The Pentagon Created a Plan to Defend the US Against a Zombie Apocalypse: Read It Online

For keen observers of pop cul­ture, the flood­tide of zom­bie films and tele­vi­sion series over the past sev­er­al years has seemed like an espe­cial­ly omi­nous devel­op­ment. As social unrest spreads and increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple are uproot­ed from their homes by war, cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe, and, now, COVID-relat­ed evic­tion, one won­ders how advis­able it might have been to prime the pub­lic with so many sce­nar­ios in which heroes must fight off hordes of infec­tious dis­ease car­ri­ers? Zom­bie movies seem intent, after all, on turn­ing not only the dead but also oth­er liv­ing humans into objects of ter­ror.

Zom­bies them­selves have a com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry; like many New World mon­sters, their ori­gins are tied to slav­ery and colo­nial­ism. The first zom­bies were not flesh-eat­ing can­ni­bals; they were peo­ple robbed of free­dom and agency by Voodoo priests, at least in leg­ends that emerged dur­ing the bru­tal twen­ty-year Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion of Haiti in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. The first fea­ture-length Hol­ly­wood zom­bie film, 1932’s White Zom­bie, was based on occultist and explor­er William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Mag­ic Island and starred Bela Lugosi as a Hait­ian Voodoo mas­ter named “Mur­der,” who enslaves the hero­ine and turns her into an instru­ment of his will.

Sub­tle the film is not, but no zom­bie film ever war­rant­ed that adjec­tive. Zom­bie enter­tain­ment induces max­i­mum fear of a relent­less Oth­er, detached, after White Zom­bie, from its Hait­ian con­text, so that the undead horde can stand in for any kind of inva­sion. The genre’s his­to­ry may go some way toward explain­ing why the U.S. gov­ern­ment has an offi­cial zom­bie pre­pared­ness plan, called CONOP 8888. The doc­u­ment was writ­ten in April 2011 by junior mil­i­tary offi­cers at the U.S. Strate­gic Com­mand (USSTRATCOM), as a train­ing exer­cise to for­mu­late a non­spe­cif­ic inva­sion con­tin­gency plan.

Despite the use of a “fic­ti­tious sce­nario,” CONOP 8888 explic­it­ly states that it “was not actu­al­ly designed as a joke.” And “indeed, it’s not,” All that’s Inter­est­ing assures us, quot­ing the fol­low­ing from the plan’s intro­duc­tion:

Zom­bies are hor­ri­bly dan­ger­ous to all human life and zom­bie infec­tions have the poten­tial to seri­ous­ly under­mine nation­al secu­ri­ty and eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties that sus­tain our way of life. There­fore hav­ing a pop­u­la­tion that is not com­posed of zom­bies or at risk from their malign influ­ence is vital to U.S. and Allied Nation­al Inter­ests.

Sub­sti­tute “zom­bies” with any out­group and the ver­biage sounds alarm­ing­ly like the rhetoric of state ter­ror. The plan, as you might expect, details a mar­tial law sce­nario, not­ing that “U.S. and inter­na­tion­al law reg­u­late mil­i­tary oper­a­tions only inso­far as human and ani­mal life are con­cerned. There are almost no restric­tions on hos­tile actions… against path­o­gen­ic life forms, organ­ic-robot­ic enti­ties, or ‘tra­di­tion­al’ zom­bies,’” what­ev­er that means.

This all seems dead­ly seri­ous, until we get to the reports’ sub­sec­tions, which detail sce­nar­ios such as “Evil Mag­ic Zom­bies (EMZ),” “Space Zom­bies (SZ),” “Veg­e­tar­i­an Zom­bies (VZ),” and “Chick­en Zom­bies (CZ)” (in fact, “the only proven class of zom­bie that actu­al­ly exists”). It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to see a mil­i­tary doc­u­ment absorb the many com­ic per­mu­ta­tions of the genre, from George Romero’s sub­ver­sive satires to Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies. No mat­ter how fun­ny zom­bies are, how­ev­er, the genre seems to require hor­rif­ic vio­lence, gore, and siege-like sur­vival­ism as key the­mat­ic ele­ments.

Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Daniel W. Drezn­er, author of The­o­ries of Inter­na­tion­al Pol­i­tics and Zom­bies, has read the Pentagon’s zom­bie plan close­ly and dis­cov­ered some seri­ous prob­lems (and not only with its zom­bie clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem). While the plan assumes the neces­si­ty of “bar­ri­cad­ed counter-zom­bie oper­a­tions,” it also admits that “USSTRATCOM forces do not cur­rent­ly hold enough con­tin­gency stores (food, water) to sup­port” such oper­a­tions for even 30 days. “So… maybe 28 days lat­er,” Drezn­er quips, sup­plies run out? (We’ve all seen what hap­pens next….) Also, alarm­ing­ly, the plan is “trig­ger-hap­py about nuclear weapons,” adding the pos­si­bil­i­ty of radi­a­tion poi­son­ing to the like­li­hood of starv­ing (or being eat­en by the starv­ing).

It turns out, then, that just as in so many mod­ern zom­bie sto­ries, the zom­bies may not actu­al­ly be the worst thing about a zom­bie apoc­a­lypse. Not to be out­done, the CDC decid­ed to cap­i­tal­ize on the zom­bie craze—rather late, we must say—releas­ing their own mate­ri­als for a zom­bie pan­dem­ic online in 2018. These include enter­tain­ing blogs, a poster (above), and a graph­ic nov­el full of use­ful dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness tips for ordi­nary cit­i­zens. The cam­paign might be judged in poor taste in the COVID era, but the agency assures us, in the event of a zom­bie apoc­a­lypse, “Nev­er Fear—CDC is Ready.” I leave it to you, dear read­er, to decide how com­fort­ing this promise sounds in 2020.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Where Zom­bies Come From: A Video Essay on the Ori­gin of the Hor­ri­fy­ing, Satir­i­cal Mon­sters

How to Sur­vive the Com­ing Zom­bie Apoc­a­lypse: An Online Course by Michi­gan State

Watch Night of the Liv­ing Dead, the Sem­i­nal Zom­bie Movie, Free Online

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

Steal Like Wes Anderson: A New Video Essay Explores How Wes Anderson Pays Artful Tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman & Other Directors in His Films

Although not the debut film of direc­tor Wes Ander­son, and cer­tain­ly not of star Bill Mur­ray, Rush­more intro­duced the world to the both of them. Ander­son­’s first fea­ture Bot­tle Rock­et (an expan­sion of the short film pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) had­n’t found a par­tic­u­lar­ly large audi­ence upon its the­atri­cal release in 1996. But quite a few of the view­ers who had seen and appre­ci­at­ed it seemed to run in Mur­ray’s cir­cles, and in a 1999 Char­lie Rose inter­view the actor told of being sent copy after unwatched copy by friends and pro­fes­sion­al con­tacts alive.

But Mur­ray only need­ed to read a few pages of Ander­son­’s new script to under­stand that the young direc­tor knew what he was doing, and his abil­i­ties became even more evi­dent on set. “I said, ‘What’s this shot we got?’ He goes, ‘Oh, it’s one I saw in Bar­ry Lyn­don.’ ” But in Rush­more it depicts “the inter­mis­sion of the school play,” a full-fledged Kubrick­ian shot “com­ing past a lot of, you know, moth­ers and fathers going — jab­ber­ing, and all the way out past peo­ple buy­ing Cokes and drinks.” Yes, “the good ones copy, the great ones steal,” but to Mur­ray’s mind that say­ing “sort of sends a mis­di­rec­tion.”

Not to Ander­son, how­ev­er, whose rare com­bi­na­tion of cinephil­ia and direc­to­r­i­al skill have inspired him to make films both rich in cin­e­mat­ic homage and pos­sessed of their own dis­tinc­tive sen­si­bil­i­ty — a sen­si­bil­i­ty that let Mur­ray break out of the stan­dard goof­ball roles that had threat­ened to imprison him. In the video essay “Steal Like Wes Ander­son,” Thomas Fight exam­ines the now no-longer-young film­mak­er’s more recent repur­pos­ing of the work of auteurs who came before. In 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, for exam­ple, Ander­son near­ly remakes an entire scene from Torn Cur­tain, Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Cold-War thriller with Paul New­man and Julie Andrews that also hap­pens to involve an east­ern Euro­pean hotel.

Ander­son does­n’t sim­ply lift Hitch­cock­’s shots but recom­pos­es them to “fit with­in his more plano­met­ric and sym­met­ri­cal style,” using the cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ence “to add to the expe­ri­ence of the sto­ry” and play with audi­ence expec­ta­tions. If you’ve seen Torn Cur­tain, you know how New­man’s char­ac­ter shakes the man tail­ing him; if you’ve seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, you know it does­n’t work out quite so well for Jeff Gold­blum’s char­ac­ter. But only if you’ve seen both films can you appre­ci­ate Ander­son­’s sequence — and indeed, Hitch­cock­’s orig­i­nal — to the fullest. Even now, those of us excit­ed­ly antic­i­pat­ing the Octo­ber release of Ander­son­’s lat­est fea­ture The French Dis­patch are spec­u­lat­ing about not only which clas­sic films inspired it, but also which clas­sic films it will com­pel us to revis­it and enjoy afresh.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Glimpse Into How Wes Ander­son Cre­ative­ly Remixes/Recycles Scenes in His Dif­fer­ent Films

Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unex­pect­ed Par­al­lels Between Two Great Film­mak­ers

Wes Anderson’s Cin­e­mat­ic Debt to Stan­ley Kubrick Revealed in a Side-By-Side Com­par­i­son

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

In a Brilliant Light: Van Gogh in Arles–A Free Documentary

Cour­tesy of the Met Muse­um comes the 1984 doc­u­men­tary, In a Bril­liant Light: Van Gogh in Arles, nar­rat­ed by Edward Her­rmann:

Near the end of his life, Vin­cent van Gogh moved from Paris to the city of Arles in south­east­ern France, where he expe­ri­enced the most pro­duc­tive peri­od of his artis­tic career. Dur­ing his 444 days there, he com­plet­ed over two hun­dred paint­ings and one hun­dred draw­ings inspired by the region’s light, wildlife, and inhab­i­tants. This film presents the sto­ries behind many beloved works along­side beau­ti­ful footage of dai­ly life in Provence, as well as glimpses of rarely seen can­vas­es held in pri­vate col­lec­tions.

This film will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our meta list: 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Geor­gia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Painter Nar­rat­ed by Gene Hack­man

New Hilma af Klint Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Life & Art of the Trail­blaz­ing Abstract Artist

Watch 270+ Short Doc­u­men­taries of Artists at Work, and Let Them Inspire Your Cre­ative Process

The Curi­ous Death of Vin­cent van Gogh

 

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Watch Lime Kiln Club Field Day, One of the Earliest Surviving Feature Films with an All Black Cast (1913)

For some of us (no names) the world of Tik­Tok is baf­fling and bizarre. Why does Gen Z flock to it? Who knows, but they do, in droves. Any­one can be a “cre­ator” on what Jason Parham at Wired calls “the most excit­ing cul­tur­al prod­uct of this time.” It also hap­pens to be a place where “dig­i­tal black­face” has evolved—an online cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non in which Black users of a plat­form get dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly cen­sored while oth­ers who adopt the trap­pings of Black Amer­i­can cul­ture, often in exag­ger­at­ed, stereo­typ­i­cal ways, rack up fol­low­ers and views.

21st cen­tu­ry forms of black­face per­sist for all sorts of rea­sons. The intent may not be con­scious­ly to demean, but the effects are usu­al­ly oth­er­wise, espe­cial­ly giv­en the long his­to­ry of black­face as a way of mock­ing Black Amer­i­cans, while forc­ing Black actors to them­selves per­form in black­face to gain an audi­ence and get work. Min­strel­sy per­formed by white stage actors, come­di­ans, musi­cians, etc. set a trag­i­cal­ly low bar for Black actors.

A once-promi­nent exam­ple comes from the career of per­former Bert Williams. “Large­ly for­got­ten today,” Clau­dia Roth Pier­pont writes at The New York­er, Williams was “the first African-Amer­i­can star: the most famous ‘col­ored man’ in Amer­i­ca dur­ing the ear­ly years of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.” He per­formed at Buck­ing­ham Palace, was the only Black mem­ber of Ziegfeld Fol­lies (and a head­lin­er) and played “along­side Fan­ny Brice and Eddie Cantor—for near­ly a decade.”

He did all of it in black­face, decades after the orig­i­nal Jim Crow char­ac­ter appeared in 1830. Born in 1874 in the Bahamas, says Caribbean nov­el­ist Caryl Phillips, Williams “was an out­sider in all sorts of ways… He didn’t see him­self to be ful­ly a part of African Amer­i­can tra­di­tions, so in a sense he didn’t quite under­stand the full impli­ca­tions of the black­face per­for­mance. He saw it as part of his cos­tume.” That may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be so. In his stage act, Williams and his part­ner resist­ed the prac­tice for as long as they could, until they real­ized that they would be sub­ject to con­stant vio­lence from white audi­ences with­out it.

Black­face affec­ta­tions helped Williams cross over into a film career. He “pro­duced, wrote, direct­ed and starred in two short films for Bio­graph,” the San Fran­cis­co Silent Film Fes­ti­val notes, “A Nat­ur­al Born Gam­bler (1916) and Fish (1916). Pro­duced by a black man for white audi­ences, they were ground­break­ing, how­ev­er, these films fea­tured char­ac­ters and sto­ry­lines that still sat­is­fied dom­i­nant racist stereo­types of black men.”

In con­trast, a third film, pro­duced three years ear­li­er, titled Lime Kiln Club Field Day, “one of a hand­ful of sur­viv­ing silent films with an all-black cast,” told a very dif­fer­ent kind of sto­ry. Williams appeared in black­face, but the oth­er actors did not. “The film … fea­tures one of the first exam­ples of on-screen inti­ma­cy between a black man and a black woman—a kiss—along with scenes of mid­dle class leisure; sto­ry ele­ments that chal­lenged the most­ly neg­a­tive, some­times evil, depic­tions of blacks in the major­i­ty of white-pro­duced films, which reached a dis­tress­ing nadir in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released two years lat­er.”

Lime Kiln Club Field Day was nev­er com­plet­ed. Its many unedit­ed reels of film were only recent­ly redis­cov­ered, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, in the archives at New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. See the film above, restored by cura­tor Ron Magliozzi and preser­va­tion offi­cer Peter Williamson, who con­duct­ed research “over near­ly a decade,” the MoMA writes, to deci­pher the plot of the film and recov­er its pro­duc­tion his­to­ry, even going so far as to employ a lip read­er and explore Stat­en Island and New Jer­sey in search of loca­tions.”

Film his­to­ri­ans do not know why the project was aban­doned. They do know that Williams suf­fered sig­nif­i­cant­ly for the racist car­i­ca­tures he felt forced to per­form. Read more about his extra­or­di­nary career at The New York­er and learn more about the Lime Kiln Club Field Day restora­tion project at the San Fran­cis­co Silent Film Fes­ti­val site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Free Films by African Amer­i­can Film­mak­ers in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion … and the New Civ­il Rights Film, Just Mer­cy

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Hon­ored by the Library of Con­gress (1898)

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

Watch the First Trailer for Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s Adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Classic Sci-Fi Novel

It takes a fear­less film­mak­er indeed to adapt Dune. Atop its rich lin­guis­tic, polit­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal, reli­gious, and eco­log­i­cal foun­da­tions, Frank Her­bert’s saga-launch­ing 1965 nov­el also hap­pens to have a plot “con­vo­lut­ed to the point of pain.” So writes David Fos­ter Wal­lace in his essay on David Lynch, who direct­ed the first cin­e­mat­ic ver­sion of Dune in 1984. That the result is remem­bered as a “huge, pre­ten­tious, inco­her­ent flop” (with an accom­pa­ny­ing glos­sary hand­out) owes to a vari­ety of fac­tors, not least stu­dio med­dling and the unsur­pris­ing incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of the man who made Eraser­head with large-scale Hol­ly­wood sci-fi. The ques­tion lin­gered: could Dune be suc­cess­ful­ly adapt­ed at all?

Well before Lynch took his crack, El Topo and The Holy Moun­tain direc­tor Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky put togeth­er his own Dune adap­ta­tion. If all had gone well it would have come out as a ten-hour film fea­tur­ing the art of H.R. Giger and Moe­bius as well as the per­for­mances of Orson Welles, Glo­ria Swan­son, David Car­ra­dine, Alain Delon, Mick Jag­ger, and Sal­vador Dalí.

But all did not go well, and cin­e­ma was deprived of what would have been a sin­gu­lar spec­ta­cle no mat­ter how it turned out. At least one ele­ment of Jodor­owsky’s Dune has sur­vived, how­ev­er, in the lat­est attempt to bring Her­bert’s com­plex best­seller to the screen: the music of Pink Floyd, heard in the just-released trail­er for Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune, star­ring Tim­o­th­ée Chalemet as the young hero Paul Atrei­des (as well as Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, and a host of oth­er cur­rent­ly big names), sched­uled for release in Decem­ber.

If a cred­i­ble Dune movie is pos­si­ble, Vil­leneuve is the man to direct it. His pre­vi­ous two pic­tures, Blade Run­ner 2049 and the alien-vis­i­ta­tion dra­ma Arrival, demon­strate not just his capa­bil­i­ties with sci­ence fic­tion but his sense of the sub­lime. Begin­ning with its set­ting, the desert-waste­land plan­et of Arrakis, Dune demands to be envi­sioned with the kind of beau­ty that inspires some­thing close to dread and fear. (The first direc­tor asked to adapt Dune was David Lean, per­haps due to his track record with majes­tic views of sand.) Vil­leneuve has also made the wise choice of refus­ing to com­press the entire book into a sin­gle fea­ture, pre­sent­ing this as the first of a two-part adap­ta­tion. And as a life­long Dune fan, he under­stands the atti­tude nec­es­sary to approach­ing this chal­lenge: “Fear is the mind-killer,” as Paul famous­ly puts it — so famous­ly that the trail­er could­n’t pos­si­bly exclude Cha­la­met’s deliv­ery of the line.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

Watch Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray Goof Off in a Newly Unearthed Ghostbusters Promotional Film (1984)

If you weren’t in the indie cin­e­ma exhi­bi­tion indus­try in the 1980s, you prob­a­bly haven’t heard of Show­est. But this was *the* con­ven­tion back then, a chance to trav­el to Las Vegas, shmooze with film dis­trib­u­tors and Hol­ly­wood stu­dios, smoke cig­ars, drink sin­gle malt Scotch, run up your company’s tab and have a dim mem­o­ry in the morn­ing of vis­it­ing a strip club. You know: Busi­ness, Amer­i­can Style!

And so what we have here is a pro­mo­tion­al film for an up-and-com­ing 1984 movie called Ghost­busters. Not the trail­er, you see, that’s for the gen­er­al pub­lic. Instead, this is two of the film’s lead actors, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Mur­ray, direct­ly address­ing atten­dees, implor­ing them to check out what could be the sci-fi com­e­dy of the sum­mer. “It’s gonna make E.T. look like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Mur­ray quips.

There’s a few things appar­ent from this pro­mo film: Ack­royd and Mur­ray are com­plete­ly wing­ing it, and this prob­a­bly took as long to shoot as it takes time to watch. Also, per­haps: they’ve been “cel­e­brat­ing” if you know what I mean. Maybe. Alleged­ly. Either way, you can tell these guys are goof­ing about and mak­ing each oth­er laugh. And it also ends with a Ghost­busters theme that isn’t the Ray Park­er, Jr. clas­sic. It’s…well, it’s this, if you need to hear the whole thing.

And final­ly: there’s a few jokes that, if not total­ly “rapey” per se, do assume a woman-as-sex­u­al-favor vibe. To that I would posit: Ack­royd and Mur­ray knew their audi­ence (unfor­tu­nate­ly). (It was the Rea­gan era, and don’t for­get, the main vil­lain of Ghost­busters is the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency!)

But let’s not end on a down note. Instead, let’s just quick­ly add that as of this writ­ing, the *oth­er* Ghost­busters star, Rick Mora­nis, has just appeared after years in seclu­sion to appear with Ryan Reynolds in a cell­phone com­mer­cial. Yes, it’s also advance pro­mo for a Hon­ey I Shrunk the Kids reboot, but I’ll take what we can get these days.

P.S. If you’re won­der­ing what hap­pened to Show­est, the con­ven­tion arm of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of The­ater Own­ers (NATO, for short, go fig­ure), you can read all about it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Zen of Bill Mur­ray: I Want to Be “Real­ly Here, Real­ly in It, Real­ly Alive in the Moment”

Bill Mur­ray Explains How He Was Saved by John Prine

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd Get Bri­an Wil­son Out of Bed and Force Him to Go Surf­ing, 1976

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.

David Lynch’s Popular Surrealism Considered on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #59

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt–along with guest Mike Wilson–discuss the direc­tor’s films from Eraser­head to Inland Empire plus Twin Peaks and his recent short films. We get into the appeal and the styl­is­tic and sto­ry­telling hall­marks of his main­stays–Blue Vel­vet, Wild at Heart, Lost High­way, and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve–and also con­sid­er out­liers like Dune, The Ele­phant Man, and The Straight Sto­ry.

What’s with the campy act­ing and the weird atti­tudes toward women? Why make us stare at some­thing mov­ing very slow­ly for a long time? Are these films appeal­ing to young peo­ple inter­est­ed in some­thing dif­fer­ent but not on the whole actu­al­ly enjoy­able? Is there actu­al­ly a “solu­tion” to make sense of the sense­less, or are these wacky plots sup­posed to remain unas­sim­i­l­able and so not dis­mis­si­ble?

Some arti­cles we drew on includ­ed:

Also, read Roger Ebert’s reviews of Dune and Blue Vel­vet, and his sub­se­quent thoughts on the lat­ter. What did crit­ics say about “What Did Jack Do?” Watch “Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained.”  Check out his short films if you can sit through them.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. If you’re not sub­scribed to the pod­cast, then you missed last week’s aftertalk high­lights episode. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. 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

Paul Schrader Creates a Diagram Mapping the Progression of Arthouse Cinema: Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky & Other Auteurs

The dozens of film­mak­ers in the dia­gram above belong to a vari­ety of cul­tures and eras, but what do they have in com­mon? Some of the names that jump out at even the casu­al film­go­er — Andrei Tarkovsky, Jim Jar­musch, Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni, Ter­rence Mal­ick — may sug­gest a straight­for­ward con­nec­tion: cinephiles love them. Of course, not every cinephile loves every one of these direc­tors, and indeed, bit­ter cinephile argu­ments rage about their rel­a­tive mer­its even as we speak. But in one way or anoth­er, all of them are tak­en seri­ous­ly as auteurs by those who take film seri­ous­ly as an art form — and not least by Paul Schrad­er, one of the most seri­ous auteur-cinephiles alive.

Schrad­er first made his name as a film crit­ic, with his 1972 book Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film: Ozu, Bres­son, Drey­er. In it he argues that the work of Yasu­jirō Ozu, Robert Bres­son, and Carl Theodor Drey­er have in com­mon a qual­i­ty that quite lit­er­al­ly “tran­scends” their dif­fer­ences in ori­gin.

This tran­scen­den­tal style in film “seeks to max­i­mize the mys­tery of exis­tence; it eschews all con­ven­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tions of real­i­ty: real­ism, nat­u­ral­ism, psy­chol­o­gism, roman­ti­cism, expres­sion­ism, impres­sion­ism, and, final­ly, ratio­nal­ism.” It “styl­izes real­i­ty by elim­i­nat­ing (or near­ly elim­i­nat­ing) those ele­ments which are pri­mar­i­ly expres­sive of human expe­ri­ence, there­by rob­bing the con­ven­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tions of real­i­ty of their rel­e­vance and pow­er.”

45 years on, Schrad­er revis­its this con­cept in the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val inter­view clip above. “Most movies lean toward you. They lean toward you aggres­sive­ly with their hands around your throat, try­ing to grab every sec­ond of your atten­tion.” But tran­scen­den­tal films “lean away from you, and they use time — and as oth­er peo­ple would call it, bore­dom — as a tech­nique.” They linger on the every­day, the unevent­ful, the repet­i­tive. Used adept­ly, this “with­hold­ing device” is a way of “acti­vat­ing” view­ers and their atten­tion. Then comes the “deci­sive action,” the moment in which the film does “some­thing unex­pect­ed”: the “big blast of Mozart” at the end of Bres­son’s Pick­pock­et, the “big blast of emo­tion” at the end of an oth­er­wise reserved Ozu pic­ture. “What are you going to do with it, now that he has total­ly con­di­tioned you not to expect it?”

In the new edi­tion of Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film pub­lished in 2018, Schrad­er includes the dia­gram at the top of the post. It illus­trates the three major direc­tions in which film­mak­ers have depart­ed from tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive, rep­re­sent­ed by the N at the cen­ter. Ozu, Bres­son, and Drey­er all go off toward the med­i­ta­tive “man­dala.” Abbas Kiarosta­mi, Gus Van Sant, and the Ital­ian neo­re­al­ists start on path that leads to the “sur­veil­lance cam,” with its unblink­ing eye on an unchang­ing patch of real­i­ty. The likes of Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, and David Lynch point the way to the audio­vi­su­al abstrac­tion of the “art gallery.” Float­ing around these aes­thet­ic end points are the names of film­mak­ers known for the “dif­fi­cul­ty” of their work: Stan Brakhage, Wang Bing, James Ben­ning.

Their work resides well past what Schrad­er calls the “Tarkovsky Ring,” named for the auteur of Mir­rorStalk­er, and Nos­tal­ghia. When an artist pass­es through the Tarkovsky Ring, as Schrad­er put it to Indiewire, “that’s the point where he is no longer mak­ing cin­e­ma for a pay­ing audi­ence. He’s mak­ing it for insti­tu­tions, for muse­ums, and so forth.” With­in the Tarkovsky Ring appear a fair few adven­tur­ous direc­tors still work­ing today, like Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kel­ly Reichardt, Alexan­der Sokurov, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Schrad­er has neglect­ed to include his own name on the dia­gram, per­haps leav­ing his exact place­ment as an exer­cise for the read­er. He cer­tain­ly belongs on there some­where: after all, some crit­ics have called his last fea­ture First Reformed his most tran­scen­dent yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Exhil­a­rat­ing Film­mak­ing of Robert Bres­son Explored in Eight Video Essays

How One Sim­ple Cut Reveals the Cin­e­mat­ic Genius of Yasu­jirō Ozu

Four Video Essays Explain the Mas­tery of Film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi (RIP)

Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Film­mak­ers: Bres­son, Anto­nioni, Felli­ni, and Oth­ers

Watch Online The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Drey­er (1928)

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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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