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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


Alongside being adept in the art of war, the samurai became conversant with the refined arts of painting, poetry, music performance, theatre and tea ceremonies

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THE ACT OF KILLING (2012)


 
Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary is the the most surreal and bizarre film experiences  I have ever witnessed. One of the most audacious documentaries ever made , the best documentary ever made

A documentary about the aftermath of the 1960s mass killings in Indonesia by Suharto's coup-installed military regime and death squads, The Act of Killing spirals into horrifying surrealism from a seemingly simple starting point: in this case, interviewing some of the paramilitary leaders and self-described "gangsters" employed to eradicate anyone deemed a "communist"-- in practice almost anyone not loyal to the new regime. 
The surprise is that these men are eager to tell their tales, often indulging in graphic detail to describe, for example, the best means of murdering captives without spilling much blood (with a wire around the neck). 




 They even enjoy reenacting their state-sanctioned murders on camera, at director Joshua Oppenheimer's invitation, adopting the lurid styles of the Hollywood crime films that influenced them back in the day. We see the rotund, disheveled Herman Koto and the slender, debonair Anwar Congo-- the latter responsible for more than 1,000 murders, many carried out with that wire-strangling technique-- searching neighborhoods they once attacked for locals to play parts in a reenactment.

"A good family movie , plenty of humor" says Anwar Congo after watching some previously made scenes.

One of the leaders of paramilitary movement and minister in Indonesian government after himself participating in one of the scenes  trying to explain to Joshua that movement is not actually that brutal as in previous scene continues saying :
"But we must exterminates Communists.We must totally wipe them out. But in more human way"



"It's powerful, surreal, frightening," says Herzog, an executive producer of the film along with Morris. The most surreal moments you've ever seen in your life. It's something completely and utterly unprecedented. It's not gonna leave you until the end of your days."

 












The Weird Genius of “The Act of Killing”
Oppenheimer struck upon an audacious and bizarre storytelling device: he invited Congo and several of his fellow-executioners to make their own movie about the purge, telling the story through dramatic reënactments of their devising, in which they would portray not only themselves but also people they interrogated, tortured, and killed. >>>






PART2
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence is a stunning companion piece, or possibly narrative development, to  The Act Of Killing. 































































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