We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
After your names: how many credits you have and name of last film response I read. The list of links before your scores are student responses I recommend you check out.
Wow, this hit me very hard. I've always been mystified how we can be left devastated by the death of someone we have never met. When I heard David Bowie as a kid I suddenly felt like there was someone who understood how secretly weird and strange I felt. I remember secretly staying up late at night to catch him on a late night rock show (Midnight something or other) and was amazed by his daring challenges to serious social strictures of the era (this was the late 70s). In particular there was a scene of him walking down the street in a urban area while singing and people of all types coming up to him.... some embracing him, some kissing him, some talking to him and walking alongside. It was just something I had never seen a man do in my social environment at that time. His challenge to us was not overly aggressive like the masculinity of that era and his music reminded me that there were other ways of being a person in this world. Throughout my life when there were moments that felt unbearable I would play his songs and for awhile I felt as if I wasn't alone. Words just can't communicate what his music meant to me
The Captors (Season 2 of Serial from WBEZ Chicago: "In May 2014, a U.S. Special Operations team in a Black Hawk helicopter landed in the hills of Afghanistan. Waiting for them were more than a dozen Taliban fighters and a tall American, who looked pale and out of sorts: Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier, had been a prisoner of the Taliban for nearly five years, and now he was going home. President Obama announced Bergdahl’s return in the Rose Garden, with the soldier's parents at his side. Bergdahl's hometown of Hailey, Idaho, planned a big celebration to welcome him back. But then, within days—within hours of his rescue, in fact—public reaction to his return flipped. People started saying Bergdahl shouldn’t be celebrated. Some of the soldiers from his unit called him a deserter, a traitor. They said he had deliberately walked off their small outpost in eastern Afghanistan and into hostile territory. Hailey canceled its celebration. The army launched an investigation. Finally, in March, the military charged Bergdahl with two crimes, one of which carries the possibility of a life sentence. Through all of this, Bergdahl has been quiet. He hasn’t spoken to the press or done any interviews on TV. He’s been like a ghost at the center of a raucous fight. Now, in Season Two, we get to hear what he has to say. For this season, Sarah Koenig teams up with filmmakerMark Boal and Page 1 to find out why one idiosyncratic guy decided to walk away, into Afghanistan, and how the consequences of that decision have spun out wider and wider. It’s a story that has played out in unexpected ways from the start. And it’s a story that’s still going on."]
Citizenfour(USA/Germany/UK: Laura Poitras, 2014: 114 mins) ["In January 2013, film-maker Laura Poitras received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself Citizen Four. In it, he offered her inside information about illegal wiretapping practices of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. Poitras had already been working for several years on a film about mass surveillance programs in the United States, and so in June 2013, she went to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with the stranger, who identified himself as Edward Snowden. She was met there by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill. Several other meetings followed. Citizenfour is based on the recordings from these meetings. What follows is the largest confirmations of mass surveillance using official documents themselves, the world has never seen…"]
Pin-Fat, Veronique. "How Do We Begin to Think About the World."Global Politics: A New Introduction. 2nd. edition. Ed. by Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss. Routledge, 2014: 20-38.
1902: A Trip to the Moon (France: Georges Méliès, 1902: 13 mins)
Knudsen, Tyler. "A Trip to the Moon."What I Learned From Watching (Posted on YouTube: November 26, 2014)
Bursztynski, Maurice, et al. "All That Jazz."See Hear #19 (July 20, 2015) ["Bob Fosse’s incredible autobiographical 1979 film, All That Jazz. The film features Roy Scheider in a career best performance (go on – argue against that notion if you can) as Fosse’s proxy, Joe Gideon. Joe is a Broadway director and choreographer, and a film director. He is all consumingly devoted to his art, but is a poor husband, father, and companion. He’s not a great male figure, yet he’s not shown as a shallow character without dimension. We have a fascinating conversation about devotion to art over devotion to domesticity, manipulation, how the entertainment business spits out its own, death, the truth, and the Mile High Club."]
Evans, Guy. "Edward Bernays - Propaganda (1928)."Smells Like Human Spirit (2013) ["Edward Bernays, born in Vienna in 1891 and famously the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was perhaps the pioneer in the field of Public Relations, and highly influential in providing the framework for modern advertising. His work aimed to convince people to want things that they didn’t need, and in the process, link their unconscious desires to the consumption of mass produced goods. This in turn, it was theorized, could be used to control the masses, as by keeping them distracted on frivolous happenings and relatively unimportant wants, they wouldn’t interfere with the activities of what he called ‘the important few’. All the while, he was remarkably candid about his intent. In one of his first books, ‘Propaganda’ (1928), he coined the term ‘engineering of consent’ to describe his technique for controlling the masses. In this podcast series, Guy Evans examines just how influential these ideas were, and details the resulting impact in relation to public relations, advertising, celebrity culture, and democracy itself."]
Smith, Imogen Sara. "In a Lonely Place."The Cinephiliacs #28 (November 17, 2013) ["While it can be fun to talk to critics who spend their time keeping up with contemporary cinema, Peter is glad to bring on Imogen Sara Smith, who has always dived into cinema's past worlds. The author of Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy and In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City talks about her initial love of film via the Great Stoneface, her desire to write long in order to thoroughly engage with a topic, and her love of Pre-Code's subversive pleasures. The two also dive deeply into the many ends and odds of the strange cycle of film noir, engaging with questions of genre, psychology, and some underrated hits, before ending with one of noir's canonical masterpieces: Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place, a film so brutal in its depiction of love by being at first so intoxicating."] Atkinson, Sarah, Dario Llinares and Neil Fox. "Goodbye Dragon Inn."The Cinematologists #6 (May 13, 2015) Llinares, Dario and Neil Fox. "The Thing; The Fly; Rollerball; (Sci-Fi Special Part 1)."The Cinematologists #7 (June 4, 2015) ["The Fly, Demon Seed, The Thing and Rollerball are all discussed in the context of what the science fiction as a key cinema genre. Neil and Dario touch upon the tropes of hard v soft sic-fi, artificial intelligence, the fear of technology, metaphors of alien invasion and control of reproduction, along with many other of the fundamental elements of the sic-fi genre."]
