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.

For near­ly as long as mankind has tried to com­mit the per­fect crime, mankind has tried to tell sto­ries of the per­fect crime. Both endeav­ors demand inten­sive plan­ning, the sto­ry of the crime per­haps even more rig­or­ous­ly so than the crime itself. No less obses­sive a teller and reteller of “per­fect crime” sto­ries than Alfred Hitch­cock knew that well, and so he remains an icon of such sto­ry­telling in cin­e­ma. Hence the visu­al ref­er­ence, albeit a van­ish­ing­ly brief one, to the mas­ter of sus­pense in Kore­an block­buster auteur Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site, which has run vic­to­ry laps around the world ever since win­ning the Palme d’Or last year. Or so Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, tells it in his new video essay on Par­a­site’s “per­fect mon­tage.”

This mon­tage comes at the end of the film’s first act, about 40 min­utes in, at which point Bong has clear­ly estab­lished the plot, both in the sense of the sequence of events that sets the sto­ry in motion, and of the devi­ous plan devised by the main char­ac­ters. Those main char­ac­ters are the Kims, a poor fam­i­ly in Seoul who, one by one, ingra­ti­ate them­selves with and obtain employ­ment with­in the house­hold of a rich fam­i­ly, the Parks — all while pre­tend­ing not to be relat­ed. After the father becomes the Parks’ chauf­feur, the son becomes their Eng­lish tutor, the daugh­ter becomes their art ther­a­pist, the Kims all work togeth­er to get the moth­er hired as the house­keep­er. But this requires the dis­place­ment of the rich fam­i­ly’s exist­ing house­keep­er, who’s worked in the home ever since it was first built.

That dis­place­ment is the sub­ject of the mon­tage, which over five min­utes relays to the view­er both how the Kims devise their plan — which involves turn­ing the old house­keep­er’s peach aller­gy into a seem­ing case of tuber­cu­lo­sis — and how they pull it off. Puschak under­scores “how bal­let­ic every­thing is, helped along by a clas­si­cal piece from Han­del’s Rodelin­da,” as well as the “mes­mer­ic” qual­i­ty enriched by Bong’s use of “both slow-motion and lin­ear cam­era moves.” Pre­sent­ing new infor­ma­tion in each and every one of its 60 shots, the mon­tage also fore­shad­ows com­ing events and ref­er­ences pre­vi­ous ones with­in itself, inspir­ing Puschak to com­pare it to a con­ver­sa­tion, and lat­er to “an organ­ism all its own.”

All well and good as a demon­stra­tion of cin­e­mat­ic tech­nique, and indeed “a tes­ta­ment to Bong Joon-ho’s con­trol of his craft.” But unless form aligns with sub­stance, no art can attain great­ness; what makes this a “per­fect mon­tage” is how its very per­fec­tion reflects that of the Kim fam­i­ly’s machi­na­tions — at least at the point in the film at which it arrives. As with most sto­ries of the per­fect crime, things start to fall apart there­after, though even as they do, Bong’s hand (as well as that of his edi­tor Yang Jin-mo) nev­er fal­ters. This sequence, and Par­a­site as a whole, would sure­ly com­mand the respect of Alfred Hitch­cock. But Hitch­cock would also rec­og­nize, as Bong him­self must, that a mon­tage can always be more fine­ly tuned. There may be no such thing as the per­fect crime, but it remains a promis­ing the­mat­ic vehi­cle for get­ting ever clos­er to per­fec­tion in cin­e­ma.

Below, as an added bonus, you can watch the direc­tor him­self break down Par­a­site’s open­ing scene:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ser­gio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghet­ti West­erns, Cre­at­ing a Per­fect Har­mo­ny of Sound & Image

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

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

The Five Best North Kore­an Movies: Watch Them Free Online

A Crash Course on Sovi­et Mon­tage, the Russ­ian Approach to Film­mak­ing That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma

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.