A film that asks some rather provocative questions about settler colonialism - or perhaps a film which does precisely the opposite - smoothing over the racial fractures of the settler colonial project.
Does Mann posit a union of the jeffersonian yeoman farmer and the indigenous population to suggest that the settler has a 'true' relation to the land as opposed to the imperial relation of the British and Fench? Or does Mann merely gesture at the way colonial dynamics use…
The central conceit of the film - that we are but the latest version of ourselves, and we can go back through those versions to purge the current self, reminds me of something the philosophy/theologian David Bentley Hart said, that in the steam age the mind was conceptualised as a steam engine and the body understood as hydraulic; then in the computing age the brain became a computer with the mind understood as a calculating and computational machine. Now in…
There has never been a working class in these films (excepting the moon robot they must flee) - there instead the twee British ideal of the inventor who can eliminate the need for labour, leaving only the middle and upper classes. What vengeance most fowl does is mount a romantic criticism of such a society - challenging the very notion of automation through the dignity and appeal of work, not labour but work for our own sakes. Gromit understands the…
Kobayashi said that with Harikiri he was attempting to do setting Kurosawa had not, a cynical engagement with the Samurai. He was right that Kurosawa (in his black and white period at least) doesn't do this, but this is where he gets closest. Mifune's character, acting as a kind of Rousseauian law giver (maybe the ronan has its own meaning, but Kurosawa's vocalness in his debt to western film making makes me feel like i can draw this comparison) as…
