these are the timesdirty beloved
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20.6.04

Johannes Pääsuke and Estonian Film
Johannes Pääsuke (1892-1918) who also was the author of the first Estonian feature film “Bear-Hunt in Pärnu District” (1914) and established the first estonian film studio “Estonia-Film” at Tartu in 1913.

[The images are so heavily watermarked they're like looking back through the century itself. Like he's sent them through the fires of two world wars and the noise and static of all that hectic inventing and mad hammering industry. It appeals to me that way, it's more accurate, though the nostalgia's gone, and the romance of it is flattened. You don't get the psychic hit of Estonian film pioneering, of this kid walking into the light, with all that hope and optimism of being 21 and having founded the first Estonian film studio. It's humbling, appropriate in a way. A reminder. It's not a show.
But it's still theft. The only people that have a right to proprietary disfigurement are the artists. Merchants have so blurred the distinction between artists as makers and owners, and simple ownership itself, that we have these ponderous absurd debates between champions of human endeavor and people who own art that they couldn't make with their small pinched souls if their lives depended on it. Music is not entertainment. That's a merchant's category, the naming itself is theft. It's as though anything not strictly necessary to maintain the body as an organism is extra, unnecessary.
Music is an essential human activity, as necessary to human survival as shitting and sleeping and fucking. As necessary as laughter.
Music was stolen from the people and sold back to them by predators whose only song is the clink and whisper of money changing hands.
Watermarking is theft, of something that has nothing to do with finance, a theft of the sacred. That's what open source is about. It's not childish idealism, it's human values going up against Leviathan, Moloch. It's mammals versus the machine. Watermarking is theft.]

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Johannes Pääsuke
Man with Two Cameras

Narva Muuseum
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"On 27 April 1912 he filmed, with a camera he made himself, the flight demonstration of the Russian aviator Sergei Utotchkin in Tartu."
two cameras—Ülle Lillak, The too short flight of Pääsuke
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millyard 1913
Johannes Pääsuke
Viru-Nigula kihelkond vanadel fotodel
Pada küla
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Anna Angunova 1989
Aldo Luud
Komi Hingus

Eesti Rahva Muuseum

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