Wednesday, January 18, A.D. 2012

Russian Ark

Christ is born!

Merry Christmas on this twelfth and final day of the Nativity.

Last week, one of Auster’s readers suggested the film, Russian Ark (originally Русский ковчег). It is somewhat of a historical fantasy wherein two men travel through time at the Russian Court. The movie lasts one and a half hours and was filmed in a single take. I believe that it breaks a record for that feat. The filming was done at the Hermitage Museum—the Tsar’s Winter Palace—in Saint Petersburg, and the result is quite impressive. Google has a video of it, though such eye candy deserves a viewing with better picture quality. Until you get the DVD with subtitles, here it is:

The last day of the Christmas season is also the eve of Theophany. I hope that you had a lovely Yuletide, and I wish you a blessed Theophany.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, January 18, A.D. 2012
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Wednesday, December 14, A.D. 2011

Vendée

I recently learnt that Navis Pictures is making a film about the counter-revolutionary revolt in the Vendée, The War of the Vendee. Navis Pictures is a new, low budget production company that uses young actors to make films of interest to Roman Catholics. The other movie that they have made so far is Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.

I wish them well, though I harbor worries about “Christian ghetto cinema.” I have watched enough terrible footage of evangelical Protestant movies to know how quality may be sacrificed when one preaches to a choir undiscriminating in quality. Angry feminists [sic] have Lifetime, the melanically endowed have BET, and evangelical Protestants have TBN. Each of those stations features a sorry showcase of trite tripe because they aim no higher than the soulless satisfaction of pressing ideological buttons or feeding demographically relevant appetites. May the Latins not indulge in the same aesthetic pathea!

Navis Pictures has posted a preview for the Vendée film. For an amateurish production, it looks pretty good. However, when I watched the trailer, I kept thinking that this is the sort of film that would have been made had T.F.P. produced The Goonies:

Any work that shows the wicked sans-culottes as the scum that they really were is worthwhile to me. The film is due to be released in January in the year of our Lord 2012.

Moreover, you may wish to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words delivered at the dedication of the memorial to the Vendée:

Mr. President of the General Council of the Vendée, Respected Vendéans:

Two thirds of a century ago, while still a boy, I read with admiration about the courageous and desperate uprising of the Vendée. But never could I have dreamed that in my later years I would have the honor of dedicating a memorial to the heroes and victims of that uprising.

Twenty decades have now passed, and throughout that period the Vendée uprising and its bloody suppression have been viewed in ever new ways, in France and elsewhere. Indeed, historical events are never fully understood in the heat of their own time, but only at a great distance, after a cooling of passions. For all too long, we did not want to hear or admit what cried out with the voices of those who perished, or were burned alive: that the peasants of a hard-working region, driven to the extremes of oppression and humiliation by a revolution supposedly carried out for their sake—that these peasants had risen up against the revolution!

That revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of envy, greed and hatred—this even its contemporaries could see all too well. They paid a terrible enough price for the mass psychosis of the day, when merely moderate behavior, or even the perception of such, already appeared to be a crime. But the twentieth century has done especially much to tarnish the romantic luster of revolution which still prevailed in the eighteenth century. As half-centuries and centuries have passed, people have learned from their own misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population and give free rein to the worst; that a revolution never brings prosperity to a nation, but benefits only a few shameless opportunists, while to the country as a whole it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people.

The very word “revolution” (from the Latin revolvo) means “to roll back”, “to go back”, “to experience anew”, “to re-ignite”, or at best “to turn over”—hardly a promising list. Today, if the attribute “great” is ever attached to a revolution, this is done very cautiously, and not infrequently with much bitterness.

It is now better and better understood that the social improvements which we all so passionately desire can be achieved through normal evolutionary development—with immeasurably fewer losses and without all-encompassing decay. We must be able to improve, patiently, that which we have in any given “today.”

It would be vain to hope that revolution can improve human nature, yet your revolution, and especially our Russian Revolution, hoped for this very effect. The French Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealizable slogan, “liberty, equality, fraternity.” But in the life of society, liberty, and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty—for how else could it be attained? Fraternity, meanwhile, is of entirely different stock; in this instance it is merely a catchy addition to the slogan. True fraternity is achieved by means not social but spiritual. Furthermore, the ominous words “or death!” were added to the threefold slogan, effectively destroying its meaning.

I would not wish a “great revolution” upon any nation. Only the arrival of Thermidor prevented the eighteenth-century revolution from destroying France. But the revolution in Russia was not restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin.

It is a pity that there is no one here today who could speak of the sufferings endured in the depths of China, Cambodia, or Vietnam, and could describe the price they had to pay for revolution.

One might have thought that the experience of the French revolution would have provided enough of a lesson for the rationalist builders of “the people’s happiness” in Russia. But no, the events in Russia were grimmer yet, and incomparably more enormous in scale. Lenin’s Communism and International Socialists studiously reenacted on the body of Russia many of the French revolution’s cruelest methods—only they possessed a much greater a more systematic level of organizational control than the Jacobins.

We had no Thermidor, but to our spiritual credit we did have our Vendée, in fact more than one. These were the large peasant uprisings: Tambov (1920-21), western Siberia (1921). We know of the following episode: Crowds of peasants in handmade shoes, armed with clubs and pitchforks, converged on Tambov, summoned by church bells in the surrounding villages—and were cut down by machine-gun fire. For eleven months the Tambov uprising held out, despite the Communists’ effort to crush it with armored trucks, armored trains, and airplanes, as well as by taking families of the rebels hostage. They were even preparing to use poison gas. The Cossacks, too—from the Ural, the Don, the Kuban, the Terek—met Bolshevism with intransigent resistance that finally drowned in the blood of genocide.

And so, in dedicating this memorial to your heroic Vendée, I see double in my mind’s eye—for I can also visualize the memorials which will one day rise in Russia, monuments to our Russian resistance against the onslaught of Communism and its atrocities.

We have all lived through the twentieth century, a century of terror, the chilling culmination of that Progress about which so many dreamed in the eighteenth century. And now, I think, more and more citizens of France, with increasing understanding and pride, will remember and value the resistance and the sacrifice of the Vendee.

Memory eternal, Alexander Isaevich! Memory eternal, Vendéen martyrs!

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, December 14, A.D. 2011
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Monday, December 5, A.D. 2011

Siri

College Humor’s video spoof on the iPhone’s Siri is wickedly funny. I find the contrast of Siri’s sweet A.I. with the dreadful couple particularly delightful (rated very, very, very R):

Depictions of broken, perverted people should not be humorous; my soul must be irremediably damaged.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, December 5, A.D. 2011
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Wednesday, October 26, A.D. 2011

Occupy Wall Street

Charles Cooke of the National Review interviewed a real daisy at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park (rated PG-13):

While I was first watching the video, it occurred to me that the woman is an unhinged, leftwing version of my mother.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, October 26, A.D. 2011
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Friday, October 7, A.D. 2011

John Safran versus God

I recently discovered John Safran’s Australian antics, and I find his comedy interesting and funny. I especially like his John Safran versus God series, where he, an apparently lapsed Orthodox Jew, explores various aspects of the world’s religions. His segments on Mormons are enjoyable. In the first, Safran attempts to pitch a movie idea—xtreme Mormons—to L.D.S. filmmakers.

Safran also lets the horse out of the barn in examining Magic Masonic Mormon Underpants:

You may also see what happens when Safran knocks on doors in Salt Lake City to spread the bad news of atheism. It is a bit obnoxious, but so are strangers who interupt family dinner, I suppose. More clever is Safran’s “The Pope versus the Dalai Lama”:

You learn a bit more about Tibetan Buddhism than you need to know.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, October 7, A.D. 2011
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Thursday, September 29, A.D. 2011

Up House

As we are both fans of Pixar’s Up, my brother Aaron notified me of a house that was built in Utah that replicates the film’s balloon carried home. Gizmodo features the curiosity: “Video Tour Inside the Up! House Looks Exactly Like the Real Thing.” We are a quirky people, indeed.

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, September 29, A.D. 2011
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Thursday, September 15, A.D. 2011

The Humanities

Given this week’s theme, I thought that this deserved to be reposted:

“. . . and death.”

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, September 15, A.D. 2011
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Tuesday, September 13, A.D. 2011

Simpsons on Graduate School

Continuing the theme from yesterday’s post, 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School, here is a Simpsons video suggested by that site:

Smile, even though it might hurt.

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, September 13, A.D. 2011
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Wednesday, September 7, A.D. 2011

Conservative Atkinson

Rowan Atkinson performs leftist mockery of the Right so well, it delights even my reactionary soul. From Not the Nine O’Clock News:

This skit might be one of those creative pieces that pleases different sets of people for different reasons. If only the Conservatives really supported “realism and responsibility.”

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, September 7, A.D. 2011
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Monday, September 5, A.D. 2011

Restaurant Sketch

On our cultural calendar, summer comes to a close. Enjoy your Labor Day, and be happy that we Americans have distanced our celebration of honest toil from those feverish Commie demonstrations of foreigners. If you are unemployed, I wish you luck in finding a job. If you are earning a wage, count your blessings.

Relevant for the day, here is one last Monty Python video to cap last week’s theme:

Happy Labor Day, especially to those in the restaurant business. Please don’t spit in our food, and we’ll try not to complain about the dirty flatware.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, September 5, A.D. 2011
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