Intellect Plus
Art
1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 19 of 21.
- Aristotle sorted drama from epic and lyric by 335 BCDrama is fiction meant to be enacted—on stage, radio, or screen—not merely read. Aristotle’s Poetics, around 335 BC, already set that dramatic mode against epic and lyric. The Gre…
- UNESCO listed flamenco as living heritage in 2010Flamenco grew from southern Spanish folk currents, especially Andalusian gitano life, with older footprints in Extremadura and Murcia. Song, guitar, dance, claps, footwork, and im…
- Folk dance is social tradition, not every ethnic ritualFolk dance mirrors everyday life in a place, yet ritual sacred dances usually sit outside the label. People with little formal training dance at gatherings to inherited music; beg…
- Breaking began in the Bronx before studios sold new styleHip-hop dance covers street styles born with 1970s U.S. crews and later studio versions. Soul Train and films such as Breakin’, Beat Street, and Wild Style broadcast early crews. …
- Chicago Compass Players wrote the modern improv rulebookImprov theatre invents dialogue, action, story, and character live, often for comedy, without a fixed script. Western documentation reaches Atellan Farce in 391 BC and Italian str…
- Jazz dance grew from Black vernacular before Broadway renamed itEarly-twentieth-century U.S. jazz dance spans social vernacular forms and staged dramatic jazz, both expanding African American styles tied to jazz music. Charleston, Lindy hop, a…
- The oldest dated joke is a Sumerian fart proverbA joke builds a short narrative toward a punchline that should not be read literally—pun, irony, or broken logic. André Jolles classed jokes among simple oral forms. One Sumerian …
- Kabuki began with women, then banned them in 1629Kabuki is classical Japanese theatre mixing drama and dance, famous for stylised acting, lavish costumes, and kumadori makeup. Izumo no Okuni’s female troupe began the form in ear…
- Robert-Houdin moved magic from fairgrounds into theatresStage magic entertains with apparently impossible feats done by natural means—sleight, misdirection, props—not supernatural claims. Clockmaker Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin opened a P…
- Silent whiteface mime crystallised in nineteenth-century ParisA mime tells story through body motion without speech; older English called such players mummers. Greek mimos means imitator, yet ancient mime was not always silent. Jean-Gaspard …
- Choreographer entered Broadway credits only in 1936Designing motion in space, shape, time, and energy is ancient practice, yet American English dictionaries listed choreography in the 1950s. George Balanchine took the credit chore…
- Modern circus rings began with Astley’s horses in 1768Philip Astley, a cavalry-trained rider from Newcastle-under-Lyme, opened trick-riding shows at Ha'penny Hatch by the Thames in 1768. By 1770 he filled the gaps with acrobats, rope…
- Egyptian tombs held clowns millennia before circus greasepaintThe oldest known clown figures appear in Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty, around 2400 BC, in socio-religious roles that could overlap with priesthood. Western circus clowns—wigs, red noses,…
- Comedy once meant happy endings, not only punch linesGreeks and Romans reserved comedy for stage plays that ended well. Aristotle called it imitation of people worse than average—specifically ridiculous, a species of the ugly—while …
- Masked Italian improvisers put Europe’s first actresses onstageCommedia dell'arte, professional Italian theatre popular from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, ran on masked stock types, lazzi gags, and half-scripted scenarios. Women play…
- Costume once meant everyday dress, not only disguisesCostume once named the distinctive clothes of a class, job, nation, or occasion—riding kit, evening wear, even swimwear counted. Fashion drift narrowed English usage toward theatr…
- Ten-thousand-year rock art already shows people dancingRock art at Bhimbetka in central India, roughly ten millennia old, and Egyptian burial paintings from about 3300 BC already depict dancers. Long before writing, patterned movement…
- A temple dance renamed in 1932 still shapes classical IndiaBritish officials banned Sadiraattam in 1910. Protest and stage work carried it beyond Tamil temples, and in 1932 reformers renamed it Bharatanatyam. The form still rests on bent …
- Forty-one big Manhattan houses still define commercial theatreBroadway means 41 professional theatres of 500-plus seats in Midtown’s Theater District and Lincoln Center—not every show on the avenue. With London’s West End it tops English-lan…
- Burlesque began as literary mockery, not just stripteaseBefore American variety halls of the 1860s–1940s paired bawdy comedy with striptease, burlesque meant laughing at serious styles. The word came through French from Italian burla—j…
- Acrobatics began as tiptoe strutting, not circus flips aloneThe Greek root meant walking on tiptoe, yet cultures worldwide turned balance and agility into harvest shows, court spectacle, and sport. Minoan art around 2000 BC already shows b…
- Western acting lore starts when Thespis left the chorusAristotle later claimed a sixth-century Athenian named Thespis stepped out of the dithyrambic chorus and spoke as a character—turning narration into enactment. From his name comes…
- English stages barred women until the Restoration of 1660From Athens to Shakespeare's London, speaking roles were men's work; boys played many female parts. Rome allowed some women on stage but rarely with lines. After 1660, England fin…
- Audiences are not one crowd but many rhetorical inventionsListeners in a room differ from viewers separated by screens, and both differ from the imaginary public a speaker invents while drafting. Rhetoric scholars map immediate, mediated…
- Ballet left Italian courts for Louis XIV's academy rulesFifteenth-century Renaissance festivals dressed nobles in motion-limiting costumes; France then professionalized the art. Louis XIV founded a dance academy in 1661 and later place…
- Competitive ballroom split into International and American schoolsWhat began as privileged social dancing now has two codified contest systems. Outside the United States the International School's ten Standard and Latin dances dominate; American…
- Belly dance is a French label for torso-led Middle Eastern danceEnglish speakers borrowed danse du ventre from a nineteenth-century painting review, yet Arabic names such as raqs sharqi and raqs baladi describe professional and social forms ce…
- Pixar's first feature began after Disney rejected edgier draftsTin Toy's Oscar made Disney court Pixar, yet early Toy Story reels stalled until the team rewrote around a quieter idea: toys crave being played with. That rewrite yielded the fir…
- Cel animation built films one hand-drawn frame at a timeBefore computers dominated studios, classical animation meant drawing every frame by hand, then transferring art to transparent cels painted on the reverse and photographed over b…
- Hitchcock's Vertigo invented the dolly zoom for acrophobiaA retired San Francisco detective with a crippling fear of heights is hired to watch a friend's wife—and the camera itself seems to fall with him. Vertigo mixed cool reviews in 19…
- A technical leap that also fueled a racist revivalIn 1915, D. W. Griffith released a twelve-reel silent epic adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.'s The Clansman. Audiences packed theaters for its Civil War spectacle and camera craft, ye…
- Paramount bought Puzo's novel cheap, then remade cinemaBefore Mario Puzo's 1969 bestseller exploded, Paramount paid eighty thousand dollars for the rights. Studio bosses struggled to hire a director until Francis Ford Coppola agreed, …
- An Italian Civil War western filmed mostly in SpainSergio Leone's 1966 epic pairs Clint Eastwood's taciturn bounty hunter with Lee Van Cleef's killer-for-hire and Eli Wallach's chaotic bandit. Though financed in Italy, cameras mos…
- Isolated talkie scenes ended Hollywood's silent reignAlan Crosland's 1927 Warner Bros. musical drama was the first feature with synchronized score plus lip-synced singing and speech in scattered sequences. Vitaphone sound made Jack …
- A crusader plays chess with Death to buy one deedIngmar Bergman's 1957 Swedish film sends knight Antonius Block home through plague-struck Sweden after the Crusades. Facing Death, he stakes a chess match to postpone the end and …
- Tracey Ullman shorts became TV's longest scripted runMatt Groening sketched a dysfunctional clan for James L. Brooks, naming them after his own relatives and swapping Bart for himself. Shorts debuted on The Tracey Ullman Show on Apr…
- A Jersey boss in therapy redefined prestige TVDavid Chase's HBO drama followed Tony Soprano—James Gandolfini—through panic attacks and sessions with Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Greenlit in 1997, it ran from January 10, 1999 to June 1…
- Julie Andrews fled Nazis on screen and swept OscarsRobert Wise's 1965 musical, scripted by Ernest Lehman from the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage hit, follows Maria and the von Trapp children in 1938 Salzburg. Shot in Los Angeles an…
- MGM's Technicolor Oz became the most-seen filmMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 musical fantasy, chiefly directed by Victor Fleming from L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel, sent Judy Garland's Dorothy down a yellow brick road. Three-strip T…
- Ozu's quiet family visit was voted cinema's greatestYasujirō Ozu's 1953 drama follows aging Shūkichi and Tomi Hirayama from Onomichi to Tokyo to see grown children too busy to host them. Exporters once called it too Japanese to sel…
- Lucas built a nine-film saga after Flash Gordon rights failedBlocked from adapting Flash Gordon, George Lucas invented his own space opera. Star Wars opened on 25 May 1977, later labeled Episode IV. Two sequels, three prequels, and three Di…
- Hollywood's Big Five ruled until antitrust broke theater chainsFrom talkies around 1927 until a 1948 Supreme Court case, a handful of studios owned production, distribution, and theatres. MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox, and RKO formed the …
- The Tonight Show still holds the longest talk-show recordConversation-as-format grew on U.S. television in the early 1950s. Joe Franklin began in 1951; NBC's Tonight Show, launched in 1954 with Steve Allen, remains the world's longest-r…
- TV shifted from live experiments to color, arcs, and streaming1930s broadcasts of the Berlin Olympics, George VI's coronation, and Sarnoff's 1939 World's Fair teased a new medium before war froze progress. Afterward, the 1947 World Series so…
- Ray filmed Apu's life on a shoestring and rewrote world cinemaSatyajit Ray's Bengali trilogy—Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), The World of Apu (1959)—follows one boy's path from village poverty to adult grief. Shot with amateurs on …
- Disney's first feature cartoon briefly topped all sound filmsHollywood scoffed that an hour-plus cartoon would empty theatres. Walt Disney spent about $1.5 million on Snow White anyway. After a December 1937 Los Angeles premiere and a Febru…
- Soap manufacturers named a genre built for endless weekday storiesDaytime serials earned their nickname from detergent sponsors, not sudsy plots alone. Scholars usually start the form with Irna Phillips's Painted Dreams on Chicago radio in 1930.…
- Movie magic began with a stopped camera and a fake beheadingIn 1895 Alfred Clark paused filming a Mary, Queen of Scots reenactment, swapped the actor for a dummy, and resumed—cinema's first true stop-trick. Georges Méliès later rediscovere…
- Miyazaki's bathhouse epic was Japan's top film for nineteen yearsChihiro wanders into a spirit spa, loses her name to the witch Yubaba, and works to free parents turned into pigs. Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 Studio Ghibli film cost about US$19 millio…
- NBC nearly killed Trek before Trekkies saved it with lettersGene Roddenberry pitched a Wagon Train to the stars in 1964; Lucille Ball's Desilu backed him. After NBC rejected the first pilot starring Jeffrey Hunter, fans later flooded the n…
- Most American silent features likely no longer existSilent cinema matured between the mid-1890s and 1929, inventing Classical Hollywood grammar alongside German Expressionism and Soviet montage. Unstable nitrate stock and studios’ …
- MGM treated Singin’ in the Rain as a routine musicalGene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 comedy about Hollywood’s scramble into talkies used Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown’s old song catalog. It opened only modestly. Later it top…
- Sitcom was a 1950s word for a much older comic shapeSituation comedy keeps one cast and one setting looping through trouble—home, office, or neighborhood—unlike sketch shows that reset every bit. The label itself only caught on in …
- Metropolis cost a fortune, then nearly vanishedFritz Lang’s 1927 Weimar science-fiction epic burned through more than five million Reichsmarks over seventeen months of shooting. Critics called the images dazzling and the plot …
- Tarkovsky’s Mirror shows a life without showing the faceAndrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film Mirror follows a dying Soviet poet through childhood, war, and uneasy adulthood—yet adult Aleksei’s face almost never appears. Color, black-and-white,…
- Hitchcock financed Psycho himself when Paramount balkedAfter Paramount refused a normal budget for a motel thriller adapted from Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock offered to shoot cheaply in black-and-white with his TV crew—and finally b…
- Reality TV grew from pranks, then denied it was stagedAllen Funt’s Candid Camera began catching strangers on film in 1948. By the early 2000s, Survivor, Idol, and Big Brother turned ordinary people into global franchises. Critics sti…
- Sesame Street treated preschool TV like a research labJoan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett launched Sesame Street on 10 November 1969 after about eight million dollars in foundation and public grants. It was the first children’s seri…
- Seven Samurai taught Hollywood how to assemble a teamAkira Kurosawa’s 1954 epic runs 207 minutes and follows villagers who hire seven fighters to stop harvest-time bandits. It topped Japanese ticket sales that year yet barely cleare…
- Sholay flopped first, then ran five years in MumbaiRamesh Sippy’s 1975 Hindi adventure paired Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan as hired guns chasing Amjad Khan’s Gabbar Singh. Critics shrugged and audiences hesitated—until word of …