The Devil's Advocate

No, for once I'm NOT talking about the FINEST movie Keanu Reeves ever made. I want to toy around a little bit with what you "gentlemen" have posted so far.

First up, thanks again for filming and uploading these, EC. Second, thanks again for writing up some smart speculation about what these films could mean, G.

Third, I think you're both wrong.

If there's any one thing we've FAILED to learn as a country from the Cold War, it's that an idea of a threat can be as powerful as the the threat itself.

If we'd had an ounce of sense on September 12, we'd have said, "Ok, a bunch of useless whackjobs did this, and whoopie for them, they just killed off a third of their own manpower. They're a sad and lonely bunch of crazies who have to hide from society because of how much everyone else in the world thinks they're fucking dogshit. They punched us. It hurt. Who gives a fuck? We're bigger and badder than that, and we're going to rebuild, and they can go fuck themselves."

Instead, we fueled the idea. We made them supermen. We made them a thousand times more powerful in our nightmares than they ever could be in reality. A handful of totally twisted broken people with a severe inability to fucking DEAL WITH IT ("it" being the rest of the fucking world) became a monster in every shadow. We closed our eyes and saw them there too. When they probably weren't enough people to storm and wipe out half the fans of a southern high school football game.

The thing is, we ALWAYS do this, and we're ALWAYS wrong. Think back on Kim Philby and Team B and HUAC and McCarthy. We've got the worst track record on this shit. Every time we figure out that we were wrong, we say, "Well, we're never going to overreact like THAT again!" And then the next crisis comes along, and we go all, "WAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGH FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!" and freak the fuck out and act like a bunch of totally unforgivable pantswetting spazzes.

What's worse is, I think you guys are doing it again here. When, if anybody SHOULD know much better, it's you guys.


So what...?

Okay, first of all, let's accept that everything GFK said about the date of this video is true. Well, what's that tell you?

Look at the time period. The Soviets weren't stupid. They could see what was going on in America. Fuck, getting a subscription to the New York Times wasn't hard. They watched as we reported on our own paranoia. HUAC was a sitting committee starting in '45. Every time the communists made a gain in Europe, we flipped the fuck out. Meanwhile, look at it from their perspective:

1. They need nukes and don't have them.
2. They know even if they crack the nuclear code and start making nukes, we're way ahead of them.
3. But we'll believe anything we read, see, or hear, so...
4. What the fuck's it matter?

Instead of racing to close the distance between us on nukes, why not say, "Fuck it"?

I know what you're going to say: "Fuck it! Yes! That's your answer. That's your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead! Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! The bums lost!"

Seriously, though, follow me here. If we were so credulous we'd just buy ANYTHING, that meant they didn't have to sell anything real. Just invent something that would make us shit our pants. Sure, we had nukes, but all they had to do was claim they could seed the sky with something that would set the world on fire. Who needs nukes when they have that? BOOM, right there, it doesn't matter if there's a gap in nukes, because nukes are on equal footing with SKY FIRE.

It's not even that implausible when you consider 1946 is when cloud seeding was invented. We'd already just figured out that we could control the weather by dropping shit into clouds, so why couldn't the Soviets control the apocalypse by doing the same? Hell, WE tried to weaponize cloud seeding anyway, so we were already thinking perfectly along the lines they'd need to promote a propaganda weapon. WE started chemically altering the sky itself, so who could even say that they couldn't do it with the right compounds, ones we hadn't even found yet? Hell, just stop and think of the images in the film. Why are ALL their troops wearing gas masks? What is this stuff coming out of the plane? What could the Piemaker be making?




CHEMICALS. Or so we'd be totally willing to believe because we almost NEED to believe shit like this.

We set OURSELVES up. All they'd need was a punchline. One filmstrip leaked to the west later, and suddenly there's "proof" how they're going to fight American nuclear armament. A little push here with a cartoon and some Higgins motherfucker, and we'd shit our pants for them and create our own fears.

Stalemate.

Jigsaw Post #3

EC, God help me, what you posted was disturbing and, to steal from Scotty's word vault, awesome as hell. I don't know whether to feel elated or unsettled. I know what my stomach feels like: it feels like about half a bottle of the Jamey. And it feels like the other half should be coming soon. I wish you'd gotten that video out before I'd got tossed out of my head, but I can't stop watching it. I really doubt I'll be able to contribute all that much, but it's just amazing to me. Where did you say you got this again? Promise me you'll remember better and tell us more.

Okay, okay, we should look at some of the frames of this, because the individual pictures reveal probably more than the video as a whole, insofar as the choices the director made are animated ones (at least partially) where he could pick out the themes of violence he wanted to evoke, irespective of consequence.


This is an amazingly menacing image, because you've got the rat behind bars. I can't tell if this is immediately a capitalist metaphor, the predatory animal that eats and steals from others. It would seem to be the well that any good Soviet video would go to. This thing creates nothing and yet prospers due to exploitation and theft from the creative and generative class. Better that he be locked up. What happens to him is anyone's guess. I can't tell what's killing him, but his stabbing/strangulation seems almost lusciously vindictive and bloodthirsty.



Given how much the "Higgins" (cf. Scotty's post) character is lecturing or directly narrating at the camera, this substance seems to be a critical element (but is it an element?—the notation suggests it is not) in the dramaturgy. But not knowing what it is obviously means that we can't really say anything informed without venturing into putting on airs or, if you like, Asshole Territory.

If you remember, our earlier inclination was to say this was an anti-nuclear film — as if to say, "Here are your horrors. You would not want them yourself. But what could they do to us?" Perhaps it was the USSR drafting a westerner ("Higgins") to warn us about the dangers of our overreaching militarily and damaging the balance of power or the planet itself. But given how threatening or frightening the rest of this clip becomes, I don't feel comfortable anymore with this being cautionary. It could be an aggressive warning. I don't know what the substance is, but my first guess is that it's highly radioactive particulate matter. Something that shows the west that their weapons have direct harm.

Can you weaponize exposed soils? If teh Soviets had access to low-density soils exposed to an atomic blast, maybe they might offer them up as condemnation (in this video) of western action, or maybe they might offer them up as a threat. Remember that balloon from the earlier clip? Perhaps they could be saying, "If you poison our soils, we will drop your poison on you."


I could not get a clear screenshot of any of this, but there is a sustained sequence involving burning bodies and fires within a city. My guess is that it shows the horrors of a deliberate strike and the breakdown in social order. But I don't know if this is a passive or active statement. Food for thought.



This is another complete puzzle. This plane flies, and after it we see stalled boats and driftwood, which seems to signify the arresting of conflict. I don't know if this is a propagandizing gesture or a descriptive one. Is what's within this plane a metaphor? Is it an actual, named weapon? Is the word an acronym or a representation of something else?




This shot is a very poor one, but I'm having trouble getting my fingers to hit the keys at the same time I'd like. What I was trying to get is the people going by in gas masks. Again, I don't know what that signifies. My quick guess would be "Fallout Protection." Going off my earlier guesses, if this animation sequence is immediately post-war, that means that the Soviet Union did not then possess nuclear capabilities. They didn't get those until the Cambridge Five brought them the necessary scientific shortcuts in the later 1940s. If my dating suppositions are accurate, then it would make this video the product of an era of total and extreme paranaoia. It would make sense that they'd broadcast to the world both nuclear horrors and how those horrors could be turned back on the aggressor: how the seeds he'd planted with his bombs could taint the soil and grow into death and malignance for himself as well, how ripe the death could be for everyone who tilled that murderous field. How crappy poetry he could write if he were drunk. Sorry for writing all dramatic like this. Gross.


Here's where the warning stops being implicit and starts getting explicit. But I don't think this amounts to any such thing as a declaration of war. Although, I'm not naive. It just as well could be. However, as I've said, the dating of the video seems to be from a very praranoid time, so you can see this violence as retributive. If there is an atomic age that the USSR isn't part of, you can see them conceptualizing nuclear violence as something that beats back and bloodies its user just as hard and just as well. I don't know. I feel like I'm almost arguing against myself and better judgment at this point.



And here's where I'm starting to freak the fuck out looking at it. Because you can see the spread of this "CNOPbl" element cast across the North American continent and rise up into this Death's Head. Obviously, it's easy to incorporate this in my earlier thesis: this is the Soviet fright manifesting as a cautionary tale for the Americans. "Use this," it says, "and the death you bring is death across your own territory too. It doesn't get localized. Nuclear terror is global. Even for the user." On the other hand, there's something not at all "friendly warning" about skulls skipping across a continent and getting huge until they blot out the screen.

I feel like I started out wanting to believe one thing about this film and now almost want to believe the exact opposite. My problem is that I still think the dating of the film is on-target. If that's the case, it just makes it more confusing and difficult to deal with. If this is a pre-nuclear Soviet film, the threats it makes are all threats WE created. If it's post-nuclear (and I don't think it is), then the threats are clear. And it's an aggressive and confident document from early in their nuclear career. If it's not nuclear and not passive, it's just a bizarre anomaly that's hard to reconcile.

I have to quit now because I'm just drunk enough to be starting to write really crappy prose-poetry, tilling that field of sounding really sappy. And I need the rest of that Jamey.

Thanks again, EC.

Also, Boston College sucks completely and couldn't even come close to the spread. Assholes.

(I'll add links in the morning.)

(Hell, who am I kidding? I'll add links in the afternoon.)

(Links added — 12/7 8:09 p.m.)

finally got more footage up

(not just talking about the footage in my pants)

okay guys, i have had a HELL of a saturday...all according to the gf's evil plans to steal all my weekends from me forever...and i am uploading this thing and sprinting for a bar

i wish this sucker answered more questions than it makes me ask...but it sucks that it doesnt. that film is really looking bad. there are bits that seem like theyre gonna break off at any second, so i tried to film a bit that looked like it was going to be pretty good...there were a lot of false starts in there. i figured you didnt want to hear me yelling at shit breaking or watch clips that were 11 seconds long. this is the best stretch

theres a lot of that Higgins guy again

we open with the spruce moose, then a lake i think...

about 25 secs in theres a FUCKING COOL scene with a rat

CNOPBLI! its what plants crave...a ton of people on fire...BAPNN -- you get it from planes

some dude gets OWNED with a flagpole in the FACE after getting seriously fucked up by someone

get this though...its a SOVIET flag...and the flag dude has a GAS MASK

after that the CNOPBLI spreads across america like death...VERY creepy

i hope this is enough for you guys to sink your teeth into because getting any kind of long clips off this reel is going to be hard...its just falling apart depending on where we are on it, and i cant sit and refeed it forever to try to get it going again. tell me you guys can get stuff out of this much because im not sure how much more i can get out of the reel without fucking up something really cool that we might not get to see again...also, i do you think im off base not taking this in somewhere? do you have a guess if its valuable??

Jigsaw Post #2: I think it's teddible you are not taking me vetty seriously

Now that we got the less critical analysis out of the way, it's time to look at this a little seriously. You know, use the brain device thing to do brainwork. I said I'd actually THINK about this stuff, and I will keep my word. Word is bond. Straight up. You feel me? Also, big ups to Biggie. Love you, dawg.

Something Max said in the comments on Post #1 got me thinking. He asked,

have you considered whether this could be anti-nuke propaganda? if the dates are as right as you think they are, then that would put the film in a period where the russians didn't have nukes, so this might be their attack on them to discourage other nations from using them or condoning them.

He raises some good points. Combined with G.'s comment that, "Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment," I spent a while thinking about this guy before I made my other post.

Here's what I think the problem is: he looks too bourgeois.

Look at that picture. Three-piece suit. Desk blotter. Pen set. Nicely wood-paneled room. Maybe some sort of exotic bird in a cage next to him.

The entire thing sets off alarm bells with me that this guy is not an engineer, and he's not a proletarian. He seems un-Soviet.

If you think about most of the videos we wind up looking at, you usually see some dude in a jumpsuit or a white coat. Something that really brings out the SCIENCE+WORKERS! element of the Soviet Union. Either that or you get some jowly commissar with a bad haircut and bags under his eyes. By comparison, this guy looks like he lives in some nice digs. He almost seems like a banker. Maybe even a British banker. Like any second he's going to get a teacup and saucer and say "oooh, lovely!" and then say

Oh, by the way, I can't believe I forgot about this; I really would lose my head if it weren't attached to my neck! I'm so bloody forgetful. But, the thing is, and this is really quite a tedious point to make, chaps, but the thing is there's this new bomb that can obliterate life on earth. Cheerio! Toodle pip!

THAT'S what makes me think Max might be onto something here. What better way to send a message to democratic governments than with someone FROM there? He can talk to us because he looks like us. If you think about it in those terms, he looks more like a professor than a banker, so maybe he can tell us about the GRAVE THREAT of nuclear weapons.

You know who he really reminds me of? The English guy from the reanimation of animals video that EC linked way back in this post. You know, this dude:

I'm too lazy to go back and read when they did that video, but I remember he was a British scientist who got discredited because people thought that the USSR was using him as a mouthpiece to front for propaganda. The thing was, a lot of the stuff he was talking about WAS real, but it just seemed a little fishy that here was this guy who was just perfectly willing to shill for Soviet science. Maybe it's a loose connection, but if years before or years later or whenever it happened the Soviets were willing to go looking for a westerner to talk to a western audience, maybe that's an idea they would have had before or gone back to after. Does that make sense?

I'm not saying I have any real reason to go with this idea, but this is just what I came up with. Like GFK, something about this guy was just bothering me in my gut, and I couldn't tell what it was. This explanation quiets my gut down, and it would make sense given the dates this is probably from.


EDIT:
Somethings's gone really wrong with blogger all of a sudden. Arrrrggghghghghghghg fuck blogger!

My first post from today - which was AWESOME - for some reason is totally fucking up our blog's main page and making it not load. I figured out it was that post, but I don't want to delete it because maybe someone at blogger can fix it.

We can get around it for now though by making every post its OWN PAGE. I know it's sort of a headache to have to click if you want to go back and read GFK's post or something, but it's better than not being able to see it at all.

Scrimshaw Post #1: Mutual ASSured Destruction, Prying Open the Truth and Cracking The Code

NOTE: I rewrote this late last night when the kid woke me up. It's sort of like the post Blogger - FUCK BLOGGER - deleted. I had a shell of it in a Word doc but had to rewrite a bunch anyway. Whatever. If you guy's think it's dumb to have it follow the serious post I technically wrote after writing this, go ahead and backdate it. I don't care.
- LS, 12/6/08


GFK has done a wonderful job of breaking this film EC found wide open and probing inside, but anyone who thinks that's where all this ends is fooling himself. After plunging off an intellectual waterfall, skiing slopes of meandering thought and snaking dynamically through the subterranean text waiting to be mined, indeed, it's time to admit: we walk from here.

What my man G. cannot tell you is critical and vital to understanding this video, and what he can't tell you is very simple. Who the fuck is El Baldo of the Professor Institute of Knowing Things?


Thankfully, I can, b/c I hold advanced degrees in Awesomeness, a Bachelors in Being Rad and a minor in Doing It With Ladies. The man in the picture is none other than Galactic Rear Admiral Chester F. Buttocks, and he's not even a man at all b/c he is 10 million times older than the Earth itself, if you're one of those people who believes in the literal word of bible (which he wrote, to troll everybody).

Over five billion years ago, after losing an apocalyptic battle of fission thumb-war with Superman - who's actually a massive DICK - the Admiral was exiled as punishment. Superman dispatched him to the outer boundaries of the new galaxy that had come into existence after the Admiral had punched him so hard in the stomach that his anus dilated like it was trying to say "Whuh-oooooooooo-OOOOOOOwwwwww" and Superman literally sharted out the new creation - much of which never changed form at all and later became Texas.

After failing to wrest control of the oblong brown prisoner transport vessel he was locked in, the admiral instead fled via escape pod after overwhelming the security forces controlled by Aquaman - proving once again that Aquaman isn't worth a tenth shit-all of FUCK outside of the water. Also, the escape pod looked a lot like like a bomb being carried by a balloon. The bomb was later worshipped as a godhead in part of a cargo cult in the year Andre 3000.


Superman's forces opted not to fire on the escape pod even after it was jettisoned, b/c sensors indicated no life forms were aboard. This is because the Admiral had changed physical form to that of an ambient gas to evade detection - like one of the angry gods of a foreign world in Star Trek. Or a vampire. Later, some of Superman's stormtroopers examining the landing area on the ground would find clues that were inconclusive.

"Look, sir! Admirals!" said one to his supervisor, while holding up a navy cap with gold-thread "scrambled eggs" on the brim.

"You're a goddam idiot," said the other. "That's just a fucking hat."

Superman's forces combed the earth, trying to track down the escaped Admiral, flying crisscrossing search patterns in airplanes that looked remarkably like Spruce Gooses. Each craft was capable of carrying 200 passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes, but almost all of them crashed due to crewmen knocking over their own jars of urine on the instrument panels and causing the craft to plummet and then augur hundreds of feet into the ground - which, if you weren't dead, you could look to the left side of the aircraft and see out the window. But you were, so fuck you.


Special note: Wonder Woman coulda totally helped out with the search party, but she didn't. Why? Because Wonder Woman is a stone bitch. The other reason is because her plane's all invisible or whatever, you can look up in the sky when she's passing over and notice what a fat fucking ass she's got now that she's all old and shit. Girl's ass so big, they call the strap of her thong the International Ain't Gettin No Date Line. Seriously, Superman told her she had to stop flying in front of the sun b/c her assclipses were scaring the shit out of all the Maya. Bitch fat, that's all I'm sayin.

Anyway, Superman eventually gave up and fucked off b/c he wanted to investigate whether somewhere in the galaxy there was a Planet of Impressionable Gay Boys Who Looked Tense and Could Use a Massage. The Admiral was left to wander the entirety of the earth in solitude for billions of years. After one billion, he settled on a static visage of himself as some kind of grayhaired suit-wearing version of Higgins from "Magnum, P.I." Either that or one of those dads from the 80s tv shows about white dudes adopting young telegenic black kids. I don't know which one. I don't have a degree in Looking Up This Gay Bullshit. You know what I do have, though? I have a doctorate in Eat Me, Look It Up Your Damn Self.

For a while, he wrote a series of totally incredible romance novels and, ashamed that they weren't his best effort, buried them for millions of years in a ditch in England, where they were eventually found and published under the name Barbara Cartland. After people were invented, he'd randomly leap into their bodies and try to help them with the aid of an invisible cigar-smoking former child actor. But the Admiral could never leap home and died. He died 1,478 times actually, regenerating every single time. Why? Stick-to-it-iveness. Also, heart.

Sometimes he'd pretend to be a god just to see if he could get a couple million people to kill a couple other million people over invisible bullshit. He would never have done this if he could have gotten drunk while watching television. Once, he got so bored waiting for Philo Farnsworth to show up and invent TV that he just invented it anyway, but it turned out it was useless b/c nothing was on. He thought about inventing Lucille Ball to have something to watch, but he knew with a flash of incredible perception and prescience that Lucille Ball would be an annoying overrated harpy that no one born after 1970 would ever sincerely like but would profess was a genius anyway b/c that's what a bunch of assholes always said.

Then he decided to invent the hot ladies from "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," and they spent ten straight years having totally hot unnatural sex. Why unnatural? Because one was a witch, the other a genie, and the other a billion-year-old goddammed immortal gas being vampire god who shart-punched superman. That's just how they do. They'll do whatever the fuck they want. I don't slap the dick out of your mouth and tell you how to do your job, so you just listen to the goddam story and stop being all snippy about why this and why that. Bitch.

Sometime in the 1940s, after spending years carving a mile-wide glacial frieze of a veiny and erect uncircumcised penis to impress Jodie Foster, the United States' atomic tests roused the Admiral from his languor. Fearing the vengeance and return of his SuperNemesis, the Admiral captured the world's leaders and imprisoned them in back braces intended to prevent scoliosis and made them watch a color broadcast of his warning to the globe.


In it, he showed off the totally badass desk he'd stolen from an old person who smelled like powder and death and on it displayed the special white mask he wore to protect himself from the haunted vapors that could be projected out of his ass. The mask rested on a canopic jar. It contained the brain, nose and ilium of Austrian empress Maria Theresa. For luck. The Admiral demanded the world cease all nuclear research and production or else be leveled by his stunning flatulence.

Undeterred, American general Carl "Tooey" Spazz ignored the threat and made more nukes. The Admiral made a face like Magnum had forgotten to let Robin Masters' dogs out. That was it. Fuck you if you thought he was just going to stick around and wait for that George-Lucas-hair-having twink bitch Superman to tie him to some half-cylinder justice dome and cram a fat man suppository up his little boy and blow him up forever. Fuck that.


Both sides in the Cold War thought they could dress everyone up in gas masks like a Wilfred Owen poem on acid and ride out the coming apocalypse in trenches, but they were wrong. the Admiral "called down the thunder" and "dropped the bomb."


It was over. The blast killed Superman. This is what happened to his face:


The Admiral was fine b/c he was dressed like a ghost. Only Americans survived b/c they led the world in being fatties and cutting ones. The rest of the world is just an illusion maintained by the Admiral to give them busy work.


Later the admiral returned to his self-imposed exile, fleeing to his White Castle of Fear in the Colorado mountains in a vintage WWII T-34 tank that he'd generated by re-arranging matter around him with the power of his mind. There he lives in seclusion and sleeps in a speedboat with a dog that can mix drinks and use a toilet.

Jigsaw Post #1

I couldn't think of a good post title, so I just went with the name of the puzzles that annoyed the bejesus out of me as a child. Since we're basically trying to piece together just what the hell EC found, it seems appropriate.

First up, I don't have a Russian dictionary/Cyrillic type pack installed on this computer, so can anyone translate this? The same goes for the text that opens the film. I have a feeling both could be of enormous help.

I have an overall impression of the film, but I want to get there after making note of a few things.


DETAILS:
1. This looks to be fairly standard WWII-era tank; the profile looks pretty much like a T-34, so going off the other cues/clues from the film, let's just assume it's that.



2. This scene shows a soldier running down a trench. Also, all the soldiers seem to be wearing gas masks. While there was significant entrenchment in Stalingrad and the siege of Leningrad, these images really seem like throwbacks to WWI — especially since they're combined. On their own, they don't signify much, but together they seem like artistic choices deliberately meant to evoke a memory of Great War-style warfare.



3. That said, while the first two pictures ground us in WWI and the early years of WWII at the latest, this image establishes that this video can't pre-date 1945.



4. The presence of the balloon, though, makes me reluctant to date this much later. And this is a significant reach on my part, so feel free to call me on it. The thing looks like it's delivering a bomb payload, but why? Balloons are incredibly unreliable, and the bomb could wind up anywhere. No country is going to go to the balloon (pardon the totally inappropriate metaphor) well if they have access to supersonic jets; the value you get out of a balloon is so much less than a jet delivery of a bomb. So that makes me want to date this no earlier than 1945 but no later than 1948 — 1949 at the latest.



5. This actually looks like a souped-up B-29 or an end-of-war prototype for a super-fortress style bomber. Actually, what it really reminds me of is the Spruce Goose, only with four fewer engines. The important distinction here is that it's very reminiscent of American bomber designs. That's actually helpful, because it only helps further anchor this film in the immediate post-war period. If you'll recall, both Lend-Lease and our open allied partnership with the USSR from 1941-1945 saw American arms shipped to the Soviet Union en masse. There was no shortage of Douglas and Lockheed aircraft in the Soviet Air Force and Army support, so it would make sense for Russian artists to go with what they knew. What they knew was a lot of American designs. It would make sense to date this video in a period before the two Air Forces significantly diverged.



6. I literally have no idea what this guy is doing, but I've been watching a lot of Pushing Daisies lately, so every time I watched this video (which was about a round ten, trying to figure it out), I thought, "Meanwhile, The Piemaker...." So that's who this guy is: The Piemaker.


SUMMARY:
As I've said, I don't see any reason to date this later than 1949 at the very latest, and because of the balloon technology and absence of jets, I really want to date this film to 1945-6. Remember the old adage: generals always fight the last war. Consumed with the desire to correct the mistakes they made last time, they make mistakes by ignoring the new details of this time. Artists make the same mistakes. They always have difficulty envisioning the next conflict (the few who don't are the real geniuses), and because of that they tend to describe what they just saw. The presence of WWI-era gas masks and trenches and WWII-era tanks and propeller planes date this as the product of the Second World War or its immediate aftermath. The presence of an atomic mushroom cloud gives us a hard date of 1945 at the earliest.


SPECULATION:
I have no idea what this video is for, just yet. Anything I say would be wildly off-base and just what I want to hear. Right now, though, the only supposition I feel comfortable with is that this is either:

a. A recap of WWII, in instructional form, maybe meant for the civilian populace's education/entertainment.

b. An immediate post-war video meant to show the Soviet Union's continued mobilization for war and readiness for national defense.

Of course, a lot of that speculation hinges on what this guy is here for:

Right now, I don't know. Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment.

Either way, that's my speech. What do you guys think?

pink floyd goes to war all fucked up in russia

ok, so heres the motherbitch...i cant believe it took me this long to get it up (all up in your blog).

i dont even know what to tell you about this. its like watching The Wall high as shit, only its not The Wall, and ive never seen it before, and its actually kind of fucking scary if youre in an empty office with the projector going clickclackclickclack over and over alone



i KNOW what you guys are going to bitch about though, so let me get this off my chest RIGHT NOW. i threaded the film in the projector and started going and realized id left my camera downstairs with the gf.

so i have NO idea how far into the strip we came in

i was running around downstairs trying to find her...i found her on the back porch, but she said shed left the camera in her bigass purse by the couch...so i had to find that. that was a HUGE help considering her purse is BIGGER THAN GOD...i spent another minute just throwing away wads of tampons and an old EXTRA CELL PHONE before i got the camera that i guess she managed to cram at the VERY BOTTOM OF THE BAG. i got it and went upstairs and fired it up and started recording

trouble is, this film is OLD. i got about a minute recorded before it broke...do NOT get on my case for this. i had no idea...i thought i had the camera with me at the time...and i really didnt sweat missing a few seconds because i thought theyd be all credits

fire away...its late and i need sleeeeeeeep

UPDATE: i added 2 stills i snapped with my point and shoot....the embedded video quality blows...

Polygon (Firing Range) Полигон

i cant believe this was made in 1978, but it was...it reminds me of newer computer animation that is stylized to look like handdrawn animation....



a scientist bent on revenge makes an artificially intelligent tank that targets fear, and of course it turns on him in the end...great story barring the cheesy flashbacks, but just watch it for the animation...i cant even imagine how long it took them to airbrush each frame...

OMFG, WTF USSR???

OK...i just stumbled across the best soviet-made cartoon i've ever seen... apparently in 1985, the US managed to slip lsd into their water, that's all i can figure...

i'm pretty frustrated that this one has no subtitles, because i don't even know enough russian to make sure not to order elk balls at a restaurant. so, i'm going to try to give a synopsis of what i think is happening at the risk of getting it completely backwards....

First, the film is called Контракт....i'm going to guess that this means 'contract...' because thats sort of what the word looks like to me, and also this dude is waving a contract around in another dudes face halfway through....but i'll get back to that later...

so, this cosmonaut is shooting space demons on the surface of some mars-like planet...i'm guessing that he is a colonist, for a corporation or state called "Sezan" or "Sezam." It was a little hard to make out and neither word seems to mean anything on babelfish... so, this colonist is suddenly surrounded by more space-dinos than he can handle and out of nowhere comes a robot that looks suspiciously like a golden cash register (they really know how to beat you over the head with heavyhanded symbolism...). Magic cash register robot joins the colonist under a forcefield he has made around them to keep the dinos out...i think the robot is telling him they should go back outside, but the colonist is like no way, dude.


'trust me, i'm a metaphor!'

so then the robot shrinks the aliens and safely stows them inside his stomach. ok. sure. crisis averted. the colonist disengages the forcefield and starts walking. then i looked away for a second and when i looked back up, a rubiks cube was unfolding into like a chair and a home entertainment console...

on the tv is a guy with the word SEZAN or SEZAM behind him...he's the typical banker/fatcat oligarch type...even has a monocle (c'mon, wasnt that dated even in the 40s?)... the robot hands the colonist a bill...i don't read russian (still) but i think it's for 'dinosaur removal and storage.'

the colonist/spaceman seems pretty pissed about this...i'm guessing because he's a recon guy for the corporation and here they are charging him for the tools he needs to keep himself out of harms way and to do the job he was hired to do....sort of like when you get hired as a waiter at a restaurant and they make you buy the apron and shirt you're required to wear (dicks).... ok, maybe marx was onto something there.

moving on, the corporate fatcat holds up a contract and is like (in russian) "you should have read the fine space print in this space contract, spaceman!" and he's like no way dude! so they send the big head from Zardoz to blow up his robot...



from this point on, i don't know what the fuck is happening...he tears up the contract, he fixes the robot and it starts laughing maniacally and then sky literally falls in....capitalism is a madness that will lead us into nuclear winter? is that right??? did i get it?

but we arent done yet. i mean that's where i would have ended this thing, but they go and top that movie where bruce willis was dead the whole time.... the camera pulls wide, and then wider, and then holy crap, the planet was actually a flower the whole time.


happy halloween...

Anti-Booze Pill Sold with Viral Soviet Vid

A friend of mine who knows I like old Soviet junk got really excited telling me all about this video a few weeks back. She was convinced it was some seriously cool real-deal stuff and started searching online for some way to buy it. (She drinks.)

(It's not like it's a huge problem or anything. She just goes out probably two or three times per week and usually has a pretty bad hangover the next day.)

(It's not like she's some raging wino, either. Although now that I think about it, I did once see her drink a bottle of scotch that had a pirate or sea captain on the label, but we've all had one of those nights. She's together. She's got a good job and a good relationship. She has a lot of good relationships. It's part of the reason why she goes out a couple times per week.)

(Ok, I just looked up the stats for what constitutes "binge drinking" if you're a woman, and I guess that means she binge drinks, which I guess makes her an alcoholic, but she's really obviously NOT an alcoholic, which I guess means that my point is that whoever comes up with the limits for bingeing and being an alcoholic seriously has no one to hang out with and must live in a place with no nightlife and winds up barfing like an SNL skit after half a glass of sherry.)

AS I WAS SAYING,

Because she was fired up about finding the pill in the video, she did her best to track it down online and figured out pretty quickly that the video was just part of a viral campaign. I wish I could tell you which one, but she hasn't answered my email, and googling the video's title isn't turning up a product name. I'm guessing the video's been rehosted since, which is why it's not pointing me at whatever they're selling.

Bottom line, though, the effort is pretty good. I like that they've distorted the film to make it look old. The uniform looks pretty authentic, and the scenery doesn't leap out at you as obviously being in Northern California or anything like that. Plus, it's interesting. I watched it all the way through, and if my friend hadn't told me about what her googling turned up, I probably would have googled myself (NO, NOT LIKE THAT, PERVERTS) and wound up finding the product too. By those standards, it's a good campaign. I get exposed to the product and have a decent time doing it. Plus, I did this all at work and got paid for it. Triple word score.

The video's got a few problems though.

First, I can't really tell if there's a cut scene or a wipe happening, but it seems like the soldier gets drunk INSTANTLY.

Second, the doctors had to be giving him PURE alcohol, which could always potentially just make him puke. If they wanted a control group, wouldn't they inject alcohol directly?

Third, they distorted the video pretty well, but the band on the right side is really regular. I think it's supposed to look like the ragged edge of an old film, but it seems like someone just slapped four photoshop filters onto the side of frames 1,2,3&4, repeat. It's cool, but kind of slick. Or maybe I'm talking out my ass.

Lastly (and this is the biggest one), they're running a test. A test where they get someone royally fucked up. A test where they get someone royally fucked up while he's standing behind a big wall. Then they hand him LIVE GRENADES. And ... stand there???

Maybe I'm not a good judge b/c I went into this one knowing it was fake, but even without knowing that, I think I would have still thought, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO STANDING THERE FOR?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!" You've got a drunk who could pull the pin and drop the grenade, or pull the pin and pass out, or pull the pin and throw the grenade into the wall. The whole POINT of this exercise is that you've made this guy almost totally incapable of functioning AT ALL, and you've GIVEN HIM THINGS THAT BLOW UP.

If they'd just hopped back behind a blast barrier or something and watched through a slit where we could see them, it would have "sold" the video about 100x better.

As it is, though, it's still pretty cool.

The other two videos aren't nearly as good. The second one goes by in about 15 seconds, and the third one is about four minutes long and really boring. This one seems to be the one that really hit all its marks.

Из дневников Йона Тихого. Путешествие на интеропию.

beats me. again, i wish one of us spoke russian...feel a bit lost without the subtitles even though the gist is always apparent (capitalism bad). i just like the art...no great insight here, move along...

Robbery, American Style (Ограбление по-американски)

this cartoon is pretty amazing on a couple levels. first, just watch this thing and take in all the colors and lines (the music rules too)...its just a fucking stunning piece of work. second, its a piece of propaganda that could have just as easily been made by an american filmmaker in the 60s...the swaggering cowboy sheriff reminds me of William Klein's great but rarely seen flick Mr Freedom.




the action starts with a bank heist. the robber leads the cops on a wild chase, leaving dozens of bodies in his wake. a sheriff in classic western garb follows the whole pursuit from a safe distance, watching the thieves doublecross one another in a way that strangely reminds me of the first 5 minutes of the dark knight. eventually the money winds up in the hands of a femme fatale who soon meets her demise as well (after being trampled in a bizarre frenzy over a reverse striptease- just watch, it's odd-...probably has something to do with materialistic fetishism). the sheriff collects the loot and returns 'empty handed' to the bankers (looking a bit like mobsters of course) and tells them that the robbers got away.... apparently there are 2 other films in this trilogy, Robbery, French Style and Robbery, Italian Style...i'll see if they are on youtube too.

fist pumping and totalitarianism?

am i the only one who feels like the best soviet stuff just dropped off the radar in the last 11 months???

i was looking through our old myspace posts and some of the stuff on the old board, and all the links are just dead...its like someone got to whoever uploaded them (kidding!), but doesnt it seem weird? why would interest in this die out? why would cool stuff just not be there to load? you cant find anything anymore

best example...i keyword searched about a dozen different things, and the best i could come up with was the same result over and over for one of Stalins b-day celebrations...the video doesnt show anything new, but watch it and let me get back to you



ok, is there a relationship between how un-free your nation is and how free your leader's elbows are?

all the soviets, hitler, mussolini...they look like theyre conducting an orchestra when they talk

roosevelt was never like this, and he had more central authority as president than probably anyone...except bush II...and LBJ

chavez bangs the podium too, like hes angry

the only one who doesnt flip out and get angry and who still has really unquestioned power is bush

maybe thats why he leans on the podium...folksy...throws everyone else off their game

the cat's out of the bag: the soviet neurobiology gap appears to have been veterinary...

Just. ew.

according to english russia

These guys penetrated the abandoned and sealed science lab of Russian Army which conducted sophisticated experiments studying human and animal brains. They got a lot photos of many test samples in an abandoned state but still excellent condition. You can see even the last Soviet leader Gorbachev that was left in rush - it was the time of his rule when the lab was closed and sealed from civilians.

yeah right, 'secret army lab...' it looks like an abandoned community college, honestly. all i see are cat and rat parts, maybe some monkey eyes in that jar. i doubt that this is really the good stuff.

it did remind of a great little failure that the cia once undertook: operation acoustic kitty. basically we thought it would be a good idea to embed radio transmitters into felines and then deploy them (using don adams dressed as a crazy cat lady i'm guessing) near kgb moles talking on park benches in washington. after 20 mil was dumped into this program, the cat's maiden voyage was almost immediately ended when it decided to run under a moving taxi...



if only we could have been better friends to the soviets perhaps today we would all own headless radio transmitting dogs or some other wonderful innovation that this kind of research leads to in peacetime.

this sort of crap isn't over either, in fact, we're just starting to roll out the 2.0 stuff with a frighteningly high degree of improvement over the suiciding radio cats of the 60s.

First CGI by soviets?

How Russian Hearts Are Heaving

"Moscow, 1947" gives an interesting glimpse of a Soviet culture that was probably already dead before its creators finished the animatic. Ostensibly celebrating the 800th anniversary of the city's founding, it is instead a propaganda film highlighting the city's recapture from Polish leadership in the Polish-Muscovite wars of the early 17th century and its withstanding Napoleon's siege of 1814. Then the video cuts off. I'd seen it years before on a bootleg VHS, but I can't remember if it went on to pay tribute to the WWII defense of Moscow, but even if it doesn't, the subtext of the rest of it clearly celebrates the recent WWII vitory.

You have to remember that prior to WWII, the internal structure of the Soviet Union was in turmoil. The Great Purge of 1937-1938 not only destroyed (probably) millions of lives, but also families, Soviet technological research and defense. Many able generals were sent to camps because, their devotion to bolshevism aside, their families had aristocratic lines pre-dating the regime.

The principle for which they were banished was Stalin's version of communism, which had become one-statist and self-interested. International communist struggles could go hang themselves so long as Russia survived. While initially this self-interest led to the necessary Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the foolhardy belief that it would spare Russia from war, it ultimately came to save Russia. Humiliated by literally millions of men encircled by (and surrendering to) German forces, Stalin was forced to re-build his military hierarchy on the fly. Old generals and colonels were rescued from the camps, told all was forgiven and asked to save the Motherland. Stalin's vision of "Communism in One Country" (i.e. "Russia First," for lack of a better term) immediately transformed into basic bourgeois patriotism. WWII was recast as "The Great Patriotic War." This film represents the last gasp of this liberalization of thought.

The video opens with soaring invocations of the city's name: MOSCOW! Quotes from Pushkin overlay images of patriotic medals, as animated WWII-era bombers fly out from behind them, taking flight over the Motherland. Bombers swoop and open their bay doors, dropping out thousands of love letters written to the city. But evidence of the erosion of the all-for-Russia spirit accompanying WWII can be seen in the video itself.

It's tough to argue that part of the motivation for Stalin's purges wasn't racial. There's a classic element in the Russian psyche, going back to Pushkin and Tolstoy at least, where almond-shaped eyes and yellow skin and the chaos of the east represents a kind of menace that, while not maliciously racist, nonetheless "others" easternness. But during the Great Patriotic War, much of that got set aside. Commissars — Russian political officers — even propagandized for racial diversity within units. E.g. "this commander is Tartar, and his adjutant is Russian, and these officers are Georgian, and this one's a Pole."

Yet, by 4:29 in the video, we already have the narrator invoking the "Tartar's yoke!" in talking about the periodic rule of parts of Russia by the mongol hordes. Worse, by 4:40 you have a kind of Punch and Judy Minstrel Show, with the white Russian puppet beating the crap out of the "BLACK FOREIGNER" Tartar. Already, that need to band together that WWII brought seems to be spooling apart.

Probably what's most interesting though is how by 1947 all this "Russia Only" Stalinism was being overcome by the ambition to push the Iron Curtain out to the fullest boundaries of Eastern Europe. While it might be all well and good to return to a racist mentality about Eastern peoples, Communism In One Country wasn't a doctrine that could bear up to scrutiny when more and more countries were coming under Soviet hegemony. By 1947, the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Hungary were communist client states.

The Great Patriotic War attitude that this film celebrates was already over and done with probably by the time any average citizen saw it. Truman had already promulgated his Truman Doctrine, fighting to contain communism on every front. American and Soviet proxies faced off in Greece. The next year, Berlin would be cordoned off Czechoslovakia absorbed into the Iron Curtain. Already the message was transitioning to the harmony and prosperity of many nations, sharing in communism, outside the boundaries of any one state. And the propaganda for that would have to be very delicate indeed, because it sounded like the multinational war for communism that all the Trotskyists had been militating for in 1937 and 1938, before they were shot and shipped east to starve to death or die of exposure.

In the end, this film is interesting because of the rarity of what it has to say. Years later, watching it is like looking at a miraculously clear shapshot taken from a moving train: unless you time it just right — just blink — that tiny era of postwar Russian nationalism and brotherhood is gone. I wish I could say the same for the print quality though. Nighttime and forest scenes are almost totally dark. A bear and an owl are virtually invisible against a dark background. I get the sense this was improperly stored in an archive for four decades. I'd be really excited to see a cleaned-up copy, if one is out there.

There Will Come Soft Rains

i dont handle the review thing as well as GFK does, but i saw this first, so i figured id be the one to write something up about it.

apologies ahead of time for the writing...ive been using all-lowercase and no apostrophes for so long in inter-office im and email for so long that i actually take twice as long to write if i stop to put in the right punctuation. my brain doesn't even understand it anymore. i sent out two pages to a buddy on my team the other day, and it took me about 20 minutes to write, but when i got home and started writing an email to my mom (which i always dress up like adult writing) i swear it took me something like an hour to write the same amount. i actually have to stop and think about every word, and then i wind up doing that thing you do when you overthink a word, like, "lamp? lamp? is that really how its spelled? god, that doesn't look right...it's got to be something else...no, wait, spellchecker thinks its ok."



ANYWAY, i ran across "There Will Come Soft Rains" the other day on youtube. the film is a soviet adaptation of a ray bradbury short story, whose title came from this classic anti-war poem by sara teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

the premise is pretty basic (spoilers ahead!). in the year 2026, automated robots tend to a family, making food, waking them, playing phonograph records and broadcasting beautiful images of the outdoors on telescreens. the gotcha! part is that the family is dead...annihilated by a nuclear war. by 1:54, you see the robots lifting sleep pods up to start the day, only to see the dark figures inside crumble and spill out on the floor...they are piles of ash.

the most chilling moments come after the 6:15 mark. a pure white dove (what could that represent???) appears at an open window. the robots that automate the dead victims' lives asks for a password. since a dove cant, like talk, the robot goes berserk trying to destroy the intruder...it converts its normal seeing/manipulating appendage (which sort of looks like a face) to a big stabby thing. it keeps trying to stab the bird, missing, destroying the inside of the house, stabbing a crucifix, creating more holes in the wall..and eventually blinding itself.

the imagery and atmosphere is very effective. the robot is conditioned to protect, but it does it without thinking or weighing threats it detects...it treats them all like crises and in the end destroys itself for lack of perspective. there is no mercy (stabbed christ), and the uberprotectiveness just weakens the whole more than a lowered guard (putting more holes in the wall). the worst thing is, if you're committed blindly to a program (like fearing everything from outside), youll eventually blind and destroy yourself following it.

the cartoon is really effective and pretty to watch, and sad. too bad it's a modern piece. "There Will Come Soft Rains" was made in 1984, so theres less of the sinister stuff that makes for good soviet propaganda films. its also probably not a rarity since its current enough that there are probably multiple clean copies out there. still, given the good story, it's probably a must-own for a good cold war buff