How can anyone truly serve the Party, if he fails to be aware that everything the Party stands for is a sham?
That’s great!
@Riss—Yet the film makes a point that these folks don’t have any kind of sense of knowing anything especially revelatory after all of their years. Work, happiness, life, new life, these are all things they value if they even acquiesce to answering the question of what has value.
Yes, by continuing to ask similar questions pertaining to life’s value, or its most important facets, I wondered if Dusan Hanák wasn’t making a mistake, since the elderly folks seemed to not quite understand the question, or were unable to give it much verbiage—almost as if they were dismissing the questions as being trite. But eventually, we realize that these wizened, broken bodies were used to only dealing in primary thoughts as adjuncts to primary life. Their brains had burned out the unnecessary or frivolous arguments which make for engaging documentary conversation, those dialogs which run down side roads and maybe stop for an anecdote to add detail to the eventual expanding answer. Their lives seemed to share more with the donkeys, the dogs, the sheep, the fields than to being social creatures of intricate personal communication. At one point, one of the old Slovak men replied, “not money, just life.” And it seemed true that these people were interested and dependent on the most basic elements of life such as food and shelter, but graciously we heard many songs from the region being sung, and its easy to remember the shepherd playing tunes upon his bag-pipes as he walked behind the flock with his energetic work dog. Not only did Pictures of the Old World introduce us to peasants who could have been living in the Dark Ages or even earlier, but we were able to watch an excavation down into the elemental needs, joys and grief of our species, which contrary to modern consumerism’s claims, are really very few and spare. The word work took on a well-earned dignity, as did love , kin, health. In some unspoken way, these ancients seemed early descendants of each one of us, some basic bloodline of appreciation for minimal desires and needs: wrinkled dirty Bodhisattvas smelling of goats and woodsmoke, giggling at the memories of eons and the fickle lives of man.
Risselada
I envy you people. I’m really missing out.
You are welcome back any time House. But this was an especially great match.