Trafic v. Traffic?
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot v. Mr Bean's holiday?
Jour de fête v. Jazz on a Summer's Day?
Playtime v. Clockwork Orange?

The mind boggles...

You can't be me, I'm taken

Actually this does raise a serious, complex issue - film-makers generally make films  for people within their own culture  - and generational experience (usually unconsciously). People within that culture/generation will generally have an intuitive understanding of the film which is difficult for those from outside that context to share. It's a bit like jokes - some of which can be very topical - and if you have to have them explained you often lose the humour.

 Some films - like other works of art - transcend their cultural context and have a very wide appeal. But this can be deceptive; one might understand the plot and general ideas and feel one has understood the film - but miss a lot if one's culture and generation are very different from those of the maker.

I was lucky enough to have a very good lecturer on the film course I did years ago, Peter Harcourt. He wrote a book of the course: "Six European Directors" and he did very detailed analyses of some of their films, a biography (many critics stop there -individualism rules), but also a very wide-ranging look at each director's culture and their relation to that culture (and other directors, writers, etc. within it). Bergman was one of the directors and I came to understand his films far more deeply due to understanding the biographical and cultural context presented by Harcourt. In this case it's relevant to know that as a youth Bergman was an admirer of Hitler - and was shocked and ashamed when he learned about the concentration camps.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice. Blog - Nice Experience

A clue to future "other purposes" may lie in the Act's parentage. The proud House "mother" of the Patriot Act's evil twin is Rep. Jane Harmon (D-California), chair of the Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee. Representative Harmon has admitted to a long and productive relationship with the RAND Corporation, a California based think-tank with close ties to the military-industrial-intelligence complex. RAND's 2005 study, "Trends in Terrorism," contains a chapter titled, "Homegrown Terrorist Threats to the United States." Is this Act a bastard child?

    Keep in mind, the RAND Corporation was set up in 1946 by Army Air Force Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold as "Project RAND," sponsored by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Keep in mind also, Donald Rumsfeld was its chairman from 1981 to 1986, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's felonious former chief of staff, and Condoleezza Rice were trustees. Enough said!

RAND maintains "homegrown terrorism" will not be the result of jihadist sleeper cells. Rather, it will result from anti-globalists and radical environmentalists who "challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world's ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare."

    Further, RAND claims anti-globalists and radical environmentalists "exist in much the same operational environment as al Qaida" and pose "a clear threat to private-sector corporate interests, especially large multinational business." Therein lies the real "other purposes."

Now tell me again that there are no conspiracies among those in power to protect their profits and keep us peasants in our place...  

Challenging the "intrinsic qualities of capitalism" is poised to become heresy and thought crime, predefined as "extremist" in a environment of ideological hegemony crafted over 4 decades and more by the capitalists' think tanks and wholly owned media.  In other words, half the discussions here at ET would qualify as exchanges of dangerously radical ideas.

How flattering that they consider us enough of a threat to "private-sector corporate interests, especially large multinational business" that they need Orwellian/Stalinist legislation to stamp us out.  I had no idea we were doing so well.

Seriously, these people are scary.  They have almost captured unlimited unitary executive power, they have declared who they intend to demonise and persecute, and they are putting the mechanisms in place to do it...  Frankly, BushCo frighten me a lot more than "would-be Leader for Life" Chavez.

sorry, all this doesn't belong on this thread, it's just that The Lives of Others is so poignant a portrait of a Surveillance State, its pathos, its idiocy, its tragedy... its horrific absurdity... it breaks one's heart to think of it all happening all over again, but with nastier weapons and more powerful spy gear -- and all in service, not even of a powerful ideal gone wrong (there's almost a tragic poetry to that), but of nothing more than the ideology of untrammelled greed...  such a sordid cause in whose name to unleash the dogs of snooping and state terror.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...