Bookmarks (6) clear filters

Welkom in Amsterdam… 1922. Neural network artist Denis Shiryaev describes himself as “an artistic machine-learning person with a soul.” For the last six months, he’s been applying himself to re-rendering documentary footage of city life—Belle Epoque Paris, Tokyo at the start of the the Taishō era, and New York City in 1911—the year of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. It’s possible you’ve seen […] Revisit Scenes of Daily Life in Amsterdam in...

For more than 200 years, the rulers of Japan kept the country all but closed to the outside world. In 1854, the "Black Ships" of American commander Matthew Perry arrived to demand an end to Japanese isolation — and a commencement of Japanese world trade. Within decades, many fashion-forward Europeans and even Americans couldn't get […] Watch Vintage Footage of Tokyo, Circa 1910, Get...

Those of us who saw the The Matrix in the theater felt we were witness to the beginning of a new era of cinematically and philosophically ambitious action movies. Whether that era delivered on its promise — and indeed, whether The Matrix's own sequels delivered on the franchise's promise — remains a matter of debate. More […] This Is What <i>The Matrix</i> Looks Like Without...

No image is more closely associated with the birth of the motion picture than a train pulling into the French coastal town of La Ciotat. Captured by cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the 50-second clip frightened the audience at its first screening in 1896, who thought a real locomotive was hurtling toward them — […] The Earliest Known Motion Picture, 1888’s <i>Roundhay Garden...

Nobody uses the word computerized anymore. Its disappearance owes not to the end of computerization itself, but to the process' near-completeness. Now that we all walk around with computers in our pockets (see also the fate of the word portable), we expect every aspect of life to involve computers in one way or another. But […] Watch a Short 1967 Film That Imagines How...

Someone should really snap up the rights for a movie about The Critics, a collective of self-taught teenage filmmakers from northwestern Nigeria. The boys’ dedication, ambition, and no-budget inventiveness calls to mind other filmmaking fanatics, from the sequestered, homeschooled brothers of The Wolfpack to the fictional Sweding specialists of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Be Kind, Rewind. […] Nigerian Teenagers Are Making Slick Sci Fi Films...