Further to the recent post on Vanessa Engle’s Lefties documentaries, here’s another curio from a bygone age. The People’s Cube highlights video, probably from around 1984, of KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov explaining psychological warfare and the demoralising effects of Marxist-Leninist ideology. It isn’t clear exactly how much is boasting and embellishment, and it isn’t clear whether the word “demoralise” is intended to mean “destroy the morale of” or “render morally impotent.” Both would seem to apply. Of particular interest is the KGB’s apparent focus on influencing the “soft” brains of Western students and rendering them impervious to inconvenient facts.

Make of it what you will.

More at Roborant. Related: this and this. 

Here’s Jonathan Klassen and Dan Rodrigues’ short animation, An Eye For Annai. For children of all ages.

More here.

Some of you may have seen Vanessa Engle’s witty BBC4 documentary series, Lefties, screened in February last year. The 3-part series revisits the “alternative politics” of the 70s and 80s, when the far left was an all-too-serious force in British political life. Among the gems to savour are the endless factional disputes over exactly how capitalism should be toppled, the farcical mismanagement of the News on Sunday, an earnest exposition on “penile imperialism”, and interviews with former self-styled radicals, now sitting by private swimming pools, fretting about fridge ownership or planning to work on llama farms.

Here’s a brief taste.

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The three episodes – Property is Theft, Angry Wimmin and A Lot of Balls – can be viewed online here. Given a generation of young lefties with little, if any, experience of what their dreams entail when applied in the real world, it’s worth casting an eye over what happened when Socialism wasn’t just something people laughed at.

Help me buy my own llama farm.

SubmarineChannel has an archive of memorable film title designs. From Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars to David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Have a look at Joost Korngold’s striking teaser for Sean Thibodeau’s “docu-horror” Devil’s Drug.

I first encountered Marjane Satrapi’s comic book memoir, Persepolis, back in 2003. The book recounts the author’s childhood in and beyond revolutionary Iran, with Satrapi’s faux-naïf illustration luring the reader into unexpectedly adult territory. Through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl we see the collective hysteria of Islamic fundamentalism and its intimate, coercive evils, contrasted with smaller, more personal, acts of rebellion. As when a pair of black market Nikes, an ABBA recording or an inch of visible hair become gestures of truly hazardous proportions. Some four years later, Persepolis has been remade as an animated film, directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud. A recent screening at Cannes, where Persepolis shared the Jury Prize, upset the Iranian authorities, prompting the obligatory accusations of “Western bias” and claims that the film is “an anti-cultural act” and “an unreal picture of the outcomes and achievements of the Islamic revolution.” Audiences will be able to decide for themselves when the film is released later this year. Though not in Iran, methinks.

More at Satrapi’s blog.