1123 – Twelve Monkeys (1995)

timespace coordinates:  2035,  subterranean compound / ruins of Philadelphia (after a deadly virus released in 1996 wipes out almost all of humanity, forcing survivors to live underground) > 1990 / 1996  Baltimore + battlefield during ww1

12 Monkeys, also known as Twelve Monkeys, is a 1995 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam, inspired by Chris Marker‘s 1962 short film La Jetée, and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt, with Christopher Plummer and David Morse in supporting roles.

TWELVE MONKEYS, Bruce Willis, 1995. ©Universal

References to time, time travel, and monkeys are scattered throughout the film, including the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Time Tunnel” playing on the TV in a hotel room, the Marx Brothers film Monkey Business (1931) on TV in the asylum, and the subplots involving monkeys (drug testing, news stories and animal rights). The film is also intended to be a study of people’s declining ability to communicate in modern civilization due to the interference of technology. (Memory,_time,_and_technology)

12 Monkeys is inspired by the French short film La Jetée (1962); as in La Jetée, characters are haunted by the images of their own deaths. Like La Jetée, 12 Monkeys contains references to Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo (1958). Toward the end of the film, Cole and Railly hide in a theater showing a 24-hour Hitchcock marathon and watch a scene from Vertigo. Railly then transforms herself with a blonde wig, as Judy (Kim Novak) transforms herself into blonde Madeleine in Vertigo; Cole sees her emerge within a red light, as Scottie (James Stewart) saw Judy emerge within a green light. Brief notes of Bernard Herrmann‘s film score can also be heard. Railly also wears the same coat Novak wore in the first part of Vertigo. The scene at Muir Woods National Monument, where Judy (as Madeleine) looks at the growth rings of a felled redwood and traces back events in her past life, resonates with larger themes in 12 Monkeys. Cole and Railly later have a similar conversation while the same music from Vertigo is repeated. The Muir Woods scene in Vertigo is also reenacted in La Jetée. In a previous scene in the film, Cole wakes up in a hospital bed with the scientists talking to him in chorus. This is a direct homage to the “Dry Bones” scene in Dennis Potter‘s The Singing Detective. James Cole is a notable Christ figure in film. The film is significant in the genre of science-fiction film noir, and it alludes to various “canonical noir” films.

After the release of The Zero Theorem in 2013, claims were made that Gilliam had meant it as part of a trilogy. A 2013 review for The Guardian newspaper said, “Calling it [The Zero Theorem] the third part of a trilogy formed by earlier dystopian satires Brazil and Twelve Monkeys [sic]”; but in an interview with Alex Suskind for Indiewire in late 2014, Gilliam said, “Well, it’s funny, this trilogy was never something I ever said, but it’s been repeated so often it’s clearly true [laughs]. I don’t know who started it but once it started it never stopped”(wiki)

imdb   /  12 Monkeys (TV series)

1119 – Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

timespace coordinates: dystopian 1984. war-torn London ruled by Oceania, a totalitarian superstate

“Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me”

Nineteen Eighty-Four, also known as 1984, is a 1984 British dystopian science fiction film written and directed by Michael Radford, based upon George Orwell‘s novel of the same name (published in June 1949). Starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, and Cyril Cusack,

the film follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking civil servant in a war-torn London ruled by Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. Smith (Hurt) struggles to maintain his sanity and his grip on reality as the regime’s overwhelming power and influence persecutes individualism and individual thinking on both a political and personal level. The film, which features Burton’s last screen appearance, is dedicated to him. (wiki)

imdb   /   Newspeak

1115 – Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Koyaanisqatsi (English: /koʊjɑːnɪsˈkɑːtsiː/), also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 American documentary / experimental film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.

The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating “it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.”  In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means “unbalanced life”/ “crazy life”.

The film is the first in the Qatsi film trilogy: it is succeeded by Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). The trilogy depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature and technology. Koyaanisqatsi is the best known of the trilogy and is considered a cult film. (wiki)

imdb

1110 – Iron Sky

timespace coordinates: 2018 – 2038 New York City, Washington, D.C.,  the far side of the Moon, Antarctica

Iron Sky (imdb) is a 2012 Finnish-German-Australian comic-science-fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko. It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon, where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth. (wiki)

As The Hollywood Reporter noted, “the score by Laibach adds character, mixing pastiche pop with symphonic elements“. (www.laibach.org/iron-sky-soundtrack)

Spin-offs

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Iron Sky: The Coming Race (imdb) is a Finnish-German comic science fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola, released on 16 January 2019 in Finland. It is the sequel to Vuorensola’s 2012 film Iron Sky. The film was crowdfunded through Indiegogo.

Like its predecessor, the movie refers to several motifs of post-war Esoteric Nazism, such as the Hollow Earth theory. The movie’s title is most likely a reference to Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s novel The Coming Race (1871) that is commonly regarded as the origin of the so-called Vril myth. The film teaser features the Vril symbol that was designed by the Tempelhofgesellschaft in the 1990s. (wiki)

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Götterdämmerung   /  Fourth Reich   /  helium-3   /  Reptilians   /   Agartha   /   Nuclear holocaust   /  Moon Nazis   /   Jobists   /   ironsky.net

1104 – The Wandering Earth / 流浪地球 (2019)

timespace coordinates: In the future, the Sun has aged and is about to turn into a red giant, pushing the nations of the world to consolidate into the United Earth Government, a world government, to initiate a project to move the Earth out of the Solar System to the Alpha Centauri system, in order to preserve further human civilization. Enormous thrusters running on fusion power are built across the planet to propel the Earth. Human population is reduced severely due to catastrophic tides that occur after the planetary engines stop Earth’s rotation, and later as the planet moves away from the Sun, much of the surface is frozen due to lowered temperatures, forcing humans to live in vast underground cities built adjacent to the engines.

The Wandering Earth (Liu lang di qiu) is a 2019 Chinese science fiction film directed by Frant Gwo, based on the novella of the same name by Locus Award and Hugo Award-winning author Liu Cixin. It stars Qu Chuxiao, Li Guangjie, Ng Man-tat, Zhao Jinmai, Wu Jing and Qu Jingjing. (wiki)

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Wandering Earth is China’s “first full-scale interstellar” film.

imdb   /   rt

1101

1092

Homer used two adjectives to describe aspects of the colour blue: kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos, to describe a sort of ‘blue-grey’, notably used in Athena’s epithet glaukopis, her ‘grey-gleaming eyes’. He describes the sky as big, starry, or of iron or bronze (because of its solid fixity). The tints of a rough sea range from ‘whitish’ (polios) and ‘blue-grey’ (glaukos) to deep blue and almost black (kuaneos, melas). The sea in its calm expanse is said to be ‘pansy-like’ (ioeides), ‘wine-like’ (oinops), or purple (porphureos). But whether sea or sky, it is never just ‘blue’. In fact, within the entirety of Ancient Greek literature you cannot find a single pure blue sea or sky.

Yellow, too, seems strangely absent from the Greek lexicon. The simple word xanthos covers the most various shades of yellow, from the shining blond hair of the gods, to amber, to the reddish blaze of fire. Chloros, since it’s related to chloe (grass), suggests the colour green but can also itself convey a vivid yellow, like honey.

The Ancient Greek experience of colour does not seem to match our own. In a well-known aphorism, Friedrich Nietzsche captures the strangeness of the Greek colour vocabulary:

How differently the Greeks must have viewed their natural world, since their eyes were blind to blue and green, and they would see instead of the former a deeper brown, and yellow instead of the latter (and for instance they also would use the same word for the colour of dark hair, that of the corn-flower, and that of the southern sea; and again, they would employ exactly the same word for the colour of the greenest plants and of the human skin, of honey and of the yellow resins: so that their greatest painters reproduced the world they lived in only in black, white, red, and yellow).
[My translation]

How is this possible? Did the Greeks really see the colours of the world differently from the way we do?    read more:

The Sea Was Never Blue

By Maria Michela Sassi