An Animated Look at the Charade of the Global Elites: Claiming They Want to “Change the World,” They End Up Preserving the Unjust Status Quo

in Animation, Current Affairs, Politics | January 8th, 2020

From Peter Kropotkin to Leo Tolstoy to Noam Chomsky, some of the most revered anarchist thinkers have exhausted page after page explaining why power over others is unjustified, no matter how it justifies itself. To those who say the wealthy and powerful benefit society with charitable works and occasionally humane policy, Tolstoy might reply with the following illustration, which opens Time editor Anand Giridharadas’ talk above, “Winner Take All,” as animated by the RSA:

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible… except by getting off his back.

The author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Giridharadas doesn’t make the case for anarchism here, except perhaps by the slightest implication in his choice of epigraph. But he does call out the “winners of our age,” no matter how much they determine to make a difference with humanitarian aid, for being “unwilling to get off the man’s back.” Unwilling to pay taxes, close loopholes and tax shelters, pay higher wages, or stop lobbying to slash public services. Unwilling to reinvest in the communities that made them.

“What does it look like to imagine the kind of change,” Giridharadas asks, “that would involve the winners of our age stepping off that guy’s back? Or being made to step off that guy’s back?” Here, he leaves us with an ellipses and moves to critique the idea of the “win-win” as a means of making change, rather than just exchange.

The market economy has imported the criteria of exchange into politics and social action. Everything is transactional. But in order to address the gross inequities that result in people figuratively sitting on the backs of others, some must gain more power and others must have less. The parties do not meet in a state of ceteris paribus.

One might take issue with the very terms used in “win-win” thinking. Rather than winners, some would call powerful capitalists opportunists, profiteers, and worse. (The term “robber baron” was once in common circulation.) To claim that good works and good intentions obviate massive power imbalances is to presume that such imbalances are justifiable in the first place. Answering this theoretical question doesn’t, however, address the practical problem.

In the current system of corporate misrule, says Giridharadas, “when everything is couched as a win-win, what you are really saying… is that the best kinds of solutions don’t ask anyone to get off anyone’s back.” Unfettered capitalism has brought us the “privatization of public problems.” That is to say, companies profit from the same issues they help create through pollution, predatory schemes, and undue political influence.

You don’t have to be an anarchist to see a serious problem with that. But if you see the problem, you should want to imagine how things could be otherwise.

via Aeon

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

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

in Music | January 7th, 2020

It’s hard to imagine that in the late 60s, the band who would become the most famous of the psychedelic era was still an obscurity to most U.S. listeners. Nowadays “Pink Floyd may be the only rock band that can credibly be compared to both the Beatles and Spinal Tap,” writes Bill Wyman in a Vulture retrospective of their entire catalogue. Indeed, it’s possible their stadium-sized popularity has been underestimated. According to the data, they’ve actually sold more albums worldwide than the Fab Four.

But they had to pay dues in the States. “In the last week of April 1973,” notes KQED’s Richie Unterberger, Dark Side of the Moon “reached No. 1 on the American charts. In the last week of April 1970, though, they had yet to crack the U.S. Top 50 after three years of recording and performing.”

Their first singer/songwriter, and later tragic muse, Syd Barrett, had come and gone after their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. They were already well into what Wyman describes as the second phase of “four, or arguably five, Pink Floyds.”

This version “was one of the founders of progressive rock, a psychedelic, space-rock‑y, quasi-improvisational ensemble.” They were excellent live musicians and masters of mood and atmosphere. But their experimental direction didn’t sell. “At that point, they were really anxious to have whatever publicity they could,” says Jim Farber, who co-produced the hour-long TV concert film above for KQED, San Francisco’s public television station.

We did not have much of a budget. Pink Floyd did the performance and offered the rights for a certain number of airings for practically nothing. My memory is we paid them $200.

The band played in the empty Fillmore Auditorium for a film crew. The venue wasn’t empty because no one showed up. They could draw a crowd and had already played the Fillmore West and toured the U.S. three times. But, “for as strong an underground following as they were building in the United States,” writes Unterberger, they “were so eager for an American audience that they played a free concert at UCLA a week later” after the KQED taping.

The station, which in 1970 “was more known for Sesame Street than psychedelic rock,” had already begun to move into concert films. “Local icons” like “Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service all got airtime.” But Pink Floyd was something different indeed. The film, broadcast in January of ’71, “got an incredibly positive response when we aired it in San Francisco,” says Farber. “After that, it had two national broadcasts on PBS.”

You can watch the full “Hour with Pink Floyd,” as the program was called, just above. At the top, see the band play “Astronomy Domine” in footage cut from the original broadcast. Further up, see the sixteen minute “Atom Heart Mother,” a testament to how far out Pink Floyd could go, and how much a local public television station was willing to go with them. The track opens with five minutes of aerial footage of the San Joaquin Valley, the band nowhere in sight. When Pink Floyd finally arrives onscreen, the desert vistas continue to weave in and out.

In “Grantchester Meadows,” below, forest sounds and images introduce the song. The effect was to translate the mystique British listeners associated with Pink Floyd to U.S. audiences just on the verge of being blown away by a very different-sounding band who released Dark Side of the Moon three years later.

via Laughing Squid

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

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John Coltrane’s Handwritten Outline for His Masterpiece A Love Supreme

in Jazz, Music | January 7th, 2020

Today we present a rare document from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History: Coltrane’s handwritten outline of his groundbreaking jazz composition A Love Supreme.

Recorded in December of 1964 and released in 1965, A Love Supreme is Coltrane’s personal declaration of his faith in God and his awareness of being on a spiritual path. “No road is an easy one,” writes Coltrane in a prayer at the bottom of his own liner notes for the album, “but they all go back to God.”

If you click the image above and examine a larger copy of the manuscript, you will notice that Coltrane has written the same sentiment at the bottom of the page. “All paths lead to God.” The piece is made up of a progression of four suites. The names for each section are not on the manuscript, but Coltrane eventually called them “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance” and “Psalm.”

In the manuscript, Coltrane writes that the “A Love Supreme” motif should be “played in all keys together.” In the recording of “Acknowledgement,” Coltrane indeed repeats the basic theme near the end in all keys, as if he were consciously exhausting every path. As jazz historian Lewis Porter, author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music, tells NPR in the piece below:

Coltrane more or less finished his improvisation, and he just starts playing the “Love Supreme” motif, but he changes the key another time, another time, another time. This is something very unusual. It’s not the way he usually improvises. It’s not really improvised. It’s something that he’s doing. And if you actually follow it through, he ends up playing this little “Love Supreme” theme in all 12 possible keys. To me, he’s giving you a message here.

In section IV of the manuscript, for the part later named “Psalm,” Coltrane writes that the piece is a “musical recitation of prayer by horn,” and is an “attempt to reach transcendent level with orchestra rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability at the end.” Indeed, in the same NPR piece which you can listen to below, Rev. Franzo Wayne King of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco describes how his congregation one day discovered that Coltrane’s playing corresponds directly to his prayer at the bottom of the liner notes.

In addition to Porter and King, NPR’s Eric Westervelt interviews pianist McCoy Tyner, the last surviving member of Coltrane’s quartet. The 13-minute piece, “The Story of ‘A Love Supreme,’ ” is a fascinating overview of one of the great monuments of jazz.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in September 2013.

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Watch Peluca, the Student Film That Became the Cultural Phenomenon Napoleon Dynamite (2002)

in Film | January 7th, 2020

You could say that Jared and Jerusha Hess got lucky. When first the husband-and-wife team got the chance to make a feature, it turned out to be Napoleon Dynamite, the movie that launched a million “VOTE FOR PEDRO” shirts. But that visually, narratively, and culturally askew tale didn’t emerge fully formed into the theaters. Nor did its title character, an extravagantly nerdy and savagely defensive high-school student in small-town Idaho. Napoleon Dynamite has a predecessor in Peluca, the short film Jared Hess made for an assignment at Brigham Young University’s film school. Napoleon Dynamite himself has a predecessor in Seth, whose curly hair, enormous spectacles, severe awkwardness, and penchant for thrifting and faux cursing will look familiar indeed.

Peluca appears to have much the same to relationship to Napoleon Dynamite as Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket short has to the feature version. Both were shot in black-and-white in locales their filmmakers clearly know well, both are memorably scored (Anderson uses jazz, Hess uses Burt Bacharach), and both tell in a basic form stories that would later unfold to their full cinematic length.

Just as Bottle Rocket, the short, stars Owen and Luke Wilson, who would go on to reprise their roles and gain fame thereafter, Jon Heder played Seth in Peluca before playing Napoleon Dynamite. And just as there’s little obvious difference between the two versions of the character besides their names, the distinctiveness of Hess’ cinematic sensibility shows through in Peluca just as it would, to a much wider audience, in Napoleon Dynamite.

The Hesses once drew frequent comparisons to Anderson, though the past decade and a half has exposed their cinematic enterprises as entirely different. Their second feature Nacho Libre, a Mexican wrestling comedy starring Jack Black, fit comfortably enough into the Hollywood zone of adolescent goofiness. But New Yorker film critic Richard Brody saw something deeper, calling it “the strangest American religious film since The Last Temptation of Christ,” one that “presents a case for nothing less than Catholic-Protestant reconciliation.” The Hesses’ third feature Gentlemen Broncos, the story of a young aspiring science-fiction writer in northern Utah, went almost completely ignored, but Brody deemed it an “even more ecstatic and personal exploration — in loopy, gross-out comic form — of the essence of faith in cosmic religious vision itself, and the ease with which those visions can be perverted to worldly ends.”

Brody continues to speak for the cinephiles who’ve paid to the work of Jared and Jerusha Hess ever more attention, not less, since Napoleon Dynamite. 2015’s Don Verdean, about a crooked Biblical archaeologist, is “a purer, stranger, and more dangerous religious vision than the three films that preceded it.” 2016’s Masterminds, a Hessian treatment of a real-life North Carolina heist gone wrong due to sheer incompetence, “has the religious intensity and spiritual resonance that marks all of Hess’s other films” and “extends his vision into darker corners of existence than he had formerly contemplated.” Considering that picture, Brody sees “a wide-eyed frontality to Hess’s filmmaking, including face-to-face set pieces and action scenes done in wide and static tableaux that suggest a kinship with the transcendental cinema of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer.” And from the right critical perspective, we can see it in Peluca as well.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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A Brief History of John Baldessari (RIP) Narrated by Tom Waits: A Tribute to the Late “Godfather of Conceptual Art”

in Art | January 6th, 2020

All modern art is conceptual in some way, bound to aesthetic theories and combative manifestoes against complacency. But only in the movement known as capital “C” Conceptual Art do the ideas become more important than the objects. Conceptual Art traces its history to Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists who declared war on the bourgeois cultural status quo.

Later experimental artists did the same by elevating mass culture to the status of high art: advertising, comic books, Hollywood spectacle, and—in the past twenty-five years or so—the Internet: Pop Art foregrounded concepts over objects by means of pastiche and metacommentary. The work of L.A. artist Ed Ruscha, for example, centers slogans and clichés over ambiguous images that sometimes look like stock desktop backgrounds.

Both Duchamp and Ruscha were influences on American Conceptualist John Baldessari, who passed away yesterday at age 88, leaving behind a legacy as “arguably America’s most influential Conceptual artist,” according to L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight. Born of European parents and raised in Southern California, Baldessari incorporated humor, satire, and Pop Art elements into his work.

He did not begin his career, however, as part of a movement, and he never expected to have much of an audience. In the early sixties, he was teaching high school art in San Diego and felt “totally isolated,” he says in the interview with Knight below. Baldessari resigned himself to a “normal life,” painting when he could on the weekends. These conditions inspired him to “try to figure out what art meant for me, what was the bottom line.”

Baldessari answers the question, to laughs from the audience, with typical laconic wit: “anything you put on canvas is art.” Baldessari reversed Duchamp’s formula. Put a cinderblock in a museum, he says, and it becomes art through context, but put a canvas on the street and it doesn’t become something else. It always retains its status as an art object. Such objects, for Baldessari, served mainly as material platforms for ideas.

“Pictures are not enough, Baldessari seems to suggest,” writes Alex Greenberger in an ARTnews tribute. “Concepts matter equally, if not even more.” Baldessari has been called “the godfather of Conceptual Art” for this insight, says Tom Waits says in his narration of “A Brief History of John Baldessari” at the top. He’s also been called a “master of appropriation” and “Surrealist for the digital age.” He never limited himself to just canvas but worked in almost every medium of visual and textual art.

Those media included credit card and iPhone app design. Art isn’t only material: it is virtual, ephemeral, and disposable. Baldessari demonstrated his own commitment to destroying the past when, in 1970, he burned all of the work he had made between 1953 and 1966 for a conceptual piece called The Cremation Project. But he wasn’t an art world anarchist. As he toyed with and challenged tradition, he also helped instill it.

Baldessari become famous enough to have warranted a guest spot on The Simpsons (and was awarded a National Medal of Arts). He became wealthy enough by far to quit his day job. But he never stopped teaching, from high school to posts at CalArts, UCLA, and UC San Diego. “I’ve taught all my life,” he said in 2003, “Everything from grade school to college to juvenile delinquents.”

We might be inclined to see in his teaching philosophy a key to understanding his conceptual universe: “I set out to right all the things wrong with my own art education. But I found that you can’t really teach art, you can just sort of set the stage for it.”

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

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Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save Available as a Free AudioBook and eBook: Features Narrations by Paul Simon, Kristen Bell & Stephen Fry

in Audio Books, e-books, Life, Philosophy | January 6th, 2020

In 2009, P rinceton philosopher Peter Singer published his practical handbook/manifesto The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty. Bill and Melinda Gates called it “a persuasive and inspiring work that will change the way you think about philanthropy”–a book that “shows us we can make a profound difference in the lives of the world’s poorest.”

Now, on its tenth anniversary, Singer has released an updated version of The Life You Can Save. And he’s made it available as a free ebook, and also as a free audiobook featuring narrations by Kristen Bell, Stephen Fry, Paul Simon and Natalia Vodianova, among others. You can get the downloads here.

Singer’s website features a page where you can find the best charities that address global poverty. Each charity has been “rigorously evaluated to help you make the biggest impact per dollar.” If you are looking for an efficient approach, you can also make one single donation to support all of the charities vetted and recommended by Singer’s organization.

The audio version of The Life You Can Save will be added to our meta collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Brief Animated History of Alcohol

in Animation, Food & Drink, History, TED Talks | January 6th, 2020

Almost anything can be preserved in alcohol, except health, happiness and money…

Roderick Phillips’ Ted-Ed lesson, a Brief History of Alcohol, above, opens with a bon mot from early 20th-century quote maven Mary Wilson Little, after which, an unwitting chimpanzee quickly discovers the intoxicating effects of overripe plums.

His eyes pinwheel, he falls off a branch, and grins, drunk as a monkey’s uncle.

And though the subject is alcohol, this primate is the only character in Anton Bogaty’s 5‑minute animation who could be hauled in on a drunk and disorderly charge.

The others take a more sober, industrious approach, illustrating alcohol’s prominent role in early medicine, religious rituals, and global trading.

Ancient Egyptians harvest the cereal grains that will produce beer, included as part of workers’ rations and available to all classes.

A native of South America stirs a kettle of chicha, a fistful of hallucinogenic herbs held at the ready.

A Greek physician tends to a patient with a goblet of wine, as a nearby poet prepares to deliver an ode on its creative properties.

Students with an interest in the science of alcohol can learn a bit about the fermentation process and how the invention of distillation allowed for much stronger spirits.

Alcohol was a welcome presence aboard seafaring vessels. Not only did this valuable trading commodity spark lively parties on deck, it sanitized the sailors’ drinking water, making longer voyages possible.

Cheers to that.

Educators can customize the lesson here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC tongight, Monday, January 6 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates Cape-Coddities (1920) by Roger Livingston Scaife. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Vatican Library Goes Online and Digitizes Tens of Thousands of Manuscripts, Books, Coins, and More

in Books, History | January 6th, 2020

If any one of us ran our own country, we’d surely drive no small amount of resources toward building an impressive national library. That would be true even if we ran a country the size of the Vatican, the smallest sovereign state in the world — but one that, unsurprisingly, punches well above its weight in terms of the size and historical value of its holdings. “It was in 1451 when Pope Nicholas V, a renowned bibliophile himself, attempted to re-establish Rome as an academic center of global importance,” writes Aleteia’s Daniel Esparza. That formidable task involved first “building a relatively modest library of over 1,200 volumes, including his personal collection of Greek and Roman classics and a series of texts brought from Constantinople.”

The Vatican Apostolic Library, known as “VAT,” has grown a bit over the past five and a half centuries. Today it contains around 75,000 codices and 85,000 incunabula (which Esparza defines as “editions made between the invention of the printing press and the 16th century”) amid a total of over one million volumes.

And in the case of increasingly many of these documents, you no longer have to make the journey to Vatican City to see them. Thanks to an ongoing digitization project launched a decade ago, increasingly many have become searchable and downloadable on DigiVatLib, a database of the Vatican Library’s digitized collections including not just the aforementioned codices and incunabula but “archival materials and inventories as well as graphic materials, coins and medals.”

Back in 2016 we featured a digital collection of 5,300 rare manuscripts digitized by the collection, including the Iliad and Aeneid as well as Japanese and Aztec illustrations. The VAT’s scanning, uploading, and organizing has continued apace since, and though it prioritizes manuscripts “from the Middle Age and Humanistic period,” its materials taken together have a wider historical and indeed cultural sweep, one that only gets wider with each page added. You can get started exploring this wealth of documents by scrolling down a little on DigiVatLib’s front page, in the middle of which you’ll find the latest digitized materials as well as a host of selected manuscripts, a few of whose pages you see above. The VAT has enjoyed its status as one of the chief repositories of Western civilization longer than any of us has been alive, but we can count ourselves in the first generation of humanity to see it open up to the world.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors

in Archives, History, Museums | January 3rd, 2020

The successes of the Freedman’s Bureau, initiated by Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and first administered under Oliver Howard’s War Department, are all the more remarkable considering the intense popular and political opposition to the agency. Under Lincoln’s successor, impeached Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson, the Bureau at times became a hostile entity to the very people it was meant to aid and protect—the formerly enslaved, especially, but also poor whites devastated by the war. After years of defunding, understaffing, and violent insurgency the Freedman’s Bureau was officially dissolved in 1872.

In those first few years after emancipation, however, the Bureau built several hospitals and over a thousand rural schools in the South, established the Historically Black College and University system, and “created millions of records,” notes the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), “that contain the names of hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved individuals and Southern white refugees.” Those records have enabled historians to reconstruct the lives of people who might otherwise have disappeared from the record and helped genealogists trace family connections that might have been irrevocably broken.

As we noted back in 2015, those records have become part of a digitization project named for the Bureau and spearheaded by the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, whose FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world. “Using modern, digital and web-based technology and the power of [over 25,000!] volunteers,” says Hollis Gentry, a genealogical specialist at the NMAAHC, the Freedman’s Bureau Project “is unlocking information from a transformative era in the history of African American families and the American nation.”

That information is now available to the general public, “globally via the web” here, as of June 20th, 2016, allowing “all of us to enlarge our understanding of the past.” More specifically, the Freedman’s Bureau Project and FamilySearch allows African Americans to recover their family history in a database that now includes “the names of nearly 1.8 million men, women and children” recorded by Freedman’s Bureau workers and entered by Freedman’s Bureau Project volunteers 150 years later. This incredible database will give millions of people descended from both former slaves and white Civil War refugees the ability to find their ancestors.

There’s still more work to be done. In collaboration with the NMAAHC, the Smithsonian Transcription Center is currently relying on volunteers to transcribe all of the digital scans provided by FamilySearch. “When completed, the papers will be keyword searchable. This joint effort will help increase access to the Freedmen’s Bureau collection and help the public learn more about the United States in the Reconstruction Era,” a critical time in U.S. history that is woefully underrepresented or deliberately whitewashed in textbooks and curricula.

“The records left by the Freedmen’s Bureau through its work between 1865 and 1872 constitute the richest and most extensive documentary source available for investigating the African American experience in the post-Civil War and Reconstruction eras,” writes the National Archives. Soon, all of those documents will be publicly available for everyone to read. For now, those with roots in the U.S. South can search the Freedman’s Bureau Project database to discover more about their family heritage and history.

And while the Smithsonian’s transcription project is underway, those who want to learn more can visit the Freedman’s Bureau Online, which has transcribed hundreds of documents, including labor records, narratives of “outrages committed on freedmen,” and marriage registers.

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

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38 Major Pop Songs Played with the Exact Same Four Chords: Watch a Captivating Medley Performed by the Axis of Awesome

in Comedy, Music | January 3rd, 2020

When we call music a universal language, it’s usually understood to be a metaphor. In its purest theoretical form, music may be more like math—a truly universal language—but in its manifestations in the real world, it resembles more the great diversity of tongues around the globe. Each regional, national, and global music has its grammar of scales, rhythms, and chords, each its syntax of melodies and harmonies, though these share some important commonalities.

The syntax of pop music, like its blues predecessor, consists of standard chord progressions, easily swapped from song to song: repeatable units that form a range of available emotional expression. Want to see that range on full display, in a bravado performance by an Australian comedy rock band? Look no further: just above, the Axis of Awesome perform their live rendition of “4 Chord Song,” a stunning medley of pop hits from Journey to Missy Higgins that all use the same four-chord sequence.

With the exception of an original composition, “Birdplane,” the ensemble’s selection of 38 songs includes some of the biggest hits of the past few decades. The tonal breadth is surprising, as we leap from “Don’t Stop Believing” to “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” to “With or Without You” to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Imagine Natalie Imbruglia, Green Day, and Toto trading licks, or Pink, the Beatles, and A‑Ha. Maybe these artists have more in common, linguistically speaking, than we thought. Or, as one of the Axis of Awesome bandmember asks, mock-incredulously, “You can take those four chords, repeat them, and pop out every pop song ever?”

Well, maybe not every pop song. One could choose other progressions and make similar compilations. These particular four chords have something of a melancholy sound, and tend to come up music with an undercurrent of sadness (yes, even “Barbie Girl”). One can quibble with some of the particulars here. “Don’t Stop Believing,” for example, throws a different chord into the second phrase of its progression. But the ubiquity of this melody in pop is quite revealing, and amusing in this musical mashup. See the Axis of Awesome in a polished video version of “4 Chord Song,” above, and consider all the other ways pop music recycles and reuses the same elements over and over to convey its range of feelings.

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

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How Anna Karina (RIP) Became the Mesmerizing Face of the French New Wave

in Film | January 3rd, 2020

If the French New Wave hadn’t crashed over cinema in the 1950s and 60s, could any of the film movements since have come about? Without auteurs like François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, and most of all Jean-Luc Godard, could the French New Wave itself have happened? And without Anna Karina, would Jean-Luc Godard have become Jean-Luc Godard? Though he did make Breathless, his first and most enduring feature, without Karina, it wasn’t for lack of desire: when he tried to bring the still-teenaged Danish actress onboard the project after spotting her in a soap commercial, she turned down his offer because it would involve a nude scene. But she made less of an objection to political themes, demonstrated by her agreement to participate in Godard’s next movie, the controversial Le Petit Soldat.

In total, Karina would appear in eight of Godard’s films, including A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, and Pierrot le Fou — more than enough to make her the nouvelle vague’s most captivating screen presence. This status has transcended culture and time, as evidenced by “Anna Karina’s Guide to Being Mesmerizing,” the short tribute video by the British Film Institute at the top of the post.

To Godard she was first an actress, then a muse; soon she became his wife, and then nearly the mother of his child. Godard, l’amour, la poésie, the above documentary on Godard and Karina’s professional and personal relationship, argues that her miscarriage became the implicit subject of My Life to Live. From then on their relationship, always described as “tumultuous,” deteriorated; they divorced in 1965, the year before their final collaboration, Made in USA.

“I can’t speak badly of him,” Karina says of Godard in a clip of an interview recorded much later. “He was my teacher, my love, my husband, my Pygmalion.” In her work with Godard, writes New Yorker film critic and Godard biographer Richard Brody, “Karina identified not with characters but with herself, perhaps even more fully on camera than in private life — to create an enduring idea of herself. Karina didn’t become the characters she played; they became her.” Throughout her career, she was thus “marked by the distinctiveness of those early performances, by their difference from all other performances, and she became a living emblem not only of herself but of the French New Wave and of the spirit of the nineteen-sixties over all.” As Brody notes, Karina went on to work with such cinematic luminaries as Luchino Visconti, Jacques Rivette, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Raúl Ruiz, and Jonathan Demme.

She also became a filmmaker herself, directing Living Together in 1973 and the French-Canadian musical road movie Victoria in 2006, and in that same span of time published four novels as well. But since her death last month at the age of 79, it is Karina’s work with Godard in the early 1960s to which cinephiles have instinctively returned and most lovingly celebrated. Both she and he, each in their distinctive artistic fashion, embodied a short time in cinema when all rules seemed broken and all possibilities open. In Godard, l’amour, la poésie, the critic Jean Douchet, a colleague of Godard’s at Cahiers du cinéma, puts it differently: “They met, they fell in love, they broke up. End of story. They were a couple like many others, but it’s true that Anna Karina is magnificent in that period with Godard.” And as the French New Wave recedes farther into the distance, that magnificence will only intensify.

How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers

An Introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Innovative Filmmaking Through Five Video Essays

How Jean-Luc Godard Liberated Cinema: A Video Essay on How the Greatest Rule-Breaker in Film Made His Name

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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