Typing programs demand some patience on the part of the student, and David Lynch Teaches Typing is no exception.
You’ve got 90 seconds to get acclimated to the cruddy floppy disc-era graphics and the cacophonous voice of your instructor, a dead ringer for FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole, the hard-of-hearing character director David Lynch played on his seminal early 90s series, Twin Peaks.
Things perk up about a minute and a half in, when students are instructed to place their left ring fingers in an undulating bug to the left of their keyboards.
That second “in”? Not a typo (though you’ll notice plenty of no doubt intentional boo-boos in the teacher’s pre-programmed responses…)
One of our favorites is the Apple-esque name of the program’s retro computer, and we’ll wager that frequent Lynch collaborator, actor Kyle MacLachlan, would agree.
Another reference that has thus far eluded online gaming enthusiasts in their 20s is Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Take a peek below at what the virtual typing tutor’s graphics looked like around the time the original Twin Peaks aired to discover the creators of David Lynch Teaches Typing’s other inspiration.
David Lynch Teaches Typing is available for free download here. If you’re anxious that doing so might open you up to a technical bug of nightmarish proportions, stick with watching the play through at the top of the page.
“C’mon you f#ck! C’mon death! Die! Axe murderer! Kill!!”
That’s my best transcription of Jack Nicholson’s loopy warm up dialog seen in the above clip, taken from “Making The Shining.” Director Stanley Kubrick let his then 17-year-old daughter Vivian wander the set during the making of this classic film, and captures a lot of the magic that went on. This scene of Nicholson warming up, Method-style, is a brief highlight.
I’m tickled that Nicholson is in his own mad little world, while the crew at Elstree Studios (where most of the film was shot), go about their business, occasionally swerving aside–careful with that axe, Eugene! I mean, Jack!
This is, of course, a warm up for the now iconic scene where Jack Torrance chops his way into the bathroom where his wife Wendy is hiding. And has there been a better axe in the door scene since? Can any film do so now without referencing Kubrick? I would say no.
If that piqued your interest, there’s even more behind the scenes footage kicking around YouTube, including Kubrick typing away, Nicholson schmoozing it up, Shelley Duvall pointing out her hair is coming out from the stress of filming, Kubrick’s mom visiting the set, the early use of Steadicam and video assist, Kubrick being kind of a dick to Duvall, and much more, including this observation from Nicholson: “The average celebrity meets in one year ten times the amount of people that the average person meets in their entire life.”
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.
Even if we can’t name them, we’ve all seen hundreds of the most important paintings in art history, and even if we can’t name it, we’ve all heard “Classical Gas.” 3000 Years of Art, the 1968 experimental film above, officiates an aesthetic union of about 2500 of those much-seen, highly influential images and Mason Williams’ instrumental hit song, all in just over three minutes.
Initially released on The Mason Williams Phonograph Record in 1967, the track went on, with the help of 3000 Years of Art, to become “one of the earliest records that used a visual to help promote it on television, which probably qualifies it as one of the earliest music videos.” Those words come from Williams himself, who posted the video to his own Youtube channel.
When “Classical Gas” first became a hit, he writes, “I was also the head writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS. I had seen a film titled God Is Dog Spelled Backwards at The Encore, an off beat movie house in L.A. The film was a collection of approximately 2500 classical works of art, mostly paintings, that flashed by in three minutes. Each image lasted only two film frames, or twelve images a second! At the end of the film the viewer was pronounced ‘cultural’ since they had just covered ‘3000 years of art in 3 minutes!’ ”
Contacting the short’s creator, a UCLA student by the name of Dan McLaughlin, Williams asked if he could re-cut its imagery to “Classical Gas” for a Smothers Brothers segment. First airing on the show in the summer of 1968 — the same year that saw another of the show’s writers, a young man by the name of Steve Martin, bring his talents directly to the air — the resulting proto-music-video rocketed Williams’ song to another sphere of popularity entirely. Not only that, it “opened the door to realizations that the viewer’s mind could absorb this intense level of visual input” with its use of kinestasis, the phenomenon whereby a montage of still images creates its own kind of motion.
Following the idea to its then-logical conclusion, Williams soon after wrote a skit for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour “projecting the idea that someday VJs would be playing hit tapes on TV.” And so the trajectories of easy-listening instrumental music, gently subversive television comedy, and art history intersected to give the world an early glimpse of MTV, Youtube, and whichever host of even shorter-form, intenser viewing experiences comes next.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
FYI. Until noon eastern time tomorrow (2/14), the Criterion Collection is running a flash sale (click here), giving you a chance to purchase “all in-stock Blu-rays & DVDs at 50% off.” Just use the promo code GOLD and get classic films by Hitchcock, Lynch, Welles, Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, and many others.
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It says a great deal about the acceptance of interracial marriage in America that you don’t much hear the phrase “interracial marriage” itself anymore: in much of the country, such unions have become so common as not to merit their own intellectual category. But what about elderly interracial newlyweds? That much more demographically unusual phenomenon — or rather, the actual nonagenarian, recently married interracial couple of Edith Hill and Eddie Harrison — provides the subject for Laura Checkoway’s short documentary Edith+Eddie, which you can watch free on Topic.com.
“Hill was 96 and Harrison 95 years old when they were married, and the film bills the two as ‘America’s oldest interracial newlyweds’ at the time of their union in 2014,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Chris Gardner in an article on the film’s having been produced by Cher.
But “what could’ve been a heart-warming love story turned into something tragic as the two were separated by Hill’s family in a bitter family feud,” a source of much of the considerable drama in the movie’s 30 minutes. “The couple had been sharing Hill’s Virginia home until one of her daughters forcibly moved her to Florida, separating the couple.”
Alas, Harrison died during a bout of influenza just three months later. “He lived for her, and she lived for him. It’s the love story of the century,” said Hill’s daughter, quoted in a Guardian article that describes how “their marriage was problematic because Hill has been declared legally incapacitated for several years.” Another daughter “contested the marriage, saying it would complicate the eventual distribution of Hill’s estate. But Hill and Harrison said they wanted to stay together.” And given all they’d lived through — “the two longtime Virginians would not have been allowed to marry if they had met in their 20s, 30s or 40s under state law at the time” — one easily understands why.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Wim Wenders began his prolific feature filmmaking career in 1970, and nearly half a century later — having directed such cinephile favorites as Alice in the Cities, The American Friend, Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire along the way — he shows no signs of slowing down. Known for his collaboration with cinematographers, and with Robby Müller in particular, Wenders has worked in everything from black-and-white 16-millimeter film, when he first started out, to digital 3D, which he’s spent recent years putting to a variety of cinematic ends. But we can trace all of his visions back, in one way or another, to the humble Polaroid instant camera.
“Every movie starts with a certain idea,” says Wenders in the short “Photographers in Focus” video above, and the Polaroid was just a collection of constant ideas.” The auteur speaks over images of some of the Polaroids he’s taken throughout his life, relating his history with the medium.
“My very first Polaroid camera was a very simple one. Mid-sixties. I was 20, and I used Polaroid cameras exclusively until I was about 35 or so. Most of them I gave away, because when you took Polaroids, people were always greedy and wanted them because it was an object, it was a singular thing.”
Wenders describes his Polaroids as “very insightful into the process of my first six, seven movies, all the movies I did through the seventies,” the era in which he mastered the form of the road movie first in his native Germany, then in the much-mythologized United States. He not only shot Polaroids in preparation, but during production, snapping them casually, much as one would on a genuine road trip. “Polaroids were never so exact about the framing. You didn’t really care about that. It was about the immediacy of it. It’s almost a subconscious act, and then it became something real. That makes it such a window into your soul as well.” Polaroid photographs, as Wenders sees them, capture a deeper kind of truth. It’s no surprise, then, even in age of the 3D digital camera, to see them making a comeback.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 decades, outside of feminist scholarship and readerships, French-Cuban-American diarist, novelist, and essayist Anaïs Nin was primarily known through her famous friends—most notably the experimental novelist Henry Miller, but also psychoanalyst Otto Rank. She had affairs with both men, and inspired some of their work, but Nin has always deserved much wider appreciation as an artist in her own right, whose surrealist explorations of sexuality, and sexual abuse, and posthumous collections of erotica rival Miller’s body of work—and for many readers far surpass his talents.
Now Nin’s expressive face and oracular quotations have taken over the Tumblr-sphere, such that she has been called the “patron saint of social media” and compared to Lena Dunham. Whether one finds these terms flattering or not comes down to matters of taste and, probably even more so, of age. But those who wish for a short introduction to Nin outside of the world of memes and macros will surely take an interest in the 1952 film above, “Bells of Atlantis,” shot and edited by her then-husband Ian Hugo (also known as banker High Guiler), with Nin in the starring role as the queen of Atlantis. Coilhouse offers this succinct description:
Over cascading experimental footage, Nin reads aloud from her novella House of Incest. We catch glimpses of her nude form swinging in a hammock, and we see her shadow undulating over sheer fabric blowing in the wind, but for the most part, the imagery, captured by Nin’s husband Ian Hugo, remains very abstract.
But it is not only the rare, hazy glimpses of Nin and the snippets of her reading that should draw our attention, but also the burbling, whistling, hypnotic electronic score, composed and created by the husband-and-wife-hobbyist team of Louis and Bebe Barron. Over a decade before Delia Derbyshire wowed audiences with her Dr. Who theme, the Barrons were making unheard-of experimental sounds using the technology available at the time—tape machines, oscillators, microphones, and other such low-tech analog devices.
“The Barrons were true pioneers of electronic music,” writes Messy Nessy, “and one of the crown jewels of their auditory collection is the soundtrack for the 1956 thriller sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet,” the first major motion picture with an all-electronic score. “Bells of Atlantis” breaks ground as an even earlier example of the form, and its hallucinatory visual journey recalls the surrealist filmmaking of decades past and looks forward to the psychedelic 60s.
Both the sounds the Barrons produced and the visions of Hugo turn out to be, in my humble opinion, the perfect setting for a brief introduction to Nin’s voice. After watching “Bells of Atlantis,” put on some more early electronica, and read Nin’s 1947 House of Incest for yourself, a hallucinatory prose-poem about, in Nin’s description, the “escape from a woman’s season in hell.”
Who hasn’t pinned one of Saul Bass’s elegant film posters on their wall—with either thumbtacks above the dormroom bed or in frame and glass in grown-up environs? Or maybe it’s 70s kitsch you prefer—the art of the grindhouse and sensationalist drive-in exploitation film? Or 20s silent avant-garde, the cool noir of the 30s and 40s, 50s B‑grade sci-fi, 60s psychedelia and French new wave, or 80s popcorn flicks…? Whatever kind of cinema grabs your attention probably first grabbed your attention through the design of the movie poster, a genre that gets its due in novelty shops and specialist exhibitions, but often goes unheralded in popular conceptions of art.
Despite its utilitarian and unabashedly commercial function, the movie poster can just as well be a work of art as any other form. Failing that, movie posters are at least always essential archival artifacts, snapshots of the weird collective unconscious of mass culture: from Saul and Elaine Bass’s minimalist poster for West Side Story (1961), “with its bright orange-red background over the title with a silhouette of a fire escape with dancers” to more complex tableaux, like the baldly neo-imperialist Africa Texas Style! (1967), “which features a realistic image of the protagonist on a horse, lassoing a zebra in front of a stampede of wildebeest, elephants, and giraffes.”
The bulk of the collection comes from the Interstate Theater Circuit—a chain that, at one time, “consisted of almost every movie theater in Texas”—and encompasses not only posters but film stills, lobby cards, and press books from “the 1940s through the 1970s with a particular strength in the films of the 1950s and 60s, including musicals, epics, westerns, sword and sandal, horror, and counter culture films.” Other individual collectors have made sizable donations of their posters to the center, and the result is a tour of the many spectacles available to the mid-century American mind: lurid, violent excesses, maudlin moralizing, bizarre erotic fantasies, dime-store adolescent adventures.…
Some of the films are well-known examples from the period; most of them are not, and therein lies the thrill of browsing this online repository, discovering obscure oddities like the 1956 film Barefoot Battalion, in which “teen-age wolf packs become heroes in a nation’s fight for freedom!” The number of quirks and kinks on display offer us a prurient view of a decade too often flatly characterized by its penchant for grey flannel suits. The Mad Men era was a period of institutional repression and rampant sexual harassment, not unlike our own time. It was also a laboratory for a libidinous anarchy that threatened to unleash the pent-up energy and cultural anxiety of millions of frustrated teenagers onto the world at large, as would happen in the decades to come.
What we see in the marketing of films like Five Branded Women (1960) will vary widely depending on our orientations and political sensibilities. Is this cheap exploitation or an empowering precursor to Mad Max: Fury Road? Maybe both. For cultural theorists and film historians, these pulpy advertisements offer windows into the psyches of their audiences and the filmmakers and production companies who gave them what they supposedly wanted. For the ordinary film buff, the Ransom Center collection offers eye candy of all sorts, and if you happen to own a high-quality printer, the chance to hang posters on your wall that you probably won’t see anywhere else. Enter the online collection here.
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