Animation Spotlight: The Films of Joaquin Baldwin

Changing the world through origami, or what voodoo has to do with windmill farms.

Joaquin Baldwin grew up in Paraguay. But, as a 19-year-old, he made his move to the US, heading first to Ohio for college, then LA for graduate school. Enrolling in The UCLA Animation Workshop, Baldwin began working on his animated films. By 2006, he released two shorts, Placenta and Alphamorphosis, which feature a signature “poetic, silent narrative.” Papiroflexia (2007) came next.

Papiroflexia (“origami” in Spanish) plays felicitously with the concept of changing the world through art, and the critics greeted it warmly. The film won 22 awards and honors overall. Even better, it was named a finalist in the Short Film Corner competition at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2008, Baldwin took another step forward with Sebastian’s Voodoo, a darker film with a more cinematic quality.

Sebastian’s Voodoo landed an even longer list of awards, despite sometimes facing competition from Pixar and Disney. Then the big coup. Baldwin re-entered the same competition at Cannes where he was a finalist the year before, and this time landed the big prize. You can watch (and even download) Baldwin’s films — including his latest one, The Windmill Farmer — at PixelNitrate.com.

Dan Colman edits Open Culture, which brings you the best free educational media available on the web — free online courses, audio books, movies and more. By day, he directs the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University, and you can also find him on Twitter.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Opening Up the Hitchcock and Lang Archives

What silent film has to do with sci-fi classics and the democratization of media.

The film careers of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock moved down parallel paths. As the British Film Institute rightly points out, the two directors started working in film around the same time and “thrived in silent film, but easily adjusted to sound. Both also moved from Europe to America and recreated their genius in a new culture.” By the 1950s, the Cahiers du cinéma placed Hitchcock and Lang in their pantheon of cinematic greats, and now you can watch a good selection of their films online — for free.

Vintage films keep slipping into the public domain, and they’re gradually finding their way onto the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle’s non-profit website dedicated to preserving cultural artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s feature films collection houses movies by Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, John Ford, and, to be sure, Hitchcock and Lang too. From the silent era, you will find Lang’s German expressionist sci-fi classic Metropolis (1927) sitting alongside Hitchcock’s first critically and commercially successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926). Then come their 1930 “talking” films: Lang ultimately considered his first sound movie – M (1931) – his finest work overall. And many rank The 39 Steps (1935) as Hitchcock’s best early film. Plus you can watch his very first sound movie, Blackmail, from 1929.

All together, the Internet Archive houses at least 15 Hitchcock films, and 4 Lang films from the 1920s and 1930s, and you can find them listed in Open Culture’s collection of Free Movies. But things start to thin out once we hit the 1940s, when Hitchcock and Lang launched their Hollywood careers. Copyright law helps explain the dearth of available films. But, don’t despair, the Archive still offers up some worthwhile movies: on the one hand, Scarlet Street, Lang’s contribution to the film noir canon; and on the other hand, Hitchcock’s Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, two French language propaganda films that he directed to support the Allied forces during World War II. Open Culture has previously surveyed the contributions made by other great directors during war time, and today we’ll point you to a free online archive of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films.

Dan Colman edits Open Culture, which brings you the best free educational media available on the web — free online courses, audio books, movies and more. By day, he directs the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University, and you can also find him on Twitter.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

The Power of Art: From Rembrandt to Rothko

Eight ways to move beyond prettiness, or what the BBC has to do with the appreciation of abstraction.

Throughout his prodigious scholarly career, Simon Schama (Columbia University) has steadily returned to one subject — art. Painters and paintings often take center stage in his academic books, his essays for The New Yorker (now collected in a single volume), and, most recently, his work on television. In 2006, Schama presented Power of Art on the BBC and PBS, and it wasn’t your ordinary trip through art history.

This is not a series about things that hang on walls, it is not about decor or prettiness. It is a series about the force, the need, the passion of art …the power of art.

That’s how the production announces itself. And, from here, Schama spends eight episodes, each an hour long, digging into the lives of eight transformative painters, starting with Caravaggio and Rembrandt and ending with Picasso and Rothko. (See the full lineup of artists here.) The series is available on DVD, and there’s also an accompanying book.

Today, we are spotlighting the episode dedicated to abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko:

The remaining segments can be watched here: Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Dan Colman edits Open Culture, which brings you the best free educational media available on the web — free online courses, audio books, movies and more. By day, he directs the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University, and you can also find him on Twitter.

We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

An Odyssey Through Asian Art & Art History

What porcelain has to do with Afghanistan, or how to break into China’s Forbidden City.

Dust off your passport. We’re heading to Asia and starting a guided tour of the continent’s rich artistic heritage.

Available for free on iTunesU, Passport to Asia: An Odyssey Through Asian Art & Art History features 25 lectures by prominent art historians. The lectures, all recorded in video, survey a wide swath of territory, moving from China and Japan, to Afghanistan and Turkey, and then Bhutan and India. And they take a broad look at Asian art. Porcelain, paintings, sacred texts, temples, palaces — they’re all covered here.

During your visit, Richard Vinograd (Stanford University) will take you inside the The Forbidden City, which served as China’s imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty; Catherine Asher (University of Minnesota) delves into the deep tradition of the Taj Mahal; Kurt Behrendt (Metropolitan Museum of Art) takes you back to the art of the Ancient Gandhara; and then Wu Hung (U. Chicago) brings you back to the future to discuss what’s happening in the Chinese contemporary art scene.

This lecture series was coordinated and presented by the Society for Asian Art, a non profit that supports the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The museum itself holds over 17,000 works spanning 6,000 years of history, making it one of the largest Asian art collections in the western world.

Dan Colman edits Open Culture, which brings you the best free educational media available on the web — free online courses, free audio books, free movies and more. By day, he directs the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University, and you can also find him on Twitter.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.