Four Horsemen (2012) - Official Version

 

The economic collapse of 2008 scared us. But little has changed since then. This 2012 film explains in fine detail why and how the global society operating within a system of neoclassical economics is in grave peril. All for the sake of a relatively small percentage of the population which controls the means of production, transport and resource extraction. The banks are complicit but they are not driving the system. It is a complex and complete network of actors, institutions, unsustainable laws, practices and methods. 

A debt/credit cycle that is now a growing negative equation. Resources are in decline. Investment is no longer needed to be productive. Banking is a pyramid scheme. The rich have access to government support while the middle and working classes are forced to fend for themselves with welfare dismantled globally. The housing crisis -  which spiked in 2009 but is still ongoing -  is a well known example of how this system functions. 

The situation with the ecology of the planet and its limited resources is the frame to this crisis that has not (yet) ruptured completely. The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020 identifies five major categories of threat to biodiversity: land and sea changes, pollution, species overexploitation, invasive species and disease, and climate change. The size of the problem is illustrated by the report’s data that suggests 23 percent of land is now degraded (for example, the Amazon rainforest has lost 17 percent of its area in the last 50 years), while agricultural-land use is responsible for 80 percent of global deforestation. The oceans’ “dead zones” already encompass an area larger than the United Kingdom. A draft UN agreement envisages that in the next decade, at least one-third of the planet should be put under nature-conservation protection. This plan also includes targets for reducing the use of pesticides, cutting plastic waste, channeling some US$200 billion into developing countries and reducing harmful government subsidies by $500 billion per year.

If the global economic system is not dramatically reformed within the next decade the results will be catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, if not the entire world's human population. There will be nowhere to go to avoid it. 

Ross Ashcroft's Four Horseman (2012) does a good job of examining the vast system that is the global economy. But on the micro and personal levels the film does not sufficiently question the ethics of wealth and accumulation. Innovation is seen as a ends in itself, rather than a focal point within the overall system of human society and how it relates to the limited resources of the planet. Four Horsemen uses a Christian ethic to justify wealth and a modernist interpretation of time to qualify a future that continues the exploitative motives of the present system but just with better rules (a 'salvation'). The film posits a capitalism managed better will be both sustainable and fair and that a two-party representative political system can still deliver the best for the majority of the population if we just get rid of lobbyists and money. I doubt these assumptions but unless action is taken to change these elements we will never know. Time is running out. 

Sebastian (1968)

 

Sebastian leads a group of mathematically minded dolly girls in a quasi futuristic 1960s London as they decode Cold War secrets. He falls in love with one of his new recruits. Swinging London forms the backdrop for this strange somewhat pointless but very groovy film from 1968. 

Complete Cast and Crew 

Starring, Dirk Bogarde, Susannah York, Lili Palmer, John Gielgud, Janet Munro, Ronald Fraser, Margaret Johnston, Nigel Davenport, John Ronane, Hayward Morse, Donald Sutherland, Ann Beach, Susan Whitman, Ann Sidney, Veronica Clifford, Louise Purnell, Portland Mason, James Belchamber, Charles Farrell, Charles Lloyd Pack, Alan Freeman, Sally Douglas, Stuart Hoyle, Lynn Pinkney, and Jeanne Roland. 

Directed by David Greene. Released in New York on January 24, 1968.

V is for Verbs

The notion that capitalism treats people as things while things take on quasi-human attributes is nothing new: Marx was writing about reification (sometimes translated as ‘thingification’) and commodity fetishism more than 150 years ago. But we’re also coming at this from another angle. In The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli explains that “the world is made of events, not things.” He goes on to say that there is “the simple fact that nothing is: that things happen instead.” If we stop thinking about being, and start thinking about becoming, then our emphasis switches from permanence to change. Put bluntly, the world doesn’t have to be like this. There are echoes here of the way E.P. Thompson insists that ‘class’ is not a structure or a category, but “something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.” In Crack Capitalism, John Holloway goes even further and suggests that a self-determining society would probably have a language where verbs are primary. It sounds like a crazy idea, but is it really any crazier than the fucked-up way we live today?

***

We live in an upside-down world.

People (living, breathing human beings) are treated as things – as figures in a report, as numbers on a spreadsheet. At the same time, inanimate objects (cars, phones, a company logo) are treated as more important than people.

How does this happen? It happens because capitalism is above all a process of double separation.

First, through the organisation of work, human activity is turned into things to be bought and sold.  Verbs (our activity) are turned into nouns (commodities).

And then those commodities are used to divide and separate us. Our relations with each other are mediated through things.

In this world of nouns, everything seems fixed. The economy. Profits. Business. Normality. “Things are the way that they are,” we sigh, as if change is impossible. “It is what it is.”

But it is the world of nouns itself which is the problem. It obscures our escape route.

If we think of a phone as a noun, we don’t think of the processes that lie behind it. We don’t think of the mining, the manufacture, the marketing. We don’t think of how the phone is to be used, or what happens to the phone when it’s finished. The phone just “is”.

It’s the same with poverty. If we think of poverty as a thing, we imagine that “the poor have always been with us”, as if poverty is a simple fact of life.

But poverty is not just a “thing”. It involves some people actively denying other people the means to provide for themselves – and many other people actively refusing to care about this ongoing denial.

When we think in the world of nouns, we think of definition. We think of “this side” and “that side”, of Brexit and Remain, of vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. We lose sight of the fact that real social change comes about when people leave those fixed identities and start to form new collective bodies.

When we think in the world of nouns, we imagine Covid is a thing which has just appeared from nowhere. It has a beginning and an end. We can “send it packing”. We lose sight of the fact that zoonotic diseases, like Covid, will persist as long as humans share the planet with other species – constantly mutating and evolving, not simply being, always in the process of becoming something new.

When we think in the world of nouns, we lose sight of the fact that the society we live in is one that is made – and re-made – every day by us.

Capitalism – this system that dominates and destroys – is not a “thing” at all. Capitalism is a social relation between people.

When we think in the world of nouns, we remain trapped inside this social form that systematically tries to hide the fact that we are its creators.

We can start to turn the world the right way up if we begin again with verbs.

Commander Arian, a history of women, war and freedom (Kurdish, Spanish subs)

 

In this story of emancipation and freedom in the face of the Syrian war, Commander Arian guides a women's battalion towards Kobane with the mission to liberate the population living under the yoke of Daesh (ISISIS). Arian, who when very young witnessed the viscous treatment that victims of sexual violence received, does everything possible to make her comrades discover the true meaning of their struggle: freedom for the next generation of women. After living for months with the commander and her troops, filming with an unprecedented intimacy that includes raw sequences of Arian's slow recovery from wounds, Sotorra makes a fascinating portrait of a woman on a mission.

2018 Duration: 77 min.

País: España

Dirección:Alba The Warrior Guion: Jesper Osmund, Alba Sotorra, Steffano Strocchi

Hippie Masala (2008)

In the 1960s and 70s thousands of hippies journeyed east to India in search of enlightenment. Hippie Masala is a fascinating chronicle about flower children who, after fleeing Western civilization, found a new way of life in India.

It is with love we announce that Baba Cesare  has left his suffering body today 29 December 2018.

“I'm nine, it's my first time in India. I don't like it at all: dirt everywhere, poverty, lepers in the streets pushing themselves on trolleys with bloody stumps. We go to visit a large temple in Delhi. To enter you have to take off your shoes and that's the last thing I want to do. I walk barefoot, with the terror of getting some kind of disease. I am shocked and lock myself in the hotel to watch television and eat peanuts. I don't want to go out anymore.

Then shortly before leaving, I put my head back out and in a square, in the midst of the large moving crowd, I see three men crouched, practically naked. They look serene, composed, and their very long hair wrapped over their heads like a kind of crown. One of them is holding a very simple musical instrument, with only one string. They have fewer than beggars, but they look like kings. "Who I am?!" We get closer and people explain to us that they are ascetics. They live alone in the jungle. It seems incredible to me that such people exist. I never forget them " [Folco Terzani from the book, A Barefoot on the Earth]

Baba Cesare felt he was not suitable to have a normal family or a normal job, he wanted something different, another life, always on this Earth, but different, not interested in material issues and needs, but made only of spiritual fulfillments. And so, Cesare leaves Italy to go to India dressed only with rags and begging along the streets. Step by step, people start to trust him, step by step Cesare also learns to speak Hindi and this makes him more reliable as an Indian guru, or rather, Sadhu. A Sadhu is a person who lives with no possessions, such as a home or money.

A Sadhu always enjoys the greatest respect of his fellows and common people who help him to have food, clothes and a place where he can sleep. Cesare attends other Indian gurus to learn the secrets of a spiritual life, showing that an alternative way to live is always possible. Until when, thanks to his knowledge, Cesare is really regarded as an Indian guru and he can live a wonderful life with no goods or other possessions. This story can be read like an educational or spiritual journey, the reflections about the meaning of life are amazing and gripping, the style is sharp, but always true.

Cesare’s life is fully different from the Western life where people are accustomed to seek saints and angels inside the beatification procedures of the Church. Humbleness and patience are the unique ingredients in Cesare’s life, but thanks to them, his life is totally fulfilled. Maybe for us it will be impossible to live like Baba Cesare, but this book reveals that nothing is impossible when accomplished with the true essence of our soul. Nothing is impossible, even with no money, no home, no jobs. This book shakes our sensitivity, screams, make us cry, and shapes a unique book, an adventure novel, but, above all, a spiritual journey inside the real meaning of life on the Earth.

Johann Hari: Lost Connections

Johann Hari on Lost Connections 9/6/21
Author and journalist Johann Hari talks about his book, Lost Connections: Why You Are Depressed and How to Find Hope with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Hari, who has suffered with depression as a teenager and an adult, offers a sweeping critique of the medical establishment's understanding of depression and the frequent reliance on pharmaceutical treatments. Hari argues that it is our lost connections with each other, with our work, and with ourselves that explains the rise in depression in recent times.
Streamed live on May 5, 2023 Johann Hari: Lost Connections - a Lecture sponsored by Tommy G. Thompson Center

“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?”

Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1979)

"Let the months and the years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear."

This film adaptation of the combat veteran Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel (the book and its sequel, The Road Back (1930), were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany) was made in 1979, in that small window of American film history when war suddenly was fully exposed for the obscenity it is and always has been, between the end of the Vietnam War and the election of Ronald Reagan. The Deer Hunter came out the year before in 1978. Apocalypse Now the same year. It was a time when the United States as a culture was seriously questioning the concept of international conflict and military power. Compare a few of the war films of 1980, the year Ronnie Raygun took office:

The Dogs of War: "Mercenary James Shannon, on a reconnaissance job to the African nation of Zangaro, is tortured and deported. He returns to lead a coup."

Private Benjamin: "When her husband dies on their wedding night, Judy decides to join the United States Army. She realizes that she has never been independent in her entire life. What looks like a bad decision at first, turns out not so bad at all."

The Big Red One: "Director Samuel Fuller's autobiographical tale of a special infantry squad and its intrepid sergeant during WWII follows the men from D-Day to the liberation of the Nazi death camps."

There was one last echo of horror in war in this time before the heroics became the standard again. It was far away in Australia, where Gallipoli by Peter Wear was released in 1981. Like another Australian film, The Odd Angry Shot from 1979, it depicted war as pointless. 

War steals life. Not just through death and killing and cost. But it takes youth, it takes laughter, it takes passion and creativity. It kills thought and contemplation. It destroys love. It smashes families, hopes, desires, ambitions. It takes everything and turns it into waste and decay. This film is a brilliant study in that ancient horror.

Politicians start wars
Generals organise them
The people pay for them.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a television film produced by ITC Entertainment, released on November 14, 1979, starring Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine. It is based on the book of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. The film was directed by Delbert Mann. A joint British and American production, most of the filming took place in Czechoslovakia.

Burroughs Bacon

 

Uncut footage that was not used in the Channel 4 Arena documentary about William S. Burroughs from 1982. William visits Francis Bacon in his home studio in London. They drink tea and have an interesting conversation about art and Tangier. There is a lot of name dropping - asking if such and such a person is still alive, or "did you know" so and so.

At the about 30 minute mark Burroughs elucidates on some of his ideas about immortality and the escape from the body. He references Mayan and Egyptian ideas on the subject and talks a bit about physics.

Burroughs was originally made in 1983 by Howard Brookner and Alan Yentob, as part of the BBC’s art strand Arena, and repeated after Burrough’s death in 1997. It is an exceptional documentary, one that gives an intimate and revealing portrait of Burroughs, as he revisits his childhood home; discusses his up-bringing with his brother, Mortimer; his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Allen Gisnberg, and Brion Gysin; and has a reunion with artist Francis Bacon, who Burroughs knew in Tangier. Other contributors include Terry Southern, Patti Smith, and James Grauerholz.

Aldous Huxley, The Gravity of Light

Aldous Huxley: The Gravity Of Light incorporates rare archival footage, computer rendered 3D animation, speculative fictions, and selections from his essays. The film begins by reflecting upon that crucial, prophetic work "Brave New World" (1932, Aldous Huxley) and then moves to a further inquiry into the human ramifications of current technological change. The film also recalls the impact of Huxley's LSD-25 and mescaline experimentations and writings for a generation of youth and examines the utopianistic impulses associated with the Rave scene.

Harry Smith: American Magus

 

A documentary about the brilliant and versatile cult figure Harry Smith (1923-1991) – compiler of a famous three-part folk album, film-maker, painter, anthropologist, obsessive collector and thinker.
The films, paintings, and recordings of Harry Smith pay tribute to his genius. Filmmaking, painting, anthropology, musicology, and the occult. His knowledge of each was encyclopedic and firsthand. As might befit a man of such varied interests, his circles of friends were large and, for the most part, wholly independent. This film demonstrates how differently Smith appeared to friends from each circle, offering personal recollections that present a multidimensional, largely contradictory picture of the man. Together with artwork, the interviews director Paola Igliori conducted with such friends as William Breeze, Robert Frank, John Cohen, Jonas Mekas, and Allen Ginsberg make up a sizable portion of the film.