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Wednesday, May 1, 2019

A list of 20 Revolutionary & Radical films for 1st May 2019




A list of 20 Revolutionary & Radical films for 1st May 2019 compiled by Wheatboi Dave
01. Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1925
02. La Commune, directed by Peter Watkins, 2000
03. Salt of the Earth, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, 1954
04. Strike, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1925
05. A place called Chiapas, by Nettie Wild, 1998
06. The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966
07. Danton, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1983
08. The Raspberry Reich, directed by Bruce LaBruce, 2004
09. Eat the Rich, directed by Peter Richardson, 1987
10. Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975
11. I am Cuba, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964
12. Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov, 1929
13. OstPunk! (too much future), film by Carsten Fiebeler and Michael Boehlke, 2006
14. They Live, directed by John Carpenter, 1988
15. Walker, directed by Alex Cox, 1987
16. A Generation, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1955
17. October, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1927
18. Brazil, directed by Terry Gilliam, 1985
19. We are from Kronstadt, directed by Efim Dzigan, 1936
20. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, directed by Dušan Makavejev, 1971
Honorable mention: Kurt Weiler (die Kunst des Puppenanimations Films), DVD collection 2012

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Sleep: A log of remembered dreams, Vol. II




Often when I sleep I have vivid dreams in some sort of futuristic nature. The dreams are more like a 2nd, 3rd or even 4th alternate life I live in sleep in different lands among other friends and often have some extreme aspect centered around survival.

Last night I had one such dream and I will write as much as I can remember in a nutshell of what is left of my memory in this time and place.

In what seemed to be not the far future from now humanity lived not much different than what we do now. Humans lived and died and often looked to either the sciences or religion for some ability to extend life or become in some way or another immortal. I had someone how discovered a way for humanity to achieve this to what ancients might call alchemy but really was some sort of science fictional chemical based physics. In a way I discovered the elixir of the Gods ,the magic that made the Gods of ancient super human and not mortal humans. In this story I had found a kinda of almost anti-matter dust that if ingested would make a person be able to have super human strength, jump higher, run faster, live fuller and in large quantities of ingestion even cheat death. As if like some super hero one could survive amazing feats, grab onto a wing of a plane with great strength without falling off, climb great slippery waterfalls up a mountain, almost anything. The problem though was this anti-matter dust continually had to be harvested with great difficultly and consumed to keep vigor up and prevent the user from wasting away. As soon as this dust was realized it caught on by the general public which for a moment in time created a Utopian society of Gods, which soon fell into demise as people turned on each other to destroy each other with their newly gained powers. People of stronger wit and knowledge often managed to avoid the petty struggles of the general masses who where slowly destroying each other and what was left of the great cities humanity has built. In the the final days these intelligent super humans who avoided the wars of the new Gods wandered the wastelands of once great cities as nomads preparing to restructure humanity without the use of the anti-matter dust for a more natural and stable future renewed as the lesson was learned the hard way of humans harnessing the power of the Gods. New anarcho-socialist communes where established with the new natural beings with the help of the intelligent nomads who were the only survivors of the human God order. These nomads searched the wastelands for natural humans to bring them to the communes as they would join together to help develop the new humanity. Unfortunately the nomads still had to use the anti-matter in small quantities in able to survive and not waste away as once a human consumed the anti-matter dust they would become addicted to it. One of the side effects of going through anti-matter withdrawals was person going through massive hallucinations where the framed work of reality would gradually melt away like runny eggs. Then the 2nd sign of anti-matter withdrawal would be the person would start having a yellow crust form around them and the space they touched that looked much like sulfur. As this yellow sulfury crust formed their body would slowly waste away which was a process that would take hundreds of years in which they didn’t die as they slowly went back into universal dust. The other side effect was once the slow decay started it was then contagious to other humans who had ingested the anti-matter dust. 

(In the end of this sci-fi dream), I was then in a strategy room of one of the communes where most of the officers would meet. There was as a closed hatched on the side of the room which lead to one of the lower levels that had a closed and sealed hatch even further below that lead to the abandoned science sub tunnels left over from the fallen age of human Gods. I had gone down there to look and had opened the hatch to the science sub tunnels and when I did a huge shock came over me. I saw a long room filled with old computers for the older age with a door on the far end of the room leading to other labs. On the floor close to the hatch door was a man in a old science suit covered with anti-matter decay and he must have been laying there for hundreds of years since the great fall of the God humans. He was slowly dying over these hundreds of years and the sulfur like substance was all over him and on the wall and floor around him as if it was growing out of him. There was nothing I could do to help as it would put me at risk of catching the anti-matter decay. I quickly closed and sealed the hatch and though the abandoned sub-room I returned through the hatch back into the commune strategy room. The strategy room was filled with the officers, generals and local community representatives who all where about to cheers to celebrate gaining ground from the wasteland to rebuild society in a great anarcho-socialist utopianism of equality of all humanity. At that moment the metals and faces of of the officers in the room started to melt and I looked at my red & black rose pin on my jacked and is slowly started to melt down my jacket dripping upon my boots. At the moment I realized I had caught the slow decay, and I knew I would not be able to live to enjoy the great renewed future that was just dawning. The world I once knew slowly melted away into an insane hallucination as I slowly wasted away over time.

After this I woke up from my dream 07.30 am, covered with sweat.

I will site that the feeling of this dream and this future world made me think much of the 1971 film “The Andromeda Strain”, directed by Robert Wise and based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. The other piece of media that has a bit of similarity of inspiration in feeling in this dream is from Classic Dr. Who, Genesis of the Daleks, from the 12th session, written by Terry Nation and directed by David Maloney. Though I would say in the beginning of the dream I felt much more like Patrick McGoohan as No. 6 in the TV show “the Prisoner” except with super human sci-fi powers much like a watered down version of Dr. Manhattan from the GRAPHIC NOVEL “Watchmen” by Alan Moore.


-David Stanley Aponte, Collective Brand Movement Studio, West Philadelphia, 20.March.2019