> French auteur Jean-Luc Godard needs no introduction. Starting from the pioneering experiments of the French New Wave in the 1960s, Godard has maintained the momentum of his filmmaking investigations with later works like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book. His works have inspired generations of artists who have fallen in love with his revolutionary approach to the art of cinema.
For this week’s highlighted short film, we have chosen Godard’s 1993 short documentary Je vous salue, Sarajevo. Only two minutes long, it is an incendiary meditation on the brutality of the Bosnian War and the Srebrenica massacre. Through powerful images and devastating commentary, Godard forces the audience to confront humanity’s capacity for inflicting tragedy on the marginalised and the helpless.
Above all else, Je vous salue, Sarajevo is an essay that creates an interesting juxtaposition between silent images of violence and a boisterous commentary on contemporary society. While Godard claimed that he wasn’t familiar with Juan Goytisolo’s work, his Cahier de Sarajevo influenced the short film in many ways and carried a similar momentum as was evident in the film’s cinematic force.
As the narrator of the film, Godard embarks on a remarkable lament: “In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed or disowned by all. But don’t be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule; cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war.
He adds, “Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed; Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes. When it’s time to close the book, I have no regrets. I’ve seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well.”
Kiev is something like 100km from the belarussia border, Kharkiv (second biggest ukrainian city) is 20km from the russian border. We're still waiting for Russia victory. No "they just take care about the civilans", we all know it's a lie, they use artilery on civilians zones and commited insane war crimes during the last weeks.
Kharkiv was a mess, russians got destroyed in this city, just take a look at any photos/videos from Kharkiv. Russian bodies and burned armors all over the place, it was a nightmare.
Russia was supposed to be one of the best army on earth for the last 15 years, but they can't enter a city like Kharkiv, Ukraine being one of the poorest european country. Good luck with the "not a botched war" theory.
It was supposed to be a less than a week operation, we are closer to a 2 month war. Russia is already economically on his knees, they need billions to stay in Ukraine and more sanctions are coming...
All they can do is bassicaly blindly destroy cities with artilery and commits war crimes out of frustration until the money runs out.
Russia will probably make ukrainians suffer a lot at least for too many weeks, but they won't win the war. Even China and India aren't going to fully support them, there are a lot of negative signs for Russia, like this one : https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220316-live-un-security...
Germany and Switzerland broke their neutrality traditions. Sweden and Finland were neutral since the WW2, now they are probably about to join NATO. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/13/finland-and-sw...
Russia basicaly lost everything. Their economy was already stagnant for the last 8 years just with a few sanctions, I bet they'll have a lot of fun during the next 5/10 years.
But they'll have Mariupol (after killing thousand of Mariupol's civilians) and some east countryside, good for them.
It reminds me an interview of the "Groland" creators, the best trash and vulgar comedy tv show in France. They use a lot of elderly actors, playing insane characters, lots of nudity etc...
There was a question about the choice of using so much elderly actors, they said "they can do almost anything, they have nothing to lose". Nailed it.
Well, in some country, you can move to the south, like in France, we have southern France. Eh !
Joke aside. French retirees don't need to leave France to have a good climat, and yet some of them go to Portugal because of tax advantages, others go to Tunisia Tunisia because they can take advantage of the very low wages...
The problem with that line of thinking is that when you silence people for their speech it doesn't really solve the fake news problem, it just reinforces amongst the conspiratorial that there's something that you don't want them to hear. Only now they can't get the mainstream version of it so they descend into the "dark news web" and find even worse crap like InfoWars or One America News.
It can very easily shut down a big part of fake news : https://www.counterhate.com/_files/ugd/f4d9b9_b7cedc05536047...
We know we just have to turn off a few faucets to clean a vast majority of the oceans. It can actually solve a significant part of the fake news problem because an insanely small amount of people/entities are responsible for this mess.
Concerning Inforwars :
People using facebook/twitter/youtube alternatives are a very small minority. Infowars is the past, they've been banned from almost everywhere.
I think the last only one infowars door to mainstream is their scam pills store on amazon...
They use a lot of alternative platforms, but does it really matter ? ... They used to have youtube videos with dozens of millions of viewers, now check the selfhosted/bitchute/etc IW channels, they're a few videos hitting 1 million, at best.
I think the last only one IW powerful tool is Telegram. I just checked the IW "social" page, the two IW Telegram only have 30k followers... Pretty much everything else are shady twitter alternatives filled with bots.
Alex Jones problably still earn a significant amount of money, no doubt about it. But his massive influence started to fade since the 2018 bans.
His income has gone down these last years and there's a good possiblity that the Sandy Hook lawsuits are going to shut him down. Can't wait.
BTW, I don't think we should shut down Joe Rogan. I don't care if people wants to listen to the biggest moron on earth having a conversation with a dumbass psychologist about hard sciences, but Spotify should definitely set public serious rules and factcheck their content as much as possible.
The situation is pathetic. Daniel Ek act like everything's ok with his libertarian bs statements, but we know Spotify is currently removing dozens of Joe Rogan's episodes. The last sources talks about 100 removed episodes... I guess the users/subscribers stats and the -20% drop stock are starting to bring Daniel Ek back to earth. Eh.
Being honest, COHERENT, and rules/warning intros/factchecking/etc could be a good start.
(there's probably a lot of broken english, sorry about that, I'm french)
True, but there's nothing we can do about it other than telling platforms we don't want to listen to him. Unless of course we decide to go full authoritarian government and take a page from the CCP's playbook.
It's never black and white. The interview most often cited was an interview with Dr. Robert Malone:
"Malone contributed to important early research. A pair of papers he coauthored with two other researchers in 1989 and six other researchers in 1990 showed that mRNA could be delivered into cells using lipids, and that doing so with mice could trigger the production of new proteins. The two papers were the first reference in a 2019 history of the mRNA vaccine technology."
I'm less upset about this guy saying something wrong after doing some faulty research (I don't think he has any bad intent) than I am when a journalist interviews another journalist about corona (as far away from a researcher as you can get, or even worse, journalists babbling on which scientists are good or not amongst themselves, the blind leading the blind).
I never understood how journalists (or comedians for that matter) can have any authority, at all. This is not an issue about fake news, but a trust issue that is not Joe Rogans fault. Trust will not magically spring up after censoring North Korea-style.
PS. I'm already vaccinated, because I do not trust the likes of the anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and I do trust the government.
Reading your comment breaks my heart. Sorry, it's going to be a long post, and my english skills are questionable...
I'm 35. French. My family used to see the same allergist since I was a kid. One day, after a really bad nose/eyes allergy attack, he told me it was probably psychological. Well yeah, it's kind of psychological when you are losing your mind with your eyes and nose being painful + the headaches. I'm a peaceful guy but the "psychological" BS with his arrogant attitude was too much for me, I was literally about to grab him... I just left without even paying him.
This idiot had the reputation to be the city best allergist, good thing he retired some time later. I was something like 23 or 24. Most internists I saw between 21/25yo didn't really cared about my condition. I guess it was too difficult to find out what was going on with my chronic colds/allergies, my obesity, my permanent tiredness, depression...
Most psychiatrists I had between 21/25yo were absolute trash, the last one tried to calm me with cyamemazine, a strong antipsychotic. Probably the worst time of my life, imagine all the symptoms I listed before + the sedative effects of the cyamemazine... It's like you don't even feel alive anymore.
I hit rock bottom when I was 25. I had severe allergies without even going outside, always tired, 1 or 2 naps every day, suicidal thoughts... I couldn't work anymore to survive.
Well, good thing it happened when I was 25, because in France you can't have any benefit welfare before 25 (except housing welfare). Before 25, sometimes I used to survive with like 200 euros per month, so the 500 euros "social solidarity benefit" was a lot of money to me.
I was a mess since I was a teenager, but for the first time of my life I met someone from the social services who took care of me. She was used to this kind of situation and recommended me a good internist.
I had to "wait" to be 25 until a good internist sent me to a competent pulmonologist who diagnosed with sleep apnea. This is why I was always tired...
My internist also sent me to a good allergist. I finally got skin tested (the family allergist never tested me...). I knew about pollen allergies, not for dust and mites... This is why I was sick all the time without even going outside. Some asthma too.
Things were getting better after trying a lot of psychiatrist, but not great. The years go by...
2021. After seeing a good psychiatrist in a mental health clinic for the last two years. Things got better, she found the best pills "recipe". :o) But most important, she started to "understand" me. She knew something was wrong despite the fact I was feeling happier.
She knew about my chaotic school years, my lack of concentration and focus, and I guess it became obvious when I failed 2 professional training courses this year.
See where this is going ? ... Early november, she sent me to one of her colleague, a specialized psychiatrist. It was brutal, after studying my records and talking to me for 2 hour, he told me he highly suspected a ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and possibly an ASD (autism spectrum disorder). When we were walking to the reception, he told me he was "betting" I was probably around 120/130 IQ, smiling. I was like... Yeah, RIGHT... WTH is he talking about. :/
ADHD was plausible to me but I was skeptical about the rest Reading articles about autism or Asperger sometimes felt very familiar to me, but that's about it.
The IQ thing ? Dude, I always felt stupid as long as I can remember. School was terrible. Rates, people, family, everything was terrible. Same as an adult, I always felt too "mental" to do anything "basic" but to dumb to do anything "better". My only good years were as a security guard on a large industrial site. Lots of night shifts, alone...
Next steps : 3 appointments with a psychologist. A first meeting, the WAIS test the next week, and the results another week later. It was among the three longest weeks of my life. Waiting for the results was a nightmare.
It's late november, ADHD is confirmed, heterogeneous IQ between 100 and 130... As far as I understood, I have good cognitive capacities, especially with visual stuff, but everything related to memory is terrible... It's such a mess I don't have a homogeneous IQ.
It was weird to feel "smart" with the cubes and other visual test. At school, maths were my nemesis, but I remember having fun with geometry.
They're still some doubts about an ASD. I was kind of shocked during the last appointment, it was a lot of information to handle. But it seems it's harder to get diagnosed when you're an adult. The psychologist needed to talk to my parents, my school grades, some specific medical informations about my childhood, etc. My mom is gone, I don't want to see my dad anymore and I have nothing about my childhood.
If I want to find out about a possible ASD, she told me we could try a "social cognitive exploration" one day. I'll wait until I feel less lost...
Early december. I'm finishing my 6 months failed professional training courses and the ADHD/ASD specialized psychiatrist put me on methylphenidate right away. "Concerta LP 54mg". "It's going to boost you up. Side effects are going to help you losing some weigh, pretty cool uh ? It's similar to amphetamines." Wait WHAT ?
This is insane. I mean, nothing's going to change about human interactions etc, but it feels like my brain can finally do things without quickly ending exhausted. It's not perfect, but I don't feel this heavy "mental fog" anymore when I try to do something mentally demanding...
This year was an emotional roller coaster. The 6 month courses probably were one of the worst experience of my life, content was boring, terrible teachers, toxic students, I ended up mentally broken... And then all of this happened.
It's a bittersweet feeling. I can't put the last 6 months behind me, I can't forget how all this toxicity affected me. I feel really great thanks to the methylphenidate. Learning seems possible, I can finally enjoy things like playing online with my friends without feeling mentally exhausted after 1 or 2 hours. But sometimes I just lose it, thinking about how things could have been different with good parenting and earlier medical care.
How to you start your life at 35yo ? I'm not even sure I'm going to live another 35 years.
Sometimes I have flashbacks of my previous life, like in high schoool, some really nice memories like being sent to the school psychologist because they suspected me of drug use because I was tired and alone all the time. I think I never touched anything until my first beer around 21yo. Yeah, 21, this is how lame I was, but to my school I was probably a drug dealer. Good job french educational system !
Domestic violence, sexual abuse. My interactions with teachers/school psychologists/family MD/police/child protection services/etc were an endless failure.
All my life I have been teased and bullied for being weird and lazy. At school, at home, in family meetings, at work...
I don't even know if I really tried to hide things, I was just used to think everything weird or terrible in my life was just normal.
How the hell are you supposed to understand something's wrong when you have no idea of what's good or wrong.
You can't place yourself on a scale if you don't know what 0 or 10 means.
So yeah, you spend years hearing people calling you lazy, unmotivated. The "where there's a will there's a way" people, the "you're just making excuses" people.
Same story, I turned down everything, which can sometimes cause bad reactions from your "friends", which can make you feel even worse...
This is why your post overwhelmed me. I felt this for decades.
I've been doing a big cleaning up of my entourage for the last 2 years so I'm not going to have a lot of decisions to make about ADHD and a possible ASD.
I'm just curious about how I'm going to use different learning methods so I can move forward.
I don't know about human interactions... I don't think I can't say anything positive about this, there's too much hate in me.
There is one thing for sure, you can't fix toxic people.
Try to remember that where you are is a good place to start, and to have compassion for your past self. Your past self did everything they could to get to a better situation. And now, things sound like they're starting to get better.
I feel for you. I've had my own fantastic journey trying to climb out of ASD and chronic health overlap. It's complete shit.
I've had luck with Stoic philosophy to try to let go of how much time I've lost because of illness, and how much more I'm going to lose. Feel free to email if you just want someone else to talk to.
