Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mastery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skepticism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent picture “a universal means of expression,” whereas the talkies, as they were then known, “necessarily have a limited field.” Nevertheless, he was too astute a reader of public tastes to believe he could stay silent forever, though he only began to speak onscreen on his own terms — literally, in the case of Modern Times. In that celebrated film, his iconic character the Tramp sings a song, but does so in an unintelligible hash of cod French and Italian, and yet still somehow gets his meaning across, just as he had in all his silent movies before.
That scene appears in the CinemaStix video essay above on “the moment the most famous silent comedian opens his mouth,” which comes not in Modern Times but The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s 1940 send-up of the then-ascendant Adolf Hitler. In it, Chaplin plays two roles: the narrow-mustachioed Hitler parody Adenoid Hynkel who “speaks” in a tonally and rhythmically convincing ersatz German, and a Tramp-like Jewish Barber interned by Hynkel’s regime whose only lines come at the film’s very end.
Dressed as the dictator in order to escape the camp, the Barber suddenly finds himself giving a speech at a victory parade. When he speaks, he famously does so in Chaplin’s natural voice, expressing sentiments that sound like Chaplin’s own: inveighing against “machine men with machine minds,” making a plea for liberty, brotherhood, and goodwill toward men.
Though it may have been Chaplin’s biggest box-office hit, The Great Dictator isn’t his most critically acclaimed picture. When it was made, the United States had yet to enter the war, and the full nature of what the Nazis were doing in Europe hadn’t yet come to light. This film’s relationship with actual historical events thus feels uneasy, as if Chaplin himself wasn’t sure how light or heavy a tone to strike. Even his climactic speech was only created as a replacement for an intended final dance sequence, though he did work at it, writing and revising over a period of months. It’s more than a little ironic that The Great Dictator is mainly remembered for a scene in which a comic genius to whom words were nothing as against image and movement forgoes all the techniques that made him a star — and indeed, forgoes comedy itself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies that 77 million Americans voted into the White House a criminal reality TV star from NBC, one groomed by a reality TV producer from CBS, who then appointed his Cabinet from Fox and X and World Wrestling Entertainment?
It’s a long story, but the moving image had something to do with it – which is to say, the way we have let television, video, and screen culture run almost entirely unregulated, purely for profit, and without regard to its impact on the minds of our citizens. And it’s no accident that the media and technology tycoons surrounding the President at his White House inauguration – from Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, TikTok, X, you name it – control the screens, networks, and technologies that propagate the lies we’re forced to inhale every day. He invited them.
What’s worse is that they accepted.
* * *
It’s a long story indeed – one that stretches back to the dawn of man, back tens of thousands of years to the time when our predecessors existed on Earth without a single written word between them. “Literacy,” the philosopher, Jesuit priest, and professor of literature Walter Ong has written, “is imperious.” It “tends to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought.” This arrogance, for Ong, is so overreaching because the written word – writing, text, and print generally – is actually such a brand-new phenomenon in the long history of man. Our species of Homo sapiens, Ong reminds us, has been around only for some 30,000 years; the oldest script, not even 6,000; the alphabet, less than four. Mesopotamian cuneiform dates from 3,500 BC; the original Semitic alphabet from only around 1,500 BC; Latin script, or the Roman alphabet that you’re reading now, from the seventh century BC. “Only after being on earth some 500,000 years (to take a fairly good working figure) did man move from his original oral culture, in which written records were unknown and unthought of to literacy.”
For most of human existence, we’ve communicated without print— and even without text. We’ve been speaking to one another. Not writing anything, not drawing a whole lot, but speaking, one to one, one to several, several to one, one to many, many to one. Those who consider writing, text, and print as “the paradigm of all discourse” thus need to “face the fact,” Ong says, that only the tiniest fraction of human languages has ever been written down – or ever will be. We communicate in other ways besides writing. Always have. Always will. Ong presses us to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of the “normal oral or oral- aural consciousness” and the original “noetic economy” of humankind, which conditioned our brains for our first 500,000 years – and which is at it once again. Sound and human movement around sound and pictures sustained us “long before writing came along.” “To say that language is writing is, at best, uninformed,” Ong says (a bit imperiously himself). “It provides egregious evidence of the unreflective chirographic and/or typographic squint that haunts us all.”
The unreflective chirographic squint. We squint, and we see only writing. Up to now, we’ve found truth and authority only in text versions of the word. But writing, when it, too, first appeared, was a brand-new technology, much as we regard cameras and microphones as brand- new technologies today. It was a new technology because it called for the use of new “tools and other equipment,” “styli or brushes or pens,” “carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood,” “as well as inks or paints, and much more.” It seemed so complicated and time- consuming, we even used to outsource it. “In the West through the Middle Ages and earlier” almost all those devoted to writing regularly used the services of a scribe because the physical labor writing involved – scraping and polishing the animal skin or parchment, whitening it with chalk, resharpening goose-quill pens with what we still call a pen-knife, mixing ink, and all the rest – interfered with thought and composition.
The 1400s changed all that. Gutenberg started printing on his press in Germany, in 1455. The great historians of print – Robert Darnton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Lucien Febvre, Anthony Grafton – tell us about how printing passed through patches of explosive growth, and how that growth was unnoticed at the time. Thirty years after Gutenberg cranked up his shop in Mainz, Germany had printers in only forty towns. By 1500, a thousand printing presses were in operation in Western Europe, and they had produced roughly 8 million books. But by the end of the 1500s, between 150 and 200 million books were circulating there.
Like ours, those early years, now 500 years ago, were full of chaos – the new technology seemed overwhelming. Harvard University Librarian Emeritus Robert Darnton has written, “When the printed word first appeared in France in 1470, it was so brand new, the state did not know what to make of it.” The monarchy (keep this in mind) “reacted at first by attempting to extinguish it. On January 13, 1535, Francis I decreed that anyone who printed anything would be hanged.” For the moving image today, with all of us on our iPhones, the modern cognate of hanging everyone recording or sharing video might seem extreme. But in the long view, we too, comparatively speaking, don’t yet know what to “make” of this new medium of ours.
That’s partly because it, too, is so young. The Lumiere brothers showed the first movie to public customers in France in 1895 – only 130 years ago. But today video is becoming the dominant medium in human communication. It accounts for most of our consumer internet traffic worldwide. The gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made now crosses the global internet every two minutes. Nearly a million minutes of video content cross global IP networks every sixty seconds. It would take someone – anyone – 5 million years to watch the amount of video that scoots across the internet each month. YouTube – YouTube alone – sees more than 1 billion viewers watching more than 5 billion videos on its platform every day. Video is here, and everywhere. It’s part of every sporting event, it’s at every traffic stop, it’s at every concert and in every courtroom. Twenty network cameras actively film the Super Bowl. The same number work Centre Court at Wimbledon. It’s in every bank, in every car, plane, and train. It’s in every pocket. It’s everywhere. For whatever you need. Dog training. Changing a tire. Solving a differential equation. Changing your mood.
It’s taken control. It’s just us who’ve been slow to realize it. Some 130 years into the life of the moving image, we are in what Elizabeth Eisenstein, writing about print, called the elusive transformation: it’s hard to see, but it’s there. If you picture an airplane flight across an ocean at night, you can sense it. As the sky darkens and dinner is served, the most noticeable thing about the plane is that almost everyone is sitting illuminated by the video screens in front of them. The screen and the speaker are now at the heart of how world citizens communicate. In many ways we are the passengers on this plane, relying no longer on the printed page, but on the screen and its moving images for much of the information we are receiving (and, increasingly, transmitting) about our world. The corruption and malfeasance and occasional achievements of our modern politicians; scientific experiments; technological developments; newscasts; athletic feats – the whole public record of the twenty-first century, in short – is all being recorded and then distributed through the lens, the screen, the microphone, and the speaker. Now text may be losing its hold (short as that hold has been) on our noetic imagination – especially its hold as the most authoritative medium, the most trustworthy medium, the medium of the contract, the last word, as it were.
Donald Trump and the greedy, cowardly technologists that surround him know it. They have the data; but they also intuit it. And they are clamping down on our access to knowledge even as the opposite seems true – which is that Apple, Netflix, Tiktok, and YouTube are making video ever freer, and more ubiquitous.
This marks the end of Part 1 of Peter Kaufman’s essay. Part 2 will appear on our site tomorrow.…
–Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world. His new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, is just out from the MIT Press.
Robots seem to have been much on the public mind back in the nineteen-thirties. Matt Novak at Paleofuture gives the example of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in newspaper stories about a robot that had done the unthinkable: a mechanical man had shot its inventor.” Despite being a typical example of the experimental-fictive journalistic style of that era, it nevertheless reflected “a time when robots represented something fearful,” and were indeed “a potent symbol of runaway automation and job loss.” Novak cites the statistic that “about 25% of jobless Americans thought automation was to blame for their unemployment by the end of the Great Depression.”
Not much more than a decade after the very term robot was coined, in Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., robots were in need of some good PR. Enter Shell Oil, which had not only the resources to commission an eye-catching advertising film, but also a robot-shaped emblem familiar to many consumers.
“The Birth of the Robot,” which made its theatrical debut in 1935, tells that character’s origin story in hyper-saturated Gasparcolor, beginning with the very motor of existence–turned by the hand of Old Father Time–while Venus plays her music out toward the stars. We then descend to Earth to find a motorist happily careening around the Egyptian desert, not just between but over the Pyramids. (Tourism must have been different in those days.)
Then a storm hits, at which point even the least attentive viewer will notice the striking characteristics of “The Birth of the Robot“ ‘s visual style. It was animated in stop motion by a New Zealander named Len Lye, who was already known for shorts like “A Colour Box” and “Kaleidoscope,” funded, respectively, by the United Kingdom’s General Post Office and Imperial Tobacco. Taking a considerable narrative and aesthetic step forward from those, Lye produces a charming, fanciful result from what was clearly a laborious process. Despite having been reduced to bones in the sand, our protagonist is eventually brought back to life by a few drops of Shell oil, albeit not in human but in humanoid robot form — and ready to show off a few moves that, today, would belong in a Boston Dynamics commercial.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Say what you want about YouTube’s negative effects (endless soy faces, influencers, its devious and fascist-leaning algorithms) but it has offered to creators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve been a fan of Adam Neely’s work. A jazz musician and a former student at both the Berklee College of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, his YouTube channel is a must for those with an interest in the how and why of music theory. If not for Neely’s talent and YouTube’s platform we wouldn’t have the above: a 30 minute (!) exploration of the bossa nova standard, “The Girl from Ipanema.” And it is worth every single minute. (Even the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim himself could not have convinced traditional television execs to give him that long an indulgence.)
Seeing we haven’t featured Neely on Open Culture before, let this be a great introduction, because this is one of his better videos. It also helps that the subject matter just happens to be one of the most covered standards in pop history.
Its legacy is one of lounge lizards and kitsch. Neely shows it being used as a punchline in The Blues Brothers and as mood music in V for Vendetta. I remember it being hummed by two pepperpots (Graham Chapman and John Cleese) in a Monty Python skit. And Neely gives us the “tl;dw” (“too long, didn’t watch”) summary up front: the song’s history concerns blues music, American cultural hegemony, and the influence of the Berklee College’s “The Real Book.” There’s also loads of music theory thrown in too, so it helps to know just a little going in.
Neely first peels back decades of elevator music covers to get to the birth of the song, and its multiple parents: the Afro-Brazilian music called Samba, the hip nightclubs of Rio de Janeiro during the 1950s, the hit film Black Orpheus which brought both samba and bossa nova (the “new wave”) to an international audience, Jobim and other musicians’ interest in American blues and jazz chords, and American interest from musicians like Stan Getz. All this is a back and forth circuit of influences that results in this song, which borrows its structure from Tin Pan Alley composers like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, and inserts a sad, self-pitying B‑section after two A‑section lyrics about a young woman passing by on a beach (lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, who also wrote the screenplay to Black Orpheus).
The key in which you play the song also reveals the cultural divide. Play it in F and you are taking sides with the Americans; play it in Db and you are keeping it real, Brazilian style. Neely breaks apart the melody and the chord sequences, pointing out its repetition (which makes it so catchy) but also its ambiguity, which explains endless YouTube videos of musicians getting the chord sequence wrong. And, what exactly *is* the true chord sequence? And how is it a riff on, of all things, Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”? Neely also shows the progression of various covers of the song, and what’s been added and what’s been deleted. Leaving things out, as he illustrates with a clip from Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lectures, is what gives art its magic.
There’s so much more to this 30 minute clip, but you really should watch the whole thing (and then hit subscribe to his channel). This essay is exactly what YouTube does best, and Neely is the best of teachers, a smart, self-deprecating guy who mixes intellect with humor. Plus, you’ll be humming the song for the rest of the day, just a bit more aware of the reason behind the ear worm.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Some remember the nineteen-nineties in America as the second coming of the nineteen-fifties. Whatever holes one can poke in that historical framing, it does feel strangely plausible inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Circular Sun House. Though not actually built until 1967, it was commissioned from Wright by shipping magnate Norman Lykes in 1959, the last year of the architect’s life. Almost dated though it may have looked by the time of its completion, supervised by Wright’s apprentice John Rattenbury, it would have accrued some retro cachet over the subsequent decades. Then, in the renovation-mad nineties, the house’s owners brought Rattenbury back out to do a thorough update and remodel.
The result is a kind of hybrid fifties-nineties aesthetic, which will suit some tastes better than others. But then, so do all the residences designed by Wright, of which the Circular Sun House in Phoenix, Arizona, is the very last.
In the Architectural Digest video above, posted when the house went on the market in 2021, real estate agent Deanna Peters points out a few of its Wrightian features: its circular form, but also its curved hallways, its custom-built cabinetry (Philippine mahogany, of course), its signature “compression-and-release” and “inside-out” spatial effects, its cantilevered balcony, its integration with the desert environment, and even its carport — Wright’s own coinage, and indeed his own invention.
Also in the manner of most Wright-designed homes — as he himself was known to acknowledge, and not without a boastful note — the Circular Sun House seems easier to look at than to live in, let alone maintain. “The 3‑bedroom home last sold in 2019, before it had a brief period on Airbnb (rented for approximately $1,395 a night),” wrote Homes & Gardens’ Megan Slack in 2023. At that time, it was on the market for $8.5 million, about half a million dollars more than its owner wanted in 2021. Paradoxically, though it remains unsold as of this writing, its asking price has risen to $8,950,000. Wright’s name brings a certain premium, of course, but so do the trends of the moment: one hears, after all, that the nineties are back.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Victoria Warmerdam, the writer and director of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” summarizes the plot of her 22-minute film as follows: The film “tells the story of Lara, a music producer who spirals into an existential crisis after repeatedly failing a CAPTCHA test—leading her to question whether she might actually be a robot. Through a dark comedic lens, [the film] explores themes of identity, self-determination, love, and technology in a world where the line between humanity and artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly blurred.” This past weekend, “I’m Not a Robot” won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short, marking the first time a Dutch short film received this honor. Distributed by The New Yorker, “I’m Not a Robot” can be viewed free online. We’re adding it to our collection of 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Now through March 9, 2025, Coursera is offering 40% off a three-month subscription to Coursera Plus. This plan provides access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive price, including programs from 350 universities (e.g., Duke and the University of Michigan) and companies like Google and IBM.
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Today, when we watch genre-defining concert films like Monterey Pop, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, or Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, we look upon the audience with nearly as much interest as we do the performers. But Pink Floyd never did things in quite the same way as other rock bands of that era. In 1972, they put out a concert film with no audience at all, substituting for visual interest the majestic ruins of the ancient Roman amphitheater in Pompeii. Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII has lately been restored, and you can see the trailer for its upcoming worldwide cinemas-and-IMAX re-release above.
Even without the unpredictable element of attendees (apart from a few local children who snuck in to watch), the production had its difficulties. Ever musically rigorous, the Floyd insisted on playing live with their actual touring gear, which took three days to truck over from London.
Only then was it discovered that the amphitheater didn’t have enough electricity available to power it all, which ultimately required running a half-mile-long extension cord to the town hall. Though hardly unimpressive, the resulting footage fell short of feature length, which required supplementary shooting at the considerably less historic Studio Europasonor in Paris.
Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII was originally meant, in part, to promote their then-latest-release Meddle. That album is best remembered for “Echoes,” which occupies the entirety of side two, and which foreshadowed the kinds of ambitious compositions of which the post-Syd Barrett version of the Floyd would be capable. The film splits it up into two parts, one to open it and the other to close it; you can get a taste of this live rendition from the clip just above. In between the two halves of “Echoes” come songs like “Careful with That Axe, Eugene,” “A Saucerful of Secrets,” and “Mademoiselle Nobs,” as well as footage of the band in the studio, at work on their next project: an album called The Dark Side of the Moon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Courtesy of Wired, historian Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College) answers the internet’s burning questions about the cultural rebirth that came to be known as The Renaissance. In 30+ minutes, Bevilacqua covers an array of questions, including: When did The Renaissance begin? What exactly was the Renaissance? Why do paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus remain so famous centuries later? What did people’s diets consist of during The Renaissance? How was their hygiene? How did Brunelleschi build a dome in Florence that defied gravity? What is inside Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks? And the questions go on…
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Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then again, as those who get hooked on his books can attest, never is his work ever wholly detached from reality. Time and time again, he delivers lurid visions of the macabre, grotesque, and bizarre, but they always work most powerfully when he weaves them into the coarse fabric of ordinary, makeshift, down-at-the-heels America. Though long rich and famous, King hasn’t lost his understanding of a certain downtrodden stratum of society, or at least one that regards itself as downtrodden — the very demographic, in other words, often blamed for the rise of Donald Trump.
“I started thinking Donald Trump might win the presidency in September of 2016,” King writes in a Guardian piece from Trump’s first presidential term. “By the end of October, I was almost sure.” For most of that year, he’d sensed “a feeling that people were both frightened of the status quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They wanted to upset the motherfucker, and would worry about picking up those spilled apples later. Or just leave them to rot.” They “didn’t just want change; they wanted a man on horseback. Trump filled the bill. I had written about such men before.”
King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”
Further Stillson-Trump parallels are examined in the NowThis interview clip at the top of the post. “I was sort of convinced that it was possible that a politician would arise who was so outside the mainstream and so willing to say anything that he would capture the imaginations of the American people.” Read now, Stillson’s demagogical rhetoric — describing himself as “a real mover and shaker,” promising to “throw the bums out” of Washington — sounds rather mild compared to what Trump says at his own rallies. Perhaps King himself does have a touch of Johnny Smith-like prescience. Or perhaps he suspects, on some level, that Trump isn’t so much the disease as the symptom, a manifestation of a much deeper and longer-festering condition of the American soul. Now there’s a frightening notion.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue it is Carl Jung who is still most with us in our communal practices: from his focus on introversion and extroversion to his view of syncretic, intuitive forms of spirituality and his indirect influence on 12-Step programs. But Jung’s journey to self-understanding and what he called “individuation” was an intensely private, personal affair that took place over the course of sixteen years, during which he created an incredible, folio-sized work of religious art called The Red Book: Liber Novus. In the video above, you can get a tour through Jung’s private masterpiece, presented in an intensely hushed, breathy style meant to trigger the tingly sensations of a weird phenomenon called “ASMR.” Given the book’s disorienting and often disturbing content, this over-gentle guidance seems appropriate.
After his break with Freud in 1913, when he was 38 years old, Jung had what he feared might be a psychotic break with reality as well. He began recording his dreams, mystical visions, and psychedelic inner voyages, in a stylized, calligraphic style that resembles medieval European illuminated manuscripts and the occult psychic journeys of Aleister Crowley and William Blake.
Jung had the work bound but not published. It’s “a very personal record,” writes Psychology Today, “of Jung’s complicated, tortuous and lengthy quest to salvage his soul.” Jung called this process of creation the “numinous beginning” to his most important psychological work. After many years spent locked in a bank vault, The Red Book finally came to light a few years ago and was translated and published in an expensive edition.
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