Yellow, in food or fashion*

“Tourists prefer the trendy colors, yellow and blue. Pacing fancies, hotels are painted yellow and blue. Blue wins. All women want to be fashionable. All women wear blue, except the English, those learning to swim, and the Germans, who are dedicated to green.”

– narrator

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

Provocateur Boyd Rice and friends perform a Satanic rite on August 8, 1988; exactly 20 years minus one year minus one day after the Tate-LaBianca murders.

“The entire world is rotten and corrupt… to us they're dead people who refuse to lay down, they're cadavers”

– Boyd Rice speaking to Geraldo Rivera (via)

Please note that the linked article is written by an dimwitted ignoramus completely oblivious of Boyd Rice's, and Anton LaVey's, prankster background.

A character has a camera or takes photos*

 

It buzzes on the set of Le mépris. These mosquitos, the Italians say paparazzi, swarm La Bardot, make it merely impossible for anyone – themselves included – to do their job. But Bardot knows them, too well, and gives them what they want, when she wants it.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

Someone at a theme park or national park*

“Telephones were still working, we are told, and the air-conditioning and refrigerators in many houses were still on.”

– narrator

The highest peak in the Parc national de la Guadeloupe is called La Grande Soufrière. The volcano had erupted before and was bound to do soon again. Hastily, the 76,000 islanders were evacuated with one farmer staying put. For Herzog reason to halt the editing of Herz aus Glas and make his way to the island.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

Someone makes an excuse on Sorry I Was on a Boat Day (USA)

“One thing I find appalling is when people who were [Vichy President] Pétain supporters come up to me and tell me what they did for the Resistance. Sometimes it's unreal. “Oh, Mr. Gaspard, if only you knew what we did, what I did for the Resistance.” Go ahead, pal, tell me all about it. I try to stay calm. I'm a salesman, and I want to sell my product. The company doesn't pay me to do politics and pick fights, so sometimes I find myself obliged to listen to a song and dance of some guy who shows me a drawer and gets his wife to confirm that there was indeed a revolver in that drawer during the war, a revolver which he was supposedly ready to use on the Germans. Only he never actually used it. History doesn't lie.”

– Émile Coulaudon aka Colonel Gaspard, former head of the French Resistance in Auvergne

Marcel Ophüls documents the people of Clermont-Ferrand as the microcosm of Vichy France, part of Europe's only country that happily collaborated with its occupier, Nazi Germany. What were their justifications, their excuses, their motivations? Was it survival, habit, greed? Comfort, conformity, obedience, fear?

 

And what is yours?

The birth, life, death or teachings of Jesus on Ascension Day

“Ich bin nicht der offizielle Kirchenjesus, ich bin nicht euer Superstar.”

– Klaus Kinski

It is November 20. The Jesus Christus Erlöser tour brings Klaus Kinski to Berlin's Deutschlandhalle. His monologue, spoken from Jesus the revolutionary's perspective, brings out the hecklers. It's 1971, the post-68 generation is not satisfied with words. It wants to debate, dissect, and devour their Saviour.

Amnesty International Day: someone who fights for human rights

“Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person”

– The Right to Live, the third of the Human Rights

Filmmaker #HaniJawharieh died while working for the #PLO Film Unit, an organisation fighting for the rights of the Palestinian people. His own death in 1976, which he caught on camera, is edited into this documentary.

An LGBTQ actor, director, or character over 55 for Honor Our LGBT Elders Day (USA)

“Ich bin meine eigene Frau” (“I am my own woman/wife”)

– Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, in response to her mother's request to settle and get married

The extraordinary life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berliner, gender bender, Nazi killer (her own father, with a wooden rolling pin, mind you), prisoner, custodian, museum founder, barmaid, Stasi informer (arguably), den mother to the GDR's LGBT+ youngsters, but most of all, her own woman.

An actor, director or character named Anthony for National Anthony Day (USA).

“Everything comes from the Great Book of Nature. Human attainments are an already printed book.”

– Antoni Gaudí

A computer mouse: the first personal computer mouse debuted on this day in 1981.

“To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.”

– Theodore J. Kaczynski

A Gedankenspiel.

 

Similar to the way moveable print has accelerated the spread of ideas, the personal computer mouse accelerated the speed of which individualist's ideas can spread. However, like the printing press and unlike the spoken word, the mouse can only point and enhance pre-existing notions, thus neutering any prospect of revolutionary change on an individual level.

 

In a grotesque snub to nature, the pointing finger has transcended the mouse, detaching our minds from our bodies in one infinite scroll.