Ed Emberley’s Make a World: The Film

What alligators from 1972 have to do with the visual culture of modern design.

In 1972, iconic illustrator Ed Emberley published Make a World — a seemingly simple yet tremendously influential 32-page book, filled with 400 priceless illustrations that taught children how to draw anything and everything, from alligators to zeppelins. It shaped the visual culture of an entire generation of artists, designers and casual art-dabblers, democratizing aesthetic perception and practice.

This year, a collective of dedicated enthusiasts is working on Make a World: The Film — an independent documentary about the life and magic of Ed Emberley.

One of the project’s goals is to crowdsource stories, drawings and sketches inspired by Emberley’s work — so if you have one, email it to the filmmakers.

And like any grassroots art and culture project, the film could use some help from like-minded Emberley evangelists — you can get involved by donating money or your professional services, support the film by buying one of these gorgeous t-shirts from their store, and follow the project on Twitter.

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The Botany of Desire: Michael Pollan Explores Big Agriculture

Cannabis, tulips and what a potato has to do with our sense of entitlement.

While the world was busy getting excited over yesterday’s much-anticipated DVD release of Food Inc., an arguably more compelling revelation of truth about food was taking place. Because Food Inc. is a fine film full of eye-opening and well-researched information, but it, like many similar documentaries, has a serious preaching-to-the-choir problem due to the self-selection bias of its audience, composed mainly of people already familiar with the issue and interested in its resolution. These are the people who would go see a limited-release indie film in theaters, or actively pursue the DVD. But what about those who lack the awareness and thus the interest in issues that clearly impact them and should thus warrant that awareness and interest?

Yesterday was also the much-less-trumpeted DVD release of the excellent PBS series The Botany of Desire, which explores how humans have used the plant world to gratify our desires. Featuring the brilliant food advocate Michael Pollan, one of our big cultural heroes about whom we’ve gushed many times before, the series isn’t sensationalistic or alienatingly focused the large-scale, institution-level pitfalls of big agriculture.

Instead, Pollan peels away at the issue through four tangible case studies of everyday plants whose evolution we’ve manipulated ruthlessly in our quest for gratuitous self-fulfillment: Marijuana, gratifying our desire to change consciousness; the potato, filling our need for control; the tulip, reflecting our yearning for beauty; and the apple, which started from Kazakhstan’s forests and ended up as the universal fruit, satisfying our craving for sweetness.

The Botany of Desire is a fascinating and rich exploration of the human relationship with the plant world, an eye-opening reflection of the ugly sense of entitlement governing many of our social, biological and moral choices. Of course, how much such awareness translates into actionable change is a separate issue altogether, one behavioral psychology has been trying to tackle for ages. But it’s a step — and we strongly encourage you to take it.

Catch the full-length programming on PBS or grab the freshly released DVD from Amazon, and think about the story of the next apple you bite into.

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SnagFilms: Democratizing Documentaries

What the Arctic Circle has to do with the Bush administration and the lifecycle of rock ‘n’ roll.

In an ideal world, we’d all be able to tour the world’s independent film festival circuit, pursuing our complete cultural enlightenment in documentaries on anything from the secret life of John Lennon to the history of horse racing. The world, of course, is far from ideal and most of us are geographically, financially, and otherwise strapped. Enter SnagFilms — an ambitious repository of full-length, high-quality documentaries that you can watch however, wherever you like, for free.

By making the films streamable on-demand, 24/7, anywhere in the world, the project rallies for — and, we dare say, greatly succeeds in — expanding the audience for documentary film. A Snag feature lets you take the films with you across your web presence — blogs, Facebook, or any other online dwelling where you can practically open your very own virtual theater.

With a rapidly growing library of 925 films, SnagFilms covers an incredibly wide range of subjects, styles and genres from filmmakers big and small.

Art from the Arctic trails the journey of British artist and filmmaker David Buckland, who organizes three sailing expeditions to the High Arctic as part of a series of collaborations between artists, educators and scientists, designed to create public awareness of global climate change.

Dig! is a raw, unfiltered journey into the underbelly of rock ‘n’ roll, illuminating the little-understood truth of its success and eventual self-destruction. The story is told through 7 years of production and 2000 hours of footage, trailing the conflicted friendship-rivalry relationship between 60’s revivalists Anton A. Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Courtney Taylor of The Dandy Warhols, all the while offering a profound, subtle commentary on the balance between art and commerce.

In The End of America, the controversial and brilliant Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, reveals chilling evidence that the Bush years may have put American democracy under serious threat. Aided by citizen journalism from the web, home videos and blogs, she unearths a number of deeply unsettling similarities between American policies and dictator-driven regimes, from secret prisons to paramilitary groups to the calculated loopholes of law.

The Photographers, originally released in 1995, goes behind the camera with veteran National Geographic photographers as they go on assignments ranging from armed conflicts to deep-sea dives. The film probes into the quintessential question of what it entails to make a memorable photograph, to brilliantly capture a moment, to create monumental meaning in a single image.

Explore SnagFilms for yourself. And be sure to try the MovieMatcher tool — a glorified smart tag-cloud, really — which makes movie suggestions based on your mood and topics of interest.

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Film Spotlight: GLASS

What roller coasters have to do with German opera and Martin Scorsese.

Philip Glass is easily our greatest living composer. His operas — like Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and The Voyage — have gotten a multitude of standing ovations throughout the world’s leading houses. Sometimes controversial, often revolutionary, and always extraordinary, he has collaborated with cultural legends like Woody Allen and David Bowie and scored critic darlings like Notes on a Scandal, The Hours, The Truman Show and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, influencing the musical and intellectual currents of our time.

In 2005, filmmaker Scott Hicks (Shine) began shooting a documentary in honor of Glass’ 70th birthday in 2007. So, over the next 18 months, he followed the iconic composer across 3 continents, with unprecedented access to every corner of his life.

The result, GLASS: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, is a fascinating film revealing the most intimate and complex layers of the man’s remarkable character. From his annual ride on the Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster to the grand premiere of his new opera in Germany, the film treks the intricate intersection between the personal and the professional, an inextricable parallel of passions so fundamental to genius.

The film is structured in 12 chapters, each exploring a different facet of Glass’ life and work. It offers a portal into his history and past, the elements that shaped his work, all filtered through the present-day experience.

What makes GLASS so powerful is precisely this intimacy of perspective that captures who Glass is in everyday life — it’s as close as we can get to understanding genius, the mosaic of character and personal passions and quirks and eccentricities that shapes the creative output of an exceptional artist.

See the brilliant film on DVD or, for the budget-impeded, on YouTube video of questionable quality. [UPDATE: The video is no longer available and now links to something completely different. Boo.]

HT @baseworld

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