M.J. Rose

Beautiful old film footage…Enjoy!

From The Public Domain Review,

Raja Harishchandra (1913)

“Directed and produced by Dadasaheb Phalke, the “father of Indian Cinema”, this 40-minute-long silent film is the very first full-length Indian feature — the beginning of Bollywood. The narrative of the film is based on the eponymous legend recounted in the Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The story centres around the hero Harishchandra, a noble king, who, to honour his promise to the sage Vishwamitra, sacrifices his kingdom, his wife, and eventually also his children. By the end, however, having pleased the Gods with his actions, Harishchandra’s former glory is restored…

Unfortunately, Raja Harishchandra only exists now in fragments (1475 feet of it), which you can see above, with both Hindi and English intertitles…”

For more on this, click here.

Unsanitized tales…

The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear

By Maria Popova (Brain Pickings)

“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays … but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.”

“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is credited with proclaiming, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Intelligence, of course, is a loose grab-bag term that encompasses multiple manifestations, but the insight attributed to Einstein applies most unequivocally to the ninth of developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences: existential intelligence.

Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet….”

More here.

Somehow these remind us of books…

From Colossal,

Secret Rooms Installed Inside Abandoned Manhole Covers on the Streets of Milan

by Christopher Jobson

“In this new series of outdoor installations artist Brian Coshock has turned abandoned manhole covers on the streets of Milan into cramped miniature rooms complete with hanging artwork, kitchen utencils, and tiled walls. Titled Borderlife, the artist says the admittedly humorous pieces are meant to draw attention to a more serious issue in Bucharest, where many hundreds of people now live underground in the sewer system…”

See more photos here.

You can learn more about these newest interventions on his website and on Facebook. (via StreetArtNews, “This Isn’t Happiness“)