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The Venus de Milo is one of art’s most widely recognized female forms.
The Mona Lisa may be the first stop on many Louvre visitors’ agendas, but Venus, by virtue of being unclothed, sculptural, and prominently displayed, lends herself beautifully to all manner of souvenirs, both respectful and profane.
Renoir is that rare bird who was impervious to her 6’7” charms, describing her as the “big gendarme.” His own Venus, sculpted with the help of an assistant nearly 100 years after the Venus de Milo joined the Louvre’s collection, appears much meatier throughout the hip and thigh region. Her celebrity cannot hold a candle to that of her armless sister.
In the Vox Almanac episode above, host Phil Edwards delves into the Venus de Milo’s appeal, taking a less delirious approach than sculptor Auguste Rodin, who rhapsodized:
…thou, thou art alive, and thy thoughts are the thoughts of a woman, not of some strange, superior being, artificial and imaginary. Thou art made of truth alone, outside of which there is neither strength nor beauty. It is thy sincerity to nature which makes thee all powerful, because nature appeals to all men. Thou art the familiar companion, the woman that each believes he knows, but that no man has ever understood, the wisest not more than the simple. Who understands the trees? Who can comprehend the light?
Edwards opts instead for a Sharpie and a tiny 3‑D printed model, which he marks up like a plastic surgeon, drawing viewers’ attention to the missing bits.
The arms, we know.
Also her earlobes, most likely removed by looters eager to make off with her jewelry.
One of her massive marble feet (a man’s size 15) is missing.
Interestingly, the plinth was among the items discovered by accident on the Greek island of Milos in 1820, along with two pillars topped with busts of Hercules and Hermes, the bisected Venus, and assorted marble fragments, including — maybe — an upper arm and hand holding a round object (a golden apple, mayhaps?)
What he’s most interested in is that plinth, which would have given the lie to the long-standing assertion that the Venus de Milo was created in the Classical era.
This incorrect designation made the Louvre’s newest resident a most welcome replacement for the loot France had been compelled to return to the Vatican in the wake of Napoleon’s first abdication.
The plinth may have been “lost” under mysterious circumstances, but its inscription was preserved in a sketch by A. Debay, whose father had been a student of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon’s now-banished First Painter, a Neo-Classicist.
(David’s final painting, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces, completed a couple of years after Venus de Milo was installed in the Louvre, was considered a bust.)
Debay’s faithful recreation of the plinth’s inscription as part of his study of the Venus de Milo offers clues as to her creator — “ …andros son of …enides citizen of …ioch at Meander made.”
It also dates her creation to 150–50 BCE, corroborating notes French naval officer Jules d’Urville had made in Greece weeks after the discovery.
The birth of this Venus should have been attributed to the Hellenistic, not Classical period.
Had her true author been known, she likely would’ve been locked away in the museum’s archive, if not sold off. Hellenistic art had by then been denigrated by Renaissance scholars who re-conceived it in anti-classical terms, finding in its expressive, experimental form and emotional content a provocative realism that defied everything their era stood for: modesty, intellect, and equanimity…It helped that the Venus de Milo possessed several classical attributes. Her strong profile, short upper lip, and smooth features, for example, were in keeping with Classical figural conventions, as was the continuous line connecting her nose and forehead. The partially-draped figure with its attenuated silhouette – which the Regency fashion of the day imitated with its empire bust-line – also recalled classical sculptures of Aphrodite, and her Roman counterpart, Venus. Yet despite all these classical identifiers, the Venus de Milo flaunted a definitive Hellenistic influence in her provocatively low-slung drapery, high waist line, and curve-enhancing contrapposto—far more sensual and exaggerated than classical ideals allowed.
It took the Louvre over a hundred years to come clean as to its star sculpture’s true provenance.
What happened to the plinth remains anyone’s guess.
The only mystery the museum’s website seems concerned with is one of identity — is she Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, or Poseidon’s wife, Amphitrite, the sea goddess worshipped on the island on which she was discovered?
Haruki Murakami has been famous as a novelist since the 1980s. But for a decade or two now, he’s become increasingly well known around the world as a novelist who runs. The English-speaking world’s awareness of Murakami’s roadwork habit goes back at least as far as 2004, when the Paris Review published an Art of Fiction interview with him. Asked by interviewer John Ray to describe the structure of his typical workday, Murakami replied as follows:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
This stark physical departure from the popular notion of literary work drew attention. Truer to writerly stereotype was the Murakami of the early 1980s, when he turned pro as a novelist after closing the jazz bar he’d owned in Tokyo. “Once I was sitting at a desk writing all day I started putting on the pounds,” he remembers in The New Yorker. “I was also smoking too much — sixty cigarettes a day. My fingers were yellow, and my body reeked of smoke.” Aware that something had to change, Murakami performed an experiment on himself: “I decided to start running every day because I wanted to see what would happen. I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything. And in the end I think it was good for me, because I became tough.”
Adherence to such a lifestyle, as Murakami tells it, has enabled him to write all his novels since, including hits like Norwegian Wood,The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore. (On some level, it also reflects his protagonists’ tendency to make transformative leaps from one version of reality into another.) Its rigor has surely contributed to the discipline necessary for the rest of his output as well: translation into his native Japanese of works including The Great Gatsby, but also large quantities of first-person writing on his own interests and everyday life. Protective of his reputation in English, Murakami has allowed almost none of the latter to be published in this language.
But in light of the voracious consumption of self-improvement literature in the English-speaking world, and especially in America, translation of his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running must have been an irresistible proposition. “I’ve never recommended running to others,” Murakami writes in The New Yorker piece, which is drawn from the book. “If someone has an interest in long-distance running, he’ll start running on his own. If he’s not interested in it, no amount of persuasion will make any difference.” For some, Murakami’s example has been enough: take the writer-vlogger Mel Torrefranca, who documented her attempt to follow his example for a week. For her, a week was enough; for Murakami, who’s been running-while-writing for nearly forty years now, there could be no other way.
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 Hitchcockian mode of filmmaking involves the maximum use of suspense to keep viewers in a heightened state of anxiety. “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” Hitchcock himself once said. How did he create suspense? In the interview clip above from 1973, Hitchcock explains how his films “convey visually certain elements in storytelling that transfers itself to the mind of the audience, whereas other films make visual statements, so that the audience becomes a spectator.” Turning audiences into spectators, he says, accounts for the excesses of blood and gore onscreen in horror films: “there’s no subtlety.” The critique goes beyond squeamishness. In Hitchcock, spectacles are secondary, at best, to information.
Visual information also takes precedence over exposition or narrative coherence in Hitchcock’s creation of suspense. “The open-palmed hand reaching for the door, the simulated fall down the staircase, the whorling retreat of the camera from a dead woman’s face,” Samuel Medina writes at Metropolis. “These stark snippets imbue the films with their uncanny allure and imprint themselves in the mind of the spectator much more effectively than any of the master’s convoluted plots.”
Hitchcock does not deploy images to shock, he says, but to make the audience complicit in the construction of the film. “I prefer to suggest something and let the audience figure it out,” he says. “The big difference between suspense and shock or surprise is that in order to get suspense, you provide the audience with a certain amount of information and leave the rest of it to their own imagination.”
Hitchcock’s preferred techniques of conveying information often rely on what feminist scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey famously called “the male gaze” in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” She revised and softened her critique in a recent collection, writing, for example, that Vertigo arrived at a time of “melancholic liberation” for the Hollywood studio system, “as the professional world of the masters faced its own end.” Hitchcock might have striven for relevance by trying to revive his heyday. Instead, he returned to the cinematic language with which he’d begun his career in the 1920s as a set designer for silent German Expressionist films.
Like Rear Window, another of the director’s vehicles built around a male character’s obsessive surveillance of women, Vertigo both enacts and subverts its subject. “On one level,” Koraljka Suton writes at Cinephilia and Beyond, the film is “about the factuality of the unrelenting male gaze that dominates and dictates both our shared collective reality…. But it should also be viewed as a clever deconstruction of it.” What does Hitchcock’s use, and subversion, of the voyeuristic male gaze have to do with suspense? The two are perhaps inseparable in Hitchcockian cinema.
In an earlier, 1970, interview, the director offered another distinction: “Mystery is when the spectator knows less than the characters in the movie. Suspense is when the spectator knows more than the characters” — usually because they have been spying on the characters. Such illicit knowledge reverses the gaze. Neither able to remain aloof nor stop the horrors they see coming, “the audience is made aware of itself as audience,” writes Popmatters, “and they are forced to wonder at their own existence as spectacle.” Or as Hitchcock put it in his inimitable way, “Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
I had always wanted to see Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” in person and many years ago I got a chance when I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, two dozen other people, who also wanted that chance, were there too, and my vision of Van Gogh’s masterpiece was one behind a phalanx of cell phones all trying to grab a “been there, done that” pic. Fortunately, the video above from the Great Art Explained YouTube channel takes you closer to the painting that an in-person viewing could without setting off an alarm. In 15 minutes, narrator/creator James Payne lays out the history, the creation, and the technique of “Starry Night” in great detail.
Some of the key takeaways from the video include:
1. A re-evaluation of asylums in the 19th century. While certainly many asylums for those with mental illness were despairing places, not so the small one in Saint-Rémy, in Provence. Though there were bars on the windows, Van Gogh’s views were of lush countryside and the small town nearby; views that would soon become the subject of his paintings. And the doctors realized that painting, and the freedom to work on his art, was the best thing for Van Gogh’s mental health. During his one-year stay at the asylum, he finished at least 150 paintings. “The Starry Night,” painted on June 18, 1889, was one of them.
But there were many masterpieces before that, including “Irises,” painted in the asylum’s walled garden before lunch one day; and many of the surrounding countryside once doctors decided he was safe to be let out alone.
2. The formative effect of Impressionism and Japanese ukiyo‑e on his work. From Monet and others, Van Gogh took the attention to natural light, the visible brushstrokes, and the pointillist coloring that would form new colors in the viewer’s eye. From the Japanese he took bold, bright colors and radical composition.
We can pinpoint the exact time and date of “Starry Night” and see what Van Gogh saw from his window (thanks to Griffith Park Observatory). And what we learn is…the man was an artist. He collaged the best bits of what he wanted us to see, from constellation and planets, to the village below (taken from a different viewpoint), to the cypress tree, which he brought forward in the composition. Van Gogh was taking a cue from Paul Gauguin, who encouraged him to use his imagination more, and finding the asylum led to a more active and more critical way of thinking about painting.
3. The “unappreciated-in-his-lifetime” myth. Yes, Van Gogh died too young. But no, he wasn’t an obscure artist. As Payne sends us off, he points out that Van Gogh was very much a part of the impressionist art scene, showed his paintings *and* sold them, and even had critics write about him. So, it might be better to call him a rising star, snuffed out too early. We can only wonder where he would have gone in his art, and what he would have created.
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.
Ford and Wayne, Hitchcock and Stewart, Truffaut and Léaud, Scorsese and De Niro: these are just a few of film history’s most beloved collaborations between a director and an actor who never threatened to murder one another. If we remove that qualifier, however, the list lengthens to include the work of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. Between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, Herzog directed Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde — to the extent, in any case, that the volatile Kinski was directable at all. The clip above captures just one of his explosions, this one on the set of Fitzcarraldo.
“By some rare chance, I was not the brunt of it this time,” Herzog says over the footage, which comes from his documentary on Kinski, My Best Fiend. “I didn’t bother to interfere because Kinski, compared with his other outbreaks, seemed rather mild.” But the star’s ravings proved “a real problem for the Indians, who solved their conflicts in a totally different manner.”
For the production had recruited a number of native locals, operating as it was in the Peruvian jungle for maximum realism. (Its story of an aspiring rubber baron dragging a steamship over a hill also necessitated, at Herzog’s insistence, dragging a real steamship over a real hill.) At one point a chief offered to kill Kinski, but Herzog had to turn him down. There was a movie to finish, and he’d already shot almost half of itonce, with Jason Robards in the title role, but when Robards came down with dysentery he was forced to re-cast and re-shoot.
A normal filmmaker would perhaps hesitate to introduce a notoriously erratic actor into an already difficult production — but then, Herzog is hardly a normal filmmaker. He was also one of the few directors who could work with Kinski, the two having known each other since they lived in the same boarding house as teenagers. (In My Best Fiend, Herzog remembers the young Kinski locking himself in the bathroom for two days and tearing it apart.) While shooting Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog had employed an unorthodox technique to put an end to Kinski’s meltdowns: pulling out a gun. “You will have eight bullets through your head, and the last one is going to be for me,” he later recalled telling Kinski in an interview with Terry Gross. “So the bastard somehow realized that this was not a joke anymore.” All such director-actor collaborations hinge on the former knowing how to get the best performance out of the latter — by any mean necessary.
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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Insofar as something is a TV hit at all these days, the small-town Pennsylvania murder mystery starring Kate Winslet seems to qualify, but what distinguishes it from the many many other crime dramas on TV? Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt discuss the plot structure, casting, and other creative choices and try to figure out how the show relates to Broadchurch, The Undoing, etc. Should there be a season two?
Here are a few of the articles that fed the discussion:
When The Sopranos drew to a close fourteen years ago, its ambiguous yet somehow definitive final scene hardly promised a continuation of the New Jersey mafia saga. Since then, fans have had to make do with reflections, histories, and exegeses, up to and including re-watch podcasts hosted by the actors themselves. As time has passed the show has only drawn higher and higher acclaim, which can’t be said about every product of the ongoing “golden age of television drama” The Sopranos got started. A return to the well was perhaps inevitable, and indeed has just been announced: The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film co-written by David Chase, the creator credited with contributing to the original series a significant portion of its genius.
Onscreen, The Sopranos drew its power from one Soprano above all: local mob boss Tony Soprano, as portrayed by James Gandolfini in what has been ranked among the greatest screen acting achievements of all time. Whether or not Tony survived that final scene, Gandolfini died in 2013, and ever since it has been impossible to imagine any other actor portraying the character — or at least portraying the character in a modern-day setting.
Telling the story of a Tony Soprano in his youth, with a young actor necessarily playing him, has remained a viable proposition. Into that role, for the 1960s and 70s-set The Many Saints of Newark, has stepped Gandolfini’s real-life son Michael.
For the then-20-year-old Michael Gandolfini, taking over his father’s role had to be a daunting prospect, especially since he’d never seen The Sopranos before. At least one binge-watch of the series (among other rigorous forms of preparation) later, he delivered the performance of which you can take a first look in The Many Saints of Newark’s new trailer above. “As rival gangs try to wrest control from the DiMeo crime family in the race-torn city of Newark,” Consequence Film’s Ben Kaye writes of its story, the young Anthony Soprano, a promising but indifferent student with an eye on college, “gets swept up in the violence and crime by his uncle Dickie Moltisanti.” As Sopranos fans know full well, “Anthony becomes the feared mob head Tony Soprano and treats Dickie’s son, Christopher, as his protégé.” Evidently, an antihero of Tony’s stature is made, not born.
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.
How does one define a masterpiece? Is it personally subjective, or it is just another word we use for status symbols? In an essay on bass player Jaco Pastorius’ 1976 self-titled debut album, scholar Uri González offers an older definition: “in the old European guild system, the aspiring journeyman was expected to create a piece of handicraft of the highest quality in order to reach the status of ‘master.’ One was then officially allowed to join the guild and to take pupils under tutelage.”
Pastorius’ debut album certified him as a master musician; he leapt from “anonymity to jazz stardom, earning admiration both from the average musically uneducated concert-goer to the hippest jazz cat,” and he gained a following among an “ever growing number of adept students that, still today, study his solos, licks, compositions and arrangements.” Pastorius’ solo on his version of the Charlie Parker tune “Donna Lee,” especially, helped redefine the instrument by, first, inventing the electric bass solo.
The “Donna Lee” solo, Pat Metheny writes, is “one of the freshest looks at how to play on a well traveled set of chord changes in recent jazz history — not to mention that it’s just about the hippest start to a debut album in the history of recorded music.”
Whether you like Jaco Pastorius’ music or not, it’s beyond question that his playing changed musical history through a transformative approach to the instrument. In the video at the top, producer Rick Beato explains the importance of the “Donna Lee” solo, an interpretation of a jazz standard played on a fretless bass Pastorius made himself, and creating a sound no one had heard before.
Beato’s is a technical explanation for those with a background in music theory, and it highlights just how intimidating Pastorius’ playing can be for musicians and non-musicians alike. But technique, as Herbie Hancock noted in a blurb on Jaco Pastorius, means little without the musical sensibilities that move people to care, and Pastorius had it in abundance. “He had this wide, fat swath of a sound,” wrote one of his most famous collaborators, Joni Mitchell, in tribute. “He was an innovator…. He was changing the bottom end of the time, and he knew it.”
One of those changes, from “Donna Lee” to the end of Pastorius’ tumultuous life and career in 1987 involved moving the electric bass into a melodic role it had not played before. This not only meant leaving the lower root notes, but also crafting a bright, round, lively tone that for those upper registers. “In the Sixties and Seventies,” writes Mitchell, “you had this dead, distant bass sound. I didn’t care for it. And the other thing was, I had started to think, ‘Why couldn’t the bass leave the bottom sometimes and go up and play in the midrange and then return?’” She found the answer to her questions in Jaco.
Hear Pastorius’ original recording of “Donna Lee” further up, and see a live version from 1982 above to take in what Mitchell called his “joie de vivre.” The song, which already had a venerable jazz history, is now considered, González writes, “the quintessential bass players’ manifesto.” Or, as conga player Don Alias, the only accompanist during Pastorius’ famous solo, put it, “every bass player I know can now cut ‘Donna Lee’ thanks to Jaco.”
Georges Méliès directed, produced, edited, and starred in over 500 films between 1896 and 1913, most of them brimming with special effects the filmmaker himself invented. Before Méliès, such things as split screens, dissolves, and double exposures did not exist. After him, they were critical to cinema’s vocabulary, and the image of a rocket in the Moon’s eye became iconic. Méliès shocked, scared, and delighted popular audiences while also earning recognition from the avant garde. “The Surrealists would hail him as a great poet,” writes Darrah O’Donohue at Senses of Cinema, “in particular his erasure or subversion of boundaries.” Critics would later call him the first auteur.
Méliès originally set out to become a stage illusionist. He performed in — and purchased, in 1888 — famous magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin’s theater, where he became obsessed with film in 1895 at a private demonstration of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph. When they refused to sell him one, he hunted down another projector — Robert W. Paul’s animatograph — and modified it to work as a camera he called the “coffee grinder” and “machine gun.”
Noisy cameras were not a serious issue in the age of silent film, but Méliès was perpetually dissatisfied with his equipment and strove to improve at every turn while learning to make better cinematic illusions, 194 of which you can watch for free in chronological order in this YouTube playlist. The playlist appears in full at the bottom of this post.
In an autobiographical sketch (ghostwritten in the third person for a journalist tasked with compiling a “dictionary of illustrious men”), Méliès describes himself “an engineer of great precision” and “ingenious by nature.” Modest, he was not, but the great showman was not wrong about his critical importance to early film. He describes the difficulties in detail, prefacing them with a statement about the mechanical heroism of the first filmmakers.
Those who today seek to make motion pictures will find all the required equipment available, complete and perfected: all they need is the necessary funds. They cannot begin to imagine the difficulties against which the creators of this industry had to struggle, at a time when no such material yet existed and when each innovator kept their work and research a closely guarded secret. Therefore Méliès, just like Pathé, Gaumont and others, was only able to progress by making numerous machines, subsequently abandoned and replaced by others which were themselves in due course replaced.
Celebrated as the ultimate fantasist in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Méliès now presides over one of cinema’s great ironies. As he helped invent cinema, he also invented the special effects-laden genre film — the sort of thing Scorsese has denied the status of cinematic art. Méliès directed the first horror film, The Haunted Castle (above) and first adaptation of Cinderella (top). He built the first film studio in Europe while making and starring in hundreds of fantasies, ranging from one minute to 40 minutes. While computers do most of the labor in the kinds of genre films we’re used to seeing now, it’s safe to say, for better or worse, that without Méliès, there would be noMarvel Universe.
But without Méliès, there would also be no Scorsese, as he says himself: “Méliès,” argues the director of such gritty neo-realist films as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, “invented everything.” His technological innovations are only a small part of his influence. “The locked room, containing forbidden sights, darkened but illumined,” O’Donohue observes, “becomes the metaphor for Méliès’ cinema, a manifestation of private desires in a public or communal medium. The flat theatricality of the social world gives way to ‘effects,’ vision, dreams, nightmares, desires, fears, perversions — the releasing of the unconscious and the inner life.” Find films by Méliès in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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