Free Online: Watch Stalker, Solaris, Mirror, and Other Masterworks by Soviet Auteur Andrei Tarkovsky

in Film | June 29th, 2022

Andrei Tarkovsky under­stood cin­e­ma in a way no film­mak­er had before — and, quite pos­si­bly, in a way no film­mak­er has since. That impres­sion is rein­forced by any of his films, five of which are avail­able to watch free on Youtube. You’ll find them on the Youtube chan­nel of Mos­film, which was once the Sovi­et Union’s biggest film stu­dio. It was for Mos­film that Tarkovsky direct­ed his debut fea­ture Ivan’s Child­hood in 1962. Based on a folk­loric war sto­ry by Sovi­et writer Vladimir Bogo­molov, the film had already been made by anoth­er young direc­tor but reject­ed by the stu­dio. Tarkovsky’s ver­sion both sat­is­fied the high­er-ups and, with its inter­na­tion­al suc­cess, intro­duced the world to his own dis­tinc­tive cin­e­mat­ic vision.

“My dis­cov­ery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a mir­a­cle. Sud­den­ly, I found myself stand­ing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, nev­er been giv­en to me.” These are the words of Ing­mar Bergman, to whom Tarkovsky would much lat­er pay trib­ute with his final film, The Sac­ri­fice, pro­duced in Bergman’s home­land of Swe­den.

But in between these films would come five oth­ers, each wide­ly con­sid­ered a mas­ter­work in its own way. Andrei Rublev offers a Tarkovskian view of the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Rus­sia inhab­it­ed by the epony­mous icon painter. Solaris adapts Stanis­law Lem’s sci­ence-fic­tion nov­el of a sen­tient plan­et and its psy­cho­log­i­cal manip­u­la­tion of cos­mo­nauts onboard a near­by space sta­tion.

It was with 1975’s Mir­ror that Tarkovsky turned inward. Draw­ing as deeply as pos­si­ble from the artis­tic poten­tial of his medi­um, he cre­at­ed a cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence rich with mem­o­ry, his­to­ry, real­i­ty, and dreams — a kind of “poet­ry” in cin­e­ma, as one often hears his work described. The result­ing break with many of the con­ven­tions and expec­ta­tions attached to motion pic­tures at the time polar­ized crit­i­cal and pop­u­lar reac­tion. But the inter­ven­ing 47 years have ven­er­at­ed Tarkovsky’s artis­tic brazen­ness: in Sight & Sound’s most recent 100 Great­est Films of All Time poll, Mir­ror came in at num­ber nine­teen, sev­en places high­er than Andrei Rublev.

Despite hav­ing come in three spots below Andrei Rublev on the Sight & Sound poll, 1979’s Stalk­er is to many Tarkovsky fans far and away the auteur’s great­est achieve­ment. Its appar­ent­ly lin­ear, vague­ly sci­ence-fic­tion­al nar­ra­tive presents a jour­ney into “the Zone,” a mys­te­ri­ous region con­tain­ing a room that grants the wish­es of all who enter it. This sim­plis­tic-sound­ing premise belies a film of infi­nite depth: “I’ve seen Stalk­er more times than any film except The Great Escape,” writes Geoff Dyer (who once devot­ed an entire book to the for­mer). “It’s nev­er quite as I remem­ber. Like the Zone, it’s always chang­ing.” We watch Stalk­er — or indeed, any­thing in Tarkovsky oeu­vre — not to see a movie, but to see “the rea­son cin­e­ma was invent­ed.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Stu­dent Films, 1956–1960

The Sto­ry of Stalk­er, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Trou­bled (and Even Dead­ly) Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Break­down of the Director’s Film­mak­ing

The Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing: A Video Essay

What Andrei Tarkovsky’s Most Noto­ri­ous Scene Tells Us About Time Dur­ing the Pan­dem­ic: A Video Essay

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Free: Watch Battleship Potemkin and Other Films by Sergei Eisenstein, the Revolutionary Soviet Filmmaker

in Film, History | June 28th, 2022

When it launched fif­teen years ago, the movie pod­cast Bat­tle­ship Pre­ten­sion took its name from two well-known sources: an atti­tude pop­u­lar­ly asso­ci­at­ed with cinephiles, and a 1925 motion pic­ture by Sergei Eisen­stein. To some, mere­ly ref­er­enc­ing a silent film made by a Sovi­et auteur in 1925 con­sti­tutes suf­fi­cient evi­dence of pre­ten­sion in and of itself. But most, even those who’ve nev­er seen a frame of Eisen­stein’s work, do rec­og­nize that Bat­tle­ship Potemkin has an impor­tant place in cin­e­ma his­to­ry — and if they actu­al­ly watch the movie, which is embed­ded just above, they’ll find that it looks and feels more famil­iar than they’d expect­ed.

Like any work of wide and deep influ­ence, Bat­tle­ship Potemkin has often been par­o­died over its near­ly 100 years of exis­tence. But none of its scenes has been paid as much homage, tongue in cheek or else­where, than the mas­sacre on the Odessa Steps, the sym­bol­ic entry­way to that city in what’s now Ukraine.

“Czarist troops march down a long flight of steps, fir­ing on the cit­i­zens who flee before them in a ter­ri­fied tide,” as Roger Ebert describes it. “Count­less inno­cents are killed, and the mas­sacre is summed up in the image of a woman shot dead try­ing to pro­tect her baby in a car­riage — which then bounces down the steps, out of con­trol.”

The con­tent of this sequence is as har­row­ing as its form is rev­o­lu­tion­ary. That’s true in the pro­pa­gan­dis­tic sense, but even more so in the artis­tic one: the Odessa Steps mas­sacre, like the whole of Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, func­tions as a proof-of-con­cept for Eisen­stein’s the­o­ries of mon­tage. Today we take for grant­ed — and in some cas­es have even come to resent — that movies so expert­ly jux­ta­pose their images so as to pro­voke the most intense emo­tion­al response pos­si­ble with­in us. That was­n’t so much the case a cen­tu­ry ago, when most exam­ples of the still-nov­el art form of cin­e­ma used their visu­als sim­ply to make their nar­ra­tives leg­i­ble.

Eisen­stein, how­ev­er, under­stood cin­e­ma’s true poten­tial. He explored it in a range of pic­tures that also includ­ed Ten Days That Shook the World, a drama­ti­za­tion of the 1917 Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion; Alexan­der Nevsky, on the repul­sion of invaders by the epony­mous thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry prince; and the epic his­tor­i­cal dra­ma Ivan the Ter­ri­ble, the sto­ry of the first tsar of all Rus­sia (and idol of Stal­in, who com­mis­sioned the project).

You can watch these films, as well as Eisen­stein’s unfin­ished trib­ute to the Mex­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion ¡Que viva Méx­i­co!, free on the Youtube chan­nel of Mos­film, the pre­em­i­nent stu­dio in the Sovi­et era. That Eisen­stein’s tech­niques have sur­vived not just him but the Sovi­et Union itself under­scores a truth he might have sus­pect­ed, but nev­er admit­ted: cin­e­ma is more pow­er­ful than pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1928)

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Sergei Eisenstein’s Sem­i­nal Bat­tle­ship Potemkin Gets a Sound­track by Pet Shop Boys

Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russ­ian Stu­dio Mos­film: Clas­sic Films, Beloved Come­dies, Tarkovsky, Kuro­sawa & More

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Color Footage of the Liberation of Paris, Shot by Hollywood Director George Stevens (1944)

in Film, History | June 24th, 2022

The above footage of Paris’ lib­er­a­tion in August 1944 looks and feels not dis­sim­i­lar to a Hol­ly­wood movie. Part of its pow­er owes to its being in col­or, a van­ish­ing­ly rare qual­i­ty in real film of World War II. But we must also cred­it its hav­ing been shot by a gen­uine Hol­ly­wood film­mak­er, George Stevens. Hav­ing got his start in pic­tures as a teenag­er in the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties (not long before mak­ing the cin­e­mat­ic-his­tor­i­cal accom­plish­ment of fig­ur­ing out how to get Stan Lau­rel’s light-col­ored eyes to show up on film), Stevens became a respect­ed direc­tor in the fol­low­ing decade. Swing Time, Gun­ga Din, The More the Mer­ri­er: with hits like that, he would seem to have had it made.

But it was just then, as F. X. Feeney tells it in the DGA Quar­ter­ly, that the war became unig­nor­able. “The dan­ger­ous artistry of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 valen­tine to Adolf Hitler, Tri­umph of the Will, moved Stevens to vol­un­teer for front­line ser­vice in World War II despite his being old enough to dodge a uni­form and sit things out.”

In vivid col­or, Stevens and his U.S. Army Sig­nal Corps crew shot “the D‑Day land­ings, where he was one of the first ashore; the lib­er­a­tion of Paris; the snowy ruins of bombed-out vil­lages en route to the Bat­tle of the Bulge; and, most unfor­get­tably, the lib­er­a­tion of the death camp at Dachau.” (Even the cel­e­bra­to­ry events in Paris had their har­row­ing moments, such as the sniper attack cap­tured at 11:54.)

Stevens went to war a film­mak­er and came home a film­mak­er. The long post­war act of his career opened with no less acclaimed a pic­ture than I Remem­ber Mama, and went on to include the likes of A Place in the Sun, Shane, and The Diary of Anne Frank, whose mate­r­i­al no doubt res­onat­ed even more with Stevens giv­en what he’d seen in Europe. Not all of it, of course, was the after­math of death and destruc­tion. These Paris lib­er­a­tion clips alone offer glimpses of such admirable fig­ures as resis­tance fight­er Simone Segouin, Gen­er­als de Gaulle and Leclerc, and even Lieu­tenant Colonel Stevens him­self. He appears pre­sid­ing over the shoot just as he must once have done back in Cal­i­for­nia — and, with the war’s end in sight, as he must have known he would do again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Albert Camus, Edi­tor of the French Resis­tance News­pa­per Com­bat, Writes Mov­ing­ly About Life, Pol­i­tics & War (1944–47)

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Watch the First Movie Ever Streamed on the Net: Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

in Film, Technology | June 9th, 2022

When the World Wide Web made its pub­lic debut in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, it fas­ci­nat­ed many and struck some as rev­o­lu­tion­ary, but the idea of watch­ing a film online would still have sound­ed like sheer fan­ta­sy. Yet on May 23rd, 1993, report­ed the New York Times’ John Markoff, “a small audi­ence scat­tered among a few dozen com­put­er lab­o­ra­to­ries gath­ered” to “watch the first movie to be trans­mit­ted on the Inter­net — the glob­al com­put­er net­work that con­nects mil­lions of sci­en­tists and aca­d­e­m­ic researchers and hith­er­to has been a medi­um for swap­ping research notes and an occa­sion­al still image.”

That expla­na­tion speaks vol­umes about how life online was per­ceived by the aver­age New York Times read­er three decades ago. But it was hard­ly the aver­age New York Times read­er who tuned into the inter­net’s very first film screen­ing, whose fea­ture pre­sen­ta­tion was Wax or the Dis­cov­ery of Tele­vi­sion Among the Bees. Com­plet­ed in 1991 by artist David Blair, this hybrid fic­tion and essay-film offered to its view­ers what Times crit­ic Stephen Hold­en called “a mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional fam­i­ly saga as it might be imag­ined by a cyber­punk nov­el­ist. It flash­es all the way back to the sto­ry of Cain and Abel and the Tow­er of Babel and for­ward to the nar­ra­tor’s own death, birth and rebirth in an act of vio­lence.”

Jacob Mak­er, the nar­ra­tor, was once a hum­ble mis­sile-guid­ance sys­tem engi­neer. But increas­ing dis­en­chant­ment with his line of work pushed him into the api­ar­i­an arts, in homage to his famous bee­keep­er grand­son Jacob Hive Mak­er. That the lat­ter is played by William S. Bur­roughs sug­gests that Wax has the mak­ings of a “cult clas­sic,” as does the film’s con­struc­tion, in large part out of found footage, jux­ta­posed and manip­u­lat­ed into a dig­i­tal psy­che­delia. Its nar­ra­tive — amus­ing, ref­er­ence-rich, and bewil­der­ing­ly com­plex for an 85-minute run­time — has Jacob men­tal­ly over­tak­en by his own bees, who implant a tele­vi­sion into his brain and repro­gram him as an assas­sin.

With Wax, writes Screen Slate’s Sean Ben­jamin, “Blair laid an extrap­o­la­tion of La Jetée atop a bedrock of Thomas Pyn­chon and came out with some­thing clos­est to ear­ly Peter Green­away — yet ulti­mate­ly sin­gu­lar.” And on an inter­net that could only broad­cast it “at the dream-like rate of two frames a sec­ond” in black-and-white, it must have made for a sin­gu­lar view­ing expe­ri­ence indeed. Back then, as Markoff wrote, “dig­i­tal broad­cast­ing was not yet ready for prime time.”

Today, in our age of stream­ing, dig­i­tal broad­cast­ing has dis­placed prime time, and it feels only prop­er that we can watch Wax on Youtube, where Blair has uploaded it as part of a larg­er, ongo­ing, and not-eas­i­ly-grasped ongo­ing dig­i­tal film project. “There is a sense in which we have all had tele­vi­sions implant­ed in our heads,” Hold­en reflect­ed in 1992. “Who real­ly knows what those end­less reruns are doing to us?” Even now, the inter­net has only just begun to trans­form not just how we watch movies, but how we com­mu­ni­cate, con­duct our dai­ly lives, and even think. We can all see some­thing of our­selves in Jacob Mak­er — and on today’s inter­net, we can see it much more clear­ly.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Very First Web­cam Was Invent­ed to Keep an Eye on a Cof­fee Pot at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Cyber­punk: 1990 Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing William Gib­son & Tim­o­thy Leary Intro­duces the Cyber­punk Cul­ture

Dar­win: A 1993 Film by Peter Green­away

Mes­mer­iz­ing Time­lapse Film Cap­tures the Won­der of Bees Being Born

The First Music Stream­ing Ser­vice Was Invent­ed in 1881: Dis­cov­er the Théâtro­phone

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Ray Liotta (RIP) Talks About His Most Memorable Performances: Something Wild, Goodfellas, Field of Dreams, and More

in Film | June 6th, 2022

Over the near­ly four decades he act­ed in motion pic­tures, Ray Liot­ta worked with auteurs from Jonathan Demme to Mar­tin Scors­ese to Noah Baum­bach — and also appeared in the likes of Oper­a­tion Dum­bo Drop, and Mup­pets from Space, and Street Kings 2: Motor City. But whether in an acclaimed Hol­ly­wood mas­ter­work, a goofy com­e­dy, or a direct-to-video thriller, Liot­ta’s char­ac­ters always seem whol­ly to belong there, exud­ing his sig­na­ture mix­ture of half-bluff­ing grav­i­tas and errat­i­cal­ly mag­net­ic suavi­ty. His death last month has sent many of us back to his var­ied fil­mog­ra­phy, some high­lights of which the man him­self dis­cuss­es in the GQ video above.

After a few years in the soap-opera trench­es, Liot­ta became a star in 1986 with his por­tray­al of a rough-hewn ex-con­vict in Dem­me’s mod­ern screw­ball com­e­dy Some­thing Wild. But the chance to play that break­out part, as he explains in the video, only came his way after he worked up the nerve to ask Melanie Grif­fith — a con­nec­tion he’d made in act­ing class­es — to get him into the audi­tion.

“I was just ready and want­i­ng it,” he remem­bers, and sure­ly these feel­ings stoked the char­ac­ter­is­tic inten­si­ty, some­times men­ac­ing and some­times com­ic, that would come through in that role, and for which he would soon become well known. Just three years lat­er, Liot­ta was play­ing Shoe­less Joe Jack­son in Field of Dreams (a beloved pic­ture he admits to nev­er hav­ing seen).

The year after that, Liot­ta put in per­haps his best-known per­for­mance as the eager but doomed mafia asso­ciate Hen­ry Hill in Scors­ese’s Good­fel­las. Though he could play every­one from a bar­tender to a com­mer­cial jin­gle-writer to Frank Sina­tra, his roles there­after would include no small num­ber of crim­i­nals, police offi­cers, mil­i­tary men, and spe­cial agents: each an author­i­ty fig­ure in his way, each made vivid by Liot­ta’s para­dox­i­cal air of unsta­ble solid­i­ty. It seems that he espe­cial­ly savored the recent NBC crime dra­ma Shades of Blue, in which he played “a bisex­u­al cop that is on the take, but also loves his group of cops that he works with.” With Liot­ta’s death, we lost one of the very few work­ing per­form­ers who could bring such a char­ac­ter to leer­ing, con­vinc­ing life.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

Orson Welles on the Art of Act­ing: “There is a Vil­lain in Each of Us”

A Vir­tu­al Table Read of Fast Times at Ridge­mont High, Fea­tur­ing Jen­nifer Anis­ton, Mor­gan Free­man, Shia LaBeouf, Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, John Leg­end & More

14 Actors Act­ing: A Gallery of Clas­sic Screen Types

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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What Is Batman? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #124 Debates the Character, the Legacy, and the New Film

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | June 3rd, 2022

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In light of the recent release of Matt Reeves’ film The Bat­man, we con­sid­er the strange alter­na­tion of dark­ness and camp that is Bat­man. Is he even a super hero? What’s with his rogues’ gallery? What’s with DC’s anti-world-build­ing?

Your Pret­ty Much Pop host Mark Lin­sen­may­er is joined by phi­los­o­phy prof/NY Times enter­tain­ment writer Lawrence Ware, improv comedian/educator Antho­ny LeBlanc, and Mar­ket­ing Over Cof­fee host John J. Wall, all of whom are deeply immersed in the comics, and we touch on oth­er recent shows in the Bat­man uni­verse.

Some rel­e­vant arti­cles include:

Fol­low us @law_writes, @anthonyleblanc, @johnjwall, and @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Terry Gilliam Visits a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies and Actors

in Film | May 26th, 2022

Let­ting a beloved film direc­tor wan­der through the aisles of a well-stocked video store feels like such guar­an­teed YouTube fod­der that it’s a sur­prise it real­ly hasn’t been done until recent­ly. But then I remind myself that the video store itself is a thing of the past, and to see one so well stocked, Library of Alexan­dria style, is news itself. For the above video, the direc­tor brows­ing the DVDs is none oth­er than mad­cap genius Ter­ry Gilliam. The video store is Paris’ JM Video. The chat as expect­ed is mar­velous. (Only 20 min­utes? I’m sure many of us could lis­ten to Gilliam rab­bit on about his favorite films for twice, thrice that.)

Along the way, here are some things we learn:

  • Some of his favorite film­mak­ers are Stan­ley Kubrick, Lina Wert­muller, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, and one of his cur­rent friends, Albert Dupon­tel, the French actor-direc­tor who has used Gilliam in sev­er­al of his films.
  • He is thanked in the cred­its of Tarantino’s Reser­voir Dogs. Why? Because when Taran­ti­no was at the Sun­dance Insti­tute with his script, it was only Gilliam who imme­di­ate­ly saw the bril­liant screen­play for what it was, and encour­aged Taran­ti­no to stay true to him­self.
  • He’s not a fan of Die Hard, but it was the scene where Bruce Willis talks to his wife while pick­ing glass shards out of his foot that revealed a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in the actor. It led to Gilliam cast­ing Bruce Willis in 12 Mon­keys. Sim­i­lar­ly, he was able to work with Brad Pitt and get him to flip his cool and hand­some demeanor on its head for the man­ic co-star­ring role.
  • Gilliam stole the idea of mul­ti­ple actors play­ing the same title char­ac­ter in The Imag­i­nar­i­um of Doc­tor Par­nas­sus (after lead actor Heath Ledger died dur­ing shoot­ing) from Luis Buñuel’s
    That Obscure Object of Desire. In that film, two women play the same char­ac­ter inter­change­ably. If it’s good enough for Buñuel…
  • Eisenstein’s Ivan the Ter­ri­ble (parts one and two) is a “dan­ger­ous” film, because it was one of Putin’s most watched movies. (Not that we should stop watch­ing Eisen­stein.) Gilliam’s way of pro­nounc­ing Putin as “pou­tine” is inten­tion­al, no?
  • Being a fan of Mon­ty Python was a good way of get­ting cast in a Gilliam film. The direc­tor knows he would have not worked with Sean Con­nery (in Time Ban­dits) or Robert DeNiro (in Brazil) if both didn’t know his work on the clas­sic com­e­dy. (It also helps to have pro­duc­ers who go golf­ing with A‑list actors.)
  • He diss­es Christo­pher Nolan (“tech­ni­cal­ly bril­liant” but then “the films become video games” with “no grav­i­ty”), and repeats a swipe against Spielberg’s Schindler’s List that he heard from Kubrick. (“It’s a film about suc­cess.”)
  • He imag­ines a bet­ter clos­ing edit to Close Encoun­ters that ends upon see­ing the legs of the alien as the hatch opens. Then we would have had some­thing to talk about on the way home, he says.

There’s anoth­er video in the series fea­tur­ing David Cro­nen­berg, along with vis­its from Michael Bay, Asghar Farha­di, Audrey Diwan, Dario Argen­to, and many more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Ter­ry Gilliam on the Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick & Spiel­berg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spiel­berg Wraps Every­thing Up with Neat Lit­tle Bows

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

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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A First Glimpse of Moonage Daydream, the New “Immersive Cinematic Experience” David Bowie Film

in Film, Music | May 25th, 2022

Above you can get a first glimpse of Moon­age Day­dream–a new film that The Guardian calls a “glo­ri­ous, shapeshift­ing eulo­gy to David Bowie.” Direct­ed by Brett Mor­gen (oth­er­wise known for Cobain: Mon­tage of Heck), the film cre­ates for view­ers “an immer­sive cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence” and “an audio-visu­al space odyssey,” using nev­er-before-seen con­cert footage. Moon­age Day­dream “not only illu­mi­nates the enig­mat­ic lega­cy of David Bowie but also serves as a guide to liv­ing a ful­fill­ing and mean­ing­ful life in the 21st Cen­tu­ry.”

Pre­mier­ing at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val this month, the film will arrive at the­aters in Sep­tem­ber, and then stream on HBO and HBO Max next spring. You can read more about the film and its pro­duc­tion at Rolling Stone.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Any­way (1998)

Bowie’s Book­shelf: A New Essay Col­lec­tion on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

When David Bowie Launched His Own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.