‘Human sacrifice’ staged at CERN's Shiva Statue

[MacCruiskeen]

I don't agree at all, guruilla. The acting of Cruise and Kidman is not wooden, not in that film. Their performances are very carefully uninflected and low-key and understated and unemotional and uninvolving and distanced; i.e, Brechtian. The way they speak is also almost surreally slow. Kubrick took endless pains with the two of them, to get their performances just they way he wanted them. A hundred and more takes, when necessary. Nicole K. has talked about it.

Certainly he mixed styles: the guy in the costume shop acts very differently again: not just theatrically, but way over the top, you might say. (That's something other than wooden.) Or look at Alan Cummings's gay hotel receptionist. These actors are all well capable of acting differently. In each case, Kubrick knew exactly what he wanted, insisted on it, and got it.

So, in the orgy scene, he was making some kind of point about the banality cheesiness of evil, even when it is really murderous.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Fascinating that opinions about onscreen footage could vary so widely.

Surely only one of you is objectively correct about Eyes Wide Shut.

[MacCruiskeen]

Fascinating that opinions about onscreen footage could vary so widely.

Surely only one of you is objectively correct about Eyes Wide Shut.

Yes. I am.

[guruilla]

That needed to be stated twice, evidently.

This could be the biggest thread hijack of all, & a great way to divide the united; but at least it's a perfect example of the subjectivity of perception. The Alan Cummings scene is one of the most excruciatingly awful I have ever seen in a mainstream movie, as are the opening, intercut scenes with Cruise & the women/Kidman/the count, in which perhaps wooden isn't the word but the opposite, extravagantly hammy. I have watched the film half a dozen times (the most I have ever watched a film which I hate) & barring a handful of scenes, I have never found it anything but ludicrous throughout. The first hour sort of works for me (or did on 6th viewing) as an After Hours-style comedy, until it begins to attempt to pass for a dark thriller... That said, Kubrick was not an ordinary filmmaker & I think he was attempting something unusual with the film as regards audience perception manipulation, central to which I believe was making the worst film, dramatically, that he could make.

Which does dovetail rather neatly with the video that's the subject of the thread, i.e., a staged event which blurs the line between intentional fakeness and unintentional and leaves the viewer in a liminal state of WTF?

Eyes Wide Shut I have found almost literally hypnotic as a film, and its power to cast a spell for me is inseparable from how risible the film is in so many ways, by ordinary dramatic (or even aesthetic) criteria.

I note also that the same sort of "sophisticated" (same root as sophist) mindset which scoffs at the CERN video also has a tendency to revere Kubrick as a genius-artist-whistleblower exposing the rank under-layer of elite machinations.... (Maybe in Paths of Glory he was . . .)

[MacCruiskeen]

That needed to be stated twice, evidently.

Nah, I was just struggling clumsily to post an image.

Anyway: "excruciating" and "hypnotic" are good words to use, guruilla. The whole film is like an interminable dream, or nightmare. (I've seen it at least five times too, btw, and there are few films I watch more than once, if that.)

Only Synecdoche, New York captures that stuffy, airless dream/nightmare feeling more strongly: the way time both stretches and contracts, one damn thing follows another, sex is everywhere, and everything & everyone is just inexplicably opaque.

It's all good clean fun.

Eyes Wide Shut I have found almost literally hypnotic as a film, and its power to cast a spell for me is inseparable from how risible the film is in so many ways, by ordinary dramatic (or even aesthetic) criteria.

Yes. Kubrick wasn't struggling in vain to make a gripping thriller, or a sexy film, or a scary film, or a fast-paced murder mystery, or a deeply moving love story. He was after something else.

Tim Kreider wrote a great essay about all this, coming at it from a very different angle than the "esoteric" symbol-spotting Kubrick freaks: "Introducing Sociology". Years back, I started a thread about it, where JackRiddler commented:

Reading Kreider's essay and exposition I thought, finally, here is someone who saw the same movie I did, and describes all the same essentials (most of all that it's not about the inner psychological torments of the protagonists but very obviously about the brutal milieu of the super-rich in which they move).

viewtopic.php?f=43&t=8902

PS Kreider has since posted an Afterword (at that link), seven years after writing the original essay. It too is brilliant.

[stickdog99]

Mac said-
And we do not "empower this act with our attention" (!) any more than Mandela or Steve Biko empowered apartheid by paying very close and sustained attention to it (in order to oppose it), rather than merely ignoring it and hoping it would go away.

Surely you are not suggesting the single act of hoaxery we have been discussing rises to the level of evil that apartheid represents?

Come on. The relevant analogy here was that that you do not honor something heinous by acknowledging and analyzing it. You know that. I know that. We all know that. So why pretend that the aptness of the analogy somehow depends on an equivalent level of heinousness? It's nothing but a transparent rhetorical sleight of hand indicative of an amateur debater left with no substantial response. Couple this trick with a little mock outrage ("How dare you demean X by comparing it to Y?"), and the transparent misdirection is complete!

I despise such inanity. Please refrain from it.

[Burnt Hill]

And I said as much in the very next sentence of the very same post.
And made a small joke about juju, of course that would go over the head of anyone taking this event oh so seriously.

[stickdog99]

guruilla-
First off, your welcome, happy to clarify that for you.

Disregarding your false narratives and complete misunderstanding of my posts,
you seem to forget there is absolutely no proof of a ritual sacrifice at CERN.
But lets grant you the double reverse logic of it not mattering whether or not it was "real".
It is still so weak as to hold no power over human beings, unless that human being allows it to, which is what seems to be happening to you.
This small non-event appears to matter a great deal to you, and that says a lot about you, not the event. And that is fine.
Some of what you are saying is sensible, just not in the context of the op.
You could maybe stop disparaging your fellow contributors and listen, you don't have to agree.
Considering you have been aligning yourself with one of the most narcissistic (and least empathetic) of cohorts, am I asking too much?

Translation:

"1. There is no proof ritual sacrifice happened, and the specter of ritual sacrifice must be ignored.

2. If you do not simply ignore spectacles of ritual sacrifice, something is wrong with you..

4. Is it too much to ask you to acknowledge that only I am allowed to disparage fellow contributors around here?."

[Burnt Hill]

Not at all.
There were two dominant themes beginning this thread.
One is that the event may have been "real".
The other that regardless of the "reality" the event deserved analysis.
Which is the tack guruilla was on.
Unfortunately the first evidence he/she presented was a Sorcha Faal article.
Once I questioned that, there was complete communication breakdown between us.
Of which I played a part.

[MacCruiskeen]

Burnt Hill, what is your native language?

[stickdog99]

Burnt Hill, the OP video is undeniably bizarre The Independent's article in the OP about the video is even stranger. And you are the RI analog to The Independent article in the OP.

A human sacrifice has been staged in the grounds of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the home of the God Particle.

A video circulating online shows hooded figures apparently engaging in a ritual, staged under a huge statue of a Hindu deity, at the end of which a woman is stabbed.

But the footage appears to have been recorded as part of a prank by scientists at Europe’s top physics lab, which serves as the home of the Lagre Hadron Collider. The identity and motives of those behind the video hasn’t yet been discovered.

In the footage itself, multiple people are shown wearing long, flowing black robes – and one appears to have hiking boots on underneath. They are depicted walking around, before a woman moves onto the floor and is apparently stabbed.

As that happens, the person who is supposedly recording the video appears to react – firing out expletives and apparently running away, which causes the camera to move away from the scene before it is cut off.

The ceremony took place under the large states of the Hindu deity Shiva, which permanently stands at the complex. In both the video and real life, it is lit from below – which means that a huge shadow is cast across the building behind.

The Shiva statue was a “gift from India to celebrate its association with Cern”, according to the institution’s website.

“This deity was chosen by the Indian government because of a metaphor that was drawn between the cosmic dance of the Nataraj and the modern study of the ‘cosmic dance’ of subatomic particles,” the organisation says on a website unrelated to the prank. “India is one of CERN’s observer states, along with the USA, Russia and Japan.

A Cern spokesperson confirmed that the video had been filmed there, but said that it had been made without permission or knowledge. Cern said that it doesn’t “condone this type of spoof” because it can “give rise to misunderstandings about the scientific nature of our work”.

I would like to see TPTB at CERN forced to answer for this bizarre video. Who made it? Who was in it? Why was it made? Who posted it online? Why? Your role here seems to be to ridicule, dismiss, and speculatively answer such questions in the most innocent terms possible for authorities who never deign to do so officially.

It is as if you were a resident JREFeree.

[MacCruiskeen]

You're wasting your time, stickdog. You are trying to get Burnt Hill to engage in a rational argument and to do so in good faith. It's not what he's here for. He's here to troll the joint.

[Burnt Hill]

Sure I'd like to get answers to those questions too.
For reasons previously discussed in this thread, I don't think we will get them.
I do have my pov, and try to provide it as simply as possible, yes.
My intent is not to dismiss or demean any human being here, just the prank.

[MacCruiskeen]

See? It's like wrestling with a bar of soap.

Sure I'd like to get answers to those questions too.
For reasons previously discussed in this thread, I don't think we will get them.
I do have my pov, and try to provide it as simply as possible, yes.
My intent is not to dismiss or demean any human being here, just the prank.

Notice the completely disingenuous first line. And then notice how he sneaks the word "prank" in at the very end. Begging the question.

[...] I despise such inanity. Please refrain from it.

"Inanity" is admirably polite. And you can bet he won't refrain. That's not what he's here for.

[guruilla]

Expectations do tend to reinforce the undesired/expected behaviors. Hence 'do not feed the trolls'