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#Potemkin City limits
punkrockmixtapes · 9 months
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Propagandhi - Fixed Frequencies
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seat-safety-switch · 11 months
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A lot of people at Home Depot are getting froggy at my comparison of them to the Third Reich. This is, of course, a media fabrication. The Nazis had easy access to working tools, and lumber that was straight. What I actually called them was “a group of useless, tin-hat fascists that can’t even stock a fucking lightswitch.”
Back when I was a kid, small hardware stores were all over the place. You could get on your bicycle and ride over to the local lumber shop, and a weird old guy would tell you what stuff to buy, occasionally implying that he was your real father. Then you’d ride home, and finish your project, happy in the knowledge that at least you could control the construction of a potato cannon or low-dimensional-stability, non-permitted birdhouse.
At some point, buoyed by the renovation-crazy era of reality television, the big hardware giants started rolling in. They’d buy out or crush all of these little hardware stores. Why would you go to two of them, they’d ask, when you can get all your stuff here, in one trip, for cheaper? This would be a great thing indeed, if I didn’t have to go to three different big-box hardware stores in order to satisfy literally any weekend project shopping list.
At least with Abnormal Ed’s House of an Unusual Amount of Paracord, you’d know what you were getting into, and if you shopped at his place a lot, he’d probably start stocking the stuff you need. With Home Depot, you’re not even a blip on their immense Excel spreadsheet of Raw Data Pure Data Good Data. With an international reach, your insane hyper-local desires (limited to your house) average out to nothing against the demands of everyone else. There’s no way you can potentially influence them to start offering something unprofitable like, say, white spray paint, or hammers that aren’t made of tinfoil, without taking hostages.
What can we do about this? Other than building a time machine and going back to save small hardware stores – which would probably require buying some parts at Home Depot, which means we’d be wasting a beautiful Saturday afternoon driving all over the city just to pick up red and black wire – the only thing we can do is convince them that an even larger, angrier, hardware store is coming to kill them.
I got the idea when I had a bunch of sparrows flying into my kitchen window. You cut out some silhouettes of bigger birds and just paste them on there. They think a bunch of giant crows are hiding behind the window, and steer clear. It took a lot of time to construct an entire elaborate replica of a hardware store megaconsortium in the empty parking lot next to the Home Depot headquarters, and it was very hard to paint the Chinese ideographs for “HILARIOUS FUN DOESN’T STOCK UNPROFITABLE ITEMS RENOVATION DEPOT” while holding on to the 60th storey of a Potemkin building made entirely out of old cardboard boxes, but I managed to pull it off. You could hear the lifetime middle managers shrieking in fear of their new competitors from blocks away, and by the time I got home, the local Home Depot had finally decided to stock both light fixtures and light bulbs.
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paintingsandrecords · 7 months
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toads ariel drew; ink and watercolor
last weeks’s listening:
pete seeger - folk songs for young people
lifetime - hello bastards
propagandhi - today’s empire’s, tomorrow’s ashes
the mountain goats - the jordan lake sessions vol 2
ramshackle glory - live the dream
frank turner - beverly
public enemy - fear of a black planet
joan jett - bad reputation
avail - over the james
linda ronstadt - heart like a wheel
propagandhi - potemkin city limits
john flansburgh - forest/trees ep
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vgn4anml · 9 months
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Check out my break down of the VEGAN SONG Propagandhi - Potemkin City Limits!
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same-old-guy · 1 year
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Si supieras de dónde viene y cómo se produce la salchicha o el bistec que te comes, te aseguro que nunca más los consumirías.
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iamdangerace · 3 years
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voidblacktea · 4 years
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vorfreud · 3 years
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films on youtube: part ii
Updated on September 29th 2021.
Below is a selection of films available on YouTube. As I try to update this list as regularly as possible (for this is a lenghthy process), please refer to the original post for the newest version. 
IMPORTANT NOTE: Apparently, Tumblr restricts the number of links you can have all on one post. Therefore, this list is divided into two parts. You can access part one by clicking on the link below:
PART I HERE.
For a visual reference of all the movies available, click here.
Titles are alphabetized by director, and organized by year of release.
Orphée (1950), Jean Cocteau
The Mother and the Whore (1973), Jean Eustache
My Little Loves (1974), Jean Eustache
La Chienne (1931), Jean Renoir
The Southerner (1945), Jean Renoir
The River (1951), Jean Renoir
The Golden Coach (1952), Jean Renoir
À Propos de Nice (1930), Jean Vigo
Zéro de Conduite (1933), Jean Vigo
Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Jean-Luc Godard
Masculin Féminin (1966), Jean-Luc Godard
Chronicle of Anna Magdanela Bach (1968), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
Class Relations (1984), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
Antigone (1992), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
Two Men in Manhattan (1959), Jean-Pierre Melville
Le Deuxième Souffle (1966), Jean-Pierre Melville
Down by Law (1986), Jim Jarmusch
My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown (1989), Jim Sheridan
Hovering Over the Water (1986), João César Monteiro
God’s Comedy (1995), João César Monteiro
Vai e Vem (2003), João César Monteiro
Underworld (1927), Josef von Sternberg
The Docks of New York (1928), Josef von Sternberg
Faces (1968), John Cassavetes
Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), John Cassavetes
Opening Night (1977), John Cassavetes
Just One Kid (1974), John Goldschmidt
King of Jazz (1930), Joh Murray Anderson
Song of Avignon (1998), Jonas Mekas
As I Was Moving Ahead Ocasionally I Saw Glimpses of Beauty (2000), Jonas Mekas
The Act of Killing (2012), Joshua Oppenheimer
…À Valparaíso (1963), Joris Ivens
Birds, Orphans and Fools (1969), Juraj Jakubisko
Sisters of the Gion (1936), Kenji Mizoguchi
The Story of the Last Chrisanthemum (1939), Kenji Mizoguchi
A Geisha (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi
Ugetsu (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi
Sansho the Bailiff (1954), Kenji Mizoguchi
Street of Shame (1956), Kenji Mizoguchi
Duel in the Sun (1946), King Vidor
Fires on the Plain (1959), Kon Ichikawa
The Ascent (1977), Larisa Shepitko
Dancer in the Dark (2000), Lars von Trier
The Upturned Glass (1947), Lawrence Huntington
Hamlet (1948), Lawrence Olivier
The Blue Light (1932), Leni Riefenstahl
Mädchen in Uniform (1931), Leontine Sagan
Rain (1932), Lewis Milestone
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Lewis Milestone
This Sporting Life (1963), Lindsay Anderson
if…. (1968), Lindsay Anderson
Au Revoir, Les Enfants (1987), Louis Malle
Jew Süss (1934), Lothar Mendes
La Terra Trema (1948), Luchino Visconti
Beautiful (1951), Luchino Visconti
The Leopard (1963), Luchino Visconti
Sandra (1965), Luchino Visconti
The Sunday Woman (1975), Luigi Comencini
L’Âge d’Or (1930), Luis Buñuel
Nazarin (1959), Luis Buñuel
Black Orpheus (1959), Marcel Camus
Limite (1931), Mário Peixoto
Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), Marlen Khutsiyev and Feliks Mironer
Vermilion Souls (2007), Masaki Iwana
La Haine (1995), Mathieu Kassovitz
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Maya Deren
Caught (1949), Max Ophüls
The Reckless Moment (1949), Max Ophüls
Black Narcissus (1947), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Gone to Earth (1950), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Gente del Po (1947), Michelangelo Antonioni
Il Grido (1957), Michelangelo Antonioni
L’Avventura (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni
La Notte (1961), Michelangelo Antonioni
Red Desert (1964), Michelangelo Antonioni
Zabriskie Point (1970), Michelangelo Antonioni
The Passenger (1975), Michelangelo Antonioni
Women of Ryazan (1927), Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov
The Stranger (1946), Orson Welles
Black Girl (1966), Ousmane Sembène
Punishment Park (1971), Peter Watkins
Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini
World on a Wire (1973), Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Martha (1974), Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Chinese Roulette (1976), Rainer Werner Fassbinder
City of Pirates (1983), Raúl Ruiz
Time Regained (1999), Raúl Ruiz
Lucrezia Borgia (1922), Richard Oswald
Strangers When We Meet (1960), Richard Quine
Framed (1947), Richard Wallace
Mouchette (1967), Robert Bresson
Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Robert Bresson
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Robert Wiene
Rome, Open City (1945), Roberto Rossellini
Paisà (1946), Roberto Rossellini
Germany, Year Zero (1948), Roberto Rossellini
The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), Roberto Rossellini
Europa ’51 (1952), Roberto Rossellini
Journey to Italy (1954), Roberto Rossellini
Repulsion (1965), Roman Polanski
Cul-de-sac (1966), Roman Polanski
Songs from the Second Floor (2000), Roy Andersson
You, the Living (2007), Roy Andersson
Two (1965), Satyajit Ray
Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergei M. Eisenstein
The Color of Pomegranates (1968), Sergej Parajanov
Shozo, a Cat and Two Women (1956), Shirō Toyoda
A Day at the Beach (1972), Simon Hesera
Royal Wedding (1951), Stanley Donen
It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Stanley Donen
Indiscreet (1958), Stanley Donen
Charade (1963), Stanley Donen
The Haircut (1982), Tamar Simon Hoffs
A Page of Madness (1926), Teinosuke Kinugasa
Badlands (1973), Terrence Malick
The Entertainer (1960), Tony Richardson
Daisies (1966), Věra Chytilová
The Outlaw and His Wife (1918), Victor Sjöstrom
Shoeshine (1946), Vittorio de Sica
Bicyle Thieves (1948), Vittorio de Sica
Umberto D. (1952), Vittorio de Sica
State Fair (1946), Walter Lang
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Walter Ruttmann
The Last Stage (1948), Wanda Jakubowska
Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), Werner Herzog
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Werner Herzog
Rope of Sand (1949), William Dieterle
Wings of Desire (1987), Wim Wenders
I Was Born, But… (1932), Yasujirō Ozu
The Only Son (1936), Yasujirō Ozu
The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941), Yasujirō Ozu
There Was a Father (1942), Yasujirō Ozu
Late Spring (1949), Yasujirō Ozu
Early Summer (1951), Yasujirō Ozu
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Yasujirō Ozu
Tokyo Story (1953), Yasujirō Ozu
Early Spring (1956), Yasujirō Ozu
Equinox Flower (1958), Yasujirō Ozu 
Late Autumn (1960), Yasujirō Ozu
The Blue Sky Maiden (1957), Yasuzō Masumura
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introvertguide · 3 years
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Influential Directors of the Silent Film Era
Upon hearing that I am a fan of silent era film, people will ask if I have a favorite actor or movie from the time period. However, when I am asked about my favorites from other fans of silent film, it tends to involve my favorite director. This is because silent film actors had to over gesticulate and performed in an unrealistic way and could not use their tone or words to convey emotion. The directors also did not have a way to review as they shot and would have to use editing skills and strategic cover shots to make sure that everything was done properly and come out the way they imagined it. It was up to the director to be creative and they were forced to be innovative and create ways to convey their vision. Luckily for many average or poor directors of the time, audiences were easily impressed. However, today's more demanding and sophisticated audiences can look back at some of the genius behind the films of silent era Hollywood.
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Alice Guy-Blache: Matrimony's Speed Limit (1913) and The Fairy of the Cabbages (1896)
Art director of the film studio The Solax Company, the largest pre-Hollywood movie studio, and camera operator for the France based Gaumont Studio headed up by Louis Lemiere, this woman was a director before any kind of gender expectations were even established. She was a pioneer of the use of audio recordings in conjunction with images and the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filming. Guy-Blanche didn't just record an image but used editing and juxtaposition to reveal a story behind the moving pictures. In 1914, when Hollywood studios hired almost exclusively upper class white men as directors, she famously said that there was nothing involved in the staging of a movie that a woman could not do just as easily as a man.
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Charlie Chaplin: The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1923), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940)
It is unfortunate that many people today think of Chaplin as silly or for screwball comedy when, in fact, he was a great satirist of the time. He created his comedy through the eyes of the lower economic class that suffered indignities over which they had no control. He traversed the world as his "Tramp" character who found his fortune by being amiable and lucky. The idea that a good attitude and a turn of luck could result in happiness was all that many Americans had during the World Wars and the Great Depression. He played the part of the sad clown and he was eventually kicked out of the country for poking fun at American society. Today he is beloved for his work, but he was more infamous than famous during a large part of his life.
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Buster Keaton: Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), and The Cameraman (1928).
That man that performed the most dangerous of stunts with a deadpan expression, Buster Keaton was a great actor, athlete, stuntman, writer, producer, and director. It is amazing that you could get so much emotion out of a silent actor who does not emote, but Keaton managed to do it. He was also never afraid to go big, often putting his own well being at risk to capture a good shot. Not as well known for his cinematography or editing as many of the other directors of the time, he instead captured performances that were amazing no matter how they were filmed. Famous stunts include the side of a house falling down around him, standing on the front of a moving train, sitting on the side rail of a moving train, and grabbing on to a speeding car with one hand to hitch a ride. If you like films by Jackie Chan, know that he models his films after the work of Buster Keaton: high action and high comedy.
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Cecil B. Demille: The Cheat (1915), Male and Female (1919), and The Ten Commandments (1923)
Known as the father of the Hollywood motion picture industry, Demille was the first director to make a real box office hit. He is likely best known for making The Ten Commandments in 1923 and then remaking it again in 1956. If not that, he was also known for his scandalous dramas that depicted women in the nude. This was pre-Code silent film so the rules about what could be shown had not been established. Demille made 30 large production successful films in the silent era and was the most famous director of the time which gave him a lot of freedom. His trademarks were Roman orgies, battles with large wild animals, and large bath scenes. His films are not what most modern film watchers think of when they are considering silent films. That famous quote from the movie Sunset Boulevard in 1950 in which the fading silent actress says "All right, Mr. Demille. I'm ready for my close-up," is referring to this director.
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D.W. Griffith: Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)
Griffith started making films in 1908 and put out just about everything that he recorded. He made 482 films between 1908 and 1914, although most of these were shorts. His most famous film today is absolutely Birth of a Nation and it is one of the most outlandishly racist films of the time. The depiction of black Americans as evil and the Klu Klux Klan as heroes who are protecting the nation didn't even really go over well at that time. Some believe that his follow up the next year called Intolerance was an apology, but the film actually addresses religious and class intolerance and avoids the topic of racism. At the time, Griffith films were known for the massive sets and casts of thousands of extras, but today he is known for his racist social commentary.
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Sergei Eisenstein: Battleship Potemkin (1925)
This eccentric Russian director was a pioneer of film theory and the use of montage to show the passage of time. His reputation at the time would probably be similar to Tim Burton or maybe David Lynch. He had a very specific strange style that made his films different from any others. The film Battleship Potemkin is considered to be one of the best movies of all time as rated by Sight and Sound, and generally considered as a great experimental film that found fame in Hollywood as well as Russia.
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F.W. Murnau: Nosferatu (1922), Faust (1926), and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
I think that most people would know the bald-headed long-nailed vampire Nosferatu that was a silent era phenomena. It was so iconic that the German film studio that produced the movie was sued by the estate of Bram Stoker and had to close. Faust was his last big budget German film and has an iconic shot of the demon Mephisto raining plague down on a town that was the inspiration for the Demon Mountain in Fantasia (1940). Also, Sunrise is considered one of the best movies of all time by the AFI and by Sight and Sound as well as my favorite silent film. Fun facts: 1) more of Murnau's films have been lost then are still watchable and 2) he died in a car wreck at only 40 when he hired a car to drive up the California coast and the driver was only 14.
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Erich von Stroheim: Greed (1924)
Maker of very strange German Expressionist films, Stroheim films are often listed as Horror or Mystery even though he considered himself a dramatic film maker. His most famous movie Greed was supposed to be amazing with an 8 hour run time but it was cut drastically to the point that it makes no sense and was both critically and publicly panned when an extremely abridged version was released in the U.S. Over half the film was lost and a complete version no longer exists. Besides this film, Stroheim was even better known for being the butler in the film Sunset Boulevard as a former director who retired to be with an aging silent film star. He also made a movie called Between Two Women (1937) that told the story of a female burn victim that was inspired by the story of his wife being burned in an explosion in a shop on the actual Sunset Boulevard.
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Victor Fleming: The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone With the Wind (1939)
Although not known for his silent films, Fleming did get his start during the silent era. He was a cinematographer for D.W. Griffith and then Fleming directed his first film in 1919. Most of his silent films were swashbuckling action movies with Douglas Fairbanks or formulaic westerns. He is the only director to have two films on the AFI top 10 and they happened to have come out the same year.
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Hal Roach: Lonesome Luke films starring Harold Lloyd, Our Gang shorts, Laurel and Hardy shorts, and Of Mice and Men (1939)
It is not really fair to put Hal Roach in the silent era directors because he was influential at the time but he had a 75 year career. He was a producer and film studio head and even had a studio named after himself. His biggest contribution to the silent era was his production of Harold Lloyd short comedies and he continued to produce films in the early talkies including Laurel and Hardy shorts, Our Gang shorts, and Wil Rogers films. Roach was the inspiration for the film Sullivan's Travels, in which a famous director who only did frivolous comedies goes out into the world to find inspiration to find a serious drama. Roach did direct a single serious drama, Of Mice and Men, but it came out in 1939 and was buried underneath the works of Victor Fleming. The wealthy cigar smoking studio head that many people think of when they picture a film studio suit is based on this guy. The man would not quit and stayed in the business into his 90s and lived to the ripe old age of 100.
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punkrockmixtapes · 1 year
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Propagandhi - Name and Address Withheld
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joshua-egan-bassist · 3 years
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Album of the week #1
Supporting Caste by Propagandhi My taste in music is more or less centered around the metal. A band such as Propagandhi wouldn’t have come to my attention if it wasn’t for the podcast ‘Scream Therapy’. Host Jason Schreurs gives a well-done recount of his experiences with the album. His enthusiasm is evident and led me to give the album a listen for myself. Immediately I was hooked by the opening riff of Night Letters. This opening section leads into a franticly chaotic verse that is hard to take your attention away from. Upon my first listen I found myself drawn to the rapidly changing sections. Tertium Non-Datur effortlessly shifts between fast and comparatively slow riffs. Lyrically this album is dense with political statements. The theme of veganism is very prominent throughout this album, Potemkin City Limits and Humane Meat directly comes to mind. These lyrical themes lead me to listen to further interviews with the guitarist/vocalist, Chris Hannah. Propagandhi is most commonly labeled as a punk band with their first few releases pertaining to that style. This album in particular sounds like a mixture of hard rock and punk with some really heavy moments. Supporting Caste by Propagandhi is a fast-paced experience of an album that goes by in an instant.  I can say that they’ve ignited a want to hear more politically charged music.
https://propagandhi.bandcamp.com/album/supporting-caste
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impressivepress · 4 years
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Landmarks of Early Soviet Cinema
The 1920s was a miraculous golden age for Soviet cinema, both for features and documentary. 
The eight films included in this meticulously curated and handsomely presented collection convey the incredible excitement filmmakers felt at the opportunity to participate in the construction of the world’s first socialist state. Freed from the need to make money that drove the Hollywood industry, they could focus on “educating” the new Soviet population. Even Vladimir Ilych Lenin, the father of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the first leader of the country that would become the U.S.S.R., understood that cinema, an art based on technology and machines, was the most suitable one for a country founded on the transformation of humanity through industry and technology. Cinema was nothing less than “the most important art,” Lenin famously declared. Experimentation was the order of the decade. It was a brief but brilliant interlude, before Joseph Stalin came to power and cast a puritanical and paralyzing pall over all the arts, including cinema, in the early 1930s.
In the thick booklet of detailed critical essays that accompanies the DVDs, curators Maxim Pozdorovkin and Ana Olenina write that their goal is to expand understanding of the early Soviet film industry beyond the relatively well-known work of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. (So highly respected was Eisenstein by the end of the 1920s that he was even invited to Hollywood in 1930 to work at Paramount Studios.) Pozdorovkin and Olenina sought to chronicle the development of Soviet Montage and to showcase “the many ways of approaching that mysterious moment between two shots…. Though the films collected here run the gamut of genres and montage styles, what unites them is a belief in the power of fragmentation, recombination, and juxtaposition. They take an active, transformative approach to the footage and display an acute awareness of the medium’s power over the spectator. They believe in cinema’s ability to transform the spectator.”
Four feature films and four documentaries make up the set. The directors are a who’s who of kino luminaries: Lev Kuleshov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and By the Law), Sergei Eisenstein (Old and New), Dziga Vertov (Stride, Soviet), Esfir Shub (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), Mikhail Kalatozov (Salt for Svanetia), Viktor Turin (Turksib), and Boris Barnet (The House on Trubnaya). All the films were originally released between 1924 and 1930. Each has a nifty new musical score, using both previously composed and original material. Robert Israel compiled four of them; his score to the early morning Moscow street scenes inThe House on the Trubnaya makes ingenious use of Sergei Prokofiev’s piano cycle, Fugitive Visions, to set the mood.
The films of Eisenstein and Kuleshov are the best-known. In Old and New, completed in 1929 with his trusty codirector Grigori Aleksandrov, Eisenstein (1898-1948) was responding to the Communist Party’s appeal to artists in all media to create work that addressed the transformation of the backward Russian countryside. The film’s production was severely complicated by the frequent changes in official policy on economic development in the agricultural sphere, and Eisenstein had to several times reedit and retitle the film. The dominant theme (as in so many other Soviet films of the late 1920s) is the triumph of the machine over outdated traditional methods. In this case, a cream separator represents the apotheosis of progress and a symbol of the shining future. Eisenstein considered the playful sequence in which the cream separator springs into action, spewing luscious cream, an experiment in “cinematic ecstasy” resembling (in Olenina’s words) “an erotic or religious rapture.” Farmwork never looked so sexy. The failure of the excessively “formalist” Old and New, roundly booed by the party press at its premiere, left Eisenstein traumatized. For nearly ten years afterwards he failed to complete another film, despite numerous false starts both in Hollywood and in Moscow. Only with the simplistically propagandistic Alexander Nevsky would he resurrect his career.
Like Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) not only made films, but also wrote extensively on film theory. His imaginative parody The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) upends negative Western preconceptions about Russians and Bolsheviks, even as it consciously imitates the style of the American action films he so admired. With an all-star cast that includes the manic, leering Aleksandra Khokhlova and cameo appearances by two directors (Boris Barnet and Vsevolod Pudovkin), Mr.West reaches its Buster-Keaton-like climax in a memorable chase sequence. “Placing a cowboy in fringed chaps on the snowcovered streets of Moscow and having him lasso an unsuspecting Russian coachman,” writes Olenina, “is a strategy that bespeaks Kuleshov’s pursuit of comic defamiliarization.” By the time he made By the Law two years later, in 1926, Kuleshov’s style had dramatically changed, becoming less artificial and more moody and psychological under the influence of German expressionism. This gloomy story (adapted from a short story by Jack London) of murderous jealousy and passion among three prospectors under extreme pressure in the Klondike packs considerable emotional power, with another hyperkinetic performance from Khokhlova.
Future director Boris Barnet (1902-65) began as a Kuleshov protégé, but they parted ways after Barnet nearly killed himself doing a stunt in the role of the cowboy inMr.West. Soon he had a successful career as a director in his own right. Barnet’s fourth film, The House on Trubnaya (1928), a witty social satire on life under the limited capitalism allowed by the New Economic Policy, made him famous abroad as well. Written by a stellar quintet that included the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, The House on Trubnaya deals with one of the favorite topics of the era: the Moscow housing shortage. As thousands of peasants flooded into the capital, they resorted to all sorts of ruses to find a place to live, crowding into communal apartments that provided ample material for domestic comedy. Barnet uses an open staircase in an apartment building for lots of up-and-down action. “Chopping wood on the staircase is not allowed!” warns a poster, but some of the brawny barechested residents do so anyhow. Parasha (played with physical gusto by Vera Maretskaya), the country girl who has come to Moscow in search of her uncle, ends up as a domestic servant to a pretentious bourgeois hairdresser. But he gets his comeuppance when she joins the union and asserts her proletarian rights.
Barnet uses lots of entertaining visual tricks and puzzles: stop-frame with reverse motion, reflections in puddles and mirrors, even a car seeming to move in a full circle with small stop-motion jumps. A scene of a workers’ march through the city streets becomes a symphony of flags and flagpoles floating disembodied in the sky. Unlike most Soviet films of the period, The House on Trubnaya illuminates human feelings and foibles within an ideological framework, in a manner reminiscent of Ernst Lubitsch. A highly original and versatile talent, Barnet later made spy films that have been favorably compared to Hitchcock’s.
In Soviet cinema, documentary film occupied a highly privileged position. As Maxim Pozdorovkin writes in his accompanying essay, “Nonfiction film was recognized both as an art form and as source material for the writing of history.” Many Soviet filmmakers blurred the line between feature and documentary; Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October provide only two of the best examples. In his ground-breaking Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov (his real name was the more prosaic David Kaufman) proved that documentary film could be exciting and artistic. In this collection, Vertov is represented by his informational “lecture-film” Stride, Soviet (1926), a plotless and heavily edited assortment of scenes from the daily life and labor of Moscow. Without the aesthetic integrity of Man With a Movie Camera, it requires patience (and probably some political background) from the viewer, but offers in its best moments a dynamic portrait of a “city-in-progress.”
Esfir Shub (1894-1959), one of the few female directors in the early Soviet film industry, had a less “activist” view of documentary than Vertov. Her masterpiece, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), is a “montage of historical documents” that she found in newsreels, official film records, and home movies of the Tsar’s family. For Shub, montage meant allowing the original footage to speak for itself without excessive formal manipulation. Because the footage she discovered is so emotionally revealing, exposing the amazing indifference of the Russian aristocracy to the squalor that surrounded them during the horrific slaughter of World War I, what emerges is a powerful documentation of “living reality,” as fellow director Vsevolod Pudovkin described it. The pace of the editing is slower, more deliberate, than in most other Soviet documentaries of the period, but the analytical message condemning the evils of the old regime no less incisive.
Vertov and Shub paved the way for the work of two other directors who took documentary in a more artistic, impressionistic, and even ethnographic direction: Viktor Turin and Mikhail Kalatozov. Both explored the remote and exotic territories on the southern fringe of the newly formed U.S.S.R., in documentaries produced outside the mainstream Russian studios. Both also celebrate the progressive mission of the Soviet government in bringing technological improvements to the lives of people whose lives had been virtually untouched by modern civilization. In Turksib (1929), made by Vostok-Kino in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, Turin chronicles the construction of a new railroad linking the textile industry of southern Siberia with the wool and cotton producing regions of Kazakhstan. His treatment of the harsh beauty of the Kazakh steppe is breathtaking, its endless sandy expanses sculpted by the wind into weird abstract patterns. To illustrate the need for a reliable connection between the textile industry and its suppliers, he shows a long caravan of camels overtaken and submerged by a violent sandstorm. Pumping pistons and speeding locomotives provide the solution. Turin uses many of the same techniques (visual metaphors, striking informational graphics, allegorical montage) seen in other Soviet documentaries of the period, but with unusual taste and restraint.
The setting for what may be the most remarkable film in this set, Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1930), is an isolated village high in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. Made by the Georgian state studio with Kalatozov as cameraman, it bears an introductory quotation from Lenin: “The Soviet Union is a country so big and diverse that every kind of social and economic way of life is to be found within it.” So Kalatozov (who was himself of Georgian origin) spends most of his time showing the bizarre, vivid world of the Svan community, living a highly ritualized and brutal existence to which the cinematography lends a mythological dimension. The village’s problem is that it has no salt with which to support life for both humans and animals. Graphic images of death and suffering abound. Only the arrival of a Bolshevik brigade in the film’s final moments promises relief.
Several decades later, Kalatozov would become world famous for his searing antiwar film, The Cranes Are Flying, and for his sumptuous portrait of the Cuban Revolution,I Am Cuba. Salt for Svanetia prefigures both of them in its unorthodox and arresting visual imagery. Pozdorovkin calls it “the most visually liberated film of the silent Soviet era,” with its preponderance of crazy angled shots and exaggerated naturalism. The evocative new score by Zoran Borisavljevic, which draws on traditional Georgian music, only heightens the emotional impact.
The quality of all the films restored for the Landmarks of Early Soviet Film DVD box set is exemplary. All but two of them (Turksib and The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty) have the original Russian intertitles as well as easily read English subtitles. The critical material in the accompanying booklet gives extensive historical background and information on the films, but there is one odd omission: the running time of each film is nowhere to be found. But anyone interested in Soviet film, or the early history of documentary, will want to own this set.
~
Harlow Robinson 
Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History at Northeastern University
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Copyright © 2012 by Cineaste Magazine
Cineaste, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2
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Propagandhi - Supporting Caste
Propagandhi eloquently blends new and old with their 2009 release Supporting Caste. #propagandhi #thrash #punk #metal
Release Date: 3/10/09 Propagandhi: unparalleled sex appeal This review was initially written 3/10/09 and contains some minor edits… and is indeed a very passionate, emotion-laden review. Propagandhi’s new album was the greatest experience in music since I got into The Beatles, since not even The Beatles’ music has made me hold back tears. Yes, you read that right, read it over again [2018 edit:…
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urfavkilljoy · 2 years
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[34F] Met a guy from tinder. And his roommate. [MFM]
I was 26 at the time. I matched with a guy on Tinder - he was a gorgeous blonde with blue eyes, a gym body, and a southern accent. He invited me over to smoke up and watch a movie.
I hopped in my car and drove to his place. It was a warm summer day so many of his neighbors were outside and some of them stopped to stare as I walked down the block in my short skirt and impossibly high heels. A few of them gave me knowing looks, a silent acknowledgement that I was a whore on my way to get railed.
I knocked on his apartment door and after a quick introduction he also introduced me to his roommate - a handsome and very tall brunette who gave me a smirk that said he had seen this song and dance before.
I didn’t waste any time once we were in his room. I walked over to his bed and leaned over so that he could have the full view of my round ass. He ran his hand up my thighs and under my skirt, pausing to feel my lacy thong underwear and the heat between my legs. He groaned softly before drawing his hand away and then bringing it back to give my ass a smack. I moaned in approval at the stinging sensation and he did it again. He laced his fingers through my hair and pulled, and then smacked my ass a third time.
He drew back and I turned around and took off my top, discarding it in one fluid motion. He cupped my breasts in his hands and pinched my nipples between his thumb and forefinger. He murmured something about how much he loved sluts as his hands traced over the front of my lacy black bra. I unzipped my skirt and let it fall to the floor around me. I perched myself on the edge of his bed. He took up the position in between my legs, leaning down to kiss me deeply before abandoning his shirt as well.
We smoked a little herb but we never got around to watching the movie. I kissed him again before working my way down to unzip his pants and let his cock spring free. It was an average length but it was thick. I was excited to ride it but first I wanted to get a taste. He moaned as I traced my tongue from the base to the tip and gingerly flicked my tongue around the sensitive head of his cock. I sucked on the tip to tease him before putting the entire length in my mouth in one swift motion. He cussed loudly and grabbed my head with both hands, thrusting his hips upward and back as he started to fuck my pretty face.
It felt like he was trying to fuck his cock all the way down my throat. Suddenly he released his grip on me. He grunted at me to turn around and get on my knees. My pussy felt like it was throbbing from how badly I needed his cock inside me. He pulled my thong to the side and traced a finger up and down my slit. I whimpered as he teased me. I saw stars as he jammed his cock inside me right up to the hilt. It was a miracle that I did not orgasm right at that moment.
He grabbed onto my hips and started fucking me with vigor, occasionally giving me a slap on the ass or tugging at my hair. I felt an orgasm building up inside of me, and I unleashed it with a shudder and a moan loud enough to wake the dead. He wasn’t far behind me. He pulled out and instructed me to face him. He grabbed onto my hair and pulled my face close to his cock. After a few strokes he unleashed a thick rope of cum onto my face.
His grip on my hair immediately slackened as he fell back onto the bed. He smiled as I used my hands to wipe the sticky cum from my face and then licked my fingers clean with a devilish grin. I laid down next to him and he wrapped his arms around me to draw me in close and kiss the top of my head.
Part 2 where I meet his roommate will come soon.
submitted by /u/potemkin-city-limits [link] [comments] from Gonewild Stories https://ift.tt/3yZCqcM
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