Ari

*You ever stop to think what would happen in these streets if we cut off the flow of drugs altogether? White folks control your neighborhood through drugs, and you dealing?* *The .22 rifles and pistols did about as much damage as a mosquito to an elephant’s ass. What’s you expect to hit from that range, with those weapons, at night? You might as well have thrown the damn pieces at the pigs… you really want to mess with whitey? I can show you how* *You know how my grandmother learned to read? Along with me * The last great Soviet film… the montaging would make Eisenstein faint… but it’s not the perfect revolutionary artifact people make it out to be, and I think that framing obscures its wit and how well it melds genre conventions together with material conditions… it’s a film about repurposing tools to match conditions, it’s a guerrilla film from production to product

Folk history and colonial history clash and engage over the soul of a man… what makes this such a transcendent work, though, is how our protagonist’s Faustian struggle is transposed beyond the soul and into a material society both trying to assert itself as itself and being utterly decimated as a neocolonial subaltern bearing the brunt of the motions of global capitalism… a protagonist has never been so instantly doomed, colonialism turns fable into folly… and yet, I think there is a very strong Pan-African call to action between the lines, one that values both localized self-determination and wider collective action against a generalizing enemy… when Paulo Freire talks about how the oppressed have double the tools of their oppressors, this is what he’s talking about So many awesome images to sink your teeth into… the doors, the ocean, the tree, the congomas, the yankee hat-wearing saxophone player, the office buildings

Jeez

The YouTube vid has hilariously ominous VHS warps littered throughout it, honestly improved it Same problems as Swimming to Cambodia but I didn’t expect anything different, just wanted to put on something entertaining *All the world’s a hospital, you’re either a nurse or a patient*