It’s worth listening to Zizek’s riffs about film. In the interview for Radio Praha he says:
Radio Praha: Do you like any Czech or Czechoslovak film directors?
Zizek: “Are you kidding? Although I admire Hollywood, they are a great example of how the West can destroy you. I’m talking of course about Miloš Forman. My absolutely favourite movies are still his three films A Blonde in Love, Peter and Pavla, and Firemen’s Ball. This is the work of a genius. I also like his first American film, Taking Off, because he tried to read the American middle class through Czech glasses. It’s the same universe and it works wonderfully.”
Radio Praha: But it didn’t work in the US; I think it did very poorly commercially there…
Zizek: “Yes. I don’t like Amadeus, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it’s not just Forman, it was the same with Krzysztof Kieślowski. Even though they were made under horrible oppression of Jaruzelski, his films from the 1980s like The Decalogue, Blind Chance, and so on, are better than those soft pornographic films which he basically made, and I’ll be very cynical here, to seduce some of the beautiful actresses like Juliet Binoche. Even with no nostalgia for the communist regime, this is maybe the greatest tragedy of the fall of communism. In those oppressive regimes, there were was nonetheless something that solicited true art. People then wrongly thought, ‘now we have freedom and all the oppressed spirituality will explode’. But it didn’t.”
And here I was pointed to this page on the hideous Russian Facebook clone Vkontakte. Its the curricula of the new Glazunova Art Academy in Moscow, the new school established in 1987 by Ilya Glazunov whom I describe as the commercial, soviet, russophile, kitch artist. There is plenty of skill there and some talent. Here are my selections (in the typical internet fashion non of them have attributions):
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Amazing pictures. Perspective – plus. Thanks Ben.
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