In light of the release of The Last Duel (which you needn’t have watched), we talk about the trope of the honor-resolving duel in movies and TV. Mark and guest co-host Dylan Casey of The Partially Examined Life are joined by Clif Mark, host of the Good in Theory podcast who wrote his political thesis and a 2018 Aeon article on the history and logic of dueling.
Since we’re all philosophy podcasters on this one (our entertainment podcaster guest dropped out at the last minute), we bring in philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche in as needed, the circle of ethical concern (who gets moral status and so is worthy to duel?), and of course the relevant class and gender critiques.
We also touch on The Duelists (incidentally, Ridley Scott’s directing debut, where The Last Duel is his latest), The Duelist and The Duel (two 2016 films), A Knight’s Tale, The Princess Bride, Dune, Hamilton, Bridgerton, The Karate Kid, and more.
For more information on the specter of dueling in politics, read about Justin Trudeau and Trump/Biden.
YouTube Originals presents The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash:
Johnny Cash stands among the giants of 20th century American life. But his story remains tangled in mystery and myth. This documentary, created with the full cooperation of the Cash estate and rich in recently discovered archival materials, brings Cash the man out from behind the legend. Taking the remarkable Folsom Prison recording as a central motif and featuring interviews with family and celebrated collaborators, the film explores the artistic victories, the personal tragedies, the struggles with addiction, and the spiritual pursuits that colored Johnny Cash’s life.
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Expressionism was an art movement that set out to take the internal—emotions, the human condition itself—and make it external, with paintings that made no attempt to recreate reality. It was a break with the classical schools of art that had come before. It was modern, very modern, very colorful, and exciting as hell. And it was soon to run headlong into that most modern of art forms, filmmaking, in the 1920s.
In the above mini-doc on the Dutch Angle, that canted framing so beloved of film noir, and apparently every shot in the first Thor movie, Vox traces its roots back to Expressionism, and particularly back to Germany of the 1910s where schools like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were assaulting realism with brutal paintings. They sensed something was changing in the subconscious of people and in the country itself. And the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the culmination of that horrific vibe.
Three expressionist painters, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Rohrig designed the crooked, bizarre, and nightmarish sets for that film. They look like the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Fritz Bleyl, but denuded of color. Expressionism had entered film. (Warm, Reimann, and Rohring had worked on, and continued to work as set designers/art directors for many films at that time, but most are lost or destroyed.) Germany being cut off from the Hollywood film industry at the time had led to this strange new direction, but once Hitler rose to power, many artists came to Hollywood, and expressionist techniques infected Hollywood.
The Dutch Angle (really, the Deutsche Angle, before being German became problematic) was a way of turning vertical and horizontal lines in a scene into diagonals. They suggest something had gone wrong, that reality has been knocked off its axis. It became part of the vocabulary of film noir, which was also filled with expressionistic lighting, high contrast black and white, light and shadows.
Those direct emotional parallels have been leached from the Dutch angle from its overuse. It’s been used in many a film as a way to jazz up a scene, or sometimes just as a way to get several elements into a tight frame. It’s ubiquity in music videos and commercials has made it almost invisible.
But when the Dutch angle is used the right way by talented directors, from Hitchcock to Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino, the effect still works. The angle makes a shot stand out, it can jar us, it can show interior confusion and moral mayhem. And when that happens it can take us back to the Expressionist’s original goal. It can reveal our inner truths, and remind us of the times when we have felt off center, when the world was not on the level.
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.
Andrei Tarkovsky had a rather low opinion of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Phony on many points,” he once called it, built on “a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.” His professional response was 1972’s Solaris, by most estimates another high point in the science-fiction cinema of that period. Yet today it isn’t widely regarded as Tarkovsky’s best work; certainly it hasn’t become as much of an object of worship as, say, Stalker. That picture — arguably another work of sci-fi, though one sui generis in practically its every facet — continues to inspire such tributes and exegeses as the video essay on its making we featured earlier this year here on Open Culture.
That video essay came from the channel of Youtuber CinemaTyler, who like many auteur-oriented cinephiles exhibits appreciation for Tarkovsky and Kubrick alike. He’s created numerous examinations on the work that went into Kubrick’s pictures, including A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket.
The ambition of 2001, outsized even by Kubrick’s standard, is reflected in what it spurred CinemaTyler on to create: a seven-part series of video essays on its production, with three-hour total runtime that far exceeds that of the film itself. It takes at least that long to explain the achievements Kubrick pulled off, especially with mid-1960s filmmaking technology, which gave us the rare vision of the future that has held up for more than half a century.
Some of the qualities that have made 2001 endure came into being almost by accident. Take the use of Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” to introduce the space station, a stroke of scoring genius inspired by the records Kubrick and company happened to be listening to while viewing their footage. That and other classical pieces replaced an original score by the composer who’d worked on Kubrick’s Spartacus, which would have struck a different mood altogether. So would the portentous narration included in earlier versions of the script, hardly imaginable in the context of such powerfully wordless scenes as the famous four-million-year cut from tossed bone to spacecraft, which turns out to have been originally conceived an Earth-orbiting nuclear-weapon platform. That’s one of the many little-known facts CinemaTyler fits into this series, and a viewing of which even the biggest Kubrick buffs will have reason to admire 2001 more intensely than ever.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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 or on Facebook.
We all think we know just what Albert Einstein looked like — and broadly speaking, we’ve got it right. At least since his death in 1955, since which time generation after generation of children around the world have grown up closely associating his bristly mustache and semi-tamed gray hair with the very concept of scientific genius. His sartorial rumpledness and Teutonically hangdog look have long been the stuff of not just caricature, but (as in Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance) earnest tribute as well. Yet how many of us can say we’ve really taken a good look at Einstein?
Even earlier colorized newsreel footage appears in the video just above, taken from an episode of the Smithsonian Channel series America in Color. It depicts Einstein arriving in the United States in 1930, by which time he was already “the world’s most famous physicist” — a position then meriting a welcome not unlike that which the Beatles would receive 34 years later.
Einstein returned to his native Germany after that visit. The America in Color clip also shows him back at his cottage outside Berlin (and in his pajamas), but his time back in his homeland amounted only to a few years. The reason: Hitler. During Einstein’s visiting professorship at Cal Tech in 1933, the Gestapo raided his cottage and Berlin apartment, as well as confiscated his sailboat. Later the Nazi government banned Jews from holding official positions, including at universities, effectively cutting off his professional prospects and those of no few other German citizens besides. The 1943 color footage above offers a glimpse of Einstein a decade into his American life.
A couple of years thereafter, the end of the Second World War made Einstein even more famous. He became, in the minds of many Americans, the brilliant physicist who “helped discover the atom bomb.” So declares the announcer in that first newsreel, but in the decades since, the public has come to associate Einstein more instinctively with his theory of relativity — an achievement less immediately comprehensible than the apocalyptic explosion of the atomic bomb, but one whose scientific implications run much deeper. Many clear and lucid précis of Einstein’s theory exist, but why not first see it explained by the man himself, and in color at that?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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 or on Facebook.
Like many famous episodes in the lives of famous people, Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes quote turns out to be a garbling of what happened. Warhol simply said that everybody wants to be famous (and by implication, famous forever). To which the Factory’s “court photographer” Nat Finkelstein replied, “yeah, for 15 minutes.” Given the way the idea has come down to us, we’ve missed the ambiguity in this exchange. Do we all want to be famous for 15 minutes (and only 15 minutes), or do we only spend 15 minutes wanting to be famous before we move on and accept it as a sucker’s game?
Finkelstein himself might have felt the latter as he watched “pop die and punk being born” (he said in a 2001 interview). It was the death of Warhol’s fame ideal, and the birth of something new: music that loudly declared open hostilities against the gatekeepers of popular culture. Not every punk band reserved its punches for those above them. California hardcore legends Fear — led by confrontational satirist Lee Ving — swing wildly in every direction, hitting their audience as often as the powers that be.
When their first taste of Warholian fame came around — in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization — Ving used the moment in front of the cameras to taunt and abuse audience members until a few of them rushed the stage to fight him. Had NBC executives seen this footage casual violence, profanity, and worrisome ebullience, it’s unlikely they would have let returning guest John Belushi book Fear on Halloween night of that same year.
The SNL appearance — for which Fear proudly earned a permanent ban — became the stuff of legend. Not only did Ving and band get up to their usual antics onstage, but the show brought in a crew of about 80 DC punks (including Dischord Records/Fugazi founder Ian MacKaye), who smashed up the set and joined the band in solidarity against New York and its saxophones. The network cut the broadcast short when one punk (identified as either MacKaye or John Brannon of the band Negative Approach) yelled “F*ck New York!” into an open mic during the last song, “Let’s Start a War.” NBC shelved the footage for years.
Although well-known in fan communities, the appearance might have faded from memory were it not for the internet, which not only has the Warholian power to make anyone famous (or “internet famous”) for no reason, but also routinely resurrects lost moments of fame and makes them last forever. Just so, the legend of Fear on SNL has grown over time on YouTube. It now warrants a short documentary — one made, no less, by Jeff Krulik, a filmmaker who, five years after the Fear appearance, documented another burgeoning Fear-like fandom in his cult short, “Heavy Metal Parking Lot.”
“Fear on SNL,” above, includes several interview clips from firsthand witnesses. DC “punk superfan” Bill MacKenzie listens to an old interview he gave about the show, in which he says the band asked him to come to the taping. As Ian MacKaye tells it, Lorne Michaels himself placed the call. (He must mean producer Dick Ebersol, as Michaels left the show in 1980 and wouldn’t return until 1985.) But both MacKaye and Ving remember that it was Belushi who really rounded up the audience of authentic punks, leveraging his own hard-won celebrity to stick it to the factory that made his fame.
In early 2020, a collection of 16mm film from 1993–95 was discovered in the archive of legendary artist Tom Petty. The film was shot while Tom was on a prolific songwriting streak for years making what he intended to be a double album called Wildflowers. Tom Petty was known for being reclusive about his personal life and his creative process. “Somewhere You Feel Free” allows you to spend 90 minutes immersed in the candid and musically rich world of Tom’s creativity as he makes his first album with legendary producer Rick Rubin. With collaborators providing unrivaled access and featuring never before seen footage captured during the making of Wildflowers, Tom’s personal favorite album.
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For short films, finding an audience is an often uphill battle. Even major award winners struggle to reach viewers outside of the festival circuit.
Thank goodness for The Screening Room, The New Yorker’s online platform for sharing short films.
It’s a magnificent free buffet for those of us who’d like nothing better than to gorge ourselves on these little gems.
If you’re not yet a fan of the form, allow us to suggest that any one of the 30 fictional shorts posted in The Screening Room could function as a superb palate cleanser between binge watches of more regular fare.
A community-supported project, starring Sutton and shot in Tanaka’s Brooklyn apartment, it’s a comedy of manners that brings fresh meaning to the semi-controversial phrase “Bed Stuy, Do or Die.”
Sutton plays a young Black artist with a masters from Yale, a gig behind the bar at Applebee’s, and a keen interest in positioning herself as an influencer, an ambition the filmmakers lampoon with glee.
When she discovers that her new apartment is haunted, she is “so freaked the f&ck out,” she spends a week sleeping in the park, before venturing back:
And it’s a studio, so it’s like living in a clown car of hell.
But once she discovers (or possibly just decides) that the majority of the ghosts are Black, she begins planning a podcast and makes her peace with staying put.
Pros: the rent’s a lot less than the 1‑bathroom dump she shared with five roommates, there’s laundry in the basement, and the ghosts, whom she now conceives of as ancestors, share many of her interests — history, the arts, and the 1995 live action/CGI adaptation of Casper the Friendly Ghost. (They give Ghostbusters a thumbs down.)
Cons: the ghost of an 18th-century Dutch Protestant settler whose white fragility manifests in irritating, but manageable ways.
Those with 18 minutes to spare should check out Joy Joy Nails, another very funny film hinging on identity.
Every day a group of salty, young Korean women await the van that will transport them from their cramped quarters in Flushing, Queens, to a nail salon in a ritzier — and, judging by the customers, far whiter — neighborhood.
Writer-director Joey Ally contrasts the salon’s aggressively pink decor and the employees’ chummy deference to their regular customers with the grubbiness of the break room and the transactional nature of the exchange.
“Anyone not fired with enthusiasm… will be!” threatens a yellowed notice taped in the employees only area.
Behind the register, the veil is lifted a bit, narrowing the upstairs/downstairs divide with realistically homemade signs:
“CASH! FOR TIP ONLY”
Like Sutton and Tanaka, Ally is versed in horror tropes, inspiring dread with close ups of pumice stones, emory boards, and cuticle trimmers at work.
When a more objective view is needed, she cuts to the black-and-white security feed under the reception counter.
When one of the customers calls to ask if her missing earring was left in the waxing room, the story takes a tragic turn, though for reasons more complex than one might assume.
Ally’s script punctures the all-too-common perception of nail salon employees as a monolithic immigrant mass to explore themes of dominance and bias between representatives of varied cultures, a point driven home by the subtitles, or absence thereof.
Identity factors in here, too, as a Sasquatch-like creature terrifies a string of camera wielding humans in its attempt to get a photograph that will show it as it wishes to be perceived.
It’s an easily digested delight, suitable for all ages.
Explore all 30+ fictional shorts in the Screening Room for free here or on The New Yorker’s YouTube playlist. You can find them all embedded and streamable below.
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