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IMAX Develops Movie Transfer Technology
kazama writes: "Toronto-based IMAX said that it had developed a new process called DMR (for "digital remastering") to digitally convert conventional 35mm films to the IMAX format without significant loss of detail. 'Our customers have been saying to us for years, "We want to see Star Wars on IMAX, we want to see The Matrix on IMAX." and DMR is the technology which is the enabler,' Co-CEO Bradley Wechsler told Reuters. 'That's going to be an increasingly important part of the company's performance.'" So what movies would you want to see on IMAX?
What the fuck are you talking about? What is a Greedo and what are Hutts? What does 'fire first' mean? Han?
Please explain this crap, or speak English.
people like you should be shoot and send back to earth.
Reading modern philosophy is often a truly trying task. Most practitioners of this obscure art revel in jargon so abstruse it would embarrass a medieval alchemist. They use their own special and unique code to say everything about nothing, and often their code is so special and unique that not even they can decipher it after the fact in any kind of consistent manner. Yet within this murky fog of allusion and half-communication one will, every so often, come across a philosopher who writes in crisp, clear language. One who, on occasion, makes a point that slashes through the opacity of our otherwise clouded understanding like a high intensity beam of light and reveals an undeniable truth. Friedrich Nietzsche was such a philosopher.
True, the ultimate meaning of his writings as whole--if there really is one--still remains subject to much bickering and interpretation. Some see Nietzsche as an ur-Nazi, while others try to pass him off as a muscle-bound J.S. Mill. Doubtless, this debate will continue ad infinitum. My interest here is not so much in the whole of his writings as it is in his ability to annunciate particular and rather undeniable insights. By way of example I point to a passage Nietzsche wrote in a piece on Schopenhauer. Here, he observes that "Wherever there have been powerful societies, governments, religions, or public opinions--in short, wherever there was any kind of tyranny, it has hated the lonely philosopher..."
In this one sentence, Nietzsche has managed to pin in place for our examination the very heart of repression. Mere tools like fear, subsidies, or honors remain just that for any tyranny, mere tools. What actuates these tools, though, what drives them is the overpowering need of the tyrant to prevent men, particularly those with intelligence, from being alone with their thoughts. In fact, this notion of Nietzsche's is so crucial to the idea of tyranny that it plays a central role in three of the 20th century's greatest dystopian novels: 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.
I turn first to George Orwell's 1984. The work has become the ne plus ultra of dystopian fiction, and considering its fine literary quality, this is no surprise. The catchphrase of this dark novel, "Big Brother is Watching You", exemplifies Nietzsche's observation. Omnipresent two-way TV monitors put teeth behind this dictum and make for a nietzschean nightmare at its worst. Orwell's antagonist, O'Brien, who speaks for the Party, expresses the logic behind this constant attention when he informs the hero of the novel, Winston Smith, that power is not only "...[p]ower over the body", but more importantly it is also power, "...above all, over the mind."
The train of events that first sets Winston against Big Brother catches perfectly the notion of the "lonely philosopher" Nietzsche tells us of. Finding himself unsatisfied with the world around him, he realizes that he knows things as they are are just not right. So he illicitly buys a diary and commits himself to writing down his thoughts. But the act of writing is more than just setting words to paper. It is a thinking-through, and when confronted with this task, Winston finds that the words he knows exist refuse to leave his mind and put themselves on the paper. So he must think, and think. In this quiet solitude Orwell has his protagonist reflect on all that is wrong: newspeak, the constant monitoring, the anti-sex leagues--Then it comes to him! Winston's reflection leads him to an intuitive break through, and he begins his diary by vindicating Nietzsche with the four fatal words every dictator fears: "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER."
Taking a different approach than Orwell, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World approaches dystopia from a more mocking and comedic perspective, yet it too uses Nietzshe's dictum as its centerpiece. Instead of TV monitors, Huxley's world is controlled through genetic manipulation, behavioral conditioning and drugs, lots and lots of drugs. This process has one great effect, namely, it deprives the mind of any stimulus it might receive from discomfort, that needling Orwell used in 1984 which tells a man things are not quite right. In addition to this, the citizens are continually entertained through a combination of mass media, garish nightclubs and easy sex. Regular relationships are discouraged and infantile behavior is glorified. Always busy, individual reflection of the sort Nietzsche exalts becomes impossible. The "World Controller" Mustapha Mond sums up his government's policy: "...people never are alone now...We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it." Mond's people are happy, but only superficially. In exchange for this 'happiness' they sacrifice meaning, nobility and heroism. Worse, they remain utterly ignorant of such concepts, perfect nietzschean "Last Men", human beings who exist only for their own comfort.
The third dystopia is both the most far-fetched and the most relevant to our day-to-day lives. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of a fireman, Guy Montag, who rebels against a futuristic American dictatorship. Unlike fireman of today, who extinguish fires, Guy Montag ignites them; he burns books, which have become an illegal commodity. The fanciful scenarios Bradbury describes, where firemen rush off in the middle of the night to set some malefactor's library ablaze, strike the reader as being ridiculously impossible, but they aren't all that important, really. The firemen act more as a vehicle to make a couple of deeper points Bradbury wanted to make about the direction American society was taking.
The first point Bradbury discussed was political correctness, though he didn't--couldn't--call it that; in 1954 the term hadn't been invented. Still, Bradbury saw the direction multi-culturalism would take society. Again, the dystopia's antagonist, Montag's boss Captain Beatty, expresses the author's thoughts most clearly:
"You [Montag] must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred...Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book."
Of course, when it comes to specifics Bradbury was wrong about the cigarettes and White people, but the basis of his prediction remains sound, almost undeniable.
The second point Fahrenheit 451 makes answers directly to Nietzsche's observation: the lack of solitude. This time the explanation comes from an English professor who has long been out of work. He tells Montag their society suffers as it does because no one has any time to think:
"If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four-wall televisor. Why?...It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest 'What nonsense!'" [emphasis original]
I wrote earlier that Fahrenheit 451 is the most relevant dystopia to our times, and this passage captures exactly what I mean by that, even more so than Bradbury's foreseeing political correctness. After all, conflict between groups is an eternal facet of human existence; however, our technology is not. With the distractions offered society through cable TV, movie rentals and even the Internet--through which, ironically, you are reading this article--people are less and less given over to solitary contemplation, the kind of leisure required to push through difficult books and digest their meaning. Again, writing in 1954, Bradbury managed to grasp the consequences of these technologies long before they became the overwhelming realities they are today, and his prediction aligns perfectly with Nietzsche's understanding of how a tyranny can take hold.
Fiction is of little use, though, if it can't be applied to the world of fact, and the same can be said of the philosophy supporting that fiction. I've briefly discussed Bradbury's relevance, and others have explored the real world implications of Orwell's and Huxley's dark worlds in an endless series of books and articles. I feel no need to add to that burgeoning pile of paper, so instead I will concentrate on Nietzsche's point about solitude being the enemy of tyranny.
This theory of his has been thoroughly confirmed by most of the 20th-century's history. Look to the totalitarian states of the last century. Both nazism and communism utilized all sorts of clubs, unions and societies to keep their subjects both busy and engaged with others. Be it marching in a parade, collecting a harvest or participating in an education session, no one was given any solitude, and those who took it of their own accord stuck out so easily that monitoring them was relatively easy. We also see this loathing of solitude in the Islamic countries. Mass mosque attendance and strict observance of every man's orthodoxy have reduced the intellectual output of the Islamic world from being the envy of the globe to little more than joke, and a bad one at that. As Nietzsche noted, powerful religions are just as oppressive as powerful governments.
Yet before we Americans become too smug, we might want to examine ourselves. Obviously, we are nowhere near as bad off as the citizens under the old totalitarianism or contemporary Islam, but we do live in the shadow of a potential tyrant, our own particularly democratic tyrant: the mob. Under our regime, democratic politicians employ a rather insidious method to prevent men from sinking into solitude. They scare them, and keep them scared for as long as they can. Critic H.L. Mencken, himself a nietzschean, captured this process perfectly when he wrote, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary"
A man constantly spooked by threats of "dirty bombs", the "Greenhouse effect", or a war in the Levant over some worthless pile of rocks is a man who can't think; he can only react on an emotional level. He can't be alone with his thoughts because he's constantly in the company of angst. The Right and the Left both play this game with him. Indeed, they revel in it, seeming at times to cooperate with one another, where one plays bogeyman and the other savior, and then they switch.
The Right goes on and on about foreign threats that demand American intervention in just about every corner of the globe. When they're not busy trying to make every foreigner behave like a good American, they're trying to censor the Net (for the chillun', you see), or giving the FBI yet more power to poke into our private affairs, all for the sake of keeping us safe. Safe from who? Not from them, that's for sure.
But give the Right this much credit, they aim high. The Left does not. In this country leftists alternate between playing Chicken Little at one moment and Sally Struthers the next. That is, when they're not busy scaring everyone about some great global cataclysm that never really seems to materialize, they are trying to bring us to tears with fantastical stories about whole populations in the inner cities starving to death. Why it is we never run into these starving people--beyond the occasional bum reeking of last night's Mad Dog 20/20--we never find out.
Will this ever change? No, not likely. Most people are not only easily scared, they enjoy being scared. It gives them a thrill. It allows them to react from the gut and not the brain. The fear keeps them occupied, but only lightly so, for it requires no great effort of thought. When it comes to the masses, there is not a damned thing that can be done to change them.
However, that society cannot be changed does not mean we are with hope. The individual can still change, and whatever flaws our society has, it is still somewhat free (Give Mr. Bush some time though; he's working on it). Men can still withdraw into themselves and, in solitude, think, just think. Nietzsche himself, in that same article from which I drew my first quote, recommends this turn inward. "Read only your own life," he writes, "and from this understand the hieroglyphs of universal life!"
It's become somewhat trite to say this, but it remains true: the most difficult struggle any man faces is with himself. It's a struggle that never ends, but in its difficulty it offers endless fascination and education. Will this struggle, this fighting with oneself, effect a meaningful change in the world? No, definitely not, but then again, in the long run nothing else will either. Our universe is a cold one, and it is infinitely apathetic to the goings on of a few mites inhabiting this remote and insignificant ball of mud we call Earth. What we can get out of such reflection, though, is entertainment, truly engaging and challenging entertainment. It is certainly better than the insipid fare now offered by today's tyrants, whether they be democrats or the more honest variety one encounters overseas.
(20 second pause for /. code)
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Sound of Music all the way!