Around here we subscribe to the theory that there’s no such thing as too much Orson Welles. In years past, we gave you Welles narrating Plato’s Cave Allegory and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” and, before that, the Welles-narrated parable Freedom River, and the list goes on.
Now, we present The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a 1977 experimental film created by Larry Jordan, an independent filmmaker who tried to marry “the classic engravings of Gustave Doré to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through a classic narrator: Orson Welles.” As Jordan describes it, the film is “a long opium dream of the old Mariner (Welles) who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it.” You can watch above.
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Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been praised in all manner of terms since it came out more than half a century ago. An early advertising campaign, tapping into the enthusiasm of the contemporary counterculture, called it “the ultimate trip”; in the equivalently trendy parlance of the twenty-twenties, one could say that it “goes hard,” in that it takes no few bold, even unprecedented aesthetic and dramatic turns. The new video essay from Just One More Thing even describes 2001 as “the hardest film Kubrick ever made” — which, given Kubrick’s uncompromising ambitions as a filmmaker, is certainly saying something.
In one of the many interview clips that constitute the video’s 23 minutes, Steven Spielberg recalls his conversations with Kubrick in the last years of the master’s life. “I want to make a movie that changes the form,” Kubrick would often say to Spielberg. Arguably, he’d already done so with 2001, which continues to launch its first-time viewers into an experience unlike any they’ve had with a movie before. Unlike the more substance-inclined members of his generation, Spielberg went into the theater “clean as a whistle,” but “came out of there altered” nevertheless. It didn’t require drugs to appreciate after all; “that film was the drug.”
This isn’t to say that 2001 is purely or even primarily an abstract work of cinema. In collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick put a great deal of technical thought into the film’s vision of the future, with its well-appointed space stations, its artificially intelligent computers, its video calls, and its tablet-like mobile devices. Working in the years before the moon landing, says Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films author Paul Duncan, they “had to completely visualize, and make real, things that had never occurred.” Such was the realism of their speculative work (up to and including imagining how Earth would look from space) that, as Roger Ebert notes, the real Apollo 11 astronauts could describe their experience simply: “It was like 2001.”
Conceived in the heat of the Space Race, the film envisions a great deal that didn’t come to pass by the eponymous year — and indeed, has yet to materialize still today. “We haven’t quite gotten to artificial intelligence as portrayed,” says star Keir Dullea in a 50th-anniversary interview. “Almost, but not quite.” Still, even since then, the technology has come far enough along that few of us can ponder the current state of AI without sooner or later hearing the ominously polite voice of HAL somewhere in the back of our minds. The saga of astronauts currently stranded on the International Space Station does contrast harshly with 2001’s visions of stable and well-functioning life in outer space — but as a story, it might well have appealed to Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The new Every Frame a Painting video explains the technique of the sustained two-shot, and, as IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat writes, “charts — in under six minutes — the technological and industrial trends that have put it more or less in favor with filmmakers and its utility in contemporary filmmaking as a showcase for two actors’ chemistry. This is standard. Zhou, who narrates the series, still can’t avoid feeling like an unseen character within the essay and also the film school TA we all wish we had.” What’s more, it incorporates footage from Zhou and Ramos’ own short film “The Second” to more directly approach the filmmaking challenge of “needing to change coverage plans for an outdoor scene when you’re losing the light.”
As implied by its name, a two-shot contains two actors, and a sustained two-shot continues unbroken for the length of a dialogue between them. We don’t see so many of them in recent pictures, Zhou explains, because they were created in a time when “film was expensive, so it encouraged filmmakers to rehearse more and conserve their takes.” Now, “digital is cheaper, so people don’t really pick one angle and shoot it; they cover a scene from as many angles as possible,” reconstructing it out of bits and pieces in the editing room. Acting styles have also changed since the old-Hollywood days, with all their “gesturing and moving around” that increased the two-shot’s visual interest.
Yet today’s filmmakers ignore the power of this disused form at their peril: “The sustained two-shot is the composition that best allows two performers to play off each other, and try as you might, you cannot replicate this feeling with editing.” And indeed, it’s only one of the effective elements of twentieth-century film that have only become more difficult to replicate amid the practically endless array of options afforded by digital tools and media. One hopes that Zhou and Ramos will cover a variety of them in Every Frame a Painting’s limited-run comeback — and even more so, that they’ll put them to good use in their own narrative filmmaking careers.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Trying to describe the plot of Fantasmagorie, the world’s first animated cartoon, is a folly akin to putting last night’s dream into words:
I was dressed as a clown and then I was in a theater, except I was also hiding under this lady’s hat, and the guy behind us was plucking out the feathers, and I was maybe also a jack in the box? And I had a fishing pole that turned into a plant that ripped my head off, but only for a few seconds. And then there was a giant champagne bottle and an elephant, and then, suddenly I was on an operating table, and you know how sometimes in a dream, it’s like you’re being crushed to death? Except I escaped by blowing myself up like a balloon and then I hopped onto the back of this horse and then I woke up.
The brainchild of animation pioneer Émile Cohl (1857 – 1938), the trippy silent short from 1908 is composed of 700 drawings, photographed onto negative film and double-exposed.
Clocking in at under two minutes, it’s definitely more diverting than listening to your bed mate bumble through their subconscious’ latest incoherent narrative.
The film’s title is an homage to a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern, known as the fantasmograph, while its playful, nonsensical content is in the spirit of the Incoherent Movement of the 1880s.
Cohl, who cut his teeth on political caricature and Guignol puppet theatre, went on to create over 250 films over the next 15 years, expanding his explorations to include the realms of live action and stop motion animation.
Above, you can watch a somewhat restored version of the film, featuring music by Fabio Napodano. To get a feel for the original grainier silent film, watch here.
Watch enough classic movies — especially classic movies from slightly downmarket studios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again: once recorded or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be re-used in another, and another, and another. No such frequently employed recording has a more illustrious and well-documented history than the so-called “Wilhelm scream,” which, according to Oliver Macaulay at the Science + Media Museum, “has been used in over 400 films and TV programs.”
“First recorded in 1951, the ‘Wilhelm scream’ was initially featured as stock sound effect in Raoul Walsh’s western Distant Drums,” writes Macaulay, but it got its name from a scene in The Charge at Feather River, from 1953: “When Private Wilhelm takes an arrow to the leg, he lets out the fabled blood-curdling cry which came to permeate Hollywood’s soundscape.”
It may well have been most widely heard in the original Star Wars, “when Luke Skywalker shoots a stormtrooper off a ledge,” but for decades it was pulled from the vault whenever “characters meet a grim and grisly end, from being shot to falling off a building to being caught up in an explosion.”
Originally labeled “Man eaten by an alligator; screams” (for such was the fate of the character in Distant Drums), the original recording session of this much-discussed sound effect is now downloadable from the USC Optical Sound Effects Libraryat the Internet Archive. It contains three collections: the Gold and Red Libraries, which “consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & 40s created for Hollywood studios,” and the Sunset Editorial (SSE) Library, which “includes classic effects from the 1930s into the ’80s” by the eponymous outfit. At a Freesound Blog post about the archiving and preservation of the SSE Library, audio engineer Craig Smith notes that the company “mainly did episodic television shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Partridge Family, and The Waltons.”
Listening through the USC Optical Sound Effects Library will thus prove a resonant experience, as it were, with fans of mid-century Hollywood movies and television alike. It may also inspire an appreciation for the sheer amount of recording, indexing, editing, and mixing work that must have gone into even outwardly simple productions, which nevertheless required the sounds of doors, birds, sirens, guns, and falling bodies — as well as the voices of men, women, children — to fill out a plausible audiovisual atmosphere. They also reveal, as Smith puts it, “the shared culture of Hollywood’s take on what things ‘sounded like.’ ” Heard in isolation, some of these may seem no more realistic than the Wilhelm scream, but that wasn’t quite the point; they just had to sound like things do in movies and on TV.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
For decades and decades, Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons have served as a kind of default children’s entertainment. Originally conceived for theatrical exhibition in the nineteen-thirties, they were animated to a standard that held its own against the subsequent generations of television productions alongside which they would later be broadcast. Even their classical music-laden soundtracks seemed to signal higher aspirations. But when scrutinized closely enough, they turned out not to be as timeless and inoffensive as everyone had assumed. In fact, eleven Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons have been withheld from syndication since the nineteen-sixties due to their content.
The LSuperSonicQ video above takes a look at the “Censored Eleven,” all of which have been suppressed for qualities like “exaggerated features, racist tones, and outdated references.” Produced between 1931 and 1944, these cartoons have been described as reflecting perceptions widely held by viewers at the time that have since become unacceptable. Take, for example, the black proto-Elmer Fudd in “All This and Rabbit Stew,” from 1941, a collection of “ethnic stereotypes including oversized clothing, a shuffle to his movement, and mumbling sentences.” In other productions, like “Jungle Jitters” and “The Isle of Pingo Pongo,” the offense is against native islanders, depicted therein as hard-partying cannibals.
At first glance, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” from 1943, may resemble a grotesque carnival of stereotypes. But as director Bob Clampett later explained, it originated when he “was approached in Hollywood by the cast of an all-black musical off-broadway production called Jump For Joy while they were doing some special performances in Los Angeles. They asked me why there weren’t any Warner’s cartoons with black characters and I didn’t have any good answer for that question. So we sat down together and came up with a parody of Disney’s Snow White, and ‘Coal Black’ was the result.” These performers provided the voices (credited, out of contractual obligation, to Mel Blanc), and Clampett paid tribute in the character designs to real jazz musicians he knew from Central Avenue.
However admirable the intentions of “Coal Black” — and however masterful its animation, which has come in for great praise from historians of the medium — it remains relegated to the banned-cartoons netherworld. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t see it today: like most of the “Censored Eleven,” it’s long been bootlegged, and it even underwent restoration for the first annual Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in 2010. Some of these controversial shorts appear on the Looney Tunes Gold Collection Volume: 3 DVDs, introduced by Whoopi Goldberg, who makes the sensible point that “removing these inexcusable images and jokes from this collection would be the same as saying they never existed.” Grown-ups may be okay with that, but kids — always the most discerning audience for Warner Bros. cartoons — know when they’re being lied to.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“In our salad days, we are ripe for a particular movie that will linger, deathlessly, long after the greenness has gone,” writes the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in a recent piece on movies in the eighties. “When a friend turned to me after the first twenty minutes of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986, and calmly declared, ‘This is the best film ever made,’ I had no cause to disagree.” Many of us reacted similarly, whether we saw the movie in its first theatrical run or not — but we probably wouldn’t have, had the final product adhered more closely to writer-director John Hughes’ original vision. Such, in any case is the contention of the new CinemaStix video essay above.
Incredibly, says the video’s creator Danny Boyd, the Ferris Bueller screenplay “took Hughes less than a week to complete — and, by some accounts, just two nights, finishing the script just as the Writers Guild was about to go on strike, and just 36 hours after pitching the movie to Paramount with nothing but the tagline ‘A high-schooler takes a day off from school.’ ”
At the height of my own adolescent Ferris Bueller-related enthusiasm, I actually read it myself; all I remember is appreciating that the montage Hughes wrote of Ferris gathering up change from cookie jars and sofa cushions, set to Pink Floyd’s “Money,” didn’t make it into the final production.
“Ferris Bueller’s first cut ran two hours and 45 minutes and didn’t work at all,” says Boyd, and its only hope lay in the editing room. Luckily, that room was occupied by Paul Hirsch, editor of Star Wars, Blow Out, and Footloose. The movie had to be not just cut down but rearranged into an order with which audiences — who’d already voiced their displeasure in test screenings — could connect. Initially, Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron’s trip to the Art Institute of Chicago came last, after the parade scene in which Ferris gets up on a float. This may have felt right on the page, but it didn’t on the screen: understanding that the parade “couldn’t be topped,” Hirsch and Hughes realized they had to finish the trio’s excursion with it (and change up its score as well). Thanks to these post-production interventions, Ferris Bueller lives on in the pantheon of modern-day trickster gods.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
One sometimes hears lamented the tendency of movies to depict Mexico — and in particular, its capital Mexico City — as a threatening, rough-and-tumble place where human life has no value. Such concerns turn out to be nearly as old as cinema itself, having first been raised in response to a roughly thirty-second-long film called Duel au pistolet from 1896. The French title owes to its having a French director: Gabriel Veyre, a contemporary of the cinema-pioneering Lumière brothers who first left France for Latin America in order to screen their early films there.
On his travels, Veyre both exhibited Lumière films and made his own. “Between 1896 and 1897, he directed and produced 35 films in Mexico,” writes Jared Wheeler at Moviegoings. “Many of those films feature the Mexican president Porfirio Díaz in daily activities.” The action captured in Duel au pistolet is “most probably a recreation of a famous duel that had taken place in September 1894, between Colonel Francisco Romero and Jose Verástegui, the postmaster general.” It seems that Romero had overheard Verástegui accusing him of not only sleeping with a mutual friend’s wife, but also of having pulled strings to get that same friend a post in the government.
His honor insulted, Romero demanded that Verástegui settle the matter with pistols in Chapultepec Park. By that time, dueling was a technically illegal but still-common practice, one “governed by a complex system of social norms that were, for some, a source of national pride as a sign of Mexico’s modernity, and of its kinship with other European nations like France.” But if a duel were to be re-created and screened on film out of its cultural context, “would other nations recognize it as an honorable, dignified ritual, or simply see it as a sign that everyday life in Mexico was characterized by violence and barbarism?”
What still impresses about Duel au pistolet (a colorized version of which appears above), nearly 130 years after its debut, is less the impression it gives of Mexico than its startling realism, which has given even some modern-day viewers reason to wonder whether it’s really a re-enactment. Many “have commented on the naturalism of the duelist’s death,” Wheeler writes, “one of the first to be depicted on screen and very much in contrast to the melodramatic style that was more typical of this time.” In real life, it was Verástegui who lost, and Romero’s subsequent trial and imprisonment meant that Mexico’s days of dueling were well and truly numbered — but the history of onscreen violence had only just begun.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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