Tayangan UBU Film Weekend minggu ini

friday, january 09 04 | 8.30pm @ UBU | donations

NOAM CHOMSKY: DISTORTED MORALITY (2002)
America's War On Terror?

"the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological."

Chomsky, renowned scholar, philosopher, political and social analyst, offers a riveting but devastating critique of America's current War on Terror, arguing, in fact, that it is a logical impossibility for such a war to be taking place. The DVD features 2 lectures, the first at Harvard University's JFK School of Government, the second at MIT, where Chomsky has been a professor for over forty years.

more info on Chomsky: here

features: 55 minutes talk at Harvard University + 60 minutes Q&A session

saturday, january 10 04 | 8.30pm @ UBU | donations

Vera Chytilova's DAISIES (Sedmikrásky, 1966)
A Mad-Cap Feminist Farce

"anarchy has never been so much fun."
– Japh Ramblings

"In Daisies the two protagonists, Marie (Ivana Karbarnova) and Marie (Jitka Cerhova), profess to "having gone bad." The problem is, though, because Daisies is a leading example of the Czech New Wave (a 1960s movement in Czechoslovakia paralleling the French New Wave) and as part of such is in defiance of both Social Realist and Hollywood conventions of simplistic meaning- and message creation (i.e. ideology), the Maries are not clear cut criminals. Their "destructive" actions can even be interpreted as critical social and political interventions. Or, they could just be "evil" as, curiously, a 1975 letter by Chytilova to the Czech President suggests.

Completed in 1966, the dazzlingly experimental Daisies was immediately the target of political attack and experienced only a brief public exhibition in 1967. A speech delivered in the Czech National Assembly on May 17, 1967, on behalf of twenty-one deputies vilifies the film: "I would like to demonstrate how money is wasted which the state budget needs. The National Assembly has the duty to express its opinion concerning basic economic, political, and cultural matters of our Republic…[Daisies shows] a road of our cultural life on which no honest worker, farmer, or intellectual would like to embark."

Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the even greater condemnation of her craft Vera Chytilova demonstrated time and again her prowess and tenacity as a cultural warrior, in defense of both her own filmmaking and that of other outcast directors. She closes the 1975 letter to the President, "As a citizen, a woman, a mother and a film director, I will continue to fight for the ideals of a socialist society and will do my utmost to bring about their realization."

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74 minutes