Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Battleship 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.
Salvador 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.
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.
Internationally 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.
Ethnobotanist 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.
Watch 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.
Carlos 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.