When Salvador Dalí Created a Chilling Anti-Venereal Disease Poster During World War II

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing “The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry” a Great Work of Art

When Sal­vador Dali Met Sig­mund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Sur­re­al­ism (1938)

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

Des­ti­no: The Sal­vador Dalí — Walt Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion That Took 57 Years to Com­plete

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.

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Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse

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.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s Famous Tele­vised Press Con­fer­ence After He Went Elec­tric (1965)

Bri­an Eno on the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

The Real Rea­son Why Music Is Get­ting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

How Com­put­ers Ruined Rock Music

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

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

How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 2

East­man giv­ing Edi­son the first roll of movie film, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

This piece picks up where Part 1 of Peter Kauf­man’s arti­cle left off yes­ter­day…

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.

When Charlie Chaplin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dictator Speech Came About

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Char­lie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dic­ta­tor: A State­ment Against Greed, Hate, Intol­er­ance & Fas­cism (1940)

Char­lie Chap­lin Finds Com­e­dy Even in the Bru­tal­i­ty of WWI: A Scene from Shoul­der Arms (1918)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

How Char­lie Chap­lin Used Ground­break­ing Visu­al Effects to Shoot the Death-Defy­ing Roller Skate Scene in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Char­lie Chap­lin & Buster Keaton Go Toe to Toe (Almost) in a Hilar­i­ous Box­ing Scene Mash Up from Their Clas­sic Silent Films

Dis­cov­er the Cin­e­mat­ic & Comedic Genius of Char­lie Chap­lin with 60+ Free Movies Online

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

How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 1

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies that 77 mil­lion Amer­i­cans vot­ed into the White House a crim­i­nal real­i­ty TV star from NBC, one groomed by a real­i­ty TV pro­duc­er from CBS, who then appoint­ed his Cab­i­net from Fox and X and World Wrestling Enter­tain­ment?

It’s a long sto­ry, but the mov­ing image had some­thing to do with it – which is to say, the way we have let tele­vi­sion, video, and screen cul­ture run almost entire­ly unreg­u­lat­ed, pure­ly for prof­it, and with­out regard to its impact on the minds of our cit­i­zens.  And it’s no acci­dent that the media and tech­nol­o­gy tycoons sur­round­ing the Pres­i­dent at his White House inau­gu­ra­tion – from Alpha­bet, Ama­zon, Apple, Face­book, Tik­Tok, X, you name it – con­trol the screens, net­works, and tech­nolo­gies that prop­a­gate the lies we’re forced to inhale every day. He invit­ed them.

What’s worse is that they accept­ed.

* * *

It’s a long sto­ry indeed – one that stretch­es back to the dawn of man, back tens of thou­sands of years to the time when our pre­de­ces­sors exist­ed on Earth with­out a sin­gle writ­ten word between them.  “Lit­er­a­cy,” the philoso­pher, Jesuit priest, and pro­fes­sor of lit­er­a­ture Wal­ter Ong has writ­ten, “is impe­ri­ous.”  It “tends to arro­gate to itself supreme pow­er by tak­ing itself as nor­ma­tive for human expres­sion and thought.”  This arro­gance, for Ong, is so over­reach­ing because the writ­ten word – writ­ing, text, and print gen­er­al­ly – is actu­al­ly such a brand-new phe­nom­e­non in the long his­to­ry of man.  Our species of Homo sapi­ens, Ong reminds us, has been around only for some 30,000 years; the old­est script, not even 6,000; the alpha­bet, less than four. Mesopotami­an cuneiform dates from 3,500 BC; the orig­i­nal Semit­ic alpha­bet from only around 1,500 BC; Latin script, or the Roman alpha­bet that you’re read­ing now, from the sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC.  “Only after being on earth some 500,000 years (to take a fair­ly good work­ing fig­ure) did man move from his orig­i­nal oral cul­ture, in which writ­ten records were unknown and unthought of to lit­er­a­cy.”

For most of human exis­tence, we’ve com­mu­ni­cat­ed with­out print— and even with­out text.  We’ve been speak­ing to one anoth­er.  Not writ­ing any­thing, not draw­ing a whole lot, but speak­ing, one to one, one to sev­er­al, sev­er­al to one, one to many, many to one.  Those who con­sid­er writ­ing, text, and print as “the par­a­digm of all dis­course” thus need to “face the fact,” Ong says, that only the tini­est frac­tion of human lan­guages has ever been writ­ten down – or ever will be.  We com­mu­ni­cate in oth­er ways besides writ­ing.  Always have.  Always will.  Ong press­es us to devel­op a deep­er under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of the “nor­mal oral or oral- aur­al con­scious­ness” and the orig­i­nal “noet­ic econ­o­my” of humankind, which con­di­tioned our brains for our first 500,000 years – and which is at it once again.  Sound and human move­ment around sound and pic­tures sus­tained us “long before writ­ing came along.”  “To say that lan­guage is writ­ing is, at best, unin­formed,” Ong says (a bit impe­ri­ous­ly him­self).  “It pro­vides egre­gious evi­dence of the unre­flec­tive chi­ro­graph­ic and/or typo­graph­ic squint that haunts us all.”

The unre­flec­tive chi­ro­graph­ic squint.  We squint, and we see only writ­ing.  Up to now, we’ve found truth and author­i­ty only in text ver­sions of the word.  But writ­ing, when it, too, first appeared, was a brand-new tech­nol­o­gy, much as we regard cam­eras and micro­phones as brand- new tech­nolo­gies today.  It was a new tech­nol­o­gy because it called for the use of new “tools and oth­er equip­ment,” “styli or brush­es or pens,” “care­ful­ly pre­pared sur­faces such as paper, ani­mal skins, strips of wood,” “as well as inks or paints, and much more.”  It seemed so com­pli­cat­ed and time- con­sum­ing, we even used to out­source it.  “In the West through the Mid­dle Ages and ear­li­er” almost all those devot­ed to writ­ing reg­u­lar­ly used the ser­vices of a scribe because the phys­i­cal labor writ­ing involved – scrap­ing and pol­ish­ing the ani­mal skin or parch­ment, whiten­ing it with chalk, resharp­en­ing goose-quill pens with what we still call a pen-knife, mix­ing ink, and all the rest – inter­fered with thought and com­po­si­tion.

The 1400s changed all that.  Guten­berg start­ed print­ing on his press in Ger­many, in 1455.  The great his­to­ri­ans of print – Robert Darn­ton, Eliz­a­beth Eisen­stein, Lucien Feb­vre, Antho­ny Grafton – tell us about how print­ing passed through patch­es of explo­sive growth, and how that growth was unno­ticed at the time.  Thir­ty years after Guten­berg cranked up his shop in Mainz, Ger­many had print­ers in only forty towns.  By 1500, a thou­sand print­ing press­es were in oper­a­tion in West­ern Europe, and they had pro­duced rough­ly 8 mil­lion books.  But by the end of the 1500s, between 150 and 200 mil­lion books were cir­cu­lat­ing there.

Like ours, those ear­ly years, now 500 years ago, were full of chaos – the new tech­nol­o­gy seemed over­whelm­ing.  Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Librar­i­an Emer­i­tus Robert Darn­ton has writ­ten, “When the print­ed word first appeared in France in 1470, it was so brand new, the state did not know what to make of it.”  The monar­chy (keep this in mind) “react­ed at first by attempt­ing to extin­guish it.  On Jan­u­ary 13, 1535, Fran­cis I decreed that any­one who print­ed any­thing would be hanged.”  For the mov­ing image today, with all of us on our iPhones, the mod­ern cog­nate of hang­ing every­one record­ing or shar­ing video might seem extreme.  But in the long view, we too, com­par­a­tive­ly speak­ing, don’t yet know what to “make” of this new medi­um of ours.

That’s part­ly because it, too, is so young.  The Lumiere broth­ers showed the first movie to pub­lic cus­tomers in France in 1895 – only 130 years ago.  But today video is becom­ing the dom­i­nant medi­um in human com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  It accounts for most of our con­sumer inter­net traf­fic world­wide.  The giga­byte equiv­a­lent of all the movies ever made now cross­es the glob­al inter­net every two min­utes.  Near­ly a mil­lion min­utes of video con­tent cross glob­al IP net­works every six­ty sec­onds.  It would take some­one – any­one – 5 mil­lion years to watch the amount of video that scoots across the inter­net each month. YouTube – YouTube alone – sees more than 1 bil­lion view­ers watch­ing more than 5 bil­lion videos on its plat­form every day.  Video is here, and every­where.  It’s part of every sport­ing event, it’s at every traf­fic stop, it’s at every con­cert and in every court­room.  Twen­ty net­work cam­eras active­ly film the Super Bowl.  The same num­ber work Cen­tre Court at Wim­ble­don.  It’s in every bank, in every car, plane, and train.  It’s in every pock­et.  It’s every­where.  For what­ev­er you need.  Dog train­ing.  Chang­ing a tire. Solv­ing a dif­fer­en­tial equa­tion.  Chang­ing your mood.

It’s tak­en con­trol.  It’s just us who’ve been slow to real­ize it.  Some 130 years into the life of the mov­ing image, we are in what Eliz­a­beth Eisen­stein, writ­ing about print, called the elu­sive trans­for­ma­tion: it’s hard to see, but it’s there.  If you pic­ture an air­plane flight across an ocean at night, you can sense it.  As the sky dark­ens and din­ner is served, the most notice­able thing about the plane is that almost every­one is sit­ting illu­mi­nat­ed by the video screens in front of them.  The screen and the speak­er are now at the heart of how world cit­i­zens com­mu­ni­cate.  In many ways we are the pas­sen­gers on this plane, rely­ing no longer on the print­ed page, but on the screen and its mov­ing images for much of the infor­ma­tion we are receiv­ing (and, increas­ing­ly, trans­mit­ting) about our world.  The cor­rup­tion and malfea­sance and occa­sion­al achieve­ments of our mod­ern politi­cians; sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ments; tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments; news­casts; ath­let­ic feats – the whole pub­lic record of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, in short – is all being record­ed and then dis­trib­uted through the lens, the screen, the micro­phone, and the speak­er.  Now text may be los­ing its hold (short as that hold has been) on our noet­ic imag­i­na­tion – espe­cial­ly its hold as the most author­i­ta­tive medi­um, the most trust­wor­thy medi­um, the medi­um of the con­tract, the last word, as it were.

Don­ald Trump and the greedy, cow­ard­ly tech­nol­o­gists that sur­round him know it.  They have the data; but they also intu­it it.  And they are clamp­ing down on our access to knowl­edge even as the oppo­site seems true – which is that Apple, Net­flix, Tik­tok, and YouTube are mak­ing video ever freer, and more ubiq­ui­tous.

This marks the end of Part 1 of Peter Kauf­man’s essay. You can now find Part 2 here.

–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.

Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Surreal 1935 Stop-Motion Animation

Robots seem to have been much on the pub­lic mind back in the nine­teen-thir­ties. Matt Novak at Pale­o­fu­ture gives the exam­ple of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in news­pa­per sto­ries about a robot that had done the unthink­able: a mechan­i­cal man had shot its inven­tor.” Despite being a typ­i­cal exam­ple of the exper­i­men­tal-fic­tive jour­nal­is­tic style of that era, it nev­er­the­less reflect­ed “a time when robots rep­re­sent­ed some­thing fear­ful,” and were indeed “a potent sym­bol of run­away automa­tion and job loss.” Novak cites the sta­tis­tic that “about 25% of job­less Amer­i­cans thought automa­tion was to blame for their unem­ploy­ment by the end of the Great Depres­sion.”

Not much more than a decade after the very term robot was coined, in Czech play­wright Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., robots were in need of some good PR. Enter Shell Oil, which had not only the resources to com­mis­sion an eye-catch­ing adver­tis­ing film, but also a robot-shaped emblem famil­iar to many con­sumers.

“The Birth of the Robot,” which made its the­atri­cal debut in 1935, tells that char­ac­ter’s ori­gin sto­ry in hyper-sat­u­rat­ed Gas­par­col­or, begin­ning with the very motor of existence–turned by the hand of Old Father Time–while Venus plays her music out toward the stars. We then descend to Earth to find a motorist hap­pi­ly careen­ing around the Egypt­ian desert, not just between but over the Pyra­mids. (Tourism must have been dif­fer­ent in those days.)

Then a storm hits, at which point even the least atten­tive view­er will notice the strik­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of “The Birth of the Robot“ ‘s visu­al style. It was ani­mat­ed in stop motion by a New Zealan­der named Len Lye, who was already known for shorts like “A Colour Box” and “Kalei­do­scope,” fund­ed, respec­tive­ly, by the Unit­ed King­dom’s Gen­er­al Post Office and Impe­r­i­al Tobac­co. Tak­ing a con­sid­er­able nar­ra­tive and aes­thet­ic step for­ward from those, Lye pro­duces a charm­ing, fan­ci­ful result from what was clear­ly a labo­ri­ous process. Despite hav­ing been reduced to bones in the sand, our pro­tag­o­nist is even­tu­al­ly brought back to life by a few drops of Shell oil, albeit not in human but in humanoid robot form — and ready to show off a few moves that, today, would belong in a Boston Dynam­ics com­mer­cial.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Word “Robot” Orig­i­nat­ed in a Czech Play in 1921: Dis­cov­er Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Uni­ver­sal Robots)

The His­to­ry of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Span­ning 116 Years, Revis­it­ed in a 3‑Minute Video

Watch a Visu­al Sym­pho­ny of Every­day Objects in the French Stop Motion Film Grands Canons

Watch Gum­ba­sia, the Jazzy Stop Motion Film That Gave Birth to Gum­by (1955)

The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912): The Tru­ly Weird Ori­gin of Mod­ern Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion

Hard­er Than It Looks: How to Make a Great Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion

Oil’d, by Chris Har­mon

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

Why “The Girl from Ipanema” Is a Richer & Weirder Song Than You Realized

Say what you want about YouTube’s neg­a­tive effects (end­less soy faces, influ­encers, its devi­ous and fas­cist-lean­ing algo­rithms) but it has offered to cre­ators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the rea­sons I’ve been a fan of Adam Neely’s work. A jazz musi­cian and a for­mer stu­dent at both the Berklee Col­lege of Music and the Man­hat­tan School of Music, his YouTube chan­nel is a must for those with an inter­est in the how and why of music the­o­ry. If not for Neely’s tal­ent and YouTube’s plat­form we wouldn’t have the above: a 30 minute (!) explo­ration of the bossa nova stan­dard, “The Girl from Ipane­ma.” And it is worth every sin­gle minute. (Even the com­pos­er Anto­nio Car­los Jobim him­self could not have con­vinced tra­di­tion­al tele­vi­sion execs to give him that long an indul­gence.)

See­ing we haven’t fea­tured Neely on Open Cul­ture before, let this be a great intro­duc­tion, because this is one of his bet­ter videos. It also helps that the sub­ject mat­ter just hap­pens to be one of the most cov­ered stan­dards in pop his­to­ry.

Its lega­cy is one of lounge lizards and kitsch. Neely shows it being used as a punch­line in The Blues Broth­ers and as mood music in V for Vendet­ta. I remem­ber it being hummed by two pep­per­pots (Gra­ham Chap­man and John Cleese) in a Mon­ty Python skit. And Neely gives us the “tl;dw” (“too long, did­n’t watch”) sum­ma­ry up front: the song’s his­to­ry con­cerns blues music, Amer­i­can cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny, and the influ­ence of the Berklee College’s “The Real Book.” There’s also loads of music the­o­ry thrown in too, so it helps to know just a lit­tle going in.

Neely first peels back decades of ele­va­tor music cov­ers to get to the birth of the song, and its mul­ti­ple par­ents: the Afro-Brazil­ian music called Sam­ba, the hip night­clubs of Rio de Janeiro dur­ing the 1950s, the hit film Black Orpheus which brought both sam­ba and bossa nova (the “new wave”) to an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence, Jobim and oth­er musi­cians’ inter­est in Amer­i­can blues and jazz chords, and Amer­i­can inter­est from musi­cians like Stan Getz. All this is a back and forth cir­cuit of influ­ences that results in this song, which bor­rows its struc­ture from Tin Pan Alley com­posers like Cole Porter and Irv­ing Berlin, and inserts a sad, self-pity­ing B‑section after two A‑section lyrics about a young woman pass­ing by on a beach (lyrics by Vini­cius de Moraes, who also wrote the screen­play to Black Orpheus).

The key in which you play the song also reveals the cul­tur­al divide. Play it in F and you are tak­ing sides with the Amer­i­cans; play it in Db and you are keep­ing it real, Brazil­ian style. Neely breaks apart the melody and the chord sequences, point­ing out its rep­e­ti­tion (which makes it so catchy) but also its ambi­gu­i­ty, which explains end­less YouTube videos of musi­cians get­ting the chord sequence wrong. And, what exact­ly *is* the true chord sequence? And how is it a riff on, of all things, Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”? Neely also shows the pro­gres­sion of var­i­ous cov­ers of the song, and what’s been added and what’s been delet­ed. Leav­ing things out, as he illus­trates with a clip from Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Har­vard lec­tures, is what gives art its mag­ic.

There’s so much more to this 30 minute clip, but you real­ly should watch the whole thing (and then hit sub­scribe to his chan­nel). This essay is exact­ly what YouTube does best, and Neely is the best of teach­ers, a smart, self-dep­re­cat­ing guy who mix­es intel­lect with humor. Plus, you’ll be hum­ming the song for the rest of the day, just a bit more aware of the rea­son behind the ear worm.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Girl from Ipane­ma” Turns 50; Hear Its Bossa Nova Sound Cov­ered by Sina­tra, Krall, Methe­ny & Oth­ers

Remem­ber­ing the “Father of Bossa Nova” João Gilber­to (RIP) with Four Clas­sic Live Per­for­mances: “The Girl From Ipane­ma,” “Cor­co­v­a­do” & More

Getz and Gilber­to Per­form ‘The Girl from Ipane­ma’ (and the Woman Who Inspired the Song)

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

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A Tour of the Final Home Designed By Frank Lloyd Wright: The Circular Sun House

Some remem­ber the nine­teen-nineties in Amer­i­ca as the sec­ond com­ing of the nine­teen-fifties. What­ev­er holes one can poke in that his­tor­i­cal fram­ing, it does feel strange­ly plau­si­ble inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cir­cu­lar Sun House. Though not actu­al­ly built until 1967, it was com­mis­sioned from Wright by ship­ping mag­nate Nor­man Lykes in 1959, the last year of the archi­tec­t’s life. Almost dat­ed though it may have looked by the time of its com­ple­tion, super­vised by Wright’s appren­tice John Rat­ten­bury, it would have accrued some retro cachet over the sub­se­quent decades. Then, in the ren­o­va­tion-mad nineties, the house­’s own­ers brought Rat­ten­bury back out to do a thor­ough update and remod­el.

The result is a kind of hybrid fifties-nineties aes­thet­ic, which will suit some tastes bet­ter than oth­ers. But then, so do all the res­i­dences designed by Wright, of which the Cir­cu­lar Sun House in Phoenix, Ari­zona, is the very last.

In the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, post­ed when the house went on the mar­ket in 2021, real estate agent Dean­na Peters points out a few of its Wright­ian fea­tures: its cir­cu­lar form, but also its curved hall­ways, its cus­tom-built cab­i­netry (Philip­pine mahogany, of course), its sig­na­ture “com­pres­sion-and-release” and “inside-out” spa­tial effects, its can­tilevered bal­cony, its inte­gra­tion with the desert envi­ron­ment, and even its car­port — Wright’s own coinage, and indeed his own inven­tion.

Also in the man­ner of most Wright-designed homes — as he him­self was known to acknowl­edge, and not with­out a boast­ful note — the Cir­cu­lar Sun House seems eas­i­er to look at than to live in, let alone main­tain. “The 3‑bedroom home last sold in 2019, before it had a brief peri­od on Airbnb (rent­ed for approx­i­mate­ly $1,395 a night),” wrote Homes & Gar­dens’ Megan Slack in 2023. At that time, it was on the mar­ket for $8.5 mil­lion, about half a mil­lion dol­lars more than its own­er want­ed in 2021. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, though it remains unsold as of this writ­ing, its ask­ing price has risen to $8,950,000. Wright’s name brings a cer­tain pre­mi­um, of course, but so do the trends of the moment: one hears, after all, that the nineties are back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

130+ Pho­tographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mas­ter­piece Falling­wa­ter

Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Man­sion That Has Appeared in Blade Run­ner, Twin Peaks & Count­less Hol­ly­wood Films

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

Inside the Beau­ti­ful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

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

Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Winner of a 2025 Academy Award

Vic­to­ria Warmer­dam, the writer and direc­tor of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” sum­ma­rizes the plot of her 22-minute film as fol­lows: The film “tells the sto­ry of Lara, a music pro­duc­er who spi­rals into an exis­ten­tial cri­sis after repeat­ed­ly fail­ing a CAPTCHA test—leading her to ques­tion whether she might actu­al­ly be a robot. Through a dark comedic lens, [the film] explores themes of iden­ti­ty, self-deter­mi­na­tion, love, and tech­nol­o­gy in a world where the line between human­i­ty and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is becom­ing increas­ing­ly blurred.” This past week­end, “I’m Not a Robot” won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short, mark­ing the first time a Dutch short film received this hon­or. Dis­trib­uted by The New York­er, “I’m Not a Robot” can be viewed free online. We’re adding it to our col­lec­tion of 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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 

Glass: The Oscar-Win­ning “Per­fect Short Doc­u­men­tary” on Dutch Glass­mak­ing (1958)

The Clas­sic 1956 Oscar-Win­ning Children’s Film, The Red Bal­loon

Watch This Year’s Oscar-Win­ning Short The Neighbor’s Win­dow, a Sur­pris­ing Tale of Urban Voyeurism

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

 

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The Classic 1972 Concert Film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii Gets Restored & Will Soon Hit IMAX Theaters

Today, when we watch genre-defin­ing con­cert films like Mon­terey Pop, Wood­stock, Gimme Shel­ter, or Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars, we look upon the audi­ence with near­ly as much inter­est as we do the per­form­ers. But Pink Floyd nev­er did things in quite the same way as oth­er rock bands of that era. In 1972, they put out a con­cert film with no audi­ence at all, sub­sti­tut­ing for visu­al inter­est the majes­tic ruins of the ancient Roman amphithe­ater in Pom­peii. Pink Floyd at Pom­peii – MCMLXXII has late­ly been restored, and you can see the trail­er for its upcom­ing world­wide cin­e­mas-and-IMAX re-release above.

Even with­out the unpre­dictable ele­ment of atten­dees (apart from a few local chil­dren who snuck in to watch), the pro­duc­tion had its dif­fi­cul­ties. Ever musi­cal­ly rig­or­ous, the Floyd insist­ed on play­ing live with their actu­al tour­ing gear, which took three days to truck over from Lon­don.

Only then was it dis­cov­ered that the amphithe­ater did­n’t have enough elec­tric­i­ty avail­able to pow­er it all, which ulti­mate­ly required run­ning a half-mile-long exten­sion cord to the town hall. Though hard­ly unim­pres­sive, the result­ing footage fell short of fea­ture length, which required sup­ple­men­tary shoot­ing at the con­sid­er­ably less his­toric Stu­dio Europa­sonor in Paris.

Pink Floyd at Pom­peii – MCMLXXII was orig­i­nal­ly meant, in part, to pro­mote their then-lat­est-release Med­dle. That album is best remem­bered for “Echoes,” which occu­pies the entire­ty of side two, and which fore­shad­owed the kinds of ambi­tious com­po­si­tions of which the post-Syd Bar­rett ver­sion of the Floyd would be capa­ble. The film splits it up into two parts, one to open it and the oth­er to close it; you can get a taste of this live ren­di­tion from the clip just above. In between the two halves of “Echoes” come songs like “Care­ful with That Axe, Eugene,” “A Saucer­ful of Secrets,” and “Made­moi­selle Nobs,” as well as footage of the band in the stu­dio, at work on their next project: an album called The Dark Side of the Moon.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

Watch the Rare Reunions of Pink Floyd: Con­certs from 2005, 2010 & 2011

David Gilmour Makes His Live at Pom­peii Con­cert Film Free to Watch Online

Take a High Def, Guid­ed Tour of Pom­peii

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

Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance

Cour­tesy of Wired, his­to­ri­an Alexan­der Bevilac­qua (Williams Col­lege) answers the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about the cul­tur­al rebirth that came to be known as The Renais­sance. In 30+ min­utes, Bevilac­qua cov­ers an array of ques­tions, includ­ing: When did The Renais­sance begin? What exact­ly was the Renais­sance? Why do paint­ings like the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus remain so famous cen­turies lat­er? What did peo­ple’s diets con­sist of dur­ing The Renais­sance? How was their hygiene? How did Brunelleschi build a dome in Flo­rence that defied grav­i­ty? What is inside Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s note­books? And the ques­tions go on…

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Michelangelo’s David: The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Renais­sance Mar­ble Cre­ation

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Renais­sance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Per­formed by Mod­ern Singers

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books Get Dig­i­tized: Where to Read the Renais­sance Man’s Man­u­scripts Online

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illus­trat­ed Film


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