650 – Guest of Cindy Sherman (2008)

Cindy Sherman von Philipp Kaiser

Analyzing his relationship with the reclusive artist Cindy Sherman leads filmmaker Paul H-O (Hasegawa-Overacker) to confront his own identity in this personal and unexpectedly humorous documentary. Paul H-O became a fixture of the New York art scene in the 1990s with his public access show “GalleryBeat.” Armed with a video camera, he attended art gallery openings, intriguing many with his candid, witty assessments of the work and winning fans in the process. Among the latter was Cindy Sherman, the press-shy art superstar, who invited Paul to her studio for a series of exclusive filmed interviews. In these sessions, he gains insight into her artistic process and a romantic relationship blossoms as they fall in love. Their initial bliss takes a turn when Paul gets caught up in the aura of Cindy’s celebrity and he is subordinated to a role as Cindy’s guest at the star-studded openings and dinners she regularly attends. Spanning over 15 years and with unprecedented access to the great artist, including interviews with a veritable who’s who of the art and entertainment world, the film paints a vivid picture of the contemporary art scene and provides a witty, illuminating look at celebrity, anxiety, and art. (rottentomatoes)

Cindy was initially supportive, but later opposed the project.

imdb

0641 – La planète sauvage / Fantastic Planet (1973)

Fantastic Planet (French: La Planète sauvage, Czech: Divoká planeta, lit. The Wild Planet) is a 1973 animated science fiction film directed by René Laloux and written by Laloux and Roland Topor. Topor also completed the film’s production design and it was animated at Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague. The entire animation team was composed of women.

The film was an international co-production between companies from France and Czechoslovakia (The animation was started in Prague but had to be moved to Paris to avoid interference by the Communist authorities who were in power at the time).

The allegorical story, about humans living on a strange planet dominated by giant humanoid aliens (blue Draags) who consider them animals, is based on the 1957 novel Oms en série by French writer Stefan Wul. (wiki)   imdb   Interpretations

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640 – Rabbit (2005)

A modern mystery film of lost innocence, greed and nature. A dreamlike but dark story of lost innocence and the random justice of nature, told with curious images from a distant childhood. A selection of 1950s educational stickers, discovered in a provincial junkshop 20 years ago, provide the ingredients for this adult fairytale.  Once they were new, delivering a simple message to those also young. Like us, however, they have grown older and now present a more complex meaning. Rabbit tells a tale of lost innocence, greed and the random justice of nature. When a boy and girl find an idol in the stomach of a rabbit, its magical abilities lead to riches. But for how long?

BACKGROUND INFO

Run Wrake found an envelope in a secondhand shop in the 1980s that contained sheets of educational stickers illustrated by Geoffrey Higham and published by Philip & Tacey Limited in the 1950s. The image of the idol was the primary inspiration for Rabbit’s storyline.

https://runwrake.com/       imdb

636

The Garden of Emoji Delights by carla gannis

“The current speed of technological advancements suggest biological organisms and the environment are irrevocably changing. In light of this, it is fascinating to discover how easily the visual vernacular of our day aligns with the symbology of a prescient artist from 500 years ago. The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s most ambitious work, embodies the conflicts, humor, darkness and absurdity of human, earthly and cosmological conditions.

In The Garden of Emoji Delights, one intention of my transcription was to mash up popular historic and contemporary sign systems, and to diversify and expand the Emoji lexicon through this process. Emoji are a contemporary glyph system which offer an emotional shorthand for virtual expression. The pleasurable stylizations are ubiquitous worldwide and across generations. Translating iconography of an earlier era using Emoji seems to makes perfect “nonsense/sense” to me.”

0634 – Anonymous (2011)

spacetime coordinates: 16th – early 17th century London

Anonymous is a 2011 political thriller film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by John Orloff. The film is a version of the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, an Elizabethan courtier, playwright, poet and patron of the arts, and suggests he was the actual author of William Shakespeare‘s plays. It stars Rhys Ifans as de Vere and Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I of England. The effects crew “took 30,000 pictures in England, of every Tudor building they could find, and then they scanned them all into the computer and built real London in 1600.”  (wiki)

The film was a box office flop and received mixed reviews, with critics praising its performances and visual achievements, but criticizing the film’s time-jumping format, factual errors, and the filmmakers’ promotion of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. (read more: controversy)            imdb

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William Shakespeare – Notes of a Lecture given
by Dr. Rudolf Steiner (On-line here)

0620 – The Last of Us (2013 Video Game)

spacetime coordinates: 2013, suburbs of Austin, Texas  2033 quarantine zone in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts >  post-pandemic  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania > fortified settlement in Jackson, Wyoming > 2034  Salt Lake City, Utah

The Last of Us is an action-adventure survival horror video game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was released for the PlayStation 3 worldwide on June 14, 2013. Players control Joel, a smuggler tasked with escorting a teenage girl named Ellie across a post-apocalyptic United States.

The game is considered one of the most significant titles of the seventh generation of video games, and has been included among the greatest video games of all time.

The Last Of Us Remastered Walkthrough

The Last of Us Original Soundtrack

Adaptations   Sequel   imdb

612 – Davi Kopenawa, Bruce Albert, Alison Dundy – The falling sky – words of a Yanomami shaman

The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest–a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.

In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.

Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa’s intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest. (amazon)

“When I come back from a trip among the white people, the dizziness leaves my eyes after a while and my thought be-comes clear again. I no longer hear cars, machines, or airplanes. I only lend an ear to the tooro toads and krouma frogs that call the rain in the forest. I only hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind and the rumbling of the thunders in the sky. The ignorant words of the city politicians gradually vanish in the quiet of my sleep. I become calm again by going to hunt and making my spirits dance.

The forest is very beautiful to see. It is cool and aromatic. When you move through it to hunt or travel, you feel joyful and your mind is slow-paced. You listen to the chirping of the cicadas in the distance, or the cries of the curassows and the agami herons, and the clamor of the spider monkeys in the trees. Your worries are eased. Your thoughts can then follow one another without getting obscured.”