Alice is a 1988 surrealistdark fantasy film written and directed by Jan Švankmajer. Its original Czech title is Něco z Alenky, which means “Something from Alice”. It is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll‘s first Alice book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), about a girl who chases a white rabbit into a bizarre fantasy land. Alice is played by Kristýna Kohoutová. The film combines live-action with stop-motion animation, and is distinguished by its dark production design.
For Švankmajer, a prolific director of short films for more than two decades, Alice became his first venture into feature-length filmmaking. The director had been disappointed by other adaptations of Carroll’s book, which interpret it as a fairy tale. His aim was instead to make the story play out like an amoral dream.
Despite the film’s heavy usage of stop motion, and unlike most other traditional stop motion films, the film does not utilize any miniature sets to portray its special effects. (wiki)
It is even hard – even in my family, coming from an east-bloc intelligentsia background (father sculptor, mother soprano), the word “gypsy” had its usual racist connotations, but it was used more in the sense of ‘underdeveloped’ or rather a slightly colonialist ‘uncivilized’ which of course completely ignored the ways Romani were supposed to be still nomads that need to become sedentary. But the pressure to ‘urbanize’, to build and produce socialism was particularly harsh on women and minorities. In my family the phrase “You were born on the ‘French Street'” (Te-ai născut pe Franceza) was a euphemism for the Romani street in the village of my mother’s side grandpa (a worker welder). They were constantly joking and accusing each other of being born there which was supposedly a way to put you down the social ladder. The interesting thing is the way the French were supposedly synonymous with ‘high culture’ in Romania (in the Interwar period as well as during Communism). So calling the Romani village street ‘French’ was supposed to be an outrage, was meant to be initially off-putting, but also, underneath, to admit that mixed couples were happening and that everyone could have Romani ancestors. A was an admission that a clear dividing line did not exist, and also a play or satire on high/low culture ideals (or this is how I understand it).
They were slaves in Romania for hundreds of years, longer than slaves existed in the US. In Bulgaria, the situation was somewhat similar from what I understand and Romani escaped to the Ottoman Empire before where they could be free.
Keep thinking of this document, where 27 Roma families, that is 117 human beings in total, adults and children, were sold between two wealthy individuals in mid-19th century Moldavia, for the price of about a head of cattle each.
Here is a very important documentary that I truly recommend and that has been long unavailable or only reluctantly so it seems (in Germany). It is not only a movie about the plight of the Romani victims of the Holocaust (together with Jewish, queer/lesbian, as well as Communists and Anarchists), but also an indictment of the autonomy of the arts and the doctrine that artists are ‘Gods’, existing above politics, above accountability, above historical events, basically outside of history. This pernicious view is popular in Germany and elsewhere, while things changed, it is still part of an official cult of artistic ‘geniuses’ and cultural elites that tries to keep “Kultur” untarnished by its miserable associations, and one that continues to whitewash and justify many abuses. There’s a direct line that leads from the authenticity and separation of fhe artist from everything else and fascism. While artists have been hunger artists, or even thrown out of the polis (Plato), or declared degenerated and pathologized (Max Nordau), there’s something very wrong with upholding the unicity of the artist – that in the end acts like mercenary at the disposal of different regimes and powerful protectors.
It is the story of the Romani survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and how Tante “Leni” Riefenstahl, well known Nazi propagandist filmmaker director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and photographer used them as extras in one of her wartime movies (Tiefland) before they were sent to the extermination camps. Don’t mean to be disprespectful to the survivors, but I could not help myself thinking ‘Tante’ Leni making Dune instead of Villeneuve, and using Romani extras as Fremen (maybe this does not forbode well for the next Dune installment).
“The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War.” (IMDB)
Suffice it to say the family is among the richest in the world and certainly in Germany. Its members were leading German industrialists, specifically Günther Quandt (1881–1954), a German industrialist, who founded an industrial empire that includes BMW andAltana, Harald Quandt (1921–1967), German industrialist, stepson of Joseph Goebbels, and Herbert Quandt (1910–1982), German industrialist, regarded as having saved the BMW firm plus made huge profit afterward. Germany’s role in the world economy was intimately linked to the way it was considered politically expedient to build a strong Germany after the war. One should not single out families and interest groups which is why I find it important to offer a structural analysis whenever possible of the conditions that lead to such close collaborations within the capitalist world system. Important to understand how the car industry (till the energy transition) was not only involved in war crimes but also worked hand in hand with Big Oil, there are no conflicting interests there, and were responsible for the historical emissions that have made our world hotter than in the last 100.000 years.
There is not much on the EN wiki page of this documentary and it is a pity. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube in 6 parts, and while the movie is freely available in German, I could not find any EN full version. Maybe nothing is really surprising and if we think about the pollution scandals that have rocked the German car industry, especially the Volkswagen defeat devices – their dark NS history does not come as a surprise. It seems to have been ripped of the ARTE channel. Anyway, I am thankful to the uploader. There is much to learn here – especially how the chief industrialists wanted to build the battery industry in Europe on the back of slave labor from concentration camps. Whenever driving a BMW one should always keep this documentary in mind.
Natja Brunckhorst Characters: Christiane Film: Christiane F. Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo We Children From Bahnhof Zoo Christiane F. DE 1981 Director: Uli Edel 02 April 1981 Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo BRD 1981, Regie Uli Edel Natja Brunckhorst / Filmplakat, Plakat, Poster, Filmposter PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: MaryxEvansxAFxArchivexConstantinxFilm 12468751 editorial use only
Christiane F. (German: Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo) is a 1981 German biographical drama film directed by Uli Edel that portrays the descent of Christiane Felscherinow, a bored 13-year-old growing up in mid-1970s West Berlin, to a 14-year-old heroin addict. Based on the 1978 non-fiction book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Zoo Station), transcribed and edited from tape recordings by Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck, the film immediately acquired cult status and features David Bowie as both composer and as himself. In 2013, Felscherinow published her autobiography Christiane F. – My Second Life.
The film was shot with a low budget in 1980 and released in 1981, but set between 1975 and 1977 in West Berlin. It skips the beginning and the end of the book, and concentrates on the main story, starting when Christiane begins her nightlife in Berlin at around 13 years old, and stops rather abruptly after her suicide attempt by stating that she recovered. In the real story, Christiane F. never fully recovered from her addiction, nor did her troubles end with going to Hamburg to begin withdrawal.
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The cast is composed mainly of first-time actors, most of whom were still in school at the time and have mostly not pursued acting careers since. Natja Brunckhorst is the only cast member who continued to act in German films and television. Real life “Stella” (Catherine Schabeck), aged 18 at the time, has a short cameo as the drug dealer that sells the first dose of heroin to Detlev. Most of the extras at the railway station and at SOUND were actual drug users and prostitutes. It would now be illegal to have minors act in the film’s graphic shoot-up, nudity and sex scenes; at the time, however, all the production needed was a written letter of consent from the parents to proceed with filming.
Bowie’s music from his albums made in Berlin during 1976 and 1977 is played throughout the picture, and as he was at the peak of his popularity during the late 1970s and early 1980s, his presence helped boost the film’s commercial success. (wiki)
Can you dream about anything?
Can you really be sure you are not dreaming?
Can you dream -are you dreaming-?
Have you pinched yourself to see that you weren’t dreaming?
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Modes of Market Creation and Price Regulation
1. China’s Tradition of Bureaucratic Market Participation: Guanzi and the Salt and Iron Debate
2. From Market to War Economy and Back: American Price Control during World War II and Its Aftermath
3. Re-creating the Economy through State Commerce: Price Stabilization and the Communist Revolution
Part II: China’s Market Reform Debate
4. The Starting Point: Price Control in the Maoist Economy and the Urge for Reform
5. Rehabilitating the Market in Theory and Practice: Chinese Economists, the World Bank, and Eastern European Émigrés
6. Market Creation versus Price Liberalisation: Rural Reform, Young Intellectuals and the Dual-Track Price System
7. Debunking Shock Therapy: The Clash of Two Market Reform Paradigms
8. Escaping Shock Therapy: Causes and Consequences of the 1988 Inflation
The film tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a 15-year-old in 1958, has an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. She disappears only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Naziconcentration camp. (wiki)
Ganz normale Männer – Der ‘vergessene Holocaust’ (2022 documentary)
The Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial of 1947/1948 is considered the largest murder trial in history against members of four death squads from the security police and SD (the security service of the SS). During World War II, six million Jews were murdered. Four million died in the extermination camps, but two million people were killed in systematic mass shootings. The perpetrators came face to face with their victims. They shot at men, women, children – day after day, obediently and assiduously, as if it were normal work. Tens of thousands of Germans belonged to the mobile commandos of the task forces and police battalions. Who were these men, how could they commit such murders? What did the few survivors tell, how were they able to escape the mass extinction and live on with the horrific experience? Based on written traditions, original documents, film footage and photos as well as expert statements, the documentary traces the path of one of these murder battalions.
TimeSpace Warps 