[ from New York Times ]
For Eisenstein, you can go to Netflix and stream “Battleship Potemkin” or “Ivan the Terrible.” For Dovzhenko, you can stream “Earth” at Netflix or “Arsenal” at Amazon. For Pudovkin, “Mother” is at Amazon.
But what if you’re looking for a more recent, if less familiar, brand of Russian cinema? Like, say, Vitali Moskalenko’s 2002 Volga river-boat comedy, “The Chinese Tea-Set.” Or Emil Loteanu’s 1979 adaptation of the Chekhov novella “The Shooting Party” (original title “My Tender and Affectionate Beast”).
For those, you’ll need to go to the YouTube channel of Mosfilm, the Russian film studio and production company. Over the last month 50 or so films from the company’s library, with English subtitles, have been posted.
Determining exactly how many films are available, or what they are, takes a little work for a non-Russian-speaker, since the site is entirely in Cyrillic. With the help of your browser’s translation function and a little cross-referencing on the Internet Movie Database, it’s possible to identify what you’re looking at.
There are some older, more familiar titles in the mix, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” (1966) and “Solaris” (1972) and Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1957 film “The Cranes Are Flying.” Perhaps the most noteworthy director represented is Kurosawa, whose Siberian adventure “Dersu Uzala” was a Soviet-Japanese co-production.
Other films, while little known in America, have opened here and won praise, like Mr. Loteanu’s “Shooting Party,” which Vincent Canby of The New York Times called “a fascinating, almost intoxicating experience.”
But American viewers will probably be most interested in what they consider oddities, like Eldar Ryazanov’s “Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!,” a cult comedy in Russia, or “easterns” like “White Sun of the Desert.”
Five films will be added to the channel each week, according to Agence France-Presse, which quoted Karen Shakhnazarov, the company’s director, “The aim is to give users the possibility to legally watch high-quality video material and prevent the illegal use of our films.” UPDATE
Michael Moore questioned by the BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman, patiently explains the significance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has spread to over 1000 cities and towns in over 80 countries. "We're not into fixing or reforming or tweaking. This simply has to end. The way of doing business as we know it has to come to an end." UPDATE
2011-09-08 12:32:38 Posted
by:ragaman7 Category:Digital Rights
[from Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net] Germany's Pirate Party is kicking major electoral ass, holding 50 local elected offices across the country, and are now poised to win their first federal electoral contests:
“We are delighted that our demands for more transparency, participation and democracy for the people of Berlin are shared by the public. The Berlin people want change, and they recognize that a vote for the Pirate Party is not wasted,” Pirate Party’s Gerhard Anger said.
“With this poll result we are not in the state parliament yet. However, it is an important step in the right direction. We have to work hard in the next four weeks. In order to see the results of this poll reflected in actual votes on election day, we still have to keep on going,” Anger adds.
Previously the German Pirate Party already held a seat in the national parliament when Jörg Tauss left the Social Democrats to join the pirates. However, having people voted into parliament through an election would be an even bigger accomplishment. UPDATE
Recently, there have been a number of incicents where the Total Recut gallery has been hijacked by various spammers posting completely unrelated content and clogging up the system. I am calling for silence from the spammers and offer this video as a token of my sentiments...no more please! Spam somewhere else. UPDATE
VIDEODROME is a one-night event of audio/visual overdose of hardcore video editing where
picture matches sound, cut for cut, beat for beat. It is a collision of IDM, video art, mash-up, VJ culture, and experimental
electronic music and contemporary club culture, bridging the gaps between the sofa, the club and the art
gallery. The event showcase experimental video works which function as dance music,
a/v mash-up, visual music with an emphasis on aggression and intensity.
Videodrome
June 10 2011 MOCCA Toronto 952 Queen St.W 8pm UPDATE
[from Rhizome.org]
Within days after the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music.
Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape. UPDATE