Charlie Schmidt (Vzion), who is credited with the production's ponderous spoken-word poetry, pontificates on possibilities of self-discovery: "Freestyle!
The horror he felt arose not so much from the preference as from its repetition: "the failure to grasp the possibilities of self-differentiation".
"Red Dust" remains the most vivid description of the Chinese people freshly liberated from Maoism, picking their way through a transformed moral landscape in which extreme poverty and repression coexist with alluring new possibilities of self-invention.
It is pro-globalization, or rather it is an alternative globalization movement -- one that seeks to eliminate inequalities between rich and poor and between the powerful and the powerless, and to expand the possibilities of self-determination.
In my 20s this was all hope and insecurity and gigs that are done and dusted by 9pm and sitting in grey hotel rooms considering the possibilities of self-harm and overpriced in-room porn.
Such visual-verbal self-narrations provide a formal interart focus for examining questions about the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text.
The contrast with American social mobility, however, is the movie's core; where Murnau looks skeptically at the modern city, Ford shows a dynamic New York of vast possibilities of self-liberation (pointedly, for men and women alike), and of laws that bend to humane purpose.
Instead of looking for an old Beltway hand or an exec from the IT business, perhaps the administration ought to look for the kind of person who can't wait to spend a few hours pondering the possibilities of self-aware and self-healing systems.
"I like nothing better than a night in on the sofa with a glass of red and a good DVD". The horror he felt arose not so much from the preference as from its repetition: "the failure to grasp the possibilities of self-differentiation".
Also, corny as it may sound, as a young Kansan new to New York, I was always struck by the possibilities of self-invention and the autonomy and individual will that a studio represented, almost regardless of the quality of the art I encountered there.
