Recommend a TV series and/or Documentary

10 posts

Fitz
Ix

Documentaries:

Barakah (1992)
Samsara (2011)
Chronos (1985)
Powaqqatsi (1982)
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Naqoyqatsi (2002)
Anima Mundi (1992)
Civilisation (1969)
Our Daily Bread (2005)
Animals Are Beautiful People (1974)
Microcosmos (1996)
The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971)
The Trials of Life (1990
The Greatest Places (1998)

Alex
Bob Dylan Roof

Proclick documentary on the American City, commissioned for the 1939 World's Fair and produced by Lewis Mumford:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/7nuvcpnysjU
With the ascent of Jewish and Frankfurt school critique in the United States, an important and influential social-philosophical "school" of critique was neglected and fell by the wayside. For want of a better term, and owing to the cultural and racial genesis of the school, I'll use the term WASP Cultural Pessimism as a label. The school included forgotten cultural critics like Dwight Macdonald (a socialist), Edward Banfield, Christopher Lasch, and Lewis Mumford. A common thread running throughout the work of each thinker was a classical distrust of the megalopolis and a generally negative view of modern technology and its effects on the City. If there is anything like an organic form of 20th century American "conservatism", this is it. It represents an attempt to curtail progressive nihilism (also a WASP obsession) and subordinate technology to the needs of a small-scale moral populism.

Don Johnson
I think this could go further back to include Brooks and Henry Adams. Perhaps Emerson and Throeau could be included as well.
Bob Dylan Roof
Yes, their influence is undoubtedly there. I wanted to distinguish the 20th century because of the more heterogeneous sources of thought (Macdonald and Lasch emerging first as Marxists and later developing into pessimists and cultural critics).
Fitz
Fitz
For 12 days in September 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev traveled the United States from coast to coast, creating a media circus as hundreds of reporters followed his every move. Americans were fascinated by the communist leader and the trip served to ease Cold War tensions -- if only for a short time.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/W9YD47F8Z8M
Fitz
In 335 BC Alexander of Macedonia set off on an expedition to conqueror the world. The voyage of Alexander the Great covered more than 22;000 miles in ten years; from Greece to India and back; through some of the most difficult and unforgiving terrain.

In 1996; more than 2000 years later; Michael Wood was hot on his trail; following; as closely as possible; in the footsteps of Alexander and the army that he drove to achieve the impossible.He did have the advantages of modern transport. Up to a point. Travelling by jeep; bus; truck; train; retired Russian ambulance and occasional lifts in helicopters; he discovered that some parts of the world are still completely inaccessible to anything but the feet of camels; mules; horses or occasionally humans.Leaving countless baffled border checkpoint guards in their wake; the crew travelled through 16 countries. They crossed post-Gulf War Iraq and entered Afghanistan during the rise of the Taleban. They crossed the Great Sea of Sand; the Gre at Salt Desert and the Desert of Death and climbed some of the highest mountain passes in the world.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/KDzUEOrXvGY
Fitz