~openculture | Bookmarks (5)

Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures. These very words might start a […]

The YouTube channel Lost in Time has taken footage from the legendary Lumière brothers, originally shot in 1896, then upscaled and colorized it, giving us a chance to see a distant world through a modern lens. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the film pioneers (and their employees) visited different parts of the world […]

The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pioneers of cinema, and their 45-second La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), is often referred to as the first film. But history turns out to present a more complicated picture. As previously featured here […]

Few cities have been as romanticized as Paris, and few eras in Paris have been as romanticized as the nineteen-twenties. This owes much to the famous expatriate artistic and literary figures residing there in that decade: Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Man Ray, to name just […]

Oliver Hermanus’ latest film Living transplants the story of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to postwar London. Apart from its own considerable merits, it has given viewers across the world reason to revisit the 1952 original, a standout work even in a golden decade of Japanese cinema — the decade The Cinema Cartography co-creator Lewis Bond (previously […]