Saleh's Pull: Boy from heaven "Boy from Heaven" is first and foremost a well-composed suspense film, but at the same time gives an exciting insight into religious environments and political lines of conflict in today's Egypt.
MODERN TIMES has spoken to seven Ukrainian and one Russian cartoonist, all associated with the Libex network, about how they view their work in relation to the war in Ukraine.
Jacques Baud: Operation Z MODERN TIMES' regular commentator, John Y. Jones, gives us here in this essay (via Jacques Baud) an overview of the balance of power, the progression of the Ukraine war, the propaganda threat, the Russians' intentions and Western reactions, the Nazi accusations and lies campaigns.
SUBJECTS: How should art stand out in a time when artistic work has come to resemble modern working life with its constant demands for communication, networking and visibility? Appearance and staging have become more important than content. Can we today actually rediscover our relationship with time, the experience of duration, practice doing less? Not being a means to an end?
MAFIA: This is a collection of anecdotal testimonies about a self-destructive social machinery with the mafia as its cornerstone. It deals with the mafia in Sicily, but also the war in Vietnam, Palestinian rights, environmental protection, class society, legal abortion and women's liberation.
DEATH: Our critic here compares his own experience with the death of his parents, with experiences described in Bjørnar Berg's book What does death teach us?.
DESPOTER: The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century caused disasters and crimes of completely different dimensions than any pre-modern tyrants could have imagined. But what qualifies those in power over the centuries to become tyrants?
MONOGRAPH: Reich had considerable influence on Norwegian intellectuals. But he was thrown out of both the Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytical Association – and died in an American prison aged just 60.
DESIRE: About the intersex subject and revolutionary impatience. A resistance made possible by the 'potentia gaudendi', the reserve of unrestrained 'pleasure potency' which constitutes the basic assumption of the philosophy of desire from Reich to Deleuze and Guattari. 'Polemical non-fiction'? Paul B. Preciado takes up Engels' confrontation with the norms of "the family, the state and private property".
REALITY NOVEL: Lene Berg's project is a staging of the memory of a father shrouded in myth – but just as much of herself and her own identity. She was only nine years old when her father was arrested for the murder of her stepmother Evelyne.
AESTHETICS: In Kiøsterud's eco-philosophical text, 'beauty' becomes a riddle as much as a solution, a question as much as an answer. Is it possible to find beauty on nature's own terms – a beauty you cannot own?
UKRAINE: There are many indications that the war in Ukraine has been provoked and desired by the USA and NATO. The mass media have turned into effective ideological institutions that perform a system-supporting propaganda function.
Role models: In public Latin America, the addiction heroes Bolívar and San Martin or Che Guevara and Evita are either idolized or satanized through paintings and photographs. This book takes a closer look at why.
AFRICA: What can a book say about Boko Haram or the porous border between today's Cameroon and today's Chad? Or about the pre-colonial kingdom of Kanem-Bornu?
FUTURE: Environmental disasters, global warming, crisis of civilization and planetary apocalypse have given rise to ideas about the doom of the earth and the end of time. Through a radical anthropology, a couple of authors make an attempt to restore our faith in the world.
PHILOSOPHY: Italian Giorgio Agamben describes and envisions different courses for our thinking than today's more technologically nihilistic will-driven production paradigm. Two books delve into other possibilities than the 'fire' he believes we find ourselves in. In this essay, Astrid Nordang tries to bring out some of this complicated material.
PHILOSOPHY: While postmodernism involved an explosion, today's posthumous condition, according to Marina Garcés, involves a liquidation of all possibilities – an implosion. Yes, are the hopes we cling to today just market-adapted needs for hope?
WOMEN: Art done by men is simply given more attention: in collections, in exhibition programs, in art literature, in the art market. But what about the large number of female artists over the past 500 years?
AUTHORITARIAN: What happened after the height of freedom ideals, the fall of the Iron Curtain and Bill Clinton's fusion of liberal politics with market forces? Today, the Chinese's mastery of original Western technology and surveillance seems limitless.
USA / CHINA: Is the current systemic divide between the US and China insurmountable? According to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: "Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should, cooperative when it can, and hostile when it has to." On the other hand, China is now led by a man who, according to book author Kevin Rudd, has considerable intellectual resources . Under his leadership, China has grown into a superpower.
ISRAEL: Ami Ayalon has been at the forefront of Israel's military actions. As naval commander and as head of the country's internal security service he had a creeping sense that the country he so passionately defended was maneuvering into a strategic impasse.
MODERNIZATION: The Nigerian professor Olùfèmi Táíwò looks at power relations between the formerly colonized and colonialists. All states strive to adapt modern institutions to their own history, cultural context and ideological climate. But can the demand to decolonize the language become absurd?
PSYCHOLOGY: Love is not a project of isolation, but a project of freedom, according to Seyda Kurt: The freedom to be able to choose for oneself is about radical tenderness, about justice.
DIRECT DEMOCRACY: We need a new social system with commons and decline. And it is possible to achieve it. We have enough experience and knowledge from previous times. It's just a matter of getting started, writes Yavor Tarinski in a recent debate book.
Do many still have fascist longings today, or can one always blame seductive leaders? A closer dive into the 100-year-old Italian fascism and its descendants says something about the dangers we are now likely to face.
The Lord's people not only had the world's best weapons, they also had the world's best religion. It was the whites and their self-imposed right to do whatever they wanted at the expense of others.
Volker Schlondorff: The Forest Maker "It's about changing people's mindset," says Volker Schlöndorff (83) to MODERN TIMES. The veteran German director himself describes his film about agronomist Tony Rinaudo's reconstruction of forests in Africa as propaganda.
Ali Abbasi: holy spider This is a political film that has chosen the thriller genre to exercise sharp social criticism against Iran. Like many of today's protesters in the country, the people behind the film were met with death threats and hate messages from the Iranian regime.
MODERN TIMES has asked five urbanists – all known to Norwegian urban developers – about some of the main themes in this supplement: global urbanization and the feminization of poverty, driving forces and counter-forces, new technology, and organization in the fight for a safer and more secure society.
Bjørn Hatterud, Fin Serck-Hanssen, Caroline Ugelstad Elnæs: Queer icons Queer icons deals with a generation that lived with the fear of AIDS, exclusion and criminalization – and not least with the pain from the lack of role models.
Bruce Weber: The Treasure of his Youth: the photographs of Paolo di Paolo It would be almost fifty years before Paolo di Paolo's daughter found the pictures his father had taken, and confronted him with his hitherto unknown past as a (Italian) celebrity photographer.