Tuesday, August 10th, 2021

Time	Event
8:00a	How Pulp Fiction ’s Dance Scene Paid Artistic Tribute to the Classic Dance Scene in Fellini’s 8½ An auteur makes few compromises in bringing his distinctive visions to the screen, but he also makes no bones about borrowing from the auteurs who came before. This is especially true in the case of an auteur named Quentin Tarantino, who for nearly thirty years has repeatedly pulled off the neat trick of directing large-scale, highly individualistic movies that also draw deeply from the well of existing cinema — deeply enough to pull up both the grind-house “low” and art-house “high.” Tarantino’s first big impact on the zeitgeist came in the form of 1994’s Pulp Fiction, which put the kind of common, sensationalistic material suggested by its title into cinematic forms picked up from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. Few clips of Tarantino’s work could distill this inspirational polarity as well as Pulp Fiction‘s twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim’s. In a film almost wholly composed of memorable scenes, as I wrote when last we featured it here on Open Culture, this one is quite possibly the most memorable. Tarantino has explained his intent to pay tribute to dancing as it occurs in films like Godard’s Bande à part, the namesake of Tarantino’s production company. “My favorite musical sequences have always been in Godard because they just come out of nowhere,” he once said. “It’s so infectious, so friendly. And the fact that it’s not a musical but he’s stopping the movie to have a musical sequence makes it all the more sweet.” But as these comparison videos reveal, Godard isn’t the only midcentury European auteur to whom Pulp Fiction‘s dance scene owes its effectiveness. “This scene is a direct steal from Fellini’s 8½ and there’s no real effort to hide it,” writes No Film School’s Jason Hellerman. “Aside from the location change, the moves and camera angles are almost the same.” In 8½ the dancers are Marcello Mastroianni’s besieged filmmaker Guido and his estranged wife Luisa, played by Anouk Aimée. This occurs in another of the precious few pictures in cinema history comprising memorable scenes and memorable scenes only; the others include vivid spectacles outlining the middle-aged Guido’s artistic struggle and voyages of memory back into his prelapsarian childhood. Childhood, writes poet James Fenton, was “a time of pure inventiveness” when “everything we did was hailed as superb.” (In this sense, a young filmmaker who makes his first Hollywood hit enjoys a second childhood, albeit usually a brief one.) In Fenton’s words, Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee finds a key to the elaborate and enrapturing but at times bewildering 8½. With growth, alas, comes “the primal erasure, when we forget all those early experiences, and it is rather as if there is some mercy in this, since if we could remember the intensity of such pleasure it might spoil us for anything else. We forget what happened exactly, but we know that there was something, something to do with music and praise and everyone talking, something to do with flying through the air, something to do with dance.” Related Content: The Power of Pulp Fiction’s Dance Scene, Explained by Choreographers and Even John Travolta Himself Federico Fellini Introduces Himself to America in Experimental 1969 Documentary Fellini’s Fantastic TV Commercials Fellini + Abrams = Super 8½ Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. How Pulp Fiction ’s Dance Scene Paid Artistic Tribute to the Classic Dance Scene in Fellini’s 8½ is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. (Comment on this)
11:00a	Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088 A few years ago we posted Kurt Vonnegut’s letter of advice to humanity, written in 1988 but addressed, a century hence, to the year 2088. Whatever objections you may have felt to reading this missive more than 70 years prematurely, you might have overcome them to find that the author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions single-mindedly importuned his fellow man of the late 21st century to protect the natural environment. He issues commandments to “reduce and stabilize your population” to “stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems,” and to “stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars,” among other potentially drastic-sounding measures. Commandment number seven amounts to the highly Vonnegutian “And so on. Or else.” A fan can easily imagine these words spoken in the writer’s own voice, but with Vonnegut now gone for well over a decade, would you accept them spoken in the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch instead? First commissioned by Volkswagen for a Time magazine ad campaign, Vonnegut’s letter to 2088 was later found and republished by Letters of Note. The associated Letters Live project, which brings notable letters to the stage (and subsequently internet video), counts Cumberbatch as one of its star readers: he’s given voice to wise correspondence by the likes of Sol LeWitt, Albert Camus, and Alan Turing. Cumberbatch even has experience with letters by Vonnegut, having previously read aloud his rebuke to a North Dakota school board that allowed the burning of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut’s work makes clear that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and that he considered book-burning one of the infinite varieties of folly he spent his career cataloging. In light of his letter to 2088, the same went for humanity’s poor stewardship of their planet. Vonnegut may not have been a conservationist, exactly, but nor, in his view, was nature itself, a force that needs “no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things.” This is, of course, the personifying view of a novelist, but a novelist who never forgot his sense of humor — nor his tendency to play the prophet of doom. Related Content: Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Letter to the High School That Burned Slaughterhouse-Five The Graphic Novel Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before His Conviction For “Gross Indecency” Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Albert Camus’ Touching Thank You Letter to His Elementary School Teacher “Stop It and Just DO”: Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Advice on Overcoming Creative Blocks, Written by Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse (1965) Benedict Cumberbatch, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry & Others Read Letters of Hope, Love & Support During COVID-19 Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. (Comment on this)
2:00p	Hear Vincent Price Star in a Classic Radio Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 Here are some things you may not know about Vincent Price: He was once a young man. Before becoming a horror icon in the 1950s, he was a successful character actor. “Only a third of his movies that he made were actually horror films,” says his daughter, Victoria Price. “He made 105 films. People don’t realize he had an extensive career in theater and radio.” He came from a wealthy St. Louis family and harbored early anti-semitic views and a misguided admiration for Hitler in the 1930s. He completely changed his views after moving to New York and was placed on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Premature Anti-Nazi Sympathizer list” in the 1950s, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, notes Susan King at the L.A. Times, a list that “raised questions about those who had been against the Nazis before the U.S. went to war with Germany.” He was a gourmet cook, had a degree in art history, and worked for nine years in the sixties as an art consultant for Sears…. He was blacklisted for being anti-Nazi too early…. After being denied work for almost a year, as Price’s daughter writes in her 1999 memoir, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, he chose to sign a “secret oath” offered by the FBI to salvage his career. Perhaps not coincidentally, he took a radio part soon afterward in Australia, as a split narrator/Winston Smith in a 1955 Lux Radio Theater adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps fearful of a future in which secret oaths became the norm. Orwell himself had made it perfectly clear what he feared. “Radical in his politics and in his artistic tastes,” Lionel Trilling wrote in a New Yorker review the year the book came out, “Orwell is wholly free of the cant of radicalism”; his talent as a writer of fiction is to make “common sense” political observations serve plot and character. Perhaps the most chilling of these arrives in the first few paragraphs of 1984: In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.  We may be reminded of the distinctions between what “Orwellian” means and what it does not, as Noah Tavlin describes in a recent explainer: if someone’s “talking about mass surveillance and intrusive government, they’re describing something authoritarian, but not necessarily Orwellian.” Authoritarianism is pure brute force. The Orwellian requires a constant misuse of language, a violent twisting of conscience, a perpetual shouting of lies as truth until the two are indistinguishable. No one is served by this but nihilistic oligarchs, Trilling writes: The rulers of Orwell’s State know that power in its pure form has for its true end nothing but itself, and they know that the nature of power is defined by the pain it can inflict on others. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in relation to the poverty of others, so power in its pure aspect exists only in relation to the weakness of others, and that any power of the ruled, even the power to experience happiness, is by that much a diminution of the power of the rulers. Orwellian societies exist solely to spread hatred and misery, even to their detriment, a point Price made at the end of another radio broadcast, a 1950 episode of NBC’s The Saint, in which the actor denounced racism and religious prejudice. Not long afterward, his name appeared on McCarthy’s list. Price learned that the government could deprive him of his happiness unless he swore fealty to an insanely nonsensical political morality. His daughter offers the experience as one reason for his love of playing villains. “Most of the villains that he played had been wronged in some way. There was a reason for their villainy.” Related Content:  What “Orwellian” Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949) George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Vincent Price Star in a Classic Radio Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. (Comment on this)

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