If you are a copyright owner and believe that your copyrighted works have been used in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, here is our DMCA Notice.
In The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, the Joker’s catch phrase to try to convince Batman not to kill him is “we complete one another.” Batman can’t morally bring himself to kill the joker because that would make him a villain too, but as he says, he doesn’t have to save him. Presumably, he lets the Joker die. We’ll see what the sequels say. So ends the Joker’s theory that if one dies, so too does the other. The fact is that once the Joker goes, many other villains will fill his shoes. This narrative trope has been repeated recently in the non-comic world by talking heads debating the death of Osama Bin Laden, the closest person we’ve had to an evil villain with a vision for world domination. Jokers come and Riddlers go, but there is always Batman. The hero perseveres. Well, unless you’re Captain America who was killed by one of his own on a simple walk into a courthouse – so much for the resilience of superpowers.
I’m driving at a point – the Joker does not complete Batman, just as Elmer Fudd does not complete Bugs Bunny, or Melamid complete Komar, or Garfunkel complete Simon, or Ulay complete Marina Abramovic (though for a time becoming a united self was the couple’s goal). Pairs such as these, whether combative or collaborative can split up and each individual can attempt a solo career or, in the case of superheroes, find new villains to rascal around with. Bugs had that construction worker, Yosemite Sam, and the Tasmanian Devil. Since 2003 Vitaly Komar has been making art independently, and - well - I don’t quite know what Alexander Melamid is up to. Marina Abramovic, since her collaborative’s poetic end on the Great Wall of China, went on to much success culminating in the first ever retrospective by a performance artist at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, and Ulay - well - I don’t quite know what he is up to either (though, in a touching moment, he did appear in the chair opposite Abramovic in The Artist Is Present). Paul Simon went on to a fully blossomed solo career, and Art Garfunkel’s career has continued as well, but not to the same commercial success. The pair, though battling over business issues for decades, has revived their friendship on occasion to continue touring as a duo. In some cases a star is born and a superhero grows out of the collaborative and, unfortunately, the other can never step out of their shadow, remaining the perpetual sidekick.
But I have yet to get to my point. Unlike the pairs I’ve mentioned, there are some dynamic duos that are absolutely co-dependent. Without the one, the other would simply not function. These seem to occur best in dynamic duels where the relationship is uniquely tied to one’s need to destroy...
By all accounts, Liska's ability to compose was nearly effortless, his scores seemingly flowing from his body like an exhaled breath. Besides being the most prolific composer in Czech history, he was known to work on composing new scores while in the studio recording others, apparently able to devote full attention to both. His gift for melody is unparalleled and his knack for combining disparate sounds, moods and genres into a wholly new musical package while also working within the rhythms, emotions and time limits of any given film is beyond compare. His many musical innovations include using the human voice as a wordless instrument, (or even as the rhythm section), using unusual combinations of instruments to create a new timbre (like for example harmonica and glockenspiel) and using sounds considered "sound effects" like whistles, creaks and bangs in his compositions, but most importantly, elevating the language of film music to the point where the music was at least as important as the image (in some cases even more so). Even Svankmajer admits that in many of his films, there is little action, but it feels like action thanks to Liska's delightful music.
Liska's working relationship with Svankmajer was especially long and fruitful. Liska's endless reservoir of invention was the perfect fit for Svankmajer's equally inventive, surreal and playfully macabre creations. They made many films together (my internet research proved inconclusive, but the final count was certainly in the double digits) and one could argue that neither would have been as artistically successful without the other. Since Liska's death in 1983, Svankmajer has never used music in his films again. That's how powerful their collaboration was.
Liska's ability to translate and enhance the action and emotions on the screen is almost entirely unique to the history of cinema. I could name a handful of exceptions, like Morricone or Rota, but I would put myself out on a limb and say that Liska was even better at it, or at the very least, had a more unique take on it. The combination of all of the elements unique to Liska's music came together to create a gripping and overwhelming emotional reaction in the viewer that, at times, feels like nothing else.
Take for example his remarkable score for Mala Morska Vila, the 1976 adaptation of Hans-Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. In the opening theme, wordless voices swell and crash like the ocean...
It wasn’t terribly easy to get something to go viral back before YouTube, Facebook, and other meme distributors. Most viral videos came in the form of full websites (think the Hamster Dance) or e-mailed .mov files (think the dancing baby) -- odd little accidents that look a bit embarrassing today, like a pair of bell-bottom jeans. One early viral sensation that has held up, however, is the series of GI Joe public service announcement parodies produced by Fenslerfilms. The parodies were an absurdist take on the original PSAs -- exhortations to stay safe and never talk to strangers were warped into a world where heavily armed and armored super-commandos harassed and confronted kids who were playing on construction sites or riding without a helmet. Series creator Eric Fensler talks about the creation process, the legal trouble with Hasbro he narrowly avoided, and what he and Fenslerfilms are up to these days.
NAmag: How did the original idea for the PSAs come about?
The idea to make the PSAs came from just revisiting the footage from my childhood via a DVD I found at Virgin Megastore in Chicago, IL on Michigan Ave. I went there on my lunch break a lot just to listen to music or just check out the sale cart bin of DVD's, CD's, records, and lotions. I found the GI Joe movie on DVD for 5 bucks and it had 25 of the PSAs as an extra supplement. I ripped the footage off and put it on my computer and started just messing around with it. Nothing much more to it.
NAmag: How did you go about making them?
I used Avid, Final Cut Pro, and Pro Tools. Standard programs in the post-production process.
NAmag: How did you find out that the PSAs were receiving wide distribution? This was pre-YouTube, so you couldn't just, say, suddenly notice that their view count had skyrocketed.
My gallery in Chicago, Heaven Gallery, had been hosting them on their site in 2003 and we originally got shut down because the PSAs had exceeded the bandwidth for that month. Something like over trillions and trillions and googillions of hits in 2003. No one could pay the bill.
Uncle Joe figured it out -- he does all my website stuff. So each month, Uncle Joe would put new PSAs up until we exceeded the hits, I guess, and it would shut down. I really don't know for certain. My apologies for not knowing the facts, to be honest I don't concern myself with these types of details. I did get a lot of emails from people saying how much they liked them, that was a good barometer I guess. Should I think about this stuff?
There’s something fitting about the unrecorded image of Harry Smith (1923-1991) foraging around Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island looking for his own artwork. By 1964, after he had failed to pay the rent on his E. 75th St. apartment, his landlord had trashed a good chunk of his oeuvre—including paintings that had been years in the making. He had no recourse but to try and recover them, unsuccessfully, from the 2200 acre dump.
It seems though, despite the fact that this wasn’t the first or the last time he would be kicked out of whatever temporary hovel he inhabited, he was forever living among mountains of junk. His collecting—which included Seminole textiles, Ukrainian eggs, paper airplanes, string figures, parakeets, ambient sounds and obscure folk records—has been posthumously estimated to be just as important a work of art as his painting or film.
And, of course, reverence for the independent collector is fashionable nowadays. Have you noticed how everything is an “eclectic” “Cabinet of Curiosities”? A Wunderkammer? How selectively reviving forgotten artists or personalities is considered an artistic activity in itself (See: Network Awesome)? But while in the 20th century the act of “collecting” was demoted from a pastime of the aristocracy (assembling Renaissance paintings) to the whim of whomever (say, buying Hummel figurines), in the 21st century the vogue is democratized “curating”. The smearing of disciplines is a given, and the supreme subjectivity of the “curator” is king..
It’s the natural byproduct of our age of immaterial work and cultural capital accumulation: Taste, when properly harnessed and exploited, is about the only thing in the culture industry you can make money with any more. In fact, the 1950 Anthology of American Folk Music, reissued in 1997 by the Smithsonian, was basically Smith’s painstakingly “curated” record collection. The Anthology has been credited with influencing the likes of Bob Dylan, and is venerated by more than a generation of musicians from Elvis Costello to Lou Reed – yet Smith didn’t get to see much of the dough that came from being such an “influential figure for several generations of underground artists”. In his moment, Smith was, as Greil Markus and others put it, a bum.
Moog gets all the credit. The iconic American company is pretty much synonymous with the synthesizer and the genesis of electronic music as we know it today (despite the fact that few people even know how to pronounce “Moog” correctly). The name pops up fifteen times in the Wikipedia article for "electronic music". But Moog is not the only synthesizer game in town. In fact, all over the Western world, scores of composers and inventors had begun experimenting with electronic music even before the production of the first computer-generated sound in 1957. Perhaps the most important of these composers and inventors were three Englishmen; three unsung heroes whose names pop up exactly zero times in the aforementioned Wikipedia article but whose influence on music, electronic or otherwise, cannot be understated: Dr. Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell, the founders of the London-based Electronic Music Studios (EMS) and inventors of the VCS3 synthesizer.
What the Future Sounded Like is the first of several documentary shorts directed by Matthew Bate. Today, when electronic flourishes from auto-tune to synthesized beats grace the majority of popular music, he has done us a great service by sharing his look at the groundbreaking work of EMS. The engaging interviews are complemented by impressive archival footage, photographs, trippy video montages, and the fascinating electronic musical selections.
After World War II, Britain, along with the rest of the world, was ready for a change -- and a young man named Tristram Cary was no exception. Cary entered the war with dreams of being a classical composer. While serving as a radar operator, Cary had his first experiences with German tape recording equipment and became infatuated. He began to experiment with the alteration of tape in his compositions. This young style of composition was known as musique concrète and is an important precursor to electronic musici. Despite the fact that musique concrète was largely avant-garde, Cary's career as a composer began to take off as he began to incorporate more and more electronic elements into his compositions. Cary's score for the Doctor Who series provided many households' first exposure to electronic music.
Cary teamed up with fellow electronic music enthusiasts Cockerell, a brilliant engineer, and Zinovieff, a who had built his own studio in a shed behind his house. Zinovieff is the real star of the show. It is a mystery as to why he is rarely mentioned in the same breath as other electronic music pioneers. The hardware that Zinovieff and company used was probably the most powerful in the country outside of an academic or military settingii. In fact, one of his primary goals in founding EMS in 1969 was to find a way to pay for it all. One interviewee credits him with “using computers in a way that would become commonplace in the mid-eighties, and he was doing it twenty years earlier with equipment that was large, unwieldy, and not designed for the purpose.” Entire genres of music owe a huge debt to his ambition and vision. In crediting him with creating the first sampler, Cockerell unwittingly points out that even hip-hop owes a great deal to Zinovieff.
What EMS accomplished is all the more impressive considering the musical environment of the time. The sounds they were interested in producing were completely at odds with popular and classical music. There was, of course, no corner of the Internet in which they could hide and build a cult following, as they might today. Rock and roll was king, and the music that their equipment was capable of producing was very far from rock and roll. Despite Cary's success as a composer, the odds seemed to be stacked against them. As you watch the footage of Zinovieff's 1967 computer concert, it is useful to keep in mind that Beatlemania was rampant and Woodstock was only two years away -- that'll help you recognize just how unconventional that performance must have been.
Luckily, EMS struck gold with its design of the first portable synthesizer. It became extremely popular with rock and roll artists, especially those of the progressive persuasion. Known as the VCS3 (short for Voltage Controlled Studio with 3 oscillators), it was employed to great and famous effect on songs such as The Who's “Won't Get Fooled Again” and Pink Floyd's “On the Run.” Among the other artists who used the VCS3 are Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and Hawkwind (that's Lemmy's first band, metal fans). Lord knows, if Kraftwerk is using your stuff, you've had quite an impact on the world of electronic music. EMS would go on to create many different synthesizer models in its ten year run. However, the VCS3 would remain its most popular model (and still goes for many thousands of dollars on ebayiii.)
From their post-war experimentation to the full-on embrace of synthesizers as musical instruments in the sixties and beyond, the three men of EMS have been able to watch electronic music grow from bleeps and bloops to a full-blown scene, complete with obsessive fans, designer drugs, and a seemingly infinite number of sub-genres. More often than not, EMS is unfairly reduced to a footnote along the lines of “See: Dark Side of the Moon.” Perhaps the short life of the company is to blame for this. Maybe it's just because some other filmmakers got around to making the Moog documentary three years earlier. But make no mistake: Without the three men behind EMS, their unusual ideas, and innovative equipment, electronic music would not be the same.
As much a work of art as any record label could ever be, 4AD was a collaboration between two dudes with arty names: Ivo Watts-Russell and Vaughn Oliver. The label was started in 1980 when Watts-Russell was given the opportunity to start a label with a small budget dolled out from his bosses at Beggars Banquet - then a successful chain of record shops in London. [1] He and co-worker Peter Kent together released their first 7” and named the label “Axis”. But there was a problem: there was already a label called Axis. In one of those fateful snap judgments, they changed the name of the label to 4AD and much to everyone’s surprise it caught on almost immediately. Ivo Watts-Russell quickly showed a penchant for savvy A&R work, releasing singles that year by a host of up and comers including Modern Lovers and this other band, some skinny guys called Bauhaus.
Whatever it is that drives a scene - or even a whole subculture – quite a few of the bands that Ivo signed had it. He seemed to have a knack for working with a diverse roster of bands to develop some of the best material regardless of genre. In 1983 4AD released albums ranging from the bombast of The Birthday Party, the ephemeral Cocteau Twins, and emerging pop-stars Modern English.[1] Despite it all though, the label began to develop an overall sound. Of course, Watts-Russell never really had any of that in mind but we humans love to classify stuff.
That same year Watts Russell hired an aquantience of his named Vaughn Oliver to work on some design for the label, and also do a bit of the heavy lifting. Oliver recounts, “I ended up saying to him that he needed some consistency, a logo, label designs and he said ‘Fabulous.’ He at that time, and for a long time afterwards, was truly philanthropic. He just wanted to put out music that he liked. He wanted other people to share in this. He had no commercial aspirations if you like. He just wanted to put stuff out and to put it out in a nice sleeve, that people would want. He had really old fashioned ethics about care and quality and stuff like that. It was about three years before he got a studio that he invited me in to and said ‘Work with me.’ And I was his first employee. And I think he expected me to do more than just sleeves so there was warehouse work and stuff like that and we went from there really.” [2]
Oliver’s aethetic fit perfectly to the 4AD sound (or maybe it was the other-way around. Who wouldn’t want to make music that sounded like a 23envelope cover?). His unique approach mixed photography with design and typography in ways that were at once immediately recognizable and embodied with a rare ability to match image to sound, the label had an impact that spread like wildfire. Oliver and 23envelope were ultimately employees of 4AD as they never worked exclusively for the label -- which did result in some tension [3] -- but the work they made together will forever set the standard by which each will be measured.
So this is the period we’re looking at, the first golden era of 4AD, and for you art students and non-conformists out there, the year was 1987.
That’s the year 4AD released Lonely Is An Eyesore. Back then labels had a bit of money and it wasn’t uncommon for an extravagantly packaged compilation to hit the market. But nobody did it like Lonely Is an Eyesore. A collection of specially commissioned short films (music videos you say? No way- this is art!) and Vaughan Oliver-designed wooden box that held a deluxe gatefold LP, a cassette, a CD, a home video and two specially-commissioned etchings. The Victoria & Albert Museum acquired one for their permanent collection.[1]
It was a manifesto in design and sound. The music ranged from the medieval tribalism of Dead Can Dance to the cold synth-pop of Clan Of Xymox. The biggest band on the label at this time was Cocteau Twins who easily wore the “Ethereal” banner proudly. Their shimmering guitars and otherworldly vocals were perfectly foiled by the guttural punch of The Wolfgang Press. The label itself emerged as the star and the potent combo proved greater than the sum of its parts. But there was another story too -the label itself was an artist on the label. Sort of.
This Mortal Coil was a project started by Watts-Russell a few years prior in 1984, when the idea popped up to get the Cocteau Twins to make a cover version of a few Modern English songs. “It instilled immense confidence in me that we would be able to create, primarily through others, interesting and worthwhile interpretations of some music that had inspired me for years and was pretty much unknown to the world at large.” [3] But it was more than that. This Mortal Coil was an attempt to elaborate on the 4AD brand from the inside. Many of the artists on the label were involved in recording, but the control of the project resided in Watts-Russell’s grip. “I was accused of being a bit of a taskmaster more than once.” Never before had a “non-artist” so masterfully and artistically delivered on the promises that the same person was making from the label side. It was amazing to watch and to listen too. Watts-Russell promised that This Mortal Coil was a 3-album project and that’s what it was, ending effectively on the release date of Blood in 1990.
But they were 3 great albums filled with gripping performances made with the same iconoclasm he ran the label with -- probably best represented by 1986’s Filigree And Shadow. An over-flowing double album full of haunting reverb drenched vocal covers of songs by Van Morrison, Talking Heads and Tim Buckley among others. The songs were held together by an underpinning of liquid ambience evocative of Eno, but wholly different and unexpected. These 3 albums were a gargantuan undertaking but lovingly so. Even if the lyrics and overall tone are a bit melodramatic, you can hear the pride just leaping from the speakers. Of course Vaughn Oliver was also at the top of his game and the dreamy ladies photographed for the covers of the albums even held a resemblance to acts on the label. It was a total package.
But 4AD never seemed to bask unnecessarily in it’s own glow and new acts continued to expand the possibilities. His Name Is Alive was an unlikely group made of a visionary guitar player, Warren Defever, and a loose group of people in his orbit, their first album, Livonia, is still a rather unusual release with drums, guitars, and vocals never really cohabitating in the same space. The group released a string of adventurous albums in fairly rapid secession that kept squirming around any musical barriers. Yep, you guessed it; Vaughn Oliver was here once again to captured the experimental fragility of these albums and rendered them into bizarre jewels that just jumped off the shelf.
There were other great acts too - The Pale Saints and Lush were brilliant shoegaze groups that proved unique and delivered a few great albums each. Dead Can Dance became a cultural force in their own right, with 7 albums full of arcane curiosities built around the mind-blowing voice of Lisa Gerrard. (She went on to do a ton of film soundtrack work and won a Golden Globe for her work on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.) There were also more conventional rock bands including Throwing Muses and Unrest – and oh yeah, this little known band called The Pixies. Each and every album completed with the incredible artwork of Vaughn Oliver.
But the collaboration between 4AD and 23envelope didn't stop at cover-art. Ivo fully understood what was going on and commsiioned 23envelope to make poster-sets, calendars, compilations some promo-only, limited editions, collector only vinyls, and even a few art prints. Watts-Russell understood the power of a brand – especially one that represented suffering suburban arty types with ready cash at hand. Luckily for Watts-Russell, Warner Bros. Records came calling in 1992 with a cash injection, but by then beast got too big. These things only can last for so long and in 1999 he sold 4AD back to The Beggers Group and left the label. He currently lives in New Mexico. Vaughn Oliver is still working as a designer and pretty much everything he touches (like the £400 Pixies box set/book Minotaur) immediately becomes a collectors item. [5]
Surprisingly, 4AD hasn't been re-explored by the larger media yet. It was a rare label that skirted so many trends while fully satisfying them. They were above being merely fashionable. From the Indy rock kids to the Goths, almost every sub-genre had a major band release on 4AD at the time. Plus the only track by M/A/R/R/S, the sample-classic dance floor smash “Pump Up The Volume”, went to #1 in the UK charts. They were everywhere.
Take a look at Pitchfork and you’ll probably be surprised that many in the coveted Best New Music category artists are either currently on 4AD or are steeped in 4AD history, and yet they don't even really fully realize it themselves. Indeed 4AD is still rolling strong with a roster that gets a lot of press action. I’m hard-pressed to think of a label that has such a strong legacy. Seems like it might be time to put a bid on that Lonely Is An Eyesore VHS tape on EBay.
“I thought jazz was much too tame.” -Dave Brubeck, 1961
Brubeck challenged jazz to take rhythmic risks and harmonic adventures. He reinvented the genre based on his signature style featuring polyrhythms, odd time signatures, and polytonality. It’s difficult to say whether Brubeck was predicting an inevitable evolution or whether the future of jazz evolved because of his innovations, but one thing Dave Brubeck could not possibly have predicted is the extent he would be long intertwined with jazz’s future.
Brubeck originally wanted to follow in his father’s career and become a cattle rancher. So in 1938, Brubeck enrolled in the College of the Pacific to study veterinary medicine. But providence, the teachings of his mother (a piano teacher), and geography stepped in when his zoology professor saw his mind was elsewhere and told him to “go across the lawn” to the conservatory the next year. Brubeck changed his major to music and immediately excelled, reaching the top of his class. He mastered composition, improvisation, performance of brass and reed instruments and until his senior year, successfully hid a secret from the entire music department - he couldn’t read a page of music. When the Dean found out, he threatened to prevent Brubeck from graduating. But after his teachers’ praise and defense of Brubeck’s musical abilities, the Dean allowed Brubeck to graduate with the stipulation that Brubeck promise never to teach music so not to “embarrass the school.”
It was this man, to whom sheet music was meaningless, and who was nearly barred from graduating music school, that introduced previously unheard time signatures, rhythms, and chords to jazz music. What Brubeck and the Dave Brubeck Quartet (featuring artists such as the famous Joe Morello on drums, Paul Desmond on alto sax, and Eugene Wright on bass) did was so innovative that many critics didn’t understand it. When using polyrhythmic techniques at a 1963 performance in Carnegie Hall, the quartet played a song where each member kept a different, individual tempo going for the whole song. The next day, a reviewer wrote, “The Brubeck Quartet can’t even keep time together.” What the critic couldn’t understand at the time was that the music was found in not trying to. Their polyrhythmic techniques involved playing multiple rhythms in a single piece of music. Joe Morello alone could play four different rhythms at once between his right and left feet and hands.
At the time he sat down with Ralph Gleason of Down Beat, Dave Brubeck explained that the Brubeck Quartet was the only jazz band he knew of that could play an entire concert without playing in 3/4/ or 4/4 time, the standard jazz signatures at the time. Drawing from their travels and cultural experiences abroad (including a 3-month State Department-funded tour of countries in the Middle East and behind the Iron Curtain in 1958), Brubeck borrowed from Turkish and African traditions and introduced songs in 9/8 (such as “Blue Rondo a la Turk”), 5/4 (such as the hit “Take Five”), and even 7/4 (as heard in “Unsquare Dance”). Always encouraging the band to invent their own time signatures, Brubeck wrote a piece in 10/4 and Desmond wrote another in 11/4 time for their album Countdown: Time in Outer Space (1962). Countdown, like the quartet’s earlier albums Time Out (1959) and Time Further Out (1961) reflect the band’s constant push to expand their understanding of musical time as the possibilities seem to get all-the-way-out-to-space larger. Brubeck told Gleason, “Now, the idea was that jazz used to challenge the public and make them think in terms more advanced rhythmically than they were used to thinking in.” Beyond rhythm, Dave Brubeck challenged the public’s ear with polytonality, or playing in multiple keys in a single piece of music. Brubeck himself can play in two key signatures between his right and left hands, and pushed for interplay between multiple key signatures across instruments. And unlike the critic at Carnegie Hall, the public appeared ready for all Brubeck’s musical challenges when Time Out became the first jazz record to go gold with over a million copies sold.
Brubeck was, in many ways, a visionary. He saw that jazz needed to take on adventure and that people too needed to take risks. In his time during WWII, Brubeck attempted to racially integrate the Third Army jazz orchestra amidst a segregated military. Brubeck anticipated change and protected what needed to stay. And lucky for us, Brubeck maintains that he is here to stay. At 91 years old, Dave Brubeck’s future of jazz is the world’s present. He continues to tour throughout the United States and create new musical compositions. Today, Brubeck has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, honorary doctorates from six U.S. universities, and two others from Nottingham University in England and the University of Duisburg in Germany. Brubeck’s alma matter, the University of the Pacific, has established The Brubeck Institute where contemporary music can continue to grow through experimentation and improvisation - a huge leap from the time Brubeck studied when he wasn’t allowed to play jazz in the University practice rooms. Brubeck has garnered a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for 50 years worth of contributions as a composer and pianist, along with a National Medal of the Arts presented at the White House from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) and induction into the International Jazz Hall of Fame. As a celebration of Dave Brubeck’s 90th birthday, Turner Classic Movies released a documentary telling the story of Brubeck’s life and music. Created by Bruce Ricker and executive-produced by Clint Eastwood, the documentary, Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way, shows the pervasive impact Brubeck had on the entertainment industry with interviews with Sting, Yo-Yo Ma, George Lucas, and Bill Cosby. And as of 2001, the Brubeck Festival takes place annually in Stockton, California to celebrate Brubeck’s music and philosophical ideas through concerts, performances, and lectures. Dave Brubeck and the Dave Brubeck Quartet touch at the heart of good music, music that challenges itself, its listeners, entire genres, and even time itself.
With technological innovations in sound and cinematography, the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, the 1930s to the 1950s, produced musical films aimed at creating a dreamscape of Middle American values – a razzle-dazzle spectacle of modernity. In the 1930s few Americans could afford the luxury of the opera, ballet, or theatre and many did not take kindly to the ‘fast and loose’ values that came with vaudeville stages and burlesque performances; however, the new form of the ‘integrated’ musical film blended story, song, and dance to produce a middle class, middle brow, middle moral option for the populist masses. Combining the high art of operatic and symphonic style with the bawdy revues and stage productions of the ‘common folk,’ musicals had a style more aptly suited for the emerging ‘middle’ America and its vernacular idiom. Music was sung in English and usually accompanied by a lively colloquial tune while women traipsed the scene in slinky yet strangely demure costumes. Heterosexual couples would fall in love as the fantastic scenarios of song and dance subsumed differences of class, economics, or ethnicity.
Yet the musical not only mediated existing artistic forms and values, but also established a genre which reflected the new urban mass of industrial workers: the emerging modern American ‘middle’ class. Suited up in top-hat-variety-show fashion and with its pivotal plot points danced out in sequins and discreetly revealed décolletage, the musical offered a compromise in entertainment between art and industry, transforming the mechanization of the factory assembly line into the ‘happy-clappy’ rhythm of tap dance and jazz.
As America was sinking into eras of economic uncertainty and war, the musical offered an escapist option for the new urbanite class to take the dull and drab of economic depression and industrial mechanization and apply the golden light of Hollywood film. Freed from the fiscal and spatial economy of the stage and equipped with camera booms and editing rooms, the movie musical incorporated lavish sets and massive choreographed numbers akin to the Vegas pomp and circumstance of today – less nudity, but all the show stopping sparkly outfits and corresponding jazz hands.
Busby Berkeley came on the scene in the early 30s, taking the mechanization of industry to film through dance numbers that thrived on girls, girls, and more girls. Okay, sequins and camera tricks played a role as well, but mainly, girls. Building on the hurly burly of scandalous burlesque dance halls, Berkeley crafted musical numbers that featured simplistic dance styles in association with uniform geometric movement and, of course, those sparkly outfits. The camera would shoot from various angles to create an illusion of difficulty while the kaleidoscopic formations of those many women would create scenes of synchronicity rivaled only by babes in bathing caps and oh-so-modest swimming gear. Berkeley’s work centered around a basic unity of movement and shape reminiscent to the assembly line in production, establishing an industry standard for choreography and paving the way for massive productions without the need for excessive skill.
Amidst all those high kicks and shuffle ball changes, the audience was also presented with the overall idea of homogeneous figures in mass. The uniformity of movement extended to the uniformity of dancers, all dressed alike in groups, all performing the same steps and projecting the same image of smiley happy people holding hands. For the 1930s and 40s, this was what it was all about – ‘we all have to work together if we are going to make it’ – whether in a bread line, chorus line, or a factory assembly line. The individual faded and the production was the ‘thing,’ choreographed cogs in a musical machine.
But it was not merely the massive dance choreography that interpreted a modern middle working-class America, the basic music constructions alongside the moments of dance took on a clicking and clacking reminiscent of the machine room floor. Even with big band or jazz compositions carrying the melody, there often still remained an underlying staccato beat or bass ostinato that invoked the repetitious sounds of industry. As films moved from massive dance choreography to more character driven performances in the 1940s, the solo stars such as Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly emphasized this ‘clickity clack’ even further as tap dancing became a thoroughly integrated ‘American’ style of musical dance. The toe taps and heel clicks resonated the mechanisms of modernity - the steady threshing of machines, passing of trains, and ticking of the time clock. The ‘tip and tap’ dancing invariably was incorporated into the music, the dancer’s feet acting as the percussion to the horns and brass. And at some point, the instruments would fade out, leaving only the metallic clicks of ‘shuffle ball change’ to soundtrack the moment. And boy did these soundtracks sell!
American movie musicals not only reflected industry, they became an industry, a factory of films putting Hollywood on the map while commodifying and proliferating the idea of the American ‘popular’ for almost 30 years. Music, dance, even the modern idea of celebrity emerged from the musical film industry. Songs such as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “Cheek to Cheek”, and “Over the Rainbow” topped music charts while actors like Fred Astaire and Judy Garland became household names both in the United States and abroad. The film musical became a product just like any other, manufactured and shipped out to the masses. Encoded in these films was not just optimistic evidence of mechanized industry, but the proposed values of mainstream middle America: freedom, love, friendship, work, leisure, and success as well as ideas of race, religion, and sexuality that shaped public perception and established normative behaviors both at home and abroad (Bruce Babington and Peter W.Evans). Regardless of accuracy, the industry of American-‘ness’ was projected in the light of a movie screen. Yet, for all the optimism and elegance, the amalgamation and mediation, the pomp and circumstance of song and dance, the musical was a piece of work, a medium through which America ‘worked out’ issues of industry and identity through popular entertainment.
Kinda puts “Whistle While You Work” in a different light.
[1] Bruce Babington and Peter W.Evans. Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1985. Print.
Meet Ralph Emery. This is his country music NBC morning show from 1966. He is “the man” according to the likes of country music’s hard-knocks and outlaws. He’s “the man” in the pejorative sense, not the complimentary sense as witnessed in “you da man. No, you da man” exchanges. In 1968, Gram Parsons (International Submarine Band, The Byrds) lambasted Emery as everything antithetical to the true spirit of country music. After an unpleasant, on-air tiff with Ralph Emery, The Byrds wrote "Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man," in which they accuse Emery of everything from racism to your classic case of white, southern douchebaggery. You’d never guess it from the casual, friendly nature of this episode, but there was a storm brewing in the world of country music. In 1966, the tension was gathering, but it had yet to break.
The 1960’s was so much about “change” it would’ve made Barack Obama nauseous. Maybe Vietnam was to blame for a lot of it. Or was it the music? After a while, it sort of turns into a chicken/egg impasse. In the news bulletin toward the end of this episode, Vietnam’s inevitable, looming presence creeps into an otherwise cheerful affair. The announcement of the war’s most devastating air attack on North Vietnam is a chilly reminder of world events that sits uneasily in the good ole boy, just hangin’ around feel of the show. Whatever the case may be, Ralph Emery was determined to keep rock and roll out of country music. This show is a little slice from a period of time when Chet Atkins' Nashville sound still reigned king in the country music scene, despite the revolution happening everywhere else.
When asked what exactly typified the “Nashville sound,” Chet Atkins reportedly jangled his pocket change and said: “It’s the sound of money.” As head of RCA’s country division in the 1950’s, he took the twang out of country music, and replaced it with croon. Guest stars on this show such as Roger Miller and Tex Ritter enjoyed long periods of wild popularity and chart-topping sales. The Nashville sound sold like crazy. It continued to hold steady throughout the 1960’s as the nation’s conservative listeners disdained the new ethics of rock and roll and sought to hold onto the purified pop of yesteryear.
Despite the commercial sensibility, the elitist attitude of the Nashville sound, and Ralph Emery himself, I have to admit that I enjoyed watching this television episode. The improvisational feel and cigarette-smoking is worlds away from the Regis and Kelly kind of morning show I’ve grown to expect and avoid. And for all the change-jangling and sound of money – the music really isn’t half bad either. There is something sweet and nice about Roger Miller’s country music, and the Nashville sound for that matter. It manages to be catchy without being cloying. Or gross (I’m thinking about today’s hits such as "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk"). It reminds me of happy, sun-shiny days minus an overwhelming load of idiocy. I can dig it.
Roger Miller, right off the bat, reminds me of Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes. He looks a heck of a lot like him and has that nervous, jittery way of responding to questions and avoiding eye-contact. Ten minutes into the show, when he declares, “I like to pick my nose,” as he does so on national television, I know that I like this man. I know also that TV humor isn’t like this anymore and I wish it was. On talk shows today the funny stuff is all pre-fabricated and fits neatly between well rehearsed segues. When I watch Emery and Miller banter back and forth I feel like I’m sitting in on a conversation between two friends – hell, they even seem like people I’d want to be friends with. I feel like I want to be in on the jokes and I want to understand the stuff they talk about that I don’t immediately get. I especially like the way that the weather is handwritten in a 3-ring notebook and held up to the camera so you can read it. Something about that made me smile.
I think today’s comedians are starting to pick up this kind of humor. When Zach Galifianakis fucks up a line he is at his funniest. People like mistakes. They like being able to envision themselves on television, just as awkward and shuffly as the next guy. I wonder, then, what happened to unpolished TV shows like this? If something like this was on network TV every morning I’d be tuning in. Instead, we have air-brushed tans and fake, hysterical laughter. And there sure as hell ain’t any music.
Okay, maybe Gram Parsons had a point about Emery’s elitism. And maybe the Nashville sound had to die to give way to a new breed of outlaw characters (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson etc.) who better typified a new American ethos. But there is something to be gleaned from country’s pop days – something wholesome and good.
This episode is from 1966, and Chet Atkin’s protégé still rules the roost. Jefferson Airplane and The Beatles are off in their own world, doing their own things. In 1966, mornings on NBC are still about country and the comfortable pop crooners of yesteryear. In the midst of the world’s first televised war, who can really blame anyone for wanting to tune in to Opry Almanac for a few laughs with the good ole boys?
I believe that there are very few artists in our time who have created as memorable a series of designs and objects. Saul Bass truly shaped the vision of our time. (Milton Glaser)
Great people like Saul Bass should be immortal...The incredible wit of Saul, his intelligent ability of reaching the essence of things, to grab form and content in powerful meaningful ways. (Massimo Vignelli)
When Saul Bass (1920-1996) died these tributes were among the many sent to his wife Elaine with whom he collaborated from 1960 onward on film titles and on a series of short films. I knew him in the last five years of his life and came to greatly admire both him and Elaine as I wrote articles about the film title sequences they were then creating for Martin Scorsese. Before he died, Saul was working on a book about his work, including that with Elaine, and since 2003 I have been working with their daughter, Jennifer Bass, on a book (to be published this coming October) about all the main areas touched by his enormous talent and creativity.
One of the most famous, influential and versatile visual communicators of the twentieth century, Saul worked as both graphic designer and film-maker. During a sixty years working life he produced a body of work that is as diverse as it is powerful. He set up his own design office in 1952 and one of the joys of my research has been to unearth many of Saul’s advertisements from the 1950s. They show him developing identities for companies and products just as he did from 1954 onwards for film when the flame around a rose was made to move at the opening of Carmen Jones. It was in the mid-to-late 1950s that he expanded the boundaries of graphic design to include film title sequences, a genre that he transformed.
He made his name with title sequences, posters, and trademarks of reductive and evocative intensity created for films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Otto Preminiger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Circulated worldwide, they provided some of the most compelling images of American postwar visual culture. By the late 1950s, Saul was probably the best-known graphic designer in the world. He went on to serve as visual consultant on five feature films (Spartacus, 1960; Psycho, 1960; West Side Story, 1961; Grand Prix, 1966; Not With My Wife You Don’t, 1966) and direct the now cult feature film, Phase IV (1974). From the 1960s Saul also became known as a leading designer of corporate identity programs, for companies and institutions as diverse as Quaker, Continental Airlines, United Airlines, Bell Telephone, AT&T, Minolta, the Girl Scouts and United Way and further enhanced his international reputation.
Elaine joined the office in 1956 and together they created an impressive series of award winning short films, including the Oscar-winning Why Man Creates (1968), Notes on the Popular Arts (1977) and The Solar Film (1981), and an equally impressive series of film titles - from Stanley Kramer’s Spartacus (1960 – Elaine directed it while Saul was at the World Design conference in Japan) to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence and Casino in the 1990s.
Besides the areas already mentioned, Saul also designed packaging, retail displays, a modular hi-fi cabinet system, album covers, book covers, sculpture, lettering, typefaces, tiles, toys and a postage stamp. He illustrated a children’s book and, in collaboration with architects, designed play environments, a proposed pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair and a series of service stations. His versatility was often remarked upon, as was his problem-solving approach to design. In 1954 American Artist attributed the ‘underlying logic’ of his work to a ‘searching mind...always inquiring into the reason for things’. Forty years later Scorsese referred to his ‘searching eye’. Both mind and eye are central to an understanding of this versatile man who made a distinctive contribution to the visual vocabulary of postwar America.
Saul received many prestigious awards, including Art Director of the Year (1957) and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA, 1981). He took pride in recognition by his peers and gave back a great deal to the professions and institutions with which he was associated. He was active in the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) as well as the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and poured his prodigious energies into the Aspen International Design Conferences and helped establish the Sundance Institute.
Liberal by outlook and disposition, he had a strong moral backbone. He disapproved of advertising that used snobbery, social status or gratuitous sex to sell goods and refused assignments that offended his ‘conscience or sense of fitness’. He cared about things and gave his services free when asked to design posters, logos and invitations for not-for-profit causes in which he believed. His friends and colleagues described him to me as “A man who speaks up to the world”. “An artist with a soul”, “A person with a conscience” and “An artist with a capital A”. He was all of those things, and more. Most people commented upon his warmth and generosity. Robert Redford talked of “a spiritual energy. One that comes from the soul...an energy born out of talent, generosity, curiosity, wisdom, experience, joy”.
A born communicator (in later years he preferred the term visual communicator to that of designer), his large expressive hands painted their own pictures as he talked. He taught from time to time, mentoring many would-be designers and film-makers including USC student George Lucas. The number of people with whom Saul kept in touch after first meeting them when they were fledglings in their field is remarkable. It can be explained in part by his sociability, but he was also conscious of the importance of mentors in his own life, especially Howard Trafton Gyorgy Kepes who helped him transform from a talented designer into a contender.
Never happier than with an audience of young people, his last public appearance, in March 1996 (a month before his death), was a ‘master class’ presentation and discussion at the School of Visual Arts, New York, where a retrospective exhibition of his work had just opened. Those lucky enough to get a seat, squeeze into the aisles or stand in the stage wings, will never forget that tour de force, his humor or his humanity. Visibly ill, and present against doctor’s orders, he gave his all (as always), insisting on the primacy of integrity and curiosity and conveying his love of process in design and film-making. He made the audience laugh while he made us think. Afterward, he showed infinite patience with each and every question and remained behind with students until the janitors closed the hall around him.
Saul was a master of the dialectic of content and form. He went straight to the kernel of a design problem and then transform it into compelling pictorial signs. There is no definitive Bass aesthetic but recurrent elements include a strong tendency towards a single strong image, reduction, distillation, economy and minimalism – features associated with Modernism – and a concern with fragmentation, layering, addition, ambiguity, montage and metaphor – features more associated with post-Modernism, but which were much in evidence by the 1950s. Wit and humor is never far away. Nor is finely-honed lettering, a passion since his boyhood.
Not too long before he dies he told me:
In the final analysis, content is the key and I’ve always looked for the simple idea. That is what I did in the ’50s and that is what Elaine and I do now. We have a very reductive point of view … We see the challenge in getting things down to something totally simple, and yet doing something with it, which provokes;… a simplicity, which has a certain ambiguity and a certain metaphorical implication … the idea that is so simple that it will make you think – and rethink. … It’s a risky business: we’re improvising and never know if it will work out.
Each of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men" contributed something of such merit to American animation that there is no sense in trying to decide which amongst them was the greatest. Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman and Ward Kimball had worked with Disney since the late 1920's and early 1930's, their work defining the company's Golden Age. Their collective legacy includes such characters as Maleficent, Shere Kahn, Bambi, Cruella De Vil, Br'ers Rabbit, Fox and Bear, Captain Hook and Mr. Smee, Monstro the Whale, the Queen of Hearts and the occupants of both the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean.
My personal favorite, however, is Ward Kimball. A man after my own heart, his first reported drawing was of a steam train. After seeing Disney's Three Little Pigs, this Santa Barbara School of Art student approached Walt and started working for him in 1934. His name can be seen on the credits of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for which he animated several dwarf scenes and after which he moved on to creating one of the company's most enduring personalities, Jiminy Cricket. The Walt Disney Family Album episode featuring Kimball iterates the challenge of making a ghastly-looking insect into the lovable cartoon character that acted as a veritable mascot for the company for decades. His effervescent style is also notable in Dumbo's crows, Ichabod Crane, Lucifer the Cat and the mice from Cinderella, Professor Ludwig Von Drake, Pecos Bill and Alice in Wonderland's Mad Hatter, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, March Hare, Cheshire Cat, and the Walrus and the Carpenter.
The madness of Ward Kimball is best demonstrated by his animation for the title song from The Three Caballeros. One of the films to come out of Disney's goodwill trip to Latin America during World War II, this sequence has Donald Duck and José Carioca meeting Panchito for the first time in an explosion of light, colour, sound and slapstick. Critics that limited themselves to the products of the modern Disney company might be excused for thinking that they always play it safe, taking few creative risks and allowing the market to dominate the artistic process. It is easy to take for granted just how innovative Walt and his animators were 70 years ago. As they gyrate from films like Dumbo to Fantasia, from Pinocchio to Song of the South, from Bambi to The Three Caballeros, it often seemed like their dominant theory was throwing everything against the screen and seeing what stuck. Kimball's effort breaks open a pinata of utter insanity.
When not behind the drawing table, Kimball could be playing the trombone with the Firehouse Five Plus Two, a Dixieland Jazz troupe composed entirely of Disney animators. They are largely credited with the revival of Dixieland in Southern California in the 1950's - invigorating retro-style when record companies buried "old fashioned" music like Jazz. They performed eleven albums and had appearances in several feature films. Walt was patient with this side project, showcasing them on the One Hour in Disneyland special, the Disneyland opening day broadcast, several episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club, recording one album live at Disneyland and overseeing their animated incarnations in the Goofy cartoon How to Dance. Nevertheless, Walt informed them that he could only indulge their hobby so long as it didn't interfere with their work for him.
Walt and Ward's relationship was shaky. He was the only one of the Nine Old Men that Walt publicly declared to be a genius, yet he was rarely given the same directorial stage as others, perhaps because his style was so far beyond the pale. One can imagine the difference in political opinion between the two, evidenced by Kimball's Escalation. Privately produced two years after Walt's death, it protests the escalating war in Vietnam by likening President Lyndon B. Johnson's policy to a throbbing johnson. In an interview with Michael Barrier, Kimball recalled when Walt threw his support behind the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon and applied pressure to his staff to do the same. Ward replied that even if he was a Republican, it would look bad for Walt to do this. It wasn't until other conservative staff-members objected that Walt let the issue fade.
In happier times, Kimball was largely to be credited with rekindling Walt's love of steam trains. No one did a hobby quite like Ward, and when a scrappy old passenger coach and 1881 Baldwin steam locomotive became available in 1938, he purchased them. Further narrow-gauge track was laid and additional rolling stock restored, so by 1942 Kimball's backyard Grizzly Flats Railroad was ready to go. This ambitious fantasy world inspired Walt to build his own miniature backyard railway at his home in Holmby Hills. It also added to the stack of inspirations for an old time studio park beside the Disney plant in Burbank. That project evolved into Disneyland in Anaheim, around which runs the Disneyland Railroad to this day.
As thanks for sharing this passion, Walt gifted Ward with the railway station from the 1948 mixed live-action and animated film So Dear to My Heart. The Victorian gingerbread-style station was merely a false front, which Ward worked on tirelessly to turn into a real building for the GFRR. Unfortunately, when Walt was looking to cut costs for the construction of Disneyland, he asked Ward for it back. Ward refused, and the current New Orleans Square/Frontierland station is a replica of that from the film. The actual station currently resides in the possession of John Lasseter and the rolling stock sits in the collection of the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris, California. Some of Kimball's collection of railway ephemera and a Firehouse Five Plus Two fireman hat can be seen at Walt's Barn in Griffith Park, preserved by the Carolwood Pacific Historical Society. In honor of his contributions, the #5 engine of the Disneyland Railroad is named for Ward Kimball.
Ward's greatest legacy, however, is in the fantastic cast of characters he created as well as the few times that Walt did put him in the director's chair. He won two Oscars: one for It's Tough to be a Bird and a second for the stop-motion Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. He was also given charge over the Man in Space trilogy for the Disneyland television show, exemplifying both his interest in the world around him and his imaginative style. Kimball, in his own gonzo way, was one of Disney's greatest Renaissance men.
Jim Henson, the widely famous puppeteer pioneer (sorry for that alliteration), is generally known for his creation of The Muppet Show and the iconic characters associated with it — namely Kermit the MC frog who Henson voiced. People like me, who unfortunately belong to Generation Y - with a mild nostalgia for the more recent Muppets movies and Sesame Street - may not have been exposed to Jim Henson’s earlier more experimental works of the 60’s and 70’s. It’s in these commercials and short films that Henson fully explores his affinity for light-hearted cynicism that appeals to an adult audience.
When Henson was just a freshman at the University of Maryland he created a 5-minute puppet show called "Sam and Friends", featuring an early version of Kermit, that aired on a local D.C. station. He worked alongside his future wife, Jane, experimenting with new methods of filming and puppet construction. This show led to various guest appearances on national-broadcasted shows like The Today Show.
While this was going on, though, Henson was hired to make a commercial for a D.C. coffee company, Wilkins Coffee. This endeavor lead to over 100 eight-second segments advertising the coffee, and beyond that, to two decades of commercial advertising for everything from Wilson’s Meat to Pak-Nit fabrics. Now, in most cases this career choice might seem like a sell-out move. But for Henson it kick-started his prolific career and gave birth to several puppet proto-types that would appear in his later works. Not to mention they also embody a pun-y simplicity that are very suited for an adult audience, despite their puppet stars.
These Wilkins coffee commercials began airing in 1957 on local television stations, and soon became extremely popular. They feature a puppet named Wilkin and another named Wontkin. In each snip-it, Wilkin somehow asks the aptly named Wontkin to drink the brand name coffee and he stubbornly refuses. Then Wontkin might be shot in the head or run over by the Wilkins “bandwagon”—afterwards Wilkin delivers a line like “you either go with Wilkins or you don’t go at all”. Henson’s clever play on the in-your-face propaganda one might expect from a commercial adds to the pure comedy of it. The Wilkins bits also highlight an endearing violence, not unlike The Itchy and Scratchy Show. As pretty much every generations knows, violence can be fun for the whole family.
Henson did a lot of other product sponsorship, but he also created loosely instructional sales videos for IBM in 1966. This unexpected combination solidified the unique stylistic qualities that make Henson’s work so venerable. And as made obvious in the range of products that he “sold,” Henson was not expressing personal loyalty to these companies but using their business as a way to develop his artistic style, and even to make fun of the typical associations with television advertising in his comedy.
One IBM video stars Rowlf the Dog, who was one of the first nationally recognized characters of Henson’s repertoire. This was his Muppet Show pianist gig that you might be more familiar with. In this piece, Rowlf is an eager salesman for IBM typewriters. In the 10-minute video he uses different versions of the typewriter to write to his mom about what a great sales-dog he is. He even goes so far as to create various commercials to send to the head of sales. Rowlf imitates Henson’s quick wit in these commercials within a commercial (so meta). In the slapstick style of Henson, Rowlf carelessly drops his typewriter case down a set of stairs and the camera shows it falling for an unrealistic amount of time. The most intriguing thing to note about this scene is the repetitive sound of the case hitting the ground that creates a distinct beat. Music is a key aspect of many of Henson’s works, like his short film "Time Piece" (also created around the same time).
"Time Piece" premiered in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And at the risk of sounding cliché, it is an undeniably artsy, visual film that shows off the broad scope of Henson’s creative abilities (sans puppets). However, it still maintains the quick-witted humor that most associate with Henson’s work. Henson plays the main character of the film, who appears in a hospital bed with a doctor checking his pulse through a stethoscope. The exaggerated, incessant beat of his heart remains constant throughout the film, like a ticking clock or the sound of his footsteps. And the beats are interspersed with catchy jazz riffs and stop-motion animation similar to "Preston Blair’s Air Force" piece. This film might be sending a message that time is inescapable, but it seems equally concerned, if not moreso, with the laughable conglomeration of short, bizarre scenes.
Interestingly, it becomes clear that Jim Henson’s legacy is not just built on Muppets. The creation of memorable puppet personalities and his innovations in television, film and animation bring hilarity and innovative art to adults as well as kids. And also coffee. And typewriters.
Beyond a few broad, core truths (the Nazis are Evil, the Axis are a Threat), propaganda is by its very nature filled with falsehoods, exaggerations, and lies. It reveals far more about the country that created it than its actual target. In the following cartoons, which cast the most popular animated characters of the time into situations both comic and nightmarish, the concerns of World War II America are laid bare: it's scared, defiant, and strangely obsessed.
Wrath
During a parable about the idiocy of signing a non-aggression pact with a man who is a wolf AND a Nazi, the Three Little Pigs run into the eldest pig’s house, which is made out of bricks and heavy cannons. There’s a sign on the door which says: “No Dogs Allowed”, except “Dogs” has been crossed out and replaced by “Japs”. No other mention of the Japanese is made during this sequence. Frankly, it seems like an afterthought -- like they completed this cartoon and sent it through the editing process, where it was determined that there was just not enough racism against the Japanese. By then, it was too late to add, say, a horrible buck-toothed reptile sidekick for Wolf Hitler, so they slapped the sign on the house and called it a day.
They really went out of their way to portray the Japanese as inhuman, too. Hitler and Mussolini are caricatures of people: Hitler is thin and floppy, while Mussolini is fat and bull-headed. Hirohito, on the other hand, is practically an alien--he’s got bright yellow skin, a face that seems to be composed entirely of buck teeth, long ears, and pinprick eyes. Last time I checked, Japanese people do not possess any of those characteristics (I would say, “anime doesn’t count”, but this doesn’t even happen in anime).
Gluttony
The wolf wants more. He will not use what he gains. It is enough for him that it is there to make his own. He will blow down the house of straw and sticks, and try to blow up the house of cannons. He will eat the pigs. All of his minions are either obese (they have gorged themselves well) or rail-thin (they are starving of their want). He will send his crow after you, to catch your duck. He will fill your children full of death. The wolf wants more.
Lust
How many times are people going to get shot in the ass in these cartoons? There’s something very strange going on here -- you Nazis may have annexed the Sudetenland and made war on civilization, but we’re gonna shoot you in the butt! Wolf Hitler gets chased around by bombs and shells that seem to have been designed to seek out his rear end. Nazi Donald Duck (more on that later) is prodded to his fascist re-education by bayonets that poke him in the ass. In the title screen to his starring role in this rump drama, Daffy Duck shoots a Nazi duck (not Donald) directly in the asshole with a rock from a slingshot.
I understand the need to be aggressive against Nazi Germany, but do we really need to move from invasions to invasions? If you watched The Fog of War, you’ll know that General Curtis LeMay (whose dying regret must have been that he never lived to use a railgun on a communist) never went near recommending anything of this nature (mostly, his strategy was bombs, regardless of anatomical location). I’m not sure exactly what this reveals about the mindset of the gentlemen animating these cartoons, but if I had a communications device that ignored the boundaries of space and time, I’d tell them to cool it down a bit. I would also tell them to make a prequel to Space Jam, this time featuring bespectacled giant and early NBA icon George Mikan, on the condition that they put aside a small percentage of the profits in a trust fund for me.
Greed
It’s perhaps a little vulgar when the three little pigs launch bullets literally full of money at Wolf Hitler. They’re helpfully labeled “Defense Bonds”, which is a nice little reminder to the American public to get crackin’ with the bond-buying. Additionally, the exhortation to BUY WAR BONDS gets repeated an awful lot during the less-subtle cartoons, but this is to be forgiven. Tanks were needed to crush the Nazis, and tanks are not free.
Envy
One very specific type of envy, to be accurate. A hint: observe the number of cannons in these cartoons. Cannons abound. Tanks have two at minimum, sometimes as many as five. Sometimes, the cannons go limp. A pig will feed the cannon vitamins, and it is ready once again to fire away.
Pride
There is only the barest mention of Russia in these cartoons. This may be a disservice.
Did you know that, out of the total number of German army soldiers who died in World War II, something like nine out of ten were killed by the Russians? Our image of that war is of America saving the day, and this is not without merit. England alone would have been unable to mount a counter-invasion on its own and would have been forced to surrender eventually had it not received American aid. It’s important to remember, however, that alongside Good Old Fashioned American Know-How and the Legendary British Resolve, the war was won by Millions and Millions of Russian Conscripts, dying in Stalingrad, clogging the gears of a meat grinder.
Sloth
Donald Duck is in hell.
He doesn’t know how he got here. It seems like he’s always been in hell, but the memories of another land flicker across his overworked brain like the last fireworks of the last Fourth of July. He is on an assembly line which stretches into infinity. His tormentors want him to build shells. His tormentors want him to hail the Fuhrer. They are not satisfied with the slightest delay in either of these actions. Earlier, in a different world, the Fuhrer was a wolf, but here, he’s a man. Someday, the wolf will be blown to hell, greeted by a leering band of devils, but Donald will not be there for that.
Donald has been up since four o’clock in the morning. He was awoken by a band of grotesques singing a song about the Fuhrer, and it seems like their chorus ambushes him at the worst possible times.
He is so very good at his job. His wings long ago evolved into hands, and they shame humanity with their quickness and dexterity. Small shells are no problem. Larger ones are a cakewalk. Donald could screw shells together forever, but his skill only encourages his tormentors. They finally trip him up. They may have never wanted him to succeed. If only they would stop screaming at him. If only the music would stop.
One day, Donald will wake up in America. He never left. He was only dreaming. The dream was eternity.
Joe DeMartino is a Connecticut-based writer who grew up wanting to be Ted Williams, but you would not BELIEVE how hard it is to hit a baseball, so he gave that up because he writes words OK. He talks about exploding suns, video games, karaoke, and other cool shit at his blog, The Toy Cannon. He can be emailed at jddemartino@gmail.com and tweeted at @thetoycannon. He writes about sports elsewhere. The sports sells better.
“Nothing seems to be more suited to be devoured by the surrealist fire than those mysterious strips of 'hallucinatory celluloid' turned out so unconsciously in Hollywood, and in which we have already seen appear, stupified, so many images of authentic delirium, chance and dream.” -- Salvador Dali, 1937
Born in the Catalan town of Figueres near Barcelona in 1904, Salvador Dalí (1904—1989) was a gifted artist from an early age. As a teenager, he travelled to Madrid to attend the prestigious San Fernando Academy of Art (Picasso’s alma mater), and by the late 1920s he had already earned a reputation in Barcelona as an excellent draughtsman and scandalizing provocateur. Dalí’s first “big break” would come not through painting, however, but through film, when in 1929 he collaborated on a seventeen-minute short with his school friend, Luis Buñuel. The film, titled Un Chien Andalou ("The Andalusian Dog"), was intended as an “anti-art” film that would shock the establishment. It went so far as to even include scenes of putrescence – ants and rotting donkeys among them – to suggest the “cultural cadavers” that needed to swept aside to make way for the new art. Although Buñuel famously reported that at the first screening of Un Chien Andalou, he carried stones in his pockets to hurl in the event that the audience revolted, somewhat to his and Dalí’s disappointment the film was an immediate success when it premiered in Paris. Indeed, its disturbing opening, in which a razorblade slashes a young woman’s eyeball, remains one of the most celebrated sequences in all of cinema history.
Un Chien Andalou also caught the attention of a group of avant-garde writers and artists in Paris: the Surrealists. The Surrealists were interested in liberating thought and expression from the moral and aesthetic concerns imposed by society, and they saw in Dalí and Buñuel’s film a parallel to dream states and the Freudian psychoanalysis that drove their own explorations into the subconscious. Dalí quickly became a fixture of the Surrealist group, contributing important ideas and texts including what he termed “the paranoiac critical method”: a self-induced “psychosis” that led him to see double-images in the world around him that he would ultimately represent in his paintings.
Dalí’s fame during the 1930s was meteoric, not least thanks to his famous “soft watch” painting, The Persistence of Memory (1931), which toured the United States extensively in the early 1930s and was for most Americans their first exposure to Surrealism; by 1936, his photograph (taken by Man Ray) was on the cover of TIME magazine. Dalí’s popularity antagonized the other members of the Surrealist group, as did his political ambiguity when other Surrealists were taking resolute stands against the rise of fascism in Europe. Relations became strained after 1934, and by May 1939 Dalí had been officially expelled from all official Surrealist activity.
Dalí’s expulsion from Surrealism began a new chapter in his life. With his wife Gala, Dalí moved to the United States in 1940 and embarked upon his quest for wealth and celebrity status, channelling his creative imagination to everything from neckties to ashtrays. He turned to designing jewelry with the flamboyant Duc Fulco de Verdura, who had opened a showroom on New York’s Fifth Avenue. He also supplied regular artwork for Vogue and Town and Country magazines (he provided Vogue’s cover art in 1939, 1944, and 1946), designed for the ballet and the stage, and became a sought-after book illustrator. Between 1944 and 1947, he produced fifteen collages to advertise Bryan’s Hosiery, and other artworks were used to sell Johnson Paints and Waxes, Chen Yu lipstick, and Leich’s “Desert Flower” perfume. Dali insisted on the artistic legitimacy of these projects, saying, “I am a man of the Renaissance. . . . I would sign a pair of pants if someone commissioned me to. After all, Michelangelo . . . designed the uniforms for the [Pope’s] Swiss Guards. . . . I feel no separation between myself as an artist and the mass of the people. I stand ready to design anything the people want.”
With Dalí’s move to America also came a public rejection of his surrealist past and an embrace of what he now called “classicism”, though various elements of his earlier style – including the ever-present double-images – persisted. Among his most notable 1940s projects were his forays into Hollywood. The Hollywood “dream factory” embraced Dalí’s dreamlike aesthetic, and the artist himself was eager to disseminate his work to a wider American audience. Unfortunately, most of Dalí’s visions for film would go unrealized – his 1937 script for the Marx Brothers, titled Giraffes on Horseback Salad, for example, and arguably also the dream sequence he designed for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, the final cut of which bears little resemblance to Dalí’s original designs.
A more successful collaboration would come in 1946 with an animated short made with Walt Disney Studios called Destino (1946). Dalí had met Walt Disney in 1945 at a party hosted by movie mogul Jack Warner – a meeting that seems to have gone prodigiously well, as shortly afterwards the artist travelled to Burbank, California to begin work on an animated film set to music in the style of Fantasia (1940). Destino would be based on a song of the same title by Armando Domínguez, and it seems the word destino (“destiny” in Spanish) “sent Dali into raptures”. Disney paired him with experienced animator John Hench and gave him more or less free reign to create as he liked, resulting in many fantastic scenes – optical illusions, double-images, and dreamlike transformations.
Unfortunately, after months of work, the cartoon was shelved, with Disney growing increasingly sceptical over whether the public would appreciate a wacky Dalí cartoon. The film remained untouched until 1999, ten years after Dalí’s death, when Disney’s nephew, Roy Disney, decided to resuscitate Destino. Produced by Baker Bloodworth and directed by French animator Dominique Monfrey, the finished Destino premiered on June 2, 2003 at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, where it was met with wide acclaim, including a 2003 Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film.
As with many “surrealistic” films, the plot of the completed Destino is difficult to convey, though fans of Un Chien Andalou will recognize a swarm of ants emerging from a hole in a man’s hand – reflecting Dalí’s 1920s interest in putrefaction and recalling the same swarms of ants that attack the soft clocks in The Persistence of Memory.
Dalí would never abandon surrealism. Despite his distance from the group’s other members, he insisted that he was, in fact, “more surrealist than the Surrealists”. His comic moustache, deliberately exaggerated speech, and bizarre antics would make him a star, often overshadowing the importance of his art (which he identified as only a small fragment of his personality). Of the many films that were made about Dalí’s life and art, perhaps none captures his clownish personality paired with extraordinary artistry as effectively as Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí (1967). This “creative documentary” by director Jean-Christophe Averty and narrated in English by Orson Welles was shot on location at Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, Spain, and includes such arresting (and suitably “surrealistic”) scenes as Dalí ecstatically playing a piano filled with cats – a reconstruction of a ‘cat organ’ in which a line of cats is fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard so that the cats cry out in pain when a key is pressed. Dalí, it seems, also associated pianos with sexuality – a link formed in his childhood by a book of venereal diseases that his father left open on the family piano to teach his son the perils of promiscuity. Other episodes in the film are no less peculiar: The artist marching triumphantly across the Spanish landscape throwing fistfuls of feathers into the air with a plaster rhinoceros head in a wheelbarrow at two children dressed as cherubs in tow is a prime example, as is the moment in which he emerges from a giant egg, spraying milk, “symbolic blood”, and “symbolic fish” across the Mediterranean beach.
Welles describes Dalí as a “prince of paradox”, but amidst the humorous hijiniks, Soft Self-Portrait proves to be one of the most informative documentaries on the artist’s life, detailing his emergence as an artist in the 1920s, his important contributions to Surrealism in the 1930s, and even his antecedence to 1960s Pop Art (Andy Warhol would later admit that he loved Dalí “because he’s so big”). The film is certainly not as well known as it should be, and the final sequence – an elaborate “happening” in which Dalí encloses himself in a clear plastic dome to “paint the sky” – confirms that Dalí was an extraordinary artist well beyond his heyday in the 1930s.
Dr. Elliott H. King is a Lecturer in Modern Art at Colorado College and a leading specialist in the work of Salvador Dali. He received his PhD from the University of Essex, working with renowned Dali scholar Dawn Ades, and has lectured and published widely on Dali's work, spearheading the critical rehabilitation of the artist's 'late' (post-1940) production. He was recently guest curator of the exhibition Dali: The Late Work, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia (catalogue published by Yale University Press, 2010). Other publications include contributions to the Dali Centenary catalogue (2004), the 2007 Tate Modern/MoMA exhibit and catalogue Dali & Film, and his 2007 book, Dali, Surrealism and Cinema. His current research interests include intersections between Dali and Andy Warhol.
