Jonathan Bowden film recommendation thread.

"With film you can go straight into the front cortex. Because that’s what visualization does. Before you hear a sound, before you hear the music, you see the image, an image gone straight into the mind." Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

"In Schrader’s piece, Mishima’s seen as a man whose death is foretold by the nature of the ideology he adopts. One which is both an emotional, a literary, a speculative, a martial and an intellectual ideology."

Now, ethically most pagan systems are very different. Paganism tends to believe in retributive violence. It tends to believe that if you push me I’ll push you back. It tends to believe even in violence and aggression as the forethought before being attacked oneself. It tends to have an honor-based system whereby morality is perceived hierarchically.

The Hindu phase for Savitri Devi/Maximiani Portas, is her belief that there should be a living paganism rather than a dead one, and her belief in certain primal Hindu beliefs which are mainstream, completely mainstream in Hindu society and in the Asian subcontinent: the belief that Hinduism is a partly racial religion, the belief that whites or partly-whites formed it; the belief—semi-mythological, to mythological, to semi-actual—to be believed in the minds of tens and tens of millions,

Less well known Bowden speeches: Tameside 2006. Not to be confused with his 2008 Tameside speech that he uploaded to his own channel, which is one of his best and best known. 2006 only has 2.2K views. Hans Jürgen Syberberg: Leni Riefenstahl's Heir? nobody listens to this but is has some of his best cultural analysis. He also wrote a short essay on Syberberg: jonathanbowden.org/articles_revie…

The core of her is these artistic books: the anti-Soviet book We the Living; the libertarian poem to heroic individualist freedom, Anthem; the poem about the artist as almost a supernatural creator, The Fountainhead, where the artist is seen as a heroic figure the artist as a dictator, the artist as a sort of Abraham Lincoln crossed with Shakespeare crossed with Saddam Hussein crossed with the man who walked on the moon. That’s what Howard Roark is.

Breker’s work is quite varied, in that it contains archaic, semi-brutalist, unshorn, martial relief, and post-Cycladic material. There is also the resolution of an inner tension leading to a Stoic calm, or a heroic and semi-religious rest, that recalls the Mannerist art of the 16th century.

Sartre wanted to bring together two enormous areas of theory. He wrote a book called The Critique of Dialectical Reason. He could only write volume one. It’s 750 pages. It’s in New Left Books, and it’s a real, real ripper of a read! New Left Books produce it. He wrote it on amphetamine, high in jazz cafés, speeding away like this.

I don’t know Leicester very well, but when I went there a couple of times in the last five years it struck me that, like a lot of our urban spaces, it’s been effectively ruined at several different levels. It’s been ruined demographically, it seems to be slightly ruined to a southerner like me by putting a motorway or several motorways right through the heart of it, which is what they’ve done with Leeds and several other cities.

The creation of the modern world against tradition - the dilemma of modernity - created an abscess, a form of degeneracy or delirium, in the general cultural 'mind', the collective nature of identity. For in nearly all other forms of art, whether Ancient or Medieval - the creative and the destructive, the ugly, the blasphemous, and the divine had been part of the same whole, it had inevitably called forth the same correspondences.