Change Your Image
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As a research and documentary duo, Aaron and Melissa (his wife) have combined their multi-varied skills to dig through obscure history, and re-contextualize the hidden, forgotten and esoteric aspects of the past with gripping insights for our present and emerging world. Together they have produced hundreds of topical videos that have generated more than 80 millions views across various platforms. Their sources are cited, even when things get strange.
In 2018, Aaron & Melissa Dykes released 'The Minds of Men' a thorough and damning investigation into the experimentation, art, and practice of social engineering and mind control during the Cold War — a mind-bending journey into the past that gives startling insight into the world that has been created for us today.
In 2021, Aaron & Melissa released 'The Trust Game,' a 10-Episode Limited Documentary Series that follows an intricate path over 4 centuries connecting the rise of central banks with the foundations of modern society.
Their forthcoming film 'Liminality' researches the role of group energy. Before COVID disruptions, they had filmed extensively in England, Texas, the U.S. Deep South, Bulgaria, Greece, Newfoundland (Canada), the Shetland Islands (UK) and Europe generally. Plans to film in Oaxaca, Mexico were canceled. Filming included dozens of events and interviews surrounding folk ritual and culture, Enlightenment and revolutionary history, and related topics.
Several other documentaries, and a few short films, have also been planned and/or filmed.
Reviews
Pierrot le fou (1965)
Humor in the unreality; the poetry of disconnecting from society
Ended up really liking this film, with some parts I love, in spite of the absurdities in Godard's work that often go too far off the deep end.
Firstly, I totally understand those with no taste at all for Godard - the strange, disjointedness is a lot to take, and is rarely a rewarding conclusion plotwise. Basically, I mostly expect Godard films, and many French new wave films, to simply devolve by the end; completely unravel, and typically end, pointlessly in death. It can be a cliché.
With that said, I really appreciated Pierre le Fou and even found it romantic, to an extent anyway.
My favorite part overall was the recurring bits of male/female voices like poetry going back and forth between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. Sometimes it was romantic; othertimes existential commentary on life, sometimes mysterious, sometimes nonsense. But I liked the technique and looked forward to the segments.
The music score was also rewarding, and perhaps my second favorite in Godard's work after Contempt (Le Mepris), which is haunting and rich indeed. I've not seen all of Godard, but have been steadily working through a lot of it.
Pierre le Fou played around in a goofy way with genre and the edge of sanity. It was unreal, delving into the surreal, and the hyper-unrealities of life-based-on fiction, stories and myths of who we are / what we're doing in our small roles in this world. Godard really overdoes it (across his films as a whole) on his attacks against the bourgeoisie - relentless ad naseum. Just watched Weekend as well, and got fed up with the heavy-handedness of the commentary.
I'm certainly no Marxist, but I will grant that Godard lands some good blows on the excesses of modern society. There may be a class system problem (not denying), but a population drenched in media messages and directed by role-play of societal expectations proved the bigger source of ripe commentary for me.
In Pierrot le Fou, Godard punched well depicting his upper-class, super-bourgeoisie as mere regurgitators of corporate slogans. They were shameless self-promoters with ads as their personal mantras which substituted for banter at the party, and this epitomized what Ferdinand gets so bored and fed up with. It's no wonder he was so willing to walk away from it all. Likewise, it was funny when Ferdinand quipped about 'putting a tiger in the tank' because everyone is programmed with the slogans of oil giants.
Ferdinand (who can't even be known by his own name) wants to put his value and interest in fine art and literary commentary, philosophy and writing (worthy enough intentions) but is constantly confronted with the trapped-mental state of so many of his fellow denizens, and his own shortcomings to boot. His own mental ambitions prove listless, and he does better at playing the Fool (obviously). His mockery of theater to entertain Americans, etc. Is well put, for instance.
Meanwhile, his own romance with Marianne (Anna Karina) draws from fantasy and is also never-quite-real - melodrama, gunrunning, crime films, etc. Keep the viewer never clear about what is really going on, what world the characters are living in, and whether or not anything inside the story is actually "real".
A few lines late in the film (which I didn't write down in detail or anything) pertain to a woman with a camera, contemplating the switch from filming fictional-characters to 'real-life' characters... and the distinction, or lack thereof, between the two.
Are we ourselves living in a film whose roles we try to act the part of, or are we living an actual "real life"?
That level of meta- about the nature of viewing a film, storytelling, and when we are and are not 'inside a film' strikes me as apt commentary, and worthy of thought. Other filmmakers have broached this topic as well; and other Godard films as well. But there are some nice moments here.
At the same time, the plot delves into "serious" but "not so serious" life-and-death situations and the killing or death of people around them without appropriate emotions. Some of it is outright cartoonish.
In between these sanguine moments upon which most films pivot and hang, our two protagonists tend to just lolly-gag with no real motivation or sense of urgency, though sometimes they take the time to run away or hide. I suspect Godard wanted us to feel disconnected from the anticipation and investment into these kinds of typical film-stories; and be cut off from the satisfaction of it all. But I could be misreading that.
The mix of humor and poetic interludes were enough to make this film enjoyable, but as usual for many Godard films, the typical film payoffs are out of pace with the investment into our characters. Their problems are possibly all fiction, or certainly out-of-step with the audience's stake in the matter. Interesting.
This was a first viewing; may have missed something, too. One of the better Godard films in my opinion.
All Light, Everywhere (2021)
The Observer Changes the Experiment
Adages such as 'the Observer Changes the Experiment' sum up this insightful reflection on the limitations of perspective.
As a camera operator and documentary filmmaker myself, I can say that it is easy to confuse what is captured in the lens with the reality. But the map is not the territory, and the image is not the object in question.
Instead, as Theo Anthony's film explains, it is something of a parallax problem -- the position of the observer -- and indeed one's position in authority, as with law enforcement in this film, alters or at least CAN alter what is "seen" in the image.
It's just about accountability and openness, but about understanding the position of observation -- making an apt (but admittedly obscure) metaphor with the Transit of Venus -- a textbook case of parallax perspective-shift.
Parallax (noun) 2. An apparent displacement of an object observed, due to real displacement of the observer, so that the direction of the former with reference to the latter is changed.
Seeing and being seen in an increasingly surveillance- and sousveillance-oriented society cannot account for all the human factors. Bias is built in and hard to strip away.
We have a tendency to take things for granted - i.e. "what you see is what you get" -- but the human eye does not take in the real world, and the brain and its functions remain completely isolated from that real world.
And thus, symbols are substituted in mental calculations, assumptions driving thinking and decision making.. and the questions of morality, justice, fairness and more are mired in the complex questions surrounding the meta-field of Cybernetics dating back to the 50s. My film "The Minds of Men" (2018) covers similar topics from a totally different perspective.
But my interest in the material I have research primed me for the appreciation of Theo Anthony's' fine film. It requires time to digest and think it over, and some audiences don't have energy for that, but a thoughtful viewer will have a lot to walk away with from this rich film.
Rat Film (2016)
Rat control... for people, too
Intriguing and uncomfortable questions are raised by Theo Anthony's film, which gives itself permission to meander between straight-forward aspects of pest control, and the larger innuendo surrounding the control of human society.
Yes, big cities like Baltimore have endemic problems. The rats are a ripe visual reminder in its gritty streets.
But what Theo Anthony really captures is that this same notorious mammal that is so often used in experimentation and treated as a close-equivalent for what to expect in humans via testing, is in fact a marker for what humans should expect in the society that is altering quickly around them.
The Rockefeller Foundation and other arms of scientific research have indeed tested on rats, and aimed to eugenically target certain human populations as well. There is much, much more to be found in personal research. A huge area, a blight on the part of society's self-appointed shepherds.
An unsettling visual metaphor emerges from the flow of the film -- the relationship between populations and their food supply; the relationship between the environment, and its ability to change its inhabitants; and at the same time, the perpetuation of conditions, the ghettos of Baltimore, namely, through policies, zoning, labeling and lending/lack of lending and investment.
What and who is marked as a pest, tends to remain a pest. Maybe it is a problem of what the looker has decided to see?