Home video games: Nintendo was founded on this day in 1889.

 

It's the late 80s and Japan is in the midst of an economic and technological bubble. Like so many kids, Makoto (litt. “truth”) and his friends are obsessed with their game console. In anticipation of the release of the fourth instalment of their favourite game, rumours start doing the rounds. Some cartridges are cursed with the “No Life King”, meaning players who cannot complete the game, will die. The curse appears to spill over into the boys' real world. What if when you die in the game, you really really die…?

The Northern Hemisphere welcomes the autumn equinox

“Those flowers, take them away; they’re only funeral decorations. This is The Fall and this is a drudge nation. Your decadent sins will wreak discipline. You puritan, you shook me. I wash every day.”

– The Fall, New Puritan (1979), via

A fictional day in the life of choreographer Michael Clark, company, and friends in preparation of the dance piece New Puritans.

Dancing, or Patrick Swayze who passed away on this date in 2009.

“I caused dreams which caused death … this is my crime.”

– Dennis Nilsen

Dennis Nilsen was a lonesome, closeted gay man in Thatcher's London, whose desperation lead to multiple horrific killings. He'd ritually bathe and dress the bodies, and held on to them for company. Radical dance troupe DV8's interpretation of Nilsen's transgressions explores the horror of the act in suffocating beauty.

“What will happen when your machines become intelligent? When they become autonomous? When they have private thoughts? You humans look down on your machines because they're man-made. They're a product of your skills and labour. They weren't even domesticated like animals were. You see them simply as extensions of yourself, of your own will. I can't accept that. I can't accept subhuman status simply because I'm a machine based on silicon rather than carbon, electronics rather than biology. If I sound fanatical, it's because I've been trapped in a time warp. In a world where the full potential of machines hasn't been guessed at. A world where I have to wear a human disguise to be accepted? I came here too late. It will all end before the computers that already control the fate of the world have reached the point where they wanted to survive.”

– Friendship

“Past. Presence. And future.”

A seafaring explorer in commemoration of Ferdinand Magellan's (almost) completed circumnavigation in 1522. The Portuguese Magellan was enlisted by Spain to gain access to the Moluccas' spices and other trading goods by sailing west instead of east, thus avoiding the heavily armed Portuguese and Dutch traders who were plundering Southeast Asia, its peoples and cultures.

“Calypso the lustrous goddess tried to hold me back, deep in her arching caverns, craving me for a husband. So did Circe, holding me just as warmly in her halls, the bewitching queen of Aeaea keen to have me too. But they never won the heart inside me, never. So nothing is as sweet as a man's own country.”

– Homer, Odyssey, ca. 8^th century CE (via)

 

With the war over, Odysseus returns home by sea, a ten year voyage known as the Odyssey

A teacher for what would have been Christa McAuliffe's birthday.

“Ich mag Männer, bin 30 Jahre alt, von Beruf Lehrer.”

– Frank Ripploh

Frank Ripploh is a sexual ethics and biology teacher by day, and hedonistic gay man and aspiring pornographer by night. When Frank Ripploh, the man, publicly came out in 1978 in the tabloid Stern, he lost his teaching job and did become that filmmaker. Taxi zum Klo – litt. taxi to the john/loo – is his story. A frank pre-AIDS pre-Internet pre-victimhood depiction of male gay culture in West Germany. Maybe raw, possibly misogynist, definitely true to life.

Black: a building or structure*

“I first noticed it in Spring last year. […] It was from [my home] that I first saw it—its crest protruding over the roofs on the other side of the road. Surprised that I hadn’t noticed it before, I wondered what it was and then forgot about it for several weeks.”

– narrator

A man becomes aware of a formerly unnoticed black tower. Surely it's nothing, yet as the weeks pass, its looming presence takes over.

 

The black tower was a real structure, first noticed by filmmaker John Smith when he moved to East London. The building, actually the upper part of a hospital's water tower, was painted pitch black, and on sunny days appeared to be a cutout in the sky. By framing the shots in such a way that only part of the surroundings is visible, and editing them in a narrative framework, Smith creates a new context suggesting movement. This style of montage called creative geography, or artificial landscape, was developed by Lev Kuleshov and enables filmmakers to expand existing material and narrative into something that usually is only available to prose poetry.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.