love your neighbor

"most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do." /bertrand russell
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Neighbours
Norman McLaren, 1952, 8 min 6 s

In this Oscar®-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower. Film without words.

thousands more shorts and documentaries from the national film board of canada.
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bedrich smetana's moldau is one of my favorite classical compositions ever. instruments breathe in and out of each other, finishing each other's phrasing wherever necessary. bells on staffs dance along to a wedding polka by the riverbank. it ends like a w.h. auden poem and finishes like a firework. read about it while you listen to its beauty:



Vltava (1874) is the second symphonic poem in Má Vlast, and portrays the river, called the Moldau by German-speaking Czechs such as Smetana, which rises in the umava forest and flows through the Bohemian countryside and the city of Prague before joining the River Elbe. For Smetana, the course of the river provided a ready-made musical structure; Vltava is a sort of rondo, with the flowing theme of the river recurring in different forms between colourful episodes depicting Bohemian life and folklore along the riverside. Two brooks, portrayed on two flutes, form the sources of the river; these flow into the main stream of the river itself, the surging string melody which Smetana is said to have derived from a Swedish folk-song but which now sounds quintessentially Czech. Hunting horns are heard in the forests, before the river flows past a rustic wedding celebration where the guests are dancing a polka. Smetana led the way (here and in his String Quartet "From my Life") in introducing this light-hearted dance to symphonic music. The next episode portrays moonlight shimmering on the river in magical orchestral colours, and Smetana evokes the legend of the Rusalkas, the water-nymphs who feature prominently in Slav folklore and would later form the subject of Dvorák’s best-known opera. The music accelerates and grows agitated as the river crashes over the Rapids of St. John, above Prague, and finally sweeps through the Czech capital itself. The majestic chorale-theme of Vysehrad, the great rock-fortress that is the symbol of the Czech nation, towers over the closing bars, as the Vltava flows unstoppably onwards to the Elbe.