the end of man (1971)

giant (1956)

Instead of pre-existing ideas, then, we find in all the foregoing examples values emanating from the system. When they are said to correspond to concepts, it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.

— Ferdinand de Saussure, 

'Course in General Linguistics'

even dwarfs started small (1970)

thirteen days (2000)

"There is no Wise Old Man" :: another in the line of incredibly-long-okay-films containing kevin costner. it's a nice primer on the cuban missile crisis in the sense of historical mental-orientation: for those who know nothing or little on the subject, it will not hurt to watch this film and gather a sense of what one side of this four-sided debate (the United States government / the people of the United States / the Cuban government [i.e.: Fidel Castro] / the Russian Government) was in consideration of. the basic theme of the picture, though, appears to be of the very classical Transition of Times; kennedy is in constant reference to 'the guns of august', a pulitzer-prize winning book published in 1962; this cross-referencing with a (now publicly obscure) contemporary (to the depicted time) text, especially from the character of a united states president, is a very intriguing quality: the scene in which kennedy reads an excerpt from this book is, perhaps, the intellectual saving grace of the entire production. however, dylan baker as robert mcnamara, — especially the moment when he informs the old-man general that the cuban blockade is A NEW KIND OF LANGUAGE and not a ye-olden gung-ho battle, — as well as steven culp's performance as robert kennedy, are really quite good. costner is always costner, and his accent gets silly :: bruce greenwood bleeds into the character of kennedy at many moments, and although he may not initially look and sound like him, when all the military advisers and misc white house columns are gather in a room, sweating and panicking, greenwood certainly reigns the aura of a dignified neo-ciceronian president. there is an overall feeling, however, wrapped invisibly into the texture of the film (and punctuated deeply by the final images) of a, 'oh! what could have been!' had every single kennedy not been assassinated. what is the lesson of 'thirteen days' (2000)? [good] movies about presidents are movies made for sitting presidents.

giant (1956)

this is the best kind of long film: over three hours, in mirror'd halves incredibly distinct, distant poles of tone/imagery/behaviour relating to the other, yet the whole of an immersive poetic resonance ...  james dean's performance is mystic; it's science-fiction unto itself: a classic example of the cinema at its purest, medium-specific, dramatic form :: the capturing of rare and intense presence. ...because he was passionate, and passion holds sway over the universe...  Lots of Texas; a woven texture of the state's founding act of Violence over the native Mexicans,  lots of drawl, lots of cowboy hats :: the performing ensemble, — including a young dennis hopper with a significant role, acting almost as the virtuous neurotic visual counter-point to james dean, — is equally brilliant in its support; never did i desire to not see what was happening in front of me, nor wished to return once it was gone. Fellini-evoking Crowds :: large groups of synchronized people, persons composed, treated as cultural colour; swirling movement and motion. Giant (1956) is the prototype of the television mini-series, so, dig it.

the postman (1997)

this is a very strange film that has followed me since my original viewing of it. don't get me wrong, there's nothing spectacular in its total aesthetic (costner *is* pretty goofy, the tone a little *too* sentimental, the amerikana propaganda a *little* too unbearable, etc...) — yet, I believe, quite a bit can still be gained from this film; especially in the short term. it's important to prophecy :: and here, this is done well: it is a fabric, primarily (abandoned gas stations in the middle of a herzogian desert-scape, the postmaster's name being Ford Lincoln Mercury, contemporary stock motivation books [as if a rare-survived classical text] deeply inspiring the fascist overlord ['Seizing the Way to Win'], the propaganda-fictional president's name being Richard Starkey, a widely-winked to but unnamed cameo by the constantly grinning Tom Petty ['I know you. You're famous.' 'I was once. Sorta. Kinda. But not anymore.' ], etc). // the unique ability to prophecy inherent in the human species, -- not of an accurate prediction of future events, but in imagining potential future states: and in imagining, opening up a psychic space for the reflection / contextualization / renegotiation / new planning / crystallization of present events / spirits / considerations, ... affecting the present to directly effect the "future" ; this is a genuine ability to prophecy, albeit fuzzy in accuracy and where the spiritual-medium is the classical dramatic-narrative. 'the postman' (1997) takes place in a ravished post-United States, 2013. the opening credit sequence plays a montage of 'archive' radio broadcasts breaking the news, only pieces of phrases popping into clarity "...power grid failure... the evacuation... rise of hate crimes and racially motivated attacks... the FBI... and protect their long denied rights... plagues that followed..." :: what an intriguing moment of cinematic-coincidence presenting itself on the april of 2012. this is the pleasure (terror?) of prophecy. in order for the psychic life of a civilization to flourish, it desires and requires a healthy proliferation of new-idea(s) new-perspective(s) PROPHECY. for this simple curiosity, it was worth reviewing.

a personal, mildly unrelated note :: the communities of this post-apocalyptic USA resettle into closed off hamlets. many years pass, many people die within of natural old age, and many children are born. assuming there is no village internet (which i believe to be a vital fight that must be won moving toward the post-apocalyptic united states that will eventually come at the hand of those who lead us globally - perhaps Mesh Networking and solar power generators?) // HOWEVER, assuming there is no village internet nor electricity ... that the cinema is a luxury within these hamlets, and are more a matter of memory to an elder viewer than immediate re-access for the whole community ... assuming they have books, perhaps personal and communal ... and in the rush to evacuate, not every book was grabbed (only the key few). what books would they be? what would a child grab that could stay with them into the journey of this dramatic re-orientation of civil human organization? — being one for the deepest history books: the terrorizing fall of contemplative Athens, the fast explosion of eternal Rome, the dramatic dissolve of the United States. forget hollywood: they're playing a decadent insider's game of low-risk investment masked by highly-tuned psychological-emotional branding, linked by fear and desire, to siphon the blood of the crowded poor's time, labor, mind, and economy. a new kind of cinema must emerge and will eventually reveal itself. the task is to create with a new kind of spectator in mind, which, in turn, will require utilizing new means of communication based, primarily, on a subtle prophecy...

hangmen also die! (1943)

 

This obscene underground, the unconscious terrain of habits, is what is really difficult to change. This is why the motto of every radical revolution is the same as the quote from Virgil that Freud chose as the epigraph for his 'Interpretation of Dreams': Acheronta movebo —  I will move the infernal regions. 

Dare to disturb the underground of the unspoken underpinnings of our everyday lives!

— Slavoj Žižek, 

'Violence' 

forces occultes (1943)

what does the world conspiracy connote?
what is the imagination sensing before reason?
that we can prophecy, -- is this a cognitive mechanism
which helps pave the way toward a cultivated future?

the men who stare at goats (2009)

belladonna of sadness (1973)

the sole means of reconstructing is by comparing,
and the only aim of comparison is a reconstruction.

in her shoes (2005)

faust (1926)

...they watch how other men live so that they can judge and regulate their own lives...

friday (1995)

 STIMULATE YOUR MIND, MAN: IT'S FRIDAY.

awesome. amazing performances; visceral, even kubrick-like. the very few self-reflexive moments of connecting the disconnected character's gaze directly into the camera lens is a nice pseudo-shakespearean touch. the sound design is rich and vivid, giving the subconscious impression of a community in flux around a static porch. the rhythm is based, like most (but made explicit in the introductory voice-over), on the foundation of a normative ("For most people, Friday is just a day before the weekend...") and its variation  ("But after this Friday, the neighborhood will never be the same..."), creating a perfectly succinct, unified, classical-dramatic narrative experience that even the most refined of elizabethan sonneteers struggle to maintain ("But more I cry, less grace she doth impart..."). the element i found most immediately intriguing, and which stuck with me after the principle viewing, was the character of Deebo, of Big Worm, and the tone of the drive-by shooting (even the faux drive-by anticipated some sequences before). Deebo is like a ghost... in a narrative who's world-view and tone is one dominantly optimistic and bordering the obviously comedic, yet staged in an environment of ambiguous social and ethical problems, the elements of this repressed Violence do not disappear. instead of being weaved into the fabric of the film, causing a shift in tone and ultimately forcing the film to become something altogether different [for example, Menace II Society (1993)], — this repression is concentrated and manifested into a form, and reveals itself as a spectre of the Real. this is what makes the fight, and Deebo's defeat, at the end so satisfying: the fragmented archetypal psyche of the collective (each character being a fragment of a whole consciousness) is able to subdue and even become victorious (albeit fictionally and momentarily) over daily uncontrollable social forces.

aelita: queen of mars (1924)

Stella, the fullness of my thoughts of thee

Cannot be stay’d within my panting breast, 

But they do swell and struggle forth of me,

Till that in words thy figure be express’d.

And yet as soon as they so formed be,

According to my Lord Love’s own behest:

With sad eyes I their weak proportion see,

To portrait that which in this world is best.

So that I cannot choose but write my mind,

And cannot choose but put out what I write,

While these poor babes their death in birth do find:

And now my pen these lines had dashed quite,

But that they stopp’d his fury from the same,
Because their forefront bare sweet Stella’s name.

— Philip Sidney, 

'Astrophel and Stella: #50' 

la femme nikita (1990)

aerograd (1935)

forces occultes (1943)

this film is a nazi's fascist-nightmare. seen within a context of a history beyond world war two, the narrative ironically reads like a genuinely foretelling resistance film :: the band of illuminated republican+fraternal infrastructuralists, fighting a 'discreet' ideological war against the german national-socialists.

one's utopia is another's dystopia. it's all down to the rhetoric; of how well one can argue in favor of such-and-such reality :: but does it oppress? is the charm of the debate also an enslavement? or is my oppression, too, a matter of argument? what if systems are built primarily upon releases and oppressions; and some are one, and some the other, some become both, and some, somehow, are also none? the dramatic narrative, certainly, is activated only by an action/reaction, known popularly as a beat, and what etymologically is inferred within the term drama ("to do"). yet all of this is in service to a singular unconsciously itching question :: what is the resolution to whole of the Human Story?

the function of this idea serves toward the styling of the image / narrative, leading further away from the perfection of a content in abstract ('divorced') from its form :: style provides the rhetorical framing in the picture :: the way shakespeare contradicts his modes of love within his sonnet sequence (the feeble exercise of writing against the face of time, to his poem being an eternal monument for his love, etc) one can easily see that so long as "love and tongue-tied simplicity" adorn the work (what Occult Forces labels, "a united front for one cause"), well, then, style is substance.

//

there is a hint of a power-structure even beyond free-masonry —

In masonry, we hide everything from the little people. At the bottom you know nothing. At the top you start to see the global game more clearly. Even I'm not sure of the intentions of our order's rulers. And when I say rulers, I am mistaken. There are no rulers among us. There are only executors. I, too, am a pawn on a chessboard. I carry out a function. I receive messages. I obey. I pass on messages. I respond. [...] It is much more complicated, and simple at the same time, than we think. What is masonry? Groups of men who are unified from the four corners of the earth, wrapping the world in a network of unbreakable links. There are 50,000 of us in France. 500,000 in England. 3 million in America. It's not many. But it's a huge number because we form a united front for one cause. We spread everywhere. We have control everywhere. Here, 300 parliamentary members are masons. In England, the King is part of our order. In the U.S., the president is at the 32nd degree. There is not a country where we do not have our secret supporters; our men, our banks, our devoted groups. And that's nothing. I'm only describing the physical force of free-masonry. There is perhaps something else... A superior doctrine. An ancient power in the world which allows us to push people sometimes towards life, sometimes towards death, as is necessary.

Death? But I thought free-masonry stood for peace?

A certain peace. Our peace.

are these the reptilian shape-shifters of david icke, unbeknowingly? alas, given the situation it is quite clear that spidery jewish international plot that so worked up the nazi estate is even here at work beyond the fringes of the depicted free-masonry; the references to judaism, however, are kept with a kind of explicit distance... at least significantly more so when compared with other contemporary axis-powers hate-propaganda films — Jew Süss (1940), The Eternal Jew (1940), The Rothschilds (1940), etc... and with this distance opens the potential for a poetic Mystery, for an allowing fluid spectatorship (to project one's own bias into the gaps), giving this films its peculiar, and also curious, aura.

KNOW YOUR PROPAGANDA

The film was commissioned in 1942 by the delegation of Nazi Germany's propaganda ministry within occupied France by the ex-Mason, director Jean Mamy. It virulently denounces freemasonry, parliamentarianism and jews as part of Vichy's drive against them and seeks to prove a Jewish-Masonic plot. On France's liberation its writer Jean Marquès-Rivière, its producer Robert Muzard and Mamy were purged for collaboration with the enemy. On 25 November 1945, Muzard was condemned to 3 years in prison and Marquès-Rivière was condemned in his absence (he had gone into self-imposed exile) to death and degradation. Mamy had also been a journalist on 'L'Appel', and on the collaborationist journal 'Au pilori', and was thus condemned to death and executed at the fortress of Montrouge on 29 March 1949.

the end of man (1971)

hercules (1997)

all life is based on appearance, art, deception, point of view, the necessity of perspective, and error.

— nietzsche, 'the birth of tragedy'

in her shoes (2005)

the cinema and taxonomy.

blood feast (1963)

the phantom carriage (1921)

...the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love.

— Slavoj Žižek, 

'Violence'