1954 BBC Telecast of 1984 with Peter Cushing

grladams at teleport.com grladams at teleport.com
Thu Apr 5 19:34:57 CDT 2007


Thanks for invoking Orwell and this flipping of intention by the defenders
of capitalism... I have been thinking alot about the connections between
doublethink and ATD's co-consciousness, I realize they're not exactly the
same but... just offering another point.

Here's a clip from wikipedia

when Winston starts to think about doublethink as he exercises:

“ His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim
to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then
to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to
forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process
itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the art of
hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink'
involved using doublethink.[2] 

According to the novel, doublethink is:

“ The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind
simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies
while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back
from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of
objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which
one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word
doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word
one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of
doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie
always one leap ahead of the truth.[1] ” 




Original Message:
-----------------
From: Dave Monroe against.the.dave at gmail.com
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 16:46:49 -0500
To: richard.romeo at gmail.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: 1954 BBC Telecast of 1984 with Peter Cushing


On 4/4/07, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6581190966603628731&q=bbc+duration%3
Along&hl=en

Thanks!  This, however, might be of interest as well ...

-----

In his recent biography, INSIDE GEORGE ORWELL, Gordon Bowker says that
after Orwell's death the CIA got control of the film rights for Animal
Farm and 1984:

excerpts from pages 421 to 423:

"...Three weeks after Orwell was buried, Muggeridge and Tosco Fyvel
went with Sonia to discuss with Fredric Warburg the future publication
of his work. The meeting, at which Warburg presided, agreed that the
next George Orwell book should be a collection of essays to be called
Shooting An Elephant - his idea, according to Muggeridge. Sonia's part
in the discussion was not recorded. Richard Rees, it seems, although
named as joint literary executor in Orwell's will was not present.
What Sonia was not to know was that Muggeridge and Fyvel, through
their wartime intelligence work, had contacts with the CIA, and
shortly afterwards, with Warburg, would be involved in the CIA-backed
Congress for Cultural Freedom....Later Warburg would become even more
involved with this shadowy organization when he published and
distributed Encounter magazine secretly funded by the CIA. With these
influential advisers helping Sonia decide what happened to Orwell's
work from early on, it is not difficult to see how decisions were made
which served the interests of Secker and Warburg, and the ideological
aims of her three advisers, as much as the literary estate, and
affected the author's reputation."

"Orwell's two last novels soon became weapons in the hands of
anti-Communist defenders of capitalism opposed to even the democratic
socialism for which he himself stood. The fate of these two books at
the hands of CIA-backed Hollywood production companies, which Frances
Stonar Saunders exposed in her book Who Paid the Piper?, has been
blamed on Sonia. She had been charged with allowing his works to be
misrepresented in the service of the right-wing Cold War cause, while
all the time it appears that Warburg and others were guiding her in
that direction. Orwell himself had been alive to these dangers and
would have avoided them, as he had in standing up to the
Book-of-the-Month Committee and complaining about the
misrepresentation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in Life magazine. But Sonia
was politically naive and, once film rights were sold, control of any
resulting script and film would have been out of her hands."

"In her book Stonar Saunders notes that Warburg took a close interest
in the screenplays of both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. This
seems to point to his hand being somewhere in the deal with Howard
Hunt*, the CIA man who bought the film rights to the former from Sonia
shortly after Orwell's death, and helped set up the first film
production of the latter....Warburg's main purpose would have been the
effect of the huge film publicity on his sales (in 1954 he published
an edition of Animal Farm with illustrations from the CIA-backed Halas
and Bachelor cartoon), though he had also come to commit himself to
the Cold War offensive, and was fully aware of the true funding behind
Encounter. Later Sonia quarelled with Warburg, but at the outset of
her literary executorship (from which Rees seems to have been simply
excluded either by the 'bustling' Sonia or the calculating Warburg)
she must have put her trust in the publisher's judgement and that of
advisers such as Fyvel and Muggeridge."

"Inevitably, the takeover of the film rights of Orwell's last two
books produced movies tailored to ideological ends. In the cartoon
version of Animal Farm the banquet at which the pigs become
indistinguishable from their human oppressors was changed. Orwell's
pessimistic intention was thereby obscured and the messge that the
tyrannical Stalinist pigs are no different from the cruel capitalist
farmers was lost. In the Hollywood Nineteen Eighty-Four the
pessimistic conclusion - that Winston, the spark of individualism
snuffed out, is reduced to loving Big Brother and awaiting the bullet
in the back of the neck - was again replaced by the optimistic message
that the individual is uncrushable, and Winston dies with the cry of
'Down with Big Brother!' on his lips...."

-----

... "the Hollywood Nineteen Eighty-Four" being, of course, not the one
linked above, or http://imdb.com/title/tt0087803/, but, rather
http://imdb.com/title/tt0048918/ ...

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