Happy Thanksgiving

 

     From dinner tables in northern Illinois (two in fact), Massachusetts, Long Island, Brooklyn, Toronto and Fairview, New Jersey, the crew from WitD wish all our friends and readers a very Happy Thanksgiving Day 2010, and continued good health to one and all!

     In addition to our revered leader in Kendal, United Kingdom, we extend our greeting to all our USA bloggers and dear friends, as well as those in Sydney Australia, Ipswich, UK, Santiago Chile, India, Tokyo, New Zealand, and other spots in Canada and the United Kingdom.  Thanksgiving is exclusively a US holiday -but the spirit and peace it imparts can be spread worldwide.

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29. Firing Range

(USSR 1977 10 min)

Director Anatoly Petrov Writer Sever Gansovsky

by Stephen Russell-Gebbett

A man, a soldier, lost his young son in the war. He blames the army, he blames war, he blames the world entire.

He brings a new weapon to be tested, a weapon that will change conflict forever. It is a tank that thinks, a tank that knows what the enemy is thinking. It can sense aggression and evade it. Best (or worst) of all, it can sense fear and annihilate it.

As soon as the idea of fear is introduced into the minds of the men, it detonates with apocalyptic force. The tank lays waste to them all, flattening….. One man escapes the onslaught and sprints after the tank striving desperately to remain within its ‘firing range’, frenziedly hurtling through the clouds of dust thrown up in its wake. With all his might he chases fear until at last he falls to his knees, exhausted.

Fear of war, fear of oppression dies when the spirit dies, as in Jiri Trnka’s The Hand. The effort of struggling here outweighs the reason for struggling. He gasps “I’m not afraid. I don’t care”. Only, tragically, that survival mechanism re-emerges and he realises that he could still be crushed under the caterpillar tracks. War wants you to give up, but once you do it cannot lay a finger on you.

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