Poor Rich People

A discussion panel at the Davos World Economic Forum has become a sensation after a Dutch historian took billionaires to task for not paying taxes.
In this video shared tens of thousands of times, Rutger Bregman, bemoans the failure of attendees at the recent gathering in Switzerland to address the key issue in the battle for greater equality: the failure of rich people to pay their fair share of taxes.
Noting that 1,500 people had travelled to Davos by private jet to hear David Attenborough talk about climate change, he said he was bewildered that no one was talking about raising taxes on the rich.
Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.
Winnie Byanyima, an Oxfam executive director, took up the fight and said high employment was not a good thing in itself because many people found themselves in exploitative work. She cited the example of poultry workers in the US who had to wear nappies (diapers) because they were not allowed toilet breaks.
“That’s not a dignified job,” she said. “those are the jobs we’ve been told about, that globalisation is bringing jobs. The quality of the jobs matter. In many countries workers no longer have a voice.
Addressing Goldman, she said: “You’re counting the wrong things. You’re not counting dignity of people. You’re counting exploited people.”
Billions of dollars were leaked by tax avoidance every year which should instead be going to alleviate poverty in the developing world, she added.

Eisenstein Emotion

The Odessa steps
The best-known sequence of the film is set on the Odessa steps, connecting the waterfront with the central city. The citizenry of Odessa take to their ships and boats, sailing out to the Potemkin to show their support to the sailors and donate supplies, while a crowd of others gathers at the Odessa steps to witness the happenings and cheer on the rebels. Suddenly a detachment of dismounted Cossacks form battle lines at the top of the steps and march towards a crowd of unarmed civilians including women and children, and begin firing and advancing with fixed bayonets. Every now and again, the soldiers halt to fire a volley into the crowd before continuing their impersonal, machine-like assault down the stairs, ignoring the people's pleas for humanity and understanding. Meanwhile, government cavalry attack the fleeing crowd at the bottom of the steps as well, cutting down many of those who survived the dismounted assault. Brief sequences show individuals amongst the people fleeing or falling, a baby carriage rolling down the steps, a woman shot in the face, broken glasses, and the high boots of the soldiers moving in unison.

Inspirations

 
In this case, the inspiration is M.C. Escher (1898-1972), the Dutch artist who explored a wide range of mathematical ideas with his woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Although Escher had no formal training in mathematics beyond secondary school, many mathematicians counted themselves as admirers of his work. (Visit this online gallery to get better acquainted with Escher's art, and be sure to click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images). As Vila explains, Inspirations tries to imagine Escher's workplace, "what things would surround an artist like him, so deeply interested in science in general and mathematics in particular." It's a three minutes of unbridled imagination.

Roundabout Amsterdam

Screens specifically designed for use in video walls usually have narrow bezels in order to minimize the gap between active display areas, and are built with long-term serviceability in mind. Such screens often contain the hardware necessary to stack similar screens together, along with connections to daisy chain power, video, and command signals between screens.
Reasons for using a video wall instead of a single large screen can include the ability to customize tile layouts, greater screen area per unit cost, and greater pixel density per unit cost, due to the economics of manufacturing single screens which are unusual in shape, size, or resolution. 

 

Ecomusee d'Alsace

Home slide shows were a relatively common phenomenon in middle-class American homes during the 1950s and 1960s. If there was an enthusiast in the family, any visit from relatives or the arrival of a new batch of Kodachrome slides from the film processing service provided an excuse to bring out the entire collection of 35 mm slides, set up the slide projector and the screen, turn out the lights, then test the endurance of the assembled audience with a marathon of old vacation photos and pictures taken at weddings, birthdays and other family events, all accompanied by live commentary.

A false sense of security

United Nations

In February 2018, OCHA (the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations) issued a report on the humanitarian impact of the Israeli settlements in Hebron. A few hundred Israeli lives in five residential areas in the city amidst around 40,000 Palestinian residents. Political action by the Israeli authorities, which directly control about 20% of the city, has resulted in the forced departure of Palestinians from their homes. The living conditions, the family life and the basic facilities of the remaining Palestinians in the parts of the city, which were closed off by military checkpoints, are gradually being nullified.

The international community considers the settlements in occupied territory to be illegal, and the United Nations has repeatedly upheld the view that Israel's construction of settlements constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. 

 

The last steam pumping station

Cinema newsreels in which Dutch subjects of a certain week are presented.
Halfweg contains the last steam pumping station in the Netherlands, which is still regularly used for the routing of water from the Ringvaart from the Haarlemmermeer to the North Sea Canal. SHOTS: ext. steam pumping station; overview of the operation of the steam pumping station.

Welcome to Gibraltar

A home movie is a short amateur film or video typically made just to preserve a visual record of family activities, a vacation, or a special event, and intended for viewing at home by family and friends. Originally, home movies were made on photographic film in formats that usually limited the movie-maker to about three minutes per roll of costly camera film. The vast majority of amateur film formats lacked audio, shooting silent film.

STAN & OLLIE Official Trailer (2018)

Stan & Ollie is a 2018 biographical comedy-drama film directed by Jon S. Baird from a screenplay by Jeff Pope. Based on the lives of the comedy double act Laurel and Hardy, the film stars Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It premiered in October 2018 at the BFI London Film Festival.

They appeared as a team in 107 films, starring in 32 short silent films, 40 short sound films, and 23 full-length feature films. They also made 12 guest or cameo appearances that included the Galaxy of Stars promotional film of 1936. On December 1, 1954, the pair made one American television appearance when they were surprised and interviewed by Ralph Edwards on his live NBC-TV program This Is Your Life. Since the 1930s, the works of Laurel and Hardy have been released in numerous theatrical reissues, television revivals, 8-mm and 16-mm home movies, feature-film compilations, and home videos.

Beeing critical of Saudi Arabia

Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films and the film medium. The concept is often used interchangeably with that of film reviews. A film review implies a recommendation aimed at consumers, however not all film criticism takes the form of reviews.

In general, film criticism can be divided into two categories: journalistic criticism which appears regularly in newspapers, magazines and other popular mass-media outlets; and academic criticism by film scholars who are informed by film theory and are published in academic journals. Academic film criticism rarely takes the form of a review; instead it is more likely to analyse the film and its place within the history of its genre, or the whole of film history.

Bohemian Rhapsody

 

A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film. The score comprises a number of orchestral, instrumental, or choral pieces called cues, which are timed to begin and end at specific points during the film in order to enhance the dramatic narrative and the emotional impact of the scene in question. Scores are written by one or more composers, under the guidance of, or in collaboration with, the film's director or producer and are then usually performed by an ensemble of musicians – most often comprising an orchestra (most likely a symphony orchestra) or band, instrumental soloists, and choir or vocalists – known as playback singers and recorded by a sound engineer. 

 

Vision and future in the Netherlands

Daan Roosegaarde has called on designers to shift focus away from designing luxury items and instead to tackle the problems facing the world such as pollution. The Dutch designer said that humanity needs new ideas to help speed up the transition between the destructive thinking of the past.

"For me design is not about making another chair or another lamp," Roosegaarde said. "Good design, good luxury is not about a Louis Vuitton bag or a Ferrari, it's about clean air, clean water, clean energy."

He said designers should not wait around for politicians or corporations to ask them to solve big problems but should instead start grassroots movements for change.

"Don't wait for permission; start working, start acting," he said. That's what the world needs today. It's about big challenges, big designs, big proposals but it's also about making it really small and showing the beauty of the world."

Turkish Delight early Verhoeven

Turkish Delight starts with a look at the failure of sculptor Eric to engage in lasting and meaningful relations with women. His brief encounters with women are purely of a sexual and sometimes violent nature. The rest of the movie consists of flash-backs that may help the viewer understand how Eric came to be this way. Eric picks up hitch-hiker Olga, and immediately they hit it off together, both sexually and spiritually. They live together and even marry at some point, but when Olga flirts with someone else, he slaps her and she leaves him. Later Olga gets a brain tumor that debilitates her (the title of the movie comes from her insistance on eating turkish delight, as she is afraid that harder food will break her teeth) and then dies.

Blues music

Images from antonwithagen its me/ mine !

Sound-on-film is a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying picture is physically recorded onto photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog sound track or digital sound track, and may record the signal either optically or magnetically. Earlier technologies were sound-on-disc, meaning the film's soundtrack would be on a separate phonograph record.

Centre Pompidou Paris

The film noir genre generally refers to mystery/crime dramas produced from the early-1940s to the late 1950s. Movies of this genre were shot in black and white, and featured stories involving femmes fatales, doomed heroes/anti-heroes, and tough, cynical detectives.

The neo-noir subgenre refers to crime dramas and mysteries produced from the mid-1960s to the present that, while they are generally shot in color and do not always emulate the visual style of classic film noir, often borrow the themes, archetypes, and plots made famous by the film noir genre.

Dutch December

On the basis of special objects and historical archive material, Home Movie Day zooms in on a number of drastic changes in amateur films this year. There was the rise of home video in the 70s and 80s, and the transition from analogue to digital. The amateur and family filmer first filmed on a narrow film or Super8, after these transitions there were plenty of new possibilities to capture daily life.