~openculture | Bookmarks (4)

The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray Bradbury declared that he wrote the novel because he was “worried about people being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a certain irony given […]

Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the […]

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of decades. Nevertheless, much like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” presented to its young protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s fantastical tale has called out the same message to generations of filmmakers around the world: “Adapt me.” This century, though not even a quarter […]

“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal […]