This film contains clips from D. W. Griffith‘s silent movie The Birth of a Nation. While Spike Lee was a student at NYU Film School, he was so outraged that his NYU Film School professors taught The Birth of a Nation (1915) with no mention of its racist message or role in the Klan’s twentieth-century rebirth that he made a student short film titled The Answer (1980) as a response. The film so offended many of his professors that Lee was nearly expelled from NYU. He was ultimately saved by a faculty vote. (read more: trivia)
Crips and Bloods: Made in America is a documentary by Stacy Peralta that examines the rise of the Crips and Bloods, prominent gangs in America. The documentary focuses on the external factors that caused African-American youth to turn to gangs and questions the political and law enforcement response to the rise of gang culture. (read more: wiki) / imdb
The archaeological record shows the first undisputed dog remains buried beside humans 14,700 years ago, with disputed remains occurring 36,000 years ago.
timespace coordinates: 2000’s Netherlands / United States / Belgium / China / Spain
The Forgotten Space (Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, 2010) follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete.
A range of materials is used: descriptive documentary, interviews, archive stills and footage, clips from old movies. The result is an essayistic, visual documentary about one of the most important processes that affects us today. The Forgotten Space is based on Sekula’s Fish Story, seeking to understand and describe the contemporary maritime world in relation to the complex symbolic legacy of the sea.
The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes. But perhaps the biggest seagoing disaster is the global supply chain, which – maybe in a more fundamental way than financial speculation – leads the world economy to the abyss. (http://www.theforgottenspace.net/)
Dark City is a 1998 neo-noir science fiction film directed by Alex Proyas. The screenplay was written by Proyas, Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer. The film stars Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, and William Hurt. Sewell plays John Murdoch, an amnesiac man who finds himself suspected of murder. Murdoch attempts to discover his true identity and clear his name while on the run from the police and a mysterious group known only as the “Strangers”.
chris skinner streetscape edition poster
(themes)Theologian Gerard Loughlin interprets Dark City as a retelling of Plato‘s Allegory of the Cave. For Loughlin, the city dwellers are prisoners who do not realize they are in a prison. John Murdoch’s escape from the prison parallels the escape from the cave in the allegory. He is assisted by Dr. Schreber, who explains the city’s mechanism as Socrates explains to Glaucon how the shadows in the cave are cast. Murdoch however becomes more than Glaucon; Loughlin writes, “He is a Glaucon who comes to realize that Socrates’ tale of an upper, more real world, is itself a shadow, a forgery.”
chris skinner skyscape edition poster
Murdoch defeats the Strangers who control the inhabitants and remakes the world based on childhood memories, which were themselves illusions arranged by the Strangers. Loughlin writes of the lack of background, “The origin of the city is off–stage, unknown and unknowable.” Murdoch now casts new shadows for the city inhabitants, who must trust his judgment. Unlike Plato, Murdoch “is disabused of any hope of an outside” and becomes the demiurge for the cave, the only environment he knows.
The city in Dark City is described by Higley as a “murky, nightmarish German expressionist film noir depiction of urban repression and mechanism”. The city has a World War II dreariness reminiscent of Edward Hopper‘s (0049) works and has details from different eras and architectures that are changed by the Strangers; “buildings collapse as others emerge and battle with one another at the end”. The round window in Dark City is concave like a fishbowl and is a frequently seen element throughout the city. The inhabitants do not live at the top of the city; the main characters’ homes are dwarfed by the bricolage of buildings. (wiki)
Mr. Hand: We’re very lucky when you think about it. / Emma Murdoch: I’m sorry? / Mr. Hand: To be able to revisit those places which have meant so very much to us. / Emma Murdoch: I thought it was more that we were haunted by them. / Mr. Hand: Perhaps. But imagine a life Alien to yours. In which your memories were not your own, but those shared by every other of you kind. Imagine the torment of such an existence….no experiences to call your own. / Emma Murdoch: If it was all you knew, maybe it would be a comfort. / Mr. Hand: But if you were to discover something different…Something….better.
The Unknown Soldier (Finnish: Tuntematon sotilas, Swedish: Okänd soldat) is a 2017 Finnish war drama independent film and the third adaption of the 1954 bestselling Finnish classic novel of the same name by Väinö Linna, a book considered part of national legacy. Directed by Aku Louhimies, it is the first one based on the novel’s manuscript version, Sotaromaani (“the war novel”). The previous two film adaptations were released in 1955 and 1985. The World War II film follows a machine gun company (Finnish: konekiväärikomppania) of the Finnish Army from a frog perspective during the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944. It was the most expensive Finnish motion picture at its release with a budget of 7 million euros. (wiki)
BlacKkKlansman is a 2018 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Spike Lee and written by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, and Lee, based on the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. The film stars John David Washington as Stallworth, along with Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, and Topher Grace. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the plot follows the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs police department, who sets out to infiltrate and expose the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The film was theatrically released in the United States on August 10, 2018, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist Unite the Right rally. (wiki)
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