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.

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.

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

Machine learn­ing keeps, well, learn­ing in leaps and bounds, and at Open Cul­ture we have watched devel­op­ments with a fas­ci­nat­ed, some­time wary eye. This lat­est advance checks off a lot of Open Cul­ture box­es: trav­el­ing back in time through the pow­er of film; home­grown inge­nu­ity; and film his­to­ry.

YouTu­ber Denis Shiryaev took the lat­est advances in AI tech and turned them onto one of the ear­li­est works of film: The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion, shot by the Lumière Broth­ers in 1896. There are plen­ty of urban leg­ends around this 50 sec­ond short: that it was the first ever Lumière film (it wasn’t, they had a selec­tion of pre­vi­ous shorts); and that audi­ences were ter­ri­fied, think­ing the train would hit them (they were amazed, no doubt, but they weren’t that naive).

You might want to watch the orig­i­nal below before watch­ing Shiryaev’s 4K upscal­ing and AI “smoothed” ver­sion to get a sense of the mar­vel at the top of the post.

What we are see­ing is not a tra­di­tion­al “restora­tion,” how­ev­er. Instead, Shiryaev is using a com­mer­cial image-edit­ing soft­ware called Gigapix­el AI. (If you have the pro­cess­ing pow­er, you can try it out). The orig­i­nal film was not shot at 60-frames-per-sec­ond. Instead, neur­al net­works are look­ing at the orig­i­nal frames and “fill­ing in” the data in between, cre­at­ing what you can see is a more nat­u­ral­is­tic effect. Peo­ple on and off the train move like they do in real life. It looks like it was shot yes­ter­day.

Now, this isn’t per­fect. There are a lot of arti­facts, squooshy, mor­ph­ing moments where the neur­al net­work can’t fig­ure things out. But hey, this is just one guy on his com­put­er. It’s an exper­i­ment. The com­put­er code will get bet­ter.

The Gigapix­el AI was devel­oped by Topaz Labs orig­i­nal­ly to help pho­tog­ra­phers upscale their pics by 600 per­cent with­out los­ing detail. It didn’t take long to apply this to video, but be warned, it can take hours of pro­cess­ing pow­er to ren­der a cou­ple of sec­onds. Still it hasn’t stopped peo­ple from exper­i­ment­ing, even with sim­i­lar neur­al net­work pro­grams:

Here’s a clip from Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” video upscaled to 4K with Gigapix­el AI:

User AkN upscaled A‑Bomb footage from the 1950s:

Some clips from Home Alone:

You get the idea. As with any tech­nol­o­gy, there are also some hor­rif­ic exam­ples out there too where it just does not work. But I have a feel­ing that Shiryaev’s first dive into film his­to­ry is not going to his, or the internet’s, last.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

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

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Wal­ter Murch, per­haps the most famed film edi­tor alive, is acclaimed for the work he’s done for direc­tors like Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, George Lucas, and Antho­ny Minghel­la. As inno­v­a­tive and influ­en­tial as his ways for putting images togeth­er have been, Murch has done just as much for cin­e­ma as a sound design­er. In the video above Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, exam­ines Murch’s sound­craft through what Murch calls “worldiz­ing,” which Filmsound.org describes as “manip­u­lat­ing sound until it seemed to be some­thing that exist­ed in real space.” This involves “play­ing back exist­ing record­ings through a speak­er or speak­ers in real-world acoustic sit­u­a­tions,” record­ing it, and using that record­ing on the film’s sound­track.

In oth­er words, Murch pio­neered the tech­nique of not just insert­ing music into a movie in the edit­ing room, but re-record­ing that music in the actu­al spaces in which the char­ac­ters hear it. Mix­ing the orig­i­nal, “clean” record­ing of a song with that song as re-record­ed in the movie’s space — a dance hall, an out­door wed­ding, a dystopi­an under­ground war­ren — has giv­en Murch a greater degree of con­trol over the view­er’s lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence. In some shots he could let the view­er hear more of the song itself by pri­or­i­tiz­ing the orig­i­nal song; in oth­ers he could pri­or­i­tize the re-record­ed song and let the view­er hear the song as the char­ac­ters do, with all the son­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics con­tributed by the space — or, if you like, the world — around them.

Puschak uses exam­ples of Murch’s worldiz­ing from Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti and The God­fa­ther, and notes that he first used it in Lucas’ debut fea­ture THX 1138. But he also dis­cov­ered an ear­li­er attempt by Orson Welles to accom­plish the same effect in Touch of Evil, a film Murch re-edit­ed in 1998. What Welles had not done, says Murch in an inter­view with Film Quar­ter­ly, “was com­bine the orig­i­nal record­ing and the atmos­pher­ic record­ing. He sim­ply posi­tioned a micro­phone, sta­t­ic in an alley­way out­side Uni­ver­sal Sound Stu­dios, re-record­ing from a speak­er to the micro­phone through the alley­way. He did­n’t have con­trol over the bal­ance of dry sound ver­sus reflect­ed sound, and he did­n’t have the sense of motion that we got from mov­ing the speak­er and mov­ing the micro­phone rel­a­tive to one anoth­er.”

Doing this, Murch says, “cre­ates the son­ic equiv­a­lent of depth of field in pho­tog­ra­phy. We can still have the music in the back­ground, but because it’s so dif­fuse, you can’t find edges to focus on and, there­fore, focus on the dia­logue which is in the fore­ground.” In all ear­li­er films besides Welles’, “music was just fil­tered and played low, but it still had its edges,” mak­ing it hard to sep­a­rate from the dia­logue. These days, as Puschak points out, any­one with the right sound-edit­ing soft­ware can per­form these manip­u­la­tions with the click of a mouse. No such ease in the 1970s, when Murch had to not only exe­cute these thor­ough­ly ana­log, labor-inten­sive process­es, but also invent them in the first place. As any­one who’s looked and lis­tened close­ly to his work knows, that audio­vi­su­al strug­gle made Murch expe­ri­ence and work with cin­e­ma in a rich­ly phys­i­cal way — one that, as gen­er­a­tions of edi­tors and sound design­ers come up in whol­ly dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments, may not exist much longer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

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.