858 – Roger & Me (1989 documentary)

timespace coordinates: 1980’s Flint, Michigan

Roger & Me is a 1989 American film written, produced, directed by and starring Michael Moore. Moore portrays the regional economic impact of General Motors CEO Roger Smith‘s action of closing several auto plants in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, reducing GM’s employees in that area from 80,000 in 1978 to about 50,000 in 1992. As of August 2015, GM employs approximately 7,200 workers in the Flint area, according to The Detroit News, and 5,000 workers according to MSNBC.  In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” (wiki)

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Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (1992) 

857 – The More You Ignore Me (2018)

timespace coordinates: rural northern England in the late Seventies and early Eighties

“Combining bittersweet comedy with mental illness can’t be easy but Jo Brand, making her feature-film debut as a writer and drawing on her years as a psychiatric nurse, does an impressive job with The More You Ignore Me.” Matthew Bond   Director: Keith English

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0856 – Sorstalanság / Fateless (2005)

timespace coordinates: World War II Hungary / Auschwitz / Buchenwald

Fateless (Hungarian: Sorstalanság) is a Hungarian film directed by Lajos Koltai, released in 2005. It is based on the semi-autobiographical novel Fatelessness by the Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertész, who also wrote the screenplay. It tells the story of a teenage boy who is sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The film’s music was composed by Ennio Morricone, and one of its songs was sung by Lisa Gerrard. The film is one of the most expensive movies ever produced in Hungary, with a cost of $12 million. (wiki)

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855 – The Secret of Kells (2009)

timespace coordinates: 9th century Ireland

The Secret of Kells is a 2009 French-Belgian-Irish animated fantasy film animated by Cartoon Saloon directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey.

The film is based on the story of the origin of the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament located in Dublin, Ireland.

Circa 800 AD, A manuscript from the illuminated gospel known as the Book of Kells, thought to have been created by Irish monks from the scriptorium of the monastery on the Scottish island of Iona between the 7th and 9th centuries AD. The tome now the most precious manu (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It also draws upon Celtic mythology; examples include its inclusion of Crom Cruach, a pre-Christian Irish deity and the reference to the poetic genre of Aislings, in which a poet is confronted by a dream or vision of a seeress, in the naming of the forest sprite encountered by Brendan. Wider mythological similarities have also been commented upon, such as parallels between Brendan’s metaphysical battle with Crom Cruach and Beowulf‘s underwater encounter with Grendel’s mother. 

The Secret of Kells began development in 1999, when Tomm Moore and several of his friends were inspired by Richard Williams’s The Thief and the Cobbler, Disney’s Mulan and the works of Hayao Miyazaki, which based their visual style on the respective traditional art of the cultures featured in each film. They decided to do something similar to Studio Ghibli‘s films but with Irish art. Tomm Moore explained that the visual style was inspired by Celtic and medieval art, being ‘flat, with false perspective and lots of colour’. Even the clean up was planned to ‘obtain the stained glass effect of thicker outer lines’. (wiki)

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853 – 9 (2009)

9 is a 2009 American computer-animated post-apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Shane Acker and written by Pamela Pettler. The film is based on Acker’s Academy Award-nominated 2005 short film/student project of the same name, created at the UCLA Animation Workshop.

9 final movie poster Shane Acker

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0848 – New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle (2018 book)

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.
In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.

From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation.
In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime. (VERSO)

James Bridle on New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

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man always makes it clear to himself: “You are using things which have the intention of not being penetrable.” 1180

840 – Savages – The Story of Human Zoos (2017 documentary)

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/067797-000-A/savages-the-story-of-human-zoos/

(available from 29/09/2018 to 28/11/2018)

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For more than a century the great colonial powers put human beings, taken by force from their native lands, on show as entertainment just like animals in zoos. The story of the savage treatment of people who were considered sub-human.

Director : Bruno Victor-Pujebet, Pascal Blanchard

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human zoo (wiki)

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