So I saw the new Spider-Man film at a preview in Nashville tonight. I’m not sure when the review embargo gets lifted, but I’m not going to offer any judgments or spoilers here. If you saw Tom Holland’s turn as the web-slinger in his extended cameo in Captain America: Civil War you’ve got a good sense of what to expect from this Marvel Studios summer tentpole. If you liked the new Spidey in the Civil War flick you’ll love the new Spider-Man movie. If this new take on Spidey turned you off in the last Captain America outing you’ll really hate the new Spider-Man movie.

The new flick doubles-down on the notion of Spider-Man as a young teenager and it’s a fun and fresh take — the original Peter Parker was introduced to the world as a 17 year old, but in the current Marvel universe, Parker was bit by the spider that changed his life at the age of 15, and this latest iteration begins shortly after that fateful sting and the events in Civil War. But the thing I liked best about the new Spider-Man is how it shouted out the animated series from 1967, and how it felt like a love letter to the gritty New York City that those old cartoons captured so well: the classic cartoon theme song is quoted in the opening credits and the phrase “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” had me recalling the title sequence from the old cartoon which is also quoted in the lyrics of the theme song. The film also highlights music from the Ramones, and spotlights old school NYC icons like the Staten Island Ferry and the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island — all icons of pre-Giuliani Gotham when New York stood for gritty toughness instead of bundled derivatives and the effete pleasures of locally-sourced, artisanal, small batch conspicuous consumption.

Check out old school Spidey in old school New York with this playlist of a ton of episodes from the 1967 animated series that even predates me. Even if you don’t have the time to watch this right now, just leave it on in the background to dig the flat-out jams that accompanied this funkiest-ever Spider-Man…

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Wednesday afternoon I headed to the fest to check out the Animating Reality short cartoon docs block. During the introduction before the program it was explained that so many documentary entries came in as animated films that the fest decided they deserved their very own section. Lately documentaries use animation a lot. It’s a trend, but it’s mostly a bad one that sees directors employing cartoon techniques as a replacement for footage that doesn’t exist or even for a dirth of imagination or creativity. The job of a filmmaker is to tell a visual story, and, for me, animation in docs nearly always seems like cop out that allows a documentary director to create anything they might dream up versus doing the hard work of finding the magic in the real life milieu in front of their lenses. I love animation, and I like when it’s used creatively in narrative films, but docs have a different set of rules and limits, and I hate the animation trend where most documentaries are concerned.

That said, making a fully animated documentary is a very different matter. Bringing together real life interviews and audio by creating images to accompany them is a sort of hybrid filmmaking that I find as fascinating as every other genre/medium bending format always is to me. The best mainstream example of this kind of real life animating might be the Blank on Blank series. I love it when artists refuse to play by rules or work within categories, and there was something subversive running through this whole program on Wednesday.

All the films were animated interviews with one or more folks telling a story, sharing experiences or voicing opinions. The animation styles were as varied as the subjects so it’s a bit of an apples and oranges situation, but I did have my favorites:

A very short film from Germany had one of the most unique visual styles of the bunch. Steve Bache, Mahyar Goudarzi, and Louise Peter’s “Eye for an Eye” featured thoughtful, minimal line drawings of an interview with a death row inmate that they discovered on YouTube. The fact that this was a student film only adds to its impressive impact.

Documentaries should be judged as films in and of themselves and not given points just because they focus on important or popular subjects. That said, both “Broken – The Woman’s Prison at Hoheneck” and “Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island” illuminate harrowing stories of human rights abuses with journeyman cartooning. “Broken” focuses on an East German work prison for female political dissidents, and “Nowhere Line” tells of the tortuous journey of an Iranian refugee who was imprisoned when he sought asylum in Australia.

I’m not surprised that my favorite of the bunch was an animation about animators: “The Sparrow’s Flight” is a love letter between filmmakers and creative partners director, Tom Schroeder and his former collaborator, Dave Herr who died of a brain tumor in 2009. The movie is an animated documentary about the pair’s friendship, and their creative, exuberant animations and experiments which were primarily inspired by the Brothers Quay. The movie looks great and this biodoc about an otherwise unknown filmmaker might be exactly the thing that will inspire the next generation of visionary animators.

Here’s the trailer for “The Sparrow’s Flight…”

“The Sparrow’s Flight” trailer from Tom Schroeder on Vimeo.

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I spent some time at the Nashville airport last week where I discovered a paperback copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov sitting on a sectional near one of the gates in a bustling concourse. There was a boarding pass inside the book so I took to them both to the nearest gate in case someone came looking at the airport lost and found. The discovery of the book reminded me of reading Crime and Punishment, and what a reading-changing experience that was — it’s an astonishing book that evokes the most immersive world I’ve ever encountered on paper. Sitting down to write up this post I immediately stumbled across this video from Open Culture — its a 30 minute animated adaptation of the book…

In this darkly poetic animation, the Polish filmmaker Piotr Dumala offers a highly personal interpretation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment. “My film is like a dream,” Dumala said in 2007. “It is as if someone has read Crime and Punishment and then had a dream about it.”

Dumala’s version takes place only at night. The story is told expressionistically, without dialogue and with an altered flow of time. The complex and multi-layered novel is pared down to a few central characters and events: In the Russian city of Saint Petersburg, a young man named Raskolnikov lies in his dark room brooding over a bloody crime.

Here’s the animated Crime and Punishment…

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I love animation, and recently I’ve featured more than one Blank-On-Blank project here, bringing archived audio to life with moving drawings. This is a new series I just discovered that promises to document some of the biggest feuds in the world of philosophy. Here’s a bit about the first installment which covers the great friendship, and bitter break between French philosophy giants Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus…

The French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were once close companions. Post World War II, their friendship enchanted the public: “Europe had been immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world. Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like,” writes Sam Dresser for Aeon. What happened for the two to split so intensely? Watch this engaging animation by Andrew Khosravani for Aeon to understand how a rift over communism and human nature dissolved the intellectual pair’s connection for good.

This is the first episode of “Philosophy Feuds”—Aeon’s original series of short animations which tell the stories of famous falling-outs.

Here’s the vid…

For some reason the fall always seems like the most poetic season — the best season for writing and reading verse. I think it has something to do with darkness. I think it has something to do with the cold and the damp that begins to creep into the coming Southern winter. I think it has something to do with the academic calendar and that sense of something that might begin as the natural cycle begins to end. It has something to do with harvest and holidays and a sense of summing up the year gone by.

Here’s a quadrilogy of Charles Bukowski poems curated by Open Culture. Find credits through their link. Here’s a bit from their recent post…

The poetry of Charles Bukowski deeply inspires many of its readers. Sometimes it just inspires them to lead the dissolute lifestyle they think they see glorified in it, but other times it leads them to create something compelling of their own. The quality and variety of the Bukowski-inspired animation now available on the internet, for instance, has certainly surprised me.

I made a playlist of the videos that I’m hosting on my YouTube channel…

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Growing up during the second half of the Cold War, when I was a child the Soviet Union was notable for two reasons: nuclear weapons and censorship. That’s about all I really knew: the Russians and citizens of their satellites can’t read or watch or print what they want. Also they have enough warheads to make our assured destruction one of the mutual sort.

I know I’m constantly posting stuff from Open Culture here, but that site is so smart and their free-to-watch/read/listen to finds are a kind of palette cleanser for the shitty mall that most of the internet has become. I came across another great find on the site today, one that put me back in mind of those nights when I couldn’t sleep because I was worried about nuclear annihilation. You know — childhood for Generation X. Here’s a bit about Glass Harmonica, the only animated film ever banned in the Soviet Union…

At first glance, one would think The Glass Harmonica would fit right into the long tradition of Soviet propaganda films begun by Vertov. As the opening titles state, it aims to show the “boundless greed, police terror, [and] the isolation and brutalization of humans in modern bourgeois society.” And yet, the film offended censors due to what the European Film Philharmonic Institute calls “its controversial portrayal of the relationship between governmental authority and the artist.” There’s more than a little irony in the fact that the only fully censored Soviet animation is a film itself about censorship.

The central character is a musician who incurs the displeasure of an expressionless man in black, ruler of the cold, gray world of the film. In addition to its “collage of various styles and a tribute to European painting”—which itself may have irked censors—the score by Alfred Schnittke “pushes sound to disturbing limits, demanding extreme range and technique from the instruments.” (Fans of surrealist animation may be reminded of 1973’s French sci-fi film, Fantastic Planet.) Although Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s film represents the effective beginning and end of surrealist animation in the Soviet Union, only released after perestroika, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a brilliantly realized example of the form.

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After being mortally shot in a restaurant urinal, German-Jewish American gangster Dutch Schultz slipped into fever and hallucination before dying. Schultz’s surrealistic screed of last words has since become a thing of literary legend. Here’s the Wiki…

Schultz’s last words were a strange stream-of-consciousness babble, spoken in his hospital bed to police officers who attempted to calm him and question him for useful information. Although the police were unable to extract anything coherent from Schultz, his rambling was fully transcribed by a police stenographer. This includes the famous:

A boy has never wept…nor dashed a thousand kim.
But the entire text (linked below) is much more rambling, for example:

You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.
Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy.
One of his last utterances was a reference to “French Canadian bean soup” (French Canadian pea soup is a popular dish that is still produced as canned goods by many food companies).

Schultz’s last words inspired a number of writers to devote works related to them. Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs published a screenplay in novel form entitled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz in the early 1970s, while Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson connected Schultz’s words to a global Illuminati-related conspiracy, making them a major part of 1975′s The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Burrough’s screenplay tells a strange tale of its own. Again, the Wiki…

Despite the title, very little of the screenplay deals with Schultz’s cryptic words. Although Burroughs specifies that a recording of Schultz’s dying words should be playing throughout the film as the soundtrack, virtually nothing which is actually depicted onscreen has anything to do with the real Schultz’s dying monologue. Burroughs creates his own dying words for Schultz to actually speak, and which reflect Burrough’s narrative; occasionally, these made-up snippets of speech include Schultz’s actual words. Similarly, large segments of the story are told from a third-person perspective, as opposed to being told from Schultz’s perspective.

The screenplay is made up of a series of loosely connected vignettes in roughly chronological order. It begins from the point of view of a dying Dutch Schultz, looking up at two police detectives. He has a brief flashback to his own shooting; from there, the movie makes a transition to Schultz’s memories of childhood, with the remainder of the movie a series of loosely interconnected vignettes in chronological order depicting Schultz’s childhood and rise to power. Occasionally, there are brief, surrealist digressions depicting real events which occurred during Schultz’s life (such as the Stock Market Crash), interspersed with equally surreal yet seemingly unrelated digressions involving Burroughs’ own fictional characters. A lengthy segment is dedicated to Schultz hiring a carnival sideshow freak who can hypnotize people by speaking phrases which plant subliminal messages; Burroughs inserts this fictional character into Schultz’s legal team during his income tax trials, and credits him with helping Schultz avoid prison time. Large segments are dedicated to Burroughs’ own creation, “Albert Stern,” a morphine addict who randomly appears at intervals throughout Schultz’s life and who ultimately attempts to take credit for his murder.

Although there have been occasional reports over the years of filmmakers wanting to adapt Burroughs’ story for the screen, to date no one has seriously taken on the project. For a brief period, Dennis Hopper owned the rights to the film, but nothing ever came to fruition. The closest it has ever come to being filmed is a 2002 Dutch short combining live action and rotoscope animated scenes. The short only features portions of Burroughs’ script, with some segments varying slightly from the source material. The film features Rutger Hauer as the voice of Schultz.

Here is The Last Words of Dutch Schultz…

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I love the Blank on Blank project’s animated takes on archived interviews. In this episode Tom Waits waxes on Stonehenge, Hawaii and everything in between. Here’s the lowdown…

Waits had just released the concert film, Big Time, when he was interviewed by Chris Roberts at a London recording studio; you can hear music playing softly in the background throughout the tape. So what’s the secret to interviewing Tom Waits?

He’s a natural raconteur. A great one. You just get out of the way and let him do his thing, perform. If you can nudge the jokes along, so much the better. – Chris Roberts

Here’s Tom…

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Recently, I was browsing through stories via Flipboard and I came across this delightful piece about a vintage animated short film based on John Lennon’s instantly recognizable cartoon doodles. Here’s a bit from the Brain Pickings site…

…six years after the beloved Beatle’s assassination, Ono commissioned independent animator John Canemaker to create a short animated film based on Lennon’s drawings, music, and interviews. Given her penchant for the intersection of art and philosophy, Lennon’s own quirky illustrations, and the odd fact that the couple’s love began in visual poetry long before they met, it was the perfect medium for commemoration.

Titled The John Lennon Sketchbook, the befittingly weird and wonderful film — a vibrant testament to our long cultural history of anthropomorphizing animals to illuminate the human experience — begins with Lennon’s iconic “Imagine,” features Ono’s song “The King of the Zoo,” and weaves in chillingly prophetic conversations from the limited-edition 1980 LP Heart Play: Unfinished Dialogue, the first interview album of Lennon and Ono’s interviews after the breakup of The Beatles and the second posthumously released Lennon record.

Here’s The John Lennon Sketchbook…

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I’ve been spending the last few days checking out various selections at the Nashville film festival. My assistant, Antonia Oakes, came up with a preliminary itinerary of films to which I’ve added a few of my own choices. The flicks I’ve seen so far highlight various countercultures and outsider aesthetics in one way or another. Most of the films only screened once so I haven’t felt the need to be super timely in my reporting since the fest started. That said, I wanted to file this report so that we could start the discussion regarding the first half of the fest. For those of you not in Nashville, let these capsule reviews serve as teasers as all of these films will be popping up in theaters on disc and online over the next 24 months or so. Here we go…

6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia – Catching the first screening of the fest last Thursday evening, 6 Desires is the latest documentary by Mark Cousins whose The Story of Film series is required viewing for any contemporary student of cinema. This latest project finds Cousins recounting a 1921 trip Lawrence and his wife took to Sardinia and it uses Lawrence’s book about the place as a map. Along the way Cousin’s illuminates Lawrence, his book and the land and people of Sardinia along with the political and cultural history of the place. Fans of Cousins will love the conversational tone of this one and it also marks the first movie Cousins has made that relies primarily on original footage. 6 Desires is a film about an author and a place, but it also documents the raw sensibilities of a filmmaker coming into his own.

Goodbye to Language: Antonia found an online synopsis for this Jean-Luc Godard film in 3D: “The idea is simple / A married woman and a single man meet / They love, they argue, fists fly / A dog strays between town and country / The seasons pass / The man and woman meet again / The dog finds itself between them / The other is in one, / the one is in the other / and they are three / The former husband shatters everything / A second film begins: / the same as the first, / and yet not / From the human race we pass to metaphor / This ends in barking / and a baby’s cries / In the meantime, we will have seen people talking of the demise of the dollar, of truth in mathematics and of the death of a robin.” —Godard in a handwritten synopsis written in verse and first posted on Twitter. As far as the film’s “meaning” goes, I don’t have much to add. I’d need at least another viewing to find something more comprehensive to say and I already feel lucky having had the chance to see this at all. I can tell you the movie is full of unforgettable images, statements and ideas. I can also tell you that all these years since Breathless Godard is still a provocateur and a prankster, and for all of its seeming incomprehensibility there is no doubt that there is a very firm hand on the wheel of this poetic, vivid, silly, infuriating, dizzying journey of a film.

(T)error: This documentary lets viewers peek through a keyhole at an F.B.I. domestic terrorism sting in progress. The movie captures the day-to-day life of Shariff, a former Black Panther and a Muslim turned informant. The movie unwinds with the tenseness of a thriller, blurring the lines between right and wrong, and hero and villain, and highlighting the controversial tactics the F.B.I. has used since 9/11 in their quest to stop another terrorist attack. The film is an indictment of contemporary law enforcement and anti-terrorism tactics that prey on vulnerable ex-felons to inform on their friends and neighbors to make convictions whether the threats uncovered are real or simply created by the bureau. Required viewing for anyone concerned about the balance between safety and freedom in America.

The Boy and the World: This trippy, wordless, psychedelic cartoon tells the story of a young boy in rural Brazil who journeys to a big city in search of his father. The idyllic surrounds of the boy’s country life are drawn in colorful crayon scrawls, but the industrial city and its squalid slums are rendered in the sharp lines and clashing juxtapositions of grotesque collages that make this movie one of the most vividly audacious films I’ve seen at the fest. Add to that a gorgeous soundtrack that ranges from samba to hip-hop and this tale about poverty, oppression and the love of family adds up to a truly moving and memorable film. Definitely a don’t miss selection for fans of animation.

L’il Quinquin: This intense, three hour film was originally a French miniseries. It tells the story of a group of young kids living on a coast in rural France where a series of grisly murders upsets the everyday life of their small town. Featuring an amazing cast of non-actors the flick features a seductive combination of sensibilities that I think Jim Ridley of the Nashville Scene described as the Coen Brothers meet Bresson. What starts off as a whodunit gradually unwinds into an existential exploration of the evil that lies in the hearts of men, and children.

The Black Panthers – Vanguard of the Revolution: This PBS produced Independent Lens film tells the history of the Black Panthers who grew from a self-defense organization in Oakland, California to become an international force for anti-capitalist revolution. The movie also documents the F.B.I.’s ruthless and illegal Counterintelpro tactics that were used to destroy the group through systematic harassment, spying and perhaps even political assassination. I’ve seen every Panther doc I’ve ever been able to get my hands on and this one is full of footage and interviews I’ve never seen. It’s a comprehensive summing-up of what I consider to be the most important revolutionary group of the 1960′s as well as a chilling indictment of current relations between cops and African-American populations where the same wanton violence and oppression seems to be back with a vengeance.

Here’s an interview with Jean-Luc Godard from the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 where the master discussed Goodbye to Language…

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