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Monday, March 25th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 7:01a | Learn to Become a Supply Chain Data Analyst with Unilever’s New Certificate Program
Supply chains—we never thought too much about them. That is, until the pandemic, when supply chains experienced severe disruptions worldwide, leaving us waiting for products for weeks, if not months. That’s when we started appreciating the importance of supply chains and their resilience. Companies like Unilever rely on supply chains to manufacture their goods (e.g., Dove, Lipton, and Ben & Jerry’s) and then move them around the globe. For Unilever, it’s essential that their supply chains remain efficient and strong. Working in partnership with Coursera, the company has created a new Supply Chain Data Analyst Professional Certificate to help entry-level professionals learn more about using data to manage effective supply chains. Designed to be completed in roughly four months, the certificate consists of four courses: 1) Supply Chain Management and Analytics, 2) Using Data Analytics in Supply Chain, 3) Implementing Supply Chain Analytics, and 4) Supply Chain Software Tools. As students move through the program, they will learn how to “achieve cost savings, reduce lead times, enhance customer satisfaction, and adapt to changing market conditions through data-driven insights and analytical approaches.” They will also learn key skills like demand forecasting and how to monitor supply chains for security risks. Emphasizing real-world experience, students will “take on the role of an analyst for a fictitious consumer goods company specializing in organic farm to table consumer products. With over 20 unique assignments, [students will] use spreadsheets and visualization tools to analyze data and make recommendations.” You can audit the four courses for free, or sign up to earn a shareable certificate for a fee. Students who select the latter option will be charged $49 per month. Coursera estimates that the certificate will take four months to complete, assuming you’re dedicating 10 hours per week. That amounts to about $200 in total. You can enroll here. For those interested, Unilever has also recently released a new Digital Marketing Analyst Certificate, which you can find here. Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture. Related Content Generative AI for Everyone: A Free Course from AI Pioneer Andrew Ng |
| 8:00a | The Cult of the Criterion Collection: The Company Dedicated to Gathering & Distributing the Greatest Films from Around the World
There was a time, not so very long ago, when many Americans watching movies at home neither knew nor cared who directed those movies. Nor did they feel particularly comfortable with dialogue that sometimes came subtitled, or with the “black bars” that appeared below the frame. The considerable evolution of these audiences’ general relationship to film since then owes something to the adoption of widescreen televisions, but also to the Criterion Collection: the home-video brand that has been targeting its prestige releases of acclaimed films squarely at cinephiles — and even more so, at cinephiles with a collecting impulse — for four decades now. “The company’s first release was a LaserDisc edition of Citizen Kane that included supplementary materials like a video essay and extensive liner notes on the provenance of the negative from which the restoration was made,” writes the New York Times’ Magazine’s Joshua Hunt in a recent piece on how Criterion became a (or perhaps the) cinematic tastemaker. “Next came King Kong, which featured the first ever audio-commentary track, inspired, as an afterthought, by the stories that the film scholar Ronald Haver told while supervising the tedious process of transferring the film from celluloid.”
With the coming of the more successful DVD format in the late nineteen-nineties, such audio-commentary tracks became a staple feature of video releases, Criterion or otherwise. They were a godsend to the cinephiles of my generation coming of age in that era, a kind of informal but intensive film school taught by not just expert scholars but, often, the auteurs themselves. “Some of the earliest were recorded by Martin Scorsese for the Taxi Driver and Raging Bull LaserDiscs, which helped cement his influence on an entire generation of young directors” — including a certain Wes Anderson, who would go on to record commentary tracks for the Criterion releases of his own pictures.
At this point, Criterion has “become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hollywood studio or awards ceremony.” It’s also amassed an unusually dedicated customer base, as explained in the Royal Ocean Film Society video “The Cult of the Criterion Collection.” “We’re at a point in film culture where brands are increasingly more popular than products,” says host Andrew Saladino, a self-confessed Criterion devotee. “More and more, it seems as though the films and the people who made them are secondary to the name and logo of the company behind them,” a phenomenon that Criterion — itself a kind of media universe — somehow both participates in and rises above.
“While studios and streaming services chase audiences by producing endless sequels and spinoffs,” writes Hunt, “Criterion has built a brand that audiences trust to lead them.” I can testify to its having led me to the work of auteurs from Chris Marker to Jacques Tati, Akira Kurosawa to Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Altman to Nicolas Roeg. Today, budding cinema enthusiasts can even benefit from the advice of famous directors and actors for navigating its now‑1,650-title-strong catalog through its “Criterion closet” video series. Recently, that closet has hosted the likes of Paul Giamatti, Willem Dafoe, and Wim Wenders, who pulls off the shelf a copy of his own Until the End of the World — which Criterion released, of course, in its nearly five-hour-long director’s cut. “I always think this is maybe the best thing I’ve done in my life,” he says, “but then again, who am I to judge?” Related content: The Art of Restoring Classic Films: Criterion Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitchcock Movies Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection Steve Buscemi’s Top 10 Film Picks (from The Criterion Collection) Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection 120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection A Celebration of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cassettes, VHS, and Polaroid Too 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. |
| 9:00a | The Evolution of Animation, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistiscope to Pixar
This year has given us occasion to revisit the 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie, what with its entry — and thus, that of an early version of a certain Mickey Mouse — into the public domain. Though it may look comparatively primitive today, that eight-minute black-and-white film actually represents a great many advancements in the art and technology of animation since its inception. You can get a sense of that entire process, just about, from the video above, “The Evolution of Animation 1833–2017,” which ends up at The LEGO Batman Movie but begins with the humble phenakistiscope. First introduced to the public in 1833, the phenakistiscope is an illustrated disc that, when spun, creates the illusion of motion. Essentially a novelty designed to create an optical illusion (the Greek roots of its name being phenakizein, or “deceiving,” and óps, or “eye”), it seems to have attained great popularity as a children’s toy in the nineteenth century, and it later became capable of projection and gained utility in scientific research. Pioneering motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, now immortalized in cinema history as a predecessor of the movie projector, was based on the phenakistiscope. The first moments of “The Evolution of Animation” include a couple of phenakistiscopes, but soon the compilation moves on to clips starring somewhat better-known figures from the early twentieth century like Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur. But it’s only after Steamboat Willie that animation undergoes its real creative explosion, bringing to whimsical and hyperkinetic life not just human characters but a host of animals, trees, and non-living objects besides. After releasing the monumental Snow White in 1937, Disney dominated the form both technologically and artistically for at least three decades. Though this video does contain plenty of Disney, it also includes the work of other studios that have explored quite different areas of the vast field of possibility in animation. Take, for example, the psychedelic Beatles movie Yellow Submarine, the French-Czech surrealist science-fiction fable Fantastic Planet, the stop-motion between-holidays spectacle of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and of course, the depth and refinement of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, beginning with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which came before the formation of the studio itself). From the mid-nineties — with certain notable exceptions, like Wallace & Gromit: The Movie and Charlie Kaufman’s AnomaLisa — computer-generated 3D animation more or less takes over from the traditional varieties. This has produced a number of features widely considered masterpieces, most of them from the now-Disney-owned Pixar. But after experiencing the history of the form in miniature, it’s tempting to hope that the next stage of the animation’s evolution will involve the rediscovery of its past. Related content: Behold the World’s Oldest Animation Made on a Vase in Iran 5,200 Years Ago Gertie the Dinosaur: The Mother of all Cartoon Characters (1914) Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917–1931) Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Photography Experiments from the 1870s Presented in 93 Animated Gifs 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. |
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