How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years

For many a clas­sic action-movie enthu­si­ast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bul­litt. The nar­ra­tor of the Insid­er video above describes it as “the scene that set the stan­dard for all mod­ern car chas­es,” one made “icon­ic part­ly because of the char­ac­ters, but also because of their cars.” The pur­suer dri­ves a Dodge Charg­er, a mus­cle car that “explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing the late six­ties in the U.S.,” with a V‑8 engine and rear-wheel dri­ve that made it “basi­cal­ly built for infor­mal drag rac­ing.” The pur­sued, Steve McQueen’s detec­tive pro­tag­o­nist Frank Bul­litt, dri­ves an instant­ly rec­og­niz­able High­land Green Ford Mus­tang, “the first major pony car, a more com­pact, sporty take on the mus­cle car.”

Bul­litt could change the game, as they say, thanks not just to the cars but also the cam­eras avail­able at the time, not least the Arri­flex 35 II. “Small­er and more rugged” than the bulky rigs of ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions, it made it pos­si­ble to shoot on actu­al city streets rather than just stu­dio sets and rear-pro­jec­tion setups. (To get a sense of the dif­fer­ence in feel that result­ed, sim­ply com­pare the Bul­litt chase to the one in Dr. No, the first James Bond pic­ture, from six years before.)

This threw down the gaunt­let before all action film­mak­ers, who over the sub­se­quent decades would take advan­tage of every tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment that could pos­si­bly height­en the thrills of their own car chas­es.

The video also includes vehic­u­lar action movies from The French Con­nec­tion and Van­ish­ing Point to Ronin and Dri­ve. But the most impor­tant devel­op­ment in recent decades actu­al­ly owes to the horse-rac­ing movie Seabis­cuit, whose pro­duc­tion neces­si­tat­ed a rig, now known as “the bis­cuit,” that “makes it look like an actor is doing the dri­ving, while a stunt per­son actu­al­ly steers from the dri­ver’s pod.” Gone are the days when a star like Steve McQueen, a gen­uine rac­er of both motor­cy­cles and cars, could han­dle some of the stunt dri­ving him­self; gone, too, is the era of the mus­cle car not pro­grammed to shut down auto­mat­i­cal­ly when it goes into a drift. But for view­ers in con­stant need of ever more spec­tac­u­lar, tech­ni­cal­ly com­plex, and expen­sive car chas­es, it seems the Fast and the Furi­ous series will always come through.

Relat­ed con­tent:

William Fried­kin, RIP: Why the 80s Action Movie To Live and Die in L.A. Is His “Sub­ver­sive Mas­ter­piece”

The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Title Sequences and Trail­ers Cre­at­ed by Pablo Fer­ro: Dr. Strangelove, A Clock­work Orange, Stop Mak­ing Sense, Bul­litt & Oth­er Films

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Take a Dri­ve Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Ange­les with Vin­tage Through-the-Car-Win­dow Films

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938)

Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not sug­gest­ing that you do—you would find your­self hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semi­te and a Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er. Many sites con­demn or exon­er­ate him; many oth­ers cel­e­brate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nau­se­at­ing­ly dif­fi­cult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this con­tro­ver­sy? What is the evi­dence brought against the famed Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and one­time close friend, stu­dent, and col­league of Sig­mund Freud?

Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Niet­zsche, whose work was delib­er­ate­ly bas­tardized by Nazis, begin­ning with his own sis­ter, Jung need not be tak­en out of con­text to be read as anti-Semit­ic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psy­chother­a­py Today, in which he mar­vels at Nation­al Social­ism as a “for­mi­da­ble phe­nom­e­non,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ uncon­scious has a high­er poten­tial than the Jew­ish.” This is only one of the least objec­tion­able of such state­ments, as his­to­ri­an Andrew Samuels demon­strates.

One Jun­gian defend­er admits in an essay col­lec­tion called Lin­ger­ing Shad­ows that Jung had been “uncon­scious­ly infect­ed by Nazi ideas.” In response, psy­chol­o­gist John Con­ger asks, “Why not then say that he was uncon­scious­ly infect­ed by anti-Semit­ic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to pow­er. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philoso­pher Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, Jung was accused of trad­ing on his pro­fes­sion­al asso­ci­a­tions dur­ing the 30s to main­tain his sta­tus, and turn­ing on his Jew­ish col­leagues while they were purged.

Yet his biog­ra­ph­er Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse per­se­cu­tion with­out his con­sent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Ver­non writes at The Guardian, “because he was actu­al­ly fight­ing to keep Ger­man psy­chother­a­py open to Jew­ish indi­vid­u­als.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essen­tial­ly by hav­ing a lead­ing physi­cian declare the Führer mad. Both came to noth­ing.” And unlike Hei­deg­ger, Jung strong­ly denounced anti-Semit­ic views dur­ing the war. He “pro­tect­ed Jew­ish ana­lysts,” writes Con­ger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, pre­cur­sor to the CIA, dur­ing the war.

His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipa­thy to what Nazism and Fas­cism stood for.” Dulles also cryp­ti­cal­ly remarked, “Nobody will prob­a­bly ever know how much Prof. Jung con­tributed to the allied cause dur­ing the war.” These con­tra­dic­tions in Jung’s words, char­ac­ter, and actions are puz­zling, to say the least. I would not pre­sume to draw any hard and fast con­clu­sions from them. They do, how­ev­er, serve as the nec­es­sary con­text for Jung’s obser­va­tions of Adolf Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his sup­posed char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a com­par­i­son that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Ger­mans did, use ancient Euro­pean belief sys­tems as clothes hang­ers for mod­ern racist nation­al­ism.

In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of psy­chic forces” that moved through the Ger­man peo­ple “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thou­sands of unem­ployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hun­dreds of thou­sands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and fren­zy, the unleash­er of pas­sions and the lust of bat­tle; more­over he is a superla­tive magi­cian and artist in illu­sion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In per­son­i­fy­ing the “Ger­man psy­che” as a furi­ous god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand out­side judge the Ger­mans far too much as if they were respon­si­ble agents, but per­haps it would be near­er the truth to regard them also as vic­tims.”

“One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evi­dent­ly against hope, that Jung did not intend” his state­ments “as an argu­ment of redemp­tion for the Ger­mans.” What­ev­er his inten­tions, his mys­ti­cal racial­iza­tion of the uncon­scious in “Wotan” accord­ed per­fect­ly well with the the­o­ries of Alfred Rosen­berg, “Hitler’s chief ide­ol­o­gist.” Like every­thing about Jung, the sit­u­a­tion is com­pli­cat­ed. In a 1938 inter­view, pub­lished by Omni­book Mag­a­zine in 1942, Jung repeat­ed many of these dis­turb­ing ideas, com­par­ing the Ger­man wor­ship of Hitler to the Jew­ish desire for a Mes­si­ah, a “char­ac­ter­is­tic of peo­ple with an infe­ri­or­i­ty com­plex.” He describes Hitler’s pow­er as a form of “mag­ic.” But that pow­er only exists, he says, because “Hitler lis­tens and obeys….”

His Voice is noth­ing oth­er than his own uncon­scious, into which the Ger­man peo­ple have pro­ject­ed their own selves; that is, the uncon­scious of sev­en­ty-eight mil­lion Ger­mans. That is what makes him pow­er­ful. With­out the Ger­man peo­ple he would be noth­ing.

Jung’s obser­va­tions are bom­bas­tic, but they are not flat­ter­ing. The peo­ple may be pos­sessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. “The true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” He goes on to paint an even dark­er pic­ture, hav­ing close­ly observed Hitler and Mus­soli­ni togeth­er in Berlin:

In com­par­i­son with Mus­soli­ni, Hitler made upon me the impres­sion of a sort of scaf­fold­ing of wood cov­ered with cloth, an automa­ton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. Dur­ing the whole per­for­mance he nev­er laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulk­ing. He showed no human sign.

His expres­sion was that of an inhu­man­ly sin­gle-mind­ed pur­po­sive­ness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a dou­ble of a real per­son, and that Hitler the man might per­haps be hid­ing inside like an appen­dix, and delib­er­ate­ly so hid­ing in order not to dis­turb the mech­a­nism.

With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a med­i­cine man, a form of spir­i­tu­al ves­sel, a demi-deity, or even bet­ter, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would nev­er be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a col­lec­tive. He is not an indi­vid­ual, but a whole nation. I take it to be lit­er­al­ly true that he has no per­son­al friend. How can you talk inti­mate­ly with a nation?

Read the full inter­view here. Jung goes on to fur­ther dis­cuss the Ger­man resur­gence of the cult of Wotan, the “par­al­lel between the Bib­li­cal tri­ad… and the Third Reich,” and oth­er pecu­liar­ly Jun­gian for­mu­la­tions. Of Jung’s analy­sis, inter­view­er H.R. Knicker­bock­er con­cludes, “this psy­chi­atric expla­na­tion of the Nazi names and sym­bols may sound to a lay­man fan­tas­tic, but can any­thing be as fan­tas­tic as the bare facts about the Nazi Par­ty and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by mere­ly call­ing them gang­sters.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

Carl Jung Offers an Intro­duc­tion to His Psy­cho­log­i­cal Thought in a 3‑Hour Inter­view (1957)

How Carl Jung Inspired the Cre­ation of Alco­holics Anony­mous

Carl Jung on the Pow­er of Tarot Cards: They Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious & Per­haps a Way to Pre­dict the Future

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

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Watch 70+ Classic Literary Films Free Online: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, and More

The term gaslight has gained so much trac­tion in pop­u­lar dis­course so recent­ly that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that par­tic­u­lar usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British nov­el­ist and play­wright Patrick Hamil­ton wrote a stage thriller about a hus­band who sur­rep­ti­tious­ly rearranges things in the house so as to make his wife believe that she’s gone insane. Gas Light proved enough of a hit to be adapt­ed for the cin­e­ma two years lat­er, with the two words of its title stream­lined into one. You can watch Thorold Dick­in­son’s Gaslight just above, and if you enjoy it, have a look at the rest of the more than 70 lit­er­ary movies col­lect­ed into this playlist from the ver­i­fied YouTube chan­nel Cult Cin­e­ma Clas­sics.

If you know your cin­e­ma his­to­ry, you’ll know that Gaslight was remade in Hol­ly­wood in 1944, direct­ed by George Cukor and star­ring Charles Boy­er, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cot­ten, and Angela Lans­bury. (That ver­sion inspired Steely Dan’s song “Gaslight­ing Abbie,” where I first heard the word myself.)

In those days, the Amer­i­can film indus­try looked to the British one for proven mate­r­i­al — mate­r­i­al the British film indus­try, for its part, had found in lit­er­a­ture. Take the work of a ris­ing young direc­tor called Alfred Hitch­cock, who adapt­ed Charles Ben­net­t’s Black­mail in 1929, John Buchan’s The Thir­ty-Nine Steps in 1935, Joseph Con­rad’s The Secret Agent as Sab­o­tage in 1936, and Daphne du Mau­ri­er’s Jamaica Inn in 1939.

Today, lit­er­ary adap­ta­tion seems to have become a rel­a­tive­ly niche prac­tice in Hol­ly­wood, but in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, it had real cachet: hence the increas­ing ambi­tion of pro­duc­tions like The Scar­let Let­ter (1934), Of Mice and Men 1939, Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios’ ani­mat­ed Gul­liv­er’s Trav­els (1939), The Snows of Kil­i­man­jaro (1952), and Jane Eyre (1970). Nat­u­ral­ly, these films reflect their own eras as much as they do the autho­r­i­al visions of Hawthorne, Stein­beck, Swift, Hem­ing­way, and Char­lotte Bron­të. Each of these pic­tures offers its own way of regard­ing its source mate­r­i­al. And would it seem so insane to believe that some of them may even have influ­ence still to exert on pop­u­lar cul­ture here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry? Watch the playlist of 70 lit­er­ary films here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Very First Film Adap­ta­tions of Shakespeare’s Plays: King John, The Tem­pest, Richard III & More (1899–1936)

The First-Ever Film Ver­sion of Lewis Carroll’s Tale Alice in Won­der­land (1903)

Watch the Trail­er for the Long-Lost First Film Adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by (1926)

When François Truf­faut Made a Film Adap­ta­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 (1966)

Watch the Huge­ly-Ambi­tious Sovi­et Film Adap­ta­tion of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

Watch an 8‑Part Film Adap­ta­tion of Tolstoy’s Anna Karen­i­na Free 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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Download 1,600+ Publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Books, Guides, Magazines & More

Many of us in these past few gen­er­a­tions first heard of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art while read­ing E. L. Konigs­burg’s nov­el From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweil­er. More than a few of us also fan­ta­sized about run­ning away to live in that vast cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion like the book’s young pro­tag­o­nists Clau­dia and Jamie Kin­caid. Yet among oth­er, more prac­ti­cal con­cerns, we might have won­dered where we were going to secure enough read­ing mate­r­i­al to get us through those long after-hours nights. Konigs­burg had Clau­dia and Jamie vis­it the for­mer Don­nell Library Cen­ter, but what about in the Met itself?

What we prob­a­bly did­n’t real­ize in our youth was that, in addi­tion to being a muse­um, the Met is a pub­lish­er. Now, at the Met­Pub­li­ca­tions dig­i­tal archive, we can read a great vari­ety of the books, guides, and peri­od­i­cals it’s put out for more than a century–from a 1911 cat­a­log of the muse­um’s col­lec­tion of pot­tery, porce­lain, and faïence (which refers to pot­tery of the tin-glazed vari­ety) to — as of this writ­ing — the lat­est issue of the Met’s Bul­letin, on Mex­i­can print­mak­ers includ­ing Diego Rivera and José Clemente Oroz­co. They and the more than 1,600 pub­li­ca­tions that lie between them are free for you to explore, some read­able online, and some down­load­able in PDF form.

You might find issues of the Bul­letin on every­thing from Frank Lloyd Wright to inter­war pho­tog­ra­phy to Kore­an art, as well as cat­a­logs for exhi­bi­tions like Anglo­Ma­nia: Tra­di­tion and Trans­gres­sion in British Fash­ion, The Art of Illu­mi­na­tion: The Lim­bourg Broth­ers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (whose cen­tral work of cal­en­dri­cal art was pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), Van Gogh in Arles, The Milk­maid by Johannes Ver­meer, and The Poet­ry of Nature: Edo Paint­ings from the Fish­bein-Ben­der Col­lec­tion. Met­Pub­li­ca­tions offers plen­ty of inter­est­ing read­ing, but if you find you sud­den­ly have to do some seri­ous art-his­tor­i­cal research, you’ll also find that it’s a far more con­ve­nient resource than Clau­dia and Jamie had.

Enter the Met­Pub­li­ca­tions dig­i­tal archive here, and, once there, par­tic­u­lar­ly explore the “Free to Down­load” sec­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Take a New Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

An Unbe­liev­ably Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map Lets You Explore the Rich Col­lec­tions of the Met Muse­um

A World of Art: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch The Cure Perform a Three-Hour Concert in London, Celebrating the Release of Their New Album


Last Fri­day, The Cure cel­e­brat­ed the release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, with a three-hour set at the Troxy in Lon­don. The band kicked off the show by per­form­ing all eight tracks from the album, before then play­ing anoth­er 23 songs, most­ly hits from their large cat­a­log of music. Orig­i­nal­ly live streamed on YouTube, you can now watch the entire show online. Just click play above.

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

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

The Cure Per­formed the Entire “Dis­in­te­gra­tion” Album on the 30th Anniver­sary of Its Release: Watch The Com­plete Con­cert Online

Watch The Cure’s First TV Appear­ance in 1979 … Before The Band Acquired Its Sig­na­ture Goth Look

Lost Depeche Mode Doc­u­men­tary Is Now Online: WatchOur Hob­by is Depeche Mode

 

Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

When the names of French poet Paul Élu­ard and Ger­man artist Max Ernst arise, one sub­ject always fol­lows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “mar­riage à trois,” as a New York Times arti­cle by Annette Grant once put it. It start­ed in 1921, Grant writes, when the Sur­re­al­ist move­men­t’s co-founder André Bre­ton put on an exhi­bi­tion for Ernst in Paris. “Élu­ard and his Russ­ian wife, Gala, were fas­ci­nat­ed by the show and arranged to meet Ernst in the Aus­tri­an Alps and lat­er in Ger­many. Ernst, Élu­ard and Gala quick­ly became insep­a­ra­ble. The artist and the poet start­ed a life­long series of col­lab­o­ra­tions on books even as Ernst and Gala start­ed an affair.”

This arrange­ment “even­tu­al­ly pro­pelled the trio on a jour­ney from Cologne to Paris to Saigon,” which con­sti­tutes quite a sto­ry in its own right. But on pure artis­tic val­ue, no result of the encounter between Élu­ard and Ernst has remained as fas­ci­nat­ing as Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, the book on which they col­lab­o­rat­ed in 1922.

“It appears that Ernst, still in Ger­many at that stage, cre­at­ed the images first: twen­ty-one col­lages com­posed of engrav­ings cut out of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry mag­a­zines and cat­a­logues,” writes Daisy Sains­bury at The Pub­lic Domain Review. Unlike in the Dada works known at the time, “the artist is care­ful to dis­guise the images’ com­pos­ite nature. He blends each sec­tion into a seam­less, coher­ent whole.”

“Ernst and Élu­ard then worked togeth­er on twen­ty prose poems to accom­pa­ny the illus­tra­tions, send­ing frag­ments of text to each oth­er to revise or sup­ple­ment.” The result, which pre­dates by two years Breton’s Man­i­feste du sur­réal­isme, “rep­re­sents a pro­to-Sur­re­al­ist exper­i­ment par excel­lence.” In the text, phras­es like “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” recall “children’s nurs­ery rhymes, with a sing-song qual­i­ty stripped of sense”; in the images, “a caged bird, an upturned croc­o­dile, and a webbed foot trans­formed through col­lage into the ulti­mate sym­bol of human friv­o­li­ty, a fan, evoke the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems of mod­ern sci­ence (and reli­gion before that) as well as their poten­tial mis­use in human hands.”

It’s worth putting all this in its his­tor­i­cal con­text, a Europe after the First World War in which mod­ern life no longer made quite as much sense as it once seemed. The often-inex­plic­a­ble respons­es of cul­tur­al fig­ures involved in move­ments like Sur­re­al­ism — in their work or in their lives — were attempts at hit­ting the reset but­ton, to use an anachro­nis­tic metaphor. Not that, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, human­i­ty has made much progress in com­ing to grips with our place in a world of rapid­ly evolv­ing tech­nol­o­gy and large-scale geopol­i­tics. Or at least we might feel that way while read­ing Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, avail­able online at the Inter­net Archive and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s dig­i­tal Dada col­lec­tion, and regard­ing these tex­tu­al-visu­al con­struc­tions as deeply strange as any­thing designed by our arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence engines today.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

A Brief, Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: A Primer by Doc­tor Who Star Peter Capal­di

Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vin­tage Doc­u­men­tary on the Two Great Art Move­ments, Dada & Sur­re­al­ism (1978)

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use


Update: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art has put online 492,000 high-res­o­lu­tion images of artis­tic works. Even bet­ter, the muse­um has placed the vast major­i­ty of these images into the pub­lic domain, mean­ing they can be down­loaded direct­ly from the museum’s web­site for non-com­mer­cial use. When you browse the Met col­lec­tion and find an image that you fan­cy, just look at the low­er left-hand side of the image. If you see an “OA” icon and the words “pub­lic domain” (as shown in the exam­ple below), you’re free to use the image, pro­vid­ed that you abide by the Met’s terms.

In mak­ing this col­lec­tion avail­able online, the Met joined oth­er world-class muse­ums in putting large troves of dig­i­tal art online. Wit­ness the 88,000 images from the Get­ty in L.A., the 125,000 Dutch mas­ter­pieces from the Rijksmu­se­umthe 50,000 artis­tic images from the Nation­al Gallery, and the 1.9 mil­lion images from the British Muse­um.

It takes a lit­tle patience. But once you start surf­ing through the Met’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, you can find and down­load images of some won­der­ful mas­ter­pieces. We’ve embed­ded a few of our favorite picks. At the top, you will find the 1874 paint­ing “Boat­ing,” by Édouard Manet. In the mid­dle, Rem­brandt’s “Self-Por­trait” from 1660. At the bot­tom, a 1907 pho­to­graph by Alfred Stieglitz called “The Steer­age.” And that’s just start­ing to scratch the sur­face.

Hap­py rum­mag­ing. And, when you have some free time on your hands, you should also check out anoth­er open ini­tia­tive from the Met. The muse­um has also put 500+ free art books online. You can learn about them here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014. We have updat­ed it to reflect some of the changes made in the Met col­lec­tion over the past decade.

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

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:

The British Muse­um Puts 1.9 Mil­lion Works of Art Online

The Rijksmu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam Has Dig­i­tized 818,000 Works of Art, Includ­ing Famous Works by Rem­brandt and Ver­meer

Down­load 50,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Down­load 50,000 Art Books & Cat­a­logs from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions

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Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the Nation­al Archives in Hol­land

One of the key ques­tions fac­ing both jour­nal­ists and loy­al oppo­si­tions these days is how do we stay hon­est as euphemisms and triv­i­al­iza­tions take over the dis­course? Can we use words like “fas­cism,” for exam­ple, with fideli­ty to the mean­ing of that word in world his­to­ry? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expres­sion fas­cist pig, writes Umber­to Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fas­cism,” “used by Amer­i­can rad­i­cals thir­ty years lat­er to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smok­ing habits.” In the for­ties, on the oth­er hand, the fight against fas­cism was a “moral duty for every good Amer­i­can.” (And every good Eng­lish­man and French par­ti­san, he might have added.)

Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fas­cist regime, which “was cer­tain­ly a dic­ta­tor­ship, but it was not total­ly total­i­tar­i­an, not because of its mild­ness but rather because of the philo­soph­i­cal weak­ness of its ide­ol­o­gy. Con­trary to com­mon opin­ion, fas­cism in Italy had no spe­cial phi­los­o­phy.” It did, how­ev­er, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influ­en­tial, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benet­ton, or Ver­sace would ever be.” The dark humor of the com­ment indi­cates a crit­i­cal con­sen­sus about fas­cism. As a form of extreme nation­al­ism, it ulti­mate­ly takes on the con­tours of what­ev­er nation­al cul­ture pro­duces it.

It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al man­i­fes­ta­tions of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, across Europe and even South Amer­i­ca. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dic­ta­tor­ship that took over a Euro­pean coun­try,” and got to name the polit­i­cal sys­tem. But Eco is per­plexed “why the word fas­cism became a synec­doche, that is, a word that could be used for dif­fer­ent total­i­tar­i­an move­ments.” For one thing, he writes, fas­cism was “a fuzzy total­i­tar­i­an­ism, a col­lage of dif­fer­ent philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal ideas, a bee­hive of con­tra­dic­tions.”

While Eco is firm in claim­ing “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fas­cist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qual­i­ties of what he calls “Ur-Fas­cism, or Eter­nal Fas­cism” down to 14 “typ­i­cal” fea­tures. “These fea­tures,” writes the nov­el­ist and semi­oti­cian, “can­not be orga­nized into a sys­tem; many of them con­tra­dict each oth­er, and are also typ­i­cal of oth­er kinds of despo­tism or fanati­cism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fas­cism to coag­u­late around it.”

  1. The cult of tra­di­tion. “One has only to look at the syl­labus of every fas­cist move­ment to find the major tra­di­tion­al­ist thinkers. The Nazi gno­sis was nour­ished by tra­di­tion­al­ist, syn­cretis­tic, occult ele­ments.”
  2. The rejec­tion of mod­ernism. “The Enlight­en­ment, the Age of Rea­son, is seen as the begin­ning of mod­ern deprav­i­ty. In this sense Ur-Fas­cism can be defined as irra­tional­ism.”
  3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beau­ti­ful in itself, it must be tak­en before, or with­out, any pre­vi­ous reflec­tion. Think­ing is a form of emas­cu­la­tion.”
  4. Dis­agree­ment is trea­son. “The crit­i­cal spir­it makes dis­tinc­tions, and to dis­tin­guish is a sign of mod­ernism. In mod­ern cul­ture the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty prais­es dis­agree­ment as a way to improve knowl­edge.”
  5. Fear of dif­fer­ence. “The first appeal of a fas­cist or pre­ma­ture­ly fas­cist move­ment is an appeal against the intrud­ers. Thus Ur-Fas­cism is racist by def­i­n­i­tion.”
  6. Appeal to social frus­tra­tion. “One of the most typ­i­cal fea­tures of the his­tor­i­cal fas­cism was the appeal to a frus­trat­ed mid­dle class, a class suf­fer­ing from an eco­nom­ic cri­sis or feel­ings of polit­i­cal humil­i­a­tion, and fright­ened by the pres­sure of low­er social groups.”
  7. The obses­sion with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fas­cist psy­chol­o­gy there is the obses­sion with a plot, pos­si­bly an inter­na­tion­al one. The fol­low­ers must feel besieged.”
  8. The ene­my is both strong and weak. “By a con­tin­u­ous shift­ing of rhetor­i­cal focus, the ene­mies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
  9. Paci­fism is traf­fick­ing with the ene­my. “For Ur-Fas­cism there is no strug­gle for life but, rather, life is lived for strug­gle.”
  10. Con­tempt for the weak. “Elit­ism is a typ­i­cal aspect of any reac­tionary ide­ol­o­gy.”
  11. Every­body is edu­cat­ed to become a hero. “In Ur-Fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy, hero­ism is the norm. This cult of hero­ism is strict­ly linked with the cult of death.”
  12. Machis­mo and weapon­ry. “Machis­mo implies both dis­dain for women and intol­er­ance and con­dem­na­tion of non­stan­dard sex­u­al habits, from chasti­ty to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.”
  13. Selec­tive pop­ulism. “There is in our future a TV or Inter­net pop­ulism, in which the emo­tion­al response of a select­ed group of cit­i­zens can be pre­sent­ed and accept­ed as the Voice of the Peo­ple.”
  14. Ur-Fas­cism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fas­cist school­books made use of an impov­er­ished vocab­u­lary, and an ele­men­tary syn­tax, in order to lim­it the instru­ments for com­plex and crit­i­cal rea­son­ing.”

One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unre­marked is his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the Ital­ian oppo­si­tion move­men­t’s unlike­ly coali­tions. The Resis­tance includ­ed Com­mu­nists who “exploit­ed the Resis­tance as if it were their per­son­al prop­er­ty,” and lead­ers like Eco’s child­hood hero Franchi, “so strong­ly anti-Com­mu­nist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a spe­cif­ic fea­ture of an Ital­ian resis­tance, one not observ­able across the num­ber of nations that have resist­ed total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments. As for the seem­ing total lack of com­mon inter­est between these par­ties, Eco sim­ply says, “Who cares?… Lib­er­a­tion was a com­mon deed for peo­ple of dif­fer­ent col­ors.”

Read Eco’s essay at The New York Review of Books. There he elab­o­rates on each ele­ment of fas­cism at greater length. And sup­port NYRB by becom­ing a sub­scriber.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

Wal­ter Ben­jamin Explains How Fas­cism Uses Mass Media to Turn Pol­i­tics Into Spec­ta­cle (1935)

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

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How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs

In a future where human­i­ty has been dri­ven under­ground by an apoc­a­lyp­tic event, a pris­on­er is haunt­ed by the child­hood mem­o­ry of see­ing a man gunned down at an air­port. A group of sci­en­tists make him their time-trav­el­ing guinea pig, hop­ing that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the soci­ety they once knew. In one of his forced jour­neys into the past, he falls for a strange­ly famil­iar-look­ing woman who con­vinces him not to return to his own time peri­od. Alas, things go wrong, cul­mi­nat­ing in the final real­iza­tion that the death he had wit­nessed so long ago was, in fact, his own.

You may rec­og­nize this as the plot of Ter­ry Gilliam’s 12 Mon­keys, from 1995, and also as the plot of Chris Mark­er’s La Jeteé, from 1962. 12 Mon­keys, a full-scale Hol­ly­wood pic­ture star­ring the likes of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, attained crit­i­cal acclaim and box-office suc­cess. But La Jeteé, which inspired it, stands as the more impres­sive cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ment, despite — or per­haps owing to — its being a black-and-white short com­posed almost entire­ly of still pho­tographs. That unusu­al (and unusu­al­ly effec­tive) form is the sub­ject of the new video above from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

“When you think about it, Ter­ry Gilliam is using still images too,” says Puschak. “It’s just that he’s using 24 still images every sec­ond, while Mark­er uses, on aver­age, one image every four sec­onds.” In La Jeteé, we’re “forced to sit with every frame,” and thus to notice that “they’re dead: all move­ment is gone, and we’re left with these life­less frag­ments of time, an appro­pri­ate thing in a world oblit­er­at­ed by war.” Mark­er “shows us that the move­ment of mov­ing pic­tures, even though it resem­bles life, is illu­so­ry; it’s real­ly just anoth­er form of mem­o­ry, and mem­o­ry is always frag­men­tary and life­less, re-ani­mat­ed only by the mean­ing we impose on it from the present.”

Yet this pho­to-roman, as Mark­er calls it, does con­tain one mov­ing image, which depicts the lady with whom the pro­tag­o­nist gets involved wak­ing up on one of their morn­ings togeth­er. Puschak describes it as “in the run­ning for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cin­e­ma” and inter­prets it as say­ing that “love, human con­nec­tion some­how tran­scends, some­how escapes the trap of time. It may be cliché to say that, but there is noth­ing cliché about the way Mark­er shows it.”  Mark­er’s inven­tive nou­velle vague col­league Jean-Luc Godard once called cin­e­ma “truth 24 times per sec­ond” — a def­i­n­i­tion bro­ken wide open, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, by Mark­er him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet William Gib­son

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

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

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

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

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

Launch Your Project Management Career with Google’s AI-Enhanced Professional Certificate

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Back in 2021, Google released a series of cer­tifi­cate pro­grams, includ­ing one focused on Project Man­age­ment. Designed to give stu­dents “an immer­sive under­stand­ing of the prac­tices and skills need­ed to suc­ceed in an entry-lev­el project man­age­ment role,” the cer­tifi­cate pro­gram fea­tures six cours­es over­all, includ­ing:

  • Foun­da­tions of Project Man­age­ment
  • Project Ini­ti­a­tion: Start­ing a Suc­cess­ful Project
  • Project Plan­ning: Putting It All Togeth­er
  • Project Exe­cu­tion: Run­ning the Project
  • Agile Project Man­age­ment
  • Cap­stone: Apply­ing Project Man­age­ment in the Real World

More than 1.7 mil­lion peo­ple have since enrolled in the course sequence. And Google has now updat­ed the cours­es with 6 new videos on how to use AI in project man­age­ment. The videos will teach stu­dents how to boost project man­age­ment skills with AI, iden­ti­fy poten­tial project risks with gen AI, use AI to improve project com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and more.

The Project Man­age­ment pro­gram takes about six months to com­plete (assum­ing you put in 10 hours per week), and it should cost about $300 in total. Fol­low­ing a 7‑day free tri­al, stu­dents will be charged $49 per month until they com­plete the pro­gram.

All Google career cours­es are host­ed on the Cours­era plat­form. Final­ly, it’s worth men­tion­ing that any­one who enrolls in this cer­tifi­cate before Novem­ber 30, 2024 will get access to Google AI Essen­tials at no cost.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Stories Read by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, William S. Burroughs & Others

Here on Hal­loween of 2024, we have a greater vari­ety of scary sto­ries — and arguably, a much scari­er vari­ety of scari­er sto­ries — to choose from than ever before. But what­ev­er their rel­e­vance to the spe­cif­ic lives we may live and the spe­cif­ic dreads we may feel today, how many such cur­rent works stand a chance of being read a cou­ple of cen­turies from now, with not just his­tor­i­cal inter­est but gen­uine chills? With each Hal­loween that brings us near­er to the 200th anniver­sary of Edgar Allan Poe’s lit­er­ary debut, the works of that Amer­i­can pio­neer of the grotesque and the macabre grow only more deeply trou­bling.

“The word that recurs most cru­cial­ly in Poe’s fictions is hor­ror,” writes Mar­i­lynne Robin­son in the New York Review of Books. “His sto­ries are often shaped to bring the nar­ra­tor and the read­er to a place where the use of the word is justified, where the word and the expe­ri­ence it evokes are explored or by impli­ca­tion defined. So crypts and entomb­ments and phys­i­cal mor­bid­i­ty figure in Poe’s writ­ing with a promi­nence that is not char­ac­ter­is­tic of major lit­er­a­ture in gen­er­al. Clear­ly Poe was fas­ci­nat­ed by pop­u­lar obses­sions, with crime, with pre­ma­ture bur­ial” — obses­sions that haven’t lost much pop­u­lar­i­ty since his day.

Exam­ined more close­ly, “the hor­ror that fas­ci­nat­ed him and gave such dread­ful uni­ty to his tales is often the inescapable con­fronta­tion of the self by a per­fect jus­tice, the expo­sure of a guilty act in a form that makes its rev­e­la­tion a recoil of the mind against itself.” This is true, Robin­son writes, of such still-wide­ly-read works as “The Fall of the House of Ush­er,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

You can hear all of those sto­ries and more in the Youtube playlist above, nar­rat­ed by a vari­ety of per­form­ers imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able by voice alone: Christo­pher Lee, Vin­cent Price, William S. Bur­roughs, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rath­bone, and the late James Earl Jones.

Whether read aloud or on the page, Robin­son notes, Poe “has always been reviled or cel­e­brat­ed for the absence of moral con­tent in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straight­for­ward moral para­bles. For a writer so intrigued by the oper­a­tions of the mind as Poe was, an inter­est in con­science leads to an inter­est in con­ceal­ment and self-decep­tion, things that are secre­tive and high­ly indi­vid­ual and at the same time so uni­ver­sal that they shape civ­i­liza­tions.” While there are civ­i­liza­tions, there will be tell-tale hearts; and while there are tell-tale hearts, there will be an audi­ence respon­sive to Edgar Allan Poe’s brand of hor­ror, on Hal­loween or any oth­er night.


Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Sto­ries and Poems

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Faith­ful & More

Watch a Strange Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” Vot­ed the 24th Best Car­toon of All Time (1953)

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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