An exploration of the ideas of philosopher Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Self
Self
An exploration of the ideas of philosopher Douglas R. Hofstadter.
1988-01-01
0
At an elite, old-fashioned boarding school in New England, a passionate English teacher inspires his students to rebel against convention and seize the potential of every day, courting the disdain of the stern headmaster.
After World War II, Antonia and her daughter, Danielle, go back to their Dutch hometown, where Antonia's late mother has bestowed a small farm upon her. There, Antonia settles down and joins a tightly-knit but unusual community. Those around her include quirky friend Crooked Finger, would-be suitor Bas and, eventually for Antonia, a granddaughter and great-granddaughter who help create a strong family of empowered women.
A scientist in a surrealist society kidnaps children to steal their dreams, hoping that they slow his aging process.
Years after the world suffered from a deadly virus, a group of survivors tries to make ends meet with resources found in abandoned areas. The arrival of an unknown boy poses an even greater threat. Elsewhere, two men involved in mysteries try to communicate using sent codes. What to expect from the future in Redemption?
Thomas Hirschhorn, one of the few Swiss artists of world renown, often touches on social wounds with his provocative works. In 2013, Hirschhorn built a monument for Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci in a public housing project in the Bronx. The contentious artist collaborated with neighborhood residents whose everyday life is impacted by poverty, unemployment and crime. Conflicts and misunderstandings are bound to arise as Hirschhorn’s absolute devotion to art is confronted with the resident’s lack of prospects and fatalistic outlooks. The «Gramsci Monument» becomes a summer-long experiment where diverse worlds collide: blacks and whites, the art elite and street kids, party people and poets, politicians and philosophers. A nuanced film about art, politics and passion.
What happens when two hands touch? How close are they like? And how can proximity be measured, and even more so, in times of a pandemic and distancing? We think we touch things, that we can take other people by the hand, but physics tells us quite another story.
A man is consumed with the idea of acquiring a chair from a bric-a-brac shop.
Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.
A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.
Almost one hundred years ago, the project to reduce the world to mathematical physics failed suddenly and completely: “One of the best-kept secrets of science,” physicist Nick Herbert writes, “is that physicists have lost their grip on reality.” The world, we are now told, emerges spontaneously, out of “nothing,” and constitutes a “multiverse,” where “anything that can happen will happen, and it will happen an infinite number of times.” Legendary reclusive genius Wolfgang Smith demonstrates on shockingly obvious grounds the dead end at which physics has arrived, and how we can “return, at last, to the real world.” The End of Quantum Reality introduces this extraordinary man to a contemporary audience which has, perhaps, never encountered a true philos-sophia, one as intimately at ease with the rigors of quantum physics as with the greatest schools of human wisdom.
Lev Nikolaevich, Levanka, Levochka, as his many friends call him, is a successful, glamorous, Moscow photographer. He's smart, good-natured. And he is an absolutely cynical person who can be rude to people. He lives in a world where talent, success and fame are valued above all else. At the same time, he is very childish, but does not realize this. The childhood fears are still inside him.
Baron Victor Frankenstein has discovered life's secret and unleashed a blood-curdling chain of events resulting from his creation: a cursed creature with a horrid face — and a tendency to kill.
Alice in Wonderland, or Who Is Guy Debord? was created as part of the Electrodist project, a collective endeavor which has the aim of introducing critical elements into the mainstream marketplace through the alteration of consumer media products. Utilizing DVD decryption freeware and common DVD authoring programs, the video is placed as a special feature within the existing and publicly accessible Disney Alice […] DVDs, and then redistributed by Electrodist into various video rental systems for consumer access. All original material and menu access structures are kept intact in the modified discs, so the addition of Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? has a parasitic relationship to the DVD product. […] The video, within this context, is an attempt to provoke adult consumers, within the safe space of their own living rooms, into thinking critically about the object of their consumption, its creators, and its viewing context.
This tape is the first of Hill’s works for which he deliberately wrote a screenplay. The title defines the piece’s starting point: Alice in Wonderland asks her omniscient father why things get in a muddle. They then talk on a metalinguistic level. A glimpse through the looking glass reveals an inversion of the customary order of things. The father ingests the smoke from his pipe, Alice does not so much blink her eyelids momentarily open as stare wide-eyed, and the playing cards fall out of the air in an orderly manner into the girl’s hand. (Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné, edited by Holger Broeker)
In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a powerful and timelessness novel which eternal theme is nothing other than man's quest for the secret of life. Since then, the Creature became a pop culture icon, overshadowing the novel and Doctor Frankenstein himself.