An Array of Utopian Flowers
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The Literary Labyrinth of Stephen T. Vessels
Posted on November 27, 2022 | No Comments - Indigenous Voices from the Northeast: Past, Present and Future
Posted on November 26, 2022 | 1 Comment - Microplastics Are Everywhere: What’s The Risk?
Posted on November 22, 2022 | No Comments - Solving the Climate Crisis Through Global Soil Health with Didi Pershouse
Posted on November 20, 2022 | No Comments - Visionary Art of Lakota Sundance Chief Marvin Swallow
Posted on November 14, 2022 | 2 Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
Film Archive
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Amazon Oil, Biodiversity and Human Rights in “Yasuni Man”
Posted on July 12, 2018 | 4 CommentsIn this episode of EcoJustice Radio, host Jack Eidt speaks with Ryan Killackey, filmmaker of the award-winning documentary film set in the Ecuadorian Amazon, "Yasuni Man." Plus, Zoe Cina-Sklar, campaigner for the #EndAmazonCrude effort by Amazon Watch, shares how California communities can play a powerful role in the fight for a just transition off fossil fuels. -
Cinematic Cultural Change in West Africa with Idrissa Ouédraogo
Posted on June 3, 2018 | 2 CommentsIdrissa Ouédraogo, whose simple, carefully observed movies about cultural change in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in Africa, brought him international acclaim and a top award at the Cannes International Film Festival, recently died. We share his first film, Yam Daabo (The Choice) about a family facing famine in the Sahel. -
La Belle et La Bête – Natural Surrealism of a Misunderstood Beast
Posted on November 6, 2017 | 1 CommentWe feature the popularized story version of the French fairy tale 'La Belle et La Bête' (Beauty and the Beast), which became a classic 1946 Jean Cocteau film accompanied by composer Philip Glass's mesmerizing 1994 score. -
Gogol’s Vision of Metaphysical Unraveling Amid the Dark Arts
Posted on August 9, 2017 | 1 CommentWatch the 1967 supernatural horror story "Viy" based on the 1835 novella by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, where a student philosopher from the Christian seminary encounters a young woman with dark powers who can summon the ogre, King of the Gnomes, which the author claims comes from Ukrainian folklore tradition. -
Visual Poems, Silent Dances of the Maquette Theatre
Posted on May 22, 2017 | 1 CommentMatthew Anthony Stokes solo show Camouflage opened in Los Angeles, which illustrates his unique multi-disciplinary background in performance, corporeal dramaturgy, dance, sculpture, assemblage, film, photography, and poetry. Multiple videos from the experimental MAQUETTE Theatre, which he co-founded, create a visionary alternative universe replete with silent dances and visual poems that "unveil" ephemeral sculpture, including costumes, sets and masks. -
‘Solaris’ – Tarkovsky’s Vision Beyond an Urban Future
Posted on April 3, 2017 | 2 CommentsA startling vision of the future, somewhere in the cosmos on a planet yet unknown, Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky investigates apparitions of the irradiated mind in a nostalgic view of humanity looking into it's own mirror. -
Prefabricated Surrealism in ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy’
Posted on December 5, 2016 | 1 CommentWatch 'Dreams That Money Can Buy', a Surrealist Film by Dada filmmaker Hans Richter, painter and photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Alexander Calder, and painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger. -
Epic of Cruelty and Revolution in Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’
Posted on October 25, 2016 | 3 CommentsBattleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent revolutionary propaganda film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers. -
Art of Collective Madness in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Impressions’
Posted on September 27, 2016 | 3 CommentsSalvador Dalí and filmmaker José Montes-Baquer, in honor of underappreciated Surrealist Poet Raymond Roussel, shot a fake documentary of an non-expedition to Mongolia in search of gigantic mythic hallucinogenic mushrooms. -
Improvised Beat Generation Dreams of John Cassavetes
Posted on August 17, 2016 | 2 CommentsJohn Cassavetes Shadows "improvises" Beat Generation Manhattan, where two brothers and a sister, black but inexplicably played by two white actors, careening off track to scaled-back sketches of Charles Mingus' saxophone jazz yearnings. Black and white neon signs blink and the old Times Square looms like the otherworld, naturalistic cordial racism separating the chosen from the downtrodden, both dreaming of making it, of creating something. -
Restlessly Original Iranian Cinematic Poet Abbas Kiarostani
Posted on July 7, 2016 | 2 CommentsInternationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's "realist parable film-making" expanded the artistic history of world cinema. Called "an icon of change in Iran," his death this past Monday has challenged critics to find ways to fully describe the distinctive nature of his cinematic mastery. -
“Embrace of the Serpent” Film: Journey of Healing and Ethnobotany
Posted on April 11, 2016 | 4 CommentsEthnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, one of the most important plant explorers of the 20th century, served as a key inspiration in a recent film called "Embrace of the Serpent." In December 1941, Schultes entered the Amazon to study how indigenous peoples used plants for medicinal, ritual, and practical purposes. After nearly a decade of fieldwork, he made significant discoveries about the sacred hallucinogen ayahuasca. In total, Schultes would collect more than 24,000 species of plants including some 300 species new to Western science. -
The Bear: Grizzly King and the Wilderness Homeland
Posted on March 3, 2016 | No CommentsWatch the 1988 French film The Bear, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, the story of an orphaned cub and a grizzly in the end of the 19th Century wilderness of British Columbia. The story is based on the 1912 book by James Oliver Curwood. -
Film: Carlos Reygadas Meditates on the Mennonites of Mexico
Posted on February 6, 2016 | 1 CommentCarlos Reygadas, the Mexican surrealistic filmmaker known for confounding audiences with somnolent landscapes and stark visions of humanity melding among the wily breeze, the flow of a silent river, and the meander of children wandering through tall grass. He has created a subtle masterpiece with his 2007 film Silent Light. -
The Big Short: A Culture Charmed by a Smiling Oligarchy
Posted on January 8, 2016 | No CommentsGuy Zimmerman, in reviewing the new Wall Street film The Big Short, muses on the desperate conformity required in today's entertainment in this new Gilded Age of oligarchy and disempowerment that has overtaken culture in the U.S. -
Dada as the Antidote to War and Capitalism
Posted on April 25, 2015 | 2 CommentsIn the sobering aftermath of World War I in Zurich, Dada preached a radical-yet-whimsical philosophy of creativity, a self-styled anti-art. Random and meaningless by definition, calculatedly irrational by design, for a short time the movement spread like revolt to the US and across Europe, voicing the bizarre protest of a brave new community of artists and writers. -
Lucifer Rising: God of Light and Color in Experimental Film
Posted on October 13, 2014 | 2 CommentsLucifer Rising is Kenneth Anger's portrait of the love generation, the dawning of a new age and morality. Inspired by the ancient solar religions and conceived with occultist Aleister Crowley's vision of the Age of Aquarius. -
The Ongoing Reconsideration of Pier Paolo Pasolini
Posted on August 30, 2014 | 1 CommentChampion of the disinherited of postwar Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterworks prefigured his country's fall to a consumerist Heart of Darkness, an uncompromising vision that may have led to his own wretched death. A biopic by Abel Ferrara that premiered at the Venice biennale reconstructed the last hours of the Italian film director, who was murdered in 1975. -
Orson Welles: Tragic Hero, Sacred Monster, Profane Clown
Posted on July 3, 2014 | 3 CommentsOrson Welles, the cinematic genius who ended his days selling cheap wine, was both noble and feeble, titanic and pathetic, sacred monster and profane clown, says Peter Conrad. We take samples from his oeuvre, his noir thriller The Stranger and his stylistic fragmentation, Othello. -
Walkabout: Following Songlines Beyond the Western Frame
Posted on May 2, 2014 | No CommentsWalkabout, vision quest, walking in Dreamtime, all of it refers to a particular rite of passage from the indigenous Australians, but also in evidence in animist cultures throughout the world. The 1971 film of the same name narrates a young woman and her brother's journey beyond their Western frame, but never quite able to follow the ancestor paths, or songlines, of the land. -
B. Traven’s “Macario” – Magical Realist Journey on Day of the Dead
Posted on September 7, 2013 | 4 CommentsThe Mexican film Macario (1960) weaves a tale of magical realism - with special appearances by God, the Devil and Death. It all begins on the Day of the Dead, when a campesino named Macario goes on a hunger strike. B. Traven, the mysterious German writer exiled in Mexico, wrote the story, inspired from indigenous folk tales. -
Legong Film: Balinese Dream Dance of Nymphs in Heaven
Posted on August 17, 2013 | No CommentsFilm and music of shimmering yet jarring beauty play together on a South Seas beach in "Legong: Dance of the Virgins." It's a rarely screened 1935 silent movie, shot entirely in Bali with a Balinese cast, mixed with a new score by Club Foot Orchestra and Gamelan Sekar Jaya. Presented in a crude but rich two-strip early Technicolor process, one of the last silent films made by Hollywood, it depicts Bali as Westerners idealized it at the time. -
Vittorio De Sica: The Alienated Unemployed in “Bicycle Thieves”
Posted on August 2, 2013 | No CommentsBicycle Thieves (Italian: Ladri di biciclette), also known as The Bicycle Thief, is director Vittorio De Sica's 1948 story of a poor father searching post-World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose the job which was to be the salvation of his young family. -
Lady Lazarus: The Hurt Imagination of Sylvia Plath
Posted on April 25, 2013 | 3 CommentsRobert Pinsky on Sylvia Plath: "Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open." -
Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Subversive Champion of the Disinherited
Posted on March 11, 2013 | 4 CommentsAlmost forty years after his violent death, Pier Paolo Pasolini, filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure, remains a subject of passionate argument. Best known for a subversive and difficult body of film work, loaded with Renaissance and Baroque iconography, he championed the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy, mingling an intellectual leftism with a fierce Franciscan Catholicism.
