Watch Martin Scorsese’s Brand New Short Film, Made Entirely in His Office Under Quarantine

Most who saw the last fea­ture by Mar­tin Scors­ese, 2019’s The Irish­man, saw it at home. That had to do with the fact that the bud­get came from Net­flix, which sure­ly aimed to get its not incon­sid­er­able mon­ey’s worth by offer­ing the film on its own stream­ing ser­vice as soon as pos­si­ble. If The Irish­man’s financ­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion was a sign of the times, Scors­ese’s new short is even more so: shot on a smart­phone by the famed direc­tor him­self, it recent­ly pre­miered on Mary Beard’s BBC spe­cial about “lock­down cul­ture.” See­ing as the coro­n­avirus isn’t known to spare famous auteurs — and indeed does seem dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly to harm indi­vid­u­als over age 70 — Scors­ese has spent a great deal of time at home over the past few months. But like all true cre­ators, he has­n’t stopped doing what he does.

“Been quite a while, now, that I’ve been quar­an­tined,” says Scors­ese, turn­ing his cam­era away from a screen­ing of Alfred Hitch­cock­’s The Wrong Man on his office wall. “We had been work­ing so hard on so many dif­fer­ent projects, and things were spin­ning and spin­ning and spin­ning, and sud­den­ly there was a crash. And a stop.” At first, “there was a day or so of a kind of relief. I did­n’t have to go any­where or do any­thing. I mean, I had to do every­thing, but I did­n’t have to do it then.” Then, “the anx­i­ety set in.” But as time passed, and as he tru­ly felt that time pass­ing, “a sense of relief set­tled in. And a real sense of free­dom, because you can’t do any­thing else. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be in this room. I don’t know when we’re going to be able to actu­al­ly start pro­duc­tion in this film.”

By “this film” Scors­ese means Killers of the Flower Moon, a $200 mil­lion true-crime West­ern set in 1920s Okla­homa that will bring Leonar­do DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, the direc­tor’s lead­ing men of choice, togeth­er in a Scors­ese fea­ture for the first time. As a joint pro­duc­tion between Apple and Para­mount, notes the Observ­er’s Bran­don Katz, the pic­ture “will receive all the nec­es­sary fund­ing it needs while still receiv­ing a world­wide the­atri­cal roll­out,” but the ques­tion of when its shoot can start — and indeed, when movie­go­ers will return to the­aters — remains open. “I do know that, giv­en the grace of time and life, we will be in pro­duc­tion some­how,” says Scors­ese in his lock­down short, after a few shots of the mem­o­ra­bil­ia on his shelves.

Toward the end of this per­son­al dis­patch, Scors­ese remem­bers his final con­ver­sa­tion with the Iran­ian film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi. “We were at a din­ner in Lyon a few years ago and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t do any­thing you don’t want to do.’ He knew. He under­stood. One can’t depend on time. One does­n’t know. Ulti­mate­ly that time has to be worth it, even if it’s just exist­ing. Even if it’s just being alive, breath­ing — if you can, under these cir­cum­stances.” But as we’ve all learned, cir­cum­stances can change, and sud­den­ly; it falls to us only to make best use of the sit­u­a­tion in which we find our­selves. To under­score that last truth, Scors­ese char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cites a clas­sic Amer­i­can movie. Though our lives may be restrict­ed, as we see in Robert Siod­mak’s Hem­ing­way adap­ta­tion The Killers, noth­ing’s stop­ping us from keep­ing our eyes on the stars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

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

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

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.

Spike Lee Debuts the Short Film “3 Brothers”: A Remake of Do the Right Thing for Our Dark Times

When beloved actor Bill Nunn died in Sep­tem­ber of 2016, two months before the elec­tion, his pass­ing felt prophet­ic of more bad things to come. Best known as the boom­box-tot­ing, ulti­mate Pub­lic Ene­my fan Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Nunn’s char­ac­ter is mur­dered by a gang of cops, who put him in a choke­hold and suf­fo­cate him. At the time, Raheem’s death was a fic­tion­al restate­ment of what had come before, as Lee explains above in the 30th anniver­sary com­men­tary on the film.

“I’m renam­ing this ‘Anato­my of a Mur­der,’” he says, explain­ing how he based the scene of Raheem’s death on the 1983 killing of graf­fi­ti artist Michael Stew­art, who was stran­gled by 11 NYC tran­sit offi­cers. “The things that are hap­pen­ing in this film,” he says, “are still rel­e­vant today.” Lee then ref­er­ences the death of Eric Gar­ner, killed in exact­ly the same way as Raheem. Now we have seen the mur­der of George Floyd, asphyx­i­at­ed with a knee to the neck. These on-cam­era killings are trau­mat­ic, but Lee has not shied away from the pow­er of doc­u­men­tary images.

He reclaimed his place as a big-bud­get inter­preter of Amer­i­can racism with Black­kKlans­man, a fic­tion­al­ized film that ends with extreme­ly hard-to-watch (espe­cial­ly for those who were there) real footage of the mur­der of anti-racist activist Heather Hey­er in Char­lottesville. Lee faced a good deal of crit­i­cism over the use of this video, but he has again tak­en real-life footage of racial­ly-moti­vat­ed killings, this time by the police, and cut them togeth­er with fic­tion, edit­ing togeth­er the death of Raheem with the deaths of Gar­ner and Floyd.

Call­ing the short “3 Broth­ers,” he opens with the ques­tion, “Will His­to­ry Stop Repeat­ing Itself?” Lee Debuted the film on the CNN spe­cial “I Can’t Breathe: Black Men Liv­ing & Dying in Amer­i­ca.” The cumu­la­tive effects of his­to­ry are crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the moment we are in, he says. The rage and protest on streets around the world are not a reac­tion to a sin­gle event—they are a con­fronta­tion with hun­dreds of years of vio­lent con­trol over black bod­ies, a state of affairs always includ­ing mur­der with impuni­ty. “The attack on black bod­ies has been here from the get-go,” Lee says.

Lee’s short is hard to watch, and I don’t blame any­one who nev­er wants to see this footage again (I don’t). The mur­ders of indi­vid­ual, unarmed black men by groups of offi­cers take on an eerie monot­o­ny in their same­ness over time. “The killings caught on cam­era,” writes his­to­ri­an Robert Greene II, “offer a dis­turb­ing reminder of the numer­ous pho­tographs of lynch­ings dis­persed through­out the nation in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Some were cat­a­logued by the NAACP and dis­played as exam­ples of Amer­i­can bru­tal­i­ty and bar­barism. Oth­ers, how­ev­er, were fea­tured on post­cards and sent to white Amer­i­cans through­out the coun­try, small trin­kets of white ter­ror.”

This chill­ing his­to­ry gives rise to an under­stand­able ambiva­lence about shar­ing videos of police killings. Are these evi­dence of bar­barous injus­tice or racist snuff films run­ning on an end­less loop? As in the lynch­ing pho­tographs, it depends on the audi­ence and the con­text in which the videos are shown. But when Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing—pre-Rod­ney King and cell phone cameras—hardly any­one out­side of heav­i­ly policed black neigh­bor­hoods wit­nessed first­hand the kind of bru­tal­i­ty that is now so depress­ing­ly famil­iar in our news­feeds.

The death of Radio Raheem was shock­ing to audi­ences, as it was dev­as­tat­ing to the char­ac­ters and remains, for those who grew up with the film, a mov­ing cin­e­mat­ic touch­stone of the time. It is tru­ly heart­break­ing and enrag­ing that such scenes have become com­mon cur­ren­cy on social media, instead of his­toric exam­ples of the bru­tal­i­ty of the past—a sto­ry, as one per­son wrote of the 1968 police killing of poet Hen­ry Dumas, of “gen­er­a­tions of lost poten­tial.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teach­ing List of 87 Essen­tial Films Every Aspir­ing Direc­tor Should See

How Spike Lee Got His First Big Break: From She’s Got­ta Have It to That Icon­ic Air Jor­dan Ad

Spike Lee Directs, “Wake Up,” a Five-Minute Cam­paign Film for Bernie Sanders

Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised”

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

The History of the Batmobile: A Free Documentary

In 2012, Roko Bel­ic direct­ed an hour-long doc­u­men­tary on The Bat­mo­bile. Orig­i­nal­ly released on The Dark Knight Ris­es (2012) blu-ray, the film explores the his­to­ry and evo­lu­tion of the Bat­mo­bile in com­ic books, TV and movies. And it fea­tures “notable Bat­man movie direc­tors includ­ing Chris Nolan, Joel Schu­mach­er and Tim Bur­ton, as well as actors Chris­t­ian Bale from The Dark Knight and Adam West from the 1960s Bat­man series.” Warn­er Bros. Enter­tain­ment has made the film avail­able on YouTube. Watch it above. Or find it list­ed in our col­lec­tion Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of meta­col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Andy Warhol Made a Bat­man Super­hero Movie (1964)

The Evo­lu­tion of Bat­man in Cin­e­ma: From 1939 to Present

1950s Bat­man Car­toon Tells Kids: “Don’t Believe Those Crack­pot Lies About Peo­ple Who Wor­ship Dif­fer­ent­ly”

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

For near­ly thir­ty years, the work of Quentin Taran­ti­no has inspired copi­ous dis­cus­sion among movie fans. Some of the most copi­ous dis­cus­sion, as well as some of the most insight­ful, has come from no less avid a movie fan than Taran­ti­no him­self. Every cinephile has long since known that the man who made Reser­voir Dogs, Pulp Fic­tion, and Jack­ie Brown — and more recent­ly pic­tures like Djan­go Unchained, The Hate­ful Eight, and Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood — is one of their own. Now the sub­ject of numer­ous video essays, Taran­ti­no could, in anoth­er life, have become that medi­um’s fore­most prac­ti­tion­er. In the Now You See It video essay above, we have the next best thing: an analy­sis of Taran­ti­no’s work nar­rat­ed, for the most part, by the man him­self.

“It’s as if a cou­ple of movie-crazy young French­men were in a cof­fee house, and they’ve tak­en a banal Amer­i­can crime nov­el and they’re mak­ing a movie out of it based not on the nov­el, but on the poet­ry they’ve read between the lines.” So goes New York­er crit­ic Pauline Kael’s review of Jean-Luc Godard­’s Bande à part — as remem­bered by Taran­ti­no in an inter­view in the 2000s.

These and oth­er such clips com­prise “Quentin Taran­ti­no and the Poet­ry Between the Lines,” or at least they com­prise the parts that don’t come straight from Taran­ti­no’s films or the films that inspired them. From Bande à part Taran­ti­no took not just the name of his pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny but also the imper­fect style of danc­ing he had John Tra­vol­ta and Uma Thur­man show off in Pulp Fic­tion, one of the many acts of cin­e­mat­ic “steal­ing” to which he glad­ly cops.

In describ­ing the rule-break­ing work of Godard, the first big cinephile-film­mak­er, Kael inad­ver­tent­ly bestowed a rev­e­la­tion upon Taran­ti­no: “That’s my aes­thet­ic!” he remem­bers think­ing. “That’s what I want to achieve!” That goal has inspired Taran­ti­no to a num­ber of acts of cul­tur­al trans­po­si­tion, and this video essay also brings togeth­er the com­ments sev­er­al oth­er fig­ures have made about his achieve­ment: Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds star Christoph Waltz remarks on the char­ac­ter­is­tic way that Taran­ti­no, “the prod­uct of the cul­ture that made the West­ern pos­si­ble at all,” would “take the genre once removed into the Ital­ian and bring it back to Amer­i­ca” as he does in his repa­tri­at­ed spaghet­ti West­ern The Hate­ful Eight. To that pic­ture, and to Quentin Taran­ti­no’s greater cin­e­mat­ic project, applies the obser­va­tion Gene Siskel made on Pulp Fic­tion just as it was becom­ing a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non in its own right: “Like all great films, it crit­i­cizes oth­er movies.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Steals from Oth­er Movies: A Video Essay

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

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

The Pow­er of Food in Quentin Tarantino’s Films

How Jean-Luc Godard Lib­er­at­ed Cin­e­ma: A Video Essay on How the Great­est Rule-Break­er in Film Made His Name

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

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.

This Is What The Matrix Looks Like Without CGI: A Special Effects Breakdown

Those of us who saw the The Matrix in the the­ater felt we were wit­ness to the begin­ning of a new era of cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly and philo­soph­i­cal­ly ambi­tious action movies. Whether that era deliv­ered on its promise — and indeed, whether The Matrix’s own sequels deliv­ered on the fran­chise’s promise — remains a mat­ter of debate. More than twen­ty years lat­er, the film’s black-leather-and-sun­glass­es aes­thet­ic may date it, but its visu­al effects some­how don’t. The Fame Focus video above takes a close look at two exam­ples of how the cre­ators of The Matrix com­bined tra­di­tion­al, “prac­ti­cal” tech­niques with then-state-of-the-art dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy in a way that kept the result from going as stale as, in the movies, “state-of-the-art dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy” usu­al­ly has a way of guar­an­tee­ing.

By now we’ve all seen revealed the mechan­ics of “bul­let time,” an effect that aston­ished The Matrix’s ear­ly audi­ences by seem­ing near­ly to freeze time for dra­mat­ic cam­era move­ments (and to make vis­i­ble the epony­mous pro­jec­tiles, of which the film includ­ed a great many). They lined up a bunch of still cam­eras along a pre­de­ter­mined path, then had each of the cam­eras take a shot, one-by-one, in the span of a split sec­ond.

But as we see in the video, get­ting con­vinc­ing results out of such a ground­break­ing process — which required smooth­ing out the unsteady “footage” cap­tured by the indi­vid­ual cam­eras and per­fect­ly align­ing it with a com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed back­ground mod­eled on a real-life set­ting, among oth­er tasks — must have been even more dif­fi­cult than invent­ing the process itself. The man­u­al labor that went into The Matrix series’ high-tech veneer comes across even more in the behind-the-scenes video below:

In the third install­ment, 2003’s The Matrix Rev­o­lu­tions, Keanu Reeves’ Neo and Hugo Weav­ing’s Agent Smith duke it out in the pour­ing rain as what seem like hun­dreds of clones of Smith look on. View­ers today may assume Weav­ing was filmed and then copy-past­ed over and over again, but in fact these shots involve no dig­i­tal effects to speak of. The team actu­al­ly built 150 real­is­tic dum­mies of Weav­ing as Smith, all oper­at­ed by 80 human extras them­selves wear­ing intri­cate­ly detailed sil­i­con-rub­ber Smith masks. The logis­tics of such a one-off endeav­or sound painful­ly com­plex, but the phys­i­cal­i­ty of the sequence speaks for itself. With the next Matrix film, the first since Rev­o­lu­tions, due out next year, fans must be hop­ing the ideas of the Pla­ton­i­cal­ly tech­no-dystopi­an sto­ry the Wachowskis start­ed telling in 1999 will be prop­er­ly con­tin­ued, and in a way that makes full use of recent advances in dig­i­tal effects. But those of us who appre­ci­ate the endur­ing pow­er of tra­di­tion­al effects should hope the film’s mak­ers are also get­ting their hands dirty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

The Matrix: What Went Into The Mix

Philip K. Dick The­o­rizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Com­put­er-Pro­grammed Real­i­ty”

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopi­an Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, Amer­i­can Beau­ty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Com­mon

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.

How Humphrey Bogart Became an Icon: A Video Essay

Accord­ing to film the­o­rist David Bor­d­well, there was a major change in act­ing styles in the 1940s. Gone was the “behav­ioral act­ing” style of the 1930s (the first full decade of sound film), where men­tal states were demon­strat­ed not just through the face, but through body move­ment, and how actors just held them­selves. Instead, in the 1940s there is a “new inte­ri­or­i­ty, a kind of neu­tral­iza­tion, of the act­ing per­for­mance, that’s intense, almost silent film-style.”

Part of this is due to increas­ing­ly con­vo­lut­ed, psy­cho­log­i­cal nar­ra­tives, includ­ing lots of voice-overs. Some of it was also due to stu­dios hop­ing to achieve the psy­cho­log­i­cal depth of nov­el writ­ing.

In short, what­ev­er the rea­sons in the 1940s, we got to watch char­ac­ters think.

In Nerdwriter’s lat­est video essay, Evan Puschak exam­ines the icon of 1940s male act­ing: Humphrey Bog­a­rt, whose skill and oppor­tu­ni­ty placed him at the right place and the right time for such a shift in styles. Think of Bog­a­rt and you think of his eyes and yes, the many moments where the cam­era lingers on his face and…we watch him think.

In hind­sight it feels like he was wait­ing for this moment. Puschak picks up the tale with 1939’s The Return of Dr. X, which fea­tures a bad­ly mis­cast Bog­a­rt as a mad sci­en­tist. But the actor had spent most of the 1930s play­ing a selec­tion of bad guys, most­ly gang­sters. He was good at it. He was also a bit tired of the type­cast­ing.

Also tired of of play­ing gang­sters was George Raft, and that turned out to be good thing, because Raft turned down the lead role in the John Hus­ton-writ­ten, Raoul Walsh-direct­ed High Sier­ra. Hus­ton and Bog­a­rt were friends and drink­ing bud­dies, and it was their friend­ship, plus Bog­a­rt con­vinc­ing both Raft to turn down the role and Walsh to hire him instead, that led to a career break­through.

As Puschak points out, though Bog­a­rt was play­ing a gang­ster again, he brought to the char­ac­ter of Mad Dog Roy Earl a world-weari­ness and a vul­ner­a­ble inte­ri­or, and we see it in his eyes more than through his dia­log.

In the same year Bog­a­rt played pri­vate detec­tive Sam Spade in The Mal­tese Fal­con, also a role that George Raft turned down. Bog­a­rt brought over to the char­ac­ter the cyn­i­cism and cool­ness of his gang­ster roles; it feels repet­i­tive to say it was an icon­ic role, but it’s true—it’s a per­for­mance that rip­ples across time to every actor play­ing a pri­vate detec­tive, who are either bor­row­ing from it or riff­ing on it or turn­ing it on its head. You wouldn’t have Colum­bo. You wouldn’t have Breath­less either.

Did George Raft ever real­ize he was a sort of guardian angel for Bog­a­rt? Because for a third time, a role he turned down became a Bog­a­rt clas­sic: Rick Blain in Casablan­ca (1942). As Puschak points out, it’s a dif­fi­cult role as Rick is decid­ed­ly pas­sive and casu­al­ly mean for the first half, leav­ing peo­ple to their fate. It only works because we can see every deci­sion Rick makes roil­ing behind Bogart’s eyes, and we know that even­tu­al­ly he will break and do the right thing.

As he got old­er and the 40’s turned into the ‘50s, Bog­a­rt began to play with these kind of char­ac­ters. His prospec­tor in The Trea­sure of the Sier­ra Madre turns wild-eyed with greed and mad­ness; his writer in In a Lone­ly Place is sus­pect­ed of mur­der, and Bog­a­rt plays him ever so slight­ly mad that we won­der if he might even be a killer. It is one of Bogart’s most uncom­fort­able per­for­mances, tak­ing what had become famil­iar and friend­ly in his screen per­sona and twist­ing it.

He died in 1957, age 57, from the can­cer­ous effects of a life­time of smok­ing. What kind of roles might he have done if he had made it through the 60s and the 70s? Would the French New Wave direc­tors have hired him? Would Scors­ese or Alt­man or Cop­po­la? Again, we can only won­der.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beat the Dev­il: Watch John Huston’s Campy Noir Film with Humphrey Bog­a­rt (1953)

Lau­ren Bacall (1924–2014) and Humphrey Bog­a­rt Pal Around Dur­ing a 1956 Screen Test

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

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.

The Evocativeness of Decomposing Film: Watch the 1926 Hollywood Movie The Bells Become the Experimental 2004 Short Film, Light Is Calling

We think of movies as last­ing for­ev­er. And since we can pull up videos of films from 50, 80, even 100 years ago, why should­n’t we? But as every­one who dives deep into this his­to­ry of cin­e­ma knows, the fur­ther back in time you go, the more movies are “lost,” whol­ly or par­tial­ly. In the case of the lat­ter, bits and pieces remain of film — actu­al, phys­i­cal film — but often they’ve been poor­ly pre­served and thus have bad­ly degrad­ed. Still, they have val­ue, and not just to cin­e­ma schol­ars. The thir­ty-year-long career of film­mak­er Bill Mor­ri­son, for instance, demon­strates just how evoca­tive­ly film at the end of its life can be put to artis­tic use.

“Cre­at­ed using a decom­pos­ing 35mm print of the crime dra­ma The Bells (1926), the exper­i­men­tal short Light Is Call­ing (2004) depicts a dreamy encounter between a sol­dier and a mys­te­ri­ous woman,” says Aeon. “With images that reveal them­selves only to dis­tort and dis­ap­pear into the decay­ing amber-tint­ed nitrate,” Mor­ri­son “invites view­ers to med­i­tate on the fleet­ing nature of all things phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al, while a min­i­mal­is­tic vio­lin score suf­fus­es the cen­tu­ry-old images with a wist­ful, haunt­ing beau­ty.” Light Is Call­ing would have one kind of poignan­cy if The Bells were a lost film, but since you can watch it in full just below — and with a decent­ly kept-up image, by the stan­dards of mid-1920s movies — it has quite anoth­er.

Like many pic­tures of the silent era, The Bells was adapt­ed from a stage play, in this case Alexan­dre Cha­tri­an and Emile Erck­man­n’s Le Juif Polon­ais. Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in 1867, the play was turned into an opera before it was turned into a film — which first hap­pened in 1911 in Aus­tralia, then in 1913 and 1918 in Amer­i­ca, then in 1928 in a British-Bel­gian co-pro­duc­tion. This 1926 Hol­ly­wood ver­sion, which fea­tures such big names of the day as Boris Karloff and Lionel Bar­ry­more, came as Le Juif Polon­ais’ fifth film adap­ta­tion, but not its last: two more, made in Britain and Aus­tralia, would fol­low in the 1930s. The mate­r­i­al of the sto­ry, altered and altered again through gen­er­a­tions of use, feels suit­able indeed for Light Is Call­ing, whose thor­ough­ly dam­aged images make us imag­ine the inten­tions of the orig­i­nal, each in our own way.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Beau­ty of Degrad­ed Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wob­bly VHS & Oth­er Ana­log-Media Imper­fec­tion

What the First Movies Real­ly Looked Like: Dis­cov­er the IMAX Films of the 1890s

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

Watch Alain Resnais’ Short, Evoca­tive Film on the Nation­al Library of France (1956)

See What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

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.

Studio Ghibli Producer Toshio Suzuki Teaches You How to Draw Totoro in Two Minutes

This is some­thing you can do at home. Every­one, please draw pic­tures —Toshio Suzu­ki

There’s no short­age of online tuto­ri­als for fans who want to draw Totoro, the  enig­mat­ic title char­ac­ter of Stu­dio Ghibli’s 1988 ani­mat­ed fea­ture, My Neigh­bor Totoro:

There’s a two-minute, non-nar­rat­ed, God’s-Eye-view with shad­ing

A detailed geom­e­try-based step-by-step

A ten-minute ver­sion for kids that uti­lizes a drink­ing glass and a bot­tle cap to get the pro­por­tions right pri­or to pen­cil­ing, ink­ing, and col­or­ing…

But none has more heart than Stu­dio Ghi­b­li pro­duc­er Toshio Suzu­ki’s sim­ple demon­stra­tion, above.

The paper is ori­ent­ed toward the artist, rather than the view­er.

His only instruc­tion is that the eyes should be spaced very far apart.

His brush pen lends itself to a freer line than the tight­ly con­trolled out­lines of Stu­dio Ghibli’s care­ful­ly ren­dered 2‑D char­ac­ter designs.

This is Totoro as Zen prac­tice, offered as a gift to cooped-up Japan­ese chil­dren, whose schools, like so many world­wide, were abrupt­ly shut­tered in an effort to con­tain the spread of the nov­el coro­n­avirus.

via MyMod­ern­Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Releas­es Free Back­grounds for Vir­tu­al Meet­ings: Princess Mononoke, Spir­it­ed Away & More

A Vir­tu­al Tour Inside the Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Muse­um

Build Your Own Minia­ture Sets from Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Films: My Neigh­bor Totoro, Kiki’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est project is an ani­ma­tion and a series of free down­load­able posters, encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to wear masks in pub­lic and wear them prop­er­ly. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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