Political theory and practice – Page 12

We Scholars

We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995) by David Damrosch

GoodReads meta-data is 242 pages rated 3.83 by 6 litizens.

The central line of argument in this monograph is the long term deleterious effects of specialisation which combines with a central tendency of colleges and universities to converge on a single model, as seen in Australia where within a decade colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology assumed the name and morēs of universities, abandoning their own distinctive histories and achievements near instantly. In my small world I had an experience similar to one the author describes. Writing a letter of assessment for a candidate for promotion in one of those re-named institutions, I meant to praise and support the individual. In it I emphasised the clever means by which she had integrated current research into undergraduate courses and presented it in ways that would arrest the attention of young students, adding that I had seen her classroom interaction with students and admired it. I also said that chapters of her dissertation could be published in the fullness of time for their groundbreaking insights. Pushing back from the keyboard, I thought that this testimonial would help. Not so. In fact, quite the reverse.

I had tried to calculate the letter to match the circumstances of what was in all but name a teaching-only institution and so stressed teaching and put that comment on publication as a ‘might be.’ Both tactics were mistakes. My assessment had been sought, said an icy reply from the dean at that institution, because I was a leader in the field (no one else before or since has ever crowned me thus, so I savoured that) at the leading research University (our marketing department always said that but this was the first and only time someone outside feigned to take it seriously) in the country so that I would measure the candidate against the standard that prevailed in my milieu. Oh. By concentrating on teaching I had condemned the applicant.

While he mourns the loss of some of the fruits of a core curriculum in a common reference point, in shared experience, and in the intrinsic value of much of it (like William Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson) as compared to watching a comic book-based film, he makes a hash of the defences of the core by the likes of Allan Bloom by showing just how selective that core always was, namely that despite the loud and persistent howls of its defenders it never did include anything of the stories from the Bible, yet what could be more core to the Western tradition than that. He also shows just how narrow the focus is of one the most widely used undergraduate literary anthologies (which I had myself in those salad days), the Norton Anthology of World Literature. His aim is not to amend the core with the Bible, but to demonstrate how tenuous the justifications for the core have been.

In my years I heard the ‘curriculum’ discussed repeatedly, even annually, but in none of those discussions did I ever hear anyone talk about what a students needed to learn and how they would learn it by graduation. The discussion was always about boxes of content that might allow us to teach our research to undergraduates. In other words, the interests served were those of the teachers not the students. This order of priorities was announced early in my experience by one colleague thus: ‘It matters not what the subject is, as long as it is offered with enthusiasm.’ I put it somewhat more delicately than he did, but clearly it was all about being the centre of attention and having a captive audience to do what he liked to do. Yet these discussions of curriculum could be teleological, reasoning backward from the knowledge and experience a citizen might benefit from in later life, a civil servant, a lawyer, a social worker, a journalist, a parent, a researcher, a data analyst, a trade unionist, a community organiser, and a graduate student. Once three or four of these generic types were identified the content and the experiences were put under them, or not. By experience I mean, essay-writing, small group seminars, group work, community research by interview, statistical literacy, front of the room presentations, analysis of data, comparative assessments, revisions, seminars and other kinds of discussions, long or short essays, and so on. This approach never worked.

He also indicts the nationalism of departments to which I plead guilty, nor do I like the changes he has outlined. Dissolving departments in financial acid, which is certainly happening, will create a mass society in which individuals relate singularly and poorly to the whole. That way lies hegemony coupled with anomie and alienation, requiring a new book to address that situation with another title drawn from Nietzsche.

He is dead right about the hypocritical individualism of the humanities and social science professoriate. On the keyboard we pound out clarion calls for community engagement, civil society harmony, fraternity, and camaraderie, but themselves refuse to go to committee meetings, or worse, once there, feigning duress, fail to take the proceeding seriously during and afterwards, or concentrate on their grievances (that start with parking). Of course many committee meetings become idle talking shops but that is because of the participants, not intrinsic to such associations.

I savoured his description of academic conferences as the opportunity for delegates to patronise inferiors, pander to superiors, and sample the local cuisine. His explication of the mechanics of conferences that lead to those ends is interesting and it is juxtaposed to a residential, invited seminar of dozen specialist which was productive. Hmm, I took part in a couple of such gatherings that included Olympian professors, ambassadors, senior civil servants, and an international celebrity and found them useless. Everyone talked when it was their turn, but it was never anyone’s turn to listen, it seemed. People talked past each other in seriatim though everyone was effusive at the end about how wonderful it was. They liked the local wines, sights, and cuisines.

Though Damrosch deplores the denigration of undergraduate teaching in favour of graduate supervision, he does the same himself in that the longest chapter of the book, with one of the most developed alternatives, concerning graduate education. While its importance is undeniable, say I as one of the its products, it is not the heart of higher education for it touches so few. Of courses, there are the indirect and long term effects but they are even harder to estimate.

It is an insightful, well written, and fully researched book. Yet since its publication in 1995 the major changes in higher education have not been such as he commended, but rather, changing attitudes of students to inflate grades, and in Australia the availability of material first through the cheaper air cargo of print books and now digital technology, and ever more resources like Wikipedia or ChatGPT.

Where is Echoland?

Echoland (2013) by Joe Joyce

GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 3.72 by 458 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

DNA: Ireland.

Verdict: More, please.

Tagline: High heels on cobble stones?

A krimi set it in Dublin during May and June 1940, sprinkled with Gaelic and the manners and morēs of rural Erin. A desperate Britain might be driven to occupy the Free State to preempt a German advance. That would start with seizing the western ports and airfields as enclaves for the Battle of the Atlantic, and once ensconced, expansion to the hinterlands would follow all the way to Dublin. Or the Germans, already using Ireland as a base for spies, might target the western ports for its U-Boats. That seems dangerous enough but there is also the irreconcilable IRA within looking for German allies to unite the island on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Meanwhile, the parliamentary government with a thin majority and thinner legitimacy sticks to neutrality in word and deed, while preparing for both eventualities.

Into this minefield steps a junior army officer who reads some German and because of that is transferred to Army intelligence and set to work spying on the spies both German and British and later American. There are some nice twists and turns and the characters are several and varied. There is much of the time and place, the bicycle as transportation, the ubiquitous cigarettes, the invisible hand of Catholicism in hospitals and schools, the furnishings and dress, the smells and sounds of the city, but the descriptions of these backdrops are spare and do not deflect or delay the narrative. By and large the author’s touch is light but firm and clear.

The officer is a country boy new to the ways of the big city, and stumbles around. But he is good at finding threads in the files of reports, and questions the obvious that others have looked through. Moreover, his knowledge of German is better than that of many others in the office, and they turn to him for help in translation, which enlightens him further about the bigger picture.

There is no explanation of the title that I noticed, and note well that the title used by three or four other authors. Nor is there an explanation of why and how he learned German.

I liked it enough to go onto the second in the series, and the third.

Above, I said that the characters are varied, and when I started another similar book, I was reminded of the importance of that variation. In this other, unnamed book, every character in the Kindle sample uses the same words, idioms, and register, like one of those plays where one actor does all the parts, changing costume but nothing else.

The Gentleman from New York (2000)

The Gentleman from New York (2000) by Godfrey Hodgson.

GoodReads meta-data is 452 pages, rated 3.58 by 40 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Well written and insightful.

Tagline: He did it his way.

Born into an ethnic minority in New York City, as a boy he shined shoes in Time Square for eating, not pocket, money. He went to high school in Harlem, while living with his mother and two siblings but no father, above a saloon in Hell’s Kitchen. He went to a modest college thanks to a stint in the US Navy 1944-1946 and the GI Bill. Those experiences etched onto his soul the belief that government could improve the lives of citizens. And that it should do so, else what is it for. This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003).

In later life he would be a cabinet official, an Ivy League professor, an ambassador twice, and for twenty-four years a US Senator where he master-minded several important acts without the glory of attaching his name to them, in part, because his name had become a lightning rod for cheap shots.

Of firm principle though not an ideologue, he was able and willing to work with everyone and anyone to advance a purpose. Indeed he often found it easier to work with his opponents than his brethren in a time less polarised than today.

A birthright Democrat he did things his way, much to the irritation of many of those brethren. With opponents the dealing was face-to-face and more likely to be honoured than with one’s own who were given to back stabbing and weaselling. He put it this way, an agreement sealed by a public handshake with a Republican always stood, but not with a Democrat for whom the handshake was only the beginning not the end.

Faults, he had a few and a few more, not all of which are given space in these pages. There was a temper that burned. When inactive he spent far too much time with the Mexican ambassador (code for drinking bottle after bottle of dry sherry in his private office). He had blindsides about some people. His prose could be so florid that the meaning was obscured by the foliage. An intellectual bully, he quoted Shakespeare or Coleridge in reply to questions without relevance to intimidate interlocutors.

His career-long commitment to social welfare conjures Michel Foucault. Moynihan opposed the welfare professionals (bureaucrats, policy makers, social workers, community counsellors, special needs educators, applied psychologists, and hordes more) for siphoning off the money. What poor people needed was money, not counselling and all that. To get money and keep getting it, they needed jobs. More and better jobs meant more and better citizens. When possible he worked on finance not welfare to reduce the need for welfare.

His arguments with and against the welfare industry lobby certainly echo Foucault and vice versa. Moynihan valued data and on those finance committees he concluded that at least 25% of the welfare allocations went to administration, paying all those specialists as indicated above. Bigger programs were even more top heavy with management and compliance costs added. In one case he documented (thanks to his unthanked research staff) more than 50% of the funds went in salaries to the middle class professionals who ran it. He concluded and said that the achieved purpose of the program(s) was not to deliver benefits to those in need but to make interesting and rewarding careers for the professionals who serviced them. (Those with ranch experience will note the use of that word ‘service’ with a smile. Others will not. So be it.)

Earlier he had used data to argue that unemployment and poverty together with the scars of slavery and racism had eroded the family among black Americans. To address this problem two things would help, one, stop the rhetorical fanning of the racial flames and, two, a productive economy based on a sound educational system. Incentives for businesses to locate in areas where a black population needed work made more sense to him than parachuting in community organisers, social workers, and so on. The organisers would certainly not stay but the businesses just might.

He always thought and said that the nuclear family was the foundation of a stable society. Imagine all the stones thrown at that contention today. The self-serving ideologues (equivalent to those welfare professionals) would be lining up to hurl abuse at him. The line forms at the right and left.

For these liberal sacrileges he was excommunicated from the tribe.

There are many details about legislation: I particularly liked the analysis of impeachment. Also interesting was his dissection of the Clinton Health care fiasco. Although it avoids the intriguing the prior question of why and how citizen Hillary Clinton could devise and propose legislation in the first place. (The second question is off page, but why did such an insider as Hillary offer such detailed legislation, having in it real or imaged targets for everyone looking for a shot, cheap or not.) Among the other tidbits was the size of a Senator’s office with committee assignments, at times he had a staff nearing 500. I suppose it is more now just to monitor the social media. He once won nearly 70% of the statewide popular vote. He became more patrician than a lord, but, unlike others, he did know when and how to quit and he did.

The book is well written and thoroughly researched, and focused on his public career. Even so there are omissions like campaign finance. At no time did he seem to have troubled to mentor others onto the path. He always seemed to do the talking. There is little, very little, about his private life as husband, father, son, churchman, or neighbour.

He loomed large on the distant horizon when I was a budding social scientist, and I wondered about him. He was both more and less than he seemed in those days. More because of his unusual background for a US Senator and Harvard professor, and less for his one-eyed focus on welfare so that he could ignore the Vietnam War, Watergate, and much else.

Róise without Frank

Róise and Frank (2022)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 7.1 by 131 cinematizens.

DNA: Ireland.

Genre: drama.

Verdict: hooray.

Tagline: When the dog takes over control…

In a village in west Ireland near the sea live Róise and Frank, who is Mr Hurling in those parts. But before the film begins, Frank has suddenly died, catching Róise unprepared and leaving her bereft. Her portrayal of grief is relentless and moving. Very purposefully a lurcher (that is a dog) makes its way through the fields, down country roads, and along lanes to her yard where he takes up a watching post. When she notices him, yes it is a him, she is, at first indifferent, then slightly bothered, and later alarmed when he insists on accompanying her grim walks to the bottle shop, and when upon her return, he pushes into the house. She takes fright and shooed him away…she thinks.

This dog is made of sterner stuff and persists and persists. And again once in the house, the mystery begins and ends. The dog takes up the deceased Frank’s chair and when hurling comes on the TV while she mopes in the kitchen with another bottle, the dog stares at the televised hurling game and barks when the home team scores. Just like Frank. His favourite meal is the same as Frank’s. And so it goes.

During one of her mopes, the dog drives her out the house and herds her on a walk to … the vista she and Frank almost always went to after tea (that is dinner to you) on nice evenings. There is more but – spoiler alert – she becomes convinced that this dog is Frank returned to her!

The dog herds a local boy into ever more hurling practice to sharpened his reflexes, hone his eye, and build his sadly lacking confidence.

It is charming blarney and the dog steals the show.

The acting is superb all the way around. Her confused grown son the doctor is, well, confused by her mania. The local pub-bound layabouts are bemused by the insinuation of the dog into village life as the hurling team’s mascot, and the widower neighbour is jealous of her affection for the dog. There is some choral singing to spice it up!

Love the sign that said ‘No Dogs Allowed…Except Frank’ at the hurling pitch.

Not my usual fare but it came up as a choice during the long flight to Honolulu in July, and since I had been reading krimis set in Ireland, I pursued the Irish connection.

Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar (2014)

IMDb meta-data is an excruciating runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes, rated an incredible 8.7 by 1,934,705 of the credulous.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Yankee.

Verdict: Alas.

Tagline: It’s the end of the world, again, and only one man can save us, no not James Bond (sigh, I wish) but….

It is the same old connect the dots plot. Our heroic pilot ferries the scientists to their deaths one-by-one with his trick reverse parks. Hundreds, thousands have been trained but he is the only one who can do that. Though twelve did go first. Sure that makes sense. Tarkovsky is not the only director who treats audiences with contempt.

Watching this was the first time I have even felt bored by the representation of space, though plenty of high priced weightlessness. There was much talk of gravity that reminded of the superb film of that name with another good ole boy in it.

‘They’? Didn’t find out and didn’t care. Liked the domino robot computer

Exhaustingly researched by watching other movies it seems. The claim is also made that it is based on S C I E N C E. Sure. Whatever. Based on science, the science of speculation. All the hallmarks of this director’s work. A serial disaster movie as the action moves from one to another.

Bladder-busting length, mountainous clichés, solitary heroism of a unique genius, and a gargantuan production in which no expense was spared. What was spared was intelligence, insight, and imagination. The acting is fine. I was surprised by MM’s credibility, but honours go to John Lithgow who delivers a fine supporting performance. Michael Caine was sleepwalking, at best, but then he didn’t write the lines, one of which posits is, by implication, that the solution to an intractable mathematical problem is simply more time, like learning conjugations. Goldbach conjecture and Riemann hypothesis are next! Anne Hathaway’s part was underwritten, leaving her little to do.

Thought they chose MM for his previous experience with aliens in Contact (1997).

These people have never seen a dust bowl and evidently did no research on the subject since the representation of a dust storm here is nothing like as ominous or ferocious and seemingly endless as the real thing. DUST BOWL PICTURES. Instead we have a long pointless scene of MM staring at the dust on the floor. Get a broom! Sweep it up man! There are a lot of those, long and pointless scenes.

There is a far better description of a dust storm in Sidney Courtier, Softly Dust the Corpse (1960), a marvellous krimi.

Gigantic wave over 12 inches of water is not possible. Check the science on that. Not even on a strange new world, about which no curiosity is ever shown. Check with your local science advisor.

We know the daughter is smart because when she left the house window open to the known threat of the elements, we see that her room have floor-to-ceiling fully loaded book shelves. Who needs a computer or Kindle when you have these tomes gathering dust. Yet she is supposed to be a tweenage wizard. While on tech, there are a lot of computer screens on display but whenever anything important comes up, it’s on a whiteboard, blackboard, or piece of paper..

My finger was never far from the fast forward button.

Maybe those who rated it highly haven’t yet seen these clichés as often as I have, but they will, I am sure.

Albeit, less preachy than I expected given the plot kickoff.

Magellan

Magellan (2017)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 43 minutes, rated 5.2 by 1694 members of the producers’ extended families.

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Yankee

Verdict: Meh

Tagline: Me, myself, and I.

In sum, the one-man crew sets off on a ten-year mission and talks to the camera in close-up for about half the runtime. There are actors who could make that engaging, but none of them were available for this film. The only explanation for the one-man crew is the producers’ budget. Why the mission must take ten years is anyone’s guess.

Here is the set-up: SETI has received and tracked three radio signals. (See, overkill. One would be enough. And overkill leads to boring repetition in lieu of development.) Off Hero goes, leaving behind for those ten years a wife and child after five-minutes of thought. No one will go with him but he loves his own company, so fine.

Like the audience, he passes much of the time asleep, repeats three searches on three heavenly bodies – two moons and a dwarf planet. We see each wake-up call. We see each search. Each time he finds an opaque glass orb tennis-ball size that seems to the origin of the signal. He reports this by instantaneous communication from Neptune. Sure. But he himself shows little interest in them since he is a pilot not a scientist. Yep, perfect man for the job. When he touches a ball with his bare hand, he has LSD visions of the cosmos which he does not report, least somebody tell him not to play with the specimens, I guess. (Confession, finding the dialogue so trite I turned down the volume for a lot of the runtime, especially when I hit fast-forward.)

In his communication things seem to be changing at Mission Control, but that hint is not developed. His spiffy controller slowly deteriorates into a ragged and haggard man. Ditto he seems to lose internet in wife and home.

It goes on, and on.

On the plus side, I am always intrigued by first contact that isn’t a shoot ‘em up. And the glass balls were a surprise but the novelty wore off by the third time. The Space Odyssey visions of the cosmos were fun but had no meaning and might just as well have been drug-induced.

On the other side, with a one-man crew there is no interaction, no second opinion, no tension, no teamwork, just sleep and awake. By the way, in the ten years his hair did not need to be cut, since there was no other member of the crew to do it, apart from Siri and Alexa. The repetition of searching for and finding the balls was a killer. Someone should have introduced him to his wife: in their few scenes and interactions before departure, they seemed to be strangers.

Some reviewers excuse its faults because of its low budget but the problems are in the story not the colour of the walls of the space ship.

Here today, and gone…!

An Atlas of Extinct Countries (2020) by Gideon Defoe

Subtitle: The Remarkable [and Occasionally Ridiculous] Stories of 48 Nations that Fell off the Map.

Genre: Non-fiction, though some of the countries were all but fictitious.

Verdict: no more!

Tagline: No kidding? No kidding!

The motley crew is divided into four parts, each is twofold:

Chancers and Crackpots who declared themselves king of an acre, like Prince Leonard in West Australia though he doesn’t make the cut here. Most of the examples treated occurred in the age of colonialism when a European would chance upon a clearing in a forest or an island in a stream and crown himself. Yes, though the author does not underline it, they are all men. He includes here the Kingdom of Bavaria, which despite the insanity in the royal family, was a country from 1805 to 1918. Ditto the kingdom of Sarawak (1841-1946) without the insanity.
Mistakes and Micro-nations. This section includes the ludicrous story of the Scots attempt at colonisation in a Panamanian jungle that is still uninhabitable; they bought the land cheap, being Scots. The most interesting other specimens are Elba when Napoleon briefly ruled it, 1814-1815 and Tangiers when it was an international city from 1924-1956. The later served as a backdrop to much thriller and spy fiction long after its 1965 absorption into Morocco. Don’t forget the tangerines, either. (Though it is curious that it went quietly into Morocco but the three Spanish enclaves along the Moroccan coast did not, and still have not, being the last examples of European colonialism.)
Lies and Lost Kingdoms. There were scams before the internet! An entrepreneurial soul would dream up a luxurious and wealthy unclaimed land where gold grows on trees, and sell shares in it to investors and settlers, then – in the time honoured fashion of bankers – take the money and run. Credulity is as old as the credulous. Old. Lost kingdoms include Sikkim (1642-1975) and Dahomey (1600-1904). Nobody wanted Sikkim, not even India, but as a buffer against China, it relented. Dahomey became a French colony of the same name, known to stamp collectors, until de-colonisation created Benin (now famous for its bronze artwork to viewers of The Antiques Road Show on BBC). The author includes here The Serene Republic of Venice (697-1797) when Napoleon ended it in person by burning the Golden Book and supervised a shotgun wedding with Italy. Methinks Defoe whitewashes Venice’s tortured and violent history, omitting the piles and piles of dirty laundry.
Puppets and Political Footballs. There are both important and unimportant examples included here. As the latter, various proto-states in North America, like West Florida (which lasted a few days and was located in Louisiana); as to the former the Texas Republic (1836-1846). Three others were even more significant: Yugoslavia that preserved ethnic hatred in amber for forty years, The Deutsche Demokratische Republik (1949-1990) that de-populated itself by a quarter while bankrupting itself, and Mussolini’s last respite, the Salo Republic (1943-1945), that gave the Germans free rein to what was left of Italy and its Jews. Here the author includes the terrible story of the rapacious and inhuman plunder of the Congo. Manchukuo (1932-1945) is in this section, a puppet state set up by the Japanese to cloak their brutal colonisation of this iron ore rich region.

There follows an appendix with some comments on the flags and anthems these places had, ranging from the silly to the stupid.

Omitted are the Second Spanish Republic (1934-1939) which had its own flag and anthem, as did Australia’s very own aforementioned Prince Leonard (1925-2019) of the Principality of Hutt River. Maybe the Spanish Republic isn’t qualified since it did not change the borders nor the existence of Spain. But as to crackpots, well, Lennie is hard to beat. Check him out on Wikipedia. Then there is California that declared itself a republic for thirty days, and the kingdom of Hawaii. Wasn’t Vermont also briefly an autonomous unit?

Each entry is written to a template of about five pages with a small map. The result is superficial but the treatment is spritely, and when you know nothing, an informative start. There is a short, but well-judged bibliography to continue with.

The Sand Digger’s Skull

The Sand Digger’s Skull (2023) by Chris McGillion.

GoodReads meta-data is 262 pages, rated 5.0 by 2 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Timor.

Verdict: Didn’t see that coming.

Tagline: who dun what?

More dirty work in Timor-Leste when labourers shovelling up sand for cement along a river came across human bones, one after another. Geographic, hydrological, and meteorological analyses indicate the bones were carried by the river and deposited in the sand at the spot where they were found. Pathological analysis suggests several died years ago but the death of one is much more recent.

Evidently most crimes in Timor-Leste trace back to the Indonesian invasion and occupation of 2002, so Investigator Codero in Dili gets the assignment to look into the matter as part of his INTERPOL duties with his reluctant Yankee associate, Carter. Together with the office interpreter and dog’s body, they head for the hills from where the remans likely originated.

What follows is immersion into the remote backwaters of the island of Timor with its animist and xenophobic culture, tropical rain, and subsistence living overlain with its recent history. Saturation in these details nearly drowned this reader but it does convey much of the place and people.

It’s a complex plot which I won’t spoil. Suffice it to say little is what it seems to be and guilt is by many hands. Jaded krimi reader though I am, I was blindsided several times. In addition, the author successfully distinguishes a host of characters and brings them together from the dissolute priest to the surly apprentice mechanic, the ever correct Carter, and the naive translator. The hardest of all and the most uncommon to the genre is the child.

Disclosure: The author is a pal.

Ever the teacher assigning further reading, because everything I read these days reminds me of something else. In this case the reference list included:

Ben Anderson, ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,’ a chapter in his book Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 1972), pp 1-70. Power incarnated in the first half of the chapter.

Denis Thompson, ‘Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands,’ American Political Science Review, 74 (4), pp 905-916. Who did it? All of them and so none of them.

Colin Turnbull, The Forest People. NYC: Simon & Schuster, 1968. One chapter concerns crime and punishment in a Pygmy community.

Miguel Unamuno, ‘Saint Emmanuel the Good Martyr,’ a short story about a priest who has no faith.

At one time or another each was on a syllabus.

Helga

Helga: A Human Requiem (2022)

Meta-data is a runtime of 20 minutes, unrated because it is not listed on the IMDb. (Strange but true.)

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Brazil.

Verdict: Olé!

Tagline: A Love Story.

Amadeus Klein is a robotics genius, fated to live in a brutal military dictatorship, who takes army funding to develop mechanical warriors and diverts it into making a robotic simulacra of the women he loved, until soldiers killed her.

Nearly silent, it conveys great emotion without a word. But it does make demands on the viewer to stick with it. Doing so certainly pays off. The sound track is, yep, a requiem from the enfant terrible Mozart.

Helga is derived from Metropolis with a touch of Frankenstein thrown in. Tin face CGI though she is, she, too, has feelings.

A marvellous short film from Caio Alves and Gabriel Gadiman for Kinelux Studios. It is on DUST and that is widely available. A one-minute trailer can also be found on the Kinelux Studios (São Paulo) website. I could not find many graphics in my two-minute search.

His name is Daniel.

The Glass Fortress (2016)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 29 minutes, rated 6.9 by 24 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Interesting.

Tagline: My name is Daniel.

In black-and-white, it starts at the end and backtracks. That gives it a zippy kickoff. Still photographs carrying the story. What follows is a free adaptation from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921). It is accompanied by a marvellous soundtrack.

I did find this couple too young and too happy in the beginning of the flashbacks. Smiling, cavorting, dancing does not mesh with the grey uniformity of the One State. Well, that is nit-picking.

It will remind viewers of La Jetée (1962) for its short, spare story in black and white, still photography, and also the retrospective take. A soundtrack carries it as much as in The First and Last Men (2020). It is far superior to the feature-length adaptation for West German television production reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Check it out.