Grab a cup of coffee, put on your thinking cap, and start working through this video from Minute Physics, which explains why guitars, violins and other instruments can be tuned to a tee. But when it comes to pianos, it’s an entirely different story, a mathematical impossibility. Pianos are slightly but necessarily out of tune.
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If you enjoy modern Japanese animation, you can no doubt name several masterpieces of the form off the top of your head, whether acclaimed series like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop to the work of cinema auteurs like Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyazaki. What may cross your mind less readily is how much these and other anime productions owe to Astro Boy, or as it was known in Japan, Tetsuwan Atomu (“Mighty Atom”). First conceived on the page by artist Osamu Tezuka, remembered today as “the Godfather of Manga” (i.e., Japanese comics), it became an animated television series in 1962, a production overseen — and fatefully under-budgeted — by Tezuka himself.
“It was a stupidly low number,” Tezuka later wrote in his autobiography of the per-episode figure he quoted to his reluctant sponsors. Yet despite the manifold production stresses it caused, it forced — like any severe limitation — a good deal of creativity.
In time, writes Matt Alt in Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, “the beloved hallmarks of Japanese animated fare — the striking of theatrical poses, the lingering freeze-frames, the limited ranges of motion — evolved from desperate cost-saving workarounds into factors that distinguish anime from content produced in other lands.”
When they were first publicly screened in November of 1962, the first episodes of Astro Boy were accompanied by a lesser-known Tezuka project: Tales from a Certain Street Corner (ある街角の物語), a 40-minute film crafted with an “anti-Disney” aesthetic. At Nishikata Film Review, Cathy Munroe Hotes describes this as “the first of Tezuka’s jikken animation – or experimental works – which Tezuka made for artistic rather than commercial purposes. Although the animation does employ some unusual techniques such as a POV shot of a plane tree seed flying to the ground, it is not ‘experimental’ in the usual sense of the word.”
The term better suits some of the other works included in the playlist at the top of the post, which collects clips of a variety of Tezuka’s experimental and quasi-experimental animations produced between the mid-nineteen-sixties and the late eighties (many of which can easily be seen in full on Youtube), which collectively exhibit both imaginative power and a sense of humor. “Memory” (めもりい), from 1964, mixes traditional animation with Monty Python-style cutouts to depict the yearnings of a postwar salaryman. The omnibus Pictures at an Exhibition (展覧会の絵), made a couple of years later, satirizes modern society in ten different ways, each scored with a movement of the eponymous Mussorgsky piece.
By the last years of Tezuka’s life, the style of his animation seems to have evolved in several directions at once. “Jumping” (ジャンピング) from 1984, imagines what it would be like to jump ever-more-superhuman heights from a first-person perspective; “Push” (プッシュ), from 1987, uses a more conventionally cartoonish aesthetic to render a post-apocalyptic world dominated by vending machines. That same year, Tezuka — a descendant of famed samurai Hanzō Hattori — also released “Muramasa” (村正), a nuclear-annihilation allegory about a haunted sword. The threat posed to Earth by man was also the major theme of Legend of the Forest (森の伝説), left unfinished by the time of Tezuka’s death in 1989 but later picked up by his son Makoto: just one of the countless animators, Japanese and otherwise, working under the Godfather’s influence today.
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 Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It pays to think intelligently about the inevitable. And this course taught by Yale professor Shelly Kagan does just that, taking a rich, philosophical look at death. Here’s how the course description reads:
There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?
You can watch the 26 lectures above. Or find them on YouTube and iTunes in video and audio formats. For more information on this course, including the syllabus, please visit this Yale site.
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Note: With the sad passing of James Earl Jones, at age 93, we’re bringing back a post from our archive–one featuring Jones reading two great American poets, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. These readings first appeared on our site in 2014.
For all its many flaws the original Star Wars trilogy never strayed too far afield because of the deep well of gravitas in James Earl Jones’ voice. The ominous breathing, the echo effect, and that arresting baritone—no amount of dancing Ewoks could take away from his vocal performance. And though Jones’ expressive face has also carried many a film, his unmistakable voice can give even the silliest of material the weight of an oil tanker’s anchor. So then imagine the effect when Jones reads from already weighty literature by Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman? “Chills” only begins to describe it. Just above, hear him read Poe’s “The Raven,” a poem whose rhymes and sing-song cadences conjure up the mad obsession that materializes as that most portentous and intelligent of all the winged creatures.
While Vader and Poe seem like natural companions, the reading by Jones above of selections from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” also makes perfect sense. As comfortable on the stage as he is before the cameras, Jones has an excellent ear for the Shakespearean line, clearly good preparation for the Whitmanian, an “operatic line,” writes The Broken Tower, “due to its brea(d)th.” In the truth Whitman sings in his expansive transcendental poem, “the body, the body politic, and the nation’s body, are all literally the stuff of the universe, stardust smattered and strewn from the unifying explosion of our shared origin.” There are few readers, I aver, who could hold such “stuff” together with the strength and depth of voice as James Earl Jones. The recording above, of sections 6–7 and 17–19, comes from a reading Jones gave in October of 1973 at the 92nd St. Y. Below, hear the complete recording, with several more stanzas. Jones begins at the beginning, rumbling and bellowing out those lines that transmute egotism into magisterial, selfless inclusivity:
It speaks to the importance of discoveries in physics over the past few generations that even the disinterested layman has heard of the field’s central challenge. In brief, there exist two separate systems: general relativity, which describes the physics of space, time, and gravity, and quantum mechanics which describes the physics of fundamental particles like electrons and photons. Each being applicable only at its own scale, one would seem to be incompatible with the other. What the field needs to bring them together is kind of a “grand unified theory,” a concept that has long since worked its way into popular culture.
In the Big Think video above, physicist Michio Kaku explains this scientific quest for what he calls “the God equation” in about five minutes. Such an equation “should unify the basic concepts of physics.” But general relativity as conceived by Albert Einstein is “based on smooth surfaces,” while quantum mechanics is “based on chopping things up into particles.”
The challenge of bringing the two into concert has attracted “the greatest minds of the entire human race,” but to no definitive avail. At this point, Kaku says, only one conception “has survived every challenge: string theory, which is what I do for a living” — and which has attained a rather high level of public awareness, if not necessarily public understanding.
Kaku breaks it down as follows: “If you can peer into the heart of an electron, you would see that it’s a rubber band: a tiny, tiny vibrating string, very similar to a guitar string. There’s an infinite number of vibrations, and that is why we have subatomic particles,” each variety of which corresponds to a different vibration. “A simple idea that encapsulates the entire universe” — and, crucially, a mathematically consistent one — string theory has attracted astute proponents and detractors alike, the latter objecting to its untestabillity. But one day, technology may well advance sufficiently to falsify it or not, and if not, the door opens to the possibility of time machines, wormholes, parallel universes, “things out of The Twilight Zone.” A physicist can dream, can’t he?
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 Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We could call the time in which we live the “Information Age.” Or we could describe it more vividly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. Whatever you think of the work of any of these figures in particular, you can hardly deny the impact they’ve had on our culture. Were we living a century ago, we might have said the same of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald (though he hadn’t quite published The Great Gatsby yet), Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud.
Were we living in the year 1225, our lives would’ve overlapped with those of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.
All this is laid out visually in The Big Map of Who Lived When, created earlier this year by a Reddit user called Profound_Whatever. As Big Think’s Frank Jacobswrites, the map reveals surprising instances of contemporaneousness, such as that current U.S. President Joe Biden “for about a year was alive at the same time as Nikola Tesla (1854–1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating current (AC) system that is used for distributing electricity.”
For “another, more recent (and more baffling) overlap: The life of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), who wrote The Lord of the Rings, coincided ever so slightly with that of Eminem.” Going farther into the past, how many of us were fully aware that “Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and Martin Luther (1483–1546) were contemporaries of each other”? Or that “the lives of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and René Descartes (1596–1650) synced almost perfectly with each other, despite the one being the dogmatically Puritan figurehead of the English Civil War, and the other the father of modern, rationalist philosophy by giving doubt to a central role in the pursuit of truth”?
The Big Map of Who Lived When uses a color-coding system to divide the figures whose lifespans it charts into eight categories, including artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Rube Goldberg), thinkers (John Locke, Charles Darwin), “business & industry” (including famed pirates from Henry Morgan to Blackbeard), and “leaders & baddies” (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler). It all reminds us that we’d give anything for a chance to meet some of them, or to stay out of the path of others. Of course, the individuals we think of as having defined a particular historical era weren’t always regarded that way by everyone else who lived at the same time: something it wouldn’t hurt to bear in mind when considering our own place in history.
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 Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A vague sense of disquiet settled over Europe in the period between World War I and World War II. As the slow burn of militant ultranationalism mingled with jingoist populism, authoritarian leaders and fascist factions found mounting support among a citizenry hungry for certainty. Europe’s growing trepidation fostered some of the 20th century’s most striking painterly, literary, and cinematic depictions of the totalitarianism that would soon follow. It was almost inevitable that this period would see the birth of the first deeply philosophical animated film, known as The Idea.
The Idea first emerged as a wordless novel in 1920, drawn by Frans Masereel. Masereel, a close friend of Dadaist and New Objectivist artist George Grosz, had created a stark, black-and-white story about the indomitable nature of ideas. Employing thick, aggressive lines obtained through woodcut printing, Masereel depicted a conservative political order’s fight against the birth of a new idea, which eventually flourished in spite of the establishment’s relentless attempts to suppress it.
Setting to work in 1930, a Czech filmmaker named Berthold Bartosch spent two years animating The Idea. Bartosch’s visual style remained true to Masereel’s harsh, vivid lines. His version of the story, however, took a decidedly bleaker turn—one that was more reminiscent of the writings of his compatriot, Franz Kafka. Whereas Masereel believed that the purity of good ideas would overwhelm their opposition, Bartosch, working a decade closer to the Nazis’ ascendancy, was wary of such idealism.
Above, you can watch what film historian William Moritz has called “the first animated film created as an artwork with serious, even tragic, social and philosophical themes.” Paired with a haunting score composed by Arthur Honegger, the 25-minute animation is a powerfully moving meditation on art, struggle, purity of thought, and populist savagery that remains untarnished after eight decades.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been praised in all manner of terms since it came out more than half a century ago. An early advertising campaign, tapping into the enthusiasm of the contemporary counterculture, called it “the ultimate trip”; in the equivalently trendy parlance of the twenty-twenties, one could say that it “goes hard,” in that it takes no few bold, even unprecedented aesthetic and dramatic turns. The new video essay from Just One More Thing even describes 2001 as “the hardest film Kubrick ever made” — which, given Kubrick’s uncompromising ambitions as a filmmaker, is certainly saying something.
In one of the many interview clips that constitute the video’s 23 minutes, Steven Spielberg recalls his conversations with Kubrick in the last years of the master’s life. “I want to make a movie that changes the form,” Kubrick would often say to Spielberg. Arguably, he’d already done so with 2001, which continues to launch its first-time viewers into an experience unlike any they’ve had with a movie before. Unlike the more substance-inclined members of his generation, Spielberg went into the theater “clean as a whistle,” but “came out of there altered” nevertheless. It didn’t require drugs to appreciate after all; “that film was the drug.”
This isn’t to say that 2001 is purely or even primarily an abstract work of cinema. In collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick put a great deal of technical thought into the film’s vision of the future, with its well-appointed space stations, its artificially intelligent computers, its video calls, and its tablet-like mobile devices. Working in the years before the moon landing, says Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films author Paul Duncan, they “had to completely visualize, and make real, things that had never occurred.” Such was the realism of their speculative work (up to and including imagining how Earth would look from space) that, as Roger Ebert notes, the real Apollo 11 astronauts could describe their experience simply: “It was like 2001.”
Conceived in the heat of the Space Race, the film envisions a great deal that didn’t come to pass by the eponymous year — and indeed, has yet to materialize still today. “We haven’t quite gotten to artificial intelligence as portrayed,” says star Keir Dullea in a 50th-anniversary interview. “Almost, but not quite.” Still, even since then, the technology has come far enough along that few of us can ponder the current state of AI without sooner or later hearing the ominously polite voice of HAL somewhere in the back of our minds. The saga of astronauts currently stranded on the International Space Station does contrast harshly with 2001’s visions of stable and well-functioning life in outer space — but as a story, it might well have appealed to Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode.
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 Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
History escapes us. Events that changed the world forever, or should have, slide out of collective memory. If we’re pointing fingers, we might point at educational systems that fail to educate, or at huge historical blind spots in mass media. Maybe another reason the recent past fades like old photographs may have to do with old photographs.
The present leaps out at us from our ubiquitous screens in vivid, high-resolution color. We are riveted to the spectacles of the moment. Perhaps if we could see history in color—or at least the small but significant sliver of it that has been photographed—we might have somewhat better historical memories. It’s only speculation, who knows? But looking at the images here makes me think so.
Although we can date color photography back as early as 1861, when physicist James Clerk Maxwell made an experimental print with color filters, the process didn’t really come into its own until the turn of the century. (It wouldn’t be until much later in the 20th century that mass-producing color photographs became feasible.) One early master of the art, Russian chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, used Maxwell’s filter process and other methods to create the images you see here, dating from between 1905 and 1915.
You can see hundreds more such images—over 2000, in fact—at the Library of Congress’ collection, digitally recreated from color glass negatives for your browsing and downloading pleasure or historical research. “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a photograph from the past and felt its subjects come alive so vividly,” writes Messy Nessy, “as if they’ve almost blinked at me, as if it were just yesterday.”
Clearly the clothing, architecture, and other markers of the past give away the age of these pictures, as does their faded quality. But imagine this latter evidence of time passed as an Instragram filter and you might feel like you could have been there, on the farms, churches, waterways, gardens, forests, city streets, and drawing rooms of Imperial Russia during the doomed last years of the Romanovs.
Several hundred of the photos in the archive aren’t in color. Prokudin-Gorskii, notes the LoC, “undertook most of his ambitious color documentary project from 1909 to 1915.” Even while traveling around photographing the countryside, he made just as many monochrome images. Because of our cultural conditioning and the way we see the world now we are bound to interpret black-and-white and sepia-toned prints as more distant and estranged.
Prokudin-Gorskii took his most famous photo, a color image of Leo Tolstoy which we’ve featured here before, in 1908. It granted him an audience with the Tsar, who afterward gave him “a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom,” Messy Nessy notes, and “two permits that granted him access to restricted areas.” After the Revolution, he fled to Paris, where he died in 1944, just one month after the city’s liberation.
His surviving photos, plates, and negatives had been stored in the basement of his Parisian apartment building until a Library of Congress researcher found and purchased them in 1948. His work in color, a novelty at the time, now strikes us in its ordinariness; an aid “for anyone who has ever found it difficult to connect with historical photographs.” Still, we might wonder, “what will they think of our photographs in a hundred years’ time?”
I suspect a hundred years from now, or maybe even 20 or 30, people will marvel at our quaint, primitive two-dimensional vision, while strolling around in virtual 3D recreations, maybe chatting casually with holographic, AI-endowed historical people. Maybe that technology will make it harder for the future to forget us, or maybe it will make it easier to misremember.
The new Every Frame a Painting video explains the technique of the sustained two-shot, and, as IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat writes, “charts — in under six minutes — the technological and industrial trends that have put it more or less in favor with filmmakers and its utility in contemporary filmmaking as a showcase for two actors’ chemistry. This is standard. Zhou, who narrates the series, still can’t avoid feeling like an unseen character within the essay and also the film school TA we all wish we had.” What’s more, it incorporates footage from Zhou and Ramos’ own short film “The Second” to more directly approach the filmmaking challenge of “needing to change coverage plans for an outdoor scene when you’re losing the light.”
As implied by its name, a two-shot contains two actors, and a sustained two-shot continues unbroken for the length of a dialogue between them. We don’t see so many of them in recent pictures, Zhou explains, because they were created in a time when “film was expensive, so it encouraged filmmakers to rehearse more and conserve their takes.” Now, “digital is cheaper, so people don’t really pick one angle and shoot it; they cover a scene from as many angles as possible,” reconstructing it out of bits and pieces in the editing room. Acting styles have also changed since the old-Hollywood days, with all their “gesturing and moving around” that increased the two-shot’s visual interest.
Yet today’s filmmakers ignore the power of this disused form at their peril: “The sustained two-shot is the composition that best allows two performers to play off each other, and try as you might, you cannot replicate this feeling with editing.” And indeed, it’s only one of the effective elements of twentieth-century film that have only become more difficult to replicate amid the practically endless array of options afforded by digital tools and media. One hopes that Zhou and Ramos will cover a variety of them in Every Frame a Painting’s limited-run comeback — and even more so, that they’ll put them to good use in their own narrative filmmaking careers.
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 Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Trying to describe the plot of Fantasmagorie, the world’s first animated cartoon, is a folly akin to putting last night’s dream into words:
I was dressed as a clown and then I was in a theater, except I was also hiding under this lady’s hat, and the guy behind us was plucking out the feathers, and I was maybe also a jack in the box? And I had a fishing pole that turned into a plant that ripped my head off, but only for a few seconds. And then there was a giant champagne bottle and an elephant, and then, suddenly I was on an operating table, and you know how sometimes in a dream, it’s like you’re being crushed to death? Except I escaped by blowing myself up like a balloon and then I hopped onto the back of this horse and then I woke up.
The brainchild of animation pioneer Émile Cohl (1857 – 1938), the trippy silent short from 1908 is composed of 700 drawings, photographed onto negative film and double-exposed.
Clocking in at under two minutes, it’s definitely more diverting than listening to your bed mate bumble through their subconscious’ latest incoherent narrative.
The film’s title is an homage to a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern, known as the fantasmograph, while its playful, nonsensical content is in the spirit of the Incoherent Movement of the 1880s.
Cohl, who cut his teeth on political caricature and Guignol puppet theatre, went on to create over 250 films over the next 15 years, expanding his explorations to include the realms of live action and stop motion animation.
Above, you can watch a somewhat restored version of the film, featuring music by Fabio Napodano. To get a feel for the original grainier silent film, watch here.
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