Abraham Lincoln: Godfrey Reggio's Film

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most famous presidents of the United States of America solely because of the emancipation proclamation. Although it is an executive order and forces the South to obey it, the South soon comes to terms with and accepts it, which gives hope to more crooked morals that can be straightened out. Godfrey Reggio’s film, Powaqqatsi, is a series of shots that unveils a number of Third World countries in such a way that it tells a story a dying culture; it’s assailant, modernization. Through Powaqqatsi, it’s viewers are able to witness both the countries’ internal, it’s citizens, and external, it’s physical landscape, transformations. Likewise, Counting Crows’ famous song Big Yellow Taxi, Kerstin Langenberger’s progressive

After the second act, an almost identical scene appears. The same sky and sunset reoccur; however, the only difference is a cloudy smokestack of a factory crudely replaces the mountain range. The replacement of the smokestack to the mountains symbolizes the newly found relevance of modernization, therefore industrialization is now the top priority of the Emerging nations. The smokestack also appears in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as the common man. In the book, Gore quotes Upton Sinclaire, who states “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” In other words, the man’s salary restricts him from not understanding the topic. An Inconvenient Truth shows that whether it be the right thing to do, if the man is not benefiting financially, he does not care. In First World nations, greed overpowers the sense of the morally right direction and overwhelms the common man’s capability to function outside of his salary’s range. Equivalently, greed for modern technology occupies Third World countries’ attention that should be focusing on their former life, the nature-centered one. Therefore, the manipulator of priorities tends to be