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| 29. MY VIDEOS and PARKING-PARK OF EXARCHEIA |
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. MY VIDEOS .
. click o see the film "MY VIDEOS" by Yannis Tritsibidas .
ENGLISH SUBTITLES to the greek narration I often have the impression that I was, and at the same time was not, there. We remember what we remember, depending on the emotional and intellectual state we happen to be in. The camera delivers a different reality. I am always amazed when I once again look at pictures I have filmed, even when they are entirely staged and invented. They often have more in them than they were intended to have. Not that cinema is the most reliable witness: in any case isolating within a frame one particular element of the chaotic reality, cinema lends another dimension and meaning to it. But aspects of many-personed reality lurk within the shot, without our permission: something I didn’t plan for in the shooting, something I didn’t consider during the editing, something kept there irrespective of my plans. Often it is these unplanned-for elements that dominate the shot. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------One of the many gifts that are bestowed from contact with India is the feeling of unity of things: the animal and the human, the violent and the peace-loving, daily routine and art, all the elements that in the West we have carefully separated. The feeling of unity leads to tolerance, acceptance of other forms beyond the ego. The performance, for visitors to the city, does not meet high specifications. It is however enlivened by the spirituality of centuries as it unfolds some well-established narratives, an art and a technique wonderfully suited to persuade. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was telling my little Nicholas about Prometheus and his theft of the fire of Zeus, how without it we would be like the other animals: its use made this mammal different: what we call human. How fire is at the same time a curse, as is evident today from the disaster that production is wreaking on the planet. A ball of fire is this earth that we tread. We know only its carapace, soil, water, air. We have set fire to its outer layer. Heraclitus reflected on fire: “the world is born out of fire and dissolves in fire, by turn, and without end”. It is said that he liked to frequent furnaces, to be close the fire. Hesiod asserts that Zeus, in punishment for the theft of fire, gave mankind another poisoned gift, the woman Pandora, who from her jar spread all the formerly sealed evils throughout the world. Fire, the woman and ..----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The earth trembles, The earth becomes quiet. The depths of the sea, onto the mountain tops. Little elephants have been dug up out of Aegean islands. Forests becoming desert. Sad foreign places. Wasteland. Abandoned youth. Abandoned life. Desolate and quiet. Spiritual calm. Consumed by desolation. The hermit’s retreat. Abandoned church, deserted island. Abandoned and alone. The whiz kid in his empty house. Forlorn young fellow. Condemned in his own absence. Abandoned and dark. The frighteners are out. A voice cries in the wilderness. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Imposition, service, pain, satisfaction, what price, anger, injustice. Weariness, Africa, prison, rich, freedom, Muslim. State, sex, mendicant, weapon, ally. Freightage , police, hunger, slaughter, boss, war, Asian, whore, revenge. Employee, rebellion, migrant, ransom, occupation.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am pressed for time. Let me find time. I have wasted my time. Time passes. Time has stopped. Where has it gone, the time that has passed? “Time is a child playing, throwing dice. The realm of a child.” Kronos/Time devours his children. And regurgitates them again.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What has remained of the enthusiasm, the inspiration, the comradeship, the generosity, they blossomed after May? Parliamentarians and ministers, more royalist than the king, sharp-eyed managers of Europrogrammes, neo-gurus of political correctness, with a bad conscience, Eurobosses. Long live the new euro-bureaurocracy! DESSOUS LES PAVES LA PLAGE, Under the paving stones the beach. CE N EST QU UN DEBUT, CONTINUONS LE COMBAT. This is just the beginning. Continue the fight. L’IMAGINATION AU POUVOIR. Imagination in command. VIVRE AU PRESENT. Live in the present. INTERDIT D’INTERDIRE. Forbidding is forbidden.JOUISSEZ SANS ENTRAVES. Pleasure without restrictions. L ART EST MORT. Art is dead.LA VIE EST AILLEURS. Life is elsewhere.LES MURS ONT DES OREILLES. VOS OREILLES ONT DES MURS. Walls have ears. Your ears have walls. ICI ET MAINTENANT. Here and now. SOYEZ REALISTES, DEMANDEZ L IMPOSSIBLE. Be realists. Demand the impossible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Turning the Blessed Mills, the engraved teachings are dispersed into the air throughout the planet. Faith in peaceful evolution, through consciousness and modesty. Heraclitus, contemporary of Budhha, everywhere sees war, the fluid equilibrium amid endless conflict. “War is universal, and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away through Strife and Need." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the third-world scenes of the beginning, with the children besieging the (by definition) affluent foreigner, clamouring for pencils or money, the threatening “cut-throat” bursts in. Everyone everywhere envies the Western-type lifestyle and its goodies. The bad side of it is something they cannot appreciate: at what cost, human and planetary, this kind of life has to be paid for. This does not interest people. The desideratum is naturally to get one’s hands on the commodities, here and now. In our Western world the problematic that was current in the 60s and 70s, on nature and the significance of material goods, and what kind of goods, the “consumer society” and the “spectacle society”, has entirely lost its drawing power. It seems passé. Changes come through a deterministic loss, not as a result of thoughtfulness. People, like the Gods, appear to be persuaded still, only by Need. It is Need that gave birth to the Fates. The Fates of those past, present and future.
=========================================================================== . PARKING-PARK .
. CLICK TO SEE THE VIDEO: "PARKING-PARK of Exarcheia" by Yannis Tritsibidas, Athens .
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