“Fellini Satyricon” (1969) is a surreal fantasy written and directed by Federico Fellini and loosely based on Satyricon, written by Petronius during Nero’s reign over imperial Rome. The film’s episodic structure follows the scholar Encolpius and friend Ascyltus as they navigate a dreamlike and decadent Roman landscape.
An English subtitled version of the film can be found here.
By Martin Schneider
Source: Dangerous Minds
George Orwell’s sinister novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it inevitable that the arrival of his eponymous year would be a media event. Decades after his death, Orwell made it onto the cover of Time magazine in late 1983, but on the big day itself—January 1, 1984—TV visionary Nam June Paik ushered in the year with an ambitious international video program called Good Morning, Mr. Orwell that was broadcast live simultaneously from New York (WNET public television), Paris, and San Francisco, with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea also carrying the transmissions if not contributing content.
According to Plimpton, Paik aptly referred to the project as a “global disco.” As the title suggested, Paik’s take on 1984 was considerably rosier than that of Orwell. In the spirit of Fluxus and/or technological optimism, as you please, Paik gathered a roster of artists with less inclination to lean on bleak themes such as Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham, Salvador Dalí, Oingo Boingo and many others for a stimulating showcase of art, music, theater, and video manipulation. One might imagine a band like DEVO being invited but it’s difficult to imagine Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale mustering up any enthusiasm for a project in which it was unironically asserted that technology is a boon to mankind.
The show was hosted by George Plimpton—the John Hodgman of his day, kind of—with assistance from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In a move you can’t imagine happening today, Plimpton enthusiastically names the satellite—Bright Star—assisting with the remote sync-up. We would consider that akin to singling out the dedicated server permitting YouTube to bring you a video.
Among the performances: Gabriel and Anderson combine on a duet called “Excellent Birds”; a fitfully amusing comedy sketch called “Cavalcade of Intellectuals” in which a transatlantic discussion devolves into an interpersonal spat (a gag that worked better in Airplane! using airport PA announcers); a sprightly song by Yves Montand; John Cage plays “amplified cacti and plant materials” with a feather (so great); Oingo Boingo perform a song called “Wake Up (It’s 1984)”; Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky sing a little ditty about meditation to the cello stylings of Arthur Russell; and much more.
By Colin Marshall
Source: Open Culture
What living director has drawn the descriptor “surreal” more often than David Lynch? If you’ve seen, or rather experienced, a few of his films — particularly Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire, or even the first half of his television series Twin Peaks — you know he’s earned it. Like any surrealist worth his salt, Lynch creates his own version of reality, with its own set of often unfathomable and inexplicably but emotionally and psychologically resonant qualities. In 1987, the year after his breakthrough Blue Velvet opened in theaters, the BBC apparently thought him enough of an authority on the matter of cinematic surrealism to enlist him to present an episode of Arena on the subject.
And so we’ve highlighted, just above in two parts, the fruit of their collaboration, with apologies for the straight-from-the-VHS quality of the video. (I just think of the slight muddledness as adding another welcome layer of unreality to the proceedings.)
Lynch’s duties on the broadcast include providing facts about the films and filmmakers excerpted throughout to tell the history of surrealist film. (He also provides several choice opinions, as when he calls Philadelphia “one of the sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists.”) We see bits and pieces of pictures like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 Un Chien Andalou, Jean Cocteau’s 1932 Blood of a Poet, Fernand Léger’s 1947 The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart, and Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée. Not only does Lynch contextualize them, he discusses their influence on his own work. Casual filmgoers who’ve caught a Lynch movie or two and taken them as the imaginings of an entertaining weirdo will, after watching this episode, come to understand how long a tradition they fit into — and they’ll no doubt want to see not just more of Lynch’s work, but his sources of inspiration as well. (They may, however, after hearing all he has to say here, still regard him as a weirdo.)
By Jonathan Cooke
Source: TruePublica
For a while I have been pondering whether to write a review of the newly released Wonder Woman, to peel back the layers of comic-book fun to reveal below the film’s disturbing and not-so-covert political and militaristic messages.
There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up, it’s only a movie!” – as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically.
My argument is that this much-praised Gal Gadot vehicle – seemingly about a peace-loving superhero, Wonder Woman, from the DC Comics stable – is actually carefully purposed propaganda, designed to force-feed aggressive western military intervention, dressed up as humanitarianism, to unsuspecting audiences.
In short, this is straight-up propaganda for the military-industrial complex. It would have looked and sounded identical had it been scripted by a joint team from the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces.
My reticence to review the film has lifted after reading the latest investigations of Tom Secker and Matthew Alford into the manifold ways the U.S. military and security services interfere in Hollywood, based on a release of 4,000 pages of documents under Freedom of Information requests.
In their new book National Security Cinema, the pair argue that the Pentagon, CIA and National Security Agency have meddled in the production of at least 800 major Hollywood movies and 1,000 TV titles. That is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, as they concede:
“It is impossible to know exactly how widespread this military censorship of entertainment is because many files are still being withheld.”
They write that their book “details how U.S. government involvement also includes script rewrites on some of the biggest and most popular films, including James Bond, the Transformers franchise, and movies from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes.”
This isn’t just about minor adjustments, but wholesale collusion between film-makers and the military: “If there are characters, action or dialogue that the DoD [Department of Defense] don’t approve of then the film-maker has to make changes to accommodate the military’s demands. If they refuse then the Pentagon packs up its toys and goes home. To obtain full cooperation the producers have to sign contracts — Production Assistance Agreements — which lock them into using a military-approved version of the script.”
The fact that script-writers, producers and directors on these mega-budget pictures know their film may never make it into production if it does not get a thumbs-up from the Pentagon inevitably influences the choice of subjects, the political and military premises of selected films, and the story lines.
One movie, Countermeasures, was ditched after the military objected to a script that “included references to the Iran-Contra scandal … Similarly Fields of Fire and Top Gun 2 were never made because they couldn’t obtain military support, again due to politically controversial aspects of the scripts.”
One can imagine just how stringent the conditions imposed by the Pentagon must be, if it felt compelled to reject a movie like Top Gun 2, the sequel to the “flyboys with toys” killing fest that starred a young Tom Cruise.
The two authors add: “The documents also record the pro-active nature of the military’s operations in Hollywood and that they are finding ways to get involved during the earliest stages of development, ‘when characters and storylines are most easily shaped to the Army’s benefit’.”
In addition, film-makers are pressured into changing scripts that suggest institutional or systemic problems in the U.S. security agencies.
The two authors observe that producer Jerry Bruckheimer has admitted that the script of the film Enemy of the State was changed under pressure from the NSA so that the wrongdoings at the heart of the film would be the responsibility of a single individual, not the agency itself.
“This idea of using cinema to pin the blame for problems on isolated rogue agents or bad apples, thus avoiding any notion of systemic, institutional or criminal responsibility, is right out of the CIA/DOD’s playbook,” they observe.
So not only are movies critical of U.S. and western politics and militarism almost certain to be off-limits for a big-budget production, but that void is certain to be filled by film proposals the studio is confident will win approval from the Pentagon, CIA and NSA.
And this is, of course, on top of the fact that the Hollywood money-men are themselves part of a larger globalized financial elite that depends on the proceeds of the homeland security industry, arms manufacturers and war profiteers. These financiers are certain to prefer funding films that support a neoliberal worldview at home and a neoconservative policy of warmongering abroad.
As Secker and Alford conclude: “In societies already eager to use our hard power overseas, the shaping of our popular culture to promote a pro-war mindset must be taken seriously.”
All of this is the context for deciphering the egregious propaganda in favor of western military violence, and the portrayal of peace-seeking as “appeasement”, that is Wonder Woman.
There has been plenty of guffawing at Middle East countries, including Lebanon, for seeking to ban Wonder Woman because it stars Gal Gadot, an Israeli beauty queen turned actress.
In fact, it is understandable that the Lebanese might object to a film heavily promoting Gadot as the world’s savior, given that she served in the Israeli army, one that brutally occupied parts of their country for two decades, until 2000, and continues to maintain a belligerent occupation of the Palestinians.
But there is also an undeniable irony to Gadot playing an Amazonian goddess who opposes the militarism of men, and cannot bear to see the suffering of children in war, when in real life she publicly cheered on the Israeli army’s massive bombardment in 2014 of the imprisoned population of Gaza, which led to the killing of some 500 Palestinian children there.
But more importantly, it is not just that Gadot, a former IDF soldier, is now the face of Wonder Woman; it is that the film’s superhero character too almost perfectly embodies the shared militaristic values of the IDF and the Pentagon. If there is one film whose script suggests it was jointly engineered by the Pentagon and Israeli army, it is Wonder Woman.
The film is set near the end of the First World War, a cataclysmic confrontation between two colonial powers, Britain and Germany, each trying to assert its dominance in Europe. The film-makers blur their focus sufficiently to gloss over the problem that there were no good guys in that “war to end all wars”. Instead in true Hollywood fashion, the First World War is presented simply as a prelude (or prequel) to the Second World War and the rise of the Nazis.
The Germans are murderous villains, while the British are the flawed – until Gadot shows them the error of their ways – defenders of humanity. In fact, the film prefers to cast the anti-German side as “Allies”, the humane members of the world community, represented by the U.S. – Chris Pine is the male lead and Gadot’s love interest – and a ragtag support group that includes a Scot, a native American, and a generic Arab, presumably symbolizing “moderate” Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.
The British leadership is trying to find ways to make peace and bring the war to an end, but is stymied by an evil presence. A German super-general, Erich Ludendorff (Danny Huston), believes he can win the war decisively by developing a horrifying gas that will wipe out men, women and children, forcing the British to surrender on his terms. To demonstrate his power, he tests the gas on innocent villagers on the front lines in Belgium.
All of this might sound disconcertingly familiar to anyone who has been following the western media-scripted coverage that has for several years now been trying to promote more aggressive “humanitarian intervention” in Syria – and before that, in Libya and Iraq.
Is Ludendorff supposed to be Bashar Assad, the evil Syrian president who – as long as we discount the dissenting voices of some experts – has twice used the chemical weapon sarin against innocent civilians?
Are the British leaders, seeking a peace deal with the Germans, supposed to be those “appeasers” in the West who have stood in the way of “intervention” in Syria, blocking no-fly zones and bombing runs that could bring down the Syrian government?
And in an even more disturbing, if now outdated, parallel, given the film’s insistent identity politics, is Wonder Woman – the Amazonian who brings peace through overpowering military violence – a stand-in for Hillary Clinton? When the movie was in production, the filmmakers must have assumed it would be released as Clinton was enjoying her early months in office as the first female U.S. president.
The use of Wonder Woman to justify Clinton’s well-documented blood lust–the woman who laughed as “our rebels” murderously sodomized Libya’s Col Gaddafi, saying: “We came, we saw, he died” – would have proved timely had the U.S. election turned out differently.
Those who have not seen the film, and take it seriously as entertainment, may wish to skip this section, which includes a significant spoiler.
The source of man’s evil in Wonder Woman is the only surviving Greek god, Ares, who is hiding somewhere in the human world. Wonder Woman believes she can end all war and human suffering only if she can locate Ares and kill him – before he kills her.
No one in the human world, of course, believes Wonder Woman, and foolishly they dismiss her ideas as lunacy. And for a while Wonder Woman makes a terrible mistake in thinking the German Ludendorff (Saddam / Gaddafi / Assad) is Ares. It is late in the film that she discovers she has been on the wrong scent.
Humankind’s ultimate enemy is not Ludendorff, but the kindly Sir Patrick Morgan (David Thewlis), the British leader who has spent the entire film counseling for negotiations and peace with the Germans.
The ultimate evil, the wolves in sheep’s clothing, Wonder Woman finds, are those among us who preach fraternity, compassion and turning the other cheek. They make possible the killing of the innocents.
Those who appear to care, those who seem to offer a route out of bloodshed and war – those who defeat the aims and threaten the profits of the military-industrial complex – are in truth nothing more than appeasers. Their efforts are certain, even intended, to lead to greater suffering.
Militarism, superior firepower, and an absolute belief in the justness of one’s cause, as Wonder Woman is reminded by her Amazonian tutors during her childhood Krav Maga training (Gadot was herself an Israeli army combat trainer) are the way to save mankind from the evildoers.
There is no time to delay, to stand back, to question or to negotiate. Wonder Woman is outraged by the dithering of the men around her. She wants to be at the front line as soon as possible, to kick ass.
“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” – and all of it is good for business, the film Wonder Woman concludes in truly Orwellian fashion.
Of course, this story – like all effective propaganda – is supposed to work its magic at a subconscious level, where it cannot be interrogated by our reason and our critical faculties. But even so, a few critics – themselves enthusiastic liberal interventionists – seem to have intuited the movie’s message.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a reviewer with the clearest sense of how the film panders to the pro-war sentiments and identity politics of many liberals is the film critic of the conservative Washington Free Beacon.
Sonny Bunch applauds the way the film “highlights the need for the strong to intervene on behalf of the weak and the oppressed, and treats as villains quislings who sue for a peace that will bring only more destruction.”
But he also understands how the film has been crafted to make its war-mongering more palatable to liberals. Wonder Woman, he writes, proves “you could slap an identity politics veneer on just about any neoconservative policy and progressives would lap it up. … Liberal interventionism is back, baby!”
And sure enough, the community of largely liberal film reviewers has mostly drooled over Wonder Woman. Despite dire acting from Gadot, preposterous dialogue and a risible screenplay, the film has racked up an astounding 92 percent approval rating from critics on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.
Here is a brief selection of their assessments:
Dana Stevens, of Slate: “This is a movie about battling evil that pauses to ask what evil is and whether it’s necessary to understand its nature in order to defeat it.”
Mick LaSalle, of the San Francisco Chronicle: “What lingers … is the feeling of hope that the movie brings, that it someday might be possible for female rationality to defeat male brutality.”
Richard Brody, of the New Yorker: Wonder Woman is “an entry in the genre of wisdom literature that shares hard-won insights and long-pondered paradoxes of the past with a sincere intimacy.”
A. O. Scott, of the New York Times: “Her sacred duty is to bring peace to the world. Accomplishing it requires a lot of killing, but that’s always the superhero paradox. … Unlike most of her male counterparts, its heroine is not trying to exorcise inner demons or work out messiah issues. She wants to function freely in the world, to help out when needed and to be respected for her abilities. No wonder she encounters so much resistance.”
Wonder Woman grapples with the paradoxes of military power every American interventionist and Israeli patriot understands. To save the “beautiful children”, she must sometimes rush to intervene and kill with extreme prejudice, even if the other side’s children are among those who are sacrificed.
Wonder Woman wants to “function freely”: she must enjoy the right to go wherever her interests take her. She cannot be shackled by borders in her quest for justice. She is there to “help out” others in trouble, even if she alone gets to decide who needs help and what counts as trouble. And she needs “respect”, and is prepared to force others to accord it to her, through her superior strength if need be.
She will face “much resistance” because others are jealous of her power and her freedoms. They are the evildoers, and they must and will be defeated.
Is it any surprise that in the Hollywood-Pentagon-IDF world of Wonder Woman, the values of a female superhero sound exactly like those of the military men who run the West’s wars?
Now roll on “Wonder Woman 2: Time to Intervene (Humanely)”.
“Eraserhead” (1977) is an infamous cult classic and debut feature film written, produced, and directed by David Lynch. The majority of the plot involves the struggles of Henry (Jack Nance) as he cares for a severely deformed baby in an industrial, possibly post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film’s pace is slow, which is a good thing for those who appreciate its unforgettable atmosphere and immersiveness.
Watch the full film here.
“The Day of the Locust” (1975) is a dark historical drama directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) with a screenplay by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt based on a novel by Nathaniel West. The plot follows aspiring art director Tod (William Atherton) who, after moving to Hollywood, becomes entangled in a community of desperate and deluded dreamers. The film’s exploration of the dark side of Hollywood and human nature is a likely influence on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
Watch the full film here.
“Bringing Out the Dead” (1999) is the fourth collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader (and their most underrated). Based on a novel by Joe Connelly, the plot follows New York paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), who’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he struggles to save a steady stream of victims of a heroin plague in the early 90s. As could be expected, the film is full of grim and harrowing situations but is punctuated by darkly humorous moments as well. Given the current wave of opiate overdoses caused primarily by the drug war and big pharma, Bringing Out the Dead is unfortunately more topical than ever.
Watch the full film here.
By Rich Monetti
Source: Omni
If you’ve never seen Rollerball, stop what you’re doing and dial up the DVD for this 1975 Science Fiction Movie classic. Set in the year 2024, this dystopia puts Bread and Circuses on a violent whirlwind that’s engineered to keep the world’s corporate overlords out of the crosshairs. As such, revolving door heroes are amply provided and give the population cause to question the saccharin surroundings they live in. That is until each warrior meets their predetermined end and complacency has no other choice but to comply. Great Science Fiction but real control is so much easier.
Nonetheless, the backdrop of this dark world takes place after the “Corporate Wars” have bankrupted the world’s nations. In the void left behind, the corporations employ and govern. This leaves the public free of concerning themselves with important decisions, which are better left to “the few” in this standout among dystopian movies.
They also enjoy the privilege – even at the expense of Jonathan E. (James Caan). In the hero class of distraction, E. lost his wife to an executive who wanted her for himself. Paid off to leave him, the accompanying villa in Rome was no match for the rugged, introspect of the world renowned figure.
In this, we are given the vehicle to dig into underbelly as we digest the glory of the game and all its bloodletting. Obviously discontented, Jonathan questions the tradeoff between the material preeminence his position affords and freedom. One of his hanger’s on who serves among the privilege Jonathan reaps doesn’t have such depth and toes the line the system forges like the mindless drone she is. “But comfort is freedom,” reasons Ella.
Enough of the citizenry bought off with nice things, the oversight does not even consider those who may reap much less, because this set up is sure to have losers on a far greater scale. This all sends E. off to determine how people have been so effectively siphoned off as sheep.
Expectedly, the information is scarce – or better yet – properly edited. Summaries of important works are readily available, and in case 24-7 of the game on telescreen gives way to inquiry, the overlords will reset any doubt in the comfort of your own easy chair. “What do you want books for?,” Jonathan’s teammate, Moon Pie asks “Look Johnny, if you wanna learn somethin’, just get a Corporate Teacher to come and teach it to ya’.
Jonathan defers and goes to Geneva to visit a computerized archive. The prospects are quickly eradicated as the librarian is little help, and the system even less. Leaving E at a loss, the willing agent reveals that “the whole of the 13th Century is gone.”
All still escapes Ella with Jonathan coming to a crossroad. “Why don’t you do what the executives want – especially since you’ll be paid handsomely,” she doesn’t get it.
Specifically, they want him to retire. His survival defies the preset odds and disturbs the complacency. Or in chilling John Houseman-speak, the game was created to demonstrate “the futility of individuality.”
Your mind is officially blown. But a simple look at voter turnout or the tune out that hundreds of TV stations afford us and control takes on the form of despondency. Most significantly, a two party system in which the same elites support both sides, and the important decisions gives the many the illusion of choice.
Even so with the two party gaming clearly at our disposal, we are still sold on the stark differences, and coalesce into our corners over less substantial issues. So while we all don’t like American jobs shipped overseas of elite born trade policy, hate money in politics, the never ending improprieties of the big banks and inefficient delivery of healthcare, we are unable to find crossover or a leader able to unite across party lines.
Instead, our only common place involves a shared sense that the other side is mired in stupidity. This even as we see enough smarts among them that they are also able to navigate survival against such a stacked deck. Blinded by the many fictional divides, who really needs to pick up spilled guts or dislodged eyeballs when the powerlessness our elites have created is so much easier to clean up.
Of course, the chance to narrow the divides can be a function of the availability of information. In the Science Fiction of Rollerball, this is diminished by keeping information controlled by offering tidbits or official accounts. But secrets only give rise to the desire to seek out what you’re not supposed to know.
It’s far more efficient to let people think they have a free press, and now with the internet and cable news, sources that rise to the top are the ones providing fictitious entertainment in place of facts.
In addition, the unseen hand of Google elevating disinformation now rivals the wall between advertising and content, which doesn’t really exist, and has always acted as editors to protect the elite.
Of course, we do have our distractions, and the cult-like mass following of the NFL can’t help but be seen as a parallel to Rollerball. The circus though is subtle and smarter than 2024.
Putting aside violence on the decline, a no one left standing approach has been replaced with parity where everyone has a chance to win. Far more effective for viewership, and the Sunday, Monday, Thursday cascade plays right into the American consumerism that one ups Rollerball’s ability to feign comfort for the masses. Or why give people stuff to keep them complacent when you can make them ever in pursuit of the next gadget that is sure to bring unending happiness.
As Brad Pitt says in Fight Club, “the things you own, they ending up owning you.” For example, when Apple outsources production to a Chinese factory where nets keep workers from jumping out the windows, stock options go a long way to allaying the guilt and getting you that Lexus you can’t do without.
But who knows, Rollerball might have emerged because people figured out how to beat the system, and the powerful went back to the basics that the Romans perfected. Maybe, we should be content, and let the elites have their ball so they go don’t go home and take it with them. You know, before they return with something worse, and we’re left rolling over dead instead of despondent.
Watch the full film here.
(To switch off subtitles, click the “cc” button on the bottom left corner of the video window.)
INDIAN COUNTRY NEWS
"It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error"..Thomas Paine
Human in Algorithms
From the Roof Top
I See This
blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
अध्ययन-अनुसन्धानको सार
After the Crash 