Somewhere between Fleischer and Plympton is Bozzetto, whose 1976 satire of Fantasia sliced up animation's tropes and let loose. Rarely screened in revival. Many tangents in Allegro's animation, like other innovations of the 70's, were discarded by the mainstream.  A must see. Here's Sibelius's Valse Triste, where an anti-Aristocat makes wall art while exploring the edge's of Bozzetto's momentary genius.

This revealing, staccato biography of the sometimes mythic retaker of Jerusalem and uniter at times of the Eastern, Arabic and Persian worlds, Anne-Marie Eddé tackles the subject in several phases: dry history, military strategies, religious aspects, myths of both the demonizing and lionizing kind. Oblique at times, Saladin cannot be perceived as a complete narrative biography (events like the siege of Acre are only partly described, stories of places like Tyre are left unfinished) but it searches for deeper meaning with a variety of views. For a time, Saladin's realpolitik empire spanned deep Egypt to beyond Syria and Beirut, and it required an as yet unseen mastery of both diplomacy and risk. Many gestures divided enemies and allies, deftly. Aspects of duty, taxation, customs, even seasonal challenges like winter storms halting sea-trade are laced with personality and conflicts. Poetry, diaries, contracts are all cited to great effect. Several oft repeated tales drive the effects home, including the determinism to die poor: at death he had only a few dinars left. Nuances like short histories of the sultan/Seljuk title, interspersed, are amazing. At times a travelogue tragedy. An ocean of desert at night for a knife at throat bedouin raid, the march of entire cities leaving every valuable behind while others are left untouched. In between slaughter is chivalry, common good will, suicidal assasin sects, wholesale ransoming, pilgrimages, somehow proof humans achieve their sense of greatness only on a vast scale. And in human cost. Extensive quotes from William of Tyre.  The cover above is from the french original.   Translated.  Harvard-Belknap Press.

Saladin's Palace, Syria

Jerome Agel, Buckminster Fuller, McLuhan, Fiore, Herman Kahn, and assorted other characters reinvent the book as the message paperback of the 60s and it sells for $2.45. While McLuhan and Fuller enjoyed long-lasting notoriety (their paperbacks were merely the mass-marketing side of their fame), unsung hero Jerome Agel created some of the most inventive new journalism as portable rapid fire non-fiction. His Signet original The Making of Kubrick's 2001 included photocopies of torn tickets stubs demanding refunds, complaints by scientist Freeman Dyson about the acting, as well as a study of the initial rejection days after the film's release by established critics. Most reviews are full length. The critical shellacing chapter is followed by one of re-reviews, sudden reversals of critics, a few merely days after their first drubbing. And then, in the chapter "The Good Stuff," came John Lennon's famous claim on WBAI, that he sees it every week at the Loews, and suddenly the tide had turned. Space Odyssey shifted from failed mainstream property to the youth cult charm of the summer of love. The book shadows esoteric data with camera printing reports and detailed imagery that reveal effects secrets. The book came with a bravura 96 page centerpiece of images.

This book from Princeton Architectural Press compiles their various pulp-visual styles and edits them into a sharp documentary paperback, the first of its kind. The first of its size. (including selections from McLuhan, Fuller, Herman Kahnciousness, The Making of 2001). Unironically priced: $19.95

An unusual article from the Washington Post.

This scant black and white masterpiece photo book, like another black and white photobook Wisconsin Death Trip, is composed of entirely found negatives, culled from historical, industrial and governmental archives (the defense industry is well in evidence). Evidence, made of some of the greatest late 20th century images of American photography, is precisely how future anthropologists will asses our near past. Specifically it will be an introductory map to our various archives of visual data which will acompany the factual data, in a time/era without very much filming/taping ability. Each image the tip of an iceberg of thousands upon thousands of negatives. Services might even rebuild motion events from a series or even a single still of an experiment, and discover what really went wrong. Documentary movies will probably be made from stills in the future, tracking algorithms can spot each speed of a street in motion's objects, render them for seven seconds. The blur has micro blurs in the negative. Evidence will come to life. First published in 1977 (the equally great Wisconsin Death Trip was published 1974). Reprinted recently.

Buster's five reel masterpiece was set in in the environs of a local movie theater and then migrated to the insides of a fantasy about film while Buster's projectionist dreamed of possibilities beyond 1924: talkies, transubstantiation and magical motorbikes. His onscreen/onscreen detective solves an impossible crime with impossibilities while just onscreen his lost love does the real detective work he's unable to improvise.

Keaton films a 40 second continuous take of a refrigerated railroad escape hatched exit (trap door), then as the train takes off Buster walks opposite the train's direction, he remains centered, leaping between trains, until at the end he simply jumps onto a water chute's chain, grabs it in mid-air and takes it down to the ground, finally awashed in a deluge. He simply gets up and walks away from the camera as a hand-operated car slides into frame with two men, who are then drowned. The take is obviously a masterpiece inside one. Later, in the dream sequence, Buster is lured up a stairs and exits a trap door that's then locked. Then a wide shot from the ground, as Keaton appears above only as the villain slides into a redlight. Keaton comes to the roof's edge, and leaps on an upright railroad crossing gate, and rides it down, right into the villain's rear seat. A mimic of reality's railroad gag.

"Keaton showed us the impossible to show that it was impossible. Distinguishing between life on the screen and life in nature - and for all that, between screen life and stage life - Keaton defined the form as no analyst had before him had done, marking out its liberties and limitations precisely. But not as theory. He made the contradiction visible. Before Buster penetrates the screen in Sherlock, Jr., he must step onto the stage in front of it."

Walter Kerr The Silent Clowns Knopf 1975

Below images: to prove he's inside the film of his dreams, Keaton steps into the dressing mirror without commentary, then (not shown) later he jumps first into a dress he's suddenly wearing, then (illustrated) he leaps impossibly into his assistant. From Silent Clowns.

The challenge for Mayan scholarly studies is simple: what's left to study after thousands of years, continual looting, a gripping moisture the jungle provides and the wars of collapse and then conquests. Many of these polities of Central America were abandoned for centuries, or trafficked rarely. What's survived in written form from the Americas' (it is poorly yet logically claimed) only literate civilization?  Not much, few codices (books of recorded data) and mostly what has survived the jungle in these forms of glyphically rendered stone and baked clay - a predominance of dates and what appears at first simplified deity or lordship worship verses, hymnals. As in most dominant indigenous cultures carefully studied by the explosion of graduate studies in the last century, the language is recorded in somewhat complete dictionaries per 'dialect' through spoken word translation. Although narrative myths exist in spoken Maya, some scattered in ethnographies, only a few complete narratives were recorded at the Spanish conquest, none are in their original written or carved glyphic transmission, and unfortunately thousands upon thousands of Mayan books are lost, a few hundred even burned by a fearful Jesuit as retribution for locals continuing to practice their local religions while also attending mass. Now Dennis Tedlock has achieved what might have seemed impossible only decades ago, he's brought the first study of Mayan literature to a masterful book form.  Although a blight of evidence might have hindered research, it also may have been a proverbial blessing in disguise. Scholars have had to work with pottery and monumental stela, and both have coded, expressive manners of storytelling; since stela, lintels etc. were integrated into sky viewing structures, they offer more complete understandings of the language's use of time and math, even interrelations between phases, and even some unusual keys: differing perceptions in meaning but not gesture, violating, or perhaps liberating them from the closed structure of western languages.  Using available data, some of which he's translated himself (a crucial one - an expansive take on the Popol Vuh), Tedlock incorporates his knowledge by impersonating unconscious strategies of Mayan and pools a vast array of master thinkers like Coe, Marcus, Taube, Marcus, Schele, Stuart, Aveni, B. Tedlock, Rice, Houston, and Kerr and assembles, in piles almost - into their spheres of specialty, translations of key artifacts and styles of writing, utilizing leaps with data they've already hinted at, but Tedlock makes certain overarching leaps: he states naming conventions across boundaries (a use of 'hereafter' that results in several 'eureka's). He shows the Maya possesed powerful storytelling strategies that any culture would could and should explore, both in literate and non-literate ways, and he extols visual specifities exclusive of translation.  He takes an open risk visual evolutions he's spotting are values that travel along a logical route, thus building skeletons of ideas from orchestrated proof. He includes astronomical data to many entries and it boosts his arguments since these chosen stories' shapes clearly expand into the night sky, some are cleverly illustrated with sky views and gradient milky ways including discussions of decaying orbits, spans of sky appearance, the goals of which are astounding once the language's overarching methods seep in (a spoiler that shouldn't be ruined here). A chapter about Mayan graffiti is pivotal, you can sense the literacy of non-royals, non-astronomers, thus the Maya convincingly hint that their language was suffusive, beyond any ideas (or ideals!) of literacy we cling desperately to in the west. This slight chapter even questions Western visual literacy by comparison. Accompanying the juicy textual discoveries are some exquisite visual strategies possible only in book form - the venn between anthropology, archeology and linguistics - connective starscapes, visually-based translations of both layout and deciphered mirroring. Sometimes these illustrations are maybe a bit asutere, but the gravity of shapes and forms in play and the historical correlations are proven (look below for only a hint): and above too, the cover's bare-bones stela-ish design is a preview of things to come inside. And the number he chooses as a timeframe, 2000, shows how unsensual our millenial epochal stopwatches are, how constrictingly dull our calendrical bookends can seem. Tedlock's book should be read by all slightly interested in the past and future of languages, and he's carefully prepared it for anyone without knowledge of the Maya with a run-through introductory chapter of conventional practice in Mayan dating and grammar. Tedlock's book is a time-extended lingual guide and much, much more. A must read.

2000 Years of Mayan Literature, Dennis Tedlock, University of California Press, 2010

A must-read 43 page transcript of Dennis and Barbara Tedlock's unedited interview for the Nova documentary Breaking the Maya Code.

The study of "emotion" in radically non-Western communities - the kind of places in which anthropologists have traditionally worked - throws light both on the nature and functions of emotion (and of the individual emotions) and on the relations of individuals in those places to the historically transmitted ambient forms that constitute their "culture." As the temptation to put the two key terms ("emotion" and "culture") within quotation marks suggest, both terms are problematic, and we will encounter some of the confusions of Alice's croquet game, with both mallets and balls, not to mention wickets, in eccentric motion.

- from Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion edited by Richard A. Schweder