Why Slow Television Is the Most Radical Programming on Air
In 2009, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation aired a seven-hour, unedited film of the Bergen-to-Oslo train journey.
2024-11-14
OR
Oliver Ramsey
123 articles
Showing 81–100 of 123 articles
How the Criterion Collection Became a Film School in a Box
In 1984, Janus Films launched the Criterion Collection with a LaserDisc release of Citizen Kane, supplemented by the first-ever audio commentary track on a home video release.
2024-11-05
What Orson Welles Understood About Showmanship and Solitude
Orson Welles was twenty-five years old when Citizen Kane premiered in 1941, and he spent the remaining forty-four years of his life living with the consequences of having peaked at the beginning.
2024-10-25
What Bach Can Teach You About Structure in Any Field
Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues — compositions in which a single melodic theme is introduced, then systematically developed through repetition, variation, inversion, and combination — represent the most rigorous structural thinking in Western art.
2024-10-23
The Photographers Who Documented an Entire City Block for Thirty Years
In 1969, Danny Lyon began photographing the demolition of Lower Manhattan's Washington Street neighbourhood — sixty acres of nineteenth-century commercial buildings razed to make way for the World Trade Center and Battery Park City.
2024-10-22
The Bookshops of Buenos Aires and the Readers They Attract
Buenos Aires has more bookshops per capita than any other city in the world — a statistic that reflects not commercial opportunity but cultural identity.
2024-10-20
Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and the Grammar of Action Cinema
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, released in 1954, established the structural template that virtually every action film has followed since: a group of specialists, each with a distinct skill and personality, is assembled for a mission that requires their collective effort.
2024-10-19
The Sculptures You Walk Past Without Knowing Their Names
Auguste Rodin's The Burghers of Calais exists in twelve bronze casts worldwide, several of them installed at ground level in public spaces where pedestrians navigate around the figures without recognising one of the most important sculptural groups of the nineteenth century.
2024-10-18
How Portuguese Fado Became the Sound of Beautiful Regret
Fado — from the Latin fatum, meaning fate — emerged in the working-class neighbourhoods of Lisbon in the early nineteenth century as the music of sailors, prostitutes, and the urban poor.
2024-10-15
On Collecting Art Without a Fortune
The assumption that art collecting requires wealth is both historically recent and factually incorrect.
2024-10-12
How Brutalist Architecture Found Its Admirers at Last
Brutalism spent decades as architecture's most hated movement.
2024-10-08
The Architecture of Silence: Libraries Worth Travelling For
The Long Room at Trinity College Dublin, completed in 1732, houses two hundred thousand of the library's oldest volumes in a barrel-vaulted space sixty-five metres long.
2024-09-30
The Architects Who Designed for Human Happiness
Alvar Aalto designed the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland in 1933 with a single organising principle: every architectural decision should serve the patient's recovery.
2024-09-19
The Documentaries That Changed Public Opinion
When An Inconvenient Truth premiered at Sundance in 2006, climate change was a partisan issue in American politics.
2024-09-18
The Forgotten Art of Letter Writing
In 1944, a twenty-three-year-old soldier named Chris Barker wrote to his future wife Bessie Moore from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy.
2024-09-11
What André 3000 Understood About Genre-Defying Dress
André Benjamin, known as André 3000 of Outkast, has spent two decades dressing in a way that defies every category the fashion industry uses to organize itself.
2024-09-06
What David Bowie Understood About Fashion as Identity
David Bowie did not use fashion to express a fixed identity.
2024-09-05
What Sean Connery Understood About Bond Style
Sean Connery's James Bond defined cinematic masculinity for a generation, but his contribution to menswear is more specific and more enduring than the broad archetype suggests.
2024-09-03
What Norwegian Wood Teaches About Living Well
Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel, his most realistic and autobiographical work, follows Toru Watanabe through his university years in late-1960s Tokyo.
2024-08-31
What A Moveable Feast Teaches About Living Well
Hemingway's posthumous memoir, published in 1964, three years after his death, recounts his years as a young writer in 1920s Paris.
2024-08-30