Watch 13 Experimental Short Films by Tezuka Osamu, the Walt Disney of Japan

in Animation, Art, Film | February 18th, 2014

Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989) is known as “the God of manga” in Japan. He created classics for both children and adults in every genre – from horror to romance to action. The sheer amount of work produced in Osamu’s relatively short life is staggering; some estimates have it that he drew over 150,000 pages of comics.

While focusing just on manga would have been enough for most mortals, Osamu was also a trailblazer in animation. He created Astro-Boy, the hugely popular character that spawned comic books, TV shows, video games and a couple of movies. The visual style of Osamu’s animated work — Astro-Boy and others — proved to be very influential. Those trademark giant eyes on anime characters come straight from Osamu (who in turn was influenced by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer).

Osamu relentlessly challenged the limits of what manga and anime could do. He’s credited with making the first ever X‑Rated animated feature film, Cleopatra, Queen of Sex (1970) — imagine Disney doing that. He also made a series of experimental animated shorts, which showcase not only Osamu’s creativity and range but also his philosophy, which was heavily influenced by Buddhism.

His 1962 work Tale of Street Corner is a surprisingly moving short about the day-to-day life of a city street corner as seen through the eyes of some anthropomorphized mice and sentient street posters.

And if you want get a sense of Osamu’s versatility, check out his 1966 movie Pictures at an Exhibition. The work is an omnibus film featuring ten smaller shorts, all set to Mussorgsky’s famous suite. Osamu recreated each short in a completely different style from the others.

His 1984 short, Jumping is a technical tour-de-force told with admirable simplicity. Seen from a first person point of view, the movie is about a young child who is jumping down a country road. As each jump gets higher and longer, the camera passes through cities, fields and oceans and eventually into a warzone. The sharp-eyed viewer will see R2D2 and C‑3PO make a surprise cameo at around the 2:57 marker.

And finally, here is an interview with the master himself as he talks about making these movies. And you can see all 13 of the animated shorts here.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time

in Film | February 17th, 2014

German director F .W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is a rare example of a foreign auteur who managed to keep his vision in the face of the Hollywood machine.

Prior to this movie, F. W. Murnau was arguably the most important film director of his time. He directed a string of German Expressionist works that were as bleak and brooding as they were technically brilliant. Murnau’s eerily, hallucinatory Nosferatu (1922) redefined the horror movie. The spectacularly depressing Der Letzte Mann (1924) featured a roving camera, double-exposure and forced perspective to brilliantly evoke the shame, humiliation and (in one tour-de-force sequence) drunkenness of a proud doorman demoted to a washroom attendant. And his adaptation of Faust (1926) was the most lavish, expensive movie Germany had ever produced at the time.

Enter William Fox, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fox Film Corporation. Though his studio was moderately successful producing Tom Mix serials, he aspired to something greater; he aspired to art. Fox convinced Murnau to make the jump to Hollywood, in part by agreeing to build a $200,000 set for the movie — an astronomical sum in those days.

Sunrise opens with a series of title cards that announce just what this movie is about:

This song of the man and his wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere at any time. For wherever the sun rises and sets in the city’s turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.

Murnau and his screenwriter Carl Meyer (who also wrote Der Letzte Mann) made the plotline so simple, so universal that the characters don’t even have names.

A struggling farmer is smitten with a femme fatale from the city. She inveigles him to drown his young wife and run off to the city with her. But when it comes time to do the deed, he realizes that he can’t do it. When the wife flees from him, he follows her into the city, apologizing profusely. Eventually, he and his remarkably forgiving wife reconcile and rekindle their love for one other. The story is so elemental that it could be a fairy tale.

Yet Murnau’s ability to spin absolutely dazzling images — using technology perfected in Germany – is what makes Sunrise so memorable. At one point in the movie, the camera seemingly floats over a crowd in an amusement park; at another the lovers walk down a city street that, without a cut, transforms into a flowering meadow. Compared to his Hollywood contemporaries – D.W. Griffith for example – Murnau’s movie seems vital, modern, and surprisingly poignant.

Though the movie earned a few Oscars – including one for Best Unique and Artistic Production and one for Best Actress for Janet Gaynor — Sunrise suffered the fate of many cinematic masterpieces: It flopped. Yet over the years, its critical reputation has only grown. In 2012, it was named the 5th best movie of all time by Sight and Sound magazine just ahead of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike Kubrick’s sci-fi saga, however, you can watch Sunrise for free on Archive.org. Check it out. Also find the classic on our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larger collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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Animated Video: Dock Ellis Throws a No-Hitter Against the Padres While Tripping on LSD (1970)

in Film, Sports | February 17th, 2014

For a sport obsessed with statistical averages, baseball seems to thrive like no other on outrageous anecdotes and singular characters. One of those characters, pitcher Dock Ellis, had a drug-fueled run in the 70s with the Pittsburgh Pirates, claiming that he almost never pitched a game sober, including several National League East Championships and a 1971 World Series win. The drugs eventually became too much and he got help, but they gave Ellis his career best anecdote, the story he tells in the short film above, “Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No.” It’s animated by James Blagdon from an interview Ellis gave to Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel that aired on NPR in March of 2008.

In June 1970, Ellis took a day off, dropped acid at the airport and, “high as a Georgia pine,” checked into a friend’s girlfriend’s house to enjoy the rest of his trip. He woke up two days later, still tripping, went to the stadium, took some stimulants—which “over 90% of the league was using,” he says—and got to work, pitching a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres. “I didn’t see the hitters,” Ellis says, “all I could tell was whether they were on the right side or left side.” Above, his colorful narration gets a full compliment of sound effects and day-glo exclamations. (We also see allusions to Ellis’ other storied antics, like appearing on the mound in curlers and beaning opposing players with fastballs.) “It was easier,” he says, “to pitch with the LSD because I was used to medicating myself.” In this instance at least, the meds were magic.

The short film premiered at Sundance and film festivals worldwide in 2010, and the Dock Ellis legend has only grown since. The same interview become part of Beyond Ellis D, a “multimedia book” for iPads developed in 2012 by Donnell Alexander and animated by Heidi Perry. (See Part 1, “Superfly Spitball,” above.) In an essay for Deadspin, Alexander laments that Ellis—an outspoken critic of racism in baseball—has been largely reduced to the LSD no-hitter, which he calls “a short take on a big life.” While it’s a hell of a good story, Alexander also sees Ellis “on a continuum with Jackie Robinson” (who advised him to tone it down), “a black ballplayer straddling the reserve-clause era and the arrival of free agency, a man who brought many of the old ways with him into baseball’s new, Day-Glo epoch.” Ellis—who died in 2008 of liver failure at age 63 after years as a drug counselor—certainly lived up to the hype. His wild life and career get a full treatment in the documentary No No, which just screened at Sundance this past month. Watch the film’s trailer below.

via The Paris Review

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life: The Oscar-Winning Film About Kafka Writing The Metamorphosis

in Film, Literature, Radio | February 13th, 2014

Peter Capaldi is best known in the States for being the most recent actor to play Doctor Who. But did you know that he is also an Oscar-winning filmmaker? His brilliant short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life took the prize for Best Short Film in 1995.

The movie shows Kafka, on Christmas Eve, struggling to come up with the opening line for his most famous work, The Metamorphosis.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Capaldi wrings a lot of laughs out of Kafka’s inability to figure out what Samsa should turn into. A giant banana? A kangaroo? Even when the answer is literally staring at him in the face, Kafka is hilariously obtuse.

Richard E. Grant stars as the tortured, tightly-wound writer who is driven into fits as his creative process is interrupted for increasingly absurd reasons. The noisy party downstairs, it turns out, is populated by a dozen beautiful maidens in white. A lost delivery woman offers Kafka a balloon animal. A local lunatic searches for his companion named Jiminy Cockroach.

You can see the film above, helpfully subtitled in German. Also find it in our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More, plus our list of 33 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

What Happens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitchcock: The Neuroscience of Film

in Film, Psychology, Science | February 13th, 2014

If you have 22 minutes, why not sit back and watch the classic piece of television above, Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ 1961 episode “Bang, You’re Dead”? You may well have seen it before, quite possibly long ago, but you’ll find it holds up, keeping you in suspense today as artfully as it or any other Hitchcock production always has. But why do we get so emotionally engaged in this simple tale of a five-year-old boy who comes into possession of a real handgun that he mistakenly thinks a harmless toy? Here with detailed answers rooted in the mechanics of the human brain, we have “Neurocinematics: the Neuroscience of Film,” a presentation by Uri Hasson of Princeton University’s Neuroscience Institute.

Hitchcock conceived of his style of cinema, says Hasson in the clip below, as “doing experiments on the audience,” and of a movie itself as “a sequence of stages designed to have an effect on your brain.”

The brains of everyone sitting in the theater thus, theoretically, all become “resonant and aligned with the movie in a very powerful and complicated way.” Various types of research bear this out, from measuring the skin temperature, perspiration, and blood flow in the brains of subjects as they watch Hitchcock’s young protagonist add more “toy” bullets to the “toy” gun he brandishes around the neighborhood. In the clip below, you can see exactly how the scientists’ functional MRI machines scan the viewers as they watch the episode, whose plot, as one of the research team puts it, “keeps the participants a bit on their feet,” flat on their back though they need to remain for the duration. You’ll find the watching experience much more comfortable in your chair. It won’t produce much data for the scientific community, but at least now you’ll know what goes on in your brain as it happens, something about which even Hitchcock himself could only guess. To conduct your own experiments, see our collection of 21 Free Hitchcock Movies Online.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Painters Painting: The Definitive Documentary Portrait of the New York Art World (1940–1970)

in Art, Film | February 12th, 2014

Emile de Antonio is one of those people who simply had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He was a Harvard classmate of John F. Kennedy. He knew all of the core members of the Beat movement, even helping to distribute the seminal Beat movie Pull My Daisies. And De Antonio was a friend with virtually everyone in the New York art scene from Jasper Johns to Willem de Kooning. He once drank himself into a stupor for Andy Warhol’s experimental movie Drink. Warhol even famously praised De Antonio saying, “Everything I learned about painting, I learned from De.”

De Antonio was also a major voice of dissent during the Cold War. He directed a series of scathing documentaries including Point of Order (1964), about the McCarthy hearings; Rush to Judgment (1966), a staple among JFK assassination theorists; and the Oscar-nominated anti-Vietnam war movie In the Year of the Pig. (1968)

For his 1972 movie Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940–1970, De Antonio managed to get artists like Warhol, Johns, and De Kooning along with Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler to talk about their craft. It is the definitive documentary portrait of the New York art world.

De Antonio talked about Painters Painting in a 1988 interview:

I was probably the only filmmaker in the world who could [have made Painters Painting] because I knew all those people, from the time that they were poor, and unsuccessful and had no money. I knew Warhol and Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Stella before they ever sold a painting, and so it was interesting to [do the film about them]. They appeared in the film along with De Kooning, whom I knew very well, and Barnett Newman, who is now dead. They talked to me in a way that they would never have talked to anybody else because they knew I knew the subject.

The film, a tad grainy, appears above. A higher res version of the film can “rented” on Amazon. Amazon Prime member can watch it for free.

635 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.

Rauschenberg Erases De Kooning

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Haunting Final Portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Part of Victoria Will’s Civil War-Era Photo Collection

in Film, Photography | February 12th, 2014

No one here gets out alive, but who will live on in the public’s memory?

Last month, photographer Victoria Will enticed present-day luminaries to sit for tintype portraits at the Sundance film festival. The 19th-century wet plate process is ill suited to paparazzo-style, on-the-go shooting, but can produce quite stunning results with subjects accustomed to a prolonged gaze.

As one who reveres movies, I’d much rather my favorite actors be nibbled about the edges by unpredictable, antique chemistry, then digitally reconfigured before a vinyl curtain. (Those unretouched Disney Princesses aren’t that removed from reality.)

There’s no way that the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrait could be anything but haunting. Elijah Wood, Maggie Gyllenhaal and William H. Macy also appear to have perfected the blank Civil War stare.

Musicians Flea and Nick Cave have got the look down pat. Pipe in the opening bars of “Ashokan Farewell” and cue the waterworks.

Esquire has the complete gallery of Will’s Sundance portraits (created with darkroom assistance from fellow photographer Josh Wool).

via Beautiful Decay

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Ayun Halliday‘s graphic novel, Peanut, is a Young Adult Library Services Association 2014 Quick for Reluctant Young Readers. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Allen Ginsberg’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit: The Poet’s Final Days Captured in a 1997 Film

in Film | February 10th, 2014

You may have read Allen Ginsberg’s final poem “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)” when we featured it last month. In it, the leading Beat poet, nearing the very end of his life, lists off all of the people, places, and things he knew he would never see, visit, and do again. But a practicing Buddhist such as Ginsberg certainly wouldn’t have viewed the event of his death with total finality. What, then, happened to him after April 5th, 1997, when his official biography came to a close? Here we have one attempt at an answer by Lithuanian avant-garde luminary Jonas Mekas (who, incidentally, happens to remain active in this mortal coil today at the age of 91). Mekas documentary Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit observes Ginsberg’s Buddhist wake and collects memories and impressions from his friends and collaborators, Mekas himself included.

The scenes occasioned by Ginsberg’s death slant, perhaps unsurprisingly, toward the artistic and literary: musician Patti Smith, poet Gregory Corso, writer Amiri Baraka, visual artist Hiro Yamagata, and poet Anne Waldman all make appearances. You can watch an excerpt of the film above and its 67-minute entirety on Ubuweb. (Also find the film listed in the documentaries section of our collection of Free Movies Online.) Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth, a kind of video diary as well as a memorial statement, gives as much insight into Mekas’ perspective as it does to Ginsberg’s existence. By the time of Ginsberg’s passing, Mekas’s body of work included “two narrative films and nearly twenty years’ worth of private recordings,” at which point he had “decided to make feature films from his home movies.” That description comes from Aaron Cutler in The Believer, writing on Mekas’ methods of turning into “oppositional cinema” records of his life spent immersed in the art world. Such a practice captures many important questions, often inadvertently. In this case, one in particular has left me thinking: what on Earth would Allen Ginsberg have reincarnated as?

Hear the Very First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading His Epic Poem “Howl” (1956)

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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

Watch 13 Experimental Short Films by Tezuka Osamu, the Walt Disney of Japan

Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time

Animated Video: Dock Ellis Throws a No-Hitter Against the Padres While Tripping on LSD (1970)

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life: The Oscar-Winning Film About Kafka Writing The Metamorphosis

What Happens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitchcock: The Neuroscience of Film

Painters Painting: The Definitive Documentary Portrait of the New York Art World (1940–1970)

The Haunting Final Portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Part of Victoria Will’s Civil War-Era Photo Collection

Allen Ginsberg’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit: The Poet’s Final Days Captured in a 1997 Film

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