Since at least the nineteen-fifties, when television ownership began spreading rapidly across the developed world, movie theaters have been laboring under one kind of existential threat or another. Yet despite their apparent vulnerability to a variety of disruptive developments — home video, streaming, COVID-19 — many, if not most, of them have found ways to soldier on. In some cases this owes to the dedication of small groups of supporters, or even to the efforts of individuals like Shuji Tamura, who operates the century-old Motomiya Movie Theater in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture single-handedly.
You can see Tamura in action in My Theater, the five-minute documentary short above. “The Japanese director Kazuya Ashizawa’s charming observational portrait captures Tamura as he screens old movies for an audience of students and cinephiles, and gives behind-the-scenes tours of the cinema,” says Aeon. Those tours include an up-close look at the thoroughly analog film projector of whose operation Tamura, 81 years old at the time of filming, has retained all the know-how. Though he officially closed the theater in the nineteen-sixties, it seems he keeps his threading skills sharp by holding screenings for tour groups young and old.
Though lighthearted, a portrait like this could hardly avoid an elegiac undertone. Already suffering from the depopulation that has afflicted many regions of Japan, Fukushima was also badly afflicted by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and their associated nuclear disaster. In 2020, the year after Ashizawa shot My Theater, a typhoon “caused the Abukumagawa river and its tributaries to flood,” as the Asahi Shimbun’s Shoko Rikimaru writes. “The Motomiya city center was inundated, seven people died, and more than 2,000 houses and buildings were damaged.” Both Tamura’s theater and his home were flooded, and “half of the 400 film cans on shelves on the first floor of his house were drenched in muddy water.”
In response, help came from near and far. “A manufacturer in Kanagawa Prefecture sent 10 boxes of film cans to the theater, while a movie theater in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, delivered a film-editing machine. About 30 people affiliated with the film industry in Tokyo showed up at the theater to help clean and dry the film. The effort led to the restoration of about 100 films.” Alas, Tamura’s planned re-opening event happened to coincide with the spread of the coronavirus across Japan, resulting in its indefinite postponement. But now that Japan has re-opened for international tourism, perhaps the Motomiya Movie Theater can become a destination for not just domestic visitors but foreign ones as well. Having been charmed by My Theater, who wouldn’t want to make the trip?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
The hope is that such uncanny facsimiles might finally convince museum Trustees and the British government to return the originals to Athens.
Today, we’ll take a closer look at just how these treasures of antiquity, known to many as the Elgin marbles, wound up so far afield.
The most obvious culprit is Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, who initiated the takeover while serving as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1798–1803.
Prior to setting sail for this posting, he hatched a plan to assemble a documentary team who would sketch and create plaster molds of the Parthenon marbles for the eventual edification of artists and architects back home. Better yet, he’d get the British government to pay for it.
The British government, eying the massive price tag of such a proposal, passed.
So Elgin used some of his heiress wife’s fortune to finance the project himself, hiring landscape painter Giovanni Battista Lusieri — described by Lord Byron as “an Italian painter of the first eminence” — to oversee a team of draftsmen, sculptors, and architects.
As The Nerdwriter’s Evan Puschak notes above, political alliances and expansionist ambition greased Lord Elgin’s wheels, as the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain found common cause in their hatred of Napoleon.
British efforts to expel occupying French forces from Egypt generated good will sufficient to secure the requisite firman, a legal document without which Lusieri and the team would not have been given access to the Acropolis.
The original firman has never surfaced, and the accuracy of what survives — an English translation of an Italian translation — casts Elgin’s acquisition of the marbles in a very dubious light.
Some scholars and legal experts have asserted that the document in question is a mere administrative letter, since it apparently lacked the signature of Sultan Selim III, which would have given it the contractual heft of a firman.
In addition to giving the team entry to Acropolis grounds to sketch and make plaster casts, erect scaffolding and expose foundations by digging, the letter allowed for the removal of such sculptures or inscriptions as would not interfere with the work or walls of the Acropolis.
This implies that the team was to limit itself to windfall apples, the result of the heavy damage the Acropolis sustained during a 1687 mortar attack by Venetian forces.
Some of the dislodged marble had been harvested for building materials or souvenirs, but plenty of goodies remained on the ground for Elgin and company to cart off.
In an article for Smithsonian Magazine, Hellenist author Bruce Clark details how Elgin’s personal assistant, clergyman Philip Hunt, leveraged Britain’s support of the Ottoman Empire and anti-France position to blur these boundaries:
Seeing how highly the Ottomans valued their alliance with the British, Hunt spotted an opportunity for a further, decisive extension of the Acropolis project. With a nod from the sultan’s representative in Athens—who at the time would have been scared to deny a Briton anything—Hunt set about removing the sculptures that still adorned the upper reaches of the Parthenon. This went much further than anyone had imagined possible a few weeks earlier. On July 31, the first of the high-standing sculptures was hauled down, inaugurating a program of systematic stripping, with scores of locals working under Lusieri’s enthusiastic supervision.
Lusieri, whose admirer Lord Byron became a furious critic of Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon marbles, ended his days believing that his commitment to Lord Elgin ultimately cost him an illustrious career as a watercolorist.
He also conceded that the team had been “obliged to be a little barbarous”, a gross understatement when one considers their vandalism of the Parthenon during the ten years it took them to make off with half of its surviving treasures — 21 figures from East and West pediments, 15 metope panels, and 246 feet of what had been a continuous narrative frieze.
Clark notes that although Elgin succeeded in relocating them to British soil, he “derived little personal happiness from his antiquarian acquisitions.”
After numerous logistical headaches involved in their transport, he found himself begging the British government to take them off his hands when an acrimonious divorce landed him in financial straits.
This time the British government agreed, acquiring the lot for £35,000 — less than half of what Lord Elgin claimed to have shelled out for the operation.
The so-called Elgin Marbles became part of the British Museum’s collection in 1816, five years before the Greek War of Independence’s start.
They have been on continual display ever since.
The 21st-century has witnessed a number of world class museums rethinking the provenance of their most storied artifacts. In many cases, they have elected to return them to their land of origin.
Greece has long called for the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum to be permanently repatriated to Athens, but thusfar museum Trustees have refused.
In their opinion, it’s complicated.
Is it though? Lord Elgin’s ultimate motivations might have been, and Bruce Clark, in a brilliant ninja move, suggests that the return could be viewed as a positive stripping away, atonement by way of getting back to basics:
Suppose that among his mixture of motives—personal aggrandizement, rivalry with the French and so on—the welfare of the sculptures actually had been Elgin’s primary concern. How could that purpose best be served today? Perhaps by placing the Acropolis sculptures in a place where they would be extremely safe, extremely well conserved and superbly displayed for the enjoyment of all? The Acropolis Museum, which opened in 2009 at the foot of the Parthenon, is an ideal candidate; it was built with the goal of eventually housing all of the surviving elements of the Parthenon frieze….If the earl really cared about the marbles, and if he were with us today, he would want to see them in Athens now.
So we invite you to bring a friend, position yourselves in opposite corners, facing away from each other, and murmur your secrets to the wall.
Your friend will hear you as clearly as if you’d been whispering directly into their ear…and 9 times out of 10, a curious onlooker will approach to ask what exactly is going on.
Onassis wrote to Mayor Abraham Beame in 1975, hoping to enlist him in the fight to spare midtown Manhattan’s jewel from an affront that the Landmarks Preservation Commission called an “aesthetic joke:”
Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud moments, until there is nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?
(Amtrak’s long distance lines operate out of Penn Station…)
Spend some time in Grand Central’s iconic Main Concourse.
Gaze up toward the great arched windows to see if you can catch a tiny human figure behind the glass bricks, passing along one of the high up hidden catwalks connecting office buildings anchoring Grand Central’s corners.
Perhaps you’ll be privy to some intrigue near the famous four-sided clock, a time-honored rendez-vous spot that’s appeared in numerous films, including The Godfather, Men in Black, and North by Northwest.
Admire the upside down and backwards constellations adorning the vaulted ceiling, marveling that it not only took five men — architect Whitney Warren, artist Paul Helleu, muralist J. Monroe Hewlett, painter Charles Basing, and astronomer Harold Jacoby — to get it wrong, their celestial boo-boo has been embraced during subsequent renovations.
If your wallet’s as fat as a Park Avenue swell’s, head to the Campbell Apartment atop the West Staircase. Formerly the private office of Jazz Age financier, John W. Campbell, it’s now a glamorous venue for blowing $20 on a martini.
(Hot tip — that same $20 can fetch you sixteen Long Island Blue Points during Happy Hour at the Oyster Bar.)
As for the East Staircase, nearly 100 years younger than its seeming fraternal twin across the Concourse’s marble expanse, that one leads to an Apple Store.
Browse various options for Grand Central Terminal guided and self-guided tours here.
Like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, it’s been reproduced on all manner of improbable items and subjected to liberal reimagining — something Sarah Urist Green, describes in the above episode of her series The Art Assignment as “numerous crimes against this image perpetrated across the internet.”
Such repurposing is the ultimate compliment.
The Great Wave is so graphically indelible, anyone who co-opts it can expect it to do a lot of heavy lifting.
For those who bother looking closely enough to take in the three boatloads of fishermen struggling to escape with their lives, it’s also narratively gripping, a terrifying woodblock still from an easily imagined disaster film.
It’s also an homage to Mount Fuji, one of a series of 36.
Thousands of prints were produced in the early 1830s for the domestic tourist trade. Visitors to Mount Fuji snapped these souvenirs up for about the same price as a bowl of noodle soup.
Green, a curator and educator, points out how the water-obsessed Hokusai borrowed elements from both the Rinpa school and Western realism for the Great Wave. The latter can be seen in the use of linear perspective, a low horizon line, and Prussian blue.
Hell, there’s even a Lego set and an official Sanrio characters greeting card showing Hello Kitty nonchalantly surfing the crest in a two piece bathing suit, more interested in disporting herself than considering the sort of extreme oceanic events we can expect more of, owing to climate change.
The world has heard much about the aging and shrinking of Japanese society, a process that has created ghost towns like those we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. But however seriously Japan’s population may be contracting, its love of cats abides undiminished. Hence the replacement of people by felines — effectively, anyway — on the island of Aoshima, visited in the CBS Sunday Morning segment above. “Here, cats outnumber humans more than ten to one,” says correspondent Seth Doane. Its “tiny fishing village once had a population of 800 people, but the sardine fisheries depleted, jobs moved to cities, and human residents left the island.”
Such is the way, it seems, of any post-industrial society — but as always, Japan has ways of setting itself apart. On Aoshima, Doane says, “the big moment of the day is when the tourist boat shows up. It’s 45 minutes of bliss for all involved,” including the cat-lovers bearing treats as well as all the peckish animals awaiting them at the dock. But Aoshima is only one of ten such “cat islands” around Japan. The much larger (but still small) Tashirojima boasts not just over 100 resident cats, but also Neko-jinja (猫神社), literally “Cat Shrine,” one of a host of such feline-dedicated religious sites in the island’s Miyagi Prefecture.
Whether Japan’s attitude toward cats amounts to worship remains a matter of debate. But the fact remains that cats have proven to be the salvation of more places in Japan than a few of its islands: take Tama (literally “ball,” but the Japanese equivalent of “Kitty”), a calico whose assumption of the position of “station master” brought a train stop in Wakayama Prefecture back from the brink of closure. In the old days, Japanese cats did the dirty work of killing rodents that would otherwise infest fishing boats and destroy silkworm farms; today, their ancestors drum up tourism. The Japanese may love cats with an enthusiasm unknown in the rest of the world, but clearly they still expect them to earn their keep.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
The world, we often hear, used to be bigger. Today, if you feel the faintest twinge of curiosity about a distant place — Beijing, Paris, Cambodia, Egypt — you can near-instantaneously call up countless hours of high-quality video footage shot there, and with only a little more effort even communicate in real-time with people actually living there. This may be the case in the early twenty-first century, but it certainly wasn’t in the early twentieth. If you’d wanted to see the world back then, you either had to travel it yourself, an expensive and even dangerous proposition, or else hire a team of expert photographers to go forth and capture it for you.
Albert Kahn, a successful French banker and speculator, did both. A few years after making his own trip around the world, taking stereographic photos and even motion-picture footage along the way, he came up with the idea for a project called Les archives de la planète, or The Archives of the Planet.
Directed by the geographer Jean Brunhes (and influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, a friend of Kahn’s), Les archives de la planète spent most of the nineteen-tens and nineteen-twenties dispatching photographers to various ends of the earth on fewer than four continents: Europe, America, Asia, and Africa. And if you click on those links, you can see the project’s photos from the relevant regions yourself.
Having been digitized, the fruits of Les archives de la planète now reside online, at the web site of the Albert Kahn Museum. You can browse its collection there, or on this image portal, where you can view featured photos or access whichever part of the world in the early twentieth century you’d like to see. (Just make sure to do it in French.) The online archive contains a large chunk of the 72,000 autochrome pictures taken in 50 countries by Kahn’s photographers before he was wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929. Made freely available in high resolution a century after the height of his project, these vivid and evocative pictures remind us that, however small the world has become, the past remains a foreign country.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
I never use a metal detector and I often walk little more than a mile in 5 hours, yet I can travel 2,000 years back in time through the objects that are revealed by the tide. Prehistoric flint tools, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor shoes, Georgian wig curlers and Victorian pottery, ordinary objects left behind by the ordinary people who made London what it is today.
As she says in the short film above, her first find has become one of her most common — a clay pipe fragment.
The term mudlark was invented to describe the poverty stricken Victorians who scoured the foreshore for copper, wire, and other items with resale value, as well as things they could clean off and use themselves.
Today’s mudlarks are primarily history buffs and amateur archeologists.
The hobby has become so popular that The Port of London Authority, which controls the Thames waterway along with the Crown Estate, has started to require foreshore permits of all prospective debris hunters.
Permitted mudlarks can claim as souvenirs however many Victorian clay pipes and blue and white pottery shards they dig up, but are legally obliged by the Portable Antiquities Scheme to report items of potentially greater historic and monetary value — i.e. Treasure — to a museum-trained Finds Liason Officer:
Any metallic object, other than a coin, provided that at least 10 per cent by weight of metal is precious metal (that is, gold or silver) and that it is at least 300 years old when found. If the object is of prehistoric date it will be Treasure provided any part of it is precious metal.
Any group of two or more metallic objects of any composition of prehistoric date that come from the same find (see note below).
Two or more coins from the same find provided they are at least 300 years old when found and contain 10 per cent gold or silver (if the coins contain less than 10 per cent of gold or silver there must be at least ten of them). Only the following groups of coins will normally be regarded as coming from the same find: Hoards that have been deliberately hidden; Smaller groups of coins, such as the contents of purses, that may been dropped or lost; Votive or ritual deposits.
Any object, whatever it is made of, that is found in the same place as, or had previously been together with, another object that is Treasure.
How did all this historic refuse come to be in the Thames? Maiklem told Collectors Weeklythat there are many reasons:
Obviously, it’s been used as a rubbish dump. It was a useful place to chuck your household waste. It was essentially a busy highway, so people accidentally dropped things and lost things as they traveled on it. Of course, people also lived right up against it. London was centered on the Thames so houses were all along it, and there was all this stuff coming out of the houses and off the bridges. It was the biggest port in the world in the 18th century, so there was all the shipbuilding and industry going on.
And then of course, there’s the rubbish that was used to build up the foreshore and create barge beds. The riverbed in its natural state is a V shape, so they had to build up the sides next to the river wall to make them flatter so the flat-bottom barges could rest there at low tide. They did that by pouring rubbish and building spoil and kiln waste, anything they could find—industrial waste, domestic waste. When they dug into the ground further up, they’d bring the spoil down and use it to build up the foreshore, and cap it off with a layer of chalk, which was soft and didn’t damage the bottom of the barges.
One of the reasons we’re finding so much in the river now is because there’s so much erosion. While it was a “working river,” these barge beds were patched up and the revetments, or the wooden walls that held them in, were repaired when they broke. But now, they’re being left to fall apart, and these barge beds are eroding as the river is getting busier with river traffic.
There are numerous social media groups where modern mudlarks can proudly share their finds, and seek assistance in identifying strange or fragmented objects.
Maiklem’s London Mudlark Facebook page is an education in and of itself, a reflection of her abiding interest in the historic significance of the items she truffles up.
Witness the pewter buckle plate dating to the 14th or 15th-century that she spotted on the foreshore in late November, turned over to her Finds Liaison Officer and researched with the help of historic pewter craftsman Colin Torode:
Prior to c.1350 pewter belt fittings seem to have been rather rare, although a London Girdlers’ Guild Charter of 1321 which banned the use of pewter belt fittings does show that the metal was certainly in use. In 1344 the Girdlers’ guild again reiterated the ban on what they felt were inferior metals such as pewter, tin and lead. In 1391 however, a statute recognized that these metals had been in use for some time and that their use could continue without restriction
This ornate plate would have had a separate buckle frame attached to it and is probably a cheaper copy of the more upmarket copper alloy or silver versions that were produced at the time.Although the the openwork design is similar to those found in in furniture or church screens, it’s not religious or pilgrim related.
Maiklem also challenges fans to play along from home with “spot the find” videos for such items as a Tudor clothes hook, Georgian cufflink, and a German salt glazed, stoneware bottle’s neck embossed with a human face.
The river also spews up plenty of drowned rats, flushing them out with the sewage after a heavy rain. Other potential hazards include hypodermic needles and broken glass.
In addition to such safety precautions as gloves, sturdy footwear, and remaining mindful of incoming tides, Maiklem advises novice mudlarks to look for straight lines and perfect circles — “the things that nature doesn’t make.”
It takes practice and patience to develop a skilled eye, but don’t get discouraged if your first outings don’t yield the sort of jaw dropping discoveries Maiklem has made — an intact glass Victorian sugar crusher, a 16th-century child’s leather shoe and Roman era pottery shards galore.
Sometimes even plastic comes with a compelling story.
I’m still feeling quite giddy over this bit of plastic. I came to Cornwall this week to write and to beachcomb. I hoped I might find a small piece of Lost Lego, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. Calm weather means less plastic: good for the beach, bad for the Lego looker. Then I found this wedged between two boulders. It’s one of the black octopuses from the Lego spill of 1997 when, 20 miles from Land’s End, a huge wave hit the cargo ship Tokio Express. It tilted 45 degrees and 62 containers slid into the water. One container was filled with nearly 5 million pieces of Lego, much of which was sea themed. Little scuba tanks, flippers, octopuses, cutlasses, life rafts, spear guns, dragons and octopuses like this still wash up on the beaches of Cornwall and further afield.
Stay abreast of Lara Maiklem’s mudlarking finds here.
Try your hand at mudlarking the Thames in person, during a guided tour with the Thames Explorer Trust.
Two and a half years ago, we featured the concept art for Studio Ghibli’s theme park here on Open Culture, and just two weeks ago it opened its doors. Located on the grounds of Expo 2005 in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture (a three- to four-hour train trip west from Tokyo, or a two-hour train trip east of Osaka), Ghibli Park comprises several themed areas like the Grand Warehouse, the Hill of Youth, and Dondoko Forest. Just hearing those names surely fires up the imaginations of many a Ghibli fan, even before they hear about the park’s visitor-ready reconstructions of everything from Castle in the Sky’s ruined gardens to Whisper of the Heart’s antique shop to My Neighbor Totoro’s Catbus.
“Unlike Disneyland, Ghibli Park does not feature roller coasters or rides,” writes My Modern Met’s Margherita Cole. “Instead, it welcomes visitors to immerse themselves in life-size sets that are harmoniously integrated with nature.” You can get a sense of how this concept has been executed in the fifteen-minute video at the top of the post from Japan-based travel vloggers Didi and Bryan.
In it, they pass through the aforementioned spaces as well as others including Cinema Orion, which screens ten short films once only viewable at the Ghibli Museum, and the Siberia milk stand, which offers the eponymous sponge cake from The Wind Rises, Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki’s final animated feature — or rather, his penultimate animated feature.
The repeatedly un-retired Miyazaki returned to the studio in 2016 to begin a film called How Do You Live?. Though the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down its production by forcing him and his collaborators to work from home, it seems not to have thrown the new theme park’s construction far off track. In three years’ time, Cole writes, “Ghibli Park will open its last two sections — Mononoke no sato (‘Mononoke Village’) and Majo no tani (‘Valley of the Witch’) — which are dedicated to the films Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service, respectively. There may even be a future ride in store, as some of the concept art appears to depict spinning teacups inspired by Kiki’s cat Jiji.” That will require careful designing: a certain other animation studio with long-standing theme parks has a teacup ride of its own — and little patience for apparent imitators, no matter the artistic heights to which they soar.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
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