Dialogic Cinephilia - May 7, 2018

I celebrated finishing the grading of way too many essays by diving into the new season of The Expanse (keeping it mellow - I have to get up very early tomorrow). If you haven't checked it out, I recommend it because it is intelligent SF, portrays power politics playing out throughout different social/economic levels of multiple societies, it effortlessly/effectively shifts perspective and focus characters in different sections of the series (always highlighting the collective/community over one aggrandized individual/perspective), and in doing all that, never sacrifices the narrative energy that makes this one of the most exciting/engaging shows:

The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence on The Leader in foreign countries. The Battlefield is also accordingly here - within ourselves and our institutions. - John Dewey (quoted in Fromm, Erich. Escape to Freedom. Open Road Media, 2013: 19-20.)

In the house of the hangman you should not speak of the rope; otherwise you will open yourself to the suspicion that you are a rancorous person. - Theodor Adorno (quoted in Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. Verso, 2017: 271.) 

Daston, Lorraine. "How To Think About Science (Part 2)." Ideas (February 11, 2015)  ["The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science occupies an elegant and airy new building in a leafy suburb of Berlin. It houses approximately a hundred scholars whose research extends from medieval cosmology to the role of experiment in 19th century German gardening to the ways in which medical technology has reshaped the contemporary boundary between life and death. The director is American Lorraine Daston.  David Cayley interviewed her recently in her office at the institute, and told him that there was a time when she would not even have dreamed of a hundred historians of science under one roof. When she was a graduate student at Harvard in the 70's, she says, the history of science was more a collection of strays from other disciplines than it was a discipline in itself. But a crucial challenge had been issued. In 1962 philosopher/historian Thomas Kuhn had published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that suddenly put the previously unusual word paradigm on everybody's lips. Kuhn rejected the assumption of a continuous linear progress in science. And thereby, Lorraine Daston says, he framed the question with which her generation grew up, how to write the history of science as something other than a triumphant progress to a foregone conclusion."]



Framing the Picture: Perspectives on Islamophobia in American Sniper and The Reluctant Fundamentalist from Matt Marlin on Vimeo.


Elba, Mariam. "How Islamophobia was Ingrained in America's Legal System Long Before the War on Terror." The Intercept (May 6, 2018)

Gores, Jared, et al. "Blade Runner 2049." Reel Fanatics #527 (October 28, 2017)

Greenwald, Glenn. "Six Animal Rights Activists Charged With Felonies for Investigation and Rescue That Led to Punishment of a Utah Turkey Farm." The Intercept (May 4, 2018)





Nelson, Max. "Claire Denis' Chemical Reactions." The New York Review of Books (April 27, 2018)

Sauter, Will. "The 15 Best Hitchcockian Thrillers of All Time." Taste of Cinema (April 12, 2018)