The early trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho above describes the film as “the picture you MUST see from the beginning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, given how early in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a policy: “Every theatre manager, everywhere, has been instructed to admit no one after the start of each performance of Psycho,” declares Hitchcock himself in its print advertisements. “We said no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States or the Queen of England (God bless her).” Even in 1960, ordinary moviegoers still had the habit of entering and leaving the theater whenever they pleased. With Psycho’s marketing campaign, Hitchcock meant to alter their relationship to cinema itself.
As for the trailer’s form and content, audiences would never have seen anything like it before. Containing no actual footage from the film — and indeed, constituting something of a short film itself — it instead offers a tour of its main locations personally guided by Hitchcock. Those are, of course, the Bates Motel and its proprietor’s house, “which is, if I may say so, a little more sinister looking, less innocent-looking than the motel itself. And in this house, the most dire, horrible events took place.”
In his telling, these buildings are not film sets, but the genuine sites of heinous crimes, about which he proves only too happy to provide suggestive details. We complain that today’s trailers “give the movie away,” and that seems to be Hitchcock’s enterprise here.
But after these six minutes, what, in a world that had yet to see Psycho, would you really know about the movie? It would seem to involve some sort of grisly murders, and you’d surely be dying, as it were, to know of what sort and how grisly. Who, moreover, could fail to be startled and intrigued by Hitchcock’s sudden reveal of a screaming blonde woman behind the motel-room shower curtain? Hitch fans might have recognized her as Vera Miles, who’d been in The Wrong Man in 1956 and the first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents the next year. They might also have noticed the name of no less a movie star than Janet Leigh, and wondered what she was doing in such a sensationalistic-looking genre picture. One thing is certain: when they finally did take their seat for Psycho — before showtime, of course — they had no idea what they were in for.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Writing in his 1995 diary about his seminal ambient album Music for Airports, Eno remembered his initial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying–that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, ‘Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’”
Created in 1978 from seconds-long tape loops from a much longer improv session with musicians including Robert Wyatt, Music for Airports started the idea of slow, meditative music that abandoned typical major and minor scales, brought in melodic ambiguity, and began the exploration of sounds that were designed to exist somewhere in the background, beyond the scope of full attention.
For those who think 50 minutes is too short and those piano notes too recognizable, may we suggest this 6‑hour, time-stretched version of the album, created by YouTube user “Slow Motion TV.” The tonal field is the same, but now the notes are no attack, all decay. It’s granular as hell, but you could imagine the whole piece unspooling unnoticed in a terminal while a flight is delayed for the third time. (Maybe that’s when the acceptance of death happens, when you’ve given up on ever getting home?)
Unlike Music for Films, which featured several tracks Eno had given to filmmakers like Derek Jarman, it took some time for Music for Airports to be realized in its intended location: being piped in at a terminal at La Guardia, New York, sometime in the 1980s. And that was just a one-time thing.
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The album seemed destined for personal use only, but then in 1997 the modern ensemble Bang on a Can played it live, translating the randomness of out-of-sync tape loops into music notation. Over the years they’ve performed it at airports in Brussels, the Netherlands and Liverpool, and in 2015 the group brought it to Terminal 2 of San Diego International. Writing for KCET, Alex Zaragoza reported that “crying babies, echoes of rolling suitcases and boarding passes serving as tickets to the concert failed to remind anyone that they were, indeed, at one of the busiest airports in the country. Even the telltale announcements were there: Airport security is everyone’s responsibility. Do not leave bags unattended.”
As site-specific multi-media art builds popularity in the 21st century with increasingly cheaper and smaller technology, we might hope to hear ambient drones, and not classic rock or pop, in more and more landscapes.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Apart from the likes of bravo and pizza, graffiti must be one of the first Italian words that English-speakers learn in everyday life. As for why the English word comes directly from the Italian, perhaps it has something to do with the history of writing on the walls — a history that, in Western civilization, stretches at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire. The Fire of Learning video above offers a selection of translated pieces of the more than 11,000 pieces of ancient Roman graffiti found etched into the preserved walls of Pompeii: “Marcus loves Spedusa”; “Phileros is a eunuch”; “Secundus took a crap here” (written three times); “Atimetus got me pregnant”; and “On April 19th, I made bread.”
Crude though some of these may sound, the narrator emphasizes that “many, many of the prominent pieces of graffiti, especially in Pompeii, are too sexual or violent to show here,” comparing their sensibility to that of “a high-school bathroom stall.” You can read more of them at The Ancient Graffiti Project, whose archive is browsable through categories like “love,”“poetry,”“food,” and “gladiators” (as decent a summary as any of life in ancient Rome).
Romans didn’t just write on the walls — a practice that seems to have been encouraged, at least in some places — they also drew on them, as evidenced by what you can see in the figural graffiti section, as well as the examples in the video.
Another rich archive of ancient graffiti comes from a surprising location: the Egyptian pyramids, then as now a major tourist attraction. Rather than posting their reviews of the attraction on the internet, in our twenty-first-century manner, ancient Roman tourists wrote directly on its surface. “I visited and did not like anything except the sarcophagus,” says one inscription; “I can not read the hieroglyphics,” complains another, in a manner that may sound awfully familiar these millennia later. “We have urinated in our beds,” declares another piece of writing, discovered on the door of a Pompeii inn. “Host, I admit we should not have done this. If you ask why? There was no chamber pot.” Consider it confirmed: the ancient world, too, had Airbnb guests.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom– holds the Guinness World Record for being the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. It’s literally a movie made with atoms, created by IBM nanophysicists who have “used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules, all in the pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times.” If you’re wondering what that means exactly, then I’d encourage you to watch the behind-the-scenes documentary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the laboratories — where IBM scientists reveal how they move 5,000 molecules around, creating a story frame by frame. As you watch the documentary, you’ll realize how far nanotechnology has come since Richard Feynman laid the conceptual foundations for the field in 1959.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having originated in Asia, that religion — or philosophy, or way of life, or whatever you prefer to call it — now has adherents all over the world. Modern-day Buddhists need not make an arduous journey in order to undertake an even more arduous course of study under a recognized master; nor are the forms of Buddhism they practice always recognizable to the layman. What’s more surprising is that the transplantation into and hybridization with other cultures that has brought about so many novel strains of Buddhism was going on even in the ancient world.
Take, for example, the “Greco-Buddhism” described in the Religion for Breakfast video above, the story of which involves a variety of fascinating figures both universally known and relatively obscure. The most famous of all of them would be Alexander the Great, who, as host Andrew Henry puts it, “conquered a massive empire stretching from Greece across central Asia all the way to the Indus River, Hellenizing the populations along the way.”
But “the cultural exchange didn’t just go one way,” as evidenced by the still-new Buddhist religion also spreading in the other direction, illustrated by pieces of text and works of art clearly shaped by both civilizational currents.
Other major players in Greco-Buddhism include the philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, who traveled with Alexander and took ideas of the suspension of judgment from India’s “gymnosophists”; Ashoka, emperor of the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC, an avowed Buddhist who renounced violence for compassion (and proselytization); and King Menander, “the most famous Greek who converted to Buddhism,” who appears as a character in an early Buddhist text. It can still be difficult to say for sure exactly who believed what in that period, but it’s not hard to identify resonances between Buddhist principles, broadly speaking, and those of such widely known ancient Greek schools of thought as Stoicism. Both of those belief systems now happen to have a good deal of currency in Silicon Valley, though what legacy they’ll leave to be discovered in its ruins a couple millennia from now remains to be seen.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the literary zaniness of The Muppet Show and the scientific enthusiasm of Cosmos. The “ship of the imagination” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot may in fact owe something to the episode above, one of nine, directed by none other than It’s A Wonderful Life’s Frank Capra. “Strap on your wits and hop on your magic carpet,” begins the special, “You’ve got one, you know: Your imagination.” As a guide for our imagination, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Raysenlists the humanities—specifically three puppets representing Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and, somewhat incongruously for its detective theme, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who plays the foil as an incurious spoilsport. The show’s host, Frank Baxter (“Dr. Research”) was actually a professor of English at UCLA and appears here with Richard Carlson, explaining scientific concepts with confidence.
The one-hour films became very popular as tools of science education, but there are good reasons—other than their datedness or Dr. Baxter’s expertise—to approach them critically. At times, the degree of speculation indulged by Baxter and the writers strains credulity. For example, writes Geoff Alexander in Academic Films for the Classroom: A History, 1958’s The Unchained Goddess (above) “introduces the viewer to bizarre concepts such as the possibility of ‘steering’ hurricanes away from land by creating bio-hazards such as ocean borne oil-slicks and introducing oil-based ocean fires.” These grim, fossil fuel industry-friendly scenarios nonetheless openly acknowledged the possibility of man-made climate change and looked forward to solar energy.
Along with some dystopian weirdness, the series also contains a good deal of explicit Christian proselytizing, thanks to Capra. As a condition for taking the job, “the renowned director would be allowed to embed religious messages in the films.” As Capra himself said to AT&T president Cleo F. Craig:
If I make a science film, I will have to say that scientific research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit… I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.
At times, writes Alexander, “the religious perspective is taken to extremes,” as in the first episode, Our Mr. Sun, which begins with a quotation from Psalms and admonishes “viewers who would dare to question the causal relationship between solar energy and the divinity.” The Unchained Goddess, above, is the fourth in the series, and Capra’s last.
Afterward, a director named Owen Crump took over duties on the next four episodes. His films, writes Alexander, “did not overtly proselytize” and “relied less on animated characters interacting with Dr. Baxter.” (Watch the Crump-directed Gateways to the Mind above, a more sober-minded, yet still strangely off-kilter, inquiry into the five senses.) The last film, The Restless Sea was produced by Walt Disney and directed by Les Clark, and starred Disney himself and Baxter’s replacement, Sterling Holloway.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest comedy stars of the silent era, but as it happened, they never shared the screen until well into the reign of sound. In fact, their collaboration didn’t come about until 1952, the same year that Singin’ in the Rain dramatized the already distant-feeling advent of talking pictures. That hit musical deals with once-famous artists coping with a changing world, and so, in its own way, does Limelight, the film that finally brought Chaplin and Keaton together, dealing as it does with a washed-up music-hall star in the London of 1914.
A specialist in downtrodden protagonists, Chaplin — who happened to have made his own transition from vaudeville to motion pictures in 1914 — naturally plays that starring role. Keaton appears only late in the film, as an old partner of Chaplin’s character who takes the stage with him to perform a duet at a benefit concert that promises the salvation of their careers. In reality, this scene had some of that same appeal for Keaton himself, who had yet to recover financially or professionally after a ruinous divorce in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and had been struggling for traction on the new medium of television.
Though Limelight may be a sound film, and Chaplin and Keaton’s scene may be a musical number, what they execute together is, for all intents and purposes, a work of silent comedy. Chaplin plays the violin and Keaton plays the piano, but before either of them can get a note out of their instruments, they must first deal with a series of technical mishaps and wardrobe malfunctions. This is in keeping with a theme both performers essayed over and over again in their silent heyday: that of the human being made inept by the complications of an inhuman world.
But of course, Chaplin and Keaton’s characters usually found their ways to triumph at least temporarily over that world in the end, and so it comes to pass in Limelight — moments before the hapless violinist himself passes on, the victim of an onstage heart attack. In the real world, both of these two icons from a bygone age had at least another act ahead of them, Chaplin with more films to direct back in his native England and Europe, and Keaton as a kind of living legend for hire, called up whenever Hollywood needed a shot of what had been rediscovered — not least thanks to TV’s re-circulation of old movies — as the magic of silent pictures.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As a New York City subway rider, I am constantly exposed to public health posters. More often than not these feature a photo of a wholesome-looking teen whose sober expression is meant to convey hindsight regret at having taken up drugs, dropped out of school, or forgone condoms. They’re well-intended, but boring. I can’t imagine I’d feel differently were I a member of the target demographic. The Chelsea Mini Storage ads’ saucy regional humor is far more entertaining, as is the train wreck design approach favored by the ubiquitous Dr. Jonathan Zizmor.
Public health posters were able to convey their designated horrors far more memorably before photos became the graphical norm. Take Salvador Dalí’s sketch (below) and final contribution (top) to the WWII-era anti-venereal disease campaign.
Which image would cause you to steer clear of the red light district, were you a young soldier on the make?
A portrait of a glum fellow soldier (“If I’d only known then…”)?
Or a grinning green death’s head, whose choppers double as the frankly exposed thighs of two faceless, loose-breasted ladies?
Created in 1941, Dalí’s nightmare vision eschewed the sort of manly, militaristic slogan that retroactively ramps up the kitsch value of its ilk. Its message is clear enough without:
Stick it in—we’ll bite it off!
(Thanks to blogger Rebecca M. Bender for pointing out the composition’s resemblance to the vagina dentata.)
As a feminist, I’m not crazy about depictions of women as pestilential, one-way deathtraps, but I concede that, in this instance, subverting the girlie pin up’s explicitly physical pleasures might well have had the desired effect on horny enlisted men.
A decade later Dalí would collaborate with photographer Philippe Halsman on “In Voluptas Mors,” stacking seven nude models like cheerleaders to form a peacetime skull that’s far less threatening to the male figure in the lower left corner (in this instance, the very dapper Dalí himself).
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
One often hears that there’s no money to be made in music anymore. But then, there was no money to be made in music when Bob Dylan started his career either—at least according to Bob Dylan. “If you could just support yourself, you were doin’ good,” he says in an interview clip included in the short compilation above. “There wasn’t this big billion-dollar industry that it is today, and people do go into it just to make money.” He appears to have made that remark in the late nineteen-eighties (to judge by his Hearts of Fire look), by which time both the industry and nature of popular music had evolved into very different beasts than they were in the early sixties, when he made his recording debut.
“Machines are making most of the music now,” Dylan adds. “Have you noticed that all songs sound the same?” It’s a complaint people had four decades ago, thinking of synthesizers and sequencers, and it’s one they have today, with streaming algorithms and artificial-intelligence engines in mind.
Not that Dylan could be accused of failing to change up his sound, or even of refusing to acknowledge what advantages they offered to the individual musician: “You can have your own little band, like a one-man band, with these machines,” he admitted, however obvious the limitations of those machines at the time. But he understood that this new convenience, like that introduced by so many other technological developments, came at a cultural price.
Even in the seventies, recording was becoming perilously easy. In the sixties, no matter if you were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or indeed Bob Dylan, “you played around, you paid enough dues to make a record.” But bands of the following generation “expect to make a record right away, without anybody even hearing them.” As for the solo acts, “if you’re a good-looking kid, or you’ve got a good voice, they expect you to be able to do it all,” but “if you don’t have experience to go with it, you’re just going to be disposable,” a mere instrument of producers who took authorial charge over the records they oversaw. All these decades later, when it’s become easier than ever to find any kind of music we could possibly want, nobody must be less surprised than Bob Dylan to hear “so much mediocrity going on.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The epistemological nightmare we seem to be in, bombarded over our screens and speakers with so many moving-image messages per day, false and true, is at least in part due to the paralysis that we – scholars, journalists, and regulators, but also producers and consumers – are still exhibiting over how to anchor facts and truths and commonly accepted narratives in this seemingly most ephemeral of media. When you write a scientific paper, you cite the evidence to support your claims using notes and bibliographies visible to your readers. When you publish an article in a magazine or a journal or a book, you present your sources – and now when these are online often enough live links will take you there. But there is, as yet, no fully formed apparatus for how to cite sources within the online videos and television programs that have taken over our lives – no Chicago Manual of Style, no Associated Press Stylebook, no video Elements of Style. There is also no agreement on how to cite the moving image itself as a source in these other, older types of media.
The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, published by the MIT Press on February 25, 2025, looks to make some better sense of this new medium as it starts to inherit the mantle that print has been wearing for almost six hundred years. The book presents 34 QR codes that resolve to examples of iconic moving-image media, among them Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination (1963); America’s poet laureate Ada Límon reading her work on Zoom; the first-ever YouTube video shot by some of the company founders at the San Francisco Zoo in 2005; Darnella Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s murder; Richard Feynman’s physics lectures at Cornell; courseware videos from MIT, Columbia, and Yale; PBS documentaries on race and music; Wikileaks footage of America at war; January 6 footage of the 2021 insurrection; interviews with Holocaust survivors; films and clips from films by and interviews with Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut and others; footage of deep fake videos; and the video billboards on the screens now all over New York’s Times Square. The electronic edition takes you to their source platforms — YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, others — at the click of a link. The videos that you can play facilitate deep-dive discussions about how to interrogate and authenticate the facts (and untruths!) in and around them.
At a time when Trump dismisses the director of our National Archives and the Orwellian putsch against memory by the most powerful men in the world begins in full force, is it not essential to equip ourselves with proper methods for being able to cite truths and prove lies more easily in what is now the medium of record? How essential will it become, in the face of systematic efforts of erasure, to protect the evidence of criminal human depravity – the record of Nazi concentration camps shot by U.S. and U.K. and Russian filmmakers; footage of war crimes, including our own from Wikileaks; video of the January 6th insurrection and attacks at the American Capitol – even as political leaders try to scrub it all and pretend it never happened? We have to learn not only how to watch and process these audiovisual materials, and how to keep this canon of media available to generations, but how to footnote dialogue recorded, say, in a combat gunship over Baghdad in our histories of American foreign policy, police bodycam footage from Minneapolis in our journalism about civil rights, and security camera footage of insurrectionists planning an attack on our Capitol in our books about the United States. And how should we cite within a documentary a music source or a local news clip in ways that the viewer can click on or visit?
Just like footnotes and embedded sources and bibliographies do for readable print, we have to develop an entire systematic apparatus for citation and verification for the moving image, to future-proof these truths.
* * *
At the very start of the 20th century, the early filmmaker D. W. Griffith had not yet prophesied his own vision of the film library:
Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance, there will be long rows of boxes or pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to “read up” on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.
No one yet had said, as people would a century later, that video will become the new vernacular. But as radio and film quickly began to show their influence, some of our smartest critics began to sense their influence. In 1934, the art historian Erwin Panofsky, yet to write his major works on Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, could deliver a talk at Princeton and say:
Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 per cent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies, the social consequences would be catastrophic.
And in 1935, media scholars like Rudolf Arnheim and Walter Benjamin, alert to the darkening forces of politics in Europe, would begin to notice the strange and sometimes nefarious power of the moving image to shape political power itself. Benjamin would write in exile from Hitler’s Germany:
The crisis of democracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions governing the public presentation of politicians. Democracies [used to] exhibit the politician directly, in person, before elected representatives. The parliament is his public. But innovations in recording equipment now enable the speaker to be heard by an unlimited number of people while he is speaking, and to be seen by an unlimited number shortly afterward. This means that priority is given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment. […] This results in a new form of selection—selection before an apparatus—from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors.
At this current moment of champions and stars – and dictators again – it’s time for us to understand the power of video better and more deeply. Indeed, part of the reason that we sense such epistemic chaos, mayhem, disorder in our world today may be that we haven’t come to terms with the fact of video’s primacy. We are still relying on print as if it were, in a word, the last word, and suffering through life in the absence of citation and bibliographic mechanisms and sorting indices for the one medium that is governing more and more of our information ecosystem every day. Look at the home page of any news source and of our leading publishers. Not just MIT from its pole position producing video knowledge through MIT OpenCourseWare, but all knowledge institutions, and many if not most journals and radio stations feature video front and center now. We are living at a moment when authors, publishers, journalists, scholars, students, corporations, knowledge institutions, and the public are involving more video in their self-expression. Yet like 1906, before the Chicago Manual, or 1919 before Strunk’s little guidebook, we have had no published guidelines for conversing about the bigger picture, no statement about the importance of the moving-image world we are building, and no collective approach to understanding the medium more systematically and from all sides. We are transforming at the modern pace that print exploded in the sixteenth century, but still without the apparatus to grapple with it that we developed, again for print, in the early twentieth.
* * *
Public access to knowledge always faces barriers that are easy for us to see, but also many that are invisible. Video is maturing now as a field. Could we say that it’s still young? That it still needs to be saved – constantly saved – from commercial forces encroaching upon it that, if left unregulated, could soon strip it of any remaining mandate to serve society? Could we say that we need to save ourselves, in fact, from “surrendering,” as Marshall McLuhan wrote some 60 years ago now, “our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, [such that] we don’t really have any rights left”? Before we have irrevocably and permanently “leased our central nervous systems to various corporations”?
You bet we can say it, and we should. For most of the 130 years of the moving image, its producers and controllers have been elites—and way too often they’ve attempted with their control of the medium to make us think what they want us to think. We’ve been scared over most of these years into believing that the moving image rightfully belongs under the purview of large private or state interests, that the screen is something that others should control. That’s just nonsense. Unlike the early pioneers of print, their successors who formulated copyright law, and their successors who’ve gotten us into a world where so much print knowledge is under the control of so few, we – in the age of video – can study centuries of squandered opportunities for freeing knowledge, centuries of mistakes, scores of hotfooted missteps and wrong turns, and learn from them. Once we understand that there are other options, other roads not taken, we can begin to imagine that a very different media system is – was and is – eminently possible. As one of our great media historians has written, “[T]he American media system’s development was the direct result of political struggle that involved suppressing those who agitated for creating less market-dominated media institutions. . . . [That this] current commercial media system is contingent on past repression calls into question its very legitimacy.”
The moving image is likely to facilitate the most extraordinary advances ever in education, scholarly communication, and knowledge dissemination. Imagine what will happen once we realize the promise of artificial intelligence to generate mass quantities of scholarly video about knowledge – video summaries by experts and machines of every book and article ever written and of every movie and TV program ever produced.
We just have to make sure we get there. We had better think as a collective how to climb out of what journalist Hanna Rosin calls this “epistemic chasm of cuckoo.” And it doesn’t help – although it might help our sense of urgency – that the American president has turned the White House Oval Office into a television studio. Recall that Trump ended his February meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy by saying to all the cameras there, “This’ll make great television.”
The Moving Image: A User’s Manual exists for all these reasons, and it addresses these challenges. And these challenges have everything to do with the general epistemic chaos we find ourselves in, with so many people believing anything and so much out there that is untrue. We have to solve for it.
As the poets like to say, the only way out is through.
–Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world. His new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, is just out from the MIT Press.
Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mastery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skepticism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent picture “a universal means of expression,” whereas the talkies, as they were then known, “necessarily have a limited field.” Nevertheless, he was too astute a reader of public tastes to believe he could stay silent forever, though he only began to speak onscreen on his own terms — literally, in the case of Modern Times. In that celebrated film, his iconic character the Tramp sings a song, but does so in an unintelligible hash of cod French and Italian, and yet still somehow gets his meaning across, just as he had in all his silent movies before.
That scene appears in the CinemaStix video essay above on “the moment the most famous silent comedian opens his mouth,” which comes not in Modern Times but The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s 1940 send-up of the then-ascendant Adolf Hitler. In it, Chaplin plays two roles: the narrow-mustachioed Hitler parody Adenoid Hynkel who “speaks” in a tonally and rhythmically convincing ersatz German, and a Tramp-like Jewish Barber interned by Hynkel’s regime whose only lines come at the film’s very end.
Dressed as the dictator in order to escape the camp, the Barber suddenly finds himself giving a speech at a victory parade. When he speaks, he famously does so in Chaplin’s natural voice, expressing sentiments that sound like Chaplin’s own: inveighing against “machine men with machine minds,” making a plea for liberty, brotherhood, and goodwill toward men.
Though it may have been Chaplin’s biggest box-office hit, The Great Dictator isn’t his most critically acclaimed picture. When it was made, the United States had yet to enter the war, and the full nature of what the Nazis were doing in Europe hadn’t yet come to light. This film’s relationship with actual historical events thus feels uneasy, as if Chaplin himself wasn’t sure how light or heavy a tone to strike. Even his climactic speech was only created as a replacement for an intended final dance sequence, though he did work at it, writing and revising over a period of months. It’s more than a little ironic that The Great Dictator is mainly remembered for a scene in which a comic genius to whom words were nothing as against image and movement forgoes all the techniques that made him a star — and indeed, forgoes comedy itself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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