The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
in Film, Music | February 15th, 2013
Here’s a remarkable short film from 1938 of the great gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band the Quintette du Hot Club de France performing on a movie set. The film was hastily organized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to introduce the band to the British public. As Michael Dregni writes in Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing:
The Quintette was unknown to the British public, and there was no telling how their new music would resonate. So, Grade sought to educate his audience. He hired a movie crew to film a six-minute-plus promotional short entitled Jazz “Hot” to be shown in British theaters providing a lesson in jazz appreciation to warm up the crowds.
That would explain the didactic tone of the first two and a half minutes of the film, which amounts to a remedial lesson on the nature of jazz. It opens with an orchestra plodding along on a note-for-note performance of Handel’s “Largo,” from the opera Xerxes, which a ham-handed narrator then contrasts to the freedom of jazz improvisation. But the film really comes alive when Django arrives on the screen and begins improvising on the popular 1938 song “J’attendrai.” Although the sequences of Reinhardt and his musicians playing were obviously synchronized to a previously recorded track, Jazz “Hot” is the best surviving visual document of the guitarist’s two-fingered fretting technique, which he developed after losing the use of most of his left hand in a fire. To learn more about Reinhardt and to watch a full-length documentary on his life, see our August 2012 post, “Django Reinhardt and the Inspiring Story Behind His Guitar Technique.”
Jazz ‘Hot’: The Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt&body=www.openculture.com/2013/02/ijazz_hoti_the_rare_1938_short_film_with_jazz_legend_django_reinhardt.html" target="_blank"> by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |
in Literature, Politics, Radio | February 15th, 2013
Like the idea of totalitarianism, perhaps best articulated by Hannah Arendt in her post-war Origins of Totalitarianism, George Orwell’s post-war scrutiny of repressive governments has become a staple, catch-all reference for pundits on either side of the political spectrum, particularly the concepts of doublespeak, doublethink, historical revisionism, and the hyper-intrusive Big Brother, all from the 1949 novel 1984. In fact, few adjectives seem to get deployed with more frequency in urgent political discourse of all kinds than “Orwellian.” But the name George Orwell, pen name of journalist Eric Blair, hides an enigma: Orwell identified himself explicitly as a Democratic Socialist of a particularly English bent (most notably in his essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”), but his scathing critiques of nearly every existing institution sometimes make it hard to pin him down as a partisan of anything but the kind of freedom and openness that everyone vaguely wants to advocate. That ambiguity is a strength; despite his steadfast leftist roots, Orwell would not be a partisan hack—where he saw stupidity, avarice, and brutal inhumanity, he called it out, no matter the source.
The seeming contradictions and ironies that permeate Orwell’s thought and fiction are also what keep his work perennially interesting and worth rereading and revisiting. He was a probing and unsentimental critic of the motives of propagandists of all stripes, both left and right. Beginning in late January, BBC Radio 4 launched a month-long series on Orwell, with the avowedly ironic name, “The Real George Orwell.” Part of the irony comes from the fact that Orwell (or Blair) once worked as a propagandist for the BBC during WWII, and later based the torture area in 1984, Room 101, on a meeting room he recalled from his time there. His experiences with the state broadcasting network were not pleasant in his memory. Nonetheless, his former employer honors him this month with an extensive retrospective, including readings and dramatizations of his essays and journalism, his semi-autobiographical accounts Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia, and his novels Animal Farm and 1984.
In this latest dramatization of Orwell’s most famous novel, protagonist Winston Smith is voiced by actor Christopher Eccleston, who has inhabited another key post-war character in English fiction, Dr. Who (Pippa Nixon voices Julia). In a brief discussion of what he takes away from the novel, Eccleston (above) draws out some of the reasons that 1984 appeals to so many people who might agree on almost nothing else. At the heart of the novel is the kind of humanist individualism that Orwell never abandoned and that he championed against Soviet-style state communism and hard-right imperialist authoritarianism both. Winston Smith is an embodiment of human dignity, celebrated for his struggle to “love, remember, and enjoy life,” as Eccleston says. “It’s the human story that means that we keep coming back to it and that keeps it relevant.” Listen to a brief clip of the 1984 dramatization at the top of this post, and visit BBC Radio 4’s site to hear parts one and two of the full broadcast, which is available online for the next year. When Europe and America both seem rent in two by competing and incompatible social and political visions, it’s at least some comfort to know that no one wants to live in the world Orwell foresaw. Despite his novel’s deeply pessimistic ending, Orwell’s own career of fierce resistance to oppressive regimes offers a model for action against the dystopian future he imagined.
For other free, online readings of Orwell’s work, you can visit our archives of Free Audio Books, where you’ll find
Related Content:
Aldous Huxley Reads Dramatized Version of Brave New World
Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio
Also find major works by Orwell in our collection of Free eBooks
Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
1984, with Christopher Eccleston as Winston Smith&body=www.openculture.com/2013/02/the_bbc_presents_a_new_dramatization_of_orwells_i1984i_with_christopher_eccleston_as_winston_smith.html" target="_blank"> by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |
in Photography | February 15th, 2013
We don’t need to tell you, an Open Culture reader, about the richness of David Lynch’s contribution to motion pictures. But the auteur also has an ongoing relationship with still photography which the past decade has seen emerge into public light. Years ago, I attended an opening in Los Angeles—the city so thoroughly captured by Lynch’s surrealism—of an exhibition of his own shots. Now, the Los Angeles Review of Books presents Lynch’s commentary, in the video above, on 99 pictures taken by others. Listen to him describe his viewing approach—that of a voyeuristic, all-feeling detective—and you’ll never look the same way at curtains, women’s shoes, stone Buddhas, and festering sores again.
Lynch selected these favorite 99 photos from the thousand presented at 2012′s Paris Photo, the international photography fair that happens each November during the European Month of Photography. Just above, you’ll find a French-language (but, to a non-Francophone like myself, still broadly understandable) clip on Lynch’s presence at the festival. He arrived as the inaugural selection of “Paris Photo vu par…,” a new tradition that will each year compile a book of images, their selection “entrusted to a different personality each year.” Die-hard fans will surely need to own their idol’s edition, and in late April they can make a pilgrimage to Lynch’s town for the launch of Paris Photo Los Angeles. Its location? The lot of Paramount Pictures, distributor of Lynch’s photographically striking The Elephant Man.
Related content:
David Lynch’s Surreal Commercials
What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Camera and 52 Seconds of Film
David Lynch Teaches Louis C.K. How to Host The David Letterman Show
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Paris Photo 2012&body=www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_lynch_talks_candidly_about_his_99_favorite_photographs.html" target="_blank"> 