Classic Animation - 'The Hand' - Jiří Trnka

  This is the yuotube trailer to the 1965 silent animation 'The Hand'. I saw this film in the early 1970s, when BBC childrens televsion showed international contributions and even made programmes for the deaf and arty, 'Vision On'. The BBC showed films that came from behind the Iron Curtain, if the aesthetic passed what they were happy to show. Children in the UK were not conditioned by the work of Disney, or the speed and editing of the MGM and Warner Bros cartoons, though they too were shown. What Jiří Trnka showed in this film was how politics did not have to be for grown ups only - any child who had a hobby and the space to practice it in would recognise the message here. Please see the full length version of the film here.

The Temptation Of America

Europe has the old Roman Empire
as their tempter, a supermarket full of religions
bound together by a crude military authority
and an unstable continuity of leadership.

Asia and Russia have their ancient tempters too,
the latter held together by an authoritarian
version of Christianity that makes belief
more consistently dishonest to itself
than it can ever admit that it is.

Meanwhile the place of wealth and tech, America
is being tempted by an old tempter-fascism
in the guise of a renewed 'Christian Nationalism',
in which 'America first' means an 'America only',
which excludes inclusive Americans who believe
in neighbourliness of whatever colour, gender,
and religious origin. In this new pecking order
whoever is white, male and wealthy comes first,
where science has to be made unfit for human
decision making if it allows 'inferior' minorities
to live, and thrive, outside white male hierarchies.   


   

An Intimacy With Soft Fruit Is Proof Of Maturity

I used to buy fruit that was sold as 'fresh'
unblemished, and sold that young 'to be kept',
which was to say 'not for eating'...   This meant
it was bitter, having travelled many miles under-ripe,
much like children in education. But the older I get
the more I find that the softer the fruit the sweeter the taste,
and the more it agrees with me, even when it is deliquescing
and becomes alcoholic. With the right recipes for its use
it is perfect. As I bake I imagine the ways I would like
to see myself used for best when I am in that state,
and wonder, who will bring out the fullness of my flavour?

I Wonder How Many Of Us Could Use Some Silence?

As Discovered by Lewis Francis Hadley in the 1890s,
Quaker, Hadley whose wish to see the Native Americans 
converted to Chrstianity was fairly obvious in his choice
of texts for which he found the Native sign language.
Nonetheless the life of the Native Americans
rubbed off on him, there is no further record
of Hadley undertaking the work of an evangelist
after completing his work of translating their sign lannguage.

Please read more about Hadley and his work here.   

 

Here Be Monsters

And the monsters who believe their own propaganda
never recognise the limits of their talents and abilities,
and never see how their sense of humour is always limited
to being at someone else's expense.   

 

By Their Works You Will Know Them

The modern history of Conversion Therapy,
from homosexuality to a Christianity,
as bought by American money that fears
modern phrases like 'hetero-normativity'
and other probing social-scientific phrases
seems to be recent. But like so many ideas,
it is a thin respray, a shoddy paint job,
over a once honestly flawed, diverse and genuine,
Christian culture that now draws new skin-deep adherents
whose real love is of some shiny new prosperity theology
devised to influence people who don't recognise propaganda
when they are fed it, and don't realise they are being bought,
sold, and repackaged as proof that political lobbying,
and the distant peddling of malign influence still works.

 

Revew - 'Alice', Jan Svankmajer

   I grew up without many things, that many that I simply did not know I was doing without. A cimena which normalised a communal audience for sharing intelligent films was one of them. Sometimes, many times, I could have thought that intelligence itself was rationed. But that was then. I now feel like it is some sort of badge of honour to have seen my first Jan Svanmajer film in a cinema, the place to see films with other people, long after seeing many of his other films at home, or online.

  To say Jan Svankmajer is a special film maker is to put it lightly. His commitment to editing shows through every frame of every film that bears his name. As a surrealist film maker he has been involved in film making since his first film 'The Last Trick' made in 1964, 21 years after being given his first puppet theatre as a child. I will not go through here the journey from that first puppet theatre to his present retired status as a film maker, theatre designer, surrealist film maker and every other category of creative activity, aged over 90. I am going to leave that to Wikipedia-they do that sort of thing rather well, even though some folk dispute their pages.

  'Alice' is not my favourite Svankmajer film, that would be 'Conspirators of Pleasure' which as a satire on how people consume and divide one another by certain activities also works well as a rather convoluted shaggy dog story that is not meant to be taken too literally. But 'Alice' is as near normal feature length cinema as Svankmajer gets. His version of Lewis Caroll's story is quite violent and uncomfortable, with a lot of images of nails in food, and of bones of unknown aniimals in cabinets  of ossuaries, stop-motion animated stuffed animals, particularly the rabbit who is always late to meet the queen who is rarely present. But as dream/nightmare violence goes it is of a very different quality to, say, the violence of a news report of a bombing complete with distressing visuals, or a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

  Yes, Alice and the rabbit get on badly, and to watch a stuffed animal leak sawdust after being kicked, and then sow up the hole where the sawdust leaked with a needle and thread it had found and eat up the sawdust with a tarnished spoon does stretch the imagination. The red queen and her court are reduced to playing cards that move by themselves across a stage set in what could perhaps be seen as a critique of human political/power structures - they are two dimentional at best. The number of iterations of Alice, and the number of times she is too big/too small and is presented with a situation that I read as an intellience test was quite notable. I was not going to count them, that went against the collective cinema experience. Though the literal minded could count the number of times Alice changes size and form if they had enough repeated viewings of the film. Then there was the device of getting from one scene to the next by diving into draws in desks where there were often sharp objects of different types-scissors, square sets, safety pins etc piled up in the draws, who knows what that was about? I am leaving that point here....   .....a lot more was going on with this film which remains open to interpretation where we can all have our own, and different reinterpretation when we come back to the film again. 

  I was pleased that the young people that run the LUMI programme at the QFT in Belfast are able to get these films that before an audience now, when in the past I was in the wrong place to find them when they were made and had their original cinema run. Back then I mostly heard about these films via reports and showings of them on television.