Propaganda (2012)

A film about the Capitalist world that is presented as according to the ideology of North Korea. It is actually a film made by New Zealand based director Slavko Martinov, who states:

It’s part of a trilogy of films about propaganda.  It was a social experiment about propaganda.  I wanted to make a film about propaganda.  If you make a film about how propaganda works, it’s going to be as dry as a bone.  I had a short list of Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.  North Korea sticks out like a sore thumb.  It’ll be about propaganda in a propaganda campaign, a metafiction.  It’s propaganda-squared.  You can’t just do it and go to a distributor.  After the first wave of people saw it, it blew up.  There’s nothing else you can do but conduct a social experiment this way.  People came up to me at IDFA to buy this film, I said you know it’s online.  I could see them become sick.  Really no one’s seen this film in the scheme of things.  It’s still a hidden film.

There are of course serious flaws in the arguments this film presents. Perhaps the most obvious is the idea that the 'West' is a homogenous whole of like minded 'slaves' without the ability to think for themselves or access alternatives to the horror that is consumption based, market driven capitalism. This is clearly untrue and the presence of this film itself on the Internet contradicts that premise.

Apart from such simplistic dimensions of the critique, the assessment of how media, production and consciousness are a triangulation of reality that only allows individual expression through consumption is not far from accurate in many cases. For this reason I believe Propaganda is worth watching.

Controversial to its core, this hard-hitting anti-Western propaganda film, which looks at the influence of American culture on the rest of the world from a North Korean perspective, has been called "Genius!" by Michael Moore, and has been described as 'either a damning indictment of 21st Century culture or the best piece of propaganda in a generation.' As first reported on mainstream new around the world, Propaganda is allegedly a video smuggled out of North Korea. Brilliantly using this 'fake North Korean propaganda' found-footage device, Slavko Martinov first parodies its language and stylings, before targeting the mountain of hypocrisies and contradictions that make up the modern Western world. In doing so, Propaganda delivers a devastating blow to those who might be quick to laugh at 'backward' ideologies before considering how 21st century political and cultural trends have hurt the moral high ground of the rest of the world. - Review from MVD (where you can buy the film)

Content:

0:00 Introduction
6:54 Creating Ideas & Illusions
16:48 Fear
19:35 Religion
25:00 Beware the 1%
28:10 Emulating Psychosis
31:21 Rewriting History
41:15 The Birth of Propaganda
45:49 Cover Ups and Omissions
54:10 Complicity
58:05 Censorship
1:01:50 International Diplomacy
1:06:14 Television
1:08:11 Advertising
1:14:36 The Cult of Celebrity
1:22:34 Distraction
1:28:01 Terrorism
1:35:00 The Revolution Starts Now

Neil Young: Don't Be Denied

A 2009 BBC documentary tracing Neil Young’s career culled from three hours of interviews shot in New York and California. Featuring Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, David Crosby, Nils Lofgren, etc, the doc features previously unseen performance footage from Young’s personal archives. Click on the image and it will take you there.

The Romantics - Liberty (BBC Documentary)

“Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath,
but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every
part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life
consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living.
A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all.
He would have fared better had he died young.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Peter Ackroyd reveals how the radical ideas of liberty that inspired the French Revolution opened up a world of possibility for great British writers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, inspiring some of the greatest works of literature in the English language. Their ideas are the foundations of our modern notions of freedom and their words are performed by David Tennant, Dudley Sutton and David Threlfall. The Romantics - Liberty (BBC Documentary) Category

John Berger and Susan Sontag / To Tell A Story (1983)

The power of stories, as modes of representation, as ways to understand ourselves and that which we experience as reality, including other people, is discussed in this highly engaging meeting between John Berger and Susan Sontag. Both of these thinkers and writers are now sadly no longer with us on this plain of reality. John Berger died two days ago, and Susan Sontag died in 2004. This discussion between them inspired so many thoughts in me, having found it on the wonderful Open Culture blog, I uploaded it here. Just so I know where it is if I ever need it...and I probably will from time to time.

One thing that struck me personally from this conversation is that the first stories I remember were told to me orally, about members of my family that I never met. Soldiers, farmers and explorers. It then occurred to me that my mother came from an oral storytelling culture - she did not go to school until she was 13, her mother did not go to school at all. They lived on a huge cattle property in central Queensland in Australia that had been in the family for over 100 years. My father on the other hand grew up in nearest big town, (5 hours drive on the sealed roads that had been created by the time I was a child, when they were kids it took a lot longer), which was becoming a city as he came of age. He lived in books and our house was literally a library. I once packed up my father's library to move him, and it came in at 300 banana boxes. That is a lot of books. But my maternal grandmother told me the stories of the bush, and the world that she remembered from the 1920s as a child.

Photograph taken the year before my maternal grandmother was born (1911) in Taroom, the nearest settlement to where she grew up. It was an oral storytelling culture, even when she was a young adult, although they read and wrote, the spoken story was the more common vehicle.

Beastie Boys - Move On Up - The Full Movie

This profile of rap trio The Beastie Boys tells the complete story of the group's lives and career, beginning with their roots in the underground scene and culminating in their unexpected ascent to the height of hip-hop crossover fame and innovation.

Prime Minister Paul Keating on Mabo - Talk Back Radio - John Laws 1992

Anyone interested in Australia should watch this. The then Prime Minister Paul Keating taking live on air questions in 1993 about the so-called Mabo Decision (Mabo v Queensland (No 2)) that was made by the High Court in 1992. Keating fields questions on the John Laws radio show. He responds with intelligence and patience, while attempting to explain what had actually happened.
The Mabo decision should be considered historic as a legal decision on an international level as;

"The High Court held that the doctrine of terra nullius, which imported all laws of England to a new land, did not apply in circumstances where there were already inhabitants present - even if those inhabitants had been regarded at the time as "uncivilized". Consequently, the Court held that the rules of reception of English law that applied were not those applicable where the land was barren and unhabited, but rather the rules that applied where an existing people were settled."

Mabo was eventually curtailed by the Native Title Amendment Act 1998 introduced by the John Howard led Liberal Government. Since then there have been large Native Title claims granted but even they often contain lease hold clauses that allow for continued economic exploitation by non-Native, and more lately non-Australian, interests (e.g. the current Adani Mining Carmichael Coal venture is being made possible by the extinguishing of Native Title) . Furthermore, Native Title can be extinguished by state governments in Australia if claims are considered to be contrary to 'the national interest'. What is more 'in the national interest' than the people themselves, the majority of whom have long supported the recognition of Indigenous dispossession.

Mabo really was a missed opportunity. The results of the ultimate failure to work with the High Court decision (i.e. finally confirmed by the Native Title Amendment Act of 1998) and all the ideas and history it represented are still developing as potential impacts and consequences. Just the current Adani Mining Carmichael Coal Mine and Rail Project is one example of how unsustainable economic interests are being imposed on people (i.e. THE national interest) via the Native Title Amendment Act 1998. It has been 25 years this new year of 2017 since Mabo 2 and it remains in the interest of all Australians to implement the original High Court decision and overturn the 1998 Act, organise a national tribunal that represents the relevant actors and formulate a new Act that will bring about both sustainable development within Native Title Lands and the recognition of Indigenous Dispossession.

TV Party Documentary

The punk public-access cable show ran from 1978 to 1982 in New York City and featured everyone from Debbie Harry and David Byrne to Iggy Pop and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Here's a documentary about the show and the late-70s downtown art scene. Click on the image to access the doco.