Bernie Sanders Time as an Educational Filmmaker: Watch His Documentary on Socialist Activist Eugene V. Debs (1979)

in Film, History, Politics | February 27th, 2020

If you grew up in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, you’ll remem­ber the name Eugene V. Debs from his­to­ry class. And if you grew up dur­ing a cer­tain era in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, you might have learned about Debs from Bernie Sanders. Try to recall one of Debs’ speech­es; if you hear it in Sanders’ dis­tinc­tive Brook­lyn accent, you have at some point or anoth­er seen Eugene V. Debs: Trade Union­ist, Social­ist, Rev­o­lu­tion­ary. A film-strip slideshow with an accom­pa­ny­ing audio track, it came out in 1979 as a prod­uct of the Amer­i­can People’s His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, Sanders’ own pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny.

That ven­ture con­sti­tutes just one chap­ter of a sto­ried life and career, which includes peri­ods as a high-school track star, a folk singer, and the may­or of Burling­ton, Ver­mont. Now that Sanders, junior Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor from Ver­mont since 2007, has pulled ahead in the race for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, peo­ple want to know what he’s all about — and he has long been giv­en, cer­tain­ly by the stan­dards of U.S. politi­cians, to clear and fre­quent expres­sion of what he’s all about. He has made no secret, for exam­ple, of his admi­ra­tion for Debs, a social­ist polit­i­cal activist who five times ran for Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. You can see it come through in Eugene V. Debs: Trade Union­ist, Social­ist, Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, which Jacobin mag­a­zine has recon­struct­ed and made avail­able on Youtube.

Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Nathan Smith writes that the doc­u­men­tary frames Debs “as a lost prophet before explain­ing how he end­ed up where he did ide­o­log­i­cal­ly. It opens with Debs’s final pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, con­duct­ed in 1920 from prison. If a mil­lion peo­ple vot­ed for this man while he was behind bars, if more peo­ple went to hear him speak than Pres­i­dent Taft, then how could his­to­ry have for­got­ten him?” Sanders explains Debs’ social­ism “as a response to issues which still res­onate today: the exploita­tion of work­ing peo­ple, seg­re­ga­tion and vio­lent racism, vot­ing rights, and the sup­pres­sion of free speech and dis­sent dur­ing World War I.” More so than see Sanders’ admi­ra­tion for Debs — Jacobin hav­ing had to use visu­als oth­er than the ones on the film strip at the time — you can hear it: as in all the shoe­string pro­duc­tions of the Amer­i­can People’s His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety’s shoe­string pro­duc­tions, Sanders him­self plays the roles of the his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ters involved.

In this case, that means we hear Sanders give Debs’ speech­es, and in cer­tain moments we view­ers of 2020 could eas­i­ly mis­take Debs’ indict­ments of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, goods, and the means of pro­duc­tion in Amer­i­ca as Sanders’ own. A self-described social­ist, Sanders has in his polit­i­cal career placed him­self in Debs’ tra­di­tion, and hav­ing made a doc­u­men­tary like this more than 40 years ago shores up that image. The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Philip Bump points out that, before becom­ing a U.S. sen­a­tor, Sanders did a cou­ple more act­ing jobs in fea­ture films, once as a man stingy with Hal­loween can­dy and once as a Dodgers-obsessed rab­bi. As much as those roles might have suit­ed his demeanor, it’s safe to say he played Eugene V. Debs with more con­vic­tion.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bernie Sanders: I Will Be an Arts Pres­i­dent

Spike Lee Inter­views Bernie Sanders: Two Guys from Brook­lyn Talk About Edu­ca­tion, Inequal­i­ty & More

Bernie Sanders Sings “This Land is Your Land” on the Endear­ing­ly Bad Spo­ken Word Album, We Shall Over­come

Allen Ginsberg’s Hand­writ­ten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burling­ton Snow” (1986)

Albert Ein­stein Writes the 1949 Essay “Why Social­ism?” and Attempts to Find a Solu­tion to the “Grave Evils of Cap­i­tal­ism”

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Tribute to NASA’s Katherine Johnson (RIP): Learn About the Extraordinary Mathematician Who Broke Through America’s Race & Gender Barriers

in Film, History, Science | February 25th, 2020

We don’t call it a tragedy when a renowned per­son dies after the cen­tu­ry mark, espe­cial­ly if that per­son is bril­liant NASA math­e­mati­cian Kather­ine John­son, who passed away yes­ter­day at the ven­er­a­ble age of 101. Her death is a great his­tor­i­cal loss, but by almost any mea­sure we would con­sid­er reach­ing such a fin­ish line a tri­umphant end to an already hero­ic life.

A prodi­gy and pio­neer, John­son joined the all-black “human com­put­ing” sec­tion at NASA’s pre­de­ces­sor, the Nation­al Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee for Aero­nau­tics, in 1953. She would go on to cal­cu­late the launch win­dows and return tra­jec­to­ries for Alan Shepard’s first space­flight, John Glenn’s first trip into orbit, and the Apol­lo Lunar Module’s first return from the Moon.

All this with­out the ben­e­fit of any machine com­put­ing pow­er to speak of and—as Hid­den Fig­ures dra­ma­tizes through the pow­er­ful per­for­mance of Tara­ji P. Hen­son as Johnson—while fac­ing the dual bar­ri­ers of racism and sex­ism her white male boss­es and co-work­ers blithe­ly ignored or delib­er­ate­ly upheld.

John­son and her fel­low “com­put­ers,” with­out whom none of these major mile­stones would have been pos­si­ble, had to fight not only for recog­ni­tion and a seat at the table, but for the basic accom­mo­da­tions we take for grant­ed in every work­place.

Her con­tri­bu­tions didn’t end when the space race was over—her work was crit­i­cal to the Space Shut­tle pro­gram and she even worked on a mis­sion to Mars. But John­son her­self kept things in per­spec­tive, telling Peo­ple mag­a­zine in the inter­view above from 2016, “I’m 98. My great­est accom­plish­ment is stay­ing alive.” Still, she lived to see her­self turned into the hero of that year’s crit­i­cal­ly laud­ed film based on the best­selling book of the same name by Mar­got Lee Shetterly—decades after she com­plet­ed her most ground­break­ing work.

Shetterly’s book, writes his­to­ri­an of tech­nol­o­gy Marie Hicks, casts John­son and her fel­low black women math­e­mati­cians “as pro­tag­o­nists in the grand dra­ma of Amer­i­can tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry rather than mere details.” By its very nature, a Hol­ly­wood film adap­ta­tion will leave out impor­tant details and take lib­er­ties with the facts for dra­mat­ic effect and mass appeal. The fea­ture treat­ment moves audi­ences, but it also soothes them with feel-good moments that “keep racism at arm’s length from a nar­ra­tive that, with­out it, would nev­er have exist­ed.”

The point is not that John­son and her col­leagues decid­ed to make racism and sex­ism cen­tral to their sto­ries; they sim­ply want­ed to be rec­og­nized for their con­tri­bu­tions and be giv­en the same access and oppor­tu­ni­ties as their white male col­leagues. But to suc­ceed, they had to work togeth­er instead of com­pet­ing with each oth­er. Despite its sim­pli­fi­ca­tions and gloss­es over Cold War his­to­ry and the depth of prej­u­dice in Amer­i­can soci­ety, Hid­den Fig­ures does some­thing very dif­fer­ent from most biopics, as Atlantic edi­tor Leni­ka Cruz writes, telling “a sto­ry of bril­liance, but not of ego. It’s a sto­ry of strug­gle and willpow­er, but not of indi­vid­ual glo­ry… it looks close­ly at the remark­able per­son in the con­text of a com­mu­ni­ty.”

Kather­ine John­son lived her life as a tremen­dous exam­ple for young women of col­or who excel at math and sci­ence but feel exclud­ed from the estab­lish­ment. On her 98th birth­day, she “want­ed to share a mes­sage to the young women of the world,” says the nar­ra­tor of the 20th Cen­tu­ry Stu­dios video above: “Now it’s your turn.” And, she might have added, “you don’t have to do it alone.” Hear Hid­den Fig­ures author Shet­ter­ly dis­cuss the crit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions of Kather­ine and her extra­or­di­nary “human com­put­er” col­leagues in the inter­view below, and learn more about John­son’s life and lega­cy in the fea­turette at the top and at her NASA biog­ra­phy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Conquer Your Vertigo and Watch this Dazzling Footage of Construction Workers Atop the Chrysler Building in 1929

in Architecture, Film, History | February 24th, 2020

Paris has the gar­goyles of Notre Dame.

New York City has eight art-deco eagles pro­trud­ing from the Chrysler Build­ing’s 61st floor.

These mighty stain­less steel guardians seem impres­sive­ly sol­id until you watch con­struc­tion work­ers muscling them into place on April 3, 1930 in the Fox Movi­etone news­reel footage above.

For­get being stur­dy enough to serve as a time trav­el div­ing board for a very freaked out Will Smith in Men in Black III…

It now seems a mir­a­cle that no unsus­pect­ing pedes­tri­ans have been crushed by an art-deco eagle head crash­ing uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly down to Lex­ing­ton Avenue in the mid­dle of rush hour.

Also that no work­ers died on the job, giv­en how quick­ly the build­ing went up and the rel­a­tive lack of safe­ty equip­ment on dis­play… no word on ampu­tat­ed fin­gers, but it’s not hard to imag­ine giv­en that only one of the guys help­ing out with the eagle appears to be wear­ing gloves.

In fact, as author Vin­cent Cur­cio describes in Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Auto­mo­tive Genius, the job site boast­ed a num­ber of inno­v­a­tive safe­ty mea­sures, such as scaf­folds with guardrails, tar­pau­lin-cov­ered plank roofs, wire net­ting between the toe boards, a hos­pi­tal on-loca­tion, and a bul­letin board for safe­ty-relat­ed updates. Founder Wal­ter Chrysler was as proud of this work­place con­sci­en­tious­ness as he was of the 4‑floors per week speed with which his build­ing was erect­ed:

In an arti­cle called “Is Safe­ty on Your Pay­roll?” He spoke of star­ing up at work­ers on the scaf­fold­ing with a friend on the street below. “‘My, that’s a risky job,’ my com­pan­ion remarked. ‘A man just about takes his life in his hands work­ing on a build­ing like this.’”

“‘I sup­pose it does seem that way,’ I replied, ‘But it’s no so dan­ger­ous as you think. If you knew the pre­cau­tions we have tak­en to pro­tect those work­ers, you might change your mind… not a sin­gle life has been lost in con­struct­ing the steel frame­work of that build­ing.’” To give an idea of how much of an achieve­ment this was, it should be not­ed that the rule of thumb at that time was one death for every floor above fif­teen in the con­struc­tion of a build­ing; by this mea­sure the Chrysler Build­ing should have been respon­si­ble for six­ty-two deaths.

By con­trast, the guys Fox Movi­etone filmed seem hap­py to play up the ver­tig­i­nous nature of their work for the cam­era, edg­ing out onto gird­ers and con­vers­ing casu­al­ly atop pipes, as if seat­ed astride a 1000-foot tall jun­gle gym:

“Gosh, that’s a long way to the street, boys.”

“How’d ya like to fall down there?”

“Whad­daya think, I’m an angel?

“Well, you’re liable to be an angel any minute.”

“You’ll break the alti­tude record going down-“

“Ha ha, yeah, maybe!”

While our appetite for this vin­tage blus­ter is bot­tom­less, it’s worth not­ing that Movi­etone usu­al­ly issued those appear­ing in pri­ma­ry posi­tions a cou­ple of lines of script­ed dia­logue.

What would those work­ers think of OSHA’s cur­rent safe­ty stan­dards for the con­struc­tion indus­try?

Fall pro­tec­tion is still the most com­mon­ly cit­ed stan­dard dur­ing con­struc­tion site inspec­tions.

Falls claimed the lives of 338 Amer­i­can con­struc­tion work­ers in 2018, the same year a con­struc­tion work­er in Kuala Lumpur used his cell phone to film a cowork­er in shorts and sneak­ers erect­ing scaf­fold­ing sans safe­ty equip­ment, whilst bal­anc­ing on unse­cured pipes some 700 feet in the air.

Watch it below, if you dare.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Brook­lyn Bridge Was Built: The Sto­ry of One of the Great­est Engi­neer­ing Feats in His­to­ry

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

A Vir­tu­al Time-Lapse Recre­ation of the Build­ing of Notre Dame (1160)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York, The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Commercials: A Playlist of 8 Short Andersonian Works

in Film | February 24th, 2020

You may have noticed cer­tain brands, over the past decade or so, going for a “Wes Ander­son aes­thet­ic” in their adver­tise­ments. But as all the younger film­mak­ers Ander­son inspires inevitably find out, repli­cat­ing the direc­tor’s sig­na­ture mise-en-scène — the dis­tinc­tive col­or palettes, the rig­or­ous geom­e­try, the care­ful­ly curat­ed objects — is no easy task. To achieve the cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Ander­son­ian, it seems you real­ly need Ander­son him­self. For­tu­nate­ly for cer­tain mar­ket­ing depart­ments, the auteur of Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and oth­er pic­tures (includ­ing the upcom­ing The French Dis­patch) has occa­sion­al­ly made him­self avail­able for com­mer­cial work.

But as any­one who has seen one or two of Ander­son­’s movies might expect, the man appears to have lit­tle inter­est in mak­ing straight­for­ward com­mer­cials. Even when direct­ing short spots for the likes of Amer­i­can Express or Stel­la Artois, Ander­son brings us into his very own aes­thet­ic and cul­tur­al realm: in the for­mer he sat­i­rizes a cer­tain idea of his own process on set, and in the lat­ter he cre­ates com­e­dy from his pen­chant for (and mas­tery of) ear­ly-1960s Euro­pean design. In oth­er instances he’s tak­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to indulge his cinephil­ia more direct­ly than usu­al, as in his Jacques Tati-inspired com­mer­cial for Japan­ese cell­phone ser­vice provider Soft­Bank. You can see all these and more on our Youtube playlist of eight of Ander­son­’s short films.

Com­mer­cial direc­tors often dis­cuss their projects in the same terms they would use to dis­cuss short films. But it seems that every time Ander­son makes a com­mer­cial, he real­ly does make a short film. Some­times he makes both: after he direct­ed a 44-sec­ond ad for Pra­da, he went on with the fash­ion house­’s spon­sor­ship to direct the sev­en-minute Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti. But ever since mak­ing the thir­teen-minute black-and-white short that would become his debut fea­ture Bot­tle Rock­et, Ander­son has also used short films in ser­vice of his long ones. Cousin Ben’s Troop Screen­ing makes for a fun intro­duc­tion to Moon­rise King­dom; Hotel Cheva­lier is prac­ti­cal­ly required view­ing before The Dar­jeel­ing Lim­it­ed. Both remind us that, how­ev­er sol­id the work a brand can get out of him, Wes Ander­son pro­motes noth­ing quite as delight­ful­ly as he pro­motes Wes Ander­son. Watch the playlist of 8 com­mer­cials and short films here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

Watch the Coen Broth­ers’ TV Com­mer­cials: Swiss Cig­a­rettes, Gap Jeans, Tax­es & Clean Coal

Wim Wen­ders Cre­ates Ads to Sell Beer (Stel­la Artois), Pas­ta (Bar­il­la), and More Beer (Car­ling)

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

Fellini’s Three Bank of Rome Com­mer­cials, the Last Thing He Did Behind a Cam­era (1992)

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch More Than 400 Classic Korean Films Free Online Thanks to the Korean Film Archive

in Archives, Film | February 18th, 2020

Even if you don’t know much about Korea, or indeed about film, it’s safe to say that you know at least one Kore­an film: Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site, which has cir­cled the world gath­er­ing acclaim and awards since its release last spring. First it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, becom­ing the first Kore­an pro­duc­tion to do so; more recent­ly, it made film his­to­ry even more dra­mat­i­cal­ly at the Acad­e­my Awards. There it won Oscars not just for Best Inter­na­tion­al Fea­ture Film, Best Orig­i­nal Screen­play, and Best Direc­tor, but also Best Pic­ture, becom­ing the first non-Eng­lish-lan­guage film to do so. For many view­ers, Par­a­site and its direc­tor seem to have come out of nowhere, but lovers of Kore­an cin­e­ma know full well that they come out of a rich tra­di­tion — and a robust indus­try.

Maybe you thrilled to Bong’s sus­pense­ful, fun­ny, and vio­lent tale of class war­fare as much as the Acad­e­my did. Maybe you’ve even seen the work of Bong’s con­tem­po­raries: Park Chan-wook, he of the con­tro­ver­sial hit Old­boy; the even more trans­gres­sive Kim Ki-duk; the pro­lif­ic Hong Sang­soo, with his Woody Allen-meets-Éric Rohmer sen­si­bil­i­ty.

But do you know their son­saeng­n­im, the gen­er­a­tions of Kore­an film­mak­ers who went before them? Now you can, no mat­ter where in the world you are, on the Kore­an Film Archive’s Youtube chan­nel. There, at no charge, you can expe­ri­ence decades of Kore­an cin­e­ma and hun­dreds of works of Kore­an cin­e­mat­ic art, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to those of mid-20th-cen­tu­ry mas­ters like Kim Ki-young, Im Kwon-taek, and my per­son­al favorite Kim Soo-yong, direc­tor of haunt­ing, even brazen pic­tures of the 1960s and 70s like Mist and Night Jour­ney.

I actu­al­ly met the then-octo­ge­nar­i­an Kim Soo-yong a few years ago, when he called me over to his table out of curios­i­ty about what a for­eign­er was doing at a screen­ing of Mist. It hap­pened at the Kore­an Film Archive’s cin­e­math­eque (known as Cin­e­math­eque KOFA) here in Seoul, where I’ve lived for the past few years. Dur­ing that time I’ve also been writ­ing a Korea Blog for the Los Ange­les Review of Books, which occa­sion­al­ly fea­tures essays on the clas­sic Kore­an films made avail­able online by the Kore­an Film Archive. I began the series with Night Jour­ney, and more recent­ly have writ­ten up pic­tures like the 1960s neo­re­al­ist cry of agony Aim­less Bul­let, the 1970s col­lege-under-dic­ta­tor­ship com­e­dy The March of Fools, the 1980s West­ern­iza­tion com­e­dy Chil-su and Man-su, the 1990s food-sex-hor­ror satir­i­cal mix­ture 301, 302, and oth­ers.

If you need more sug­ges­tions as to where to start with the KOFA’s more than 400 free films online, pay a vis­it to the Kore­an Movie Data­base (KMDb), where KOFA reg­u­lar­ly post selec­tions from their cat­a­log. This mon­th’s picks are “spy thriller films from the 1950s to 1970s infused with the anti-com­mu­nist ide­ol­o­gy dur­ing the time.” Pre­vi­ous months have round­ed up “melo­dra­mas that are filled with women’s desire and crav­ing for love,” films about “indi­vid­ual or fam­i­ly tragedies lead­ing to his­tor­i­cal tragedies,” and “heart-warm­ing clas­si­cal movies all the fam­i­ly mem­bers can enjoy togeth­er.” You can watch all these films either on the KMDb (which requires free reg­is­tra­tion) or on KOFA’s ever-grow­ing Youtube chan­nel. Either way, as we say here in Korea, 재미있게 보세요.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Secret of the “Per­fect Mon­tage” at the Heart of Par­a­site, the Kore­an Film Now Sweep­ing World Cin­e­ma

Mar­tin Scors­ese Intro­duces Film­mak­er Hong Sang­soo, “The Woody Allen of Korea”

The Five Best North Kore­an Movies: Watch Them Free Online

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Watch This Year’s Oscar-Winning Short The Neighbor’s Window, a Surprising Tale of Urban Voyeurism

in Film | February 14th, 2020

As the last cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions to come of age have redis­cov­ered, urban liv­ing has its ben­e­fits. One of those ben­e­fits is the abil­i­ty to keep an eye on your neigh­bors — quite lit­er­al­ly, giv­en a sit­u­a­tion of build­ings in close prox­im­i­ty, suf­fi­cient­ly large win­dows, and min­i­mal usage of drapes. Fortysome­thing Brook­lyn cou­ple Alli and Jacob find them­selves turned into voyeurs by just such a sit­u­a­tion in Mar­shall Cur­ry’s The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow, the Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Acad­e­my Awards. “Do they have jobs, or clothes?” asks Alli, over­come by the frus­tra­tion of look­ing after her and Jacob’s three young chil­dren. “All they do is host dance par­ties and sleep ’till noon and screw.”

You may rec­og­nize Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller, who play Alli and Jacob, from their appear­ances in Noah Baum­bach’s While We’re Young. That film, too, dealt with the envy New York Gen-Xers feel for seem­ing­ly more free­wheel­ing New York Mil­len­ni­als, but The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow takes it in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion.

Cur­ry based it on “The Liv­ing Room,” an episode of the sto­ry­telling inter­view pod­cast Love and Radio in which writer and film­mak­er Diana Weipert tells of all she saw when she enjoyed a sim­i­lar­ly clear view into the life of her own younger neigh­bors. “Am I sup­posed to have maybe respect­ed their pri­va­cy and just looked away?” Weipert asks, rhetor­i­cal­ly. “But it’s impos­si­ble because that’s the way the chairs face. They face the win­dow! I could­n’t have not seen them if I want­ed to.”

Then again, she adds, “I guess I could’ve not got­ten the binoc­u­lars.” That irre­sistible detail makes it into The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow as a sym­bol of Alli and Jacob’s sur­ren­der to their fas­ci­na­tion with the cou­ple across the street. “They’re like a car crash that you can’t look away from,” as Alli puts it. “Okay, a beau­ti­ful, sexy, young car crash.” Yet both she and her hus­band, like any human beings with a par­tial view of oth­er human beings, can’t help but com­pare their cir­cum­stances unfa­vor­ably with those seen from afar. Even­tu­al­ly, as in “The Liv­ing Room,” the twen­tysome­things expe­ri­ence a rever­sal of for­tune, chang­ing Alli and Jacob’s view of them. They also regain the view of them­selves they’d lost amid all their voyeurism — enough of it to make them for­get that the observers can also be observed.

The Neigh­bor’s Win­dow will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Father and Daugh­ter: An Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Film

The Last Farm: An Oscar Nom­i­nat­ed Short Film

Watch A Sin­gle Life: An Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short About How Vinyl Records Can Take Us Mag­i­cal­ly Through Time

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Wes Anderson Releases the Official Trailer for His New Film, The French Dispatch: Watch It Online

in Film | February 13th, 2020

James Pogue in the Baf­fler recent­ly lament­ed the rise of “share­able writ­ing,” man­i­fest in a now-com­mon breed of arti­cle both “easy for pub­lish­ers to repro­duce” and for read­ers to absorb. Share­abil­i­ty requires, above all, that pieces “be sim­ple to describe and pack­age online.” This in con­trast to the writ­ing pub­lished by, say, The New York­er in decades past. “Every time I have a rea­son to pull up a piece from the archives, I am shocked at how strange and out­ré the old­er pieces read — less like work from a dif­fer­ent mag­a­zine than doc­u­ments from an alien soci­ety.” That alien soci­ety pro­vides the back­drop for Wes Ander­son­’s next fea­ture film The French Dis­patch, whose trail­er has just come out.

Any­one who watch­es one of Ander­son­’s films will sus­pect him of lov­ing all things mid-cen­tu­ry — that is to say, the arti­facts of life as it was lived in the decades fol­low­ing the Sec­ond World War, espe­cial­ly in west­ern Europe. This love comes through in the look and feel of even Ander­son­’s ear­li­er pic­tures, like Rush­more and The Roy­al Tenen­baums, whose sto­ries osten­si­bly take place in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca. But in recent years Ander­son has gone in for increas­ing­ly intri­cate peri­od pieces, set­ting Moon­rise King­dom in mid-1960s New Eng­land and The Grand Budapest Hotel in the years 1932, 1968, and 1985, all in the imag­ined Euro­pean coun­try of Zubrowka. The French Dis­patch takes place in the 1960s in the very real Euro­pean coun­try of France, but a fic­tion­al town called “Ennui-sur-Blasé” that allows Ander­son to con­jure up a mid-20th-cen­tu­ry France of the mind.

The mid-cen­tu­ry objects of Ander­son­’s love include The New York­er, a mag­a­zine he’s read and col­lect­ed since his teen years. The influ­ence of that love on The French Dis­patch has not gone unno­ticed at the cur­rent New York­er. A piece pub­lished there offer­ing stills of Ander­son­’s new film describes it as “about the doings of a fic­tion­al week­ly mag­a­zine that looks an awful lot like — and was, in fact, inspired by — The New York­er. The edi­tor and writ­ers of this fic­tion­al mag­a­zine, and the sto­ries it publishes—three of which are dra­ma­tized in the film — are also loose­ly inspired by The New York­er.” Head­ing the tit­u­lar dis­patch is Arthur How­itzer, Jr., played (nat­u­ral­ly) by Bill Mur­ray and inspired by New York­er found­ing edi­tor Harold Ross. Owen Wilson’s Herb­saint Saz­er­ac is “a writer whose low-life beat mir­rors Joseph Mitchell’s.” Jef­frey Wright as Roe­buck Wright, “a mashup of James Bald­win and A. J. Liebling, is a jour­nal­ist from the Amer­i­can South who writes about food.”

Oth­er reg­u­lar Ander­son play­ers include Adrien Brody’s Julian Cadazio, an art deal­er “mod­elled on Lord Duveen, who was the sub­ject of a six-part New York­er Pro­file by S. N. Behrman, in 1951.” Con­sid­er, for a moment, that there was a time when a major mag­a­zine would pub­lish a six-part pro­file of a British art deal­er who had died more than a decade before — and when such a piece of writ­ing would draw both con­sid­er­able atten­tion and acclaim. There are those who crit­i­cize as mis­placed Ander­son­’s appar­ent nos­tal­gia for times, places, and cul­tures like the one The French Dis­patch will bring to the screen this sum­mer. But here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, inun­dat­ed as we are by what Pogue calls the “large­ly voice­less and pre­cise­ly for­mu­la­ic” writ­ing of even respectable pub­li­ca­tions, can we begrudge the film­mak­er his yearn­ing for those bygone days? The only thing miss­ing back then, it might seem to us fans, was Wes Ander­son movies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

Watch Wes Anderson’s Charm­ing New Short Film, Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Star­ring Jason Schwartz­man

Watch the New Trail­er for Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Film, Isle of Dogs, Inspired by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Experimental Abstract Films of Pioneering American Animator Mary Ellen Bute (1930s-1950s)

in Film | February 12th, 2020

There’s been a lot of talk about the blur­ring of nation­al and lin­guis­tic bound­aries at the Acad­e­my Awards this year. Have we entered a new era of moviemak­ing inter­na­tion­al­ism? “His­to­ry, that nev­er-fail­ing fount of irony,” writes Antho­ny Lane at The New York­er, “may be of assis­tance at this point.” When Louis B. May­er first pro­posed the Acad­e­my in 1927 at the Ambas­sador Hotel in Los Ange­les, it was to be called the Inter­na­tion­al Acad­e­my of Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences. “The word ‘Inter­na­tion­al’ didn’t last long. It smacked of places oth­er than Amer­i­ca, so it had to go.”

As every stu­dent of the medi­um knows, how­ev­er, not only have var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al styles dom­i­nat­ed film since its incep­tion, but so too have var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic languages—among them the pro­duc­tion of abstract “visu­al music” films like those pio­neered by Ger­man-Amer­i­can artist and film­mak­er Oskar Fischinger, who worked on the spe­cial effects for Fritz Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon, cre­at­ed sev­er­al dozen short films, and inspired Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia.

Fischinger’s work also inspired anoth­er, far less famous Amer­i­can film­mak­er, Mary Ellen Bute, a Hous­ton-born, Yale-edu­cat­ed ani­ma­tor and exper­i­men­tal direc­tor who “pro­duced over a dozen short abstract ani­ma­tions between the 1930s to the 1950s,” notes Ubuweb, “set to clas­si­cal music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with col­or­ful forms, ele­gant design and spright­ly, dance-like rhythms.” See sev­er­al of her short films above and below.

Bute col­lab­o­rat­ed with many promi­nent cre­ators, includ­ing com­pos­er Joseph Schillinger, musi­cian and inven­tor Thomas Wil­fred, Leon Theremin, ani­ma­tor and direc­tor Nor­man McLaren, and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ted Nemeth, whom she mar­ried in 1940.

The films in Bute’s See­ing Sound series are “like a mar­riage of high mod­ernism and Mer­rie Melodies”—and the shorts proved so com­pelling they were screened reg­u­lar­ly at Radio City Music Hall in the 1930s.

Like Fischinger’s, her ani­ma­tions spoke a pure­ly abstract lan­guage, though they some­times ges­tured at sto­ry (as in “Spook Sport,” fur­ther down). “We need a new kinet­ic, visu­al art form—one that unites sound, col­or and form,” she told the New York World-Telegram in 1936. She con­ceived of sounds and images as work­ing in har­mo­ny or coun­ter­point, along the same math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples. “I want­ed to manip­u­late light to pro­duce visu­al com­po­si­tions in time con­ti­nu­ity,” Bute wrote in 1954, “much as a musi­cian manip­u­lates sound to pro­duce music.”

The lan­guage of film has nar­rowed con­sid­er­ably in the decades since Bute made her films, it seems, exclud­ing exper­i­ments like visu­al music. In so doing, con­tem­po­rary cinema—with its reliance on nar­ra­tive plot­ting and dia­logue as its cen­tral engines—has exclud­ed a sig­nif­i­cant part of the human expe­ri­ence. In her last film, her only fea­ture, Bute adapt­ed pas­sages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book that turned lit­er­a­ture into music as Bute had sought to do with film.

She opens her Finnegans Wake with title cards bear­ing quo­ta­tions from Joyce, includ­ing a quote she also used to explain her tran­si­tion from abstract, ani­mat­ed film to a movie with actors and sets: “One great part of every human exis­tence is passed in a state which can­not be ren­dered sen­si­ble by the use of wide-awake lan­guage, cut-and-dry gram­mar and go-ahead plot.” Such mod­ernist abstrac­tion in cin­e­ma, Bute wrote, adds up to more than “nov­el­ty,” a word some­times used to describe her work to the pub­lic. Like Joyce, her use of abstrac­tion, she wrote, “is about the essence of our Being.”

via @reaktorplayer

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Exper­i­men­tal Film with Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Music Fea­tur­ing Anaïs Nin (1952)

Watch the Med­i­ta­tive Cinepo­em “H20”: A Land­mark Avant-Garde Art Film from 1929

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast