Yilmaz Arslan directed this Turkish-German-Swiss drama. A woman arrives at an apartment building in a German city to visit her friend Hülya (Yelda Reynaud), only to learn that Hülya has returned to Turkey with her aunt and uncle because of an unspecified illness. There are indications Hülya was kidnapped by her family. Back in Turkey, the unhappy Hülya refuses to speak or eat. At the first chance, she escapes, heading back to Germany without money or identity papers. Beginning the arduous journey, she collapses on the road, is taken care of by peasants, locates her estranged mother, has a run-in with police, and is thrown into a women’s mental institution. Dream sequences are intercut throughout. Shown at the 1998 Venice Film Festival.

— Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
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Synopsis
Upon returning home to Iran after more than two decades abroad, visiting professor Arash is quickly thrust into a past he’s spent his whole life trying to escape. With an estranged father on his deathbed and a mother who wants nothing to do with her husband’s shady past, Arash finds himself at the mercy of the rest of the family who have their own ideas about what should happen to his father’s assets. Meanwhile, Arash is also grappling with the legacy of his brother’s mysterious, long-ago death. A stranger in his native country, he struggles to navigate the labyrinthine state bureaucracy, as well as the darker twists and turns of a corrupt and violent netherworld.
Seattle Film FestivalRead More »

Naked Repose: A Conversation with James Benning about “Twenty Cigarettes”

Written by Darren Hughes

Published on 07 October 2011
James Benning

“The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than in lone bedrooms where there’s a mirror. People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.” —Walker Evans

“So, have you ever smoked?” I laughed when James Benning asked me this question at the end of our conversation. “Honestly, I’ve probably smoked about twenty cigarettes,” I told him. “I’m a child of the 70s and 80s. Nancy Reagan told me to say ‘no.'” That was almost the full extent of our discussion of smoking, despite the fact that Benning’s feature-length video, Twenty Cigarettes, is constructed solely of portraits of smokers. The duration of each of the twenty shots is determined by the length of time it takes each subject to light, smoke, and discard a cigarette. Benning composed each shot, staged the person in front of a flat backdrop, and then walked away from the camera.Read More »

Plot:
As Japan nears defeat at the end of World War II, Emperor Hirohito starts his day in a bunker underneath the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. A servant reads to him a list of activities for the day, including a meeting with his ministers, marine biology research, and writing his son. Hirohito muses about the impact on such schedules when the Americans arrive but is told that as long as there is a solitary Japanese person living, the Americans will not reach The Emperor. Hirohito replies that he at times feels like he himself will be the last Japanese person left alive. The servant reminds him that he is a deity, not a person, but Hirohito points out that he has a body just like any other man. He later reflects on the causes of the war when dictating observations about a hermit crab, and then about the peace to come when composing a letter to his son. Soon enough General Douglas MacArthur’s personal car is sent to bring him through the ruins of Tokyo for a meeting with the supreme commanderRead More »

Feature film 1903 UK

This was the very first film version of “Alice” and encapsulated much of the “Wonderland” story into a short ten minute feature. Despite the infancy of the film-making process, the production included some creditable special effects and Alice grew and shrank to good effect. The film is preserved by the British Film Institute, although two of the sixteen scenes are missing.
“The History of the British Film: 1896-1906” by Rachael Low and Roger Manvell (distributed in the USA by R.R. Bowker, 1948, 1973) offers this description: (see above right)
“The film is composed of sixteen scenes, dissolving very beautifully from one to another, but preceded, where necessary for the elucidation of the story, by descriptive titles.”
The book proceeds to describe the 16 scenes in considerable detail and also offers a brief entry on the Hepworth Manufacturing Company and its founder, Cecil Hepworth (born 1874).Read More »

The film captured the atmosphere of the 1920’s with effortless ease: this story of two school teachers Kristina and Ljiljana, the former a Slovene and the latter a Serb woman, lost somewhere in the Yugoslav provinces of the north is imbued from start to finish with the literary and visual spice of Dada and Surrealism. The story itself is hardly of importance; what’s important is that the teachers are forever dreaming of a new life in a big city. But – like those adrift on Gericault’s raft named Medusa in that classic painting of the French Romantic period – the important thing may just being on the move in a sea of chaos. The main question of the film is: did the avant-garde movement have a sense on the Balkans?
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It’s a 2012 short-film, text by Theodore J. Kaczynski, made of scans of a document from a FBI Laboratory, about the danger of experiments with accelerated particles:
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After losing control of his car and crashing into a local restaurant, a man loses consciousness on the street. Later, while working on a case, the police’s anti-drug division captain, Zhang Lei (Honglei Sun), realizes that the man in the crash is drug lord Tian Ming (Louis Koo). In order to avoid the death penalty, Tian Ming helps the police put a stop to the entire drug trafficking circuit, but just as soon as the police are ready to make a large bust, Tian Ming makes a decision that shocks everyone involved.
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International Philosophers’ Project 1971

Interviewer: Fons Elders

Aired on Dutch television, hence the additional subs. Debate took place in the US according to this.

Quote:
In 1971, American linguist/social activist Noam Chomsky squared off against French philosopher Michel Foucault on Dutch television … the program was entitled ‘Human Nature: Justice Vs. Power’ and offered sharp contrasts between the more traditional view of ‘human nature’ and what would become a postmodernist perspective … Chomsky, following a rationalist lineage going back to at least Plato, believes that there is a foundational ‘nature’ and that its positive aspects (love, creativity, recognizing and embracing justice) must be realized, while Foucault remains skeptical of any such notion… for him, the issue is not so much whether ‘justice’ or ‘human nature’ ‘exists,’ but how they have historically (and currently) function in society … in regard to justice, he says (this is not included in the clips): “… the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power…” The point of any political struggle, for Foucault, is to alter the ‘power relations’ in which we all find ourselves (youtube user hiperf289)Read More »