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.

Watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Influential German Expressionist Horror Film (1920)

Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

In ear­ly 1920, posters began appear­ing all over Berlin with a hyp­not­ic spi­ral and the mys­te­ri­ous com­mand Du musst Cali­gari wer­den — “You must become Cali­gari.”

The posters were part of an inno­v­a­tive adver­tis­ing cam­paign for an upcom­ing movie by Robert Wiene called The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari. When the film appeared, audi­ences were mes­mer­ized by Wiene’s sur­re­al tale of mys­tery and hor­ror. Almost a cen­tu­ry lat­er, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari is still cel­e­brat­ed for its rare blend­ing of low­brow enter­tain­ment and avant-garde art. It is fre­quent­ly cit­ed as the quin­tes­sen­tial cin­e­mat­ic exam­ple of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, with its dis­tort­ed per­spec­tives and per­va­sive sense of dread.

Like many night­mares, Cali­gari had its ori­gin in real-life events. Screen­writer Hans Janowitz had been walk­ing late one night through a fair in Ham­burg’s red-light dis­trict when he heard laugh­ter. Turn­ing, he saw an attrac­tive young woman dis­ap­pear behind some bush­es in a park. A short time lat­er a man emerged from the shad­ows and walked away. The next morn­ing, Janowitz read in the news­pa­pers that a young woman match­ing the descrip­tion of the one he had seen had been mur­dered overnight at that very loca­tion.

Haunt­ed by the inci­dent, Janowitz told the sto­ry to fel­low writer Carl May­er. Togeth­er they set to work writ­ing a screen­play based on the inci­dent, draw­ing also on May­er’s unset­tling expe­ri­ence with a psy­chi­a­trist. They imag­ined a strange, bespec­ta­cled man named Dr. Cali­gari who arrives in a small town to demon­strate his pow­ers of hyp­no­tism over Cesare, a sleep­walk­er, at the local fair. A series of mys­te­ri­ous mur­ders fol­lows.

Janowitz and May­er sold their screen­play to Erich Pom­mer at Decla-Film. Pom­mer at first want­ed Fritz Lang to direct the film, but Lang was busy with anoth­er project, so he gave the job to Wiene. One of the most crit­i­cal deci­sions Pom­mer made was to hire Expres­sion­ist art direc­tor Her­mann Warm to design the pro­duc­tion, along with painters Wal­ter Reimann and Wal­ter Röhrig. As R. Bar­ton Palmer writes at Film Ref­er­ence:

The prin­ci­ple of War­m’s con­cep­tion is the Expres­sion­ist notion of Bal­lung, that crys­tal­liza­tion of the inner real­i­ty of objects, con­cepts, and peo­ple through an artis­tic expres­sion that cuts through and dis­cards a false exte­ri­or. War­m’s sets for the film cor­re­spond­ing­ly evoke the twists and turn­ings of a small Ger­man medieval town, but in a patent­ly unre­al­is­tic fash­ion (e.g., streets cut across one anoth­er at impos­si­ble angles and paths are impos­si­bly steep). The roofs that Cesare the som­nam­bu­list cross­es dur­ing his night­time depre­da­tions rise at unlike­ly angles to one anoth­er, yet still afford him pas­sage so that he can reach his vic­tims. In oth­er words, the world of Cali­gari remains “real” in the sense that it is not offered as an alter­na­tive one to what actu­al­ly exists. On the con­trary, War­m’s design is meant to evoke the essence of Ger­man social life, offer­ing a pen­e­trat­ing cri­tique of semi­of­fi­cial author­i­ty (the psy­chi­a­trist) that is soft­ened by the addi­tion of a fram­ing sto­ry. As a prac­tic­ing artist with a deep com­mit­ment to the polit­i­cal and intel­lec­tu­al pro­gram of Expres­sion­ism, Warm was the ide­al tech­ni­cian to do the art design for the film, which bears out War­m’s famous man­i­festo that “the cin­e­ma image must become an engrav­ing.”

The screen­writ­ers were dis­ap­point­ed with Wiene’s deci­sion to frame the sto­ry as a flash­back told by a patient in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. Janowitz, in par­tic­u­lar, had meant Cali­gari to be an indict­ment of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment that had recent­ly sent mil­lions of men to kill or be killed in the trench­es of World War I. “While the orig­i­nal sto­ry exposed author­i­ty,” writes Siegfried Kra­cauer in From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Psy­cho­log­i­cal His­to­ry of the Ger­man Film, “Wiene’s Cali­gari glo­ri­fied author­i­ty and con­vict­ed its antag­o­nist of mad­ness. A rev­o­lu­tion­ary film was thus turned into a con­formist one — fol­low­ing the much-used pat­tern of declar­ing some nor­mal but trou­ble­some indi­vid­ual insane and send­ing him to a lunatic asy­lum.”

In a pure­ly cin­e­mat­ic sense, of course, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari remains a rev­o­lu­tion­ary work. You can watch the com­plete film above. Or find it list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch the Quin­tes­sen­tial Vam­pire Film Nos­fer­atu

Watch the Cult Clas­sic Hor­ror Film Car­ni­val of Souls (1962)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More

Mythology Expert Reviews Depictions of Greek & Roman Myths in Popular Movies and TV Shows

It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most of us no longer believe in their lit­er­al exis­tence, but some of us have faith in their box-office poten­tial. This two-part video series from Van­i­ty Fair exam­ines a vari­ety of movies and tele­vi­sion shows that have drawn on Greek and Roman myth since the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, includ­ing Jason and the Arg­onautsClash of the Titans, Troy, and Dis­ney’s Her­cules. Offer­ing com­men­tary on their faith­ful­ness to the source mate­r­i­al is Peter Mei­neck, Pro­fes­sor of Clas­sics in the Mod­ern World at New York Uni­ver­si­ty.

Not that he insists on hold­ing these enter­tain­ments to rig­or­ous stan­dards of accu­ra­cy. “I would not use the term ‘accu­ra­cy’ at any point in Xena: War­rior Princess, because it’s fan­tas­tic,” he says at one point. But then, when it comes to the sto­ries told by ancient Greeks and Romans, we’re deal­ing with rather fan­ta­sy-rich mate­r­i­al from the start.

Height­ened, aug­ment­ed, refined, and syn­cretized over many gen­er­a­tions, they’ve come down to us in forms that reflect more or less eter­nal­ly human notions about the forces that gov­ern real­i­ty and its vicis­si­tudes — ready made, in some cas­es, to incor­po­rate into the lat­est twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry super­hero spec­ta­cle.

Pos­sessed of dis­tinc­tive phys­i­cal traits, tem­pera­ments, super­hu­man pow­ers, and even grudges, the many gods of the poly­the­is­tic antiq­ui­ty were, in their way, the com­ic-book heroes of their time. And just as we have dif­fer­ent “uni­vers­es” of char­ac­ters to choose from, dif­fer­ent eras and cul­tures had their own line­ups of deities, none quite the same as any oth­er. “At the pin­na­cle of this teem­ing numi­nous uni­verse were the Olympians, the twelve gods head­ed by Zeus and Hera,” says ancient-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan in the Told in Stone video above. “The Greeks influ­enced Roman reli­gion vir­tu­al­ly from the begin­ning. By the time Rome emerged into the full light of his­to­ry, the Roman gods had been assim­i­lat­ed to their Greek coun­ter­parts.”

Hence our rec­og­niz­ing Greek Olympians like Posei­don, Artemis, Athena, and Diony­sus, but also their Roman equiv­a­lents Nep­tune, Diana, Min­er­va, and Bac­chus. “There seems to have been lit­tle doubt in Romans’ minds that their chief gods were the same as those of the Greeks,” Ryan says. “The Greeks, for their part, gen­er­al­ly accept­ed that the Romans wor­shipped their gods under dif­fer­ent names — while also being “eager col­lec­tors of exot­ic deities,” many of which could be found with­in their own vast empire. The result was a bewil­der­ing pro­fu­sion of gods for every occa­sion, Greek-inspired or oth­er­wise: an omen of the more-is-bet­ter ethos that the Hol­ly­wood block­buster would embrace a cou­ple of mil­len­nia lat­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

How Rome Began: The His­to­ry As Told by Ancient His­to­ri­ans

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Clas­si­cal Greek Civ­i­liza­tion in All Its Glo­ry

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

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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