Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I have had built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young did not possess the virtue of saving. Poor and dear companions of my life!
—Giuseppe Verdi
Is there a remedy for the isolation of old age?
What about the jolly fraternity and competitiveness of an art college dorm, as envisioned by opera composer Giuseppe Verdi?
Shortly before his death, the composer donated all royalties from his operas to the construction and administration of a luxurious retreat for retired musicians, designed by his librettist’s brother, architect Camillo Boito.
Completed in 1899, Casa Verdi still serves elderly musicians today—up to 60 at a time. Residents of Casa Verdi include alumnae of the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House. Guests have worked alongside such notables as Chet Baker and Maria Callas.
Competition for residential slots is stiff. To qualify, one must have been a professional musician or music teacher. Those selected enjoy room, board, and medical treatment in addition to, writes The New York Times, “access to concerts, music rooms, 15 pianos, a large organ, harps, drum sets and the company of their peers.” Musical programming is as constant as the fine view of Verdi’s grave.
Dining tables are named in honor of Verdi’s works. Those inclined to worship do so in a chapel named for Santa Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians.
Practice rooms are alive with the sound of music and criticism. As Casa Verdi’s music therapist told the Financial Times, “They are very competitive: they are all prima donnas.”
When memory fails, residents can tune in to such documentaries as actor Dustin Hoffman’s Tosca’s Kiss, below
Get a peek inside Verdi’s retirement home for artists, compliments of Urban Sketchers here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
The dark arts of “Hollywood accounting” make it difficult to determine film budgets with precision. But according to reasonable reckonings, James Cameron may have directed not just one but several of the most expensive movies of all time. The underwater sci-fi spectacle that was The Abyss necessitated one of the biggest production budgets of the eighties, but it looked straight off Poverty Row when compared to Cameron’s next project just two years later. Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the first film to cost more than $100 million; True Lies, his next Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, could have cost as much as $120 million. What challenge remained for Cameron at that point? Why, re-creating the most famous shipwreck in history.
Such an improbable-sounding ambition didn’t come out of nowhere. Fascinated with the Titanic since childhood, Cameron eventually found himself able to make multiple expeditions of his own to its final resting place in deep-sea submersibles. He wasn’t just well placed to gather the information necessary to bring it back to life on screen, but also to implement and indeed develop the techniques to film it believably, powerfully, and with a high degree of historical accuracy.
It perhaps does Cameron a disservice to refer to him only as a filmmaker, since throughout his career he’s displayed just as much the mind of an engineer, characterized by the willingness to make his own technological advancements in the service of bringing his vision to the screen. You can get some insight into that mind at work in the Studio Binder video above on how he directed the Titanic’s sinking scene.
Titanic cost $200 million, more than the ship herself. In 1997, that was an eye-watering sum, but given the movie’s eventual take of $2.264 billion, it seems money well spent. A non-trivial amount of those profits came from viewers who bought a ticket — again and again, in some cases — expressly to see their favorite heartthrob. But Cameron must have known full well that most moviegoers turned up to see the ship go down; everything thus rode on that one hour of the film’s 195-minute runtime. Its unprecedentedly complex shoot involved, among other things, hundreds of stunt performers and extras, the latest in CGI tools, and a 775-foot-long replica of the Titanic installed in a custom-built seaside set in Mexico. The scene, as well as the film that contains it, holds up nearly thirty years later in part due to this combination of digital and analog effects, a fusion of almost experimentally cutting-edge digital technology and old-fashioned, thoroughly analog movie magic — something Cameron understands just as well as he does undersea exploration.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
From the 18th century onward, the genres of Gothic horror and fantasy have flourished, and with them the sensually visceral images now commonplace in film, TV, and comic books. These genres perhaps reached their aesthetic peak in the 19th century with writers like Edgar Allan Poe and illustrators like Gustave Dore. But it was in the early twentieth century that a more populist subgenre truly came into its own: “weird fiction,” a term H.P. Lovecraft used to describe the pulpy brand of supernatural horror codified in the pages of American fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales—first published in 1923. (And still going strong!)
A precursor to EC Comics’ many lurid titles, Weird Tales is often considered the definitive early twentieth century venue for weird fiction and illustration.
But we need only look back a few years and to another continent to find an earlier publication, serving German-speaking fans—Der Orchideengarten (“The Garden of Orchids”), the very first horror and fantasy magazine, which ran 51 issues from January 1919 to November 1921.
The magazine featured work from its editors Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, from better-known contemporaries like H.G. Wells and Karel Capek, and from forefathers like Dickens, Pushkin, Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Voltaire, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. “Although two issues of Der Orchideengarten were devoted to detective stories,” writes 50 Watts, “and one to erotic stories about cuckolds, it was a genuine fantasy magazine.” And it was also a gallery of bizarre and unusual artwork.
50 Watts quotes from Franz Rottensteiner’s description of the magazine’s art, which ranged “from representations of medieval woodcuts to the work of masters of the macabre such as Gustave Dore or Tony Johannot, to contemporary German artists like Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Otto Lennekogel, Karl Ritter, Heinrich Kley, or Alfred Kubin.” These artists created the covers and illustrations you see here, and many more you can see at 50 Watts, the black sun, and John Coulthart’s {feuilleton}.
“What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings,” like the dense, frenzied pen-and-ink scene above, Coulthart comments, “is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years.” Indeed, though the format may be similar to its successors, Der Orchideengarten’s covers show the influence of Surrealism, “some are almost Expressionist in style,” and many of the illustrations show “a distinct Goya influence.”
Popular fantasy and horror illustration has often leaned more toward the soft-porn of seventies airbrushed vans, pulp-novel covers, or the grisly kitsch of the comics. Rottensteiner writes in his 1978 Fantasy Book that this “large-format magazine… must surely rank as one of the most beautiful fantasy magazines ever published.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment. View, read (in German), and download original scans of the magazine’s first several issues over on this Princeton site.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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Whether or not we believe in any god, most of us here in the twenty-first century have the impression of divine rulers overlooking humanity with at least theoretical love and benevolence. They forgive us, they have plans for us, they never close a door without opening a window, and so on. But in the particular case of the Christian God, we’ve all heard that he both giveth and taketh away, even if we’ve never so much as opened the Bible, Old Testament or New. That line comes from the Book of Job, which belongs to the Old, a text whose depiction of God may surprise first-time readers — especially in his willingness to cause death, the subject of the Hochelaga video above on “God’s Biblical Kill Count.”
It turns out that, if you go through the King James Version and tally up every single person God kills on a spreadsheet (a task to which Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny is surely among the best-suited YouTubers), you end up with a high number at the bottom indeed. “Throughout the Old Testament, God is responsible for a whole slew of natural disasters,” he says, “from erasing life on Earth in a world-ending flood to unleashing devastating plagues of” — yes — “Biblical proportions.”
Concerned as it is with laying out God’s law, the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, spends a great deal of time explaining what happens to the violators of those laws. In one passage, 50,070 men are “pulverized for glimpsing inside the Ark of the Covenant,” and, in another, God sends an angel to “wipe out 185,000 soldiers in one night,” to name just two incidents.
Trelawny’s initial count of the deaths the Bible attributes to God comes to a precise-sounding 2,559,449. But that figure only includes instances in which the text specifies how many people died. Sometimes it doesn’t, which requires the conscientious biblical body-counter to rely on the best historical estimates of, for example, how many people an army or a city — entities the Old Testament God could annihilate with a flick of the wrist — comprised at the time, to say nothing of the Earth’s total population at the presumptive time of the Flood. Trelawny goes with 20 million, bringing the final count to 24,681,116, about the same as the entire population of Shanghai. It may seem ironic to draw a comparison with a city outside what we could call the Judeo-Christian world, but Chinese civilization has strict deities of its own. Run afoul of Leigong, for instance, and you could find yourself struck down by a bolt of lightning. But he’d surely have to get busy throwing a whole lot more of them before even hoping to approach the Lord’s record.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
From Yale professor Paul North comes a chapter-by-chapter study of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. According to the description that accompanies the course on YouTube, this “book from 1872 is still the best guide to the predatory economic and social system within which we live. The book solves five basic mysteries in our social world. The mysteries are: why social classes struggle against one another, why human beings are in the thrall of things, how a quantity of money turns into more money without seeming to add anything, why some people are forced to work and the more they work the less they make proportional to their effort, and finally, and why it is so hard to transform the system for the better.” You can watch the 19 lectures from the course in the playlist above.
Prof. North is the co-editor of the new English translation and critical edition of Capital Volume 1, and it’s the text used in the course. If you’re interested in delving deeper into Marx’s Capital, see the David Harvey courses listed in the Relateds below.
It takes about five hours to drive from Düsseldorf to Hamburg on the Autobahn. During that stretch, you can listen to Kraftwerk’s album Autobahn seven times — or if you prefer, you can loop its eponymous opening song thirteen times. For it was “Autobahn,” more so than Autobahn, that changed the sound of music around the world in ways we still hear today. “Germany was suddenly on the musical map,” writes the Guardian’s Tim Jonze. “David Bowie – who used to ride the autobahn while listening to the record – moved to Berlin and went on to make the electronically influenced Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. Brian Eno relocated to the rural village of Forst to record with the influential avant-garde band Harmonia.” Soon would come the electronic pop of Ultravox, DAF and the Eurythmics, followed by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s floodgate-opening “I Feel Love”.
Not a bad pop-cultural coup for, as Jonze puts it, “a 22-minute 43-second song about the German road network.” At the time of its release in early 1975, Kraftwerk had put out three full albums, but what would become their signature Teutonic-electronic sound hadn’t quite taken shape. But it was already clear that their work took its inspiration from twentieth-century modernity, a subject of which no single work of man in their homeland could have been more evocative than the Autobahn.
With its origins in the Weimar Republic and its long stretches without a speed limit, the German freeway network is internationally regarded as a concrete symbol of total personal freedom, and total personal responsibility, within a highly rule-respecting culture. To the young members of Kraftwerk, who often drove the Düsseldorf-Hamburg section, it held out the promise of freedom.
So did the then-new Minimoog synthesizer, which cost as much as a Volkswagen at the time, but offered the chance to make music like nothing the public had ever heard before. “Autobahn” captured the imaginations of listeners everywhere with not just its electronic effects, but also the incongruity of their combination with instruments like the flute (a holdover from Kraftwerk’s earlier compositions) and vehicular sounds evocative of a genuine road trip — all assembled at what would then have seemed a hypnotically expansive length for a pop song. Little did even the hippest listeners of the mid-seventies, such as the Americans tuned into early free-form FM stations where no corporate programming rules applied, know that they were hearing what Jones calls “the point where electronic pop music truly began.” All car trips run out of road eventually, but humanity’s journey into the possibilities of high-tech music shows no signs of approaching its end.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
You can’t beat the market. That, at least, is the advice we all encounter early on when first we try our hand at investing. Homespun though it may sound, the idea has academic roots: the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as the economists call it, holds that the prices in any financial market already reflect all available information relevant to what’s being traded within them. In the case of the stock market, for example, everything known — or indeed, knowable — about the future prospects of a particular company is already incorporated into its stock price, or might as well be. If the EMH is true, then it must also be true that nobody can beat the market, no matter how deep their experience or developed their instinct for picking stocks.
Nobel Laureate economist Eugene Fama, who’s done more than anyone alive to refine the EFM and keep it in circulation, appears as one of the interviewees in Tune Out the Noise, the Errol Morris-directed documentary above. So do a range of other figures, mostly septuagenarian and octogenarian, whose great success in their fields owes to their having trusted the wisdom of the market. All have been involved with the investment firm Dimensional Fund Advisors, which, since its founding in the early nineteen-eighties, has been one of the engines of change in its industry. In the first half of the twentieth century, investing had an almost mystical quality about it — a quality swept away by the “data revolution” of the second half.
That revolution was powered, of course, by computers. Most of Morris’ interviewees first found themselves placed in front of one of those hulking, inscrutable machines at some point in their tertiary education, more than likely at the University of Chicago. They learned to work those early computers’ punch cards and whirring reels of tape even as electronic computing itself first found its uses in civilization. Suddenly, though it demanded painstaking collection and programming work, it had become possible to examine stock market data and determine what patterns, if any, it contained, and whether any investor had consistently outperformed the average. The answers revealed would become the premise of not just “passive” investment firms like DFA, but also of the original creation of index funds like the S&P 500.
All this may not sound like the usual terrain of Errol Morris, whose previous documentaries have profiled everyone from pet cemetery operators to former U.S. secretaries of defense to Stephen Hawking. His films aren’t without their confrontational moments, though given that Tune Out the Noise was commissioned by DFA itself, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Morris never shifts into interrogation mode (despite using his signature Interrotron rig to shoot the interviews). Despite claiming not to know anything about investing or financial markets going in, he finds plenty of overlap with interests that have long run through his work: epistemology, for example, and the nature of scientific revolution. After all, most any field has some connection to the inexhaustible subject of how we know, what we know, and what we can’t know. “People shrink from uncertainty, but it’s uncertainty that really creates opportunity,” DFA co-founder David Booth says to Morris. “What would the world be like if there were no uncertainty? I mean, pretty dull.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A catchy tribute to mid-century Soviet hipsters popped up a few years back in a song called “Stilyagi” by lo-fi L.A. hipsters Puro Instinct. The lyrics tell of a charismatic dude who impresses “all the girls in the neighborhood” with his “magnitizdat” and guitar. Wait, his what? His magnitizdat, man! Like samizdat, or underground press, magnitizdat—from the words for “tape recorder” and “publishing”—kept Soviet youth in the know with surreptitious recordings of pop music. Stilyagi (a post-war subculture that copied its style from Hollywood movies and American jazz and rock and roll) made and distributed contraband music in the Soviet Union. But, as an NPR piece informs us, “before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootleg jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X‑ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.” See one such X‑ray “record” above, and see here the fascinating process dramatized in the first scene of a 2008 Russian musical titled, of course, Stilyagi (translated into English as “Hipsters”—the word literally means “obsessed with fashion”).
These records were called roentgenizdat (X‑ray press) or, says Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita), “bone music.” Author Anya von Bremzen describes them as “forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens”: “They would cut the X‑ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan….” The ghoulish makeshift discs sure look cool enough, but what did they sound like? Well, as you can hear below in the Beatles samples, a bit like old Victrola phonograph records played through tiny transistor radios on a squonky AM frequency.
Dressed in fashions copied from jazz and rockabilly albums, stilyagi learned to dance at underground nightclubs to these tinny ghosts of Western pop songs, and fought off the Komsomol—super-square Leninist youth brigades—who broke up roentgenizdat rings and tried to suppress the influence of bourgeois Western pop culture. According to Artemy Troitsky, author of Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, these records were also called “ribs”: “The quality was awful, but the price was low—a rouble or rouble and a half. Often these records held surprises for the buyer. Let’s say, a few seconds of American rock ’n’ roll, then a mocking voice in Russian asking: ‘So, thought you’d take a listen to the latest sounds, eh?, followed by a few choice epithets addressed to fans of stylish rhythms, then silence.”
See more images of bone music records over at Laughing Squid and Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly’s blog Street Use, and above dig some historical footage of stilyagi jitterbugging through what appears to be a kind of Soviet training film about Western influence on Soviet youth culture, produced no doubt during the Khrushchev thaw when, as Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich tells NPR, things got “a little more liberal than before.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
The artificial language of Esperanto was conceived with high ideals in mind. In the eighteen-eighties, its creator L. L. Zamenhof envisioned it as the universal second language of humanity, and if it hasn’t achieved that status by now, it at least remains the world’s most widely spoken constructed auxiliary language. One factor complicating its spread is that no language, even one guided by internationalism, can remain the same for long enough in two different cultures. As in spoken and written languages, so in the concrete one of architecture — and in the case of the style known as Brutalism, that would be literal concrete. Meant to make humanity whole again after the Second World War, its buildings ended up being rather more particular, and less utopian, than their architects intended.
Examples aplenty appear in the new video above from Built Narrative, which offers what amounts to a postcard tour of Brutalist (and Brutalism-adjacent) buildings from around the world. Named for its main material béton brut, or raw concrete, the style came into its own during the rebuilding of war-ruined sections of British and continental European cities — and, over in the U.S., the rapid proliferation and expansion of college campuses — which had to be done quickly and under less-than-extravagant budgets.
Libraries, research facilities, city halls, administrative buildings, courthouses, housing projects: these are the sorts of structures that most often took Brutalist form in the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and seventies, resulting in the institutional, bureaucratic, and in some places totalitarian associations it still has today.
Some publicly loathed Brutalist buildings, like the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and the Third Church of Christ, Scientist in Washington, D.C. have been torn down, often after decades of negligent maintenance. Others, like the Barbican Estate in London or Habitat 67 in Montreal, are now beloved sites of pilgrimage. Widely acknowledged masters of Brutalism include Le Corbusier, who pioneered it with buildings like the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (not Berlin, contra the caption in the video) and Kenzo Tange (pronounced “tawn-gay,” not “tang” as the narrator says it), whose work steered the Japanese version of the movement in its own subtle, sometimes playful directions. Now, thanks in part to the rapid diffusion of architectural photography made possible by social media, a new enthusiast of Brutalism seems to be born every minute. Even if they don’t believe that architecture can bring a new world into being, they still feel the pull of a future that never came — or, at any rate, hasn’t come yet.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Before the New Year, we brought you footage of Russian polymathic inventor Léon Theremin demonstrating the strange instrument that bears his surname, and we noted that the Theremin was the first electronic instrument. This is not strictly true, though it is the first electronic instrument to be mass produced and widely used in original composition and performance. But like biological evolution, the history of musical instrument development is littered with dead ends, anomalies, and forgotten ancestors (such as the octobass). One such obscure oddity, the Telharmonium, appeared almost 20 years before the Theremin, and it was patented by its American inventor, Thaddeus Cahill, even earlier, in 1897. (See some of the many diagrams from the original patent below.)
Cahill, a lawyer who had previously invented devices for pianos and typewriters, created the Telharmonium—also called the Dynamaphone—to broadcast music over the telephone, making it a precursor not to the Theremin but to the later scourge of telephone hold music. “In a large way,” writes Jay Williston at Synthmuseum.com, “Cahill invented what we know of today as ‘Muzak.’”
He built the first prototype Telharmonium, the Mark I, in 1901. It weighed seven tons. The final incarnation of the instrument, the Mark III, took 50 people to build at the cost of $200,000 and was “60 feet long, weighed almost 200 tons and incorporated over 2000 electric switches…. Music was usually played by two people (4 hands) and consisted of mostly classical works by Bach, Chopin, Greig, Rossini and others.” The workings of the gargantuan machine resemble the boiler room of an industrial facility. (See several photographs here.)
Needless to say, this was a highly impractical instrument. Nevertheless, Cahill not only found willing investors for the enormous contraption, but he also staged successful demonstrations in Baltimore, then—after disassembling and moving the thing by train—in New York. By 1905, his New England Electric Music Company “made a deal with the New York Telephone Company to lay special lines so that he could transmit the signals from the Telharmonium throughout the city.” Cahill used the term “synthesizing” in his patent, which some say makes the Telharmonium the first synthesizer, though its operation was as much mechanical as electronic, using a complicated series of gears and cylinders to replicate the musical range of a piano. (See the operation explained in the video at the top.) “Raised bumps on cylinders helped create musical contour notes,” writes Popular Mechanics, “not unlike a music box, with the size of the cylinder determining the pitch.”
The huge, very loud Telharmonium Mark III ended up in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera House for a time as Cahill worked on his scheme for pumping music through the telephone lines. But this plan did not come off smoothly. “The problem was,” Popular Mechanics points out,” all cables leak off radio waves. Sending a gigantic, amplified signal on turn-of-the-20th-century phone lines was bound to cause trouble.” The Telharmonium created interference on other phone lines and even interrupted Naval radio transmissions. “Rumor has it,” the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts writes, “that a New York businessman, infuriated by the constant network interference, broke into the building where the Telharmonium was housed and destroyed it, throwing pieces of the machinery into the Hudson river below.”
The story seems unlikely, but it serves as a symbol for the instrument’s collapse. Cahill’s company folded in 1908, though the final Telharmonium supposedly remained operational until 1916. No recordings of the instrument have survived, and Thaddeus Cahill’s brother Arthur eventually sold the last prototype off for scrap in 1950 after failing to find a buyer. The entire rationale for the instrument had been supplanted by radio broadcasting. The Telharmonium may have failed to catch on, but it still had a significant impact. Its unique design inspired another important electronic instrument, the Hammond organ. And its very existence gave musical futurists a vision. The Douglas Anderson School writes:
Despite its final demise, the Telharmonium triggered the birth of electronic music—The Italian Composer and intellectual Ferruccio Busoni inspired by the machine at the height of its popularity was moved to write his “Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music” (1907) which in turn became the clarion call and inspiration for the new generation of electronic composers such as Edgard Varèse and Luigi Russolo.
The instrument also made quite an impression on another American inventor, Mark Twain, who enthusiastically demonstrated it through the telephone during a New Year’s gathering at his home, after giving a speech about his own not inconsiderable status as an innovator and early adopter of new technologies. “Unfortunately for Thaddeus Cahill,” writes William Weir at The Hartford Courant, “Twain’s support wasn’t enough to make a success of the Telharmonium.” Learn more about the instrument’s history from this book.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
With his last picture The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg told a story of his own. Given his long-held stature as more or less the personification of big-screen Hollywood entertainment, there’s only one such story he could have told: that of how he became a filmmaker. The most memorable of The Fabelmans depicts the young directorial surrogate alone in the basement of his family home, re-creating the train crash scene from The Greatest Show on Earth with an eight-millimeter camera and a Lionel set. Today, on the brink of his ninth decade with his famous productivity hardly slowing, Spielberg remains, on some level, the wide-eyed boy smashing his toys together at just the right angle. What better way to pay him tribute than to replicate his cinematic achievements in miniature?
The Fabelmans ends with its protagonist a college student, eager to drop out and go straight to Hollywood. At the same point in life, the real Spielberg was about to receive an offer from Universal Pictures to write and direct the short film that became Amblin’, which itself led to a contract to direct television productions.
He showed what he could do with episodes of Marcus Welby, M.D., The Name of the Game, and Columbo, among other series. Then he stepped up to TV movies, a form regarded as inferior in all respects to theatrical releases, but one he managed to transcend on the first try. When it first aired in 1971 as an ABC Movie of the Week, Duel presented its viewers with a harrowing, near-mythological confrontation between a middle-aged traveling salesman in a Plymouth Valiant and an unseen trucker in a hulking, smoke-belching big rig who seems bent on destroying him.
Given that its director was just 24 years old at the time, Duel very much counts as early Spielberg. Yet it’s also distilled Spielberg, a head-on treatment of middle-class normality’s sudden encounter with a force of incomprehensible menace — a theme much revisited in his work since — with cinematic rhythms precisely calculated for optimal tension and release. An aspiring filmmaker could learn much from re-creating its sequences shot-for-shot. The YouTube channel Movies Miniatures Effects does just that in the video above, which documents a remaking with 3D-printed maquettes of the final crash, after Dennis Weaver’s desperate everyman manages to outwit his pursuer. “Sheer skill needed more philosophy for a fitting resolution,” wrote David Thomson of this ending. Perhaps so, but the more than 18 million views so far racked up by its miniature version do suggest a film that more than retains its power after 45 years.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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