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Wednesday, February 7th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | A Cultural Tour of Istanbul, Where the Art and History of Three Great Empires Come Together
Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther east — much farther east, in the view of Great Art Explained creator James Payne. In his latest Great Art Cities video, he makes the case for Istanbul, adducing such both artistically and historically rich sites as the İstanbul Archaeological Museum, the Basilica Cistern, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul Modern, and of course — as previously featured here on Open Culture — the unignorable Hagia Sophia. Payne introduces Istanbul as having been “the capital of three great empires, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman.” In the continent-straddling metropolis as it is today, “both ancient and modern art blend elements from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, reflecting its geographical and historical positioning as a bridge between the East and the West.” The works on display in the city constitute “a visual embodiment of its complex history,” from the Hellenistic to the Roman to the Islamic to the styles and media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with all of which “modern-day Turkey is now creating its own artistic legacy.”
That legacy is also deeply rooted in the past. Visit the Archaeological Museum and you can see the Alexander Sarcophagus from the fourth century BC, whose astonishingly detailed carvings include “the only existing depiction of Alexander the Great created during his lifetime.” The underground Basilica Cistern, built in the sixth century, counts as much as a large-scale work of Byzantine art as it does a large-scale work of Byzantine engineering. From there, it’s a short tram ride on the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn to the brand-new, Renzo Piano-designed Istanbul Modern, which has paintings by Cihat Burak, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Bedri Baykam. You may not know those names now, but if you view their work in the unique cultural context of Istanbul — in which so many eras and civilizations are manifest — you’ll never forget them. Related content: Watch Digital Dancers Electrify the Streets of Istanbul An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again How Londinium Became London, Lutetia Became Paris, and Other Roman Cities Got Their Modern Names Great Art Cities: Visit the Fascinating, Lesser-Known Museums of London & Paris 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. |
| 10:00a | Watch Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)
Dziga Vertov is best known for his dazzling city symphony A Man with a Movie Camera, which was ranked by Sight and Sound magazine as the 8th best movie ever made. Yet what you might not know is that Vertov also made the Soviet Union’s first ever animated movie, Soviet Toys. Consisting largely of simple line drawings, the film might lack the verve and visual sophistication that marked A Man with a Movie Camera, but Vertov still displays his knack for making striking, pungent images. Yet those who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Soviet policy of the 1920s might find the movie — which is laden with Marxist allegories — really odd. Soviet Toys came out in 1924, during Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which gave some market incentives to small farmers. Not surprisingly, the farmers started producing a lot more food than before, and soon a whole new class of middleman traders formed — the reviled “NEPmen.” The movie opens with a NEPman — a bloated caricature of a Capitalist (who coincidentally looks vaguely like Nikita Khrushchev) — devouring a massive heap of food. He’s so stuffed that he spends much of the rest of the movie sprawled out on the floor, much in the same way one might imagine Jamie Dimon after Thanksgiving dinner. Then he belches riches at a woman who is can-canning on his distended belly. I said this film is odd. Later, as a couple of squabbling Russian Orthodox priests look on, a worker tries to extract money from the NEPman by cutting his gut with a huge pair of scissors. When that fails, the worker and a passing peasant fuse bodies to create a two-headed being that stomps on the Capitalist’s belly, which pops open like a piñata filled with cash. Then members of the Red Army pile together and form a sort of human pyramid before turning into a giant tree. They hang the Capitalist along with the priests. The end. Some of the references in this movie are clear: The worker’s use of scissors points to the “Scissors Crisis” – an attempt by the Central Government to correct the price imbalance between agriculture and industrial goods. And the physical melding of the peasantry and the proletariat is a representation of the never quite realized dream of the Bolsheviks. Other images are as obscure as they are weird — the leering close ups of the Capitalist, the NEPman’s girlfriend who disappears into his stomach, the revolutionary filmmaker who has the eyes of a camera lens and the mouth of a camera shutter. They feel like something out of a Marxist fever dream. Soviet Toys can be found in the Animation section of our collection of Free Movies Online. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014. Related Content: Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968) A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986) Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. |
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