A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 2023
Original Title:
vista in the sky
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 10
An incisive and disturbing meditation, vista in the sky involves the viewer in a journey to the dark heart of contemporary society’s ambitions of growth and success under capitalism. The meditation is guided by Dhātu-Ba'dan*, a spiritual healer named after an ancient Himyarite goddess of the oasis and worshiped at tree-circled pools. Dhātu-Ba'dan was said to forbid any invocation to her without a priestess in her sanctuary, employing a khalimah (i.e. 'Dreamer') who would sleep to receive an oracle in the form of a prophetic dream. Today, tarot card readers take on this mediating role, inhabiting the damp, leaky corners of the web and using network technology to mediate the relationship with their earnest followers.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.