of the many great buildings that have directly or indirectly inspired millions of imitators worldwide. And you can do that for free at the Youtube channel ACB (Art and Culture Bureau), which features over 50 documentaries, writes Arch Daily, “devoted to the most significant achievements of architecture, its beginnings, and the latest creations of the great architects of today.”

Maybe begin with the Bauhaus film, at the top of the post, an almost thirty-minute history of the fascinating post-WWI movement, school, and building in Dessau, Germany. Be sure to also catch films on Paris’ Georges Pompidou Centre, the 17th century Tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulah (called the “baby Taj Mahal”), Le Corbusier’s Brutalist Convent of La Tourette, and Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno science center, among many, many more. All of the films are directed by Richard Copans and some of them have interviews with the architects themselves. See the full list of documentaries here.

These films will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via Arch Daily

A is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times

Download Original Bauhaus Books & Journals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

in Business, Film, Radio | April 13th, 2016

“Jam” Handy (1886–1983) was known for two things: 1.) participating in the 1904 and 1924 Olympics (quite a feat if you think about the gap in time), and 2.) making thousands of educational training films for American corporations, schools and the US armed forces. A guru of cinematic advertising, he shot films for General Motors, DuPont, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola and U.S. Steel, from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Above you can watch Back of the Mike, a film shot for Chevrolet in 1938. Like other films in this genre, this piece of cinematic advertising offers us an entertaining, if not educational, look at how old-time radio shows created their sound effects–all while helping market a product, the Chevrolet that helps the good guys win in the end. If the film makes you want to buy a Chevy, we can’t help you there. But if Back of the Mike gives you a hankering to listen to old time radio plays, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve got a few good items listed for you in the Relateds below.

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.

via VA Viper

Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More

Free: Listen to 298 Episodes of the Vintage Crime Radio Series, Dragnet

The Original 1940s Superman Cartoon and the Original Radio Show

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue (Over 4 Million Lines in 2,000 Scripts) Reveals Gender Bias Built Into Cinema

in Film, Gender | April 13th, 2016

By their color palettes, by their dramatic structures, by their shot lengths, by the frequency and variety of their characters’ swearing: film enthusiasts have found ways to analyze just about every aspect of film. But only recently has the world of film analysis seen a large-scale study of dialogue by gender and age — in fact, the largest-scale study of dialogue by gender and age yet — undertaken by a new site called Polygraph, “a publication that explores popular culture with data and visual storytelling.” They wanted to put to the data test part of the notion, widely expressed in opinion pieces, that “white men dominate movie roles.”

“We Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor,” write Polygraph’s Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels. “From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.” They present their quantitative results with great visual clarity, and you can view them for three distinct areas of cinema territory: just the 2,000 screenplays the study focused on; only high-grossing films at the American box office; and only Disney movies (known, of course, for their abundance of princesses, with or without many lines).

“Across thousands of films in our dataset,” they write, “it was hard to find a subset that didn’t over-index male. Even romantic comedies have dialogue that is, on average, 58% male. For example, Pretty Woman and 10 Things I Hate About You both have lead women (i.e., characters with the most amount of dialogue). But the overall dialogue for both films is 52% male, due to the number of male supporting characters.” And as far as age, “dialogue available to women who are over 40 years old decrease substantially. For men, it’s the exact opposite: there are more roles available to older actors.”

Depending on what kind of films you watch, this may well jibe with your viewing experience: mainstream stories have long tended to favor macho and often mature protagonists, and the antagonists they defeat in man-to-man combat have sometimes reached advanced ages indeed (all the more time, presumably, in which to have mastered the art of villainy, especially of the one-last-grand-speech-before-I-destroy-the-world variety). The women, and usually young women, featured in such pictures, when they appear at all, have to do much of their communication nonverbally.

This all supports a complaint I’ve long had about the movies, mainstream or otherwise: over a century in existence, and they’ve hardly touched the vast creative space available to them. The all-female Ghostbusters coming this summer will surely do its small part to rectify the lack of woman-delivered dialogue on the silver screen, but the depth of the deficiency, as revealed by Polygraph, suggests we could do with a few all-female Glengarry Glen Rosses as well.

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

10 Tips From Billy Wilder on How to Write a Good Screenplay

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Free MIT Course Teaches You to Watch Movies Like a Critic: Watch Lectures from The Film Experience

in Film, Online Courses | April 12th, 2016

We all have our favorite film critics. Maybe we gravitated to them because they write well or because they share our tastes, but the very best of them — the critics we read even on genres and directors we otherwise wouldn’t care about — make us see movies in a new way. Specifically, they make us see them the way they do, and the point of view of a professional critic steeped in cinema history and theory (not to mention the thousands and thousands of hours of actual film they’ve watched) will always have a richness that the casual moviegoer can’t hope to enjoy on his/her own.

Unless, of course, you take The Film Experience, a 23-lecture course from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And you don’t need to enroll at MIT — or even show up and surreptitiously audit — to take it, since the school has made those lectures, their accompanying materials, and even supplemental media (just like the DVD extras that have inspired a generation of cinephiles) free on their OpenCourseWare site. They’ve also assembled the videos, starring MIT’s Film and Media Studies program founding professor David Thorburn, into a single Youtube playlist.

Thorburn’s lectures begin with the introduction to film as a cultural form at the top of the post, which itself begins with the question “What is film?” He then launches into a journey through film history, from the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (see also our Keaton and Chaplin collections) to the Hollywood studio era and Alfred Hitchcock (for whom we’ve got a collection as well) to American film in the 1970s and Italian neorealism to François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa. When you come out of the course possessing a newly heightened ability to decode the language of film, you may or may not hear the calling to become a critic yourself — but at least it’ll make your next trip to the multiplex more interesting.