William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exor­cist might feel wrapped in the his­tor­i­cal glow of “ele­vat­ed hor­ror” now–serious film­mak­ing for dis­cern­ing fans and critics–but that was very much *not* the case back in the year of its birth. Back in the grimy, Water­gate years of the ear­ly ‘70s, The Exor­cist was as much a side-show freak­out as any­thing William Cas­tle pro­duced back in the day. It was an endurance test.

The above film from that time proves it, show­ing the long, around-the-block lines, the sold-out screen­ings, the repeat view­ers, and the record-break­ing open­ing week­end gross­es ($2 mil­lion in just 24 the­aters in Decem­ber, before open­ing wide across the nation in 1974.) This event had more in com­mon with your cur­rent com­ic book movie or Star Wars sequel, and all the while being an R‑rated film based on Catholic dog­ma and fea­tur­ing some of the most col­or­ful pro­fan­i­ty ever hurled at a man of the cloth (on screen at least).

Of course, it is the reac­tions of the view­ers that make this footage worth it. The cin­e­ma work­ers talk about how even the biggest guys can’t hack the film and exit white as a sheet. Two young women say this is their sec­ond attempt to watch the film all the way through. Anoth­er guy say he wasn’t scared by the film but “I dun­no, I just faint­ed.”

And we do in fact see some peo­ple faint in the lob­by, just going down like a sack of bricks, and an ush­er tells the cam­era he has two kinds of smelling salts to choose from. One woman in line even tells the cam­era crew, “I wan­na see if it’s gonna make me throw up.” In fact, at one point some the­aters start­ed hand­ing out “barf bags” for ner­vous view­ers (which prob­a­bly increased their chances of vom­it­ing). MAD Mag­a­zine even got in on the hype with an appro­pri­ate cov­er (“If the Dev­il Makes You Do It” reads the bag.)

All this was incred­i­bly good for busi­ness, and incred­i­bly good for the news media, who sent crews like this one down, along with a reporter to inter­view peo­ple bail­ing on the film halfway through. The demon­ic voice is what did it for peo­ple, pro­vid­ed by actress Mer­cedes McCam­bridge, who report­ed­ly downed raw eggs, smoked cig­a­rettes and drank whiskey to give her voice that raspy edge.

From this year’s van­tage point it all looks quaint and fun–all these dif­fer­ent peo­ple from var­i­ous walks of life hav­ing a shared expe­ri­ence in a the­ater, every­body whipped up into a delight­ful and ulti­mate­ly harm­less fren­zy.

Most of the doc­u­men­tary was shot at the Nation­al The­ater in West­wood, Los Ange­les. Only three years old at the time, the cin­e­ma was the last sin­gle-screen the­ater built in the Unit­ed States. It was torn down in 2008, replaced by some tony apart­ments and a street-lev­el sushi bar.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

How Famous Paint­ings Inspired Cin­e­mat­ic Shots in the Films of Taran­ti­no, Gilliam, Hitch­cock & More: A Big Super­cut

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.

If you were to watch David Lynch’s com­plete fil­mog­ra­phy from begin­ning to end, how would you see real­i­ty after­ward? Video essay­ist Lewis Bond sure­ly has some idea. As the cre­ator of Chan­nel Criswell, whose exam­i­na­tions of auteurs like Andrei Tarkovsky, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, and Mar­tin Scors­ese we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, he once released a med­i­ta­tion on what makes a Lynch film “Lynchi­an.” Now, under the new ban­ner of The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy (and in part­ner­ship with film stream­ing ser­vice MUBI), Bond not only returns to the well of the Lynchi­an, but plunges in deeply enough to come up with The David Lynch Ret­ro­spec­tive.

In two hours, this video essay makes a jour­ney through all the dark recess­es of Lynch’s fea­ture fil­mog­ra­phy — a fil­mog­ra­phy that, admit­ted­ly, can at times seem made up of noth­ing but dark recess­es. It begins in 1977 with Eraser­head, Lynch’s first full-length pic­ture as well as his least remit­ting. How­ev­er har­row­ing its bio­me­chan­i­cal strange­ness, that debut drew the eye of Hol­ly­wood, result­ing in Lynch’s hir­ing to direct The Ele­phant Man, a chiaroscuro vision of the life of deformed 19th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish­man Joseph Mer­rick. There fol­lows the infa­mous Dune, which finds Lynch at the helm (at least nom­i­nal­ly) of a $40-mil­lion adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s sci­ence-fic­tion epic, an extrav­a­gant mis­match as was ever made between direc­tor and mate­r­i­al.

Bond men­tions that he con­sid­ered exclud­ing Dune from The David Lynch Ret­ro­spec­tive, see­ing as the direc­tor him­self has dis­owned the pic­ture. Still, no Lynch enthu­si­ast can deny that it brought him to the artis­ti­cal­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing posi­tions that have made the rest of his body of work what it is. But what, exact­ly, is it? Bond draws some pos­si­bil­i­ties from Blue Vel­vet, Lynch’s return to the art house whose mem­o­rably oneir­ic fusion of idyl­lic small-town Amer­i­ca with sadism and voyeurism also func­tions as a state­ment of philo­soph­i­cal and aes­thet­ic intent. Not that Lynch is giv­en to state­ments, per se: as Bond empha­sizes in a vari­ety of ways, none of these works admit of direct expli­ca­tion, and this holds as true for the ultra-pas­tiche road movie Wild at Heart as it does for the split-per­son­al­i­ty neo-noir Lost High­way.

Then comes 1999’s The Straight Sto­ry, a movie about an old man who dri­ves a trac­tor across the Amer­i­can Mid­west to vis­it his broth­er. Bond frames the lat­ter as the most Lynchi­an choice the direc­tor could have made, its seem­ing­ly thor­ough mun­dan­i­ty shed­ding light on his per­cep­tion of cin­e­ma and real­i­ty itself. It also low­ers the Lynch-fil­mog­ra­phy binge-watcher’s psy­cho­log­i­cal defens­es for the simul­ta­ne­ous Hol­ly­wood fan­ta­sy and night­mare to come, Mul­hol­land Dri­ve. Though Bond describes it as “the zenith of all that’s Lynchi­an,” not every fan agrees that it’s Lynch’s mas­ter­piece: some opt for the impen­e­tra­ble three-hour dose of pure Lynchi­an­ism (and cryp­tic sit­com rab­bits) that is Inland Empire. Bond describes Inland Empire, still Lynch’s most recent fea­ture, as “a tor­tur­ous film, and this should be seen only as com­pli­men­ta­ry.” There speaks a true Lynchi­an.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

A Young David Lynch Talks About Eraser­head in One of His First Record­ed Inter­views (1979)

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demys­ti­fies It All

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.

Cour­tesy of the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art: “Dar­ren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream has only grown in stature since its explo­sive debut in 2000. His har­row­ing and influ­en­tial visu­al depic­tion of addic­tion and depen­den­cy across four char­ac­ters in Brook­lyn is a film that’s still whis­pered about in tones of rev­er­ence.” To cel­e­brate 20th anniver­sary, Aronof­sky and actors Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jen­nifer Con­nel­ly, and Mar­lon Wayans reunit­ed to recon­sid­er the film and its impact on cin­e­ma and cul­ture. This vir­tu­al con­ver­sa­tion was mod­er­at­ed by Rajen­dra Roy, the Celeste Bar­tos Chief Cura­tor of Film. If you become a MoMA mem­ber, you will gain access to more spe­cial events along these lines.

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.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Ear­ly cin­e­ma is full of leg­ends, but none as endur­ing as the leg­end of the Lumière Broth­ers’ Arrivée d’un train à la Cio­tat (Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat). The fif­teen-sec­ond reel of a loco­mo­tive so star­tled audi­ences, alleged­ly, they scram­bled from their seats. Ger­man film schol­ar Mar­tin Loiperdinger calls the anec­dote “cinema’s found­ing myth,” a sto­ry repeat­ed over and over, for over 100 years, though there’s no evi­dence it actu­al­ly hap­pened. One film his­to­ry text even titled a chap­ter “Begin­ning with Ter­ror” to under­line the sem­i­nal impor­tance of the event.

If we think about it, the inci­dent, how­ev­er apoc­ryphal, does mark an ori­gin. Con­sid­er how many films after­ward fea­tured trains as a cen­tral scene of the action, from The Great Train Rob­bery to Strangers on a Train to Snow­piercer. There are mag­i­cal trains and train heists in space. Trains are every­where in the movies. If we think about it some more, isn’t cin­e­ma itself some­thing like a train? Even films that play with time still move inex­orably from begin­ning to end, fol­low­ing some sort of dis­cernible through-line from one end to the oth­er.

But, say we were to enter­tain an alter­nate film his­to­ry, a Philip K. Dick-like ver­sion in which, rather than trains, the found­ing myth of cin­e­ma involved snow­balls….

In 1896, the year after the sup­posed pub­lic shock of Arrival of a Train, the Lumières shot Bataille de boules de neige, “Snow­ball Fight,” which you can see in its orig­i­nal black and white, above (with added, faux-vaude­ville music). A group of sol­id cit­i­zens pum­mels each oth­er with snow­balls, then a cyclist, unawares, rides into the fray, gets pelt­ed, and hur­ries off for dear life. It’s a mad­cap ver­ité gem. “The film was shot in Lyon, France using one of the duo’s all-in-one ciné­matographe cre­ations,” notes Petapix­el, “which was part cam­era, part pro­jec­tor, and part devel­op­er.” There were no reports of pan­ics in the the­ater.

At the top of the post, you can expe­ri­ence the short in full col­or and HD, thanks to Joaquim Cam­pa, “who used the AI-pow­ered soft­ware DeOld­ify to upscale the footage to 1080p, inter­po­late addi­tion­al frames for a smoother result, and col­orize the old footage.” Despite appear­ances, it seems the film’s speed remains unchanged. Campa’s star­tling­ly imme­di­ate ver­sion arrives in the midst of a debate over the trendy col­oriza­tion of old films and pho­tos. Rather than bring­ing us clos­er to his­to­ry, the British Library’s Luke McK­er­nan told Wired, dig­i­tal pro­cess­ing “increas­es the gap between now and then.”

Col­orized, cleaned-up, and upscaled images show us the past as it nev­er actu­al­ly exist­ed, his­to­ri­ans claim. But isn’t that what film and pho­tog­ra­phy have always done? As media of tech­ni­cal inven­tion and rein­ven­tion, they inevitably shape and alter the scenes they cap­ture, both dur­ing and after shoot­ing. When Georges Méliès saw the Lumière’s films, he was not inter­est­ed in their real­ism but in their poten­tial for cre­at­ing fan­tasies. He went off to make his spe­cial-effects mas­ter­piece, A Trip to the Moon, which screened in both black-and-white and gar­ish­ly hand-col­ored prints in 1902.

“Sure, it can be argued that adding col­or, inter­po­lat­ing frames, and remov­ing scratch­es is cre­at­ing infor­ma­tion that was nev­er there and could ‘obscure the past instead of high­light­ing it,’” writes Petapix­el. “But how many peo­ple (who aren’t film buffs) will have ever heard of ‘Bataille de boules de neige’ before today? And how many might dis­cov­er a pas­sion for film­mak­ing or his­to­ry as a result?” Per­son­al­ly, I’d like to see more films that look like “Snow­ball Fight.”

via Joaquim­Cam­pa

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Watch the Films of the Lumière Broth­ers & the Birth of Cin­e­ma (1895)

The Ear­li­est Known Motion Pic­ture, 1888’s Round­hay Gar­den Scene, Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

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