Scenes of New York City in 1945 Colorized & Revived with Artificial Intelligence

in Film, History, Travel | October 28th, 2021

Are you irked when a movie or video you’re attempting to enjoy is constantly interrupted by the commentary of a chatty fellow audience member?

If so, don’t watch archivist Rick Prelinger’s 2017 assemblage, Lost Landscapes of New York, in the company of a New Yorker.

Unlike Open Culture favorite NASS’s five minute sample of Lost Landscapes of New York, above, which adds color and ambient audio to the unvarnished found footage, Prelinger — described by the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis as a “collector extraordinaire…one of the great, undersung historians of 20th century cinema” — relishes such mouthiness from the audience. His black and white compilations are mostly silent.

If you are a New Yorker, view that as an invitation here.

For everyone else, on behalf of New Yorkers everywhere, we concede that our confident utterances may indeed drive you out of your gourd…

Tourists with just one visit to their name can be forgiven for flaunting their personal brushes with such hall of famers as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Washington Square Arch, but there’s no competing with long time residents’ intimate knowledge of the city’s geography.

It’s snobbery of a type, but have pity on us long time residents, who know we will be viewed as subordinates by those who were born within the five Boroughs.

(We submit that there are layers to this…a native of, say, the Hoosier State, who can remember the original Penn Station should be considered to have at least as much street cred as a millennial whose birth in Brooklyn, Harlem or the West Village confers native New Yorker status.)

However you slice it, consider this fair warning that some of us, viewing Lost Landscapes of New York in your company, will not be able to stop ourselves from triumphantly crowing, “That’s 8th between 43rd and 44th!”

Again, it’s something Prelinger courts in local live screenings of his Lost Landscapes series.

The phenomenon is not limited to New York.

Be the setting San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Detroit, he views audience outbursts as the soundtracks to his mostly silent, non-narrative pastiches drawn from his vast archive of vintage home movies, government-produced films, and background footage shot with an eye toward compositing into a feature film.

In a conversation with The Essay Review’s Lucy Schiller, he remarked:

I’ve discovered that home movies become something else when blown up to theater-screen size. The change of scale provokes a role change in the audience, who without necessarily expecting it become more than simple commentators. They turn into ethnographers, noticing and often remarking on every visible detail of kinship, word and gesture and every interpersonal exchange. They also respond as cultural geographers, calling out streets and neighborhoods and buildings, reading signs aloud, repeating tradenames and brands and marking extinct details in the cityscape. If I could capture them (and I generally cannot, because it is hard to intelligibly record the voices of hundreds of people in one room), it would play back like an urban research project distributed through a crowd of investigators. Each successful identification, each naming achieved, is an endorphin trigger.

Prelinger is happy to play fast and loose with chronological order, scrambling period fashions, and color and black-and-white stock. This crazy quilt approach is in step with his resistance to constructing narratives (“the curse of contemporary documentary”) and admiration for the way enthusiastic amateurs’ footage renders “caste distinctions between animals and humans, between places and their inhabitants” moot:

I am much less interested in the minutiae of local history than I am in the process of daylighting it, in the relationship of history and contemporary life.

His approach allows those of us who live or have lived here to revel in New York City’s long standing capacity for reinvention.

Like the anonymous tide of humanity bustling along our sidewalks (and darting into traffic, mid-block), the marquees, restaurant names and words on the delivery trucks aren’t fixed. We claim to hate it, but philosophers might suggest it’s what keeps us engaged.

You won’t find many street vendors hawking frumpy cotton undies these days, but there are plenty of corners where you can buy fruit and veg… and iPhone cases, earbuds, and COVID-19 era face masks.

As exciting as it is to successfully peg the quintessentially New York things that remain, there’s an equal thrill to recognizing and shouting out the things that don’t, especially if there’s a significant personal connection.

It makes us feel like we’re notable, contributing in some way.

You contribute, too, by watching Lost Landscapes of New York (2017) here, while simultanously keeping your eyes peeled for gratifyingly well attended, highly participated live screenings.

If vintage amateur footage you’re in possession of is gathering dust, consider donating it to expand Prelinger’s archive, already some 60,000 films strong.

Watch Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes compilations of other cities here and here (see episode 7 of his San Francisco series above).

Explore his massive archive on the Internet Archive.

And if you want to practice sounding like a “real New Yorker,” head back up to the top of the page, skip to the end, and inform everyone within earshot that that building is the old James A. Farley Post Office at 32nd and 8th:

“Now it’s Moynihan Train Hall! It opened on January 1! It’s part of Penn Station! Don’t forget to look up inside the 33rd street entrance, or you’ll miss Kehinde Wiley’s incredible stained-glass ceiling! And if you want a snack for the ride, you should hit H‑Mart on 32nd just east of Greeley Square!”

Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breathtaking Photos of Historic New York City

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Play Masterfully Together in Vivid Color (1938)

in Film, Music, Technology | October 27th, 2021

Few jazz guitarists today could claim to be entirely free of the influence of Django Reinhardt. This despite the fact that he lost the use of two fingers — which ultimately encouraged him to develop a distinctive playing style — and that he died 68 years ago. The unfortunate abbreviation of Reinhardt’s life means that he never built a substantial body of solo work, though he did play on many recorded dates that include performances alongside Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. It also means that he left even less in the way of footage, though we do get a crisp and illuminating view of him and his guitar in the 1938 documentary short “Jazz ‘Hot,’ ” previously featured here on Open Culture.

“Jazz ‘Hot’ ” also features violin-playing from Stéphane Grappelli, who founded the group Quintette du Hot Club de France with Reinhardt in 1934. As they deepened their knowledge of jazz, the two influenced each other so thoroughly as to develop their own style of music.

Grappelli lived long enough to play with the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty, Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma, and even Pink Floyd. Still, more than a few jazz fans would surely claim that none of his professional collaborators was more important to his musical formation than Reinhardt. Now you can see them playing together in color, and fairly realistic color at that, in the clip at the top of the post.

The original black-and-white footage (which appears just above) was colorized with DeOldify, a deep learning-based application developed to restore photographs and motion pictures from bygone times. Perhaps you’ve seen the previous DeOldify colorization projects we’ve featured here, which run the gamut from musical numbers in Stormy Weather and Hellzapoppin’ to scenes of 1920s Berlin and even an 1896 snowball fight in Lyon. Granted access to a time machine, more than a few jazz-lovers would no doubt choose to go back to the Paris of the 1930s to see the Quintette du Hot Club de France in action. Technology has yet to make that a viable proposition, but it’s given us a next-best-thing that no appreciator of jazz guitar — or jazz violin — could fail to enjoy.

How Django Reinhardt, After Losing Two Fingers, Developed An Innovative Style & Inspired Black Sabbath Guitarist Toni Iommi to Do the Same

Django Reinhardt Demonstrates His Guitar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s

Hear Lost Recording of Pink Floyd Playing with Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli on “Wish You Were Here”

One of the Greatest Dances Sequences Ever Captured on Film Gets Restored in Color by AI: Watch the Classic Scene from Stormy Weather

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 or on Facebook.

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

How Radiohead Wrote the Perfect James Bond Theme Song

in Film, Music | October 22nd, 2021

Over the past 59 years, the duty of performing a James Bond movie theme has fallen to the likes of Tom Jones, Paul McCartney, Carly Simon, Bono, Madonna — and most recently, for the latest installment, No Time to Die, Billie Eilish. But one of the greatest Bond themes ever written has never been heard in any of the movies. This, in any case, is the contention of the video essay above, “How Radiohead Wrote the Perfect Bond Theme.” Commissioned for 2015’s Spectre, the second-most recent film in the series, Thom Yorke and company came up with a song that moves Listening In creator Barnaby Martin to declare, “This is Bond, but it’s also unmistakably Radiohead.”

Like many Bond title themes, Radiohead’s “Spectre” is in a minor key with “added blues notes,” working off the distinctive chord progression composer John Barry employed in the series’ original instrumental theme. And while, like most Bond title-theme performers, Radiohead are popular musicians, their actual work has always refused to align perfectly with straightforward pop-music expectations.

“Spectre” embodies both the band’s “love of rhythmical ambiguity” and their “trademark harmonic ambiguity.” The “beauty and simplicity of the music contrast painfully with the words,” reflecting “perfectly that dichotomy in contemporary Bond: a man struggling to reconcile love and duty.”

As if that weren’t enough, Radiohead’s song also includes unexpected but consummately Bond-esque compositional and instrumental moves. “It’s jazzy but discordant,” says Martin. “It’s a modern re-imagining of John Barry’s big-band orchestrations.” In every section the piece exquisitely maintains the tension between Radiohead and Bond, creating “an instantly compelling and dark musical world. Alas, it was ultimately replaced, ostensibly because the mood of the music and lyrics didn’t fit properly with that of the film: “We had this beautiful song,” lamented director Sam Mendes, “and we weren’t able to use it.” But that hasn’t stopped Bond aficionados from imagining what could have been, and you can get a sense of it in a fan video, previously featured here on Open Culture, that reunites “Spectre” with Spectre.

via Kottke

Introducing The Radiohead Public Library: Radiohead Makes Their Full Catalogue Available via a Free Online Web Site

James Bond: 50 Years in Film (and a Big Blu-Ray Release)

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Performs Songs from His New Soundtrack for the Horror Film, Suspiria

The Secret Rhythm Behind Radiohead’s “Videotape” Now Finally Revealed

Intimate Live Performances of Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the White Stripes, PJ Harvey & More: No Host, No Audience, Just Pure Live Music

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 or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

When Salvador Dali Viewed Joseph Cornell’s Surrealist Film, Became Enraged & Shouted: “He Stole It from My Subconscious!” (1936)

in Art, Film | October 20th, 2021

Did Salvador Dalí meet the diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder and maybe, also, a form of psychosis, as some have alleged? Maybe, but there’s no real way to know. “You can’t diagnose psychiatric illnesses without doing a face to face psychiatric examination,” Dutch psychiatrist Walter van den Broek writes, and it’s possible Dali “consciously created an ‘artistic’ personality… for the money or in order to succeed.” No doubt Dalí was a tireless self-promoter who marketed his work by way of a sensationalist persona.

But maybe Dalí faked symptoms of mental illness (via his understanding of Freud) in order to deliberately induce states of psychosis as part of his paranoid-critical method, a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena,” he wrote. One of Dalí’s extreme “unorthodox methods for idea generation,” the practice of pretending to be insane may have driven Dalí to believe too strongly in his own delusions at times.

Throughout the early 1930s, Dalí championed paranoia, “a form of mental illness in which reality is organized in such a manner so as to be served through the control of an imaginative construction,” he said in a 1930 lecture. “The paranoiac who thinks he is being poisoned discovers in all the things that surround him, down to their most imperceptible and subtle details, preparations for his death.” And the paranoiac Surrealist who believes he’s being robbed of his ideas may see artistic theft everywhere — especially in an exhibit of Surrealist artists that does not include him. (After all, as Dalí once declared, “I am Surrealism.”)

In 1936, Dalí attended a screening of Joseph Cornell’s short Surrealist film Rose Hobart (top), named for the obscure silent actress whose scenes Cornell excised from a “1931 jungle adventure film” called East of Borneo. Cornell took the footage, slowed it down, “chopped it up, reordered it, and discarded the entire plot,” writes Catherine Corman. “He cut out reaction shots… removed overtly upsetting scenes,” edited in scenes from other films, and “made the film seem deliberately modest and worn,” projecting it through a blue filter and scoring it with two songs from Nestor Amaral’s album Holiday in Brazil (which he’d found at a junk shop).

The screening happened to be held in New York at the same time as the Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibit of Surrealist art, an exhibition “rife with controversy,” MoMA writes, that “provoked fierce reactions from battle factions among the Dadaists and the Surrealists.” French Surrealist poet and critic André Breton, who two years earlier expelled Dalí from the Surrealist group for “the glorification of Hitlerian fascism,” wrote the catalogue introduction. The Spanish Civil War had just broken out that year, further aggravating Dalí, no doubt, when he encountered Cornell’s film at a matinee screening.

Partway through the screening of Rose Hobart, Dalí became enraged, stood up, shouting in Spanish, and overturned the projector. Later, he reportedly told Julian Levy, whose gallery held the screening: “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made.… I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if [Cornell] had stolen it.” Other versions of the story had Dalí saying, “He stole it from my subconscious!” or “He stole my dreams!” Cornell had not, of course, reached into Dalí’s subconscious but had manifested the film from his own obsessions with silent film and Hollywood divas, themes that run throughout his work. After Dalí’s outburst, the shy, reclusive artist refused to screen Rose Hobart again until the 1960s.

Dalí had vanquished an imaginary rival, but perhaps his true targets — Breton and his former Surrealist colleagues — remained untouched. It would not matter: Dalí eclipsed them all in fame, especially in the age of television, which embraced the artist’s antics like no other medium. But through his performances of insanity, maybe Dalí actually did touch into a creative preconscious state shared among artists — a place in which Joseph Cornell just might have found and stolen his ideas.

In 1932, Dalí had an epiphany about Jean-Francois Millet’s The Angelus, a painting with which he’d been obsessed since childhood and that influenced him heavily as an adult, becoming a key source for his paranoid-critical method. Dalí claimed that the two farmers praying over a meager harvest were actually mourning a lost child. He persisted in this belief until the Louvre agreed to X‑ray the painting. Underneath, they found a small, child-sized coffin, and at least one of Dalí’s paranoid fantasies was proved true.

Salvador Dalí Gets Surreal with 1950s America: Watch His Appearances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)

When Salvador Dalí Created a Surrealist Funhouse at New York World’s Fair (1939)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Slot Machine Age: A 1964 British Newsreel Angsts Over Whether Automated Machines Will Displace People

in Film, History, Technology | October 14th, 2021

When Americans hear the phrase “slot machine,” they think of pensioners compulsively pulling levers day and night in Las Vegas. But when the British hear it, a much less bleak vision comes to their minds: the automated dispensation of cigarettes, coffee, groceries, and even entire meals. Or at least such a vision came to the minds of Britons back in 1964, the year of the British Pathé newsreel above. With its brilliant colors and jazzy score, Slot Machine Age proudly displayed to the viewing public the range of coin-operated wonders already making their way into daily life, from pay phones and pinball machines to shoe-buffers and bottle-recycling stations.

“This invention, this brainchild of the boffins, has created a new disease,” declares the announcer: “slot machine fever.” Again, this has nothing to do with gambling, and everything to do with automation. Nearly 60 years ago, buying something from a machine was a novelty to most people in even the most highly industrialized countries on Earth.

Yet even then the automat, where diners pulled all their dishes from coin-operated windows, had in certain cities been an institution for decades. Alas, such establishments didn’t survive the explosion of fast food in the 1970s, whose business model made use of more, not less, human labor.

But in the 1960s, the age of the robot seemed well on its way — so much so that this phrase titles another, slightly later British Pathé production showcasing a “semi-computerized version of the dumbwaiter” being tried out in hotel rooms. From it the film’s honeymooning couple extract cocktails, peanuts, toothpaste, and “that last cigarette of the day.” It even offers reading material, a concept since tried again in France, Poland, San Francisco, and an eccentric bookstore in Toronto, but the glorious age of all-around convenience predicted in these newsreels has yet to materialize. We citizens of the 21st century are in many cases hardly pleased, but rather anxious about what we see as our growing dependence on automation. Still, with the coronavirus-induced vogue for contact-free payment and dining, perhaps it’s time to give the automat another chance.

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation Will Necessitate a Universal Basic Income

Buckminster Fuller Rails Against the “Nonsense of Earning a Living”: Why Work Useless Jobs When Technology & Automation Can Let Us Live More Meaningful Lives

Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writing Essays, Books & Songs, to Performing Surgery and Driving Trucks

Watch the “Biblio-Mat” Book-Vending Machine Dispense Literary Delight

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 or on Facebook.

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

Watch Free Cult Films by Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Streaming Service

in Film | October 13th, 2021

For many Open Culture readers, the Halloween season offers an opportunity — not to say an excuse — to re-experience classic horror films: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunted Castle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we suggest a home screening of the formidable work of vintage cinema that is 1968’s The Astro Zombies? Written, produced, and directed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Devils — it features not just “a mad astro-scientist” played by John Carradine and “two gore-crazed, solar-powered killer robot zombies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door victims; Chinese communist spies; deadly Mexican secret agents led by the insanely voluptuous Tura Satana” and an “intrepid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zombies for free, and newly remastered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new streaming site from film and video distributor Kino Lorber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treated to a wealth of titillating viewing options of a variety of eras and subgenres: “Drive-in favorites” like Ape and Beware! The Blob; “golden age exploitation” like Reefer Madness and She Shoulda Said ‘No’!; and even classics like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire.

True cult-film enthusiasts, of course, may well go straight to the available selections, thoughtfully grouped together, from “Master of Italian Horror” Mario Bava and prolific Spanish “B‑movie” kingpin Jesús Franco. Those looking to throw a fright night might consider Kino Cult’s offerings filed under “hardboiled horror”: Killbillies, The House with 100 Eyes, Bunny: The Killer Thing.

Few of these pictures skimp on the grotesque; fewer still skimp on the humor, a necessary ingredient in even the most harrowing horror movies. Far from a pile of cynical hackwork, Kino Cult’s library has clearly been curated with an eye toward films that, although for the most part produced inexpensively and with unrelenting intent to provoke visceral reactions in their audiences, are hardly without interest to serious cinephiles. The site even includes an “artsploitation” section containing such taboo-breaching works as Curtis Burz’s Summer House. Among its general recent additions you’ll also find Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos, perhaps the most daring high-profile provocateur currently at work in the medium. Since Kino Cult has made all these films and more available to stream at no charge, none of us, no matter our particular cinematic sensibilities, has an excuse to pass this Halloween un-entertained — and more to the point, undisturbed. Enter the collection here.

The First Horror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunted Castle (1896)

Watch Nosferatu, the Seminal Vampire Film, Free Online (1922)

Martin Scorsese Creates a List of the 11 Scariest Horror Films

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: Full of Horror & Suspense

Time Out London Presents The 100 Best Horror Films: Start by Watching Four Horror Classics Free Online

What Scares Us, and How Does this Manifest in Film? A Halloween Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#66)

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 or on Facebook.

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

Quentin Tarantino Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becoming a Filmmaker

in Film | October 8th, 2021

When Quentin Tarantino hit it big in the 1990s with Reservoir Dogs, and then much bigger with Pulp Fiction, he became known as the auteur who’d received his film education by working as a video-store clerk. But like much Hollywood hype, that story wasn’t quite true. “No, I was already a movie expert,” says the man himself in a clip from the 1994 BBC documentary Quentin Tarantino: Hollywood’s Boy Wonder. “That’s how I got hired at Video Archives.” Located in the South Bay — a comparatively little-seen region of Los Angeles County later paid loving tribute with Jackie Brown — the store was, in the words of one of its owners, “one of the few places that Quentin could come as a regular guy and get a job and become like a star.”

“Me and the other guys would walk into the local movie theater and we’d be heading toward our seats and we’d hear, ‘There go the guys from Video Archives,’ ” says Tarantino in Tom Roston’s I Lost It at the Video Store. On one level, the experience constituted “a primer to what it would be like to be famous.” Having begun as a Video Archives customer, Tarantino wound up working there for five years, offering voluminous and forceful recommendations by day and, after closing, putting on staff-only film festivals by night. “That time is captured perfectly in True Romance,” which Tony Scott directed but Tarantino wrote, and one of those co-workers, Roger Avary, would collaborate with him on the screenplay for Pulp Fiction.

Video Archives was a beacon to all the South Bay’s “film geeks.” Then as now, most such people “devote a lot of money and they devote a lot of their life to the following of film, but they don’t really have that much to show for all this devotion,” other than their strongly held cinematic opinions. “What you find out fairly quickly in Hollywood is, this is a community where hardly anybody trusts their own opinion. People want people to tell them what is good, what to like, what not to like.” Hence the ability of the young Tarantino, brimming with opinions and unafraid to state them and possessed of an unwavering resolve to make movies of his own, to go from video-store clerking practically straight to the top of the industry. Though he didn’t need film school — nor college, or indeed high school — he could hardly have found a more suitable alma mater.

Quentin Tarantino Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Quentin Tarantino’s Handwritten List of the 11 “Greatest Movies”

Quentin Tarantino’s Copycat Cinema: How the Postmodern Filmmaker Perfected the Art of the Steal

Quentin Tarantino Reviews Movies: From Dunkirk and King of New York, to Soul Brothers of Kung Fu & 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 or on Facebook.

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

Quentin Tarantino Reviews Movies: From Dunkirk and King of New York, to Soul Brothers of Kung Fu & More

in Film | September 28th, 2021

Some of the most influential directors of the French New Wave, like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Éric Rohmer, first stepped into the world of film as critics. They found their voices by publishing in the Paris cinephile institution of Cahiers du cinéma; a few decades later, Quentin Tarantino found his own by working at the Manhattan Beach cinephile institution of Video Archives. Stories of all the myriad ways in which he would express his enthusiasm for and expertise on cinema there have passed into legend. But just like the critics Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer, the video-store clerk Tarantino ultimately seems to have signed on to the old proposition that the best response to a work of art is another work of art.

Tarantino’s endorsements of and introductions to the work of other directors (for example, the one he recorded for Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express) have given us a sense of his cinematic taste. So, in an even more telling manner, do the elements he steals — by his own admission — from other movies.

A look at the dance scene in Pulp Fiction, for example, reveals a filmmaker well acquainted with the French New Wave, and even more so with the work of Italia master Federico Fellini that came out in the same era. And even if you think you could go head-to-head with Tarantino on midcentury European auteurs, could you match his understanding of A Man Called Tiger, Fatal Needles vs. Fatal Fists, or Soul Brothers of Kung Fu?

Those are just three of the films Tarantino has reviewed at the web site of the New Beverly Cinema, the theater he owns in Los Angeles. Published in a low-profile manner, these short essays on the kind of 1970s Hong Kong martial-arts pictures that rightfully belong on downtown triple-bills (and that Tarantino surely first saw on downtown triple-bills) exude the kind of fan-critic energy that brings to mind bygone days of the internet.

Not that Tarantino eschews more recent movies and movie media. In late 2019 and early 2010, he appeared three times on The Ringer’s The Rewatchables podcast to share his thoughts on three pictures worth seeing again: Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk from 2017, Tony Scott’s Unstoppable from 2010, and Abel Ferrara’s King of New York from 1990. Listen and you may just feel like a Video Archive customer in the 1980s, getting recommendations from an oddly persuasive clerk.

Quentin Tarantino’s Handwritten List of the 11 “Greatest Movies”

An Analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Narrated (Mostly) by Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino’s Copycat Cinema: How the Postmodern Filmmaker Perfected the Art of the Steal

Quentin Tarantino Releases His First Novel: A Pulpy Novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

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 or on Facebook.

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

Scenes of New York City in 1945 Colorized & Revived with Artificial Intelligence

Watch Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Play Masterfully Together in Vivid Color (1938)

How Radiohead Wrote the Perfect James Bond Theme Song

When Salvador Dali Viewed Joseph Cornell’s Surrealist Film, Became Enraged & Shouted: “He Stole It from My Subconscious!” (1936)

Slot Machine Age: A 1964 British Newsreel Angsts Over Whether Automated Machines Will Displace People

Watch Free Cult Films by Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Streaming Service

Quentin Tarantino Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becoming a Filmmaker

Quentin Tarantino Reviews Movies: From Dunkirk and King of New York, to Soul Brothers of Kung Fu & More

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