George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother" ~ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four (1984)

With all the news wires abuzz over the past year and a half about the revelations concerning domestic spying in the United Kingdom and the United States  by Edward Snowden, the former technical contractor for the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) we at Far Future Horizons thought it only fitting that we present the most recent film adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The novel and film  illustrate the full magnitude of how our civil rights as citizens may eventually become eroded.

Snowden leaked details of top-secret U.S. and British government mass surveillance programs such as PRISM to the press. Has the Orwellian vision of the surveillance society become a reality?

Nineteen Eighty-Four, also known as 1984, is a 1984 British dystopian film written and directed by Michael Radford, based upon George Orwell's novel of the same name. The film follows the life of Winston Smith in Oceania, a country run by a totalitarian government. It stars John Hurt, Suzanna Hamilton and Richard Burton in his final film role.

After The Atomic War the world is divided into three states. London is a city in Oceania, ruled by a party who has total control over all its citizens. Winston Smith is one of the bureaucrats, rewriting history in one of the departments. One day he commits the crime of falling in love with Julia. They try to escape Big Brother's listening and viewing devices, but, of course, nobody can really escape...

Throughout Orwell’s novel and the film reference is made to Emmanuel Goldstein's book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism which is a fictional book that is a thematic and plot element integral to the novel. This explains how the world depicted in Orwell’s novel came into being from a historical perspective and is available online.

The novel Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) by George Orwell and the film version on DVD are both available from Amazon Books.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) .

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