Jeux interdits, René Clément, 1952

Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological, but also mental catastrophe. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.

— Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive

In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea (1924-25), director unknown

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself.

— Adorno & Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Early nature documentary made by F. Percy Smith (1880-1945)

by Kseniya Vaschenko

To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete [...] Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal, or -vegetable, becomes-molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible. These becomings may be linked to each other by a particular line [...] or they may coexist at every level, following the doorways, thresholds, and zones that make up the entire universe [...]

Gilles Deleuze (trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco) Literature and Life 

Mural, 1926, Fernand Léger