Tag: Politics
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Religious Manipulation and Political Power: the Case of The Oracle of Delphi and Bene Gesserit from Dune Films
“The Delphic oracle, which for modern poets – Yeats, for example – can conjure up mystic romantic visions, was for Sophocles and his audience, a fact of life, an institution as present and solid, as uncompromising… as the Vatican is for us. States and individuals alike consulted it as a matter of course about important…
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Yukio Mishima on Visconti’s “The Damned”: Dangerous Decadence
In its Wagnerian manner, its German grotesquerie, its transvestitism, its nervous insanity, its ponderousness, its symphonic sense of psychological danger, its worship of the body, its unceasing dramatic tension, its excesses, its obsession with hurling every single character toward tragedy and death, its ostentation, its sensuality, its love of ritual and ceremony, its intoxication, and…
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Decay of a Mortal God: Béla Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies”
Valuska, a dreamy, and intellectually “slow” postman, with a poetic understanding of his surroundings, stages a little scene with a bunch of weary drunkards, in a bar, at the very beginning of the film. He arranges the drunkards to act the roles of the the Moon and the Earth, as they revolve around the Sun.…
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Creation of the First Galactic Empire in “Star Wars”: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
Before reading this essay, you can read the previous one: Creation of the First Galactic Empire in Star Wars: Episodes I & II. Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem [Authority, not truth creates the law] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 24 Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker heroically rescue Chancellor Palpatine from Count Dooku’s pre-ordained “grip”; Dooku is…
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Creation of the First Galactic Empire in “Star Wars”: Episodes I & II
I will start to chronicle the events which resulted in the overthrow of the Galactic Republic by writing about Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. I will use Carl Schmitt’s writings on dictatorship, sovereignty and the state of exception, which are extremely fruitful for understanding such a multilayered fictional political persona as Chancellor…
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Freedom or Security? – MCU’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
Chris Evans, the actor who impersonated Captain America, said the following words regarding his character’s transition from the WWII era to the modern day: “It’s not so much about his shock with [technology]… It’s more about the societal differences. He’s gone from the ’40s to today; he comes from a world where people were a…
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Combustible Decadence of Neo-Tokyo in the Flawed Masterpiece of Anime “Akira”
I found Akira, a landmark animated film which introduced the Japanese animated films to the Western audience, to be an eclectic mess. During the first and even the second watching of the film it seemed that way. Later, as I managed to put the pieces together (and some parts of the film are fragments of…
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In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Words: Struggle Against Censorship and Tyranny of the Spirit
An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist does not live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would…
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Dream of a Pure Land in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”
From the very first scene of Nausicaä we can see that we are in a place of magical beauty. The trees, a windmill and the surroundings are coated in what looks like a spider-web or frozen snow; the flakes are falling around a man riding strange creatures, wearing a mask, looking bird-like. The man breaks…
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When Civilization Betrays Itself: Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”
Dr. Strangelove, based on the Peter George novel Red Alert is clearly deeply rooted in its own time; shot when Cold War was in its zenith, yet it manages to speak to us. It will speak to us as long as Doomsday Machine in the form of the nuclear arsenal possessed by the major world powers…
Vigour of Film Lines 