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Thursday, August 31st, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 2:00p | Man Ray and the Cinéma Pur: Watch Four Groundbreaking Surrealist Films From the 1920s
Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, his works spanned various media, including film. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or "Pure Cinema," which rejected such "bourgeois" conceits as character, setting and plot. Today we present Man Ray's four influential films of the 1920s. Le Retour à la Raison (above) was completed in 1923. The title means "Return to Reason," and it's basically a kinetic extension of Man Ray's still photography. Many of the images in Le Retour are animated photograms, a technique in which opaque, or partially opaque, objects are arranged directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper and exposed to light. The technique is as old as photography itself, but Man Ray had a gift for self-promotion, so he called them "rayographs." For Le Retour, Man Ray sprinkled objects like salt and pepper and pins onto the photographic paper. He also filmed live-action sequences of an amusement park carousel and other subjects, including the nude torso of his model and lover, Kiki of Montparnasse. Emak-Bakia (1926):
The 16-minute Emak-Bakia contains some of the same images and visual techniques as Le Retour à la Raison, including rayographs, double images and negative images. But the live-action sequences are more inventive, with dream-like distortions and tilted camera angles. The effect is surreal. "In reply to critics who would like to linger on the merits or defects of the film," wrote Man Ray in the program notes, "one can reply simply by translating the title 'Emak Bakia,' an old Basque expression, which was chosen because it sounds prettily and means: 'Give us a rest.'" L'Etoile de Mer (1928):
L'Etoile de Mer ("The Sea Star") was a collaboration between Man Ray and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. It features Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) and André de la Rivière. The distorted, out-of focus images were made by shooting into mirrors and through rough glass. The film is more sensual than Man Ray's earlier works. As Donald Faulkner writes: In the modernist high tide of 1920s experimental filmmaking, L'Etoile de Mer is a perverse moment of grace, a demonstration that the cinema went farther in its great silent decade than most filmmakers today could ever imagine. Surrealist photographer Man Ray's film collides words with images (the intertitles are from an otherwise lost work by poet Robert Desnos) to make us psychological witnesses, voyeurs of a kind, to a sexual encounter. A character picks up a woman who is selling newspapers. She undresses for him, but then he seems to leave her. Less interested in her than in the weight she uses to keep her newspapers from blowing away, the man lovingly explores the perceptions generated by her paperweight, a starfish in a glass tube. As the man looks at the starfish, we become aware through his gaze of metaphors for cinema, and for vision itself, in lyrical shots of distorted perception that imply hallucinatory, almost masturbatory sexuality. Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929):
The longest of Man Ray's films, Les Mystères du Château de Dé (the version above has apparenlty been shortened by seven minutes) follows a pair of travelers on a journey from Paris to the Villa Noailles in Hyères, which features a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Geuvrikain. "Made as an architectural document and inspired by the poetry of Mallarmé," writes Kim Knowles in A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray, "Les Mystères du Château de Dé is the film in which Man Ray most clearly demonstrates his interdisciplinary attitude, particularly in its reference to Stéphane Mallarmé's poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard." The films will be listed in our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April, 2012. Related Content: Man Ray’s Portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp & Many Other 1920s Icons Four Surrealist Films From the 1920Watch Dreams That Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter Man Ray and the Cinéma Pur: Watch Four Groundbreaking Surrealist Films From the 1920s is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 5:39p | The Periodic Table of Elements Presented as Interactive Haikus
British poet and speculative fiction writer recently got a little creative with the Periodic Table, writing one haiku for each element. Carbon Show-stealing diva, Silicon Locked in rock and sand, Strontium Deadly bone seeker You can access the complete Elemental haiku here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content The Periodic Table of Elements Scaled to Show The Elements’ Actual Abundance on Earth Periodic Table Battleship!: A Fun Way To Learn the Elements “The Periodic Table Table” — All The Elements in Hand-Carved Wood World’s Smallest Periodic Table on a Human Hair “The Periodic Table of Storytelling” Reveals the Elements of Telling a Good Story Chemistry on YouTube: “Periodic Table of Videos” Wins SPORE Prize The Periodic Table of Elements Presented as Interactive Haikus is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:30p | Jared Leto Stars in a New Prequel to Blade Runner 2049: Watch It Free Online
Blade Runner, as anyone who's seen so much as its first shot knows, takes place in the Los Angeles of November 2019. Though the film flopped when it came out in 1982, the acclaim and fans it has drawn with each of the 35 years that have passed since didn't take long to reach the kind of critical mass that demands a sequel. After numerous rumors and false starts, the October release of Blade Runner 2049, produced by Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and directed by Arrival director Denis Villeneuve, now fast approaches. The new movie's promotional push, which has so far included trailers and making-of featurettes, has now begun to tell us what happened between 2019 and 2049. "I decided to ask a couple of artists that I respect to create three short stories that dramatize some key events that occurred after 2019, when the first Blade Runner takes place, but before 2049, when my new Blade Runner story begins," says Villeneuve in his introduction to the brand new short above. Taking place in the Los Angeles of 2036, the Luke Scott-directed piece "revolves around Jared Leto’s character, Niander Wallace," writes Collider's Adam Chitwood, who "introduces a new line of 'perfected' replicants called the Nexus 9, seeking to get the prohibition on replicants repealed," the government having shut replicant production down thirteen years before due to a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack for which replicants took the blame. A timeline appeared at Comic-Con this past summer covering the events of the thirty years between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, though in very broad strokes: in 2020 "the Tyrell Corporation introduces a new replicant model, the Nexus 8S, which has extended lifespans," in 2025 "a new company, Wallace Corp., solves the global food shortage and becomes a massive super power," in 2049 "life on Earth has reached its limit and society divides between Replicant and human." The two other short films to come should just about tide over fans until the release of Blade Runner 2049 — not that those who've been waiting for a new Blade Runner movie since the 1980s can't handle another month. The short Blade Runner 2049 prequel, entitled "Nexus: 2036," will be added to our list, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Blade Runner 2049’s New Making-Of Featurette Gives You a Sneak Peek Inside the Long-Awaited Sequel The Official Trailer for Ridley Scott’s Long-Awaited Blade Runner Sequel Is Finally Out Philip K. Dick Previews Blade Runner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Overwhelming” (1981) The Blade Runner Promotional Film Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Jared Leto Stars in a New Prequel to Blade Runner 2049: Watch It Free Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 8:00p | Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Provide Doorways to the Unconscious, and Maybe a Way to Predict the Future
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each…. In the Tarot deck, each suit has four ‘court’ cards: King, Queen, Jack, and Knight.” The latter figure has “mysteriously disappeared from today’s playing cards,” though examples of Knight playing cards exist in the fossil record. The modern Jack is a survival of the Page cards in the Tarot. (See examples of Tarot court cards here from the 1910 Rider-Waite deck.) The similarities between the two types of decks are significant, yet no one but adepts seems to consider using their Gin Rummy cards to tell the future. The eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung, however, might have done so. As Mary K. Greer explains, in a 1933 lecture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, noting the late Medieval cards are "really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of the four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individual symbolism. They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” The cards, said Jung, “combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.” This, too, is how Tarot works—with the added dimension of “symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations.” The images—the hanged man, the tower, the sun—“are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.”
Thus far, Jung hasn't said anything many orthodox Jungian psychologists would find disagreeable, but he goes even further and claims that, indeed, “we can predict the future, when we know how the present moment evolved from the past.” He called for “an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.” He compared this process to the Chinese I Ching, and other such practices. As analyst Marie-Louise von Franz recounts in her book Psyche and Matter:
Content seemed to matter much less than form. Invoking the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences, Jung notes in his lecture, “man always felt the need of finding an access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition, because there is a sort of correspondence or a likeness between the prevailing condition and the condition of the collective unconscious.”
What he aimed at through the use of divination was to accelerate the process of “individuation,” the move toward wholeness and integrity, by means of playful combinations of archetypes. As another mystical psychologist, Alejandro Jodorowsky, puts it, "the Tarot will teach you how to create a soul." Jung perceived the Tarot, notes the blog Faena Aleph, “as an alchemical game,” which in his words, attempts “the union of opposites.” Like the I Ching, it “presents a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light.”
Much later in 1960, a year before his death, Jung seemed less sanguine about Tarot and the occult, or at least downplayed their mystical, divinatory power for language more suited to the laboratory, right down to the usual complaints about staffing and funding. As he wrote in a letter about his attempts to use these methods:
Later interpreters of Jung doubted that his experiments with divination as an analytical technique would pass peer review. “To do more than ‘preach to the converted,’” wrote the authors of a 1998 article published in the Journal of Parapsychology, “this experiment or any other must be done with sufficient rigor that the larger scientific community would be satisfied with all aspects of the data taking, analysis of the data, and so forth.” Or, one could simply use Jungian methods to read the Tarot, the scientific community be damned.
As in Jung’s many other creative reappropriations of mythical, alchemical, and religious symbolism, his interpretation of the Tarot inspired those with mystical leanings to undertake their own Jungian investigations into parapsychology and the occult. Inspired by Jung’s verbal descriptions of the Tarot’s major arcana, artist and mystic Robert Wang has created a Jungian Tarot deck, and an accompanying trilogy of books, The Jungian Tarot and its Archetypal Imagery, Tarot Psychology, and Perfect Tarot Divination. You can see images of each of Wang’s cards here. His books purport to be exhaustive studies of Jung’s Tarot theory and practice, written in consultation with Jung scholars in New York and Zurich. Sallie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey is less voluminous and innovative—using the traditional, Pamela Coleman-Smith-illustrated, Rider-Waite deck rather than an updated original version. But for those willing to grant a relationship between systems of symbols and a collective unconscious, her book may provide some penetrating insights, if not a recipe for predicting the future. Related Content: Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Creative Inspiration The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Salvador Dalí Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Available as 78-Card Deck Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Provide Doorways to the Unconscious, and Maybe a Way to Predict the Future is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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