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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 23, 2023 21:17:41 GMT
That does look quite interesting!
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 20, 2023 13:45:38 GMT
Anselm Kiefer is a major German multiform artist, diversely appreciated in Germany but very appreciated in the rest of Europe. He left Germany in 1992 and took over a 40 hectare domain in Barjac France (near Nimes) which he has filled with his monumental works, outdoors, in greenhouses, warehouse and hangars.
I went to see the Wim Wenders documentary about him -- in 3D -- today, and he is really an amazing artist.
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Post by Kimby on Oct 20, 2023 15:14:22 GMT
Cross posting from the TV series thread:
Did anyone else watch the new Ken Burns 2-part miniseries American Buffalo?
Really well done with lots of information about Native Americans and their reliance on and reverence for Bison bison.
Also a sobering account of the white mans mistreatment of both the bison and the natives. And wrapping up with efforts to recover the buffalo and return them to the prairies, much of which was filmed just up the road from us.
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Post by Kimby on Nov 13, 2023 4:57:06 GMT
TICKLED, ostensibly about Competitive Endurance Tickling, an athletic event, sort of. A New Zealander tracks down the mastermind behind a big-dollar empire of tickling dens that auditions new talent and collects video, lots of video, and puts it to nefarious use. Strange but interesting. www.imdb.com/title/tt5278506/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
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Post by mickthecactus on Dec 7, 2023 12:49:42 GMT
Sky Documentaries had an excellent programme on Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb last night.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 30, 2024 12:10:48 GMT
James Ivory's A Cooler Climate (Un été afghan en français) dates from 2022 but has only just been released on a big screen. Obviously it must have circulated on the little screens. It's about the months he spent in Kabul in 1960 where he went to make a documentary, except that he never made the documentary. Until now. He rediscovered the reels of film that he shot 60 years earlier, and they are amazing. He also talks about life there of course. For example, they tried to stop him from filming women wearing burkhas because the burkha had just been outlawed "so nobody needs to see that." Conditions were extremely primitive of course. "One night at dinner after a few bites, I couldn't stomach the food they served, so the waiter just took away my plate and served it to a German woman who ate it without comment. If you didn't finish your glass of water, the last half was poured back into the pitcher." Kabul has no grand palaces like India -- they have all been destroyed over the years, with just a few traces of the Moghul empire left. He visited Bamayan, now destroyed by the taliban. Ivory also talks about the empire of the past with a lot of illustrations of Persian miniatures, of his sexual interrogations when nothing was possible, various other trips, and finally meeting Ismail Merchant in 1951 with whom he remained until his death. It was absolutely fascinating.
In view of what has happened since then, it makes me boiling mad.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 30, 2024 15:19:54 GMT
Good grief! The disparity between the first part of the Golden Age video and the last part is so stark that it's bewildering. That is compounded by trying to make sense of the short period of time between the 1960 shown in the documentary's trailer and the 60s and 70s shown in the Golden Age one. It is weird to think that in Türkiye, where the wearing of a hijab was restricted and even banned in places such as government offices, many young modern women returned to wearing it, perhaps as an expression of freedom to choose. By contrast, it would appear in Afghanistan in 1960 women were joyfully tossing aside their burkhas and making use of their rights. The trailer for A Cooler Climate is the real thing of a teaser, as it frustratingly whets the viewer's appetite for more. it must have circulated on the little screens Apparently not. This site says that it is not available for streaming. When I opened the site, it was set to Australia so I clicked through a few other countries, none of which can currently stream it. It was shown at a film fest in Morelia in October of 2023, so I guess I'll have to wait till it hits an art house or similar in Xalapa.
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Post by Kimby on Jan 30, 2024 16:22:21 GMT
The quirky mind behind TICKLED also brought us MY SCIENTOLOGY MOVIE. What a strange and paranoid “religion”. Tom Cruise (unwittingly) stars. www.imdb.com/title/tt5111874/
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Post by Kimby on Jan 31, 2024 15:48:51 GMT
PBS Frontline last night was a 2:30 documentary called Democracy on Trial.
Well worth watching. It’s on YouTube and PBS online.
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Post by Kimby on Feb 1, 2024 4:49:37 GMT
Neither Confirm Nor Deny, the true story of the Watergate-era CIA mission to “steal” a sunken Soviet submarine to mine its secrets. A huge ship is built ($1.6 billion in todays dollars) under the elaborate ruse of Howard Hughes starting an undersea mining operation. I’d never heard of this operation. www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/movies/neither-confirm-nor-deny-review.htmlSide note: the footage of Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev pursuing the SALT treaty really makes it obvious how far US politicians have fallen. Who knew Trump could make Nixon look good?
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 5, 2024 23:10:29 GMT
La ferme des Bertrand is a magnificent film that spans 50 years bcause it was put together with a first report in 1972, then bits of another documentary in 1997 and finally footage from 2022.
It is absolutely fascinating watching the family go from total manual labour and upgrading slowly but surely to the latest machines. But there is quite a bit of human collateral damage along the way because not everybody wanted to be a farmer, except they saw no way out. They bust their arses every day except sometimes during the winter, the men can sit at the dinner table a little longer. And one of the old farmers marvels at how the younger generation can get the job done "and even finish the work before nightfall!" You see the progression from throwing a bucket of grain down for each cow to the new computerised machines that know exactly how much feed to dole out to each cow. The computer shows exactly how much milk each cow has produced every day and if they are holding up their end of the bargain. I have never learned so much about farm life as I did today.
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Post by Kimby on Feb 7, 2024 0:45:31 GMT
I used to “help” during milking at a dairy farm near our family cabin. We kids would look up each cow (by her ear tag number) in a ledger book that said how much grain she was to get. Then we’d hang a bucket on a scale, scoop the grain into the bucket and pour it out in front of her in her stall.
After the farmer attached the milking machine to her teats, milk would collect in its large stainless steel reservoir. It would be poured out into a clean bucket that we kids would take to the scale and weigh, recording the weight of the milk next to the cow’s number, then dumping the milk into the refrigerated bulk tank that would be emptied by a tanker truck the next day to haul to the dairy for pasteurization and packaging.
There were 14 stalls in the dairy barn as I recall, and there were two or three shifts of milking, both morning and evening. After the first go-round, the cows were released from their stancheons and left the barn. The next group of cows was already lined up to come in the barn, and they all knew where “their” stall was. They were eager to be milked as their bags were bulging.
This was low tech, high labor milk production. Years later my family visited a modern dairy a few miles away from our neighbor’s barn that milked 1000’s of cows using a continuously revolving platform with milk lines overhead and a continuous parade of cows stepping on as others stepped off. The only human activity was to hose off their udders and attach the cups to their teats. When milk stopped flowing, about the time the turntable had completed its revolution, the milking machine would drop off the cow and retract back toward the ceiling. Quite a difference from the olden days!
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 7, 2024 2:54:31 GMT
Yes, that documentary showed all that and also showed that the cows have different personalities. In one scene when they were still manually putting the feed in buckets, one of the cows was on strike or something because every time the guy would put the (empty) bucket in its holder, the cow would grab it with its mouth and throw it on the floor. It did this three times in a row while the other cows just watched in complete placidity.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 26, 2024 18:35:54 GMT
I am a total fan of Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, who has appeared in all sorts of movies around the world. Just in terms of American movies, she has been in Blade Runner 2049, Succession, Exodus: Gods and Kings or even Hellraiser. I prefer her in European, Israeli and Palestinian movies, but maybe that's just me.
Anyway, her daughter made a film about some of her life, and it revealed quite a few things to me about her life and also about Palestinian history. Bye Bye Tibériade (Bye Bye Tiberia) uses both archival footage and home movies and videos about life since 1948 when the Israelis pushed them out of their homes with the help of the British army. Israelis definitely have not changed over the years, because they immediately destroy the Palestinian buildings the moment they arrive. The family never saw Tiberias again when it became an Israeli city. Some of the "fond" memories are surprising. For example, when the parents just had 8 children (there were eventually 10), they all slept together in the same one room. "The parents were in bed in the middle of the room, and there wre mattresses for the children spread around on all sides." Hiam was the rebellious daughter and even told her father that she had slept with her boyfriend. "Do you want me to go see his father to arrange the engagement?" "We have no intention of getting married. " "Get out of my house!"
I was amazed by a lot of the history. Hiam married an Englishman, officially converted to Islam, but that didn't last. Then she married a good Muslim but that didn't last either. Finally she married Franco-Algerian actor Zinedine Soualem with whom she had her children, but that relationship has also ended. No problem -- she is a free spirit. Anyway, she has lived in Paris for decades even though she didn't speak a word of French when she arrived.
It was interesting to see Hiam Abbass in everyday life, looking like an aging frump (she is 63). In movies she always looks great with movie makeup and elegant clothing and stylish hair.
Anyway, this user review from IMDb is pretty good even though the person was disappointed that the movie did not concentrate on just Him Abbass and her career.
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