Hacker Cinema
How I Ended This Summer
Как я провёл этим летом
2010 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Alexey Popogrebsky
A polar station on a desolate island in the Arctic Ocean. Sergei, a seasoned meteorologist, and Pavel, a recent college graduate, are spending months in complete isolation on the once strategic research base. Pavel receives an important radio message and is still trying to find the right moment to tell Sergei, when fear, lies and suspicions start poisoning the atmosphere...
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
The nice thing about unclarified metaphors is that you can often find meaning in things from your own perspective, experience, and life. And most importantly - you're not just seeing shapes in the clouds. Many metaphors are not really about what happened in some situation, even when they literally are, but about humanity. And we tend to repeat the exact same behaviors over and over again, with little but technology providing a change of scenery.
As an example of this, much (and probably most) of good modern Russian cinema is a completely unexpressed metaphor between "old Russia" and "new Russia." What that actually means, oddly enough, isn't especially relevant. In America one could easily see it as a metaphor between religion and secularism, urban and rural, woke or not, liberal and conservative, and so on endlessly. You can even see it as an internal metaphor of our younger selves vs our older selves.
And the great thing is - is that it, in many ways, fits all of these contrasts perfectly. Because the details of the exact change that's "really" being contrasted, aren't nearly as relevant as how we, as humans, handle change and conflict. Or in this specific metaphor, how both sides of some issue may one another as wrong/inferior/flawed/etc from their own perspective. And how both are simultaneously right and wrong.
A movie that's absolutely excellent on this front is, "How I Ended This Summer." Even the title of the movie itself is a metaphor. The first time I watched that movie I did not especially like (nor dislike) it, but when you stop watching it literally, and as a broad unclarified metaphor it morphs into an excellent piece of art - even with 0 personal context of what the metaphor is "really" about.
Also available with English subtitles for free streaming at:
https://tubitv.com/movies/30843/how-i-ended-this-summer
One of them kinda played a starring role in a film called "How I Ended This Summer"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Ended_This_Summer
It's a beautiful and grim piece of Russian film making...
Unrelated but there is a movie that features one of those RTG as an interesting prop in the story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Ended_This_Summer