This is a 1951 Russian animation of an 1833 fairytale poem written by Alexander Pushkin that is based upon the classic Grimms tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was directed by Ivan Pyetrovich Ivanov-Vano, known as the ‘patriarch of Soviet animation.’
You can read Pushkin’s The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights
The film is in Russian so you can use the YouTube settings to turn on English subtitles.
This film was directed by Vladimir Tarasov and was adapted from a novel by Kir Bulychev.
Here’s a 1950s Soviet animated version of the classic fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast.’
Parts 1 – 2 after the jump…
Adam Curtis makes fascinating documentary films for the British Broadcasting Corporation. This one is about the manipulation of memory, or the attempt to manipulate it, by governments during the Cold War era. It features several scientists and psychology experts who worked for either the U.S. or Soviet governments trying to figure out how to control minds.
I post the work of Curtis because his filmmaking is actually quite a lot like my own in several ways. This film bears a relationship to my latest film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, which is also about memory and how it influences the future. Curtis dwells in the domain of documentary, a form that I have serious misgivings about, while I dwell in the domain of art – or direct mind control if you will! I like Curtis’ use of corporate, military, instructional, and entertainment films as his raw visual material. He mixes it up with what is actually a rather simplistic script relating information that is not especially insightful. The film seems to suggest something more under the surface because of its imagery which often bears no relationship whatsoever to the information being related by the voice-over. This is a tricky area for documentary that brings it perilously close to the realm of art. You don’t quite know what it is that you are actually watching. I like that but I also distrust it. But Curtis appears to me to be making a documentary about his own feelings and artistic interpretations of the factual material. He is not trying to teach or inform at all. He is simply trying to create an impression. The words of the documentary could be replaced with gibberish. In fact, it would probably be a slightly better film if they were!
The Living Dead – Part 1 (watch the next 5 parts after the jump)
Memory is perhaps the single most important quality of existence. We are simply memory machines walking around and recording. All of our activities point toward an ever-increasing ability to record and remember. We are building memory. The idea, pursued in the first half of this documentary, of wiping out unpleasant memories that are assumed to be destroying the health of an individual, seems to me to be misguided and foolish. I have always viewed it as the job of every human to be able to stare straight into the most horrific scene, remember it, and not allow it to take control. Very simple. You must be able to look at anything… and continue to eat your ice cream.
This is a cartoon criticism of capitalism by Roman Davydov, from Soyuzmultfilm. It was made in 1963 and captures the early 1960s better than most American cartoons have. It’s look at the struggle of an American worker fooled into thinking he’s doing well because he’s a stock owner in his company is very accurate and should speak loudly in today’s circumstances. The widescreen art looks like it comes straight out of an illustrated magazine advertisement of the time. The finale with all the race cars and crashes is incredible. There is an irritating tendency to refer to films like this one as ‘propaganda.’ Why is it so difficult to criticize capitalism in democracies? Capitalism is simply an economic program and should be under constant criticism and assault from all sides. There is absolutely nothing about capitalism that should protect it from becoming obsolete.
Part 2:
Part 3: