Philosophy

Quote:
Correction Please is a formally adventurous and rigorously philosophical essay on the nature of early cinema, made under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain in the late 1970s. It emerged in the era of works like Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall’s Argument (1978), two other instances of filmmaking-as-film-theory to which Burch’s otherwise singular project might be compared. The topic of Correction Please is the development of narrative cinematic language from film’s inception to the period of sound—what Burch has dubbed “the gestation of the Institutional Mode”—investigated through a series of tautly structured segments, including ten archival examples of so-called “primitive” films made prior to 1906, animated diagrams explicating these early works, quotations from Maxim Gorky, Christian Metz, and Lillian Gish, and, most dramatically, a series of five staged sequences that recapitulate and analyze emblematic formal properties of five different chapters in cinema’s evolution.Read More »

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being to be sent into space and thus to a certain death. According to a legend, she returned to Earth as a ghost and has roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Following her trace, and filmed from a dog’s perspective, SPACE DOGS accompanies the adventures of her descendants: two street dogs living in today’s Moscow. Their story is one of intimate fellowship but also relentless brutality, and is interwoven with unseen archive material from the Soviet cosmic era. A magical tale of voyagers scouting for unknown spaces.Read More »

In this adaptation made during the the London Blitz of George Bernard Shaw’s edgy comedy of the same name, Wendy Hiller as the idealistic title character is running a Salvation Army shelter in the East End that aims to save the souls of the destitute while preserving their physical well-being. She becomes engaged to the sceptical, unworldly Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison), a professor of Ancient Greek who discards his agnosticism and joins the Salvation Army to be near his fiancee. Cusins is then startled to learn that Major Barbara in fact comes from a privileged background – she is the grand-daughter of an earl on her mother’s side, and her long-absent estranged father Andrew Undershaft (a young Robert Morley) is a multi-millionaire arms manufacturer.Read More »

IMDB:
An ex-soldier, living homeless in London, is offered a place to stay at a decaying house inhabited by a young woman and her dying mother. As he starts to fall for her, he cannot ignore his suspicion that something sinister is going on.Read More »

»Der Entschluß steht fest, das KAPITAL nach dem Szenarium von Karl Marx zu verfilmen«, notierte Sergej Eisenstein am 12. Oktober 1927. Eisenstein, der mit Panzerkreuzer Potemkin (1926) die Filmsprache revolutionierte, wollte Marx’ Buch »kinofizieren«. Die Herausforderung, die von einem solchen Werk ausgeht, so glaubte Eisenstein, würde die Filmkunst von Grund auf umrücken. Ihm schwebte die Anwendung völlig neuer, von James Joyce’ Ulysses abgeleiteter Formen vor: »faits divers«, »emotionale Konvolute« und Reihen »dialektischer Bilder«.Read More »

A cultural documentary that uses some of the central ideas of 19th century German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx to try to make sense of the global financial crisis of 2008-09. This crisis prompted the U.S. government to spend more than 1 trillion dollars in order to rescue its banking system from financial meltdown. But can the largest financial losses in history really be put down to the natural risks and uncertainties of the free market? Or is there another explanation as to why the crisis happened and what its implications are for the future of our society, our economy, for our whole way of life?Read More »

After a bike accident, the amnesiac produces one-minute shots. The voice-over weighs in on gender, animals and the end of literary culture. An essay featuring Elvis, wrestlers, boy ballet, naked cyclists and the heavenly voices of ChoirChoir!. (from MUBI)Read More »

Synopsis
This famous Chinese scroll painting traces the Emperor Kangxi’s second tour of his southern empire in 1689. Painted by Wang Hui (1632-1717) and assistants, it was executed before Western perspective was introduced into Chinese art. Hockney contrasts the more fluid spatial depictions of this scroll with a later scroll painted by Xu Yang and assistants, The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (1764-1770), scroll four. This scroll illustrates the same tour, but now taken by the Qianlong emperor, grandson of the Kangxi emperor. Read More »

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This interview with Castoriadis was conducted in 1989 by famed filmmaker Chris Marker for Marker’s own television series L’héritage de la chouette (“The Owl’s Legacy”). Eighty-one minutes long, the raw footage originally recorded in French has been translated into English (via easy-to-read subtitles) and edited anonymously as a public service. Here, Castoriadis lays out and examines the contributions of ancient Greece to questions of contemporary relevance relating to democracy, politics, philosophy, art, poetry, economic and social reorganization, and the creative chaos that underlies all existence.Read More »