The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Saturday April 15th, 2023
EO: Three Hooves up in High Heaven by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Films featuring animals as screen filled protagonists, often in an imperfect, callous human world, have been made before. There was Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, which introduced audiences to a saintly donkey subject to the terrible things human beings are so often prone to inflict.
In recent times, the documentary black-and-white film Gunda, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky (executive producer Joaquin Phoenix), stripped of human dialogue, featured the farm life of an impressively large sow and her piglets. To their lives were added cows and a chicken with one leg. In such a film, livestock are seen as breathing, living creatures; they are not mere units of stock, destined for the packet and table. It is a film stunningly free of didactic hectoring or moral scolding.
EO, a film by Jerzy Skolimowski, that seasoned though less known member of the Polish New Wave, which included such busting, big hitters as Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, pays tribute to Bresson’s work. At the very least, the same animal of biblical lore features. It certainly has gone down well with some of the critics, winning a nomination for Best International Feature Film and netting the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.
Interestingly enough, this particular animal is very much in cinematic vogue: Jenny, the miniature donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, has made something of a splash. Jenny was even featured alongside the Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel at this year’s events. “Not only is she an actor,” the humourless Kimmel strained,“she’s a certified emotional support donkey – or at least that’s what we told the airline to get her on the plane from Ireland.”
Continue reading HERE!
Talk All Transforming #poem by Saloni Kaul
“Those obstacles that our paths do harrass,
At each turn rise of newest plot contrive,
Bring in line, override tactics crude crass
And from the whole only pleasure derive.”
Continue reading HERE!
Sacco and Vanzetti: That Agony is Our Triumph by Rene Wadlow
Sacco and Vanzetti, along with a third member of the Italian anarchist group involved in the robbery were electricuted at midnight on 23 August 1927, after seven years of legal procedings and an organized social campaign to prevent the execution led by some of the leading intellectuals of the time, especially the novelist John Dos Passos. Some 200,000 persons attended the funeral, and there were demonstration in front of U.S. embacies in many parts of Europe. Since then, Sacco and Vanzetti have been symbolic figures in efforts to abolish the death penalty.
Two aspects of the trials and legal procedures have stood out in the anti-death penalty debates. The first is that it is often difficult to have a trial that is not influenced by emotions and the political currents of the times.
Both Sacco and Vanzetti had been members of an anarchist network led by the Italian anarchist writer Luigi Galleani who was living for some years in the New York area. He edited a journal calling for violent revolution. He was deported to Italy in June 1919, but his journal continued for several years after that. In the minds of many in the U.S.A. there was a link between anarchy and Bolshevism which had just come to power in Russia in 1917.
Continue reading HERE!
Mika Toxica #52 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Mika Toxica HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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