Large Fierce Mammal

Film noir
/ film nwär /
noun:

• A style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.
• A film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.

Today’s Dark Sentiment presents two short films of the modern era that epitomize, “… a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.” To my mind, each also carries the message that the further we go, the more that is of True Value gets missed, or lost in translation. Whatever the reason, human development perpetually misses the point, on the small and grand scale alike, both with ourselves and everything else, world without end. Until it ends that is, and what also gets missed is that when people speak of “saving the planet”, what they really mean is making sure it has people on it because, to their way of thinking, without them nothing else matters.

I find these films also highlight one of the many reasons I hate any reference to “raising awareness” of anything for any fucking reason. If that were even possible, we’d be more widely aware of these Truths by now, but yet current events mirror the sins of the past.

The Silent City is the tale of a small band of soldiers making their way through a post apocalyptic wasteland that was once a thriving metropolis. It’s the work of Irish Film Director Ruairi Robinson, whose website describes him thus, in part:

Ruairí fell to Earth in 1978. Found on the streets by a kindly fortune teller after having been raised heretofore by wolves, she raised him some more as a circus trapeze artist. Upon discovering their evil plot for world domination, Ruairí fled, crying manly tears, and vowed to use his powers for good instead of evil. So he joined the Army, killing civilians in countries all over the world in the name of peace.

So now, welcome to The Silent City.

Our next presentation, Balance, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in  1989, and was directed by twin German brothers Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein. In its review, Short of the Week begins:

From post Communist Germany comes this remarkable social experiment that serves as an allegory in explaining the fall of Soviet Communism – all without uttering a single word.

And ends:

And so a parable about selfishness becomes an allegory about German society and Soviet Communism at its fall. The sad and ironic ending of Balance, who is at fault? The men that fail to do what is best for them? Or the system that fails to acknowledge this human quality?

I believe the film delves deeper than that, leading to an outcome that is at once obvious and expected in its exposure of just how fragile is the veneer of “civilization” and cooperation in  the name of the “common good”, in this time, and all past times for which evidence exists. But you decide for yourself.