(Make sure you’ve already perused German Prototype.)
I don’t doubt that murder is older than war: but I bet that mutilation and group rape are probably almost as old. Terror would go way into pre-history. But never mind that: let’s talk about movies!
I have to quote one of the most famous images from Metropolis:
Machine with nice immortal breasts:
And get a load of the hips!
I’m watching Spies in bits and pieces as I so often do these days. In the old days I’d go to the theater and sit and suffer through marathons of movies, enslaving my bladder and so forth to my need not to miss a single detail. (The Apu trilogy once kept me in my seat from noon to ten that night!)
Pather Panchali
(I’m reminded of how I reread Shakespeare: my first reading of Hamlet might take me several hours, not counting break time. My second reading might take six hours, not counting break time: and this has nothing to do with how absorbed I am in it. Sometimes I’ll burn through a novel; more often a novel like War and Peace will take me years to read, counting break time, the book with me constantly. (My third reading of King Lear took three days, by the end of which tim I had ideas for two or three original, I was sure, papers on the play: and I don’t mean undergraduate original, I mean professional original.)
Spies is simply wonderful. The movie is full of men in wheel chairs: crippled alphas. Good gosh: FDR again! Dr. Strangelove!
It’s a German movie but it seems to concern Russians spies in a science-fiction a-la-Gernsbach London: with Japs underfoot!