Václav Svankmajer

Václav Svankmajer 's Alice is pretty cool. The best film verson so far, in my opinion. Bizzare and animated, that white rabbit AWEsome. Watch it!

"Václav Svankmajer"

La Strada

Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) is among the most important films of post-war Italian cinema. It was Fellini’s La Strada, built upon a firm Neo-Realist foundation yet possessing something more—a fairy-tale-like narrative, resonant with archetypal characters whose lives illuminate the basic truths of the human condition—that revealed the full aesthetic richness of Neo-Realism just as it was being transformed by Fellini into something other than a faithful recording of mundane reality. It is this sometimes whimsical, sometimes hallucinatory visual and narrative quality in Fellini’s work that distinguished him from his fellow Neo-Realists and which, even more significantly, pointed the way to future styles and directions in world cinema. La Strada has always conveyed to audiences a certain universal significance which has made it one of the most revered films in world cinema; an artistic masterpiece that transcends national borders to deliver a profound commentary on the nature of the human condition and our most basic needs as sentient creatures.

La Strada possesses a fable-like simplicity that conceals the film’s seemingly unplanned, episodic structure. As a filmmaker who came of age during the flowering of Italian Neo-Realism, Fellini has an unerring instinct in La Strada for creating an often harshly realistic portrayal of post-war Italian society. Certainly the film’s attention to lower class and socially marginalized characters reflects the politics of Neo-Realism and its goal of developing the cinema as a tool for representing and analyzing the experiences of average, ordinary people, an impulse that arises from Neo-Realism’s roots in Italian Marxism. Evidence of pervasive poverty and the scarring effects of war are brilliantly incorporated into the mise-en-scene of the film through Fellini’s art direction and costume design. His use of actual locations in La Strada, rather than the more easily controlled environment of the film studio, and his use of untrained actors in several minor roles, likewise followed basic Neo-Realist aesthetic principles that aimed at presenting a more authentically realistic image of the world.

But Fellini was always something more than a realist. Every Fellini film possesses a certain ineffable poetry, a sense of magic and wonder that can range from the hilarious to the frightening to the uncanny. He is what I would call, mixing literary and cinematic modes, a "magic neo-realist." In Fellini’s films we ultimately encounter a fidelity to something larger and more complex than a strictly empirical notion of social and economic reality. We encounter a highly subjective view of the world, often grotesque and distorted, brimming with both irony and pathos and filtered through Fellini’s profoundly humanistic vision as an artist. Indeed, the unique blend of reality and surreality that Fellini’s films offer, their deft mingling of the objective and the subjective, reality and dreams, constitute the very essence of that often-used adjective in film criticism—Felliniesque. Fellini’s pursuit of his own, personal vision as an artist often made him a controversial figure within Italian film culture, where other directors and critics complained that his films failed to live up to the strict ideological requirements of Neo-Realism. Such complaints had little effect on Fellini, however, who continued to pursue his visionary approach to cinematic storytelling over the course of a nearly 40-year career.

The film won numerous honors and prizes including the Academy Award as best foreign film in 1954. La Strada must also be seen as the product of several fertile collaborative relationships between Fellini and others, most notably his wife, the actress Giuletta Masina who plays Gelsomina, one of my fav actresses and so similiar to my mom...a great performance on her part, indeed, one of the best in film history.

La Strada means "the road," and the film is best understood as a journey taken by the two main characters: Gelsomina (Masina), a simple-minded young woman who is sold by her family to a brutish, itinerant carnival strong man, Zampano (Anthony Quinn). Traveling the countryside in a crude hutch attached to the strong man’s motorbike, Gelsomina is abused and mistreated by Zampano until she is finally driven to madness and death. Along the road they encounter "The Fool," (Richard Basehart) a circus acrobat and clown who teaches Gelsomina that there might be more to life than her servitude to Zampano. The Fool and Zampano are depicted by Fellini as a study in contrasts: the strong man’s sullen brutishness and awkward demeanor around others stand in sharp contrast to the graceful and loquacious Fool, whose free-spirited contempt for authority leads him to taunt and ridicule Zampano. Finally the strong man confronts the Fool, and in the fight that follows he accidentally murders him. Gelsomina, already the victim of Zampano’s physical abuse, witnesses the Fool’s death, and begins a slow descent into madness. Finally, unwilling and unable to care for the increasingly deranged Gelsomina, Zampano abandons her to fate.

Fellini’s La Strada is fundamentally about different ways of being human, three different ways of interacting with your fellow human beings, and thus about three different ways of finding meaning in human existence. For Gelsomina it is the wide-eyed openness and sensitivity to other beings and forces in the universe that makes her a magical, even holy, presence in the film. She, too, can be seen as a kind of savior through whose death Zampano is finally brought to some kind of emotional and spiritual awakening. For the Fool, the meaning of life is to be found in the play of personal expression, the performance of self for others that has made him a star attraction of the circus. This is also why the Fool is such a fascinating and attractive figure for Gelsomina, despite the fact that he ridicules her and calls her ugly. Still, through the "parable of the pebble," the Fool is able to impart to Gelsomina a sense of her own value and purpose in life that redeems her even in the midst of Zampano’s brutal treatment. However, the interpersonal and existential choices that Zampano makes determine that he will be unable to find any redemptive meaning to existence, any purpose to his endless wanderings as a circus strong man. He seems doomed to continuously perform an act that increasingly becomes a parody of masculinity and male strength and that scarcely conceals his basic loneliness and inability to sympathetically engage with other human beings.

Zampano is the real subject of Fellini’s film. Anthony Quinn’s brooding, laconic performance as Zampano has the effect of making the character seem remote and distant; he is often seen only on the edges of the frame, in the background, as in the first scene when he comes to purchase Gelsomina and Fellini places him hovering in the background while our attention is focused on the drama of Gelsomina’s separation from her family. But his centrality to the film is clearly established by the ending of La Strada. Several years have gone by and the strong man has become noticeably older when he arrives at a seaside village where he hears a young woman singing the plaintive melody that had become Gelsomina’s theme. Zampano learns of her death from the young woman. Later in the evening, after his performance, Zampano wanders down to the beach where he is overwhelmed by his thoughts. The final, redemptive moment occurs when he stares up at the stars and begins to cry, signaling the emergence of human emotions which he had long suppressed and denied. But it is too late; Gelsomina is dead, and the humanizing influence of her gentle spirit is lost in the overwhelming sense of grief and isolation experienced by Zampano.

La Strada—The Road is perhaps a too obvious metaphor for the journey we are all embarked upon; a journey in which how we treat others is inevitably the final measure of our own happiness.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (Отцы и дети)

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (Отцы и дети)


Fathers and Sons is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev. A facinating book about two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", because he says he follows nihilism all the time. He also trys to reject the old order. Personally I don't like this character, in his intellectual world he fails to recognize that he is very mediocre, due to the pyseudo science he preaches as true and his morally individualistic character.

Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement.

The Clash - Only Band that Matters (as they say)

I dare anyone listen to the powerful First album titled simply "the clash". I dare someone listen to 'Super Black Market Clash" and not feel insightfull and excited. After these, its inevitable to follow with "Give'em enough rope" the "SANDINISTA!", "Combat Rock" and even "Cut the crap" (not in chronological order)

Anyways, listen to them. In the meantime, heres a cool punk77 page
http://www.punk77.co.uk/

Tchuss!

D.

Who are the Taliban?

Recent years have seen the re-emergence of the hardline Islamic Taliban movement as a fighting force in Afghanistan and a major threat to its government.

They are also threatening to destabilise Pakistan, where they control areas in the north-west and are blamed for a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks.

The Taliban emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

A predominantly Pashtun movement, the Taliban came to prominence in Afghanistan in the autumn of 1994.

It is commonly believed that they first appeared in religious seminaries - mostly paid for by money from Saudi Arabia - which preached a hard line form of Sunni Islam.

The Taliban's promise - in Pashtun areas straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan - was to restore peace and security and enforce their own austere version of Sharia, or Islamic law, once in power.

In both countries they introduced or supported Islamic punishments - such as public executions of convicted murderers and adulterers and amputations of those found guilty of theft.

Men were required to grow beards and women had to wear the all-covering burka.

Madrassas

The Taliban showed a similar disdain for television, music and cinema and disapproved of girls aged 10 and over from going to school.



The Taliban first came to prominence in Afghanistan in 1994
Pakistan has repeatedly denied that it is the architect of the Taliban enterprise.

But there is little doubt that many Afghans who initially joined the movement were educated in madrassas in Pakistan.

Pakistan was also one of only three countries, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which recognised the Taliban when they were in power in Afghanistan from the mid-1990s until 2001.

It was also the last country to break diplomatic ties with the Taliban.

But Pakistan has since adopted a harder line against Taliban militants carrying out attacks on its soil.

The attention of the world was drawn to the Taliban in Afghanistan following the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001.

Tiananmen masacre

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has urged China to publicly account for those killed in the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests 20 years ago.
About time!