Иван Грозный Часть II: Боярский заговор [1958)

[IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART II:  THE BOYARS’ PLOT (1958)]

заговор.

It gets many people in trouble.

In Stalinist Amerika.

We don’t know what list we’re on.

We don’t know when our identity has been appropriated.

Or misappropriated.

No man can be prepared for such a state of techno-terror.

And so we clap together our stones of flint.

We eat what we have caught.

We waste nothing.

Because we have offended the great dictator.

14 years in the desert ye must wander.

40?  No, fourteen.

This was The Empire Strikes Back.

There would be no Return of the Jedi.

[and certainly none of the other rubbish]

THis was when intercutting between BW and color was bleeding edge.

And only in the hands of Eisenstein did it work.

This was a voice crying out in the wilderness.

Eisenstein the prophet, predicting.

But a voice as cryptic as Shostakovich.

Today.

We might see the propagandists with their unenforceable contracts give the game away in little breadcrumb details.

To let us know that certain “realities” have been faked.

For our benefit.

And it was ever the same.

That Stalin needed a role to play.

That of Ivan IV.

But what he saw in the mirror displeased him.

And so he smashed that mirror.

Seven years of oprichniki.

1947.

Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.

Houellebecq.  Perec.  Borges.

Finally we get Lithuania.

And Mikhail Zharov with his Elvis eye.

Wasn’t nothing but a hound dog.

An absolutely devastating chess move.

And again.

And again.

Blitzkrieg.

Hansa.  Livonia.

And now the Poles in NATO.

Ah!  …

Always a new wrinkle of literary ingenuity.

Disruptive innovation, gentlemen.

Cheap cheap cheap (funding) ECLIPSE.

<laurels Laurel (MD) laurels CHECK MATE>

I would really like to help you out, but I fear I’m too dumb to do that.

I’m certainly too old.

Because cost accounting must be strictly observed.

And local efficiencies must trump complete conception.

I understand.

It takes many losses to understand the causal mechanism.

The unclaimed coins will indicate our casualties.

And so we finally see that, historically, the CIA has been a crystallization of class warfare.

Operatives, analysts, technicians…were not the dogs of the upper crust.

They were not slaves.

But perhaps now there is a difference.

Not all Harvard grads are created equally.

Epic breaking of the fourth wall.

Brechtian epic.

Identify, friend or foe?

I’m an American.

I like our military.

I respect them.

I like our intelligence professionals.

I look up to them.

I loathe whomever is pulling the really nasty levers.

Whomever is giving the orders.

It’s only natural to look to the top.

And over their shoulders.

Beware of the researchers.

Brothers, do not kill your own.

Sisters, we might not have your erudition and immaculate logic.

Our rhetoric may be daft.

But do not reject us.

 

-PD

خمس كاميرات محطمة‎ [2011)

[5 BROKEN CAMERAS (2011)]

Israel is the most shameful country on Earth.

But America is not far behind.

Israeli soldiers are cowardly, repugnant beasts.

With their high-tech weapons.

It is the same for America.

The Jews of Israel who occupy the Palestinian West Bank are disgusting semblances of human life.

They need their walls.

They need to steal land.

Oh, sounds very progressive for the cause of Zion.

So very brave that these automata in their yarmulkes move in to the olive fields of Arabs.

They set the olive trees on fire.

That sounds like an outrageous claim.

But it is nothing compared to kidnapping children.

The Israeli military kidnaps children in West Bank villages.

Why?

To try and terrorize these subsistence farmers into ceasing their protests.

And why are these farmers from small villages protesting?

Because their land is being gobbled up little by little.

“Hey, I was using that land…by the way.”

Picking olives.

So the Israeli Humvees roll in at night.

Spielberg’s pathetic imagination could never conjure what documentary filmmaker Emad Burnat captured on film.

Israelis should be puking in the streets and smearing themselves with their own shit…in shame for what their military does in their name.

And America is not far behind.

Israeli soldiers with weak faces knocking on the doors in a West Bank village.

If there are children inside, the children are taken.

It is shock and awe…Stockholm syndrome…terroristic tactics of which Goebbels would have approved.

The weak Jews who move into settlements (concrete apartment blocks) on stolen land.

All they can yell is, “I’ll sue you.  I’ll sue you.”

How dare you film me as I move into my new patriotic Israeli home?

How dare you film the scramble of settlers eager to establish false legitimacy?

What kind sick people allow their military to shoot at children?

In this film.

Never a single gun among the Palestinians.

The only rocks they throw are when the Israeli stormtroopers roll through their village in an arrogant convoy.

But the children who are shot…

The incessant tear gas…

The stun grenades thrown at people…

These every day occurrences…rather, every Friday.

The villagers of Bil’in protesting a wall.

A nonviolent protest.

And every time (every fucking time) the Israelis disperse the crowd by means of violence.

People die.

People holding nothing but Palestinian flags.

Unarmed.

In the middle of fucking nowhere.

But it’s THEIR nowhere!

It’s where the olives grow.

“Hey…your wall has cut us off from the trees.  Our trees are now on your side of the wall.”

This film, 5 Broken Cameras, shows the struggle of a filmmaker who suffered more in making this film over five years than Jean-Luc Godard suffered making films over a lifetime.

And yet, Godard is the best of the Westerners.

The only one with a conscience.

He was in Palestine in the 70s.

No other filmmaker comes close to the integrity of Godard.

Except for Emad “The Real Deal” Burnat.

Immense credit is due to the Israelis who joined the struggle with their Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Co-director Guy Davidi was one.

Immense credit is due to Kino Lorber for releasing this film.

Immense credit is due to Hulu for currently streaming this film.

Last I checked, it was also available on Apple iTunes.  Great work, Apple!

Emad Burnat threatens to unseat Abbas Kiarostami as the most relevant Middle Eastern director.

Emad Burnat lays his cards on the table in a metaphorical game of poker with Abdellatif Kechiche.

There are real tears to be cried, do you understand?

I like a good lesbian fuckfest as much as the next bloke, but these are real tears, do you understand, Adèle Exarchopoulos?

We want to see beauty.  We want to see stories which mirror our pathetic little lives.

But 5 Broken Cameras shows you hell on Earth.

Palestine.

Norman Finkelstein is a two-face Janus (which is to say, a Janus).

And so am I.

But I am so out of fear.

I am human.

[Finkelstein attacked BDS for not boycotting 5 Broken Cameras.  That’s an intel op move.  Princeton.  Princeton.]

If you’re not afraid to post something, then it’s probably not important.

 

-PD

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [1933)

This might be the one great key of the 20th century.

The skeleton key, so to speak.

We have one of the great directors of all time (Fritz Lang) laying out the operational details of criminal conspiracies.

But perhaps even more, we have the fine line between genius and madness which Hitler was beginning to toe.

It is important to note that Hitler was synonymous with the Nazi party.

He was their God, so to speak.

And yet it seems to me that Hitler was not particularly bright.

A fiery orator?  No doubt.

But not really a criminal mastermind.

No.  There were others.

Things were just getting going in 1933.

We…

become enthralled by intellect.

As our minds are stimulated, we sometimes lose track of any ethical grounding.

Which is to say, intellectuals are the most dangerous.

I would like to fancy myself an intellectual, but I will let the Order decide that.

Yes, dear friends…there is no other way to put it.

Fritz Lang, the prophet, is clearly delineating a criminal Order which would come to rule the world in the 20th century.

His message is far-reaching.

The methods outlined in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse are perhaps most applicable today.

The 21st century (which began on 9/11/01).

Terror for the sake of terror.

Hidden-hand machinations.

The man behind the curtain.

It is no small detail.

Every detail drives Otto Wernicke to the brink of madness.

He is the portly J. Edgar of this affair.

In Wernicke’s case, his opposition are mad geniuses.

Literally mad.

Goethes of crime.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge sums up the problem.

Knowledge is inextricable from high-level criminal insanity.

Dr. Mabuse has studied too much.

And so he spools out reams of handwritten blather.

He reexamines language.

Hinting at post-structuralism.

Language, year 0.

Whirls and whorls and squiggles.

And slowly the comatose “brains” of the operation finds himself a new body.

Each one well-paid.  And each compartmentalized in their knowledge.

We must come back to Max Weber for this one.

A couple of times the word.  simuliert.

The prospect.

That he could be faking it.

Madness.  To avoid the punishment he deserved.

But it seems rather that the psychiatrists have been infinitely engrossed in the case histories of their patients.  [Which is to say in their patients themselves.]

The psychiatrists have the secrets of the 20th century.

And the science rolls on.

On the one hand, we have Ewen Cameron of Project MKUltra.

On the other we have Dr. Steve Pieczenik.

And it is at this point which we need to discuss the counterintelligence apparatus of the Order:  2-B.

It’s not Abteilung.  Something different.  Less significant.  But tasked with the dirty work.  The cleanup.

Mord.  Murder.  Nipping the stragglers.  There’s no leaving the Order.

And so is it any wonder that Goebbels (or Garbage, as Charlie Chaplin rechristened him) had Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse banned in Germany?

Why?

Because it gave away all the secrets.

The secrets of control.  Each level glued together by terror.

And the controlled chaos.  The buildup of addictions.  The incredibly farsighted chess game of our conspirators.

The reign of crime.  A lusty pronunciation.

Vs. a homicide detective wont to sing strains of Die Walküre here and there.

Germany split in two.

Soon enough.

And something as simple as a love letter.

When one least expects it.

Few films deserve the label masterpiece quite like this one.

 

-PD

La Bête Humaine [1938)

This might be the most depressing film of all time.

And that’s not nothing.

I seem to remember.  Thurston Moore.

A Rolling Stone review of Lou Reed’s album Berlin.

The fucked-up kids will always search out these masterpieces.

Because they are forbidden.

Like the strange death of James Forrestal.

The first U.S. Secretary of Defense.

But let’s back to cinema.  [sic]

Let’s active.

Trains.

I often dream of trains.

Such an important part of my lineage.

Whether there were drunkards or not, I have no idea.

But train men there were many in my family.

Enough.

We think it’s gonna be like La Roue of Abel Gance.

That 273-minute behemoth.

But it’s only the trappings which match.

Perhaps, dear reader, you are more perceptive than I.

But I couldn’t have seen this ending coming in a million years.

Like the Maginot Line being overrun.

This was 1938.  Jean Renoir.

Madness.  Madness.

On the precipice of World War II.

Not history.

But present.

It must be ever present.

We must be terrified of history.

And to each of us is given a special area to study.

I long labored in the musical mines.  Studying birdsongs.

But one day I escaped my cage.

And I lived to see the blowout.

Jericho, Kentucky.

But now I am given over to film.

Because I am too old to be a rock star.

“My face is finished/My body’s gone”

It would be a miracle of spectacle for me to be relevant again in the most venal of concert halls.

And so we move on to opera.  Silent film.  Quail eggs.

Madness vs. madness.

When magazine was a store.

And journal was a newspaper.

When was that?

The false-friends attack of language.  Cognates.  Faux.

Gripping his steam engine.  A night without sleep.

La Bête Humaine.  The human beast.  Monster.

Fighting it.  Fighting it.

The banality of evil had already suffused Europe by 1938.

And so we live with a corpse throughout most of this film.

Pocket watch.  Wallet full of dough.

But Simone Simon is already flirting her way to destiny.

Der müde Tod.

Femme fatale.  Serial.  Concatenation of sickly sweet roles.

Roles.

Jean Gabin.

Here’s to you, my friend!

And Julien Carette.  Always sucking on that cigarette.

We begin to covet the boring comfort of his life.

Living from one cigarette to the next.

Vive le tabac!

Piss-poor English Wikipedia will not tell you that Monsieur Carette was an integral part of Renoir’s masterpiece La Règle du jeu.  Not, that is, if you are looking at his page.

And so, dear reader, I am here to make those connections for you.

Perhaps they will mean nothing.

Perhaps they will mean everything.

Let me just say this…

La Bête Humaine was an extremely brave film to make in 1938.

More Hitchcock than anything Hitch had made up till that point.

Ahead of its time, yes.

But most particularly…symptomatic of that age of anxiety.

 

-PD

 

We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook [2014)

From a group called Independent Media Solidarity comes this excellent exposé concerning what was almost certainly a false flag:  the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting of 2012.

I had researched the topic rather extensively for the simple reason that it happened on my birthday.  There I was headed over the frozen highways of Utah and Colorado and this pall hung over what should have been a more-or-less festive time for me.

The event pulled me in.  It seemed incredible.  And as I followed all of the false leads which came out about the case (espoused by all of the major American media outlets), I began to see that something was terribly amiss.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Back to the film at hand.

What we are talking about here is essentially a YouTube phenomenon.

The Independent Media Solidarity group have produced quite a professional piece of work.

The documentary’s setting is Newtown, Connecticut.

Ah, Newtown…

It’s sort of like Scrabble.  James Brunot.

And it’s definitely like the phantasmic “Woodchipper Murder” (the basis for the Coen Brothers’ Fargo).

Charles Ives might have called it the Housatonic at Stockbridge.

Robert Underwood Johnson.

Sandy Hook is a community within Newtown.

Newtown counts among its progeny the “Father of Robotics” Joseph Engelberger.

So too Renata Adler (who famously ripped Pauline Kael).

Perhaps most notably (as Dr. Steve Pieczenik has pointed out), the town counts among its residents Suzanne Collins (author of The Hunger Games trilogy).

Collins even lives in the Sandy Hook portion of Newtown (where our massacre ostensibly occurred).

Yet Collins has given no statement.

If this had been a real event (the “school shooting”), then Collins would have been among the first likely to be interviewed.  This seems to be the point Pieczenik made some weeks back on the esteemed Dr. James Tracy’s radio show Real Politik.

But we push on through the parade:

-Charles Goodyear (rubber vulcanization)

-Caitlyn Jenner (actually, quite an interesting angle given the media blitz surrounding her and Sandy Hook)

-Elia Kazan (the genius sell-out…and most germane to my subject)

-Mead Treadwell (very interesting angle, but he’s a Republican).

What we mostly find is a lot of power.

Newtown.

About 27,000 residents.

U.S. Congressmen.  Connecticut governors.  Dept. of Justice.  U.S. Treasury.

A well-heeled community.  A bedroom community for New York City.

Then there’s Sherman…three-time mayor of Chicago.

And, perhaps most of all, an inordinate number of children’s authors.

But the pithy name we need to understand the film under consideration is that of graffiti artist Emit.

Yes, we have to take a different logic to understand this new brand of filmmaking.

These are filmmakers who dig deep.

They seek to understand Robert Crafts and how he could put his wife Helle Crafts through a woodchipper at Lake Zoar.

Maybe hoaxing goes all the way back to Luther Meade Blackman in the town of Sandy Hook.  Blackman was accused of forging the Bat Creek inscription (an engraving on a dubious Native American artifact unearthed by the Smithsonian [actually, Bureau of American Ethnology] in Tennessee in 1889).

Our auteurs first focus on the Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown.  It was the setting for the Hollywood film Sleepers in 1996 (a mere one year after the facility [of 1930s vintage] was closed).

Our auteurs further flesh out the tale of Fairfield Hills by relating the story of MTV’s Fear television show (which filmed at the abandoned mental hospital in the tunnels beneath the facility).

The point is that, for all of Fairfield Hills’ psychiatric crypticism, Sandy Hook suddenly replaced the sanatorium as the town’s defining mystery.

It is at this point which we meet the protagonist (who may or may not have actually existed):  Adam Lanza.

Dr. Steve Pieczenik asserts (elsewhere) that Lanza indeed did not exist.

Nevertheless, we are presented with the mainstream cover story (a bit like Lee Harvey Oswald’s or that of the 19 hijackers).

Adam Lanza.  Autistic.

Vs. equally dubious characters like Natalie Hammond (celebrated at a Boston Bruins’ game).

Nancy Lanza.  Dead in bed.

I will admit that the footage of Robbie Parker really started to make me suspicious.

Our auteurs point out that all of the parents (who got copious primetime news coverage) display characteristics at odds with truly grieving parents.

In other words, none of them are very good (crisis) actors.

That is the realization we are faced with:  these are crisis actors.

Valley girl reactions.

The laughing coroner.

All of these personages seem nervous.  Not comfortable in their own skin.

Is it perhaps because they are playing the roles of their lives?

They would, therefore, be breaking the law to a significant extent by helping to foist this false narrative on the American public.

Is this real world or exercise?

Ah, now we are getting somewhere.

Because once you get to the bottom of one of these false events, you are able to chop through the BS of other similar events with a metaphorical machete.

Why should you watch this film?

Because one of the parents (Lenny Pozner) has apparently been harassing Independent Media Solidarity [going so far as to hack or have hacked their Google Drive].  Oops…

https://memoryholeblog.com/2016/03/13/public-service-announcement-from-ims-unauthorized-access/

Dr. James Tracy lost his tenured position at Florida Atlantic University for standing up to the media barrage of senselessness which narrowly-framed the Sandy Hook debate.  Tracy has made it very clear that Pozner and his HONR Network (think Jewish Defense League…terrorizing the targets of their opprobrium) are a stalking Internet gang inconsistent with grieving parents.  The dialogue between HONR Network group members (which has been exposed at Tracy’s Memory Hole Blog, the ostensible reason for his termination from FAU) can be characterized as being more like a band of hired thugs than true vigilantes.  In other words, their essence is the real terror of a fake terror event.  They are the clean-up crew.

https://memoryholeblog.com/2016/01/08/lenny-pozners-honr-network-the-fine-art-of-online-stalking-and-harassment/

The mastermind of Independent Media Solidarity appears to be a YouTube user named “mrstosh314”.  “MrStosh” pops up again as one of three credited producers of the follow-up to We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook (that being The Life of Adam [another great documentary which I hope to review soon enough]).

Other excellent contributors to We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook include:

-Sherrie QuestioningAll

-Swan Song (editor of insanemedia.net) [whose voice sounds a lot like that of David Knight from infowars.com]

-TyrannyNewsNetwork

-Odinrok

-FreeRadioRevolution

-Sandy Hook Research

-Professor Doom1

-QKUltra

-UpNorthOfThe49th

[keep in mind that these are all YouTube “handles”]

To clarify, the end credits list MrStosh314 as writer and director of this film (which is slightly at odds with the ad hoc structure presented).  Regardless, his efforts are much appreciated.  I wasn’t sure (until I checked further) whether he was the same person as Peter Klein (another of the listed producers for The Life of Adam).  [It seems he is not.]  As even Lenny Pozner acknowledged in a pilfered series of messages, Klein “has skills”.  Of course, Pozner doesn’t entirely break character.  Talented but “evil”.

That’s the pot kettle black.

 

-PD

Il Deserto rosso [1964)

My hair hurts.

She says.

Yes.

This is one of the miracles of cinema.

Every frame a painting with a camérastylo.

One critic will boil it down to “mental illness”.

And Monica Vitti does that very well.

Red hair.  Red desert.

But we should know Antonioni by now.

This is that existential nausea you used to hear of at coffee shops.

Except the coffee shops no longer exist.

And Manhattan is a ghost ship with no one on board.  Saying nothing.

No doubt Kubrick visited this for 2001.  And George Lucas for THX 1138.

But we are more interested in Godard.

Il Deserto rosso is a film for filmmakers.

Mulholland Dr. stands no chance.

But why?

Because, yes, we all feel like this.

Lost.

The floating world in Japanese mythology.

No doubt Kurosawa pinched the end bit for Dreams.

It’s ok.

That’s what makes Il Deserto rosso a watershed film.

In the shed.  Surrounded by water.

A proto-orgy.

Roman atavism at the group level.

No, no…

I’m not getting anywhere.

The critics will cry “overwrought”.

What we have here is really a sick sadness.

Feel too much.

Bowie’s Low title is above the artist in profile.

Low profile.

And that color.

Her hair.

What acting!

Is it?

Bow down to the master Michelangelo.

One of the true auteurs.

For the uninitiated it will seem unbearably pretentious.

Or just confusing.

It will seem that there is no plot.

And, indeed, in space there is no “up” or “down”.

There are simply bodies with sufficient mass to exert gravity.

Is that the way to say it?

Is that how it works?

Because we are all floating, right?

32 feet per second per second.

[sic]

Acceleration of falling bodies.

God bless her…

Always a sinking feeling.

Because her husband is a vapid jerk.

And the most sensitive guy can’t get close enough…cause she’s nuts.

Makes perfect sense.

Our own worst fears played out by the players on the screen.

Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore.

Precisely.

Pirandello.

Logic bombs and bombs of illogic.

The latter in Dadaism.

Hackers who terrorize simply to make their point.

To outsmart.

Legacy networks and newer nets introduced in phases…

Allowing for GDP, profit margin, and public sector infrastructure.

Which is to say, DARPA.

And where does the film critic fit in?

Merely as a voice…reminding…don’t forget your Sun Tzu.

Everything else will be diverted to slag heaps and holding tanks.

Opaque tanks…glowing green like antifreeze.

Does this sound like a fun adventure?

Then Il Deserto rosso is for you.

And for me.

Because I identify with Monica Vitti’s character so much.

Afraid of everything.

My hair hurts.

 

-PD