John Lydon does a fiery reading of modern central London in a dérive from the upper deck of a red bus. He screams at glass and steel buildings, city workers and police. His vision of urban space is an open, shared environment where the new is built in symbiosis with the old, rather than one replacing the other. He borders on the conservative in places, a nostalgia always threatening to take over the anger he uses like a brand. However instead of quoting Keats as he does at one point, he would have been better referring to Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary of a New Urbanism:
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces--the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry.
In the last scene of Johnny Rotten's Tour of London he takes us to a rooftop to watch a sunset. Here should be the temple Chtcheglov dreamed of. The rituals of the city must be reinvented if we are to stop the annual summer riots that ring Europe like a rash. As the decay sets in the mice will come out to play.
"Marx Reloaded" is a cultural documentary that examines the relevance of German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx's ideas for understanding the global economic and financial crisis of 2008—09. The crisis triggered the deepest global recession in 70 years and prompted the US government to spend more than 1 trillion dollars in order to rescue its banking system from collapse. Today the full implications of the crisis in Europe and around the world still remain unclear. Nevertheless, should we accept the crisis as an unfortunate side-effect of the free market? Or is there another explanation as to why it happened and its likely effects on our society, our economy and our whole way of life?
Marx Reloaded is a 2011 documentary by critical theorist Jason Barker. You can now watch the full documentary featuring Nina Power, Jacques Ranciere, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek and more. It focuses on the modern day relevance of Marxism with interviews from Marxists and economists. The documentary also notes the competing notions of Communism, capitalism and politics between the various philosophers.
"Today it is the instant speed of electric information that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development" (McLuhan 1964 352).
Duration: 45 minutes
"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with
which people communicate than by the content of the communication."
- Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan, one of Canada's most influential and controversial
figures, burst into the centre of media circles in North America with
his strange and prophetic pronouncements - "electric light is pure
information" - on advertising, television and the emerging computer age.
Known for his imaginative descriptions of the media environment, McLuhan
coined the phrases 'the medium is the message' and 'the global
village.' These two aphorisms still linger on the tongues of critics,
philosophers and pop-culture makers as McLuhan's predictions and
revelations continue to be proven true over and over again.
Initially celebrated, later doubted and recently resurrected, McLuhan
has stood the test of time as one of the truly innovative minds of this
century. Some of his statements are as fresh today as they must have
been when he first appeared on North American televisions in the 1960s.
"Where advertising is heading is quite simply into a world where the ad
will become a substitute for the product," said McLuhan.
With the help of family, friends, and theorists, McLuhan is revealed.
Deeply conservative, reserved, difficult, uncomfortable with the fame he
sought, this very private man remained an enigma for most of his life.
The documentary charts the course of McLuhan's life and work, his
successes and failures, paying careful attention to the central
principle of his work - the medium. Out Of Orbit also pays tribute to
McLuhan, his message, and the way in which his theories and words have
penetrated and influenced the consciousness of today's media literate
society.
Charles Baudelaire ;
(April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced
notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of
Edgar Allan Poe. This is a lecture by Dr. Richard R. Brettell, Professor of Aesthetic Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas.
Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His
poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th
century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect
it more closely to the work of the contemporary 'Parnassians'. As for
theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the
supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically
espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive
and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of
individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (Linked with decadence.)
and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban
subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all
expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and
ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of
'symbols', (images which take on an expanded function within the poem),
betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential
object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and
Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.
Transcript
If the first lecture was about the Parisian art world and the Salon
exhibitions that defined it in the 1850s and 60s when the Impressionists
were young, and the second was about the city in which those
exhibitions were set, the city undergoing intense and important
transformation during the 1850s and 60s. This lecture will deal with
another vital subject that is a necessary background to the study of
Impressionism, the relationship between painting and writing. Not just
writing about painting, but writing itself.
The entire history
of advanced French letters, from the middle of the 18th century through
the 20th, is one of a kind of interlinking between painting and writing.
Virtually every great French writer, whether of plays, novels, or
poetic texts, also wrote criticism, sometimes about literature, past
art, and often about contemporary art.
The sense that as works
of visual art, as paintings were made, they were also talked about in
highly experimental prose by the greatest writers of their time. It's
something very difficult for us, being late 20th, early 21st century
Americans, actually to understand, because very few great American
writers of our own lifetimes have actually practiced the art of art
criticism.
Probably the most notable exception would be John
Updike, whose art criticism is only one slim volume, but a pretty
interesting one. From Diderot through Stendhal, Baudelaire, and then
the whole array of his successors, the most important and most ambitious
of French writers, have written about art. Indeed, writing about art
is considered to be central to their entire literary enterprise. That's
something that shows in many ways, how important painting was. Not is,
but was. And how important painting was to the whole experience of
urban life, intellectual life, and culture in general in the 19th
century.
We'll talk in this lecture about one critic. His name
was Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867, who was without question the most
important French poet of the mid-19th century. A man whose oeuvre,
whose total production as a writer, is not large. He was very careful
about what he wrote, which he edited, reworked, and made more and more
powerful through reworking. So even his complete poetic works is one
volume, while his art criticism is two volumes. So he wrote probably
more art criticism than he wrote poetry in terms of number of words.
Yet his entire production as a writer is not a large one.
Born in
1821, Baudelaire was a young, ambitious, highly intelligent artist who
decided to make his entree as a published writer, not in his chosen
field of poetry, because he had difficulty early on in his life
publishing his poetry, but as a journalist in art criticism. The very
first writing of any kind, published by Baudelaire, was his review of
the Salon of 1845. It's a review that's utter unremarkable. He was
young, not even 20 yet, being born in 1821, this is 1847, so he's 18
years old!
So as a teenager, he's writing a review of the Salon
which is published, something hard for us to realize. Yet the next
year, in 1846, after he'd gotten this thing under his belt, he wrote a
highly experimental, brilliantly argued, polemical review of the Salon,
which is actually arguing with the Salon, and thinking about painting in
a way that was so experimental and so much about the relationship
between painting and society, and between painting and the state of the
city, the state of modern man, that there had been nothing like it in
the entire history of art criticism. It was an essay that transformed
people's idea of what art criticism actually could be.
Baudelaire,
from that point on, was associated with art and artists very strongly
throughout his career. We'll remember him, especially as we look at
Courbet's painting, as being the poet on the far right of A Real Allegory, that huge painting we already analyzed in three parts, which was shown in his own private exhibition of 1855.
Courbet knew Baudelaire well, and painted him twice, including this wonderful portrait of Baudelaire
alone, reading an old book. We can see the worn edges of the binding.
It's very thick and there's a sense that it might even be the bible.
It's a book that has authority. It's thick, heavy, old, and worn. His
attention to it is complete. He's absorbed as a reader. Looking at
him, we feel almost as if we've invaded his privacy, as if he ought to
be alone, as if he's unaware of being observed as a reader.
There's
a very prominent quill pen in a cheap and ordinary, ceramic ink stand,
on a very plain worktable, with little problems and inconsistencies in
it, like its little turned leg, no money, no class, nothing on it. Yet a
stack of things is there, a portfolio with its little tied string on
the left, which may even have drawings or prints in it, its that kind of
thing. There is a novel, which when you buy new in France during the
19th century is covered with yellow paper. People bound them by
themselves, so there were no hardbacks to buy that were already bound.
So
a yellow papered book, and all French bindings in the 19th century
means novel. So he's reading a novel, and then there's another book on
top of that, which is leather bound and old, showing the kind of range
of his interests and his comparative poverty. We're in a simple room
with no adornments on the wall, there are no paintings, no sculpture,
nothing that indicates he has any money whatsoever, which he didn't.
There's
a sort of sofa, on which he doesn't sit, but almost leans, showing his
elegant long hand, almost looking like a hand painted by El Greco, it
has this kind of long fingered romantic and its kind of touching the
soft fabric of the cushion in a kind of sensualist way. His cheeks are
red, he's wearing ordinary clothing, not dandy clothing, not fancy
clothing. He's completely absorbed in his work, his mind is what this
painting is about. Courbet paints Baudelaire as being a reader and
producer of words, as somebody who's alone in the city, in a small place
where he escapes only from that place in his mind.
Yet that
actually isn't all of Baudelaire, so we have to turn to a wonderful,
tiny etching of Baudelaire, one of two prints of Baudelaire by his
friend Edouard Manet, the painter who succeeded Courbet as the greatest
French avant garde painter of the second empire. A painter to whom the
next lecture will be developed. Here one sees Baudelaire
with hardly any marks at all, as if Manet makes only a few little
lines. It's an etching, which means Manet was working on a copper plate
that had been covered with a kind of gummy substance, and he made those
lines with a pin or a needle, in that gummy substance.
There's
so few lines and it's such a tiny portrait, that it almost seems as if
Baudelaire has kind of wandered by and has left before Manet can finish
the portrait. He's also wearing a strangely shaped top-hat, and he's
facing into the picture plane, as if himself a passerby, as if he's not
standing still, as if both the viewer of the portrait and the subject of
the portrait are in motion. That sense of transience, of being in the
city, out of doors, moving around, spied by someone on your walk, is a
notion that is absolutely essential to the whole experience of
Baudelaire's prose, and of his own particular definitions of modernity.
It was indeed the word modernity and modernism, the modern
world, and being true to one's own time, and being a representer who
makes the essential qualities of one's own time, permanent, sticking,
and lasting for posterity, which is essential to Baudelaire's aesthetic.
Baudelaire thought it was wrong that artists represented art by
looking at other art, and by reading old texts and by creating images
which are in their way, archeological.
His view was that great
art from the artists of the 6th century BCE in Athens weren't
representing Egyptians, but that they were representing people of the
6th century BCE in Athens! That the artists who were painting in
Florence in the 15th century, or in Rome in the late 15th and early 16th
century, were representing their own world, and they made the gods in
their own images, and represented imported historical events in their
own city with people wearing contemporary dress. The same thing with
the Dutch artists of the 17th century.
Baudelaire wanted artists
to get out of literature, to get out of the past, and to get into the
city, into the most modern form, the most transformed world, the social
and physical world of mankind, and make the city into a work of art. He
became a man who is in many ways, what he called himself and the
artists whose work he admired the most, a flaneur (wanderers). One who
walks around in a city without a destination or plan.
You leave
your apartment, and rather than going to an appointment, to the cafe to
meet someone, to lunch at a restaurant, you simply walk to where your
own interests in the streets and the weather and your mood and who you
see and who you interact with, all those accidental things determine the
course of your walk. You don't ever know when you leave, where you
will end up, or how long you will be away. You are like a
truffle-snuffer for sensations in the city. The city's ability to
provide you with hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of sensations,
from which you choose the most splendid and evocative of sensations, is
the mark of your ability to be a good flaneur or a great flaneur.
Now
this idea is so different from the idea of educating the artist or
educating the writer by reading, by looking at other art, by patiently
studying modes of composition and modes of creating works of art, be
they literature or other works of art. It comes from the kind of idea
that what you do as an artist is that you educate your sensibility, your
sight, your response mechanisms. Through that, almost random and
personal form of education, you create a world of images and experiences
that you transform into art.
That notion is anti-hierarchical,
and actually does not presume that the flaneur is educated in any
particular way, but is endlessly diverted and curious. Now one of the
extraordinary things about Baudelaire as an art critic, is the way in
which he uses language, which comes fundamentally from his abilities as a
poet. We'll read an excerpt from one of his short poems called Spleen
from his first great collection of poetry, published in 1857, the title
of which was Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). It was
immediately censored when it appeared because it was so shocking and
evil it was thought to be mired in decadence. We'll see that sense of
decadence and his extraordinary eloquence as a writer and user of words,
even in this English translation:
"I am like the king of a rainy country,
rich and yet powerless, young and yet most old,
who distrustful of the bows his tutors make,
sits bored among his dogs, as with his other beasts.
Nothing can lift his spirits, neither hawk nor game,
the dying subjects gather to his balcony,
the grotesque ballad of his best-loved fool,
no more distracts him in this sickness cruel.
His lillied bed is changed into a tomb.
The ladies of his court, all lords might love,
and yet they can no longer find shameless attire
to draw a smile from their young, wasted sire."
Now
what's extraordinary about this poem, even in English, is that it has
nothing to do with the modernity which Baudelaire thought was essential
to painting. One of the most fascinating literary contradictions in
literary history and in Baudelaire's career is that his poetic texts are
timeless and ahistorical, while his art criticism is powerfully direct.
It's this directness of his art criticism, of his writing about art
and its relationship to modern urban experience, which is so important.
We'll get at this by reading a little bit from one of his late
essays which he worked on for many years. It's a long essay from 1863
called The Painter of Modern Life. We'll come to remember this
publication date of 1863 for many reasons, particularly in the next
lecture. It's an essay about a painter who in fact didn't paint oil
paintings, and didn't exhibit major paintings in the Salon. He was a
painter who in every sense was a popular artist, and a painter of the
spectacle of the city. A painter who used that spectacle of the city in
very powerful ways.
His name was Constantin Guys 1805-1892,
who worked in London and Paris for illustrated, weekly magazines. He
represented people who lived in the city, the spectacle of the modern
city, military parades in the modern city, balls and finery,
particularly urban women of the lower sort, who he was fascinated by and
sort of represented the city as a glittering world.
Guys was
the artist who, because he was not a high artist, but a low artist, a
popular artist, an artist who trafficked in the ordinary or popular, in
the world of mass culture rather than of high culture, that Baudelaire
was courageous enough to celebrate. Rather than celebrating Courbet or
Delacroix, which he did in an obituary written in 1867 later, rather
than celebrating Ingres or the modern painters of the countryside of
Paris, he celebrated a little artist who was not trained as an artist in
the academy and not part of the world of the Salon. That was a
courageous act!
He begins his essay with an entire analysis of
what he calls "the crowd." This is the subject of the modern artist and
of Constantine Guys, the painter of modern life. We'll read about the
crowd, as theorized by Baudelaire:
"The crowd is his element..."
(by "his" he means Guys)
"...as
the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his
profession are to become one flesh with the crowd, for the perfect
flaneur, for the passionate spectator. It is an immense joy to set up
house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement
in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home,
and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home. Just see the world, to be
at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.
Such a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate,
impartial natures which the tongue can clumsily define. The spectator
is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of
universal life enters into the crowd as though an immense reservoir of
electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the
crowd itself. Or to a kaleidoscope gifted to a consciousness,
responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity
of life in the flickering grace of all the elements of life."
This
idea of anonymous, impersonal, immersion, into multitudes, into others,
into a world of sensation separated from oneself, is the role of the
modern artist. What Baudelaire looked for throughout his life was an
artist who could actually assume that role. Maybe the tragedy of
Baudelaire's life is that he met that artist rather late. That artist
became what Baudelaire wanted him to be, yet mostly only after
Baudelaire's death in 1867, the funeral of which, that artist attended.
That artist was Edouard Manet.
Now if we look at these Guys watercolors, they're watercolors about women moving through the cities, the dresses of the women, and the excitement of the women. They are slight, they seem insubstantial, it seems as if they were tossed off in no time, which is another element of modernity that Baudelaire loved.
Then
if we turned to them, with their sort of febrileness, their sense of
being transitory and impermanent, as life itself is. Yet then if look
at the first major Salon painting by Manet, we see that we're in a
different world. This is Manet's portrait of his parents,
from 1859 and then exhibited in the Salon of 1860. It represents a
rectitudinous bourgeois couple, Mom and Dad. Mom has her sewing basket,
so she's the appropriate wife, behind her seated husband, who is
looking rather infirm, and actually had tertiary syphilis so was to die
two years after this time. Manet lived for the rest of his life with
Mom which we'll get to in a bit.
Yet here we see Mom and Dad as
people of incredible propriety, and shown in a deeply respectful, slow,
careful, and private manner. This is not a Baudelairian painting, it
is modern painting and personal painting, yet not the painting of the
spectacle of the city, of the crowd, of the larger world that Baudelaire
loved.
Yet lets turn to another Manet painting, a very almost
clinical look at a particular woman. It's a painting done in 1862, and
represents a woman who we've all been taught to think was his mistress,
named Victorine Meurend.
She was a beautiful red-headed woman with sort of greeny blue eyes,
highly intelligent, she acted as an artist/model, wrote poetry of her
own, was a kind of independent woman of sort of courtesan class in a
certain way, but with whom Manet was deeply in love. He used her as a
model, placing her in many different costumes and settings for many
different reasons as his muse goddess, and as the person who for him, is
his first Baudelairian figure.
As we look at Victorine
Meurend, Richard reads another little passage from The Painter of Modern
Life, so we can hear Baudelaire's words, written as this picture and
the next one, also painted in 1862, were being painted:
"Woman in a word for the artist in general, and for the Mr. G..."
(we called Guys)
"...in
particular, is far more than just a female of man. Rather she is a
divinity, a star which presides at all the conceptions of the brain of
man. A glittering conglomeration of all the graces of nature, condensed
into a single being. The object of the keenest admiration and
curiosity that the picture of life can offer its contemplator. She is a
kind of idle, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching, who holds
wills and destinies suspended on the glance. Everything that adorns
woman, everything that serves to show off her beauty is part of herself.
No doubt, woman is sometimes a light, a glance, an invitation to
happiness, sometimes just a word. But above all she is general harmony ,
not only in her bearing in the way in which she moves and walks, but
also in the muslins, the gauzes, the vast iridescent clouds of stuff in
which she envelops herself and which are as it were, the attributes and
the pedestal of her divinity. In the mettle and the mineral which
twists and turns around her arms and her neck, adding her sparks to the
fire of her glance, or gently whispering at her ears. What poet, in
sitting down to paint the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful
woman, could venture to separate her from her costume?"
Now
Manet, beginning in the 1860s, beginning with his friendship with
Baudelaire that commences in the early 1860s, turns his painting away
from his parents, from the museum, from the past, towards the city,
towards the city of Paris and towards the way in which women preside
over that city for him, as for Baudelaire.
There is a particular and interesting aspect of this city, and of a woman's role in it, which is exemplified by this painting
at the Yale University Art Gallery, where you see a woman, a
dark-haired beauty, dressed not as a woman, but as a man. Also, not as
any man, but as a bullfighter or matador, as a slayer of beasts, as a
person exquisite in the art of the sword, but reclining on a wonderful
sofa, with a cat at her feet, eating or playing with an orange, all
symbols of sensuality.
This idea of woman as man, of woman as transformer, of woman as slayer of man, is made even stronger in this painting,
a very large painting, also of 1862 at the Metropolitan Museum in New
York, which represents Victorine Meurend, the same woman we saw before,
dressed "en travesti", the French word for "in drag" in English, also as
a bullfighter, but with he sword and with her pale pink little poof,
which is supposed to be our draw, and we the viewer, are the bull. She
is looking right at us, and we are about to be slain by her!
One
of the most artificial and idiotic of pictures that one can imagine,
and a painting that comes not from this particular passage of Baudelaire
that we read, but from an essay written by Baudelaire, written about an
artist who represents women in drag, and men in drag, and the play
between the sexes that is such an elevated and interesting part of upper
class sexuality, which Manet and Baudelaire were fascinated with.
These
works of art, this last painting was done for the Salon, for a large
public, and it was painted to be shocking! It was painted to raise
issues of gender roles, their instabilities, and cruelties, in sheerly
Baudelairian terms, and it raised them in a way which poses questions
about the relationship about the modern artist to history, and the
modern artist to literature.
Now Manet knew Baudelaire very
well. Manet was one of the handful of people who attended Baudelaire's
funeral in early September of 1867. Baudelaire had the misfortune to
die to early in September, that the French, as we all know, leave "en
mass" the Parisians, to go on holiday in August, that almost no one was
back in Paris yet when poor Baudelaire died. So there were fewer than
30 people at his funeral, and Manet was one of them. There was an
extraordinary rainstorm that day when the body was taken to Père
Lachaise cemetery, and Manet witnessed it in a painting which veritably
weeps with his own grief for the death of his friend.
That same year in the Salon, Manet was represented by a young follower of his, a painter named Henri Fantin-Latour in this painting,
now in the Art Institute of Chicago. It represents Manet as a flaneur,
as a man not shown in the city, but in the midst of the nothingness of a
primed canvas, but dressed to walk out of doors, one hand gloved, the
other hand bare, holding the glove. In his hands, the walking stick
that will propel him out of doors. The sharp gaze of his eyes, the
perfect clothing that he wears for his afternoon walk. He stares at us,
as if we the viewer of the picture, are part of the crowd, the
Baudelairian crowd that he paints.
This painting was the only
Manet that was shown in the Salon of 1867, the year of Baudelaire's
death. Manet's own paintings were rejected by the jury, as Courbet's
had been earlier. Yet Manet was present as a portrait figure, painted
by a young admirer in a highly conventional style. Yet let the style
not fool us, because what this painting is, is Baudelaire's flaneur,
looking at the crowd of the city as it is gathered in the rooms of the
Salon, everyday and crammed on Sunday, a very crowd Baudelaire had
written about so eloquently and powerfully in his great essay The
Painter of Modern Life, published in 1863.
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Noland.
Born in Flames is a 1983 documentary-style feminist science fiction film by Lizzie Borden that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternative United States socialist democracy.
The plot concerns two feminist groups in New York City, each voicing their concerns to the public by pirate radio. One group, led by an outspoken white lesbian, Isabel (Adele Bertei), operates "Radio Ragazza". The other group, led by a soft-spoken African-American, Honey (Honey), operates "Phoenix Radio". The local community is stimulated into action after a world-traveling political activist, Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), is arrested upon arriving at a New York City airport, and suspiciously dies while in police custody. Also, there is a Women's Army led by Hilary Hurst (Hilary Hurst) and advised by Zella (Flo Kennedy) that initially both Honey and Isabel refuse to join. This group, along with Norris and the radio stations, are under investigation by a callous FBI agent (Ron Vawter). Their progress is tracked by three interns (Becky Johnston, Pat Murphy, Kathryn Bigelow) for a socialist newspaper run by screenwriter Ed Bowes, who go so far they get fired. The story involves several different women coming from different perspectives and attempts to show several examples of how sexism plays out, and how it can be dealt with through direct action. A famous scene is one during which two men are attacking a woman on the street and dozens of women on bicycles with whistles come to chase the men away and comfort the woman. The women in the movie have different ideas about what can and should be done, but all know that it is up to them, because the government will not take care of it.
Recording of one of the many Weirdnight shows on the legendary Radio100 in Amsterdam. Weirdnight was a bi-monthly, Saturday night gathering of various program makers.
Free Radio 100 Amsterdam was a pirate radio station that ran from 1986-2004. It was eventually closed by the Dutch authorities following years of harassment and intimidation.
This recording: Sounds and mixes by Bergman (00:00-30:00) and Exit Frame (30:00-59:00) Introductory words By JT (DFM) & Bergman (Zvook) Studio: Dakafka, Roses, The-j, Onkruid, Lebrain Original recording was done on a C60 audio cassette tape so there is a cut where the tape turns at around 30:00
An informal documentary on Beat/satirical/avant-garde novelist William
S. Burroughs, featuring interviews, footage of Burroughs's public
readings, and bits of experimental films featuring Burroughs. He
discusses literature, American culture, art and morals. and other aspects of society.
The film mainly features Burroughs reading at 'Filmkunst 66' in
Berlin, Germany (9th May 1986) and an interview by Jürgen Ploog.
Director: Youssef Chahine Writers: Mohamed Abu Youssef (dialogue), Abdel Hai Adib Stars: Farid Shawqi, Hind Rostom, Youssef Chahine
Kinawi, a physically challenged peddler who makes his living selling
newspapers in the central Cairo train station, is obsessed by Hannouma,
an attractive young woman who sells drinks. While she treats Kinawi in a
sympathetic way and jokes with him about a possible relationship, She
is actually in love with Abu Sri', a strong and respected porter at the
station who is struggling to unionize his fellow workers to combat their
boss' exploitative and abusive treatment.
The Man Who Crossed Hitler is a 2011 BBC film set in Berlin in the summer of 1931, dramatising the true story where lawyer Hans Litten subpoenas Adolf Hitler as a witness in the trial of some Nazi thugs. Hitler has formally renounced the use of political violence, and the young lawyer sees a chance to expose the Nazi leader's deceptions to the German establishment, thereby discrediting both Hitler and the Nazi Party.The film was given an alternative title Hitler on Trial which was used when the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States aired the work.
Hans Achim Litten (June 19, 1903 – February 5, 1938) was a German lawyer who represented opponents of the Nazis at important political trials between 1929 and 1932, defending the rights of workers during the Weimar Republic. During one trial in 1931, Litten subpoenaed Adolf Hitler, to appear as a witness, where Litten then cross-examined Hitler for three hours. Hitler was so rattled by the experience that, years later, he would not allow Litten's name to be mentioned in his presence. In retaliation, Litten was arrested on the night of the Reichstag Fire along with other progressive lawyers and leftists. Litten spent the rest of his life in one Nazi concentration camp or another, enduring torture and many interrogations. After five years and a move to Dachau, where his treatment worsened and he was cut off from all outside communication, he committed suicide. A number of memorials to him exist in Germany, but Litten was largely ignored for decades because his politics did not fit comfortably in either the west or the communist postwar propaganda. Not until 2011 was Litten finally portrayed in the mass media, when the BBC broadcast The Man Who Crossed Hitler, a television film set in Berlin in summer 1931.
Nice film that looks at the early career of Roger "Syd" Barrett - Cambridge Autumn 2009 Interviews with friends
Richard Jacobs, Sue Unwin, John Watkins, Stephen Pyle, Warren Dosanjh,
Diana McKenna, et.al. Made by Alexandros Papathanasiou.
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist,
playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he
was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing.
This interview was recorded when he was 71 years old, four years before his death. English subtitles are available from the button at the bottom of the screen.
Genet was born in 1910. By 1949 Genet had completed five novels, three plays and numerous poems. His explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality was such that by the early 1950s his work was banned in the United States. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer) entitled Saint Genet (1952) which was anonymously published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the next five years. Between 1955 and 1961 Genet wrote three more plays as well as an essay called "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet", on which hinged Jacques Derrida's analysis of Genet in his seminal work Glas. During this time he became emotionally attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker. However, following a number of accidents and Abdallah's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression, even attempting suicide.
Roland S. Howard was the guitarist and songwriter with the Australia post-Punk Brechtian apocalyptic The Birthday Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He went on to lead a number of musical projects, always with such art and intensity that the majority of people were just to frightened to deal with it, and he never really gained large-scale appreciation in his lifetime. He died of liver failure in 2009. AUTOLUMINESCENT details
personal moments with the man, his many musician mates and his
long-lasting musical legacy - from the genre bending post-punk creations
of seminal 80's group The Birthday Party to the breathtaking edge of
the audio abyss in These Immortal Souls, Rowland S. Howard remained an
artist foremost and a mysterious enigma to the end. From the creators of
cult punk classic Dogs In Space and underground music tribute We're
Livin' on Dog Food, AUTOLUMINESCENT is a detailed charcoal sketch of the
man in captivating chiaroscuro, his art and the many ghosts that
influenced his world - featuring rare archival footage and exclusive
interviews with the likes of Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Phil Calvert, Lydia
Lunch, Henry Rollins, Thurston Moore, Ollie Olsen and Bobby Gillespie.
