A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 2006
Original Title:
The Language of Things
Production Companies:
Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 33
An attempt to translate Walter Benjamin's theory "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man" into a montage using images from Tokyo's hightech amusement parks and artificial environments: precisely calculated acceleration and merry-go-round machines, sophisticated wave pools affecting bodies with promethic rhythms – how does the language of man and the language of things read in relation to the industrial development of hightech amusement parks and the calculability of sky-reaching affects? (Angela Melitopoulos) „There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents on language as such and on the language of man.“ (Walter Benjamin: "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man")
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.