DonaMajicShow

snuh: felipezee:maryhadalittledeer deer. what are you doing?...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:29:12 -0500

snuh:

felipezee:maryhadalittledeer

deer. what are you doing? you are not pig. you don’t belong in bun. you are deer.

snuh: ready-ok:

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:16:26 -0500

snuh:

ready-ok:

twink: this isn’t happiness. - Lou Reed and The Raven

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:14:43 -0500

twink:

this isn’t happiness. - Lou Reed and The Raven

snuh: (via rrrick) very nicely done!

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:56:10 -0500

snuh:

(via rrrick)

very nicely done!

If I refuse to make a meal today, how can I eat tomorrow?

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:40:20 -0500

"Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never..."

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:34:56 -0500

“Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”

- Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (via bridgettelizabeth) (via furchesl) (via miianwilson)

——————————————————————————————

The reason I lived at a Buddhist monastery, jumped off a 60ft cliff, ran across a freeway carrying a bicycle, tramped over the summer, have consistently taken a different route to school everyday (regardless the subtle changes), wear opposing argyle socks, am planning to join a Buddhist Peace Corps upon graduation, read volumes of magical realism, classical ficition, science-fiction, atheistic/agnostic/and religious philosophies, physics, near-Eastern apocalyptic Judaism, Taoist/Buddhist sutras, enjoy small pleasures like sitting in a warm bathtub that’s far too small for me, talking with trees and giving them names, petting my cat, laughing when cars cut me off, seeing the game for what it is, conversations with Trevor, the cathartic purge of tumblr…

(DMS)

Trev took this the other day on campus.

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:48:26 -0500

Trev took this the other day on campus.

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have..."

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:56:55 -0500

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid. — Marcus Aurelius”

- (via endlessforms) (via miianwilson)

The Make-Believable Meaner Magician (My Personal Theory on Film)

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:51:00 -0500

summary: That “magic” we ascribe to film is real though perhaps not tangible. It is meaningful only to the extent that that we make it meaningful. We might choose to disbelieve in certain realities/truths depicted onscreen simply because they have no existential reference to the external world. Truth, however, is not merely a rolodex of cold facts, but also gains its meaning in relation to the quality of values presented onscreen. We can be cinematic skeptics or believers. In the end, however, we choose to see heaven, hell or purgatory in all of the films we watch; chalk them up as rubbish or revere them as sacrosanct.

theoreticians: Immanuel Kant, Werner Heisenberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Schatz, Franz Kafka, Stephen Prince

film practitioners: Georges Méliès, Ingmar Bergman, Kim Ki-duk, Michel Gondry

buzz words/phrases: magical realism, “believing is seeing,” reality is perception, from skeptic to believer

view of text: hides or reveals truths/meaning according to the sensitivity, imagination and active level of participation of the spectator.

view of spectator: may or may not believe in the realities depicted onscreen or see textual truths as meaningful because of cultural biases. Nevertheless, can uncover truths the creator did not intend.

view of creator: is the “make-believable meaner magician”—one who intends for subtle truths to be found within a text and hopes to change others by persuasion from disbelieving skeptics to zealous believers.

view of “reality”: If we recast our customary notion of what we think reality is, widen its breadth beyond scientific concretes, we will find that the term “reality” refers not just to existential objects, but embraces both visible and invisible worlds of perception. This means that the imagination is just as real, if not more so, than what is visible to the naked eye. Although we may not always believe in the realities beyond our physical grasp, they are there, just like the intangible qualities of number and feelings, waiting for us to awaken to them, waiting for us to acquire the eyes to see and ears to hear.

determinant: extracting meaning where perhaps the meaner did not mean to mean…know what I mean?

transcendence: Atheists and agnostics are often skeptical about the reality of things like God, mermaids and ferries because they limit their definition of “reality” to scientific concretes. Theirs is the cold and sterile maxim, “Seeing is believing.” Film, however, has the power to make us all believers in what we once thought was supernatural, impossible, absurd or just plain wrong. If we can cinematically learn to play “make-believe,” then we can think up worlds and beings not yet extant that might one day become living realities. Film not only can convert us to believe in the magical realities beyond our physical grasp, but reveals that with enough imagination “believing is seeing.”

bête noir: those who deny the power of imagination and magic.

optimisto: (via oceanofmind)

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:37:28 -0500

optimisto:

(via oceanofmind)

How People Become Gay Good friend, Chris Duce, made this.

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:52:13 -0500

How People Become Gay

Good friend, Chris Duce, made this.

Soviet Montage Theory: From Militant Propaganda to Psychological Healing

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:48:00 -0500

(Sergei Eisenstein)

Lenin’s declaration that “The cinema is for us the most important of the arts” was a precursory dictum to the rise of Soviet cinema that carried profound political implications on how the motion-picture medium could unify a large, discordant nation (Taubman 51). Soviets during the early twentieth century viewed film as an extremely powerful, propagandist tool through which Marx’s Das Kapital could proliferate and ultimately unite their nation under the Communist Party. A pledge to thus cement the proletariat ideology in celluloid—with particular emphasis on social reform—came through the use of montage. Soviet montage theory, as it was later coined, was an extremely influential method of filmmaking that relied heavily upon the juxtaposition of images to create meaning, viz. editing.

For many of the early Soviet filmmakers, editing was the essence of the cinema based on the psychology of perception and Marxist dialectic. One such filmmaker and notable theoretician, Sergei Eisenstein, was convinced that the cinema could manipulate time and space to create new meanings that would bolster his vision of the Soviet Party. In his essay, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” he argues that “montage is conflict” and “art is propaganda,” a unique style reputable to Eisenstein that he believed would subsidize the arts completely, free artists from the shackles of bosses and budgets, intellectually guide spectators to decry capitalist ideology, and ultimately usher in Marx’s Kapital to bring about social reform (Braudy & Cohen 23).

Although Eisenstein’s flamboyant filmic style initially won him favor from the Soviet Party and even greatly influenced how other filmmakers approached the medium, major paradigm shifts occurred in his country that arguably caused future Russian filmmakers to wholly divorce from his methodology of filmmaking. The particular interest of this study is to ponder the impacts of Soviet montage theory, first as Eisenstein applied it using the cinema as a propagandist ruse, and second as contemporary Russian filmmakers apply it using the cinema as a psychological, cathartic tool to explore their country’s repressed consciousness. To give partial scaffolding to this comparative study, an examination of two of Eisenstein’s controversial films—“Strike” and “Ivan the Terrible, Part 2”—will be juxtaposed against a post-Khrushchev Thaw picture, “Commissar,” and a contemporary, post-Soviet picture, “The Island.” The purpose here will be to demarcate between the presence and absence of Eisenstein’s montage theory, what aesthetical impacts it had on Soviet filmmaking through the Stalinist “freeze years,” Khrushchev’s Thaw period, the openness movements of perestroika and glasnost, and how film as militant propaganda ultimately transformed in post-Soviet Russia to film as psychological healing. The study will begin with a brief overture of the origins of Eisenstein’s theory, afterwards which will exhibit its operations and purposes in his first film, “Strike.”

Like many young filmmakers during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Eisenstein found exhilaration in the radical transformation of film in which traditional modes of artistic expression were abandoned in favor of experimental, avant-garde methods. He and many other revered exponents of Soviet cinema, including Kuleshov, Vertov and Pudovkin, “considered themselves radical in the sense of advocating a decisive break with the bourgeois notions of art” (Kenez 416). In the climes of this creative freedom, Eisenstein’s artistic aptitude drew heavily upon Hegelian dialectics and the Kuleshov experiments to formulate his theory of “the montage of attractions” which intellectually guided spectators into a “desired mood” (Eisenstein 77). Film, he believed, offered the best medium to develop his theory that could communicate abstract, intellectual or emotionally charged meanings through the juxtaposition of two concrete images, a + b = c. Meaning is not inherent in either image (a or b) but in their “collision”—the relationship between the two that creates a third abstract in the spectator’s mind. Ostensibly, then, “Marx’s Das Kapital or any equally abstract work could be made into a film” (Newcomb 471). In addition to guiding the spectator’s attention from one point of the narrative to the next, his theory was used to “control rhythm, to create metaphors, and to make rhetorical points” that enhanced the proletariat image (Bordwell 9). For Eisenstein, film existed strictly as a tool for social change rather than for entertainment.

In his first film about the rise of the working class man in pre-revolutionary Russia, “Strike” (1925) exemplifies Eisenstein’s montage theory in ways that “depart from traditional narrative and the idealization of individual heroes” and instead addresses broad social issues such as collectivism versus individualism, slave-wage mentalities, corporate fat-cats, and the worker’s paradise ideology (Briley 527). Based on the 1912 factory strike in Tsarist Russia, the story is a somewhat exaggerated recreation of a group of factory workers who resort to domestic violence in order to protest harsh working conditions. With emphasis on “types such as the organizer, worker, spy, foreman, and manager,” Eisenstein carefully crafts a “mood [for] his audience with metaphors” that are rapidly placed side by side, “cross-cutting between the violent suppression of the strike and the butchering of animals in a slaughter house” (527). Pigs, geese, ducks and kittens are also superimposed over administrative hacks that give the impression of their animalistic, non-rational nature. The juxtaposition of these types of images no doubt deprecates commercial ideology, calls for social reform, and seeks to place power back into the hands of the proletariat. More of this explosive, fast-paced, and propagandist style of montage editing will later be seen in Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), especially during the hypnotic Odessa Steps sequence.

Although later film theoreticians like Andre Bazin would criticize his collision theory calling it a “surrender to chaos,” Eisenstein’s colleague Grigori Kozintsev will have told directors “anything we’ve been doing up till now is mere childish nonsense” (Braudy & Cohen 41, Barna 3). Indeed, these revolutionaries were strongly committed to their ideas on film and saw them as the saving tools to unite their country. But contrary to the sanguine heyday of Eisenstein’s avant-garde progressive experimentation and his efforts to expand the vocabulary of film language and facilitate the goals of Soviet Marxism, his country became increasingly under control of the State Party in the 1930’s “which extolled socialist realism as the prescribed art form for Soviet writers, artists, and filmmakers” (Briley 531). Social Realist art was derived from the implacable politics of the Cultural Revolution of 1928-32 which upheld precise ideological formulations that “no filmmaker could possibly satisfy” (Kenez from Nowell-Smith 389). These were films that bolstered the Party’s leadership in social affairs and “had to be given absolute monopoly, for it had to convince the audience that it alone depicted the world as it really was” (390). Eisenstein’s montage theory was accused under Stalinist rule of being too subjective, ambivalent, inaccessible to the masses, and not meeting the dictates of the State. Since Stalin himself was the supreme censor who gave his stamp of approval or disapproval on all Soviet films, many filmmakers like Eisenstein who used intellectual montage were either “coerced to come up with principles and methods that would be suitable for the new order” or be banned from making films altogether (389).

Eisenstein’s last film, “The Ivan Trilogy: Ivan the Terrible Part 2” found itself in the latter category. The Party’s Central Committee criticized its adverse depictions of the Stalin regime, noting that Eisenstein had “concealed deep inside the narrative” subtle traces of anti-Stalin propaganda and had “betrayed his ignorance of historical fact by showing the progressive bodyguard of Ivan the Terrible as a degenerate band rather like the Ku Klux Klan, and Ivan the Terrible himself, who was a man of strong will and character, as weak and indecisive, somewhat like Hamlet” (Platt 296, Thompson 43). Many more production freezes would occur throughout the Stalinist years that virtually denunciated and politicized every aspect of Soviet montage theory, individual style and destroyed the talent of great artists. Peter Kenez notes that these were indeed the “ironies of the cultural revolution that the more radical and leftist the artist was, the more likely he was to suffer” (416). And it was true. The brilliant originality of Vertov, Dovzhenko, and Pudovkin was suffocated and soon vanquished. Kozintsev and Trauberg became increasingly more conservative, and Kuleshov stopped making films altogether (Kenez from Nowell-Smith 393). As Ron Briley observed, Eisenstein’s “artistic revolution was over!” (531). His controversial “Ivan the Terrible, Part 2” and others like it would not be released till the mid-1950’s Thaw period following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes.

A close view of the post-Stalin “Thaw”—a period that “implied the sharpest break with dogmas in force for a quarter century more” and a time when censorship laws were partially reversed—will help verify the ways in which Eisensteinian montage theory lost its propagandist edge and started to lean more towards psychological healing (Stillman 12). Indeed, Khrushchev’s Thaw would initiate irreversible transformation for filmmakers to explore their country’s repressed aesthetical liberties, thus giving a new purpose for the film medium: to voyeur back upon the social injustices hid from public view during the darkness of the Stalin era and to “depart from the lacquered unreality of Social Realism to tell cautious truths about the poverty of the village life or the real sacrifices of the war, and imply that the Soviet common man, not Stalin, had defeated Hitler” (Taubman 786). These “Soviet New Wave” pictures were not too dissimilar from the films of Italian Neorealism which both called “for ‘truth’ and ‘sincerity’ in art and renewed focus on individual human beings” (Johnson from Nowell-Smith 641). They were the types of films that “altered viewers’ expectations about verisimilitude in film” and emerged at a “time of constant conflict, debate, and controversy, during which a handful of filmmakers managed to snatch an often partial victory from the old guard and the reactionary forces ranged against them” (Taubman 786, Woll 66).

One such filmmaker, Aleksandr Askoldov, had attempted to “snatch” victory during the political climes of 1967’s tail-end Thaw period with his film “Commissar”—the story of a militant female officer , Vavilova, who enlists in the Red Army Calvary while pregnant during the Soviet Civil War (1917-1922). Compared to Eisenstein’s explosive editing style which juxtaposed a different image every four or five seconds, the pacing of “Commissar” is deliberately slow, surreal and methodical. It even seems to go against Eisenstein’s propagandist vision of film as it challenges the patriotism of the Soviet Civil War and its alleged laudability. As such, Askoldov explores more the morality of his country’s past through the depicted Vavilova who wrestles with her allegiance to maternity versus loyalty to country. The film was later shelved not only because of its ruthless portrayal of a female Commissar who ultimately leaves her baby with a Jewish family during the Revolution, but also for its presentation of Jews who were displayed “more sympathetically than the Communist heroine” (Johnson from Nowell-Smith 645). Anything that even seemed to criticize the war efforts, the failure of Communism or paint the Soviet past in lugubrious colors, as was found in other Thaw pictures like Vladimir Naumov’s “A Nasty Tale” (1965) or Iurii Ilenko’s “A Spring for the Thirsty” (1965), were extremely sensitive, if not exactly taboo, for Party leaders. Josephine Woll stresses that…

“…filmmakers had to be wary of presenting the war itself in an unpatriotic or “un-heroic” manner that would belittle the achievements of the Soviet people and its fighting forces. Even cautious suggestions that life was not perfect in contemporary Soviet society, that poverty, misery, bureaucratic incompetence, and technological backwardness still existed, and that life down on the collective farm was often far from idyllic, were usually met with fierce and indignant rebuttals” (65).

Askoldov and many directors like him were tormented with merciless demands of reediting “to make their work more optimistic, patriotic, truthful, and ideologically acceptable” since a lot of what was being filmed mirrored the bleak atmosphere they lived in: “beggars on the streets, impoverished pensioners, economic chaos, street crime, Mafia shootings, pornographic magazines and videos, decaying houses and ramshackle communal flats, and the emergence of a new class (66, Beumers 891). The absence of Eisenstein’s gaudy montage style and its once “patriotic” and “ideologically acceptable” content that placated spectators into Marx’s Kapital had been replaced with an age of criticism and a style in search for a new, more truthful realism. In the end however, that “criticism” served by directors like Askoldov caused them to be stripped of their professions and prevented from making films ever again. Indeed, “Commissar” had exposed the fears of Party leaders. They were not ready to psychologically explore the dark underbelly of their past let alone throw diatribes upon its blackened corpse. As a result, the Thaw was rendered anathema. The ice that had briefly thawed would soon “freeze again in the solid mud of stagnation” and would remain so until the openness movements of the 1980’s: perestroika and glasnost (Woll 66).

During this period, Russian filmmakers were ready to bring reconstruction (perestroika) and openness (glasnost) to their country. The creative energies of Soviet montage directors that were suppressed in the 1930’s were rediscovered, freed from censorship laws and prepared to dig deep into their country’s past by de-Stalinizing it. Soviet historical analysts Horton and Brashinsky remarked on this period saying, “For Soviet citizens and filmmakers alike, looking into the future from the present is necessarily a process of coming to grips with the socialist past” (33). Victor Listov also captured the friction between the Soviet past and present with his remark, “Our lack of tolerance is worse than our lack of soap” (IREX-Film Arts Academy Conference, Nov. ’89). And indeed, the annals of intolerance shaped and fostered through the Stalinist years would provide the obsessive platform for filmmakers to investigate and come to grips with Russia’s past. In fact, Soviet montage theory would be used during this new age to construct a different reality than was known through Eisenstein’s glitzy didacticism; a dark reality that reminisced upon the critical films shown during the Thaw. One question in hindsight that can be postulated is whether Eisenstein’s propagandist methods were any less truthful than were the methods of the New Russians.

Birgit Beumers comments on the dangers spawned by Eisenstein’s use of montage in the following way: “Filmmakers of the 1920’s discovered [the cinema’s] potential to construct a different reality, to build through montage the perfect utopia, and thus made it open to abuse for the purpose of constructing a myth instead of a true identity” (891). But would the New Russians really be prepared to substitute “myth” for a “true identity”? After all, the open discussion of Russia’s true past that was briefly touched upon during the Thaw was wickedly horrifying and without quick remedies. It was a painful and uncomfortable situation for most everyone involved, including the filmmakers. It might be argued, then, that to divorce from Eisenstein’s “perfect utopian” style of montage and instead indulge in “the true identity” style instigated by perestroika and glasnost—not to forgo all of its moral decadence and chernukha (i.e. blackness) to be exposed—was just as equally, if not more, challenging. These “chernukha” films were a “mark of emancipation from the state-regulated norms that always insisted on positive portraits of “Soviet reality”” (Menashe 55-56).

Should there be any wonder, then, why “the difficulty filmmakers and citizens alike have experienced in getting back to the present is, as Klimov suggested, one of being unprepared[?]; thus, as Popov makes clear, they are unable to “create an effective economy” in sync with the radical populism of the times” (Horton and Brashinsky 35, Italics added). With Russia’s mainstream indulgence in bleakness and no alternative perspective than to dive full throttle into the wormholes of their repressed consciousness, Russian “audiences, in turn, have rejected films which offer no positive outlook or spiritual guidance amid the chaos” (Beumers 891-892). To be sure, the schism between gloomy and cheerful art is indeed a precarious and acrobatic dance to master, one that should lead all Russian filmmakers to ask certain paramount questions: “what is the function of cinema in the new Russia? Can, and should, cinema offer what reality cannot provide: an aim, a goal for people to live up to at a time when politics and ideology fail to provide directions? Can, and should, cinema help defining the identity of the new Russia?” (892).

In more recent times, certain films have emerged in Russia that have attempted to answer these questions, and although they make no attempts to exonerate their past, they do, in some instances, seek to ritualistically cleanse their past. One such filmmaker, Pavel Lungin, took on the ponderous task in his film “The Island” (2008). Lungin is a filmmaker with a past similar to his lead character, Father Anatoly, a prophet with a past. Together they examine the paradoxes of Russian spirituality in a sort of theological montage style: one that is altogether burdensome but redemptive. The story follows the eccentric monk living on a hermetic island, who, for over thirty years, has carried the guilt of murder after been forced by Nazi’s to kill an innocent man. The deed bruises his conscience, turns his days hellishly ritualistic, and surrenders him to live a life inside a blackened and fiery boiler room. It is a remarkably filthy place but for Anatoly a sanctuary, a place where deep solitude and daily repentance occur. The deep structure of the film reveals an artist at work who uses a character’s psychological, repentant diggings to get at a deeper issue—a country’s psychological and political past. Just as Anatoly isolates himself from the world and forces relentless restrictions and ascetic values upon his life, Lungin-as-narrator-in-the-text incontrovertibly mirrors his character against the character of Soviet Stalinism.

A comparison between the Soviet Union’s historical film freezes and thaws to Father Anatoly’s restrictions and freedoms is one that Lungin seems to explore quite religiously. On the one hand, Anatoly lives in a literally frozen and icy environment, one that is restrictive, uncomfortable and uncannily parallel to Soviet’s political history. But on the other hand, he dwells within a fiery boiler room; one that unthaws his oppressive, icy heart and allows his prayers to ascend freely into the heavens. Ice and fire are thus integral images of the film that act as metaphors for those historical freezes and thaws, restrictions and freedoms. Juxtaposed against Eisenstein’s collision montage and its desire to place the proletariat in the limelight, “The Island” is virtually absent of Marxist ideology and overt propaganda. And this should be no surprise either since “the disappearance of the working class and working-class heroes from their once prominent place on Soviet screens” had become the norm within most contemporary, post-Soviet Russian films (Menashe 52). Indeed, the cinema’s purpose in Russia had undergone a metamorphosis.

The evidence of Soviet cinema’s dynamic character and transformative functions hitherto shown no doubt confirms the formidable challenges its filmmakers have dealt with for the past century. From the provocative merits of Eisenstein’s “art is conflict” propaganda to the cathartic difficulties of the Thaw, perestroika and glasnost, there is little debate that the application of Soviet montage theory is controversial and widely differentiated. Although Stalin would denunciate Eisenstein in a letter saying he had “lost his comrades confidence in [the] Soviet Union,” scholars of cinema today continue to contemplate the impacts his theories had, “and many critics judge his films to be some of the most outstanding contributions to the history of world cinema” (Briley 535). His theories, however, with perhaps exception of what some might today consider “MTV-edits,” have become virtually extinct in modern post-Soviet Russian films. Theirs is a cinema not centered on the “perfection that had been required of the artist for so long under Soviet rule,” but one that psychologically exploits its country’s defects in a rather no-holds-barred fashion (Beumers 892). Beumers makes it clear that “it may not be pleasant and entertaining to watch modern Russian films which refuse to comply with the call for a ‘positive hero,” but nevertheless the spectator would do well to keep in mind that at the crux of the Soviet New Wave lies a country’s desperate attempt to make atonement with its broken past (893).

WORKS CITED

Barna, Yon. EISENSTEIN. IN: University of Indiana Press, 1973. 3

Beumers, Birgit. “Cinemarket, or the Russian Film Industry in ‘Mission Possible.’” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51:5 (1999) 891-893.

Bordwell, David. “The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film.” Cinema Journal, 11:2 (1972). 9.

Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall. FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM, SIXTH EDITION. Including Essays from Sergei Eisenstein’s “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” & Andre Bazin’s “What is Cinema: The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” NY: Oxford University Press, 2004. 23, 41.

Briley, Ron. “Sergei Eisenstein: The Artist in Service of the Revolution.” The History Teacher, 29:4 (1996). 527, 531, 535.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “FILM FORM: ESSAYS IN FILM THEORY” (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 77.

Horton, Andrew & Brashinsky, Michael. THE ZERO HOUR: GLASNOST AND SOVIET CINEMA IN TRANSITION. NJ: Princeton University Press (1992). 33, 35.

Kenez, Peter. “The Cultural Revolution in Cinema.” Slavic Review, 47:3 (1988). 416

Kuiper, John B. “Cinematic Expression: A Look at Eisenstein’s Silent Montage.” Art Journal, 22:1 (1962).

Listov, Victor. IREX-Film Arts Academy Conference on Media held in Moscow, October-November 1989.

Menashe, Louis. “Buttons, Buttons, Who’s Got the Workers? A Note on the (Missing) Working Class in the Late Post-Soviet Russian Cinema.” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 50 (2001). 52, 55-56.

Newcomb, James W. “Eisenstein’s Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 32:4 (1974). 471.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. THE OXFORD HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA. Including essays from Peter Kenez’ “Soviet Film Under Stalin,” Vida Johnson’s “Russia After the Thaw.” NY: University Press, 1996. 389, 390, 393, 64, 645

Platt, Kevin M. “Towards a New Sergei Eisenstein.” The Slavic and Eastern European Journal, Vol. 48:2 (2004). 296.

Stillman, Edmund O. “The Beginning of the “Thaw,” 1953-1955.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 317 (1958). 12.

Taubman, Jane. KIRA MURATOVA. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. 51.

Taubman, Jane. Review of Josephine Woll’s “Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw.” The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 45:4 (2001). 786.

Thompson, Kristin. “Ivan the Terrible and Stalinist Russia: A Reexamination.” Cinema Journal Vol. 17 (1977). 43.

Woll, Josephine. REAL IMAGES: SOVIET CINEMA AND THE THAW. NY: I.B. Tauris, 2000. 65, 66.

(for more on Italian Neo-Realism)

movielove: kempcartunista: Taxi Driver

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:38:22 -0500

movielove:

kempcartunista:

Taxi Driver

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:57:00 -0500

Donatello

Raphael

Leonardo

Michaelangelo

Splinter, Shredder

Rahzar

Tokka

Bebop

Rocksteady

Baxter

Foot Soldier

Mondo Gecko

Muckman, Pizza Face

Panda Khan

Rat King

Genghis Frog

Napoleon BonaFrog

Ray Fillet

Scumbug

General Trag

Usagi Yojimbo

Wingnut & Screwloose

Raph the Space Cadet

Super Shredder

Fugitoid (this guy was worthless in battles)

Tattoo, i.e. Ehonda

Groundchuck

Pizza Thrower

Better believe I owned every one of ‘em.

miianwilson: alcoholicgifts: racheldee: aloneinthecity: (via...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:30:53 -0500

miianwilson:

alcoholicgifts:

racheldee:

aloneinthecity:

(via fuckprincecharming)

<333333

not sure why i found this so funny. reminds me of fupenguin

——————————————

One of the best things you’ve ever reblogged Wilson:)

(DMS)

Radiohead — A Reminder

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:16:00 -0500

Radiohead — A Reminder

Revelation

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:02:00 -0500

I fear that the common perception of the word has warranted severe antipathy in the minds of secularists, not to mention has become vulnerable to attacks ever since the exegesis of Plato’s theory of “divine illumination.” ‘Empty the mind of all false beliefs,’ he said, ‘and wait for illumination to occur.’ Later, when St. Augustine Christianized the said principle and modern theists used it under the pretext of how Jesus actually taught its operations, millions of devout religious followers—predominantly European Christians—could not understand why staunch atheists like Ayn Rand would write excessive volumes on epistemology that virtually screamed, “We don’t know how the hell you religious people come to the conclusions you do, but you obviously negate the minds’ functions.” I must admit, my sentiments are far too congenial with Rand’s blast against what is considered today a holy tenet of Classical theism, sprung by Plato’s ghastly ideal of how knowledge is gained. Rand said it best in her vitriolic slam against this type of mystical revelation:

“It defines no method of acquiring conceptual knowledge. Such knowledge, it holds, is gained automatically, by passive exposure to revelations of some sort, a process that involves one’s “just knowing.” He becomes an emotionalist, coasting on his past conclusions and the automatic reactions they create, while describing these latter as the voice of God: “It is not necessary to validate your ideas. Instead, take the content of your consciousness, however acquired, as a given, which qualifies as cognition simply because it is there.” This type of thinking completely ignores the nature and requirement of a rational animal.

As brash as her words appear, they are also very welcomed in consideration of how revelation has been abused through holy wars, the Inquisition, 9/11 and continual mobocracy, terrorist organizations that “hate,” as Vonnegut argued, “without limit, hate with God on its side.” I therefore find it urgent to recast the platonic myth and posit a newer version of revelation that runs uncannily parallel to Hegel’s “dialectics.” In his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaftens, Hegel argues that man’s epistemological foundation ought to be predicated upon a certain “repeated action of thought.” “A reinforcement of thought,” as Kant might argue, but the type that nevertheless is spawned from preexisting material, preexisting thought. Hegel saw the human mind and its ability to reason as constantly evolving, and he called the process by which history moves forward through constant acts of thought synthesis “the process of dialectic.”

Dialectic is when two thoughts occur in the mind, a thesis and antithesis, which joined together pop out a third abstract (a synthesis of the previous two). The principle is ostensibly demonstrated with any singular invention. Take the wheelchair for instance. Prior to the wheelchair there was only the preexisting, singular chair and the preexisting, singular wheel. Then some pragmatic-erudite-of-a-fellow who probably received less credit than deserved came up with the brilliant idea, based upon his knowledge of the two preexisting entities, to merge them together and lo and behold, out popped the wheelchair! The same could be said with any invention or train-of-thought, for we call “original thought” is never completely original, but as Truman Madsen posited, “a combination of prior realities.” Thus, the zealous progression of mankind’s history and all of those widgets his mind has thought up, created and grasped has always been predicated upon forming a new relationship amongst known parts, or what Hegel called “dialectics.”

Recall now Jesus’ serene promise that the kingdom of God lies within, an eternal treasure available to all, but will forever lie dormant unless we “ask, knock and seek” after its opulence as opposed to the “type of thinking [that] completely ignores the nature and requirement of a rational animal.” What would revelation mean to this burgeoning scientific community if it meant that inspiration for new thought, or inspiration for new knowledge did not come about through passive, “divine illumination,” but through exacerbating the minds faculties by volitionally adhering to reality and following certain rules of method, a method based on Hegelian dialectic? Indeed, we already know as Lee Smolin claims that “in science, in order for a theory to be believed, it must make new predictions—different from those by previous theories—for an experiment not yet done.” But how can science make new predications if it doesn’t have preexisting theories from which to postulate a third abstract from? Does not all science rest upon taking two known theories, or a hybrid of several proven theories, and conjecturing a third abstract that waits to be confirmed by experiment?

What, then, is this nebulous-to-the-masses but known-to-the-askers-knockers-and-seekers principle that allows for new knowledge, new theories, new inventions and new everything to penetrate the dust of this planet? It is revelation—the pulling back of the curtains so to speak to reveal what was once in darkness. My understanding of revelation is defined as the active faith we have to take what’s already in our minds, think about what’s there, what it means, what others have said it means, and amalgamate these ideas together to form new relationships amongst the known parts, amongst the “prior realities.” This revelatory process is no easy or benign task, but one that requires we maintain the tie between our minds and what already exists out there. For instance, we concentrate on a question, on everything we know about to be relevant to it, keep our content lucid and operative by continuous, conscientious rethinking of what has already been said about God, morality, sex and death or whatever strokes your petunia.

Fail to do these things, allow all the data you’ve so far discovered to lapse into retarded fog, let past knowledge fade, new evidence blur, methodological standards relax, or drift to groundless conclusions at the mercy of random material fed by your subconscious—or “whim worships” as Rand argues—and you will not be receiving revelation for your hard efforts, but illusions of grandeur fed to you by your insatiable ego that desires nothing but glory independent of labor.

twink: Supertopic - .gif it to me baby - .gif it to me baby

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:35:21 -0500

twink:

Supertopic - .gif it to me baby - .gif it to me baby

Kitchen Stories: The Failure of Objectivism

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:34:00 -0500

For a film that virtually has no dialogue, deadpan character expressions and a sparse musical underscore, Kitchen Stories is a docudrama that articulates a good deal about humanity by spending much of its time as Derrida would say “in the margins.” Set in the wintry Alps of Norway, the story is based on a project by the Home Research Institute (HRI) in Sweden that analyzes the domestic habits of Norwegian bachelors and seeks to limit their level of walking activity inside the kitchen. The rules are strict: researchers are sent to the homes of volunteers with large, over-sized chairs to observe and record the day-to-day habits of their subjects without interference of any kind, thus making their case studies “objective” and “value-free.”

If anything, the film wryly challenges the absurdist methods taken by certain social sciences that seek to acquire truth about the human condition from a distance. At one point in the film, the disenchanted researcher, Folke, erupts into a questionable fury, “How can we know anything about our fellow man if we don’t speak to him?” No doubt the question holds much merit, one that suggests that the purposes of a social science should be exactly that—something social; not confused with the methods a physicist might use where removal of self reigns paramount. Director Bent Hamer harps upon the notion that people are not determined like physical laws and therefore need special attention, care and interaction with other communicable beings. They need to be engaged, not disengaged.

But as a docudrama, Kitchen Stories asks tricky questions relating to the delicate dance a documentary filmmaker/researcher must make when inside a subject/object, viewer/viewed relationship: Should the observer be merely as a fly-on-the-wall with zero interaction with the subject? Or should there be some level of interaction? If so, how much? How can a documentary filmmaker/researcher attain visual, historical, and statistical accuracy of a subject without imposing his/her biases into the study? The answers to these questions as suggested throughout the story are partly simple, partly difficult. Let’s first consider the relationship between the determined observer, Folke, and his reluctant subject, Isak.

Folke sits perched high upon his chair and overlooks Isak’s entire kitchen, watches his every move and takes copious notes. His birds-eye perspective allows him, as scientists would argue, a sort of objective point-of-view. Attempts, however, to surreptitiously obtain scientific, predictable data of how Isak would behave in the absence of Folke’s larger-than-normal chair runs amok. In fact, Isak rebels against the study since he believes he was lied to about the reward he was supposed to receive in volunteering for the experiment. Consequently, he intentionally disturbs Folke’s report by doing things he normally would not have done were he not trying to passively gain revenge. For example, he leaves the faucet dripping, turns out the lights when he’s in the kitchen, and most importantly, cooks in his bedroom to escape Folke’s observant eye.

What we see here is that because the subject knows he is being watched, along with personal qualms against the promises of the HRI, the accuracy of the study is stymied. In order for the study to present pure data, Folke would have to be invisible or create a veil that could not be rent. Isak could not be aware of his existence, and only then could his actions be judged as authentic. With this evidence we can assume for starters that a researcher who studies a human subject and later tries to present the data of his/her findings as “objective” has already, by default, imposed a degree of bias in the study in virtue of the knowledge that the subject is aware of the observer’s presence. That knowledge can change the way a subject behaves and therefore pervert the objectivity of the experiment. For instance, the subject might feel he needs to act differently if he knows he’s being watched, or he might get nervous and unintentionally act differently, and the list can go on. Indeed, one of the film’s themes dwells upon this very idea of how people behave when they know they’re being watched. They are contrived, disruptive, inauthentic and virtually not the same as they would be if they were unaware that the eye in the sky sees all.

Furthermore, the film exploits the idea that when a documentarian sets up the camera in a certain location and shoots a certain subject, he/she has already begun in a sense to fictionalize the reality of the matter being shot. The reason being is that the camera cannot possibility capture anything from an omniscient or objective perspective and that any one perspective chosen would by default negate a multitude of others, thereby subjugating the chosen perspective to a prejudiced or limited perspective. Similarly, the moment when Folke chooses the exact location in the kitchen to set his work station up at and then proceeds to record what he thinks is scientific, trustworthy information, he has already started to fictionalize Isak’s life since his mere presence alters Isak’s behavior. What makes matters worse is when Folke decides to sneak off his chair and literally rearrange the common household items in the kitchen, like the salt shaker, that he really begins to impose his bias upon the experiment. Isak soon finds out and is not pleased, thus showing the ineffectualness of the fly-on-the-wall approach.

In so many words, Folke’s study has been subverted by scientific overkill. The real study becomes how long it will take for both parties to realize that the rules of non-interaction need to be broken in order for both to fulfill their basic human needs: social affinity and communication—the foundation that all social sciences should be predicated upon. It is only when Isak runs out of tobacco for his pipe and Folke tosses him a packet that the peace overture between the two begins. Slowly but surely, the two develop a warm comradeship with one another despite violating the rules that ultimately get Folke fired. What Hamer shows us in this blooming relationship is how two awkward strangers can overcome the scientific sensibility that claims that society can be shaped by reason, logic and lab experiments alone and instead fall back upon nature’s gravitational impulses to communicate with one another as the true determinant, at least in one respect, of human identity.

-kiara-: (via defeatinginfinity)

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:53:14 -0500

-kiara-:

(via defeatinginfinity)