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| Filling the Void - Fill the Void |
A sublime movie. A moment in time with Hasidic Orthodox Jews in Israel as a young girl is urged to marry her recently widowed brother-in-law. Her personal conflict in doing so is detailed. The religious group is living in frozen time, where ancient rituals are observed, and the modern world does not enter their lives where their emotional and intellectual center is, although they use cell phones.
It is a breathtakingly beautiful movie. Haunting. Moving. a true work of art and an aesthetic of life. Devoid of shocking images and faux drama it proceeds slowly, unraveling the feelings and possible future to be realized.
At the end I am bathed in a radiance of contemplation and love
as I watch the credits roll.
And then I see listed in the financial support
Israel Film Board
I stiffen, my after glow broken.
I have long noted France and Canada supporting films financially so why was this so disturbing to me?
I had all but finished Sweet Tooth when I saw Fill the Void. It's 1970's setting and theme concerns two people caught in the machinations of MI5 and its secret plan to fund artists and writers who do not espouse a dystopian view of the world and instead one of hope.
Hopefully.
Of course hands will be off as to influencing or controlling the output, but the selections have been made stacking the deck towards that hoped for result. And McEwan takes us to the American version of huge outlays of grant money into a similar project, a rundown of how it managed this kind of propaganda during the cold war - The Soviets doing it superlatively also - and McCarthy period, and in this novel we are seeing it applied to counteract the terrible fear of terrorism and its intended apocalyptic future for Western Civilization.
It does not take a big jump to observe the intention of Israel to fund a film that is so religious, so beautiful, so everything that one will leave the theater with a radiant feeling of certain lives in Israel that have nothing to do with the atrocities that Israel is inflicting on Palestinians. All anger will be submerged and forgotten and when it resurfaces it will merge with this beautiful film to be somewhat neutralized. And more will come to continue this.
And interior security and control funnels this money through layers of non-profits and their umbrellas until it reaches the unsuspecting artist who has no idea of the cynical and vicious intent of the State. To launder their violence.
So you'll know this kind of thing has a long history. IRD have worked with us and MI6 for years, cultivating writers, newspapers, publishers. George Orwell on his deathbed gave IRD a list of thirty-eight communist fellow travelers. And IRD helped Animal Farm into eighteen languages and did a lot of good work for Nineteen Eighty-four. And some marvelous publishing ventures over the years. ( ST p. 86)
Woe to the nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. - Solzhenitsyn 1970 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
So you'll know this kind of thing has a long history. IRD have worked with us and MI6 for years, cultivating writers, newspapers, publishers. George Orwell on his deathbed gave IRD a list of thirty-eight communist fellow travelers. And IRD helped Animal Farm into eighteen languages and did a lot of good work for Nineteen Eighty-four. And some marvelous publishing ventures over the years. ( ST p. 86)
Woe to the nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. - Solzhenitsyn 1970 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
This is a repetition of Hitler and Goebbels support of the all knowing Leni Riefenstahl and her marvelous films Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. Pure beauty and art and the ultimate in propaganda.
The West is learning from Hitler and Stalin in great doses lately.
Once you learn to see, you can't unsee.
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