A Conservative Obligation: David Lean’s The Sound Barrier
Cinema means movement, hence the nickname, “motion pictures.” Right from its beginning in Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion films of horses – and of male and female nudes – the “movie camera” has demonstrated understandable fondness for things robustly animate, the more impressive the hyper-kinesis the better. Visiting aliens might be excused for thinking that the main subjects of film are the galloping horse, the steam locomotive, the automobile, and the flying machine. A remarkable Georges Méliès (1861-1936) production based loosely on Jules Verne, Le voyage à travers l’impossible (1904), deploys all of these modes of transportation in a mélange of mechanical and transcontinental fantasies in the auteur’s inimitable style. [Clip] In the aftermath of “The Great War” (1914-1918), filmmakers began to see the possibility of theatrical spectacle in aeronautics. For Wings (1927), director William Wellman (1896-1975) put together an air force in San Antonio, Texas, that must have rivaled the United States Army Air Corps of the time; he installed cameras in a variety of “platform” aircraft and shot “dog fights” (below) of astonishing realism. [Clip]
Fitting the Marxist Patterns
1.When Chavez nationalizes an industry, he is engaging in a political and not an economic action as he puts enterprises under political control. In his case, “politics” mean “Chavez”. Louis 16th said that “I am the state” and in the Venezuelan reality that imitates the Sun King, the public realm has become identical with the Bolivarian “Leader’s” eccentric whims. When such nationalizations occur, the accompanying commentary tends to note that Venezuela’s problems made the Chavists to take control of new enterprises. This cause and effect relationship can be turned around. Wanting to comprehend reality the conditional “can” might even need to be translated into an imperative “must”.
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