John Berger's Ways of Seeing, a Marxist art documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk&t=2s
The Shock of the New, a fantastic overview of modernism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ne7Udaetg
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, a sociocultural overview of cybernetics and mass culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgADKpMStts
Baraka, a snapshot of life across the globe in 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15NLms8Gyq0
Koyaanisqatsi, the same idea of Baraka but it's about the disharmony of modern development. It also has Philip Glass' first truly good work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-K-arVl-U
The book forms of that and The Shock of the New are what made me a modern art nerd. Especially when Berger gets to Walter Benjamin and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, just brilliant shit.
Man, Baraka was my favourite movie when I was younger, I must have watched it dozens of times.
I will always love the film for its ingenuity and beautiful cinematography and music, but now I can't help but think that the movie is really fundamentally anti-modernity, and in a subtle way kind of misanthropic. It kind of suggests that human civilisation can bring only chaos and death, and almost in an anarcho-primitivist sort of way seems to suggest a return to pre-modern civilisation as preferable.
I like the way it frames that juxtaposition between modernity and premodern/natural systems. Both are coexisting at the same time, both are represented, and without any kind of narration we're left to gravitate toward whatever feels more right. While it favours those other systems, so does Marxism ultimately. Those indigenous cultures are an anticolonial argument, those premodern cultures are a re-establishment of the commons, those monkeys in the hot spring are a case for animal liberation.
John Berger's Ways of Seeing, a Marxist art documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk&t=2s
The Shock of the New, a fantastic overview of modernism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ne7Udaetg
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, a sociocultural overview of cybernetics and mass culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgADKpMStts
Baraka, a snapshot of life across the globe in 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15NLms8Gyq0
Koyaanisqatsi, the same idea of Baraka but it's about the disharmony of modern development. It also has Philip Glass' first truly good work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-K-arVl-U
John Berger ♥️ that series blew my mind
The book forms of that and The Shock of the New are what made me a modern art nerd. Especially when Berger gets to Walter Benjamin and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, just brilliant shit.
Man, Baraka was my favourite movie when I was younger, I must have watched it dozens of times.
I will always love the film for its ingenuity and beautiful cinematography and music, but now I can't help but think that the movie is really fundamentally anti-modernity, and in a subtle way kind of misanthropic. It kind of suggests that human civilisation can bring only chaos and death, and almost in an anarcho-primitivist sort of way seems to suggest a return to pre-modern civilisation as preferable.
I like the way it frames that juxtaposition between modernity and premodern/natural systems. Both are coexisting at the same time, both are represented, and without any kind of narration we're left to gravitate toward whatever feels more right. While it favours those other systems, so does Marxism ultimately. Those indigenous cultures are an anticolonial argument, those premodern cultures are a re-establishment of the commons, those monkeys in the hot spring are a case for animal liberation.
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