60 Free-to-Stream Movies for Women’s History Month: Classic Agnès Varda, a Portrait of Susan Sontag, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, and More
March is Women’s History Month, and every month is a good one for watching movies. Well aware of both those facts, the people behind free-to-user online streaming service Kanopy have made a range of 60 woman-centric and mostly woman-made films available this month. Some of the women involved include Nouvelle Vague auteur Agnès Varda, director of Cléo from 5 to 7 and The Beaches of Agnès; Susan Sontag, the prolific writer and subject of Regarding Susan Sontag; and Greta Gerwig, who went from respected indie-cinema actress to even more respected indie-cinema director with 2017’s Lady Bird.
If the trailers for these films in this post intrigue you, you can, of course, go right to Kanopy to watch them in full. First, though, you’ll want to pull out your local library card. “We stream thoughtful entertainment to your preferred device with no fees and no commercials by partnering with public libraries and universities,” says Kanopy’s about page, explaining that you need only “log in with your library membership and enjoy our diverse catalog with new titles added every month.”
To check and see whether your library (or university) is among Kanopy’s partners, just type it into the search window on this page.
After logging in you can explore the full breadth of Kanopy’s list of Women’s History Month selections, which also includes documentaries like Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines, The Girls in the Band: Female Jazz Musicians, Who Does She Think She Is?: A Portrait of Female Artists, and Women of ’69: Unboxed: Women from the Sixties Share their Stories, as well as other examinations of women in politics, women in gaming, women in STEM, and women in prison. Once you’ve seen them all, you might consider exploring Kanopy’s other cinematic offerings, from a variety of other documentaries to drama, comedy, and even horror and thriller as well as science fiction and fantasy.
That last section, one can’t help but notice, comes headed by Mark Sawers’ No Men Beyond This Point, which takes as its setting a world that hasn’t been able to produce male babies for the past 60 years. Its main character is the last man alive. Kanopy describes it as “a wry mockumentary that asks the question, what would the world be like if women were in charge?” However positive or negative an answer to that question just popped into your head, all these films will surely give it a bit more nuance, and at no charge at that.
Kanopy’s own list of five Women’s History Month films recommended from each of their major collection runs as follows:
Films Directed by Women
- Lady Bird — Directed by Greta Gerwig and nominated for five Oscars, this warm, affecting comedy follows a high schooler who must navigate a loving, but turbulent relationship with her strong-willed mother over the course of her eventful and poignant senior year of high school.
- Cleo from 5 to 7 — Director Agnes Varda eloquently captures Paris in the ‘60s with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift as she awaits test results following a biopsy.
- The Miseducation of Cameron Post — Directed by Desiree Akhavan and Grand Jury Prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival, the film follows Cameron when she’s sent to a gay conversion therapy center after getting caught with another girl in the backseat of a car.
- American Honey — Nominated for six Film Independent Spirit Awards and winner of two Special Jury Prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, the film follows an adolescent girl from a troubled home who runs away with a traveling sales crew across the American Midwest to sell subscriptions door-to-door.
- Madeline’s Madeline — From director Josephine Decker, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur when a young actress is pushed too far. An Official Selection at the Berlin International Festival, Madeline’s Madeline stars Molly Parker (“Lost in Space”).
History
- Anita — Against a backdrop of sex, politics, and race, Anita reveals the intimate story of a woman who spoke truth to power.
- Killing Us Softly (Four-Part Series) — Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how print and television advertisements bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes, distorting the ideals of femininity over the decades.
- Women of ’69: Unboxed — An intimate, personalized portrait of women of the 1960s through the eyes of one colorful class that graduated in 1969 and started to explore the New Old Age.
- Political Animals — This multi-award winning film tells the story of the civil rights struggle of this century — the gay rights movement — through the eyes of the first four members of the LGBT Legislative Caucus.
- The Girls in the Band — An award-winning documentary film that tells the poignant, untold stories of female jazz and big band instrumentalists and their fascinating, history-making journeys from the late ‘30s to present day.
Major Figures
- Regarding Susan Sontag — An intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of the 20th century, Susan Sontag.
- Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise — The film traces Dr. Angelou’s incredible journey, shedding light on the untold aspects of her life through never-before-seen footage, rare archival photographs and videos in her own words.
- Jane’s Journey — A 2010 film that follows Jane Goodall across several continents, from her childhood home in England to the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, where she began her groundbreaking research and where she still returns every year to enjoy the company of chimpanzees.
- The Beaches of Agnes — From director Agnes Varda, this cinematic self-portrait touches on everything from the feminist movement and the Black Panthers to the filmmaker’s husband Jacques Demy and the birth of the French New Wave.
- Mavis! — An award-winning documentary on gospel/soul music legend and civil rights icon, Mavis Staples and her family group, The Staple Singers.
Current Events
- Women’s March — Shot on location in five U.S. cities in 2017, this is a story about democracy, human rights and what it means to stand up for values in today’s America.
- I am a Girl — Nominated for four Australian Academy Awards including Best Documentary and Best Director, this inspirational feature-length documentary follows six girls from around the world, painting a clear picture of the reality of what it means to be a female in the 21st century.
- Miss Representation — Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, this film exposes how mainstream media contributes to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America.
- Starless Dreams — A stark testimonial of the previously unseen and unheard, this award-winning documentary plunges into the lives of young teenage girls sharing temporary quarters at a rehabilitation and correction center on the outskirts of Tehran.
- Hooligan Sparrow — Maverick activist Ye Haiyan (a.k.a Hooligan Sparrow) and her band of colleagues travel to Hainan Province in southern China to protest the case of six elementary school girls who were sexually abused by their principal.
Related Content:
1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.
An Ambitious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Filmmakers
The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922)
11 Essential Feminist Books: A New Reading List by The New York Public Library
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.
Read More...The Elaborate Pictogram Ernest Hemingway Received in the Hospital During WWI: Can You Decode Its Meaning?
Everyone who knows the work of Ernest Hemingway knows A Farewell to Arms, and everyone who knows A Farewell to Arms knows that Hemingway drew on his experience as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. Just a few months after shipping out, the eighteen-year-old writer-to-be — filled, he later said, with “a great illusion of immortality” — got caught by mortar fire while taking chocolate and cigarettes from the canteen to the front line. Recovering from his wounds in a Milanese hospital, he fell in love with an American nurse named Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky, who would become the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway wrote that novel years after Kurowsky had left him for an Italian officer, but when their prospects still looked good, they received this curious letter, which at first glance looks like nothing more than a few pages of doodles. “We think it may be a rebus or another type of pictogram that uses pictures to represent words, parts of words, or phrases,” wrote Jessica Green, an intern at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library where it turned up, in 2012. “Can you help us solve this puzzle?” Quite a few Hemingway-enthusiast commenters dutifully got to their interpretive work below Green’s post, bringing to bear their knowledge of the writer’s life and work on these animals, musical notes, grinning faces, and mugs of beer, all strung together with logic symbols.
If you need a hint, you might start with the apparent fact that the letter came from three of Hemingway’s ambulance-driver buddies. “The letter is a cheerful narrative of the three friends’ recent hijinks,” writes Slate’s Rebecca Onion. “In the salutation, the writers used a foaming mug of beer to represent Hemingway’s name (he was often called ‘Hemingstein’); clearly, these were men who shared Hemingway’s love for inebriation.” But even before they addressed good old Hemingstein, they addressed Kurowsky — as, in the visual language invented for their purposes, a frying pan with an egg in it. “Ag sounds like egg,” explains the decipherment Green later posted to the JFK Library’s blog.
Green goes on to break down the pictographic letter section by section, from Brummy, Bill, and Jenks’ plans to take leave time and come to Milan, Brummy’s unfortunate recent experience with “mixed drinks made from Asti Spumanti, Rum, Cognac, Marsala, and Rock Syrup,” Jenks’ driving of the bedbugs in his bed into that of another driver, and the glorious results of Bill’s trimming and waxing of his mustache, and more besides. To modern readers, the letter offers not just a glimpse into the sensibilities of Hemingway’s social circle but life on the Italian front in 1918. And for Hemingway himself, receiving such an amusing piece of correspondence during six long months of recuperation in the hospital must surely have done something to lift the spirits, though what effect its distinctive compositional style may have had on his own writing seemingly remains to be studied.
Click here to read a decoding of this pictogram from 1918.
Related Content:
Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Published Stories, Free as an eBook
Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading List for a Young Writer (1934)
Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction
Hear Hemingway Read Hemingway, and Faulkner Read Faulkner (90 Minutes of Classic Audio)
Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe
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.
Read More...Download 10,000+ Books in Arabic, All Completely Free, Digitized and Put Online
If you’ve considered learning a new language to open up a new realm of reading, you could do much worse than Arabic. Though its mastery may demand a considerable amount of time, it repays the investment as the language of not just a country but an entire region of the world, and a region with a deep textual history at that. Anyone interested in becoming a student of Arabic, casually or seriously, can get their start at our collection of Arabic lessons available free online, and when up to speed on reading might consider a visit to Arabic Collections Online (ACO), a digital library of Arabic-language texts now boasting 10,042 volumes across 6,265 subjects, all of them also available free online.
With a list of contributing partners including institutions in both America (New York University, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia) and the Middle East (the American University in Cairo, the American University of Beirut and United Arab Emirates National Archives) — and, as ArabLit notes, a $1.34 million grant received last August — ACO “aims to digitize, preserve, and provide free open access to a wide variety of Arabic language books in subjects such as literature, philosophy, law, religion, and more.”
This mission addresses not just a lack of widely available Arabic texts on the web, but the condition of much of the material digitized, as “many older Arabic books are out-of-print, in fragile condition, and are otherwise rare materials that are in danger of being lost.”
Though clearly an ever more valuable resource for students of Arabic, ACO has much more to offer those already acquainted with the joys of the language. ArabLit specifically points out two of its featured Egyptian titles this month, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Return of the Spirit (عودة الروح), which English translator William Maynard Hutchins describes as “a gloriously Romantic tribute to the solidarity of the Egyptian people of all classes and religions and to their good taste and excellent sense of humor,” andColors (ألوان) by Taha Hussein, one of the country’s most influential intellectuals of the 20th century. But the full scope of Arabic-language literature, as the already vast holdings of Arabic Collections Online reveals, extends beyond Egypt, and far indeed beyond the past couple of centuries. To those about to explore it,bil-tawfiq.
Related Content:
How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition
A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes to Learn Foreign Languages: From Easiest to Hardest
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.
Read More...Hear Underground 12, the Earliest Known Case of Musicians Recording While Under the Influence of LSD (1966)
Music and LSD: after “Tomorrow Never Knows” and Sgt. Pepper, we knew what an acid trip should sound like. Other folks needed to know more. Somewhere in Los Angeles in 1966 a group of musicians were dosing and recording while tripping.
The resulting recording–credited to “Underground 12” and considered the earliest known case of musicians recording while under the influence of LSD–was only available, as the legend goes, by mail order–you can see a copy of it here on discogs, a plain red label with only an address: 12457 Ventura Blvd. in Studio City, CA. A little bit of Google snooping revealed this to be an office for Huntington Park First Savings and Loan in 1966, but assuming there was another office there, an issue of Billboard from that year also mentions an artist manager called Bob Reed at the same address. (Bob, we’re on to you!).
There’s nothing particularly groovy about this music. There’s no sitars, no fuzz pedals, no incense, no peppermints. There is, however, a lot of echo and delay, a lot of sped up tape (which in parts sounds a bit like Zappa’s “King Kong”), plenty of atonal laughing, and welp, that’s about it for side one.
Side two is a bit better, with an actual piano played at normal speed, and an electric guitar soloing against it. This sounds a bit proggy, about five years ahead of its time. But then the producer (Bob Reed, is that you again?) starts speeding up the tape again.
Con job or bad trip? Did these musicians know what they were in for? Did they really dose, or was studio trickery seen as a good enough placebo? Did the LSD produce some pretty ordinary studio jamming and the LP is a salvage job? So many mysteries, so little time.
Lysergia, a Swedish label that re-releases rare grooves such as this has also put out The Psychedelic Experience: The Ultimate Journey Through Late 60s Psychedelia, Acid Burns and Druggy Grooves by Patrick Lundborg, a Swedish writer whose subject was LSD, and rereleased the only album by Madrigal, a Morristown, New Jersey twosome which has a 13-minute track called “Stoned Freakout.”
However if the above sampler thrills you and you would like to own an original copy of this dubious classic by the Underground 12, it will set you back $666. The seller, obviously, knows what’s up.
Related Content:
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Documentary That Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of Germany’s Legendary Art, Architecture & Design School
This April 1st marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, the German art school that, though short-lived, launched an entire design movement with a stark, functional aesthetic all its own. It can be tempting, looking into that aesthetic that finds the beauty in industry and the industry in beauty, to regard it as purely a product of its time and place, specifically a 20th-century Europe between the wars searching for ways to invent the future. But as revealed in Bauhaus World, this three-part documentary from German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the legacy of the Bauhaus lives on not just in the reputations of its best known original members — Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers, among others — but in the currently active creators it continues to inspire in every corner of the Earth.
“What do escalators in Medellín, Arabic lettering in Amman, story-telling furniture from London, urban farming in Detroit and a co-living complex in Tokyo have to do with the Bauhaus?” asks Deutsche Welle’s web site. They all draw from “the influence that the philosophy of the Bauhaus movement still exerts on the globalized society of the 21st century,” a time that has its societal parallels with the year 1919.
To illustrate those parallels as well as the continuing relevance of Bauhaus teachings, “we meet architects, urban planners, designers and artists from around the globe who, in the spirit of the Bauhaus, want to rethink and change the world.” True to its title, Bauhaus World’s journey involves a wide variety of countries, and not just European ones: different segments profile the work of Bauhaus-influenced designers everywhere from Mexico to Jordan, Colombia to Israel, the United States to Japan.
It’s in Japan, in fact, that the first part of Bauhaus World, “The Code,” finds the outer reaches of the spread of Bauhaus that began with the exile of its members from Nazi Germany. The second part, “The Effect,” deals with the enduring influence that has turned Bauhaus and its principles from a movement to a brand, one that has potentially done more than its share to make us as design-obsessed as we’ve become in the 21st century — a century that, the third and final part “The Utopia” considers, may or may not have a place for the original Bauhaus ideals. But whatever Gropius, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, and the rest would think of what the Bauhaus they created has become over the past hundred years, over the next hundred years more and more designers — emerging from a wider and wider variety of societies and traditions — will come to see themselves as its descendants.
Bauhaus World will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Related Content:
32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Available Online by Harvard Museum Website
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.
Read More...Hear Neil Gaiman Read Aloud 15 of His Own Works, and Works by 6 Other Great Writers: From The Graveyard Book & Coraline, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven & Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Neil Gaiman is a storyteller. That title encompasses quite a few pursuits, most of which seemingly involve writing — writing novels, writing radio dramas, writing comic books — but he also occasionally tells stories the old-fashioned way: speaking aloud, and to an audience of rapt listeners. Traditionally, such storytelling happened in a circle around the campfire, but as a storyteller of the 21st century — albeit a master of timeless techniques who uses those techniques to deal with timeless themes — Gaiman can tell stories to the entire world. Today we’ve gathered all of Gaiman’s streamable readings, both video and audio, in one place.
Nearly every type of text at which he has tried his hand appears in this collection, from novels (The Graveyard Book) to novellas (Coraline) to poetry (“Instructions,” above) to manifestos (“Making Good Art”). Suitable as his voice and delivery are to his own work, Gaiman’s live storytelling talent also extends to the works of others, as you’ll find out if you listen to the selections on the second list below.
The material varies widely, from nonsense or near-nonsense poetry like Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” to the work of his friend Ursula K. Le Guin to a classic like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” whose Gothic atmosphere will no doubt appeal to Gaiman’s fans.
And Gaiman certainly has his fair share of fans. If you already count yourself in that group, you’ll need little convincing to do a binge-listen of his readings here. But if you aren’t yet familiar with Gaiman’s work in all its various forms, you might consider using these pieces of video and audio as an entryway into his narrative world, with its emotional chiaroscuro, it modern-day mythology, and its unflagging sense of humor. There’s plenty of Neil Gaiman out there to read, of course, but with his style of storytelling, sometimes he must simply be heard — if not around an actual campfire, then on that largest campfire ever created, the internet. These texts will be added to our list, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
- “Click-Clack the Rattle Bag” — Free Video
- Coraline — Free Video
- “Harlequin Valentine” — Free Audio at Last.FM
- “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” – Free MP3
- “Instructions” — Free Video
- “Orange” (read live) – Free Video
- “Other People” (read live) – Free Video
- “Making Good Art” — Free Video
- “The Day the Saucers Came” — Free Video
- “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury” — Free Audio
- The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains — Free Audio
- The Graveyard Book (a novel read live with illustrations) – Free Video
- The Wolves in the Walls — Free Video
- “Witch Work” — Free Video
- “A Study in Emerald” – Free iTunes
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens — Free Audio
- Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss — Free Video
- “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen — Free Video
- “How It Seems to Me,” a Poem by Ursula K Le Guin — Free Video
- “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll — Free Video
- “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe — Free Video
Related Content:
18 Stories & Novels by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Readings by Neil Himself
Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains
Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling in His New Online Course
Amanda Palmer Animates & Narrates Husband Neil Gaiman’s Unconscious Musings
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.
Read More...Dieter Rams Lists the 10 Timeless Principles of Good Design–Backed by Music by Brian Eno
Nearly all of us have heard the dictum “Less, but better,” and nearly all of us have used Braun products. But how many of us know that both of those owe their considerable popularity to the same man? After studying architecture, interior decoration, and carpentry, the German industrial designer Dieter Rams spent 40 years at Braun, most of them as the company’s chief design officer. There he created such hits as the 606 universal shelving system, the SK61 record player, and the ET66 calculator. That last provided the model for the calculator application interface in Apple’s iOS 3, among other homages Apple has paid to Rams.
Rams, in turn, has been complimentary to Apple, calling it one of the few companies in existence that designs products according to his principles. Anyone can sense the affinity between the most enduring Apple products and Rams-designed Braun products, but what are those principles?
You can hear them laid out by the man himself himself in the trailer above for Rams, last year’s documentary by Gary Hustwit, he of Helvetica (the documentary about the font) and Objectified (the documentary about industrial design that featured Rams as an interviewee). The list is as follows:
- Good design is innovative. “Design always comes about in connection with innovative technology. How can design be good if the technology is not on the same level?”
- Good design makes a product useful. “Good design optimizes usefulness and ignores anything that doesn’t serve the purpose or works against it.”
- Good design is aesthetic. “Objects you use daily significantly shape your surroundings and your sense of well-being. Only something that is well-made can be beautiful.”
- Good design makes a product understandable. “It makes it easy to understand the structure of the product. Even more, it can make the product ‘talk.’ Ideally, it explains itself best.”
- Good design is unobtrusive. “Products that serve a purpose have the characteristics of a tool. Their design should be neutral and leave room for the user’s self-expression.”
- Good design is honest. “Honest means not trying to make a product look more innovative, powerful, or valuable than it really is.”
- Good design is long-lasting. “In contrast to fashionable design, it lasts many years even in our current throwaway society.”
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail. “Nothing should be arbitrary or left to chance. Thoroughness and precision are expressions of respect for the user.”
- Good design is environmentally friendly. “Design makes an important contribution to preserving the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution.”
- Good design is as little design as possible. “Back to simplicity. Back to purity. Less, but better.”
The trailer illustrates each of these principles with one of Rams’ designs, developed at Braun or elsewhere: the T 1000 CD radio, the MPZ 21 citrus juicer, the 740 stool, the 620 chair. Though designed forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, these gadgets and pieces of furniture have stood the test of time. Some have even made a return to the market in recent years of our both aesthetically and environmentally conscious age. You can watch Rams on Vimeo on Demand, and if you do, you’ll not only get to enjoy its Brian Eno-composed score, you’ll learn much more about how Rams designed his most beloved products — and about where he still sees ways to improve them. That holds true even for his design principles themselves: “I always emphasized that they weren’t meant to last forever,” he says. “They should be updated.”
Related Content:
Bauhaus, Modernism & Other Design Movements Explained by New Animated Video Series
Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity
Saul Bass’ Oscar-Winning Animated Short Ponders Why Man Creates
Saul Bass’ Advice for Designers: Make Something Beautiful and Don’t Worry About the Money
Sketches of Artists by the Late New Media Designer Hillman Curtis
Abstract: Netflix’s New Documentary Series About “the Art of Design” Premieres Today
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.
Read More...Watch 66 Oscar-Nominated-and-Award-Winning Animated Shorts Online, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada
I recently heard someone quip that proposals to cut the Academy Awards are tantamount to suggesting that the NFL trim down the Super Bowl. Certainly for many who would rather watch the former any day of the week, even the play-by-play of technical categories repays attention. Yet people who think of the Oscars as a major sporting event with big stars and blockbusters going head-to-head can still appreciate the show as more than spectacle. How else, for example, would most of us learn about brilliant animated short films like the National Film Board of Canada’s Animal Behaviour, made by husband and wife team Alison Snowden and David Fine and nominated in this year’s Oscars? (See the trailer above.)
Snowden and Fine previously won an Oscar in 1995 for Bob’s Birthday, a hilarious short about an unhappy British dentist. Their latest film takes a charming, anthropomorphic route to the question Fine poses as, “Should what comes naturally to you be something that you seek to change to please others, or should others accept you as you are?”
Group therapy participants seeking acceptance include Lorraine, a leech with separation anxiety, Victor, an ape with anger issues, and Cheryl, a praying mantis, writes the National Film Board, “who can’t seem to keep a man.”
The NFB informs us that Animal Behaviour is their 75th Oscar-nomination in the category of Animated Short Film, and whether you’re inclined to watch this part of the awards or not, you can get caught up with their extensive playlist of 66 Oscar-winning and nominated films on YouTube. (Bob’s Birthday is not available, at least in the U.S., but you can watch it here.) See Snowden and Fine’s first film, George and Rosemary, a story in which “two golden agers prove that passion isn’t reserved for the very young.”
Watch the very impressive stop-motion animation of 2007’s Madame Tutli-Putli, an “exhilarating existential journey” directed by Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski. See Chris Landreth’s 2013 Oscar-winning computer-animated short, Ryan, about a character “living every artist’s worst nightmare.”
And see the 2007 Oscar-winning existential animated short The Danish Poet, directed by Torill Kove and featuring narration by Liv Ullmann. The offerings are vast and varied, displaying the very best of Canadian animation, a national art that usually goes unseen and unacknowledged by audiences outside its borders. But after watching several of these films you might agree that NFB animation deserves its long history of recognition at the Oscars. See the complete playlist of films here.
Many of these films can be found in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Related Content:
Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917 to 1931)
Free Animated Films: From Classic to Modern
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch a Towering Orchestral Tribute to Kate Bush: A 40th Anniversary Celebration of Her First Single, “Wuthering Heights”
Some Americans like their pop musicians to be more accessible, less theatrical, and eccentric—and generally more desperate for the approval of their audience. Kate Bush, thankfully, has never seemed bothered by this need. She could leave the spotlight when she needed to, or leave the music business altogether for a time, and yet remain a creative force to be reckoned with for four decades now. Her legacy has permeated contemporary music since she appeared in 1978, then retired from the stage the following year after her first tour to focus solely on writing, recording, and making short musical films.
Her debut, The Kick Inside, proved that an original new songwriter worth watching had arrived, and she delivered on the promise in ten studio albums and a career she seemed to sum up in the title of “This Woman’s Work,” from 1989’s The Sensual World. It is work she has always done in her own delightfully odd, passionate, eccentrically British, theatrical, and deftly literary way, all qualities that have made her a massive star in the UK and a hero to artists like Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Grimes, Florence and the Machine, and too many more to name.
Bush’s unusual traits also make her a perfect artist to pay tribute to in an orchestral setting, as Sweden’s Gothenburg Symphony has done in the 2018 concert also titled “This Woman’s Work” and featuring the very-Bush-worthy vocal talents of guest singers Jennie Abrahamson and Malin Dahlström. It’s “a towering tribute,” the Symphony writes, “with hit songs and pure poetry in special arrangements by Martin Schaub.” And it arrived to mark a special moment indeed: the 40th anniversary of the release of Bush’s brilliantly strange debut single “Wuthering Heights.” See the full performance at the top of the post and excerpted songs throughout, including Abrahamson’s cover of “This Woman’s Work,” above.
Appearing in the ghostly guise and ethereally high-pitched voice of Cathy Earnshaw, doomed heroine of Emily Brontë’s novel, Bush captivated millions in two videos that are now absolute classics. She drew on the mime theatrics of her teacher Lindsay Kemp, who previously mentored David Bowie, and gave us the indelible image of a woman possessed by weird imagination, uncanny musical talent, and some frightening dance moves. The images and sounds she created in just those 3 and a half minutes are iconic. Or, putting it a little differently in a short BBC documentary, John Lydon says, “Kate Bush and her grand piano… that’s like John Wayne and his saddle… her shrieks and warbles are beauty beyond belief.”
If you came to Bush later in her career, say during 1985’s huge Hounds of Love, and somehow missed her unbelievable first fine art-rock performances on film, watch both the white and red dress versions first, then watch the Gothenburg Symphony’s glowing, career-spanning tribute to a woman who “laid the groundwork for [a] generation of performers,” as Marc Hirsh writes at NPR. Even though he is an American who does not care for Kate Bush, Hirsh can’t seem to help enumerating the very reasons she is so special to so many, and he features a number of her videos that demonstrate why she’s an artist her fans love “from the very core of their being.”
Related Content:
2009 Kate Bush Documentary Dubs Her “Queen of British Pop”
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World
“What’s the one thing that all great works of science fiction have in common?” asks a 1997 episode of The Net, the BBC’s television series about the possibilities of this much-talked-about new thing called the internet. “They all tried to see into the future, and they all got it wrong. Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: all, to some extent or other, wrong. And there’s another name to add to this list: William Gibson.” But then on strolls Gibson himself, fresh off the writing of Idoru, a novel involving a human who wants to marry a digitally generated Japanese pop star, to grant the interview above.
In it Gibson admits that computers hadn’t gone quite the way he’d imagined thirteen years earlier in his debut novel Neuromancer — but in which he also offers prescient advice about how we should regard new technology even today. “The thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn’t actually like the internet at all!” Gibson says in a more recent interview with Wired. “I didn’t get it right but I said there was going to be something.” Back in the mid-1980s, as he tells the BBC, “there was effectively no internet to extrapolate from. The cyberspace I made up isn’t being used in Neuromancer the way we’re using the internet today.”
Gibson had envisioned a corporate-dominated network infested with “cybernetic car thieves skulking through it attempting to steal tidbits of information.” By the mid-1990s, though, the internet had become a place where “a really talented and determined fifteen-year-old” could create something more compelling than “a multinational entertainment conglomerate might come up with.” He tells the BBC that “what the internet has become is as much a surprise to me as the collapse of the Soviet Union was,” but at that point he had begun to perceive the shape of things to come. “I can’t see why it won’t become completely ubiquitous,” he says, envisioning its evolution “into something like television to the extent that it penetrates every level of society.”
At the same time, “it doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists” — still very much a concern in certain parts of the world — and even the most promising technologies don’t merit our uncritical embrace. “I think we should respect the power of technology and try to fear it in a rational way,” he says. “The only appropriate response” is to give in to neither technophobia nor technophilia, but “to teach ourselves to be absolutely ambivalent about them and imagine their most inadvertent side effects,” the side effects “that tend to get us” — not to mention the ones that make the best plot elements. Seeing as how we now live in a world where marriage to synthetic Japanese idols has become a possibility, among other developments seemingly pulled from the pages of Gibson’s novels, we would do well to heed even these decades-old words of advice about his main subject.
via Big Think
Related Content:
Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)
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.
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Receive our Daily Email
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
