These same ambiguities prevail in Kurosawa's films with contemporary settings -- Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, among others -- bleak visions of post-war criminality that draw on the same sources as the Italian neo-realist cinema.
I had to take the top off my skull when I was writing Crash and start touching pain and pleasure centres to see what happened.
Schools of architecture and design like Art Deco and the Modernist movement were engines running forward into the future.
In the years after the Second World War, the future was the air that everyone breathed.
It's quite possible that deregulation of the airwaves will lead to a deregulation of the imagination.
Each of us is little more than the meagre residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives.
Even on the domestic level, our homes are just loaded with consumer electronics which have changed our lives to a considerable degree -- TV sets, CD players, video cameras, microwave ovens, freezers and all the other gadgets which have changed our lives and, indeed, our sense of ourselves.
Look at all those Christs squirming away in their own blood, pinned to their crosses like characters in a horror comic.