More Shoes: A 5,000-Kilometer Dream Pursuit

From Madrid to Kiev, or what chasing a dream across time zones can teach us about aspiration.

In 2006, after spending a lifetime dreaming about filmmaking but instead droning through an endless string of office jobs, Lee Kazimir did something crazy. He took the advice of Werner Herzog (how’s that for a segue from yesterday’s pickings?) literally.

Every day, my dream of becoming a filmmaker seemed further and further away. My days didn’t change, only my neckties did. Until I read a book of interviews with Werner Herzog. In this book, Herzog says that if you want to learn filmmaking, you should skip school. Instead, he says, you should make a journey alone, on foot, for 5,000 kilometers, and the experiences you have on this journey will teach you everything you need to know.”

So Kazimir embarked upon on of the possible routes Herzog suggests, Madrid to Kiev, and decided to walk the distance. More Shoes is Kazimir’s record of that journey — sometimes comic, sometimes profound, and consistently fascinating

When you come up on foot, you are never denied anything you need. Strangers would invite me into their homes, give me hot meals and cold drinks. They gave me beds to sleep in.”

In a way, Kazimir’s journey is one we all, at one point or another, aspire to take — one of chasing a dream across borders and time zones, against odds, and over unpredictable hurdles.

For the rest of 2010, both parts of the feature-length film will be available online for free, but we encourage you to grab a copy of the DVD and support the bravery and spontaneity of a filmmaker who, like very few of us ever do, actually got up and did that crazy, outlandish thing that would bust him out of an existential rut.

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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.

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The Genius of Design: A BBC Design Retrospective

What plastic chairs have to do with German partisanship and how women use the kitchen.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the films have been pulled from Vimeo. Semi-fortunately, you can now catch the series, with questionable legality, on Chinese video portal Tudou, in English. We’ve swiftly navigated Mandarin drop-downs and updated the embeds below.

UPDATE 2: The Genius of Design is now available on DVD, sweet!

Last year’s cinematic design obsession was indisputably Objectified, director Gary Hustwit’s fantastic documentary about industrial design and all the ways in which it touches our daily lives. This year, the BBC is bringing us The Genius of Design — a new five-part documentary series exploring the broader history of design, from the Industrial Revolution through the Bauhaus of the 1920’s, the swinging 60’s, the fetishism of the 80’s, to today.

Though a “design documentary,” the series touches a diverse cross-section of disciplines, from art history to architecture to cultural anthropology.

From celebrity-status designers like Wedgwood and William Morris to the anonymous talent responsible for iconic designs like the cast-iron cooking pot, the series offers a remarkably wide-angle view of design not only as a creative discipline but also as a social facilitator. Treats include interviews with legendary designer Dieter Rams and archival footage of early industrial design production processes.

The first two hour-long episodes are available for free on Vimeo — and we guarantee they’ll be some of the best time investment you’ve made this year.

What makes the series particularly compelling is the ease with which it bridges historical context and present-day relevance, breathing a refreshing appreciation for the place and power of design even into those of us most immersed in it already.

The remaining three episodes will be released over the coming few weeks — so keep an eye out for an update.

UPDATE: All parts have been released and, thanks to Chinese video portal Tudou, we’ve embedded them below for your enjoyment.

PART 2: GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

PART 3: BLUEPRINTS FOR WAR

PART 4: BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

PART 5: OBJECTS OF DESIRE

via whiteboard journal

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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.