Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Nick Cave’s Beautiful Letter About Grief

in Letters, Life | July 11th, 2022

We would rather not grieve. Because we avoid it, death can leave us numb, and we may not know how to talk about it without turning loss into a lesson. “Even when it’s expected, death or loss still comes as a surprise,” writes psychotherapist Megan Devine in her book on grieving, It’s OK That You’re Not OK. And in grief, it can so happen that “otherwise intelligent people have started spouting slogans and platitudes, trying to cheer you up. Trying to take away your pain.” Everything happens for a reason, they’re in a better place, they’d want you to be happy, this will make you stronger….! However well-intentioned, “platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing.”

Is loss a problem to be solved? Can we avoid grief without shutting out the intimacy of love? There are many sage answers to these questions. Few, for example, have written as elegantly or agonized as publicly about love and loss as singer Nick Cave of The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds. These are subjects to which he returns on album after album and in entries of his cult-favorite blog The Red Hand Files, where Cave publishes answers to an assortment of fan questions.

Musing in 2019 on whether artificial intelligence will ever produce a great song, for example, Cave states one of his major themes plainly: “A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.” From this capacity come our greatest imaginative feats, Cave writes: our ability to conjure “bright phantoms” in our deepest grief.

Cave wrote these last words in 2018 to a fan named Cynthia who told him about her family’s losses and asked the singer if he and his wife Susie communicated with their son Arthur, who died tragically in 2015. In answer, Cave avoids the cliches that Devine says do nothing for us. He neither denies the reality of Cynthia’s pain, nor does he leave her without hope for “change and growth and redemption.”

Dear Cynthia,

This is a very beautiful question and I am grateful that you have asked it. It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.

I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

With love, Nick

Cave’s full letter, above, is as eloquent a piece of writing on grief and loss, in its way, as John Donne’s famous meditation (a poet for whom Nick Cave has a “soft spot,” he writes in another entry). At the top, you can hear a very moving reading of the text by Benedict Cumberbatch for Letters Live. Read more of Cave’s brief-but-deep meditations and lyrical replies at The Red Hand Files.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch an 8‑Part Film Adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Free Online

in Film, Literature | July 10th, 2022

Earlier this week we featured Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. You can watch that most ambitious of all filmed versions of War and Peace free online on the Youtube channel of Mosfilm, the Soviet Union’s national studio. Though the U.S.S.R. may have gone, Mosfilm hasn’t. Under the direction of filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov, the studio has soldiered on as a quasi-private production company and put out a variety of films, many of them rooted in Russian history and literature. Five years ago, Shakhnazarov himself directed an eight-part adaptation of another beloved Tolstoy novel, Anna Karenina.

War and Peace (watch here) has been made into four different films. But that’s nothing beside the at least seventeen Anna Karenina movies in existence, not counting Shakhnazarov’s. It was first released in a relatively short cut, its runtime truncated to a bit over two and a half hours, as Anna Karenina: Vronsky’s Story.

That version’s narrative focused, as you may have guessed, on the life of Anna’s irresistible aristocratic lover. Later, Russia‑1 television broadcast Shakhnazarov’s work in full as an eight-episode series simply titled Anna Karenina, which you can now watch free online, in full, at Mosfilm’s Youtube channel. Stream all parts above.

In a sense, this serial format is well suited to Tolstoy’s novel, originally published as it was in installments between 1875 and 1877. But even those who’ve read Anna Karenina’s thousand pages over and over again will have reasons to be surprised by Shakhnazarov’s version, which takes the story of family, class, infidelity, faith, and feudalism in directions of its own. It also incorporates material from outside Tolstoy’s oeuvre, such as “During the Japanese War” and “Stories About the Japanese War” by Vikenty Veresaev, a doctor, writer, and Tolstoy scholar who participated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Like any “free adaptation,” Shakhnazarov’s version of Anna Karenina, will send its viewers back to the book — and ensure that they never read it quite the same way again.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964: Artificial Intelligence, Instantaneous Global Communication, Remote Work, Singularity & More

in Science | July 8th, 2022

Are you feeling confident about the future? No? We understand. Would you like to know what it was like to feel a deep certainty that the decades to come were going to be filled with wonder and the fantastic? Well then, gaze upon this clip from the BBC Archive YouTube channel of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke predicting the future in 1964.

Although we best know him for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1964 television viewing public would have known him for his futurism and his talent for calmly explaining all the great things to come. In the late 1940s, he had already predicted telecommunication satellites. In 1962 he published his collected essays, Profiles of the Future, which contains many of the ideas in this clip.

Here he correctly predicts the ease with which we can be contacted wherever in the world we choose to, where we can contact our friends “anywhere on earth even if we don’t know their location.” What Clarke doesn’t predict here is how “location” isn’t a thing when we’re on the internet. He imagines people working just as well from Tahiti or Bali as they do from London. Clarke sees this advancement as the downfall of the modern city, as we do not need to commute into the city to work. Now, as so many of us are doing our jobs from home post-COVID, we’ve also discovered the dystopia in that fantasy. (It certainly hasn’t dropped the cost of rent.)

Next, he predicts advances in biotechnology that would allow us to, say, train monkeys to work as servants and workers. (Until, he jokes, they form a union and “we’d be back right where we started.) Perhaps, he says, humans have stopped evolving—what comes next is artificial intelligence (although that phrase had yet to be used) and machine evolution, where we’d be honored to be the “stepping stone” towards that destiny. Make of that what you will. I know you might think it would be cool to have a monkey butler, but c’mon, think of the ethics, not to mention the cost of bananas.

Pointing out where Clarke gets it wrong is too easy—-nobody gets it right all of the time. However, it is fascinating that some things that have never come to pass—-being able to learn a language overnight, or erasing your memories—have managed to resurface over the years as fiction films, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His ideas of cryogenic suspension are staples of numerous hard sci-fi films.

And we are still waiting for the “Replicator” machine, which would make exact duplicates of objects (and by so doing cause a collapse into “gluttonous barbarism” because we’d want unlimited amounts of everything.) Some commenters call this a precursor to 3‑D printing. I’d say otherwise, but something very close to it might be around the corner. Who knows? Clarke himself agrees about all this conjecture-—it’s doomed to fail.

“That is why the future is so endlessly fascinating. Try as we can, we’ll never outguess it.”

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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An Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript, the World’s Most Mysterious Book

in Books, History | July 8th, 2022

“The Voynich manuscript is a real medieval book, and has been carbon-dated to the early 1400s.” No modern hoax, this notoriously bizarre text has in fact “passed through the hands of many over the years,” including “scientists, emperors, and collectors.” Though “we still don’t know who actually wrote it, the illustrations hint at the book’s original purpose,” having “much in common with medieval herbals, astrology guides, and bathing manuals.” Hence the likelihood of the Voynich manuscript being “some sort of medical textbook, although a very strange one by any measure. Then there’s the writing.”

This summary of the known history and nature of the most mysterious manuscript in existence comes from the Youtube video above, “Secrets of the Voynich Manuscript.” Its channel Hochelaga has previously been featured here on Open Culture for episodes on medieval monsters, a guide to supernatural phenomena from renaissance Germany, Hokusai’s ghost art, and the Biblical apocalypse.

In short, the Voynich manuscript could hardly find a more accommodating wheelhouse. And as in Hochelaga’s other videos, the subject is approached not with total credulity, but rather a clear and straightforward discussion of why generation after generation of enthusiasts have kept trying to figure it out.

No aspect of the Voynich manuscript fascinates as much as its having been “written in a mystery language with a unique alphabet and grammatical rules.” It could be an existing language rendered in code; it could be one created entirely and only for this book. Though attempts are made with some frequency, “no one has been able to definitively solve the Voynich manuscript’s language.” It could, of course, be that “we’ve fallen for one big medieval prank,” but the video’s creator doesn’t buy that explanation. Even in its incomprehensibility, the text appears to possess great complexity. If it were to be decoded, “would the magic and mystery disappear? Or would we uncover a whole new set of questions and embark on another journey entirely?”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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The Earliest Known Footage of New Orleans Discovered: See a Mardi Gras Parade in 1898

in Film, History | July 7th, 2022

“America has only three great cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” This quotation has been repeated for decades — not least, unsurprisingly, in New Orleans. I saw and heard it often on my last trip there, and though attributions varied, most credited the remark to either Mark Twain or Tennessee Williams. According to Quote Investigator, no historical evidence points to either man as the line’s originator, though “the notion that only three cities in the U.S. were commendable or distinctive has a very long history.”

In 1895, for instance, the then-popular comedienne Vernona Jarbeau said that “there are only three cities in the United States that I would care to live in, and one of them is San Francisco.” But she said it, one should note, to a San Francisco newspaper; who’s to say the crowd-pleasing instinct wouldn’t have motivated a transposition of her preference elsewhere in America? New Orleans, then in existence for more than half a century, possessed an even longer-established distinctiveness. The embellished galleries of the French Colonial buildings in the 1898 film clip above, identify the city at a glance.

Even more New Orleanian, of course, is what’s going on in the street: the city’s signature festivity, the Mardi Gras parade. “The film is not only the oldest moving picture of a New Orleans Mardi Gras; it’s the oldest film of New Orleans,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Jane Recker. Recently rediscovered in Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum, the two-minute clip shows us — on detail-absorbing 68-millimeter film — that “one float is pineapple-themed, with riders wearing hats shaped like pieces of pineapple and vests resembling pineapple skin. Another features the Rex, the ‘King of the Carnival,’ sitting atop a float decorated with tasseled globes.”

“Contemporary viewers will surely recognize the film’s parade as a Mardi Gras celebration, though the event features some distinct differences from the one that takes over the Big Easy’s streets today,” writes Artnet’s Sarah Cascone. “There are, for example, no beads, no barricades, no police. Onlookers don suits and top hats and parasols, a far more formal approach than that taken by 21st-century revelers.” Here in the 2020s their revelry has been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and only this year did New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parade tradition resume. Perhaps it’s too much to hope that the dress sense of spectators 124 years ago will make a comeback as well.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Titanic Survivor Interviews: What It Was Like to Flee the Sinking Luxury Liner

in History | July 7th, 2022

Millvinia Dean, the last surviving passenger of the RMS Titanic, died in 2009. She’d lived a full life of 97 years, but that meant that she’d been only two months old when the famously luxurious and innovative ship hit the iceberg that sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic in the middle of its maiden voyage. Despite being humanity’s last direct link to the Titanic, she would have retained no memory of the ship or its sinking. That’s very much not the case with the survivors interviewed in the 1970 British Pathé documentary footage above. One of them, Edith Russell, remembers the Titanic as having been “so very formal.” The “coziness” of other ocean liners, the “get-together feeling — it didn’t exist.”

A celebrity stylist and Paris correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, Russell was traveling first-class: one stateroom for her, and another for her luggage. Not so Gurshon Cohen, who’d been “sleeping six in a bunk” down below. Unlike many of the Titanic’s third-class passengers, prohibited as they were from entering the upper decks, Cohen managed to find a place on a lifeboat (after jumping ship first).

Whatever the differences in their situations, Russell and Cohen had congruent memories of the disaster, especially as regards the popular notion that the ship’s band continued performing until the bitter end. As Russell puts it, “when people say that music played as the ship went down, that is a ghastly, horrible lie.”

Eva Hart, interviewed in 1993, does recall hearing music — specifically, a rendition of “Near My God to Thee” — right up until her escape. The vivid images she retained from the lifeboat also included the ship’s breaking in half, an event widely denied until it was proven decades thereafter. You can hear more stories of how the Titanic really went down, as it were, from the 1956 and 1970 BBC interviews with Kate Gilnagh Manning, Maude Louise Slocombe, and Frank Prentice (the latter two of whom were working on the ship) just above. They all remember the incongruously “slight bump” of the impact, the “dead calm” of the sea, the perilous sight of lifeboats dangling 70 feet above the water — and the feeling of impossibility that the “unsinkable” Titanic could really have met its end.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Why You Should Read The Handmaid’s Tale: A Timely Animated Introduction

in Books, Current Affairs, Politics | July 6th, 2022

Prophecies are really about now. In science fiction it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.

– Margaret Atwood

There is no need to explain why Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has gone from reading like a warning of the near-future to an allegory of the present after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Atwood’s story revolves around the fictional Republic of Gilead, which takes over the U.S. after a fertility crisis decimates the population. Overnight, the fundamentalist Christian theocracy divides women into two broad classes – Handmaids: chattel who perform the labor of forced birth through forced conception; and the infertile who prop up the patriarchal ruling class as wives, overseers, or slave labor in the polluted “colonies.”

It’s a bleak tale, a story far less about heroism than the TV series based on the book would have viewers–who haven’t read it–believe. (The 5th season, slated for this July, seems to have been delayed until September without explanation.) Why should we read The Handmaid’s Tale? Because it is not only a work of dystopian futurism, but also a narrativized account of what has already happened to women around the world throughout history to the present. The novel is a prism through which to view the ways women have been oppressed through reproductive slavery without the sci-fi scenario of a precipitous loss of human fertility.

As Atwood has explained, “when I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time.” Some of the worst offenses were not well-known. “Female genital mutilation was taking place,” says Atwood, “but if I had put it in 1985 [when the novel was written] probably people wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. They do now.” But we can still choose to overlook the information. “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance,” Atwood says in the novel, “you have to work at it.” The quote opens the 2018 TED-Ed lesson by Naomi Mercer above on Atwood’s book, walking us through its sources in history.

The Handmaid’s Tale, the lesson points out, is an example of “Speculative Fiction,” a form of writing concerned with “possible futures.” This theme unites both utopian and dystopian novels. Atwood’s books trade in the latter, but any reader of the genre will tell you how quickly a more perfect fictional union becomes a nightmare. The Canadian writer has offered this literary inevitability as an explanation for the multiple crises of American democracy:

The real reason people expect so much of America in modern times is that it set out to be a utopia. That didn’t last very long. Nathaniel Hawthorne nailed it when he said the first thing they did when they got to America was build a scaffold and a prison.

What Atwood doesn’t mention, as many critics have pointed out, are the slave pens and auction houses, or the fact that Gilead closely resembles the slave-holding American South in its theocratic patriarchal Christian hierarchy and ultimate control of women’s bodies. And yet, the novel completely sidesteps race by having the Republic of Gilead ship all of the country’s Black people to the Midwest (presumably for forced labor). They are never heard from again by the reader.

This tactic has seemed irresponsible to many critics, as has the show’s sidestepping through colorblind casting, and the wearing of red cloaks and white bonnets in imitation of the book and show as a means of protest. “When we rely too heavily on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ which ignores the presence of race and racism,” says activist Alicia Sanchez Gill, “it really dehumanizes and dismisses our collective experiences of reproductive trauma.” Atwood’s “possible future” pillages slavery’s past and conveniently gets rid of its descendants.

The trauma Gill references includes rape and forced birth, as well as the forced sterilizations of the eugenics movement, carried out with the imprimatur of the Supreme Court (and continuing in recent cases). Kelli Midgley, who founded Handmaids Army DC, offers one explanation for using The Handmaid’s Tale as a protest symbol. Though she agrees to leave the costumes at home if asked by organizers, she says “we are trying to reach a broader audience for people who need this message. We don’t need to tell Black women that their rights are endangered. They always have been.”

Maybe a new message after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is that an assault on anyone’s rights threatens everyone. Or as Atwood wrote in a Canadian Globe and Mail op-ed in 2018, “depriving women of contraceptive information, reproductive rights, a living wage, and prenatal and maternal care – as some states in the US want to do – is practically a death sentence, and is a contravention of basic human rights. But Gilead, being totalitarian, does not respect universal human rights.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Doghouse, His Smallest Architectural Creation (1956)

in Architecture, History | July 6th, 2022

On your first day in architecture school, you have to design a doghouse. Having never set foot inside an architecture school, I concede that the previous sentence may well be false, but you have to admit that it sounds plausible. As the simplest form of shelter in common use across the world, the humble doghouse presents to an aspiring architect the most basic possible test. If you can’t build one, what business do you have building anything else? Yet it was with characteristic idiosyncrasy that Frank Lloyd Wright, that most famous of all American architects, took on the project of a doghouse only toward the end of his long life and career.

Images courtesy of the Marin County Civic Center

“ ‘Eddie’s House’ is a doghouse designed gratis by Wright in 1956 to complement a Usonian-style house he built on commission for Robert and Gloria Berger between 1950 and 1951, in the Marin County town of San Anselmo, California,” writes Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp. The commission, such as it was, came from the Bergers’ twelve-year-old son Jim. “I would appreciate it if you would design me a doghouse, which would be easy to build, but would go with our house,” he wrote to Wright, specifying Eddie’s dimensions and offering compensation in the form of his paper-route money.

“A house for Eddie is an opportunity,” replied the architect, and the following year — after finishing up the previous project that had delayed him, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — he sent Jim a literal back-of-the-envelope diagram. As explained in the brief video from Marin County’s Youtube channel above, that was standard Wright practice: the architect’s rough drawings were then converted into proper plans by his staff at Taliesin. “I wanted it to be easy,” says the grown-up Berger. “It wasn’t. It was a nightmare, so my dad built it.” And as for Eddie, he never actually slept in it.

The Bergers’ golden retriever “certainly wouldn’t be the first of Wright’s clients to be disappointed by some of the architect’s shortcomings,” writes Sharp. “Apparently, as with many of Wright’s designs, the roof to Eddie’s House leaked.” Nevertheless, it’s become a beloved addition to the Wright canon since Berger rebuilt it for Michael Miner’s Romanza: A Frank Lloyd Wright Documentary and subsequently donated it to the county. To this day, the replica of Wright’s smallest work remains on display inside his largest one: the Marin Civic Center, a slightly later and much more ambitious building, but one not entirely lacking in family resemblance to Eddie’s House.

via Hyperallergic

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Watch the Hugely-Ambitious Soviet Film Adaptation of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

in Film | July 5th, 2022

On the question of whether novels can successfully be turned into films, the cinephile jury remains out. In the best cases a filmmaker takes a literary work and reinvents it almost entirely in accordance with his own vision, which usually requires a book of modest or unrealized ambitions. This method wouldn’t do, in other words, for War and Peace. Yet Tolstoy’s epic novel, whose sheer historical, dramatic, and philosophical scope has made it one of the most acclaimed works in the history of literature, has been adapted over and over again: for radio, for the stage, as a 22-minute Yes song, and at least four times for the screen.

The first War and Peace film, directed by and starring the pioneering Russian filmmaker Vladimir Gardin, appeared in 1915. Japanese activist filmmaker Fumio Kamei came out with his own version just over three decades later. Only in the nineteen-fifties, with large-scale literary adaptation still in vogue, did the mighty hand of Hollywood take up the book. The project went back to 1941, when producer Alexander Korda tried to put it together under the direction of Orson Welles, fresh off Citizen Kane.

For better or worse, Welles’ version would surely have proven more memorable than the one that opened in 1956: King Vidor’s War and Peace expediently hacked out great swathes of Tolstoy’s novel, resulting in a lush but essentially unfaithful adaptation. This was still early in the Cold War, a struggle conducted through the amassing of soft power as well as hard. “It is a matter of honor for the Soviet cinema industry,” declared an open letter published in dthe Soviet press, “to produce a picture which will surpass the American-Italian one in its artistic merit and authenticity.”

The gears of the Soviet Ministry of Culture were already turning to get a superior War and Peace film into production — superior in scale, but far superior in fealty to Tolstoy’s words. This put a formidable challenge in front of Sergei Bondarchuk, who was selected as its director and who, like Gardin before him, eventually cast himself in the starring role of Count Pyotr “Pierre” Kirillovich Bezukhov. As a production of Mosfilm, national studio of the Soviet Union, War and Peace could marshal an unheard-of volume of resources to put early nineteenth-century Russia onscreen. Its furniture, fixtures, and other objects came from more than forty museums, and its thousands of uniforms and pieces of military hardware from the Napoleonic Wars were recreated by hand.

The most expensive production ever made in the Soviet Union, War and Peace was also rumored to be the most expensive production in the history of world cinema to date. With a total runtime exceeding seven hours, it was released in four parts throughout 1966 an 1967. Now, thanks to Mosfilm’s Youtube channel, you can watch them all free on Youtube. 55 years later, its production values still radiate from each and every frame, something you can appreciate even if you know nothing more of War and Peace than that — as a non-Russian filmmaker of comparatively modest production sensibilities once said — it’s about Russia.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Mama Cass and John Denver Sing a Lovely Duet of “Leaving On a Jet Plane” (1972)

in Music, Politics | July 5th, 2022

My issue is that it’s all very well to sit back and complain but when it’s your country you have a responsibility. — Cass Elliot

What could be more heavenly than Cass Elliot of The Mamas & The Papas and singer-songwriter John Denver harmonizing on Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” a tune many conceived of as a protest to the Vietnam War, owing largely to folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version.

Maybe some voter registration added to the mix?

Before breaking into their duet on the late night TV musical variety show The Midnight Special, Denver invited Mama Cass to share a few words on her efforts to get out the vote in a presidential election year:

I’ve been traveling around the country for the past year or so, talking on a lot of college campuses and trying to find out exactly what people are thinking, and the thing that’s impressed me the most is, there is still in this country, believe it or not, after all the talk, a tremendous amount of apathy on the part of people who maybe don’t like the way things are going and maybe want to change it, but don’t do anything about it, y’know?

It was August 19, 1972. The war in Vietnam and the upcoming contest between President Richard Nixon and his Democratic challenger George McGovern were the top stories. June’s Watergate break in was a mounting concern.

Earlier in the day, the New York Times reported that “Senator George McGovern expects (South Vietnamese) President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and his “cohorts” to flee Saigon into exile and a Communist-dominated coalition to take control of South Vietnam if Mr. McGovern is elected President of the United States on Nov. 7.”

Cass Elliot, a McGovern supporter, had become much more vocal about her political activism following the 1968 break up of The Mamas & The Papas, as in this interview with Rolling Stone:

I think everybody who has a brain should get involved in politics. Working within. Not criticizing it from the outside. Become an active participant, no matter how feeble you think the effort is. I saw in the Democratic Convention in Chicago that there were more people interested in what I was interested in than I believed possible. It made me want to work. It made me feel my opinion and ideas were not futile, that there would be room in an organized movement of politics for me to voice myself.

She remained diplomatic on the Midnight Special, telling viewers that “I don’t think it’s so important who you vote for, you vote for who you believe in, but the important thing is to vote,” though it’s hard to imagine that anyone tuning in from home would mistake her for a Nixon gal.

Earlier in the year she had ushered at the Four For McGovern fundraising concert at the LA Forum, was in the audience at Madison Square Warren Beatty’s Together for McGovern concert Garden, and attended a party Americans Abroad for McGovern held in London.

Shortly after the election (SPOILER: Her man lost), during an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, above, she intimated that she might be open to a career shift:

I think I would like to be a Senator or something in twenty years. I don’t think I really know enough yet. I’m just 30 now and I wouldn’t even be eligible to run for office for another five years. But I have a lot of feelings about things. I know the way I would like to see things for this country and in my travels, when I talk to people, everybody wants pretty much the same thing: peace, enough jobs, no poverty and good education. And I’ve learned a lot. It’s funny. So many people in show business go into politics, and I used to say ‘What the heck do they know about it?’ But when you travel around, you really do get to feel–not to be cliche–the pulse of the country and what people want. I’m concerned and it’s not good to be unconcerned and just sit there.

Listening to her discuss Watergate during her final visit to The Mike Douglas Show, shortly before her 1974 death, really makes us wish she was still here with us.

What we wouldn’t give to hear this outspoken political observer’s take on the situation our country now finds itself in, especially with another five decades of experience under her belt.

Perhaps there’s an alternate universe in which Cass Elliot is President.

If you haven’t yet registered to vote, now would be a great time to do so. It may not be too late to participate in your state’s primary elections. You know that’s what Cass would have wanted.

Joni Mitchell Sings an Achingly Pretty Version of “Both Sides Now” on the Mama Cass TV Show (1969)

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlikely Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Timeline of World War II (Month by Month) Told With Scenes Made from Dozens of WWII Movies

in Film, History | July 4th, 2022

We all learned a bit about the Second World War in school, or perhaps more than a bit. But for a great many of us, what we know of that period of history comes less from teachers and textbooks than it does from movies. World War II as a cinematic genre has existed since the early years of World War II itself, and at this point it has produced so many films that not even the most avid historically-minded cinephile could watch them all. Many such pictures, of course, take enormous liberties with their source material. But if you concentrate on just the most accurate parts of the most acclaimed movies about World War II, you can piece together a reasonably truthful portrayal of its events.

Such is the premise, at any rate, of the video above, “Timeline of WW2 in Films.” Created by Youtuber Salokin, it arranges clips from dozens of films released over the past half-century — Patton, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Battle of Britain, Dunkirk — in historical order.

Opening with footage from Roman Polanski’s The Pianist referring to the invasion of Poland in September 1939, it goes on to cover that year by drawing from the depiction of Soviet-Japanese border conflicts like the Battles of Khalkhin Go and Nomonhan in Kang Je-gyu’s My Way, then from the depiction of the titular fights on the Karelian Isthmus in Pekka Parikka’s The Winter War.

As Korean and Finnish productions, respectively, My Way and The Winter War offer perspectives on World War II different from the American one taken by Hollywood movies — Hollywood having once been the only motion-picture industry with the resources to re-create the war in a convincing manner. But the development of global film production in recent decades has also given rise to widely seen World War II movies from countries like Australia, Germany, Denmark, and Russia, to name a few countries whose films appear in this video. Not all of them agree perfectly with history as taught in the United States, but then, American World War II movie enthusiasts have unresolvable conflicts of their own: do you prefer Saving Private Ryan, for instance, or The Thin Red Line?

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

Watch Footage of the Allies Rolling Through a Defeated German Town in April, 1945: Restored & Colorized with AI

Time Travel Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remarkably High-Quality 1940s Video

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless: How World War II Changed Cinema & Helped Create the French New Wave

Quentin Tarantino’s World War II Reading List

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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The Timeline of World War II (Month by Month) Told With Scenes Made from Dozens of WWII Movies

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