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Thursday, September 5th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 5:01a | Coursera Offers 30% Off of Coursera Plus (Until September 30), Giving You Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates
As the new school year gets underway, millions of students are heading back to classrooms. And you can too. From now until September 30, 2024, Coursera is offering a 30% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (currently available for $279.30) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes courses covering everything from artificial intelligence, to ancient history, philosophy, psychology, and health, to courses that will sharpen your professional skills (e.g., data science and cybersecurity). The $279.30 annual fee–which translates to 76 cents per day–could be a good investment for anyone interested in learning new subjects and skills, or earning certificates that can be added to your resume. Just as Netflix’s streaming service gives you access to unlimited movies, Coursera Plus gives you access to unlimited courses and certificates. It’s basically an all-you-can-eat deal. Explore the offer (before September 30, 2024) here. Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture. |
| 5:49a | Watch Fantasmagorie, the World’s First Animated Cartoon (1908)
Trying to describe the plot of Fantasmagorie, the world’s first animated cartoon, is a folly akin to putting last night’s dream into words: I was dressed as a clown and then I was in a theater, except I was also hiding under this lady’s hat, and the guy behind us was plucking out the feathers, and I was maybe also a jack in the box? And I had a fishing pole that turned into a plant that ripped my head off, but only for a few seconds. And then there was a giant champagne bottle and an elephant, and then, suddenly I was on an operating table, and you know how sometimes in a dream, it’s like you’re being crushed to death? Except I escaped by blowing myself up like a balloon and then I hopped onto the back of this horse and then I woke up. The brainchild of animation pioneer Émile Cohl (1857 – 1938), the trippy silent short from 1908 is composed of 700 drawings, photographed onto negative film and double-exposed. Clocking in at under two minutes, it’s definitely more diverting than listening to your bed mate bumble through their subconscious’ latest incoherent narrative. The film’s title is an homage to a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern, known as the fantasmograph, while its playful, nonsensical content is in the spirit of the Incoherent Movement of the 1880s. Cohl, who cut his teeth on political caricature and Guignol puppet theatre, went on to create over 250 films over the next 15 years, expanding his explorations to include the realms of live action and stop motion animation. Above, you can watch a somewhat restored version of the film, featuring music by Fabio Napodano. To get a feel for the original grainier silent film, watch here. For the definitive biography of Emile Cohl, read Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film by Donald Crafton (Notre Dame). Related Content: Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917 to 1931) Watch Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924) Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917 to 1931) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in New York City tonight, May 13, for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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| 9:00a | Every Frame a Painting Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sustained Two-Shot Vanished from Movies
Video essayists don’t normally retire; in most cases, they just drift into inactivity. Hence the surprise and even dismay of the internet’s cinephiles when Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos declared the end of their respected channel Every Frame a Painting in 2016. We here at Open Culture had featured their analyses of everything from the work of auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Jackie Chan, and Michael Bay to how classical art inspired celebrated shots to the thoughts and feelings of editors to the use of Vancouver in film. Now, nearly eight years after their last such video essay, Zhou and Ramos have returned to YouTube. The new Every Frame a Painting video explains the technique of the sustained two-shot, and, as IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat writes, “charts — in under six minutes — the technological and industrial trends that have put it more or less in favor with filmmakers and its utility in contemporary filmmaking as a showcase for two actors’ chemistry. This is standard. Zhou, who narrates the series, still can’t avoid feeling like an unseen character within the essay and also the film school TA we all wish we had.” What’s more, it incorporates footage from Zhou and Ramos’ own short film “The Second” to more directly approach the filmmaking challenge of “needing to change coverage plans for an outdoor scene when you’re losing the light.” As implied by its name, a two-shot contains two actors, and a sustained two-shot continues unbroken for the length of a dialogue between them. We don’t see so many of them in recent pictures, Zhou explains, because they were created in a time when “film was expensive, so it encouraged filmmakers to rehearse more and conserve their takes.” Now, “digital is cheaper, so people don’t really pick one angle and shoot it; they cover a scene from as many angles as possible,” reconstructing it out of bits and pieces in the editing room. Acting styles have also changed since the old-Hollywood days, with all their “gesturing and moving around” that increased the two-shot’s visual interest. Yet today’s filmmakers ignore the power of this disused form at their peril: “The sustained two-shot is the composition that best allows two performers to play off each other, and try as you might, you cannot replicate this feeling with editing.” And indeed, it’s only one of the effective elements of twentieth-century film that have only become more difficult to replicate amid the practically endless array of options afforded by digital tools and media. One hopes that Zhou and Ramos will cover a variety of them in Every Frame a Painting’s limited-run comeback — and even more so, that they’ll put them to good use in their own narrative filmmaking careers. Related content: The Most Beautiful Shots in Cinema History: Scenes from 100+ Films Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
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