Charlie Chaplin's Speech in "The Great Dictator (1940) Mixed with "Time" by Hans Zimmer from the "Inception" soundtrack.
Quote:
General Schulz: Speak - it is our only hope.
The Jewish Barber (Charlie Chaplin): I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.
Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men---machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.
Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
Why do I post this?
This video is a powerful example of new forms of collaborative authorship afforded by new media. I have always liked the new ways of looking at collaboration and authorship used to communicate new ideas provided by Lev Manovich’s take on new media in the early 2000’s - and have used his thinking before in Artichoke Blog - Keep your eyes on my nipples- Living on the fringes of conversation
New media culture brings with it a number of new models of authorship which all involve different forms of collaboration. Of course, collaborative authorship is not unique to new media: think of medieval cathedrals, traditional painting studios which consisted from a master and assistants, music orchestras, or contemporary film productions which, like medieval cathedrals involve thousands of people collaborating over a substantial period of time. In fact, romantic model of a solitary single author occupies a very small place in the history of human culture. New media, however, offers some new variations on the previous forms of collaborative authorship.
(1) Collaboration of different individuals and/or groups.
(2) Interactivity as collaboration between the author and the user.
(3) Authorship as selection from a menu.
(4) Collaboration between a company and the users.
(5) Collaboration between the author and the software.
(6) Remixing
(7) Sampling: New Collage?
(8) Open Source Model
And Hans Zimmer is noted for his community approach to collaboration when composing musical scores
Originally I had this idea that it should be possible to create some kind of community around this kind of work, and I think by muddying the titles - not having "you are the composer, you are the arranger, you are the orchestrator" - it just sort of helped us to work more collaboratively. It wasn't that important to me that I had "score by Hans Zimmer" and took sole credit on these things.
If only our schools (and those who work in them and for them) could muddy their titles.
But then I also liked this bit from the Chaplin 1940 text
Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
With our relentless focus on the machine in schools 70 years later it is easy to neglect kindness and gentleness - for what Rem Koolhaus claims for threat of virtuality in Junkspace (2002) pdf we might also claim for learning places dedicated to learning through the screen - virtuality becomes the new real - and "friendship" is re-imagined.
The constant threat of virtuality in Junkspace is no longer exorcized by petrochemical products; the synthetic cheapens. Junkspace is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real - stone, trees, goods, daylight, people - into the virtual. Entire mountains are dismembered to provide ever greater quantities of authenticity, suspended on precarious brackets, polished to a blinding state of flash that makes the intended realism instantly elusive. Stone only comes in light yellow, flesh, a violent beige, a soapilke green, the colors of communist plastics in the fifties. Forests are felled, their wood is all pale: maybe the origins of Junkspace go back to the Kindergarten... ('Origins' is a mint shampoo that stings the anal region). Color in the real world looks increasingly unreal, drained. Color in virtual space is luminous, therefore irresistible. The average Powerpoint presentation displays sudden bursts of Indian exuberance that Junkspace has been the first to translate into realityä, a simulation of virtual vigor. A surfeit of reality TV has made us into amateur guards monitoring a Junkuniverse... From the lively breasts of the classical violinist, the designer stubble of the big-brother outcast, the contextual pedophilia of the former revolutionary, the routine addictions of the stars, the runny makeup of the evangelist, the robotic movements of the conductor, the dubious benefits of the fundraising marathon, the explanation of the politician: the swooping movements of the TV camera suspended from its boom - an eagle without beak or claws, just an optical stomach - swallows images and confessions indiscriminately, like a trashbag, to propell them as cyber-vomit in space. TV studio sets - garishly monumental - are both the culmination and the end of perspectival space as we've known it: angular geometric remnants invading cosmic, starry infinities; real space edited for smooth transmission in virtual space, crucial hinge in an infernal feedback loop... the vastness of Junkspace extended to infinity. Because we spend our life indoors - like animals in a zoo - we are obsessed with the weather: 40% of all TV consists of presenters of lesser atrractiveness gesturing helplessly in front of of windswept formations, through which you recognize, sometimes, your own destination / current position. Conceptually, each monitor, each TV screen is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, cyberspace has become the great outdoors...