When R.E.M.‘s Michael Stipe Created the Lyrics for “The Voice of Harold” by Riffing on the Liner Notes of an Old Gospel Album (1983)

in Music | September 30th, 2020

R.E.M. is one of those bands that just think­ing about can send me into a rever­ie of mem­o­ries of the rooms of friends with whom I lis­tened to “Pret­ty Per­sua­sion,” “Rockville,” and the poet­ry of “7 Chi­nese Bros.”—one of Michael Stipe’s ear­ly, incom­pre­hen­si­ble songs, like “Swan Swan H,” whose cryp­tic lyrics one must seem­ing­ly take on faith. The song must mean some­thing, after all, to Stipe. Maybe the mys­tery of who, exact­ly, the “sev­en Chi­nese broth­ers swal­low­ing the ocean” were to him would be revealed some­day in an inter­view or stray ref­er­ence in a biog­ra­phy….

Now that we live in an age of instant infor­ma­tion grat­i­fi­ca­tion, we can skip the years of won­der and find the answer right away: the song was part­ly inspired, we learn at Song­facts, by a 1938 children’s book called The Five Chi­nese Broth­ers, based on a tra­di­tion­al folk tale of young broth­ers with super­nat­ur­al pow­ers. (It’s also part­ly a trib­ute to pho­tog­ra­ph­er Car­ol Levy, a friend who died in a car crash before the record­ing of Reck­on­ing.) Need­ing anoth­er syl­la­ble, maybe, Stipe changed the num­ber to sev­en, an odd­ly prophet­ic move giv­en that a new ver­sion of the sto­ry, pub­lished ten years lat­er, also fea­tured sev­en broth­ers.

The ref­er­ence shows how many great song­writ­ers work: pick­ing at bits and pieces from their mem­o­ries and what­ev­er cap­ti­vat­ing text hap­pens to be lay­ing around…. And Stipe is one of those singers, like Elton John, who can sell any line, no mat­ter how obscure or absurd.

In ear­ly songs, espe­cial­ly, he showed an uncan­ny abil­i­ty to invest incan­ta­to­ry com­bi­na­tions of words with haunt­ing pathos and urgency. He could sing from the phone book or the back of a cere­al box and make it com­pelling. In fact, the sto­ry of “7 Chi­nese Bros.” involves an almost sim­i­lar feat in the form of “Voice of Harold,” famil­iar to fans as the B‑side to “So. Cen­tral Rain” and part of the 1987 odds and ends col­lec­tion Dead Let­ter Office. What pos­si­ble expla­na­tion could there be for these non sequitur gospel lyrics, sung to the tune of… “7 Chi­nese Bros.”?

Was Stipe a secret Evan­ge­list, hop­ing to win con­verts by extolling “the pure tenor qual­i­ty of the voice of Harold Mont­gomery”? More teas­ing­ly vague themes emerge, along with ref­er­ences to fig­ures like the Rev­erend Bill Fun­der­burk, Charles Sur­ratt, John Bar­bee, and Rhon­da Mont­gomery (“That’s Rhon­da! An artist!”). Instead of “Sev­en Chi­nese broth­ers swal­low­ing the ocean,” the cho­rus intro­duces us to “The Rev­e­laires, A must / The Rev­e­laires / A must.” If you’re one of those who heard this song and thought, “What…?”, you can won­der no more.

The expla­na­tion comes to us from a 2009 inter­view pro­duc­er Don Dixon gave to Uncut mag­a­zine. (For some rea­son, Dixon refers to “7 Chi­nese Bros.” as “7 Chi­nese Blues,” nev­er a title of the song). The sto­ry begins with Stipe feel­ing down in the dumps in a stair­well out­fit­ted as a lounge for him in the stu­dio.

We were work­ing on the vocal for “7 Chi­nese Blues,” but Michael just was­n’t into it. He was down in his stair­well. I hit the talk-back to let him know I was com­ing through to make an adjust­ment… This was just an excuse to take a look at him, see if I could loosen him up a lit­tle. While I was in the attic, I’d noticed a stack of old records that had been tak­en up there to die, local R&B and gospel stuff most­ly. I grabbed the one off the top (a gospel record enti­tled The Joy of Know­ing Jesus by the Rev­e­laires) and as I passed Michael on the way to the Con­trol Room, I tossed it down to him. I thought he might be amused. When I fired up the tape a few sec­onds lat­er, Michael was singing, but not the lyrics to “7 Chi­nese Blues.” He was singing the lin­er notes to the LP I’d tossed him. When Michael began to sing these lin­er notes, he was much loud­er than he’d been ear­li­er and it took a few sec­onds for me to realise what was going on and adjust the lev­els. He made it all the way through the song, work­ing in every word on the back of that album! I rewound the tape, we had a chuck­le and pro­ceed­ed to sing the beau­ti­ful one-take vocal of the real words that you hear on Reck­on­ing. He seemed more con­fi­dent after that day.

Stipe didn’t just sing the words from the back of the album, he impro­vised cut-ups as he went, re-arrang­ing phras­es to fit the meter of the orig­i­nal song. “Voice of Harold” became a fan favorite for much the same rea­son as “7 Chi­nese Bros.” and “Swan Swan H”—it seemed to hide a mys­tery in plain view, its impas­sioned deliv­ery at odds with its non­sen­si­cal nar­ra­tive. Released after Reck­on­ing, it turns a spon­ta­neous moti­va­tion­al tool dur­ing the mak­ing of the album into a cre­ation all its own.

Jim Con­nel­ly explores the rela­tion­ship between “7 Chi­nese Bros.” and “Voice of Harold” even fur­ther in a post at Medi­alop­er, point­ing to the firm con­vic­tion that’s so “chill-induc­ing” in the lat­ter (and that comes through in the for­mer record­ing, made imme­di­ate­ly after­ward). They may be found words, serendip­i­tous­ly picked up and put togeth­er on the spot, but in Stipe’s voice we can tell that “He’s real. He means it,” what­ev­er the hell it is. See a video of “Voice of Harold” with lyrics, at the top, and fol­low along with the lin­er notes on the back of Rev­e­laires’ gospel album The Joy of Know­ing Jesus just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” Michael Stipe Pro­claims Again, and He Still Feels Fine

Why R.E.M.’s 1991 Out of Time May Be the “Most Polit­i­cal­ly Impor­tant Album” Ever

R.E.M.’s “Los­ing My Reli­gion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale

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

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Mulan Re-Disneyfied: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#62) Discussion with Actor Michael Tow

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 30th, 2020

Is the new Mulan the equiv­a­lent for Asian-Amer­i­cans what Black Pan­ther was for African-Amer­i­cans? The largest enter­tain­ment machine we have fea­tured an all-Asian cast telling a tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese sto­ry aimed at the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence. Did it work?

Actor Michael Tow joins your hosts Eri­ca Spyres, Mark Lin­sen­may­er, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the devel­op­ment, aes­thet­ics, and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing the film. The vision of fem­i­nism changed between the orig­i­nal poem from ca. 550 C.E. (“When the two rab­bits run side by side, how can you tell the female from the male?”) to the present, and the “just be you” eth­ic (with your mag­i­cal chi!) is not the norm for Chi­na in any peri­od. Was the project in its very con­cep­tion doomed to fall short of some of its goals? Was the live-action an improve­ment over the 1998 ani­mat­ed ver­sion?

Read the poem, and watch a read­ing of the illus­trat­ed 1998 Robert San Souci book Fa Mulan that the films were based on. There have been many adap­ta­tions of the sto­ry in Chi­na.

Oth­er sources we read to pre­pare includ­ed:

Fol­low Michael on Twit­ter @michaelctow and check out his imdb cred­its. Michael host­ed a Q&A with the Mulan cast short­ly after the film’s release.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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Explore the Codex Zouche-Nuttall: A Rare, Accordion-Folded Pre-Columbian Manuscript

in History | September 29th, 2020

In the past two decades, the Latin Amer­i­can world has seen a tremen­dous resur­gence of indige­nous lan­guage study and lit­er­a­ture. Some Mex­i­can writ­ers are “ditch­ing Span­ish,” Dora Ballew writes, for “Zapotec, Tzotzil, Mayan and oth­er lan­guages spo­ken long before Euro­peans washed up on the shores of what is now Mex­i­co.” Large antholo­gies of such lit­er­a­ture have been pub­lished since 2001. The move is not a recov­ery of lost lan­guages and cul­tures, but an affir­ma­tion of “the num­ber of peo­ple flu­ent in both an indige­nous lan­guage and Span­ish,” schol­ars and writ­ers Earl and Sylvia Shorris explain.

“At least sev­er­al mil­lion” indige­nous lan­guage speak­ers in Mex­i­co alone ensure that “lit­er­a­ture has ample place in which to flour­ish.” Despite the incur­sions of both the Aztecs, then the Span­ish, speak­ers of Mix­tec, for exam­ple, sur­vived and now “inhab­it a vast ter­ri­to­ry of broad moun­tain ranges and small val­leys that stretch across the mod­ern-day states of Puebla, Guer­rero and Oax­a­ca,” writes Dr. Manuel A. Her­mann Lejarazu.

An expert on Mix­tec codices, Lejarazu ties the con­tem­po­rary cul­ture of Mix­tec speak­ing peo­ple back to the Post­clas­sic past, “a peri­od between the tenth and six­teenth cen­turies when polit­i­cal cen­tres pro­lif­er­at­ed, fill­ing the vac­u­um left after the col­lapse of large cities estab­lished in pre­ced­ing cen­turies.”

Much of the lit­tle that is known of the indige­nous Mix­tec lit­er­ary cul­ture comes from the Codex Zouche-Nut­tall, one of only a hand­ful of pre-Columbian man­u­scripts in exis­tence. Made of deer skin, the codex “con­tains two nar­ra­tives,” the British Muse­um notes. “One side of the doc­u­ment relates the his­to­ry of impor­tant cen­tres in the Mix­tec region, while the oth­er, start­ing at the oppo­site end, records the geneal­o­gy, mar­riages and polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary feats of the Mix­tec ruler, Eight Deer Jaguar-Claw.”

Although fin­ished around 1556, the pic­to­graph­ic fold­ing man­u­script “is con­sid­ered to be of pre-His­pan­ic ori­gin,” Lejarazu writes, “since it pre­serves a strong indige­nous tra­di­tion in its pic­to­graph­ic tech­niques, with no demon­stra­ble Euro­pean influ­ence.” The codex was first dis­cov­ered in 1854 in a Domini­can monastery in Flo­rence. It’s unclear exact­ly how and when it arrived in Europe, but sev­er­al such codices “reached the Old World as gifts or as part of the doc­u­ments sub­mit­ted to Span­ish courts that han­dled legal mat­ters in the Indies.”

Though sev­ered from its ori­gins, the Codex Zouche-Nut­tall is now freely avail­able online in a scanned 1902 fac­sim­i­le edi­tion at the British Muse­um and the Inter­net Archive. You can learn much more about these incred­i­bly rare doc­u­ments from Lejarazu’s arti­cle and Robert Lloyd Williams’ Com­plete Codex Zouche-Nutall, which explains how the pic­to­graph­ic record func­tions like a sto­ry­board, or out­line, for a com­plex nar­ra­tive tra­di­tion that tied Mix­tec rulers to the gods, to each oth­er, and to the past and future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

Peru­vian Schol­ar Writes & Defends the First The­sis Writ­ten in Quechua, the Main Lan­guage of the Incan Empire

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

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How Storyboarding Works: A Brief Introduction to How Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson & Other Directors Storyboard Their Films

in Art, Film | September 29th, 2020

When you’re mak­ing a film with com­plex shots or sequences of shots, it does­n’t hurt to have sto­ry­boards. Though pro­fes­sion­al sto­ry­board artists do exist, they don’t come cheap, and in any case they con­sti­tute one more play­er in the game of tele­phone between those who’ve envi­sioned the final cin­e­mat­ic prod­uct and the col­lab­o­ra­tors essen­tial to real­iz­ing it. It thus great­ly behooves aspir­ing direc­tors to devel­op their draw­ing skills, though you hard­ly need to be a full-fledged drafts­man like Rid­ley Scott or even a pro­fi­cient com­ic artist like Bong Joon-ho for your work to ben­e­fit from sto­ry­board­ing.

You do, how­ev­er, need to under­stand the lan­guage of sto­ry­board­ing, essen­tial­ly a means of trans­lat­ing the rich lan­guage of cin­e­ma into fig­ures (stick fig­ures if need be), rec­tan­gles, and arrows — lots of arrows. Draw­ing on exam­ples from Star Wars and Juras­sic Park to Taxi Dri­ver and The Big Lebows­ki, the Rock­etJump Film School video above explains how sto­ry­boards work in less than ten min­utes.

As sto­ry­board artist Kevin Sen­za­ki explains how these draw­ings visu­al­ize a film in advance of and as a guide for film­mak­ing process, we see a vari­ety of sto­ry­boards rang­ing from crude sketch­es to near­ly com­ic book-lev­el detail, all com­pared to cor­re­spond­ing clips from the fin­ished pro­duc­tion.

These exam­ples come from the work of such direc­tors as Alfred Hitch­cock, Mar­tin Scors­ese, James Cameron, Wes Ander­son, and Christo­pher Nolan — all of whose films, you’ll notice, have no slight visu­al ambi­tions. When a shot or sequence requires seri­ous visu­al effects work, or even when a cam­era has to make just the right move to advance the action, sto­ry­boards are prac­ti­cal­ly essen­tial. Not that every suc­cess­ful direc­tor uses them: no less an auteur than Wern­er Her­zog has called sto­ry­boards “the instru­ments of the cow­ards,” those who can’t han­dle the spon­tane­ity of either film­mak­ing or life itself. Rather, he tells aspir­ing direc­tors to “read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read… read, read… read.” But then so did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, who did­n’t just draw his movies in advance — he paint­ed them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

How the Coen Broth­ers Sto­ry­board­ed Blood Sim­ple Down to a Tee (1984)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Paint­ed the Sto­ry­boards For Scenes in His Epic Films: Com­pare Can­vas to Cel­lu­loid

How Bong Joon-ho’s Sto­ry­boards for Par­a­site (Now Pub­lished as a Graph­ic Nov­el) Metic­u­lous­ly Shaped the Acclaimed Film

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

Down­load New Sto­ry­board­ing Soft­ware That’s Free & Open Source

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 Story Behind the Iconic Photograph of 11 Construction Workers Lunching 840 Feet Above New York City (1932)

in Architecture, History, Photography, Video - Arts & Culture | September 28th, 2020

Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Moth­er”…

Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning “The Ter­ror of War”…

Richard Drew’s “The Falling Man”…

Through­out the years, a num­ber of icon­ic pho­tographs have tapped into the col­lec­tive uncon­scious, shap­ing our view of his­toric events, some­times to a degree that leads to social change.

These images are not depen­dent on know­ing the sub­jects’ iden­ti­ties, though it’s always inter­est­ing when more con­text leaks out, often as the result of some seri­ous sleuthing by reporters, archivists, or oth­er inter­est­ed par­ties.

1932’s “Lunch atop a Sky­scraper (New York Con­struc­tion Work­ers Lunch­ing on a Cross­beam)” is one of the lighter-heart­ed pho­tos to cre­ate such a last­ing pub­lic impres­sion.

Eleven work­ers are depict­ed enjoy­ing their break, relax­ing on a gird­er a dizzy­ing 840-feet above New York City, unbur­dened by safe­ty har­ness­es or oth­er pro­tec­tive gear.

In the words of Rock­e­feller Cen­ter archivist Christi­na Rous­sel, who nar­rates the TIME Mag­a­zine 100 Pho­tos episode above, they are the “unsung heroes of con­struc­tion.”

The unusu­al des­ig­na­tion may lead you to rack your brains for a sung hero of con­struc­tion.

Grandpa’s cog-in-the-wheel con­tri­bu­tion to the erec­tion of an icon­ic land­mark can be a source of anec­do­tal pride for fam­i­lies, but it rarely leads to greater renown.

Loom­ing over this image is John D. Rock­e­feller, Jr, who mas­ter­mind­ed a 22 acre com­plex of 14 com­mer­cial build­ings in the Art Deco style. The project was a boost to the econ­o­my dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, employ­ing over 250,000 people—from truck­ers and quar­ry­men to glaziers and steel­work­ers and hun­dreds of oth­er jobs in between. It cre­at­ed an enor­mous amount of good­will and patri­ot­ic pride.

The Rock­e­feller orga­ni­za­tion cap­i­tal­ized on this pos­i­tive recep­tion, with a steady stream of staged pub­lic­i­ty pho­tos, includ­ing the dar­ing eleven shar­ing a nose­bleed seat on what was to become the 69th floor of the RCA Build­ing (now known as 30 Rock.)

As film crit­ic John Ander­son, review­ing the doc­u­men­tary Men at Lunch in The New York Times, wrote:

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of the pic­ture, which has been col­orized, sat­i­rized, bur­lesqued with the Mup­pets and turned into a life-size sculp­ture by Ser­gio Furnari, is part­ly about the casu­al reck­less­ness of its sub­jects: The beam on which they sit seems sus­pend­ed over an urban abyss, with the vast­ness of Cen­tral Park spread out behind them and noth­ing, seem­ing­ly below. But in fact a fin­ished floor of 30 Rock­e­feller Plaza was prob­a­bly just a few feet away.

The doc­u­men­tary helped con­firm the iden­ti­ties of sev­er­al of the men.

Irish immi­grants Mad­dy O’Shaughnessy and Son­ny Glynn hold down either end, as ver­i­fied by their sons.

William Eck­n­er, third from left, and Joe Cur­tis, third from right, were named in a sim­i­lar­ly spir­it­ed anno­tat­ed pho­to tak­en around the same time.

The man seat­ed to Cur­tis’ right may or may not be John Charles Cook of the St. Reg­is Mohawk Reser­va­tion.

The photographer’s iden­ti­ty is also debat­able. It’s most often cred­it­ed to Charles C. Ebbets but Tom Kel­ley and William Left­wich were also on hand that day, leather satchels of glass plates slung across their backs, as they, too, defied grav­i­ty, doc­u­ment­ing the com­ple­tion of archi­tect Ray­mond Hood’s mas­ter plan.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Dorothea Lange Shot, Migrant Moth­er, Per­haps the Most Icon­ic Pho­to in Amer­i­can His­to­ry

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hand-Colored Maps of Wealth & Poverty in Victorian London: Explore a New Interactive Edition of Charles Booth’s Historic Work of Social Cartography (1889)

in History, Maps | September 28th, 2020

Map­ping has always been con­tentious, no mat­ter where you look in time. Maps pre­serve ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions on paper, ratio­nal­iz­ing phys­i­cal space as they ren­der it in two dimen­sions. No mat­ter how didac­tic, they can become polit­i­cal weapons. In the case of Charles Booth’s visu­al­ly impres­sive Maps Descrip­tive of Lon­don Pover­ty, we have a series of maps whose own assump­tions can some­times seem at odds with their osten­si­ble pur­pose: to improve the liv­ing con­di­tions of London’s poor.

Booth’s “colour­ful pover­ty maps were cre­at­ed between 1886 and 1903,” Zoe Craig writes at Lon­don­ist, as part of a “ground-break­ing study into the lives of ordi­nary Lon­don­ers.” A phil­an­thropist born into wealth in the ship­ping trade, Booth took it upon him­self to study pover­ty in Lon­don in order to ini­ti­ate social reforms.

He suc­ceed­ed. The study, con­duct­ed by Booth and a team of researchers, led to the cre­ation of Old Age pen­sions, which Booth called “lim­it­ed social­ism,” as well as school meals for hun­gry chil­dren. He was clear about that fact that he saw such reforms as a bul­wark against social­ist rev­o­lu­tion.

The study’s sev­en­teen vol­umes are filled with pic­turesque accounts. “Pick­ing through the tid­bits of infor­ma­tion from these people’s lives will make you feel a bit like a Vic­to­ri­an cos­tume dra­ma police detec­tive,” Craig remarks. This ref­er­ence to polic­ing feels point­ed, giv­en the role of the police in main­tain­ing class hier­ar­chies in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. As an Amer­i­can, it can be hard to look at Booth’s map and not also see the 20th redlin­ing prac­tices in U.S. cities. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the cat­e­gories Booth applied to London’s class­es:

Called ‘Inquiry Into the Life and Labour of the Peo­ple in Lon­don’, the epic work stud­ied fam­i­lies and res­i­dents liv­ing across Lon­don, and coloured the streets accord­ing to their finan­cial sit­u­a­tion: between black for ‘low­est class, vicious, semi-crim­i­nal’ through pink for mixed ‘some com­fort­able, some poor’ to orange for ‘wealthy’.

As in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pater­nal­is­tic 1965 report on the Black under­class in the U.S., the lan­guage rein­forces Social Dar­win­ist ideas that deem the “low­est class” unfit for full par­tic­i­pa­tion in civ­il society—“vicious, semi-crim­i­nal…”

Of course, the social and his­tor­i­cal con­text dif­fers marked­ly, but we might also con­sid­er Fear­gus O’Sullivan’s obser­va­tions at Bloomberg City­Lab. A new pub­lished edi­tion of the map, he writes, “accom­pa­nied by com­pelling if bleak peri­od pho­tos, reveals a city that pos­sess­es echoes of Lon­don today. It depicts, after all, a dense­ly-packed metrop­o­lis with a cos­mopoli­tan pop­u­la­tion where immense­ly wealthy peo­ple lived just around the cor­ner from neigh­bors who were strug­gling to make ends meet.”

Maps may not cre­ate the social con­di­tions they describe, but they can help per­pet­u­ate them, ren­der­ing peo­ple vis­i­ble in ways that allow for even more con­trol over their lives. Crit­i­cisms of Booth’s study claimed that not only did the pro­posed reforms not go far enough but that the report described London’s class struc­ture while offer­ing lit­tle to no analy­sis of the caus­es of pover­ty. In lan­guage that sound­ed less objec­tion­able to Vic­to­ri­an ears, the poor are most­ly blamed for their own con­di­tion.

None of the study’s par­tic­u­lar lim­i­ta­tions take away from the graph­ic achieve­ments of its maps and explana­to­ry charts. They are, the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics writes, a strik­ing “ear­ly exam­ple of social car­tog­ra­phy.” The LSE hosts an incred­i­bly detailed, search­able, high-res­o­lu­tion inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the maps, assem­bled togeth­er and over­laid on a mod­ern GPS map of Lon­don. They also detail the var­i­ous edi­tions of the maps as they appeared between 1898 and 1903.

Hand-col­ored and based on the 1869 Ord­nance Sur­vey, the maps seemed “suf­fi­cient­ly impor­tant” to Booth to war­rant “com­pre­hen­sive revi­sion.” Here, the police appear in per­son to guide the process. “Social inves­ti­ga­tors accom­pa­nied police­men on their beats across Lon­don,” the LSE writes, “and record­ed their own impres­sions of each street and the com­ments of the police­men.” You can read the police note­books from these sur­veys at the LSE and learn more about the 12 dis­trict maps and the demo­graph­ic data they rep­re­sent at Map­ping Lon­don. The LSE print­ed a hard­cov­er print edi­tion of Booth’s work in 2019, com­plete with 500 illus­tra­tions. You can pur­chase a copy here. Or vis­it the inter­ac­tive edi­tion here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

Syn­chro­nized, Time­lapse Video Shows Train Trav­el­ing from Lon­don to Brighton in 1953, 1983 & 2013

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

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Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Is “the Greatest Acting Achievement Ever Committed to the Screen”: A Video Essay

in Television | September 28th, 2020

The ongo­ing “gold­en age” of pres­tige tele­vi­sion dra­ma began more than twen­ty years ago, but how many shows have tru­ly sur­passed The Sopra­nos, the one that start­ed it all? How­ev­er many series come and go, rais­ing large and often obses­sive fan bases with their vary­ing mix­tures of crime, his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, sci­ence fic­tion, fan­ta­sy, and intrigue, none have shown the cul­tur­al stay­ing pow­er of this six-sea­son tale of a mob boss in turn-of-the-21st-cen­tu­ry New Jer­sey. That The Sopra­nos remains rel­e­vant owes in part to the vision of cre­ator David Chase as well as to the tour de force per­for­mance of star James Gan­dolfi­ni.

Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, has stronger words of appro­ba­tion: Gan­dolfini’s is “prob­a­bly the great­est act­ing achieve­ment ever com­mit­ted to the screen, small or big.” In the video essay “How James Gan­dolfi­ni Nav­i­gates Emo­tion” he mar­shals in sup­port of this claim just one scene, but a scene that fea­tures Gan­dolfi­ni at the height of his dra­mat­ic pow­ers.

Tak­en from the fifth-sea­son episode “Uniden­ti­fied Black Males,” orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2004 (and co-writ­ten by Matthew Wein­er, lat­er to cre­ate the pres­tige-TV fran­chise Mad Men), this selec­tion takes place in the office of Tony’s psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Jen­nifer Melfi, played by Lor­raine Brac­co. (When The Sopra­nos debuted, two months before the pre­miere of Harold Ramis’ Ana­lyze This, a mob­ster in ther­a­py was very much a nov­el idea.)

“Tony Sopra­no is going to have a pan­ic attack in this ther­a­py ses­sion,” says Puschak, and “the way James Gan­dolfi­ni builds to that attack” demon­strates “how he car­ries us with him through a com­plex sequence of emo­tions.” Here Gan­dolfi­ni ris­es to the for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of lying con­vinc­ing­ly: not con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that Dr. Melfi believes him, but con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that we believe the grap­ple with con­flict­ing truths and untruths that char­ac­ter­izes Tony’s life. Tony must pin his recent spate of pan­ic attacks on some­thing oth­er than his cousin Tony B, who com­mit­ted a hit he should­n’t have. That Tony does­n’t quite believe his own words Gan­dolfi­ni trans­mits with “his tone, his eyes, and the tilt of his head.” He uses the musi­cal­i­ty of Tony’s speech, “some com­bi­na­tion of left­over Ital­ian rhythms and a New York-inflect­ed North Jer­sey accent,” to build to “larg­er and larg­er crescen­does.”

As it fore­shad­ows the approach­ing emo­tion­al tur­moil, his “rhyth­mic anger, like waves crash­ing on the shore, is hyp­not­ic, draw­ing you deep­er into his men­tal and emo­tion­al space with each new cycle.” Tony then dou­bles down on his lie, try­ing to cov­er for his cousin by invent­ing on the spot a sto­ry about hav­ing been beat­en up by a gang of shoe thieves in 1986. Only lat­er in the scene does the truth come out, or at least par­tial­ly leak out, even as Gan­dolfi­ni por­trays Tony strug­gling to fight back the pan­ic attack that has emerged as a result of telling these sto­ries. For all the tech­nique it show­cas­es, the scene ends in a clas­si­cal­ly dra­mat­ic fash­ion, with a kind of cathar­sis — which, if you know The Sopra­nos, you know is hard­ly the word Tony has for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopra­nos

David Chase Reveals the Philo­soph­i­cal Mean­ing of The Sopra­no’s Final Scene

James Gan­dolfi­ni Reads from Mau­rice Sendak’s Children’s Sto­ry In The Night Kitchen

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopra­nos with the Talk­ing Sopra­nos Pod­cast, Host­ed by Michael Impe­ri­oli & Steve Schirri­pa

How Humphrey Bog­a­rt Became an Icon: A Video Essay

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

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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Discovered: The User Manual for the Oldest Surviving Computer in the World

in Computer Science | September 28th, 2020

Image by Clemens Pfeif­fer via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The first com­put­er I ever sat before, the 1983 Apple IIe, had a man­u­al the size of a text­book, which includ­ed a primer on pro­gram­ming lan­guages and a chap­ter enti­tled “Get­ting Down to Busi­ness and Plea­sure.” By “plea­sure,” Apple most­ly meant “elec­tron­ic work­sheets,” “word proces­sors,” and “data­base man­age­ment.” (They hadn’t ful­ly estab­lished them­selves as the fun one yet.) Get­ting these pro­grams run­ning took real effort and patience, espe­cial­ly com­pared to the Mac­Book Air on which I’m typ­ing now.

All those old tedious process­es are auto­mat­ed, and no more do we need manuals—we’ve got the inter­net, which also hap­pens to be the only way I could oper­ate an Apple IIe, whether that means track­ing down a man­u­al on eBay or find­ing a scanned copy some­where online. Luck­i­ly, for vin­tage Apple enthu­si­asts, this isn’t dif­fi­cult, and some­one with rudi­men­ta­ry knowl­edge of Apple DOS could mud­dle through with­out one.

When we go fur­ther back into com­put­er his­to­ry, we find machines that became incom­pre­hen­si­ble over time with­out their oper­at­ing instruc­tions. Such was the case with the Zuse Z4, “con­sid­ered the old­est pre­served dig­i­tal com­put­er in the world,” notes Vice. “The Z4 is one of those machines that takes up a whole room, runs on mag­net­ic tapes, and needs mul­ti­ple peo­ple to oper­ate. Today it sits in the Deutsches Muse­um in Munich, unused. Until now, his­to­ri­ans and cura­tors only had a lim­it­ed knowl­edge of its secrets because the man­u­al was lost long ago.”

The computer’s inven­tor, Kon­rad Zuse, first began build­ing it for the Nazis in 1942, then refused its use in the VI and V2 rock­et pro­gram. Instead, he fled to a small town in Bavaria and stowed the com­put­er in a barn until the end of the war. It wouldn’t see oper­a­tion until 1950. The Z4 proved to be “a very reli­able and impres­sive com­put­er for its time,” Sarah Felice writes. “With its large instruc­tion set it was able to cal­cu­late com­pli­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic pro­grams and was able to work dur­ing the night with­out super­vi­sion, which was unheard of for this time.”

These qual­i­ties made the Zuse Z4 par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful to the Insti­tute of Applied Math­e­mat­ics at the Swiss Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (ETH), where the com­put­er per­formed advanced cal­cu­la­tions for Swiss engi­neers in the ear­ly 50s. “Around 100 jobs were car­ried out with the Z4 between 1950 and 1955,” writes Her­bert Brud­er­er, retired ETH lec­tur­er. “These includ­ed cal­cu­la­tions on the tra­jec­to­ry of rock­ets… on air­craft wings…” and “on flut­ter vibra­tions,” an oper­a­tion requir­ing “800 hours machine time.”

René Boesch, one of the air­plane researchers work­ing on the Z4 in the 50s kept a copy of the man­u­al among his papers, and it was there that his daugh­ter, Eve­lyn Boesch, also an ETH researcher, dis­cov­ered it. (View it online here.) Brud­er­er tells the full sto­ry of the computer’s devel­op­ment, oper­a­tion, and the redis­cov­ery of its only known copy of oper­at­ing instruc­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the First Record­ing of Com­put­er Gen­er­at­ed Music: Researchers Restore Music Pro­grammed on Alan Turing’s Com­put­er (1951)

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

The First Piz­za Ordered by Com­put­er, 1974

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

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The Beastie Boys’ Final Concert Streaming Free Online This Weekend

in Music | September 26th, 2020

Until Mon­day, the Beast­ie Boys’ final concert–captured at Bon­na­roo on June 12, 2009–will stream free on YouTube. (Watch it above.) Just five weeks after the show, Adam “MCA” Yauch would announce that he had been diag­nosed with sali­vary gland can­cer. Orig­i­nal­ly opti­mistic, Yauch said “I just need to take a lit­tle time to get this in check, and then we’ll release the record and play some shows.” “It’s a pain in the neck (sor­ry had to say it) because I was real­ly look­ing for­ward to play­ing these shows, but the doc­tors have made it clear that this is not the kind of thing that can be put aside to deal with lat­er.” Sad­ly, the can­cer proved aggres­sive and took MCA’s life in May, 2012, leav­ing the show above as the Beast­ie Boys’ final live doc­u­ment. Find the setlist for the final show here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 36 Beast­ie Boys Videos Now Remas­tered in HD

The Beast­ie Boys Release a New Free­wheel­ing Mem­oir, and a Star-Stud­ded 13-Hour Audio­book Fea­tur­ing Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costel­lo, Bette Midler, John Stew­art & Dozens More

The Beast­ie Boys & Rick Rubin Reunite and Revis­it Their For­ma­tive Time Togeth­er in 1980s NYC

Look How Young They Are!: The Beast­ie Boys Per­form­ing Live Their Very First Hit, “Cooky Puss” (1983)

 

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Frida Kahlo’s Venomous Love Letter to Diego Rivera: “I’m Amputating You. Be Happy and Never Seek Me Again”

in Art, Letters, Life | September 25th, 2020

Painter Diego Rivera set the bar awful­ly high for oth­er lovers when he—allegedly—ate a hand­ful of his ex-wife Fri­da Kahlo’s cre­mains, fresh from the oven.

Per­haps he was hedg­ing his bets. The Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment opt­ed not to hon­or his express wish that their ash­es should be co-min­gled upon his death. Kahlo’s remains were placed in Mex­i­co City’s Rotun­da of Illus­tri­ous Men, and have since been trans­ferred to their home, now the Museo Fri­da Kahlo.

Rivera lies in the Pan­teón Civ­il de Dolores.

Oth­er cre­ative expres­sions of the grief that dogged him til his own death, three years lat­er:

His final paint­ing, The Water­mel­ons, a very Mex­i­can sub­ject that’s also a trib­ute to Kahlo’s last work, Viva La Vida…

And a locked bath­room in which he decreed 6,000 pho­tographs, 300 of Kahlo’s gar­ments and per­son­al items, and 12,000 doc­u­ments were to be housed until 15 years after his death.

Among the many rev­e­la­tions when this cham­ber was belat­ed­ly unsealed in 2004, her cloth­ing caused the biggest stir, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ways in which the col­or­ful gar­ments were adapt­ed to and informed by her phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties.

Her pros­thet­ic leg, shod in an eye-catch­ing red boot was giv­en a place of hon­or in an exhib­it at the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um.,

These trea­sures might have come to light ear­li­er save for a judg­ment call on the part of Dolores Olme­do, Rivera’s patron, for­mer mod­el, and friend. Dur­ing ren­o­va­tions to turn the couple’s home into a muse­um, she had a peek and decid­ed the lip­stick-imprint­ed love let­ters from some famous men Fri­da had bed­ded could dam­age Rivera’s rep­u­ta­tion.

In what way, it’s dif­fi­cult to parse.

The couple’s his­to­ry of extra­mar­i­tal rela­tions (includ­ing Rivera’s dal­liance with Kahlo’s sis­ter, Christi­na) weren’t exact­ly secret, and both of the play­ers had left the build­ing.

One thing that’s tak­en for grant­ed is Kahlo’s pas­sion for Rivera, whom she met as girl of 15. Tempt­ing as it might be to view the rela­tion­ship with 2020 gog­gles, it would be a dis­ser­vice to Kahlo’s sense of her own nar­ra­tive. Self-exam­i­na­tion was cen­tral to her work. She was char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly avid in let­ters and diary entries, detail­ing her phys­i­cal attrac­tion to every aspect of Rivera’s body, includ­ing his giant bel­ly “drawn tight and smooth as a sphere.” Dit­to her obses­sion with his many con­quests.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, she was capa­ble of pen­ning a pret­ty spicy love let­ter her­self, and the major­i­ty were aimed at her hus­band:

Noth­ing com­pares to your hands, noth­ing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mir­ror of the night. the vio­lent flash of light­ning. The damp­ness of the earth. The hol­low of your armpits is my shel­ter. my fin­gers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-foun­tain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

Her most noto­ri­ous love let­ter does not appear to be one at first.

Bedrid­den, and fac­ing the ampu­ta­tion of a gan­grenous right leg that had already sac­ri­ficed some toes 20 years ear­li­er, she direct­ed the full force of her emo­tions at Rivera.

The lover she’d ten­der­ly pegged as “a boy frog stand­ing on his hind legs” now appeared to her an “ugly son of a bitch,” mad­den­ing­ly pos­sessed of the pow­er to seduce women (as he had seduced her).

You have to read all the way to the twist:

Mex­i­co,
1953

My dear Mr. Diego,

I’m writ­ing this let­ter from a hos­pi­tal room before I am admit­ted into the oper­at­ing the­atre. They want me to hur­ry, but I am deter­mined to fin­ish writ­ing first, as I don’t want to leave any­thing unfin­ished. Espe­cial­ly now that I know what they are up to. They want to hurt my pride by cut­ting a leg off. When they told me it would be nec­es­sary to ampu­tate, the news didn’t affect me the way every­body expect­ed. No, I was already a maimed woman when I lost you, again, for the umpteenth time maybe, and still I sur­vived.

I am not afraid of pain and you know it. It is almost inher­ent to my being, although I con­fess that I suf­fered, and a great deal, when you cheat­ed on me, every time you did it, not just with my sis­ter but with so many oth­er women. How did they let them­selves be fooled by you? You believe I was furi­ous about Cristi­na, but today I con­fess that it wasn’t because of her. It was because of me and you. First of all because of me, since I’ve nev­er been able to under­stand what you looked and look for, what they give you that I couldn’t. Let’s not fool our­selves, Diego, I gave you every­thing that is human­ly pos­si­ble to offer and we both know that. But still, how the hell do you man­age to seduce so many women when you’re such an ugly son of a bitch?

The rea­son why I’m writ­ing is not to accuse you of any­thing more than we’ve already accused each oth­er of in this and how­ev­er many more bloody lives. It’s because I’m hav­ing a leg cut off (damned thing, it got what it want­ed in the end). I told you I’ve count­ed myself as incom­plete for a long time, but why the fuck does every­body else need to know about it too? Now my frag­men­ta­tion will be obvi­ous for every­one to see, for you to see… That’s why I’m telling you before you hear it on the grapevine. For­give my not going to your house to say this in per­son, but giv­en the cir­cum­stances and my con­di­tion, I’m not allowed to leave the room, not even to use the bath­room. It’s not my inten­tion to make you or any­one else feel pity, and I don’t want you to feel guilty. I’m writ­ing to let you know I’m releas­ing you, I’m ampu­tat­ing you. Be hap­py and nev­er seek me again. I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want you to hear from me. If there is any­thing I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not hav­ing to see your fuck­ing hor­ri­ble bas­tard face wan­der­ing around my gar­den.

That is all, I can now go to be chopped up in peace.

Good bye from some­body who is crazy and vehe­ment­ly in love with you,

Your Fri­da

This is a love let­ter mas­querad­ing as a doozy of a break up let­ter. The ref­er­ences to ampu­ta­tion are both lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal:

No doubt, she was sin­cere, but this cou­ple, rather than hold­ing them­selves account­able, excelled at rever­sals. In the end the letter’s threat proved idle. Short­ly before her death,  the two appeared togeth­er in pub­lic, at a demon­stra­tion to protest the C.I.A.’s efforts to over­throw the left­ist Guatemalan regime.

Image via Brook­lyn Muse­um

Once Fri­da was safe­ly laid to rest, by which we mean rumored to have sat bolt upright as her cas­ket was slid into the incer­a­tor, Rivera mused in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy:

Too late now I real­ized the most won­der­ful part of my life had been my love for Fri­da. But I could not real­ly say that giv­en “anoth­er chance” I would have behaved toward her any dif­fer­ent­ly than I had. Every man is the prod­uct of the social atmos­phere in which he grows up and I am what I am…I had nev­er had any morals at all and had lived only for plea­sure where I found it. I was not good. I could dis­cern oth­er peo­ple’s weak­ness­es eas­i­ly, espe­cial­ly men’s, and then I would play upon them for no worth­while rea­son. If I loved a woman, the more I want­ed to hurt her. Fri­da was only the most obvi­ous vic­tim of this dis­gust­ing trait.

via Let­ters of Note and the book, Let­ters of Note: Love.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Fri­da Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

What the Icon­ic Paint­ing, “The Two Fridas,” Actu­al­ly Tells Us About Fri­da Kahlo

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Understanding Chris Marker’s Radical Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Distributed to High Schools in the 1970s

in Education, Film | September 25th, 2020

Pop quiz, hot shot. World War III has dev­as­tat­ed civ­i­liza­tion. As a pris­on­er of sur­vivors liv­ing beneath the ruins of Paris, you’re made to go trav­el back in time, to the era of your own child­hood, in order to secure aid for the present from the past. What do you do? You prob­a­bly nev­er faced this ques­tion in school — unless you were in one of the class­rooms of the 1970s that received the study guide for Chris Mark­er’s La Jetée. Like the inno­v­a­tive 1962 sci­ence-fic­tion short itself, this edu­ca­tion­al pam­phlet was dis­trib­uted (and recent­ly tweet­ed out again) by Janus Films, the com­pa­ny that first brought to Amer­i­can audi­ences the work of auteurs like Ing­mar Bergman, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa.

Writ­ten by Con­necti­cut prep-school teacher Tom Andrews, this study guide describes La Jetée as “a bril­liant mix­ture of fan­ta­sy and pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic romance” that “explores new dra­mat­ic ter­ri­to­ry and forms, and rush­es with a stun­ning log­ic and a pow­er­ful impact to its shock­ing cli­max.”

The film does all this “almost entire­ly in still pho­tographs, their sta­t­ic state cor­re­spond­ing to the strat­i­fi­ca­tion of mem­o­ry.” More prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, at “twen­ty-sev­en min­utes in length, La Jetée is an ide­al class-peri­od vehi­cle” that “can help stu­dents spec­u­late on the awe­some poten­tial of life as it may exist after a third world war” as well as “man’s inhu­man­i­ty to man, not only as it may occur in the future, but as it already has occurred in our past.”

“Why do you sup­pose Mark­er filmed La Jetée in still pho­tographs? What sig­nif­i­cance does the one moment of live action have?” “How does Mark­er’s con­cept of time and space com­pare with that of H.G. Wells in the lat­ter’s nov­el, The Time Machine?” “If the man of this sto­ry has helped his cap­tors to per­fect the tech­nique of time trav­el, why do they wish to liq­ui­date him?” These and oth­er sug­gest­ed dis­cus­sion ques­tions appear at the end of the study guide, all of whose pages you can read at Socks. It was pro­duced for Films for Now and The Human Con­di­tion, “two reper­to­ries for high school assem­blies and group dis­cus­sions” based on Janus’ for­mi­da­ble cin­e­ma library. (François Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows also looks to have been among their edu­ca­tion­al offer­ings.) You can see fur­ther analy­sis of La Jetée in A.O. Scot­t’s New York Times Crit­ics’ Picks video, as well as the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion video essay Echo Cham­ber: Lis­ten­ing to La Jetée.

Much lat­er, in the mid-1990s, Ter­ry Gilliam would pay trib­ute with his Hol­ly­wood homage 12 Mon­keys, and Mark­er him­self still had many films to make, includ­ing his sec­ond mas­ter­piece, the equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al Sans Soleil. But at time of this study guide’s pub­li­ca­tion, La Jetée’s con­sid­er­able influ­ence had only just begun to man­i­fest. It was around then that pio­neer­ing cyber­punk nov­el­ist William Gib­son viewed the film in col­lege. “I left the lec­ture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, pro­found­ly alone,” he lat­er remem­bered. “My sense of what sci­ence fic­tion could be had been per­ma­nent­ly altered.” Per­haps his instruc­tor heed­ed Andrews’ advice that “teach­ers would prob­a­bly do bet­ter not to ‘pre­pare’ their stu­dents for view­ing this film.” Not that any­one, in the 58 years of the film’s exis­tence, has any­one ever tru­ly been pre­pared for their first view­ing of La Jetée.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci­Fi Film, La Jetée, Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet, William Gib­son

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

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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