Mon oncle Antoine Claude Jutra, Canada, 1971, 110 min 20 s
‘Le plus grand film canadien de tous les temps’
L’atmostmosphère d’une petite ville minière du Québec des années 1940, la veille de Noël. Insouciante pour quelques heures, la population, rassemblée au magasin général, oublie sa pauvreté. Aux aguets, Benoit, un garçon de quinze ans : il découvre le monde des adultes, celui des sensations, de la souffrance et des petites folies, qui, pour un instant, prennent un air de bonheur. Avec Jean Duceppe, Jacques Gagnon, Olivette Thibault, Monique Mercure, Lionel Villeneuve.
The Century Of Self
Adam Curtis, UK, 2002, 240 minutes
Part 1 : Happiness Machines
Part 2 : The Engineering of Consent
Part 3 : There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed
Part 4 : Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today’s world.
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Comment ça marche / Explique-moi la vie
Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media
Mark Achbar & Peter Wintonick, Canada, 1992, 167 min 15 s
A Fire In My Belly (Film In Progress)
David Wojnarowicz, USA, 1986-87, Super 8mm film, black and white & color, Silent
In November 2010, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, removed Wojnarowicz’s short silent film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibit « Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture » at the National Portrait Gallery after complaints from the Catholic League and Rep. John Boehner. One segment of the film shows ants crawling over a crucifix.
In response, The Andy Warhol Foundation, which had co-sponsored the exhibition, announced that it would not fund future Smithsonian projects, while several institutions, including SFMOMA, scheduled showings of the removed work.
Arena: Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
Nigel Finch, GB, 1991, 60 min
Profile of Kenneth Anger, looking at the uproar his books on Hollywood scandals caused and journeying through the darker side of Hollywood’s history, including film clips, and Anger playing a guide with comedian Mike McShane playing the God of Hollywood. It also includes a look at some of Anger’s own work… Film historian Kevin Brownlow has repeatedly criticized the book, citing Anger as saying his research method was, « Mental telepathy, mostly. »
