If you’re looking for some quiet time spent reading this holiday weekend, here are a few recommendations:
The Library of Congress has an immense collection of film-related resources dating back to the very beginning of the medium in the late 19th century, but has had to fight an ongoing battle to preserve, restore, and archive materials that are subject to physical deterioration in a way that other media are not. The supervisor of the LOC’s Film Preservation Laboratory, Ken Weissman, wrote this article for Creative COW Magazine about their work and the challenges, both technical and curatorial, of preserving over a century’s worth of film history.
The Bavarian town of Oberammergau has been staging a Passion Play every ten years since the 17th Century. This Der Speigel article focuses on the conflict between the play’s current director, an Oberammergau native who went on to become a leading theater director in Germany, and some of the townspeople as they clash over issues of modernity vs tradition. Among the contentious issues: removing anti-semitic content from the play (What? German Catholic anti-semitism? Unpossible!) and allowing non-Catholics and non-Germans to appear in the play (What? Racism? In Germany? No wai!). Hey, who is this guy, HITLER? (complete with special guest appearance by Papa Ratzi himself!)
Speaking of Hitler…well, sort of…this article from conservative mag City Journal by Judith Miller (yes, THAT Judith Miller) details the use of biological weapons by Japan during their invasion and occupation of China up to and during the Second World War. Like the heinous “research” done by Joseph Mengele in Hitler’s concentration camps, the Japanese Army’s Unit 731 used hundreds of innocent Chinese peasants as guinea pigs to test human physiological response to weaponized biological agents; the lucky peasants were murdered once the “research” was done, but many have lived for decades with the results. The U.S. and Soviet Union downplayed these particular atrocities, since they both benefitted from information from captured Japanese scientists for their own biological warfare efforts, but now there is an effort to create a memorial to the Chinese people victimized during the war by preserving the place where much of it happened, not unlike the preservation of Auschwitz as a World Heritage Site.
And, because you’ll need something a little more uplifting after THAT, here’s a good article at WFMU’s “Beware of the Blog” that chronicles the long career of Betty White. I, for one, don’t really care for the current Betty White meme; it’s twee and insincere in my opinion and smacks of the effort by people on the Internet to seem earnest-yet-secretly-ironic. Nevertheless, Betty White has been around FOREVER, and she’s one of those celebrities who didn’t seem to be famous for anything in particular except being a celebrity for a very long time (really, until she joined the Mary Tyler Moore show). This article covers how she got that way in the first place.
Related Posts:
