Werner Herzog: Movies Won’t Change the World

in Current Affairs, Film | November 16th, 2011

Wern­er Her­zog does­n’t work under any illu­sions. In this Stu­dio Q inter­view, the film­mak­er tells Jian Ghome­shi that “movies don’t change things.” “Even influ­en­tial doc­u­men­taries like Inside Job “do not real­ly change the course of our lives.” And that applies to his lat­est film, Into the Abyss, which takes a Dos­toyevskian look at a triple mur­der com­mit­ted in Texas. (See trail­er below.) Into the Abyss prob­a­bly won’t change the U.S. penal sys­tem, or how the death penal­ty gets met­ed out. But that was nev­er the point of the film, and it’s not why Her­zog threw him­self, body and soul, into what he calls the most intense film­mak­ing expe­ri­ence of his life, a project that left him feel­ing each day like he had been “hit by a truck.” The con­ver­sa­tion runs 25 min­utes. h/t @webacion

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Reads “Go the F**k to Sleep” in NYC (NSFW)

Wern­er Her­zog Los­es a Bet to Errol Mor­ris, and Eats His Shoe (Lit­er­al­ly)

Wern­er Her­zog and Cor­mac McCarthy Talk Sci­ence and Cul­ture

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The Story of Broke: An Animated Look at US Federal Spending and Values

in Current Affairs, Economics, Politics | November 14th, 2011

Back in 2008, Annie Leonard pro­duced The Sto­ry of Stuff (see below), a 20-minute ani­mat­ed film that explores the way our con­sumerist habits take a toll on the envi­ron­ment and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. The video racked up mil­lions of views on YouTube, and now Leonard returns with the sec­ond video in a longer series. It’s called the The Sto­ry of Broke (see above) and it takes a short­er, ani­mat­ed look at U.S. gov­ern­ment spend­ing — at how we pri­or­i­tize our spend­ing, and what it says about our core nation­al val­ues.

We have a lot of mon­ey float­ing around. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment col­lect­ed $2.16 tril­lion in tax rev­enue in FY 2010 (and we bor­rowed yet anoth­er $1.3 tril­lion more). Mean­while, rough­ly $705 bil­lion went to defense spend­ing, which is sev­en times (or $589 bil­lion) more than the next biggest defense spender, Chi­na. It turns out that oper­at­ing a bloat­ed empire with troops deployed across 150 coun­tries is a cost­ly nation­al pri­or­i­ty. Then, as Leonard points out, we also unthink­ing­ly fun­nel a lot of mon­ey, in the form of sub­si­dies and give­aways, to dinosaur indus­tries. And then we’re told that noth­ing is left over for Social Secu­ri­ty ($707 bil­lion), Medicare/Medicaid ($732 bil­lion), and edu­ca­tion. But we should­n’t take those claims at face val­ue. Where we spend mon­ey is a choice. It’s ide­al­ly our choice, but all too often it’s real­ly a mat­ter of what’s val­ued by our lead­ers and their finan­cial back­ers.…

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The Van Doos in Afghanistan (Free Until Monday)

in Current Affairs, Film | November 12th, 2011

A quick fyi: To mark Remem­brance Day, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da (NFB) has made Claude Guilmain’s doc­u­men­tary The Van Doos in Afghanistan avail­able online for a lim­it­ed time. You can watch it free until Mon­day. The NFB writes:

In this doc­u­men­tary, we hear direct­ly from fran­coph­o­ne sol­diers serv­ing in the Roy­al 22e Rég­i­ment (known in Eng­lish as “Van Doos”) who were filmed in the field in March 2011, dur­ing their deploy­ment to Afghanistan. They speak sim­ply and direct­ly about their work, whether on patrol or per­form­ing their duties at the base. The film’s images and inter­views bring home the com­plex­i­ty of the issues on the ground and shed light on the lit­tle-under­stood expe­ri­ences of the men and women who served in Afghanistan.

You’ll find oth­er free films by the NFB in our big col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online. It now has north of 435 films on the list.

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David Crosby & Graham Nash at Occupy Wall Street; Echoes of Woodstock

in Current Affairs, Music | November 9th, 2011

First came Willie Nel­son, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie, and now Cros­by & Nash (sans Stills). Play­ing yes­ter­day at Occu­py Wall Street, their short set includ­ed Mil­i­tary Mad­ness, What Are Their Names, They Want It All, Teach Your Chil­dren (above), and Long Time Gone, which they sang dur­ing their hey­day at Wood­stock more than 40 years ago. A long time gone, indeed.

All of this pro­vides a good excuse to post anoth­er favorite video of ours — CSN’s one-time band­mate Neil Young play­ing Ohio, a now canon­i­cal song from the protest move­ment song­book. The haunt­ing clip was record­ed live at Massey Hall in 1971, and appears on one of the fin­er acoustic gui­tar LPs.

More Occu­py Videos:

Noam Chom­sky at Occu­py Boston

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occu­py Wall Street

 

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Noam Chomsky at Occupy Boston

in Current Affairs, Politics | November 1st, 2011

Noam Chom­sky joined the fac­ul­ty of MIT in 1955, and, soon enough estab­lished him­self as “the father of mod­ern lin­guis­tics.” (Watch him debate Michel Fou­cault in 1971.) Dur­ing the 60s, he also firm­ly posi­tioned him­self as a lead­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al tak­ing aim at Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy and glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, and we reg­u­lar­ly saw him engag­ing with fig­ures like William F. Buck­ley.

All of these years lat­er, it’s quite fit­ting that Chom­sky, now 82 years old, would pay a vis­it to Occu­py Boston and deliv­er a talk in the Howard Zinn Memo­r­i­al Lec­ture Series. Why has our polit­i­cal sys­tem become more respon­sive to cor­po­ra­tions than cit­i­zens? How has wealth become increas­ing­ly con­cen­trat­ed in the hands of an ever small­er elite — a plu­toc­ra­cy, to put it sim­ply? And why do bil­lion­aire hedge fund man­agers enjoy a low­er tax rate than maligned school teach­ers and pret­ty much every­one else? Chom­sky explains how we got to this point, and what’s to be done about it. Find his talk in three parts: Part 1 (above), Part 2 and Part 3.  via Dan­ger­ous Minds.

More Occu­py Videos:

Willie Nel­son, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occu­py Wall Street

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occu­py Wall Street

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Hans Rosling Uses Ikea Props to Explain World of 7 Billion People

in Current Affairs | November 1st, 2011

Accord­ing to Unit­ed Nations demog­ra­phers, the world’s pop­u­la­tion like­ly topped 7 bil­lion on Mon­day, and we’ll now steam for­ward, hit­ting 9.3 bil­lion by 2050. 7 bil­lion is a news­wor­thy mile­stone, to be sure. But what does this num­ber real­ly mean? To put things in per­spec­tive, we’re fea­tur­ing a recent TED Talk by Hans Rosling, a pro­fes­sor of glob­al health who presents data in imag­i­na­tive ways. His pre­sen­ta­tions can get wild­ly dig­i­tal. (Just watch 200 Coun­tries & 200 Years in 4 Min­utes). But not so in this case. The props are sim­ple goods bought at IKEA, and they do more than an ade­quate job explain­ing the past, present and future of glob­al pop­u­la­tion growth.

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10,000 Solutions

in Current Affairs | October 27th, 2011

Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty has launched a new con­test called 10,000 Solu­tions open to any­one over 18, any­where in the world, and it offers a $10,000 prize. Entries can take on one of the eight great­est chal­lenges fac­ing the world, like sus­tain­abil­i­ty and the future of edu­ca­tion. What makes the con­test unusu­al is that par­tic­i­pants are encour­aged to col­lab­o­rate and build on one another’s solu­tions. ASU wants to cre­ate an open solu­tions bank that oth­ers can use to gen­er­ate new ideas, and some stu­dents at ASU have already met up in per­son to talk over things they shared on the site. The school is pro­mot­ing 10,000 Solu­tions as an exper­i­ment in col­lab­o­ra­tive inven­tion and the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion is fund­ing a team of ASU researchers to study the con­test and see how ideas are shared and devel­oped.

The con­test is off to a strong start, get­ting some high-pro­file entries like this one from Dan Ariely.

While many of the solu­tions share ques­tions or ideas at the brain­storm­ing stage, some groups are using the plat­form to pro­mote work­ing pro­to­types. This group of ASU stu­dent engi­neers is work­ing on a low-cost smart­board tech­nol­o­gy based on the Wii that could be set up any­where you can run a pro­jec­tor.

ASU hopes 10,000 Solu­tions will bring some fresh ener­gy to prob­lems that often seem over­whelm­ing. If you have a minute to spare and a bright idea for mak­ing the world a bet­ter place, why not share it?

Ed Finn is an occa­sion­al con­trib­u­tor to Open Cul­ture. He recent­ly start­ed work­ing at Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty in Uni­ver­si­ty Ini­tia­tives, an office focused on devel­op­ing new projects and think­ing big about the future of pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion. 10,000 Solu­tions is a project his team is help­ing to launch this year.

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Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occupy Wall Street

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | October 22nd, 2011

There’s some­thing hap­pen­ing here
What it is ain’t exact­ly clear…

The intel­lec­tu­als have paid a vis­it to Occu­py Wall Street (Joseph Stiglitz, Lawrence Lessig, Slavoj Zizek, etc.). And so have some icon­ic cul­tur­al fig­ures. This week, Willie Nel­son and his wife wrote and read a poem sup­port­ing the surg­ing move­ment.

Then last night, Pete Seeger marched some 30 blocks through the streets of mid­town, NYC. At 92, the leg­endary voice of protest can still raise some hell. If you have any doubts, just watch his musi­cal protest against British Petro­le­um per­formed last year.

Near 1:00 a.m., the fes­tiv­i­ties were capped off at Colum­bus Cir­cle with Arlo Guthrie and friends lead­ing a sin­ga­long to the folk clas­sic, “This Lit­tle Light of Mine.” As more cul­tur­al fig­ures pay a vis­it, we’ll post them…

H/T to @webacion

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