An interesting movie.

I'm taking two film classes this semester, as a senior guest auditor (meaning it's free). So I'm in hyperdrive with films and wanted to recommend one to you. It is called Die Wiesse Holle Vom Pitz Palu/The White Hell of Pitz Palu. If you've seen Inglorious Basterds you might have heard of it. It was made in 1929. Sound had already come to America by then, but the Europeans held back a bit because sound was expensive and risky. And so this one is silent. It was one of a specific German genre known as the Mountain Film. Most of them were directed by Arnold Fanke, who discovered the actress and later film maker Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl was a big star by this time and insisted that Fanke hire G.W. Pabst to help him. Pabst was one of the greatest of a galaxy of German Directors in the 1920s (Fritz Lang,  F.W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch,  and Paul Leni were some of the others).

The Mountain Films were shot on location and the actors did all their own stunts (except, of course, when they fell to their deaths in giant crevasses). This is an example of the peak (no pun intended) of the silent cinema. The film is three hours long, and the inter-titles are in German. The titles don't make a bit of difference in understanding the film, because, as Norma Desmond/Gloria Swanson said much later in Sunset Boulevard (paraphrasing here) "Talking pictures, nothing but a bunch of yak, yak, yakking." WHPP has been reconstructed with a beautiful soundtrack and is a joy to watch.

Silent films from about 1925-1930 were at the apex of an art form that was completely independent from the films that followed. Silents were not an evolutionary step on the way to sound, wide screen, and digital. They were an art unto themselves, a lost and buried art. If you are interested in seeing why, Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By... is a great starting point

I've been watching quite a few lately, The Wind (1928--Victor Sjostrom) (Intoduction by Lillian Gish) (Vimeo--music is jarring, you may want to watch it with no sound at all)

The Docks of New York (1928--Josef Von Sternberg)

 Nanook of the North (1922--Robert Flaherty)

Robin Hood (1922--Allan Dwan--I watched this one with my mom, and as her vision isn't the best, I acted as her Benshi, really got into the role),

The Last Laugh/Der Letzte Mann, Sunrise, and Tabu (all F.W. Murnau, 1924, 27, and 31 respectively)

The Abyss (turn closed caption English on)  (1910--Urban Gad, the film which introduced Asta Nielsen, one of the first great actresses)

Die Nibelungen (1924--Fritz Lang)

 J'Accuse (1919--Abel Gance)

Man With a Movie Camera (1929--Dziga Vertov)

The End of St. Petersburg (1927--Vsevolod Pudovkin)

and the last silent film of the 20th Century, Juha  (trailer only) (1999--Aki Kaurismaki)

Next time you watch a modern film, ask yourself how much of it is carried by the dialog. There is no dialog at all in Tabu. 

WHPP is unique. I've never seen anything like it. If you get a chance, feast your eyes on it.

Harvey Goldberg--Ideology of Private Property--1977

Here's my first shot. It's an annotated transcription I did some time ago of Harvey Goldberg's Lecture on the origins of private property.

Original audio lecture (#39) is available at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120511113937/http://brechtforum.org/harvey-goldberg-lectures

Address in the transcript may be out of date. 

You can read it at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0GaXGfixoCMZWtaa3Q5c2d3d1E/view?usp=sharing

This is a Microsoft Word document that has been saved into Google Documents. The links, though appearing to be live, may not be. I have discovered that if the internal links wrap around a line, they will not work from Google docs, as Google docs has inserted a line break, thereby breaking the URL. These URLs should work if you download the Word document and read it out of Word directly. Eventually I will put each URL on its own line. (8-Jul.-2013).  If clicking on them doesn't work, then down arrow to save the file, and either save it to use with live links later, or open as a Microsoft Word document in another window. Once you have a live, working Word document,  to get the links to work, just hit the CTRL key and  left click the mouse on the link simultaneously.
 
Note that the links in the footnotes were put in over a year ago. Most of them work. For the ones that don't:

Cut them out of the browser (you won't be able to out of the Word document) and go to:

http://archive.org

remove the http;// from the "Wayback Machine" and paste the link in there. Find a date that is circled, and click on it. It will point correctly to the link that has since been changed. I know. I checked.

Original audio file (#39) is available at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120511113937/http://brechtforum.org/harvey-goldberg-lectures

Hope the transcription is legible to you. Enjoy.

BTW: Who's Harvey Goldberg, some of you might ask? See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Goldberg