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Fishelakh-In-Vaser
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." ~ Karl Marx
"The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large. They find themselves born into a certain place in society, and they accept what each day brings forth, without any effort of thought beyond what the immediate present requires. Almost as instinctively as the beasts of the field, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought, and without considering that by sufficient effort the whole conditions of their lives could be changed. A certain percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort of thought and will which is necessary to place themselves among the more fortunate members of the community; but very few among these are seriously concerned to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have that kind of love toward mankind at large that makes them unable to endure patiently the general mass of evil and suffering, regardless of any relation it may have to their own lives. These few, driven by sympathetic pain, will seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape, some new system of society by which life may become richer, more full of joy and less full of preventable evils than it is at present. But in the past such men have, as a rule, failed to interest the very victims of the injustices which they wished to remedy. The more unfortunate sections of the population have been ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and weariness, timorous through the imminent danger of immediate punishment by the holders of power, and morally unreliable owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To create among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort after general amelioration might have seemed a hopeless task, and indeed in the past it has generally proved so. But the modern world, by the increase of education and the rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners, has produced new conditions, more favorable than ever before to the demand for radical reconstruction. It is above all the Socialists, and in a lesser degree the Anarchists (chiefly as the inspirers of Syndicalism), who have become the exponents of this demand. ~ Bertrand Russell
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A few of my favourite films.
Traité de bave et d'éternité, Isidore Isou (1951)
L'année dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais (1961)
Dog Star Man, Stan Brakhage (1961-1964)
La Jetée, Chris Marker (1962)
Mothlight, Stan Brakhage (1963)
2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick (1968)
Valerie a týden divu, Jaromil Jireš (1970)
A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick (1971)
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Stan Brakhage (1971)
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky (1973)
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975)
Eraserhead, David Lynch (1977)
Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick (1978)
Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio (1982)
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Michael Radford (1984)
Begotten, E. Elias Merhige (1990)
Sátántangó, Béla Tarr (1994)
Gummo, Harmony Korine (1997)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam (1998)
The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick (1998)
The Dark Tower, Stan Brakhage (1999)
The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson (2001)
The Pianist, Roman Polanski (2002)
Irréversible, Gaspar Noé (2002)
Strange Circus, Sion Sono (2005)
Noriko's Dinner Table, Sion Sono (2006)
Inland Empire, David Lynch (2006)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik (2007)
No Country for Old Men, Ethan Coen & Joel Coen (2007)
The Tracey Fragments, Bruce McDonald (2007)
Enter the Void, Gaspar Noé (2010)
Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek (2010)
The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (2011)
A Torinói ló, Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky (2011)
Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson (2012)
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Ratings
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Reviews
The Machine (2013)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Machine is a rather successful attempt at implementing hard science fiction tendencies with a cyberpunk aesthetic. It may not be particularly adroit in terms of human and AI relationships, but I appreciate the rigor of the scientific explanation for the artificial intelligence. The film really excels at this in the beginning when Vincent conducts his own Turing tests as part of a secret headhunting operation. Then as he meets Ava things start taking a problematic turn. The military-industrial complex is invoked, but its purpose is sort of shadowy and never is contextualized in a way that would make the narrative more coherent.
The questioning of human identity is the strongest point of the film, but I suppose that, at the very core, this film was more interested in being a thriller, rather than an exploration of the philosophical concepts.