Philosophy

Plot Synopsis: In the bourgeois circles of Europe after the Great War, can anything save the modern man? Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, has all his life feared his dual nature of being human and being a beast. He’s decided to die on his 50th birthday, which is soon. He’s rescued from his solipsism by the mysterious Hermine, who takes him dancing, introduces him to jazz and to the beautiful and whimsical Maria, and guides him into the hallucinations of the Magic Theater, which seem to take him into Hell. Can humor, sin, and derision lead to salvation?Read More »

Synopsis
The three Villasbôas brothers start their quest as young, urban men who are looking for an adventure in the Brazilian hinterland. Adding to the discovery of natural wonders, they end up finding a cause worth defending. But the challenges are vastly overwhelming.Read More »

Photographer Frantisek Drtikol

The documentary film “The Photographer Frantisek Drtikol” by the director Jiri Holna (28 min, 2002) drawn from Drktikol’s diaries and private correspondence, includes the recollections of Drtikol’s daughter Ervina Bokova, as well as part of a short film by Drtikol from 1920.

“Man can never be lazy and indifferent to flashes of beauty:
he must collect them, keep them and treat them well,
because in a while they disappear as footprints in sand.”

This documentary is about world-famous Czech photographer, painter and philosopher Frantisek Drtikol (1883-1961).Read More »

PEACE VOICES RISING FROM GALATA
Sema symbolising a going and return, a spiritual voyage to the perfection is a salutation from the secret brave men in the heart. This voyage composed of seven parts embraces with love and affection all humanity, all living creatures by turning from right to left around the heart.

Galata Mevlevi Music and Sema Group from Galata Mevlevihane organising sema ceremonies fulfills its mission of peace representative thanks to the shows held on the whole world. The group organising a sema ceremony and conversation meeting to the honour of the Queen of Spain in the past years took part in the activities of “World Aid Committee to the Helpless Children” arranged by UNESCO in Brussels.Read More »

synopsis

Richard Linklater returned to the semi-improvised approach and philosophical themes of his debut feature Slacker while embracing a new and groundbreaking visual technology in his sixth feature film, Waking Life. Linklater and cameraman Tommy Pallotta shot the film on location in Austin, TX, using digital video equipment. Linklater and digital animator Bob Sabiston then used newly developed computer software to transform the images through a process called “interpolated rotoscoping”; the result merges the naturalism of live action with a stylized look that resembles a cartoon or a painting in motion. Waking Life’s flexible, non-narrative approach follows a young man (Wiley Wiggins) who arrives in Austin and hitches a ride with a stranger, who engages him in a conversation about rarely considered facets of existentialism. As the visitor drifts through the city, he encounters a variety of people and finds himself absorbing their views on art, philosophy, society, and numerous other issues of contemporary life. Linklater’s cast is dotted with well-known actors (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt) and pop-culture notables (filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, Martin Scorsese associate Steven Prince, comic Louis Black), alongside a large number of relatively little-known players. Waking Life received its world premiere at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival; Linklater’s next film, Tape, was also screened at the same festival.by Mark DemingRead More »

english description :
In this French tour-de-force a young student (Jacques Speisser) decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him. His inner musings as he wanders the luminous streets of Paris are narrated in the form of an unwritten diary by Ludmila Mikael.Read More »

Quote:
This provocative and insightful film is the first in a series of documentaries that will reveal the secret knowledge embedded in the work of the greatest filmmaker of all time: Stanley Kubrick. This famed movie director who made films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, placed symbols and hidden anecdotes into his films that tell a far different story! than the films appeared to be saying.In Kubrick’s Odyssey, Part I, Kubrick and Apollo, author and filmmaker, Jay Weidner presents compelling evidence of how Stanley Kubrick directed the Apollo moon landings. He reveals that the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey was not only a retelling of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s novel, but also a research and development project that assisted Kubrick in the creation of the Apollo moon footage. In light of this revelation, Weidner also explores Kubrick’s film, The Shining and shows that this film is, in actuality, the story of Kubrick’s personal travails as he secretly worked on the Apollo footage for NASA.

“Weidner produces devastating proof that the landing was shot in a studio on Earth.”
–David IckeRead More »

Fourth lecture from the ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture’ Masterclass Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, 17. June 2009, 3:00pm

A two hour, wide ranging, and topical talk.Read More »

Quote:
The bridge film between his (Sokurov’s) first decade’s essays into historicized metafilm and the subsequent, fame-making fata morganas is Days of the Eclipse(1988), a patience-testing post-apocalyptic dawdle (based on a novel by the Strugatsky brothers) that plays more like aimless third-world doc than science fiction. Concerning a young doctor stuck in the middle of a rocky wasteland (actually, Turkmenistan, though it could easily pass for any post-colonial hunk of Africa), Daysis maddeningly oblique, visually erratic, and utterly disconnective. Angels, earthquakes, talking corpses, Stalinist iconography, and visual disjunctions may figure in, but for the most part Sokurov designed the film as an elusive tissue of non-happenings and mysterious nexuses, all of it sucking the dusty air of Soviet-satellite poverty.Read More »