behemothing

“The Movie Set That Ate Itself”

The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted. A steady stream of former extras and fired PAs talked of the shoot in terms usually reserved for survivalist camps. The director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, was a madman who forced the crew to dress in Stalin-era clothes, fed them Soviet food out of cans and tins, and paid them in Soviet money. Others said the project was a cult and everyone involved worked for free. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. No, no, others insisted, the entire thing was a prison experiment, perhaps filmed surreptitiously by hidden cameras. Film critic Stanislav Zelvensky blogged that he expected “heads on spikes” around the encampment.

…

“I don’t give a shit about GQ, I don’t give a shit about America,” Khrzhanovsky yells. “He is asking people to pose. He is not observing life, he is staging it. And I can’t have that. My people are not puppets!” It seems that Sergey has asked to shoot Olya taking a bath. That was apparently fine. But Sergey asked her to take a bath wearing a towel as a turban. Khrzhanovsky throws himself down onto a chair and slams his fist against a lace-covered tabletop. Various underlings look on from the corners, a silent chorus.

“Olya,” he says emphatically, “does not bathe in a turban.” Khrzhanovsky takes a breath and switches to a polite half whisper. “We are ending our collaboration,” he informs me. “Let me finish, and then you can riposte in any way you see fit, not that it matters, because it’s my decision. You are, after all, on my territory. In short, please leave.”

-MICHAEL IDOV, “The movie set that ate itself,” GQ (November 2011). 

“The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5”

In the summer of 1941, delegates at the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers’ convention in Cleveland, Ohio, listened to a keynote address from an astrologer named Louis de Wohl. The bespectacled German-Hungarian—late thirties, rather corpulent, flamboyant in dress and confident in manner—told his rapt audience that Hitler was operating under advice from “the best astrologers in Germany,” who had plotted out the course for Germany to attack the U.S. The invasion, it seemed, would occur sometime after the following spring, once Saturn and Uranus, the two “malefic” planets, had entered Gemini, America’s ruling sign: “America,” he warned, “has always been subject to grave events when Uranus transits Gemini.” De Wohl’s professional assessment, nonetheless, was that the stars portended eventual disaster for Hitler. “We can’t predict a date for his defeat,” he said, “but if the United States enters the war before next spring, he is doomed.”

What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the British government, which was attempting to drag the Roosevelt administration into WWII by any means necessary…

- Emma Garman, ”The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5,” The Awl (11 April 2012). 

“Pop Culture’s 100-year Obsession With Eugenics”

i09:

“For the past century, pop culture has told plenty of stories about eugenics. Some of them have criticized the notion that you can make people “better” — but others have been wishful fantasies about making a better world through genetics. Here’s the weird history of eugenics in popular culture.”

I want to teach a class on this.