TV Multiversity

Two Ethnographic Films on Muslim Music

2012-02-15T08:02:00.000+09:00

Ethnomusicologist John Baily researched, directed and edited two films during a two-year Leverhulme Film Training Fellowship at The National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the United Kingdom. 'Amir: An Afghan Refugee Musician's Life in Peshwar, Pakistan' was made in 1985 (with photography by Wayne Derrick), and 'Lessons from Gulam: Asian Music in Bradford' in 1986 (with photography by Andy Jillings). In each film Baily worked with a student cameraman who was in his last year of studies. The films are very much in the documentary style of the NFTS, forged by its director, Colin Young. The film making process is acknowledged in the films rather than hidden, and the (short) commentaries are spoken by the film maker in the first person. While editing the films, Baily was able to benefit from feedback by other film makers at the NFTS during regular weekly screening of the work in progress.

In 'Amir,' all the dialogue and interviews are subtitled, as well as the song texts. In 'Lessons from Gulam' the performers, Asian immigrants in the British city of Bradford, speak English, thus subtitling was unnecessary, but Baily did not subtitle the song texts (for financial reasons or to leave the image free, or for both reasons?). The audience that does not speak and understand Urdu would certainly be grateful for translations of the songs, and not every film spectator will have the opportunity to read the forthcoming booklet where the translations are given.

It is worthwhile reproducing the film maker's stated aims, since some ethnomusicologists and anthropologists claim that ethnographic or ethnomusicological films should be made (and judged) with a well defined audience in mind (e.g. archive, university, museum, TV, etc.). The accompanying booklet indicates that the film 'Amir' had to satisfy several audiences: '1.The general audience. 2. Specialists in ethnomusicology, anthropology and regional studies. For them the film is a report on the condition of Afghan refugee musicians in Peshawar. 3. The Afghan audience, for whom very few films had ever been made in their own languages, Pashto and Dari. 4. It had to satisfy the cinematic criteria of the NFTS audience, concerned less with anthropology than with making good movies.' The film

'Lessons from Gulam' had similar aims, with exception of the general audience: '1. The Bradford audience; not only had the interests of the musicians themselves to be paramount, but if one of the goals of the film was to help promote Asian music education in Bradford then it was important to present the musicians in as positive a way as possible according to Muslim values. 2. The film had to have an educational content and be of interest to school teachers who were faced with the problem of introducing Asian music into their curricula. 3. The film had to be ethnomusicologically sound.' 4. was identical with point 4 for 'Amir.'

According to the film aesthetics of the NFTS (summarized by Baily), there should be 'no supplementary information, all the information needed to interpret the action (or to arrive at an interpretation) is provided by the action itself'. In other words, each film should stand by itself. I have seen (and enjoyed) Baily's films on several occasions (ethnomusicology and film colloquia) without supplementary information other than his introduction and answers to the audience's questions. But in reading the manuscripts of the forthcoming booklets, I was struck by how much more informative the films become when complemented by the written texts. These not only give a general introduction to the historical and social context, and to the research, but also discuss shooting and editing strategies, and provide shot by shot analyses describing the conditions in which each shot was made and why it was edited in that way, as well as what happened before or after the shot, and what had not been kept in the final editing of the film. There are also transcriptions of Baily's spoken commentaries and translations of the song texts (but not of the dialogues and interviews).

Many ethnographic film makers claim that films should be accompanied by printed study guides. John Baily provides an outstanding model for such booklets for ethnomusicological films. One might only regret the absence of musical transcriptions and analyses. The main focus of the booklets is film making, and on this topic I would have liked to know a bit more about the actual working methods with the cameraman during shooting. Who made decisions about focal length, angle, framing, length of the shots, mobility or fixity to the camera, etc.? From the booklet we learn that, in the case of 'Lessons from Gulam,' 'the shoot was characterized by endless self-questioning and discussions with Andy Jillings (the cameraman) about what we were doing, about the subject of the film, with constant reviews of what had been shot and what else required to be shot.' I have heard from other film makers that it is difficult to control efficiently the shooting while simultaneously making the sound recordings. The soundman has to choose the best position to pick up the best sound without being in frame, he has to be careful not to get extraneous noises from the microphone and cables, and he cannot communicate in sign language with the cameraman, tap on his shoulder or guide him in lengthy sequence-shots. Ethnomusicologists who consider making films with a similar minimal crew would certainly be grateful for more information about how Baily managed to both direct and record the sound. As the study guides are not printed yet, it is maybe not too late to include something about that.

'Amir' is a film portrait of an Afghan professional musician, a refugee in Pakistan. Amir is presented in a wide range of situations, showing the environment and conditions of a refugee's life: in Peshwar's street, at his home, in his band leader's ‘office,’ in a cemetery and at a shrine, etc. He plays the rubab in the band of a well-known singer and harmonium player, and we see him playing solo and in the group at private sessions and during a Pakistani wedding. He takes music lessons from a Pakistani master musician who speaks with some beautiful metaphors about the value of music. While the spectator might expect that refugees perform many resistance songs, an interesting discussion about an audio cassette reveals that their condition forces them to record love songs ‘for business’ instead. There are some striking cinematographic high points in the film. At the wedding nationalistic songs which have meaning for the Pakistani wedding guests as well as for the Afghan musicians are filmed in a virtuoso sequence-shot. The camera follows the playing, dancing, offering of money and the shooting of a rifle (with the additional dramatic insert of a Kalashnikov being fired). Another strong emotional impact is achieved by a special editing effect in image and sound. Speaking about his life as a refugee Amir starts to weep and, hearing an aircraft approaching, he looks up to the sky. This, of course, evokes bombers devastating his homeland. The sound amplifies and cross-fades into the sound of the next image showing a river, a ‘metaphorical river of tears.’ After the first surprise, the emotion is taken away as quickly as it arose when we discover Amir sitting by the river in his usual cheery mood, speaking about this resort where he passes Ramadan in the cool mountain air.

'Lessons from Gulam' is a film about ethnomusicological research. As Baily says: ‘The data shown - the lessons and rehearsals - are the research data, they are not illustrative of a wider investigation or set of conclusions. They show some facets of musical enculturation in Bradford, but the film does not tell us what these add up to. Rather, they should prompt further inquiry.’ The film is also a double portrait of two friends, Gulam and Shaukat, amateur musicians respectively of Gujerati and Pakistani origin, living in the British city of Bradford, who specialize in a type of Muslim religious music called qawali, which has been popularized through films and records. Inter-titles introduce each scene and thus reveal the overall structure of the film. Scene 1’Introduction to Gulam and Shaukat’ presents the two friends in their environment: John Baily has a short lesson from Gulam. In scene 2 ‘Shaukat’s Ghazal Lesson,’ Shaukat has problems in playing harmonium and singing at the same time. Scene 3 ‘Workshop’ focuses on rhythm: a third member of Gulam's group appears. Norman, an English guitarist and sitar player, who demonstrates metric cycles to a school class; later a young boy teaches an adult tabla playing, Gulam's father, formerly a professional drummer, gives a demonstration of his art. Scene 4 ‘Qawali Rehearsal’ shows the main performance context for Gulam’s group: playing on Sunday afternoons for the musicians' own enjoyment. In scene 5 'The Touchstone', we are again at a workshop where Norman teaches the schoolchildren a well known movie-song, and Shaukat performs another song. Scene 6 'Ramadan: The month of Fast' is a section without music but which talks about the fast. The high point of the final scene 7 'Celebrating the End of the Fast' is the performance of a song by Gulam accompanied by his group. The film ends somewhat abruptly with a very short shot showing Shaukat arriving in the street and saying to the camera: 'Am I a bit late?' In the booklet, Baily justifies his choice of cutting in this shot taken on a different day, saying that for cinematographic reasons it was essential to end the film with Gulam and Shaukat in close proximity.’ To that I would argue that with his last shot the proximity is not shown (they are not together), and that this abrupt ending gives the film a conclusion which is at odds with its main focus, musical enculturation. Baily honesty reports Shaukat's complaint that ‘it made him look as though he was always late.’ But apart from this ending, which I dislike as much as Shaukat, I admire the way the film is carefully thought out and edited. Those who believe that making movies is simply a matter of pressing a video camera button and putting the shots together as they come may learn a lot through studying the booklet and analysing the film at a micro level (cutting from one shot to another) and at a macro level (the overall structure). Besides taking ‘Lessons from Gulam’ in performing qawali music, one can take 'Lessons from Baily' in how to structure a film.

Despite this compliment about the editing of 'Lessons from Gulam' (which was more difficult to edit than 'Amir'), I think 'Amir' is more successful from the cinematographic point of view, since the success of portrait films relies heavily on the personality of the figure portrayed. Amir is a stronger personality, more articulate and more open about himself, and his situation as a refugee contributes to the emotional power of the film. In contrast, in 'Lessons from Gulam,' Gulam and Shaukat are shy, 'even when performing,' as Baily writes in his booklet, admitting that he had to ask 'too many questions in order to elicit information.' Indeed, the viewer gets the impression that every bit of information had to be squeezed out of the musicians. This situation, of which Baily was fully aware and about which he felt uncomfortable, prompted him to resign his status as unseen film maker and interviewer, and enter the film as an actor, a learning and performing musician. 'Through joining them on the other side of the camera I was able to experience something of what I was asking of them, and at the same time give them more confidence.' Besides the difference in personality and the social and political context, Amir's more open response may also come from the fact that he is an old friend of John Baily who had worked with him in Afghanistan 10 years before, and they share memories of life in Herat before the Soviet invasion. On the other hand, Baily's short period of fieldwork with Gulan anti Shaukat in Bradford was conducted just before filming started.

Both films have longer shots than most conventional TV documentaries, with many spectacular takes, for example when the walking cameraman accompanies walking people, even following them during changing light conditions (these are ‘training films’ and the cameraman wanted to show his professional skill). The remarkable long sequence shots are particularly relevant since they allow one to see the performance techniques of the different musicians of the group, and the interaction amongst themselves and with their audience.

For ethnomusicologists who judge the quality of a film by the quantity of musical performance (I know at least one who criticized 'Amir' - and other films - for having too little music), 'Lessons from Gulam' should be slightly more satisfying since it has more than 25 minutes of musical performance and lessons, while 'Amir' has 'only' 19 minutes out of a 52-minute film. In my opinion, both films are fascinating for ethnomusicologists and music lovers. Furthermore, 'Amir' appeals very strongly to a general audience through its human and emotional portrait of a refugee. Thanks to this film we become close to him and we would greet him as an old friend it we had the opportunity to meet him in reality. At the fifth ‘Bilan du Film Ethnographique,’ Paris 1986, a ‘Prix special du jury’ for film schools was attributed to the NFTS in England for the film 'Amir.'

Both films show that with good training in film making, lengthy work in editing and careful reflexion about what one is doing cinematographically, it is possible to make films which are 'ethnomusicologically sound' as well as being 'good movies.' Accompanied by their study guides (and John Baily’s other publications), the two films should be acquired by every ethnomusicology program, institution, archive and museum department. Not only are both films highly interesting for area studies in Asian music, but they are also outstanding examples in the methodology of filming music and musicians.

[The foregoing was written by Hugo Zemp and originally published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 20, 1988, pp. 257-60. Both films were originally shot and edited in 16mm but they're now available on DVD with study guides in PDF from Documentary Educational Resources here and here.]

A Selection of Videos from PRATEC

2012-02-02T07:06:00.000+09:00

The Project on Andean Peasant Technologies (PRATEC) is a Peruvian NGO that works with rural communities on various projects related to education and cultural affirmation. Active for over 20 years, PRATEC has evolved a way of working with the indigenous peoples of the Andean highlands that is based on the spirit of walking together with, rather than leading or guiding, the local communities. Independent filmmaker Maja Tillmann Salas collaborated with PRATEC from 2003 until 2007 to produce a number of videos documenting their projects and activities, ranging from deschooling and educational reform to the ritual nurturance of cultivated fields. Many of the films have been screened at international festivals. They offer a unique view of Andean peasant communities and their cosmovision.

Sowing to Eat in the Andes (2007)

Food and life are intimately intertwined among the Quechua-Lama communities of the High Andes. The local cosmovision sees a mutual relationship between humans and nature, bound to one another in a reciprocal pattern of nature nurturing humans as humans nurture nature. And eating is central to this relationship, as all organisms in the cycle must eat and rely on a healthy abundance of food. This video portrays the biodiversity of food within a regional community near San Martin, Peru, where villagers, farmers, and families live an agrocentric lifestyle with their chacras, or cultivated fields. At the same time, this lifestyle is stressed due to migration and pollution, so the community is also attempting to regenerate its traditional knowledge to face these challenges.

Allin Kawsay: Well-Being in the Andes (2007)

In the Andes, when local people talk about welfare, "allin kawsay," they mean living in harmony among all beings, not just among humans. But for healthy living among humans, deities, and nature, material well-being is not the basis for feeling good. What matters most is respect. This video explores processes of cultural and agricultural rejuvenation in the High Andes, and features scenes depicting the recovery of knowledge nearly lost to recent generations, including the myriad uses of local plants, as well as discussions on the importance of maintaining respect for cultural traditions in clothing and music.

Sallqa Mama: Natural Communities in the Andean Highlands (2007)

The Law of the Earth is expressed in the Andes in the relationship of affection and respect that the Andean communities hold for their land, their duties and their deities, which are revealed in an active process of mutual nurturance. This understanding of the Andean peoples of today about community environmental governance guarantees the sustainability of life in their ecosystem, and ultimately on our planet. This video addresses two key questions related to the sallqa, or natural communities, of the Andean Highlands: What is the relationship of Andean Highlands communities with the wild? How is this relationship expressed in concrete community activities that may be strengthened?

Puchka Kururay: Threading Life Around (2006)

Insights to ritual life and community learning among indigenous peoples of the Andes. In Huarcaya, Peru, children known as bailiffs learn the responsibilities of ritual life in this agrocentric community by doing directly during the year, especially in the four moments of harmonization of the Pacha (the cosmos and the local world). In Carnival (February), Holy Week (April), Yarqa Aspiy (the water festival held in September) and Christmas (December), they are in charge of rituals where they converse with the deities. This conversation is an exchange of experience and affection that will accompany them in their lives. This is a way of learning how to thread life into rounds, it is a way of nurturing the children of Huarcaya.

Samaykuy: To Give Breath to Encourage (2005)

Since beginning its work in 2002, the Fund for Community Cultural Affirmation Initiatives has accompanied the indigenous peoples of the high Andes in the recovery of respect for traditional crafts within their extended families. As understood through the local cosmovision, these families include not only the people in their communities but also the spirits and nature of the local environment. Samaykuy shows the experience of the Nucleus of Andean Cultural Affirmation with the Fund by focusing on the first three years of its operation to recover weaving and pottery making.

Iskay Yachay: Two Kinds of Knowledge (2005)

This video brings the voices and minds of campesinos from Cusco, Peru. They explain what school they want for their children. What education is needed for life to flourish and for the strength of ancestral times to be carried over to new generations. Over the past decade the Nucleus for Andean Cultural Affirmation has been working in Cusco with groups of rural teachers and parents in order to attain an understanding of education and cultural diversity. The reflections they make on the way in which Andean children learn of both worlds, Western and Andean, lead them to unexpected conclusions that deserve to be listened to and taken into account.

Being a Wawa in the Andes (2003)

The diverse world in which a child is nurtured in the Andes of Peru is alive. The inhabitants of the Andes are in constant conversation with nature. Humans nurture nature and nature nurtures humans. Maria Nunez from Cuchoquesera, Quispillaccta, Ayacucho, describes her life as being a garden in which different flowers are found. Maria Nunez sees in herself a community of flowers, not only an individual.

Allin Puriq: Virtuous Walking (2003)

Cultural Affirmation is an ongoing process by which the Andean communities who live in a place regenerate the practices which allow them to nurture their local world for a life worth living in sufficiency. In the Peruvian Andes this life turns around the ritual nurture of plants and animals in an affectionate and respectful conversation with Nature, promoting the flowering of great agricultural and biological diversity. The Fund for Cultural Affirmation is a program coordinated by the Andean Project for Peasant Technologies (PRATEC). It is supported by the Geneva Federation for Cooperation and sponsored by the Swiss Organization 'Traditions for Tomorrow.' The Fund is destined to support initiatives of cultural affirmation of Andean and Amazonian Communities.

Loving Teacher (2003)

This video illustrates the effort toward understanding and learning to respect the visions of multiple communities in Peru, and how these are integrated in education. The cooperation between the Andean-Amazonian communities and their rural schools is a fundamental process in which teachers and communities seek to change attitudes, to convert the school to a place in which children learn in a loving way how to be in both worlds, the traditional local one and the modern western one, without neglecting or negating their cultural identity.

Culturally Sensitive Education (2003)

A culturally sensitive education program friendly to local knowledge in the high mountains of Peru. An experience of Vida Dulce in Andahuaylas in collaboration with Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas in the project Children and Biodiversity, funded by Terre des hommes, Germany. Schools in the high Andes design and implement a significant percentage of the school curriculum, which due to the hard work of communities and teachers has been adjusted to suit local needs, rather than those of the educational technocrats in Lima. At the time this video was made in 2003, the community designed 30% of the curriculum, but following the success of the project most of the curriculum is now in the hands of the community. This video documents the early stages of that process. Special thanks to the communities of Churrubamba and Cotahuacho.

The Ritual Nurturance of Cultivated Fields in the Andes (2003)

In the Andean Highlands and in the Upper Amazon, ten Nuclei for Andean Cultural Affirmation are operating as executing units of the project in situ for the conservation of native plants and their wild relatives. They carry out these activities in coordination with the Andean Project for Peasant Technologies (PRATEC), which has learned to walk hand in hand with, and even be guided by, the peasant communities. This project received financial support from the Global Environmental Facilities and the Italian Government, managed by the local United Nations Development Program office.

Maja Tillmann Salas is currently a member of InsightShare, where she has worked since 2008 at participatory video production with a focus on illustrating the cosmovisions of indigenous peoples. Prior to her films with PRATEC, she created the audiovisual department at the Center for Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge in Kunming, China, and she studied visual anthropology and filmmaking at the University of San Francisco. She has made over 40 films, several of them award winning.

[The videos featured on this page can be downloaded from the TV Multiversity channel on Vimeo. Selections of PRATEC videos are also available on YouTube. For more information about PRATEC and its activities readers may consult The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronts Western Notions of Development, edited by Frederique Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC (Zed Books, 1998).]

Review of 'The Battle of Chile'

2012-01-25T02:15:00.000+09:00

Great films rarely arrive as unheralded as "The Battle of Chile" did in 1975, a two-part, three-hour-and-ten-minute documentary about the events leading to the fall of Chilean President Salvador Allende. This film doesn't even present itself with fanfare, and it takes a while to get going. It opens in March of 1973 with inquiring reporters asking people how they're going to vote in the coming congressional election, which amounts to a plebiscite on the Allende government. The election is taking place after Allende has been in office for over two years and has been trying to reorganize the society and move it toward Socialism within the framework of democratic government. His Popular Unity coalition was put into office with only a third of the popular vote, so he has been on shaky ground. His efforts to nationalize certain industries have brought on a squeeze from the banking and industrial community and from foreign interests (especially the United States), and Chile is suffering economic deprivations.

The interviews show us the colliding points of view in the country and the self-assurance of each group, but we don't have enough background information to sort out the material and we tend to look at it in human-interest terms, enjoying the faces, being amazed at the unembarrassed articulateness of the Chileans. The mikes are shoved at them and they talk; this goes on for a long time, and we seem to be getting no more than a bystanders' view of history. Up through the election - in which Allende makes a small gain (to 43.4 per cent of the votes), though the opposition bloc also makes a gain (to 54.6 per cent), and the result is a continuing stalemate - we have a sense of the limitations of photographic journalism when it comes to analyzing what's going on. Besides the man-in-the-street interviews, the film seems to give us only the public actions - the speeches, the violent confrontations, the mobs and meetings, the parades with workers chanting funny, dirty rhymed slogans - and none of the inner workings. Those are supplied by an English narrator (a woman), who keeps interpreting for us. She is concise in exactly the wrong way. We need to have groups identified and their positions explained. When the miners in the nationalized copper mines strike, we want to know the issues; she tells us that the less politically sophisticated workers were deceived by the Fascists, while "the more politically knowledgeable stay on the job." There may be considerable truth here; but this kind of thing can drive one a little crazy. She gives us a strict ideological account - almost a parody of Marxism - in which everything that happens is the result of the imperialists' and the industrialists' strategy.

There is no suggestion of any form of regimentation under Allende, yet his supporters talk in terms of "worker consciousness" and other standard formulations which make us wonder where the indoctrination is coming from. When the miners' strike against the government ends (the narrator tells us that it "falls apart"), Allende mobilizes the masses at a big rally and calls out, "Jump if you're not a Fascist!" - and a half-million people jump. It's a staggering image. But, oh, for a more open-minded narrator. We're told that the last strikers "have taken refuge at Catholic University." Who is it that they're taking refuge from - that benevolent papa pleading for a show of support? According to the film, any opposition to Allende is corrupt - as if there were no conceivable good reason to oppose him. Clearly, Allende, who isn't in control of most of the Army units, is hemmed in. The public transportation system is disintegrating: Chile can't get spare parts because of the American embargo. From that big rally on through the street violence that follows, Part I ("The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie") is terrifyingly well done. It concludes with newsreel footage from the camera of an Argentine who was photographing the skirmishes in the street. An Army man takes slow, careful aim right at us and kills the cameraman, and the image spins skyward. It's an intrusion for the narrator to say of that Army man, "This is the face of Fascism;" that's the voice of ideology, the diminisher.

Part II ("The Coup d'Etat") begins with that summer's insurrectionary right-wing violence against the government; rebel Army troops seize control of downtown Santiago and fire at the Presidential palace, but this attempted coup is put down in a few hours. Now the film gets to its central question: Can a society dedicated to constitutional law make the transition to Socialism peaceably? The Marxist argument has always been that violence comes not from the revolution but from the counter-revolution, and that the workers have to be prepared to defend the revolution by violent means. And Chile serves as a demonstration. There appears to be no way that Allende's legally constituted revolutionary government can move toward Socialism within a legal, democratic framework. It can't defend itself against the industrialists' counter-revolutionary moves unless it suspends constitutional guarantees, forms a people's militia, and claps the opposition in jail. (Could Allende do that without precipitating an immediate right-wing putsch? Maybe not, but in the view here that was his only chance.) The film leaps from one group to another, from meetings of the Chilean Congress to bombings to street demonstrations to workers' discussions. It shows the different elements in the explosive situation with so much clarity that it's a Marxist tract in which the contradictions of capitalism have sprung to life. At a union meeting, the faces are intense and involved, but there are divided, competing strategies among the left-wing groups that support the government, and the workers have a tremendous concern for legality. Meanwhile, Allende is desperately wheeling and horse-trading to get the congressional support he needs, and failing. We actually see the country cracking open. The inner workings are now so public that they can be photographed. Allende asks Congress to declare martial law - which would give him the power to appoint military personnel. It's his only chance of preventing another attempt at a military coup. He is refused, and that same day troops go into the factories, searching for weapons. The violence escalates while Allende's supporters argue whether they should be armed or not, and, step by step, the legal government is overthrown.

This documentary cross-section view of a collapsing government is surely unprecedented. Everybody in the country seems to know that a coup d'etat is coming, and people talk about it freely and coherently. No one seems apathetic, not even the middle-class women, who speak vigorously about how much they hate Socialism. Has there ever been a more articulate culture? Now we understand why the picture laid all that inquiring-reporter groundwork: everybody knows that it's just a matter of time, yet the people who have the most to lose can't get together enough to do anything. Then Allende's naval aide-de-camp, Captain Araya, is killed, and at the funeral the camera moves around solemnly, in closeup, scanning the high-ranking officers gathered there - General Augusto Pinochet among them - as if they were a sculptural group. This is the military brass of Chile shown in all its formality, and at a time of utter stillness. We see these handsome, well-coiffed heads in their dress-uniform collars and hats, and this funeral is the funeral of a society. It's like a classic passage in Tolstoy. We know from this frieze, a monument to the past, that there's no hope for Socialism in Chile. In July, the truck owners, funded by the C.I.A., begin their long strike, which paralyzes the distribution of food, gasoline, and fuel, and there is a call for Allende to resign. Instead, he holds another rally, and eight hundred thousand people, give or take a few, arrive in the afternoon and stick around into the night. But those people have no weapons. On September 11th, the Navy (in touch with United States destroyers that are standing by) institutes the coup d'etat, and the Air Force bombs the state radio station. We hear Allende say he won't resign. The palace is bombarded from the air. And then we see the chiefs of the junta on television, presenting themselves as the new government. They announce that they'll return the country to order, after three years of Marxist cancer.

How could a team of five - some with no previous film experience - working with limited equipment (one Eclair camera, one Nagra sound recorder, two vehicles) and a package of black-and-white film stock sent to them by the French documentarian Chris Marker produce a work of this magnitude? The answer has to be partly, at least: through Marxist discipline. The young Chilean director, Patricio Guzman, and his associates (all Chileans except for one Spaniard) had a sense of purpose. They considered themselves a collective, and they were making a work of political analysis. The twenty hours of footage they shot had to be smuggled out of the country; four of the filmmakers spent some time in custody, and the cameraman, Jorge Muller, hasn't been heard of since his imprisonment. The others fled separately, assembled in Cuba, and, together with a well-known Chilean film editor, Pedro Chaskel, and both Chilean and Cuban advisers, worked on the movie. (A planned Part III has yet to be completed.) There is still the sheer technical skill to account for - the quality of the sound, the camerawork that is discreet and mobile and live, and, above all, the editing, which is so smooth and unemphatic that it never calls attention to itself. Chaskel has an immensely subtle, fluid new technique; Part II has the effect of one long, continuous shot. He owes something to the Italian neorealists, but his other influences aren't easy to place - maybe the early Russians, though he gets the emotion without the shock cuts, in legato.

Patricio Guzman is, of course, the organizing force behind this production, and its controlling intelligence. He has said, in an interview with Julianne Burton (in the magazine Socialist Revolution, later reprinted in her book Cinema and Social Change in Latin America), that during the street battles he could anticipate what was going to happen and, standing next to the cameraman, tell him when to pan or lower the camera or raise it. That is, he was so attuned to the possibilities in the situation that it was almost as if he were directing the action; he could use the fiction-film methods that he had studied at film school in Madrid in the late sixties. But if the imagination here is Guzman's, so is the vise put on the material. The footage is so spectacular and so sensitively shot that one tends to laugh off the narrator's rigid, instructional approach, but it soaks in, because the whole film is structured to make the same analysis. When we listen to a fiery young leftist urging his comrades to arm in that summer of 1973, we can't help wondering if he's alive - or half alive - but Guzman doesn't encourage elegiac speculations. His is a no-nonsense, revolutionary approach; he is recording the political process as Marx and Lenin described it. That was how he and his group selected what to film: they worked from an outline. In "The Battle of Chile," the United States serves as the imperialist enemy that proves the necessity for revolutionaries to arm their supporters and lock up their potential enemies. Chile is set up as a model failure.

Guzman and his associates have taken a relentlessly non-aesthetic approach, yet with their artistic sensibilities and superb taste "The Battle of Chile" is an elegy in spite of them. For viewers, it is an accusatory elegy. Aesthetically, this is a major film, and that gives force even to the patterning of its charges. We may have less faith than the moviemakers do in the masterminding powers of the C.I.A., but their dogmatic Marxist view of the role of the United States in Chile seems to coincide with all too many facts. Our own American newspapers have given us corroborative evidence. But what else was going on? What was the United States counterpunching at, and why? And when the narrator tells us that the most powerful TV channel in Chile was funded by the Ford Foundation, what was involved in that? It's not enough for "The Battle of Chile" to run for a couple of weekends at the Film Forum in New York City. It needs to be seen on public television worldwide, with those government officials who formed the American policy toward Allende explaining what interests they believed they were furthering. We're owed more discussion of what the United States was up to - even if we can get it only through the public service sponsorship of transnational corporations.

[This is a slightly edited version of a review by Pauline Kael that was originally published in The New Yorker on 23 January 1978. It also appears in the press kit for the 1998 Icarus Films Special Edition DVD of the film. An interview with Patricio Guzman is in The Documentary Makers by David A. Goldsmith and an English subtitled Conversation with Allende is available on Google Video.]

The American Documentary Phenomenon

2012-01-15T05:07:00.000+09:00

An extraordinary efflorescence of political documentaries is taking place around the world, not least in the United States. Though particular cultural artifacts -- manga, anime, chutney, and 'world music,' among many others -- have taken on transnational forms and flourished in recent years, and though mass and pop culture in their numerous manifestations have come under increased scholarly scrutiny, the emergence of political documentaries as an aspect of world culture is a phenomenon which so far has received little attention. Documentary filmmakers are far from being celebrities, but documentary retrospectives at major festival festivals are nonetheless now common. The most recent edition of the Sundance Film Festival, now one of the most well-known avenues for showcasing independent and avant-garde cinema, especially in the United States, commenced with a screening of the documentary, Chicago 10, director Brett Morgen's attempt to bring to life the turbulence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the trials of anti-war protesters that came in its wake. To invoke what we might call the contemporary documentary phenomenon is not to suggest that the political documentary has no previous history, nor even that contemporary documentaries are necessarily distinguished by their breadth of vision, cinematic qualities, or more than the ordinary form of political awareness. Nonetheless, it is palpably clear that in countries as diverse as the United States, India, Brazil, and Korea, the political documentary is undergoing a renaissance, and that the sheer proliferation and visibility of such documentaries marks a new stage in the history of both this art form and political activism in an age saturated by the image and visual icons.

In the United States alone, eight of the ten largest grossing documentaries in the country's history have been released since 2002, and documentaries no longer appear to be films watched only by cinema buffs, activists, or nerds. To underscore this phenomenon, it perhaps suffices to recall that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) was seen on theater screens by 15 million viewers within one month of the film’s release. Moore had achieved a considerable measure of commercial success with his earlier film, Bowling for Columbine (2002), but Fahrenheit 9/11's eventful run points to the much more significant inroads made by this documentary into cinematic traditions and the public's viewing habits. The subject of Fahrenheit 9/11, one might aver, was calculated to arouse common interest, and the searing images of planes plummeting into towers had been, so to speak, handed to the filmmaker on a platter. But Moore's film, in fact, was scrupulous in steering clear of images that might easily have been exploited to excite patriotic sentiments, focusing instead on the blunders and criminal follies of the Bush administration; moreover, if the subject matter of the film is to be viewed as furnishing ready-made fodder to the filmmaker, it is also notable that no other documentary film on the events of September 11th has achieved anything remotely resembling Moore's success. But Fahrenheit 9/11's success can be written in multiple registers. Documentary filmmakers who touch upon politics or other volatile subjects have generally always had to wrestle with censorship; but, were we to reflect upon the matter, it becomes transparent that all documentaries are by default subject to the regime of censorship since documentaries seldom obtain commercial release. Though Moore's films are by no means the first documentaries to have had commercial screenings, documentary filmmakers can, in invoking his example, perhaps aspire to greater visibility and more exposure at the box office.

Just what, then, is the documentary phenomenon, and what might account for the rise, renaissance, or reemergence of political documentaries? What is it that documentaries document, and do they perform this documentation with more authority, efficaciousness, and daring than other practitioners of political awareness? Some commentators are likely to aver that filmmaking has been revolutionized by the digital camera and other commensurate developments in technology. Filmmaking has always been an expensive enterprise, and documentarians, in particular, were doubtless hobbled in the past by their inability to raise funds. It would not have been uncommon even fifteen years ago to find filmmakers lugging large cameras. Recent technological advances, it is often argued, have democratized the medium, and popular platforms such as YouTube and Google Video hold out the promise of taking this democratization even further. Not only have more aspiring filmmakers, operating on shoe-string budgets and often armed with little more than a digital camera and computer, stepped into the fray, but it is becoming increasingly possible to overcome the hitherto insurmountable problems of publicity, distribution, and repeated access. By the same token, if the Internet is a space of uncharted freedom, there is ample evidence to suggest that it is at least equally hospitable to authoritarian, intolerant, and politically reactionary worldviews. The political documentary so far has been largely animated by an oppositional politics, by a politics critical of dominant political structures, the culture of violence, war and militarism, and (in the plain old-fashioned Marxist sense) ruling class ideologies, but those halcyon days may be short-lived.

It may well be argued that political documentary filmmakers, in particular, have had to take on the role that, to whatever limited extent, television may at one point have performed in several countries. For all their severe shortcomings, the BBC and ITV in Britain were somewhat responsive to documentary filmmakers. American network television has taken even fewer risks. Edward R. Murrow, the subject of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (2006), was able to put on a television show, See It Now, in the 1950s that puts to shame nearly everything shown on American network television over the last four decades and certainly these days. Mass media outlets have long been captured by the conglomerates, and though liberals like to point to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has a viewing audience that pales in comparison to the numbers commanded by the rabidly jingoist and scurrilous Fox News Channel, PBS has never been confrontational and very much likes to retain the aura of objective investigative reporting. The films of leading contemporary Anglo-American documentary filmmakers -- Frederick Wiseman, Michael Moore, John Pilger, Robert Greenwald, Allan Francovich, Eugene Jarecki, and others -- have never been screened on American television. Indeed, many documentary filmmakers have come to the awareness that the extraordinary hold of the mass media over vast sectors of the American population is itself a worthy subject for documentaries, particularly in view of the fact that no country has been so singularly successful in projecting itself as the arch exemplar of a free information society. Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004) tells an obvious but necessary story; and just what is not told on Fox News, or indeed or any other American television channel, is best gleaned by a viewing of Al-Jazeera, the subject of Egyptian-American Jehane Noujaim's documentary of the same year, Control Room. It is not merely the Iraq War that the US consigned to what it called 'embedded' journalists: nearly the entire American media industry, whether in the domain of print, radio, television, or cable, is comfortably embedded, to the point of corruption and complete capitulation, in the intertwined world of political elites, lobbyists, corporate fat dogs, 'consultants,' and the numerous varieties of captains of culture.

Whatever one may say abut the relative ease with which documentaries can be made today, and, ironically, the immense difficulties that documentary filmmakers, especially those who are committed to a dissenting politics, face in obtaining commercial releases of their films or an outlet on television, it cannot be doubted that the contemporary explosion of documentaries constitutes one kind of response to the utter degradation of contemporary politics. The American invasion and occupation of Iraq is still generating, in the fourth year of the conflict, a stream of films -- and as the war's consequences continue to unfold, one should expect and hope that the focus will not remain so maddeningly on what the war means to Americans or what it has done to them. Even the most liberal Americans have a hard time thinking about what the war has done to Iraq. Robert Greenwald's Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006) exposes the immense profits that certain individuals and corporations have stood to gain from the war, and it reinforces the point that so long as war remains a highly lucrative business, it will undoubtedly have relentless if not cheerful advocates. The Ground Truth (2006), directed by Patricia Foulkrod, features veterans of the Iraq war: bearing witness to the truth from the ground level, they point not only to the growing unhappiness within the ranks of the US military with the war, but to the manner in which working-class Americans, who constitute the vast bulk of the armed forces, have been sold the war.

Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight (2006) is more complex and politically informed in its exploration of the systemic problems which underlie the American aspiration to remain the world’s sole hegemon with unrivalled military strength at its command. As Jarecki proposes, the war on Iraq is only the latest instantiation of the aggressive militarism and militancy that, since at least the 1940s, have come to exercise an incalculable influence on the American ethos. The film commences with Eisenhower's ominous warning about the military-industrial complex: much as this warning remains a dominant leitmotiv of the film, the film's rather surprising valorization of Eisenhower is never wholly persuasive. Jarecki nevertheless deploys all the skills with which good documentarians are armed. The film's title plays upon an earlier film by the same name, a seven-part documentary directed by the renowned Frank Capra to inspire Americans to an exertion of greater energy and patriotism to quell the menace of Nazi and Japanese aggression. Interviews with some architects and critics of the war, public policy analysts, and military historians are interspersed with comments by people drawn from all walks of life -- while this is common enough in documentaries, Jarecki is able to suggest the yawning gap that divides common people from the framers of American foreign policy. The film commences and practically ends with comments from a retired New York City policeman, a tragic figure who lost his son at the World Trade Center bombings and, filled with rage, successfully pleads with the military to have his son's name inscribed on one of the bombs that is rained down on Iraq. If he appears at the beginning and the end to serve as the film's framing device, his intermittent appearances thread the narrative together. 'Why We Fight' sounds as if it were an interrogative, but Jarecki poses no query, nor does he pretend that the documentarian’s preeminent task is to document and present rather than to judge. Quite to the contrary, he is unambiguously clear that American militarism drives the dream of domination and has acquired a frightening centrality in American life.

The war with Iraq and the wider war on terror have been obvious subjects for documentary filmmakers, but so have been the emergence of evangelical Christianity as a major force in American politics, the fortunes of the Bush family, the electoral and political difficulties afflicting American democracy, and the nearly complete corporatization of large segments of American life. Many films remain resolutely riveted on particular phenomena and personalities, but as Why We Fight suggests, a view which reflects a more profound understanding of the systemic transformations to civil society in the United States is likely to make documentary filmmakers more effective. The economic democratization of the medium, for all its welcome consequences, has also sharply reduced the passage of time from conception of an idea to its final execution. Reflection has almost become something of a luxury, and documentary filmmakers, who are susceptible to the same cultural norms as everyone else, display the larger culture's propensity towards black and white characterizations of social and political phenomena. American culture's inability to live with fundamental ambiguities, nowhere more vividly demonstrated these days than in the Manichean cosmologies which have been invoked in the war on terror, in the far too easy distinctions between 'them' and 'us,' has yet to be confronted by documentary filmmakers. Nonetheless, the renaissance of documentary filmmaking is a hopeful sign that politics may yet have something of a future in a country dominated by dreary and mind-numbing discussions of the presence or lack of what is called the bipartisan spirit.

Other Recommended Documentaries: American Blackout (2006, director Ian Inaba); Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, Alex Gibney); The Fog of War (2003, Errol Morris); Gitmo: The New Rules of War (2005, Tarik Saleh and Erik Gandini); Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of the American Empire (2004); Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, Matt Brown); The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2003, Marc Achbar); The Letter: An American Town and the Somali Invasion (2005, Ziad H. Hamzeh); The Road to Guantanamo (2005, Michael Winterbottom); The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002, Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki); Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005, Robert Greenwald); With God On Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America (2004, Calvin Skeggs); The World According to Bush (2004, William Karel); and The Yes Men (2004, Dan Ollmann and others).

[This essay was written by Vinay Lal and was originally published as a 'Letter from America' in the Economic and Political Weekly of India (17 February 2007, pp. 544-45). Many of the documentaries discussed above are available on YouTube through our TV Multiversity Documentary Phenomenon playlist. Vinay Lal is a historian and a cultural critic, and a founding member of Multiversity. On extended leave from UCLA, he is currently Professor of History at the University of Delhi. His most recent book is Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (Delhi: HarperCollins, 2011). For information about this and his other books, visit the book page on his blog Lal Salaam.]

Books on Films on the Bomb

2011-12-27T16:55:00.000+09:00

The development and deployment of the atomic bomb by the Americans during World War II ushered in what is commonly referred to as the 'nuclear age.' A growing shelf of books continues to be written about the various repercussions of the bomb, ranging from the socio-political to the cultural and psychological. Several recent titles explore this legacy, including Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future (Lexington Books, 2010) and The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009) both by Robert A. Jacobs, After Hiroshima: The United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945-1965 by Matthew Jones (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan by Hiroshi Kitamura (Cornell Univ Press, 2010), and Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan by Sean L. Malloy (Cornell University Press, 2008). While many of these books are about the historical and political issues related to nuclear weapons, Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future focuses on how art and popular culture, including cinema, have confronted the bomb.

In chapter 6 of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future, Mick Broderick traces the development of an early and often studied bomb film, ‘The Beginning or the End’ (1947). Although other films had subsequently addressed directly or indirectly the development, deployment and aftermath of the atomic bomb, ‘The Beginning or the End’ remains distinctive for its having been positioned as a docudrama, purporting to tell the story of the development and subsequent use of the bomb for posterity. Making use of prior studies, but also adding original research into primary sources, Broderick details the conflicting political interests that shaped the film’s production. While the studios were concerned with capitalizing on the obvious public interest in the topic by producing an appealing piece of entertainment, the military was concerned about what should and should not be shown in such a film, either in terms of national security or for its own wartime image, while the scientists, whose consent was needed in order to use their names and images, had concerns about technical accuracy and ethical treatment of the subject. Broderick shows that there were complex behind-the-scenes negotiations that expressed the competing interests of these three groups. He further suggests that Hollywood may have had some advance notice of the ‘secret weapon’ before its deployment in Hiroshima, and had already developed scripts to capitalize on that once the news broke publicly. There was also a great deal of concern on the part of the White House as to how Truman would be depicted, and in particular that the decision to drop the bomb was shown to be the result of deep deliberation. However, Broderick shows that ‘Truman’s script revisions comply with the manufacturing of a popular Hiroshima mythology, yet are clearly contradicted in his later published memoirs.’ By focusing in detail on the role of the Truman White House in manipulating the film’s production, Broderick both compliments and extends the existing literature on atomic bomb feature films and on ‘The Beginning or the End’ in particular.

As the first American film that explicitly depicted the history of the bomb, ‘The Beginning or the End’ received treatment by previous studies of atomic bomb films. The earliest book to delve into the topic, Nuclear War Films by Jack Shaheen (1978) includes a chapter on the film. Although much briefer and in less detail than later works, Shaheen had identified the themes in this, and other films, that would occupy the minds of later atomic bomb film scholars, such as the varying interests involved in the production and the numerous inaccuracies for a film claiming to provide the history of the bomb, concluding that ‘inaccurate documentation and an abundance of romantic sentiment deprived the movie of the authoritative quality claimed by its producers.’ Nuclear War Films includes chapters on several classic, and lesser known, bomb films, including ‘On the Beach’ (1959), ‘Ladybug, Ladybug’ (1963), ‘Dr Strangelove’ (1964), and the ‘Bedford Incident’ (1965). The book also includes a section on documentary short educational films, such as ‘To Die, To Live’ (1975) and ‘A Thousand Cranes’ (1962), which are not nearly as thoroughly addressed in the later literature as the fictional films, if even mentioned at all. While he did include some of the less well known, and subsequently unstudied works, Shaheen curiously omits from the volume the numerous science fiction and giant monster films that came to pervade the later scholarship, except to note their ‘illogical visions,’ a statement to which Broderick (1991) later referred as a ‘myopic dismissal.’ Nevertheless, by including reviews of documentary and fictional feature length films, as well as educational short subjects (the latter receiving virtually no attention to date), Shaheen did set the agenda for much later scholarship and the book is still worth reading as an introductory, if not complete, introduction to the genre.

‘The Beginning or the End’ also received fairly extensive treatment in two other titles from the growing shelf of atomic bomb film books. In Atomic Bomb Cinema (2002), Jerome Shapiro positions the film as the first overt statement of what he calls the ‘apocalyptic consciousness’ that comes to characterize, in his analysis, the genre. Like other scholars who discuss this film, he provides plot details and points of political intrigue, but ultimately he presses the film into service of his broader agenda which is to demonstrate the prevalence of apocalyptic imagery in bomb films, which leads him to position some of the film’s characters and scenes in more mythological terms. For example, in discussing the fictional character Matt Cochran, added by the studio as a tragic love interest in the story and in order to voice some concerns of the scientists, Shapiro notes that through his closing posthumous monologue, read by his bereaved wife, the film positions Matt as ‘the supernatural being that interprets the revelation for the uncomprehending human.’ In further developing this theme, Shapiro suggests that ‘The Beginning or the End' unintentionally ‘invites the viewer to speculate on whether the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg, Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Auschwitz, or the victims of any other conflict were also made in the image of God.’ Shapiro’s use of a quasi-religious discourse, which draws upon a Jewish understanding of the apocalypse as redemption through destruction, is an intriguing device through which to view the by that time fairly large selection of American bomb-related films. In subsequent chapters, he pays close attention to the science fiction and giant monster films neglected by Shaheen and develops a chronological periodization of bomb films that includes chapters on ‘losing faith in social institutions‘ and the ‘post-cold war years,‘ and also includes a long chapter on Japanese bomb films. Ultimately, though, his insistence on viewing all of these films through the apocalyptic lens seems at times forced, in particular with reference to the Japanese films, which really need a book length treatment on their own rather than as an appendage to this study. Still, Shapiro has pulled together an impressive array of sources and themes into this imaginative and informative study.

Since ‘The Beginning or the End’ is addressed in many works on atomic bomb films, it provides a good way to survey the discourse and to also evaluate the books that include references to it. In Celluloid Mushroom Clouds (1998), Joyce Evans includes a case study on the film in her chapter on the business of atomic bomb films in Hollywood. She explores in greater detail some of the political and economic themes that were alluded to in passing by Shaheen and further developed by Broderick, as noted above, including the intrigues surrounding the film’s development and the resulting inaccuracies. Beyond this material, Evans is useful for her attention to the business of film production and provides an important point about the difference between the ‘dramatic truths’ emphasize by Hollywood and the ‘factual truths’ of the historian. Dramatic truths are those not documented in the historical record, such as their intimate moments with family and colleagues, and which connect the rather serious topic of the film to ticket buying audiences who may be drawn into the story through such devices. However, at times these dramatic truths, as we have seen, contradict the factual truths. In this case, their inclusion was ultimately a failure as the film was a box office flop. Evans continues this analysis of the economic and political workings of Hollywood through several subsequent chapters, each developing a theme and then providing a detailed analysis of a particular film as a case study. She shows, for example, that the same story of the development and usage of the bomb can take on remarkably different tone in a few years time, through her study of the the’ 1952 film ‘Above and Beyond,’ which is more clearly impacted by Cold War concerns than 'The Beginning or the End,’ despite the scant five years between their productions. In later chapters, she treats the theme of radiation and mutation, including a case study of the giant ant film ‘Them!’ (1954). Like other scholars, Evans transverses the typical themes, but the real strength of her work is in her detailed treatment of the economic dimension.

Shaheen and Shapiro both include select filmographies, with the former highlighting 25 representative titles, each receiving a short review essay, and the latter providing a more complete filmography, along with several Japanese titles. While notable for being more comprehensive, Shapiro’s filmography is scant on details, as he chose instead to focus on selected films for exposition throughout the text, in particular as they pertain to the book’s thesis. Between these two efforts, Broderick weighed in with Nuclear Movies (1991), a guidebook which features a filmography less comprehensive than Shapiro’s but including more details, and more inclusive than Shaheen’s but with less detailed exposition. While each of these three tried to strike a balance between inclusion and exposition, Broderick’s approach is to provide a long essay up front that synthesizes the filmography in terms of themes, such as the Nazi threat, Soviet spies, the Fifties, science fictions, mutations and monsters, alien interventions, proliferation and super heroes, to name a few, each noting the connections between films under its respective theme. The rest of the book consists of an annotated filmography arranged by year from the pre-1950s through the end of the 1980s. Shapiro would pick up on this periodization by developing his own discussion of ‘prototypical bomb films,’ joining Broderick in projecting later atomic themes back to the early 20th century. Broderick also includes a selection of Japanese films, discussed under the theme of ‘the human dimension,’ noting in particular films such as ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’ (1950), ‘Record of a Living Being’ (AKA 'I Live in Fear' 1955), and ‘The H-Man’ (1958). These films are noteworthy for providing the ground level view the bomb to counterbalance the view from above that characterized many American bomb films of the period. However, the comprehensive scope of Broderick’s guidebook, it includes several factual errors and minor inconsistencies, likely due more to low budget editorial policy than to author shortcomings, but which nevertheless preclude the book from being the final word on essential points such as characters, titles and dates, although with this caveat it remains a useful volume for its thoughtful thematic survey and fairly comprehensive filmography.

Broderick also offered the 1996 edited collection Hibakusha Cinema, which features a selection of previously available essays reprinted along with some fresh material. The book begins with three oft-cited essays: Donald Richie’s ‘Mono No Aware’ (1961), Susan Sontag's ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ (1965), and Chon Noriega’s ‘Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare’ (1987). While it is useful to have these under one cover, Broderick summarizes but does not contextualize or evaluate these earlier works in his Introduction. Two other reprinted essays are also included: ‘Depiction of the Atomic Bombings in Japanese Cinema’ by Kyoko Hirano (1992) and ‘Akira Kurosawa and the Atomic Age’ by James Goodwin (1994). The latter employs interviews with Kurosawa (published elsewhere) and finds that ‘Ikimono no Kiroku’ (Record of a Living Being 1955) was partly influenced by Kurosawa's experience of a huge earthquake when he was a teenager and the mass hysteria that followed. While the role of memory in ‘Ikimono no Kiroku’ is indirect, the film forefronts the issue of awareness, and more specifically, what does it mean to live in the nuclear age and to be aware of the bomb. More directly related to the question of memory is the later Kurosawa film ‘Hachigatsu no Rapusodi’ (1991), which is about the experience of and memory of the bomb and what happens to those experiences and memories in subsequent generations. Goodwin’s essay is useful for it’s discussion of memory in the bomb films of Kurosawa, whose works are also discussed by Linda Ehrlich in a chapter on ‘the extremes of innocence’ in Kurosawa’s ‘Yume’ (Dreams 1990) as well as ‘Rhapsody in August.’ Two final chapters include studies of narrative strategies in the novel Black Rain and the subsequent film treatment by Shohei Imamura, and a chapter on politics and gender in the depiction of female hibakusha by Maya Morioka Todeschini. Broderick’s introductory essay lays out the topics of each chapter and draws connections among them, but tends to take at face value some of the more questionable points made by Richie and Noriega, both of which essentialize and dichotomize ‘the Japanese’ in ‘us and them’ frameworks that have been problematized by later scholars. However, this collection remains valuable because it extends the discourse to include anime, such as ‘Akira’ (1988), and literature, through the comparison of ‘Black Rain’ as film and novel.

The question of essentializing ‘Japaneseness’ is taken up as a theme by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto in Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (2000), which specifically engages the essentialist notions of Richie and others. Yoshimoto uses a critical analysis of existing scholarship on Kurosawa’s works as a way to problematize the film studies outlook on Japanese cinema. For our purposes, the book is useful for its inclusion of essays about three atomic bomb films: ‘Ikimono No Kiroku’ (Record of a Living Being, AKA I Live in Fear, 1955), ‘Yume’ (Kurosawa’s Dreams 1990) and ‘Hachigatsu no Kyoshikyoku’ (Rhapsody in August 1991). In ‘Ikimono no Kiroku,’ Yoshimoto notes that Kurosawa explores the bomb in a visceral way by focusing on the plight a Japanese industrialist whose attempt to save his family from nuclear fallout due to nuclear testing in the Pacific eventually drives his family to ruin and himself insane. As Yoshimoto is more clearly writing in the vein of film studies, as opposed to cultural studies or history, he pays closer attention to technical as well as narrative features. For example, he notes that Kurosawa uses the 'static shot packed with objects and human figures,' contrary to his usual emphasis on movement, to create an 'oppressive atmosphere appropriate for the film's subject.' Yoshimoto sums up the main point of ‘Ikimono no Kiroku,’ and perhaps Kurosawa's main challenge in the film, with this question: 'how can we really feel the threat of nuclear warfare and the possible extinction of the human race not as an abstract issue manipulated by career politicians and bureaucrats but as a concrete problem seriously menacing all of us?' In other words, the method of representation has a major impact on the subject, and by objectifying the nuclear threat as a monster, or by focusing on images of destruction only, the central concern is somehow diluted or diminished. Yoshimoto also asks whether or not Kurosawa is using an 'unrealistic psychological approach' to make his point about the bomb in this film, but then suggests that in facing the threat of nuclear destruction there may be no reasonable or rational response that can counter the intensity of the challenge. Yoshimoto’s chapter on ‘Rhapsody in August’ includes a useful, though brief, analysis of a controversy surrounding the film, as American reviewers misinterpreted a scene in which a Japanese-American character appears to apologize to his grandmother for the bombing.

While Yoshimoto provides insights into Kurosawa’s atomic bomb bomb films, and Shapiro includes a chapter on Japanese bomb films, the bulk of the literature in English remains mainly focused on American films, which have received a variety of treatments from several different theoretical perspectives. This allows more detailed analysis, as scholars can eschew the basics in favor of more nuanced theoretical studies. For example, adding further depth to the American focus in the literature is Dr Strangelove’s America by Margot Henrikson (1997), which uses bomb film films as part of a effort to trace the origins of America’s ‘culture of dissent’ that emerged in the 1960s to the repressed climate of the 1950s, countering the viewpoint of ‘consensus historians’ who saw the 1960s as a break. Henrikson meticulously shows, perhaps in far more detail and theoretical rigor than any of the works reviewed so far, how films, television and popular culture of 1950s America evidenced a wide ranging and complex set of feelings toward the bomb that were more or less absent from official public discourse, which was pre-occupied at the time with the Cold War and related national security issues. Henrikson’s goal in pursuing this legacy is to highlight ‘the changed forms of cultural expression which challenged the serenity and order of the atomic consensus with a new cultural chaos that mirrored the disruption of matter achieved in the technology of the atomic bomb.’ In pursuing this thesis, Henrikson evaluates a number of sub genres of atomic bomb film. For example, she finds in1950s science fiction films two tendencies of the Cold War era: fear of the bomb and anxieties about the McCarthy era hunt for ‘un-American’ activities, the latter targeting several filmmakers and writers. Henrikson notes that, ‘This merging of anti-atomic and anticommunist fears – particularly in the form of attack or invasion from outside forces, often tainted with radiation – became a relatively standard device in cold war science fiction films, and the representation of anticommunist anxieties helped to make the identical representation of atomic anxieties more acceptable to scrutinizing studios and law-and-order committees.’ Her main task is to link the covert culture of dissent in the 1950s its overt forms in the 1960s. Toward this end, she suggests, ‘The surface complacence of the Eisenhower years, perhaps in part artificially induced by the security network that promoted conformity, may also have been medicinally aided by the billions of tranquilizers ingested by Americans in the postwar era. Adding to the complexity and ambiguity of this era’s surface calm was this new reality: mental health had become the number one medical concern of the nation.’ This problematizes the narrative of conservative historians who haven written off the 1960s only in terms of youthful frivolity. Henrikson continues: ‘While the mainstream American culture of consensus and Eisenhower’s politics of tranquility continued to uphold the image of a secure and contented American society, the culture of dissent shifted its attention to this coexistent underground America of anxiety, where tranquility and satisfaction dissolved into tension and conflict.’ Henrikson concludes this important and wide ranging work by suggesting a resolution of the multifarious tensions manifested in the culture of dissent: ‘The culture of dissent, whether with a violent or peaceful counter-force of protest, had kept the tension in American culture and society high and had ultimately promoted the alternative peaceful and humanist values that helped to control the destructive values of the system.’ An odd ending, perhaps, for an enlightening book, since she finds a benefit in the decades of hysteria, death and destruction that become more apparent once one places her story in a global context. This oddly anti-climatic conclusion points to perhaps a key shortcoming of the work, which arises from her adherence to a particular methodological orthodoxy of American scholarship. Henrikson, an American historian, infuses her work with the insights of cultural studies – a welcome addition to a discipline that all but ignores culture – but despite this she concedes almost completely to the rigid and limiting periodization and localization faddish among historians. While the book, as a result, lacks breadth, it is nevertheless a worthwhile synthesis that provides a much needed insight into the ways in which the atomic age created its own uniquely tragic cultural history for Americans.

Pursuing a similar line of reasoning in Monsters, Mushroom Clouds and the Cold War (2001), Keith Booker focuses on the emergence of post-modernism in the same period, which he attempts to show through analysis of science fiction novels and films of the ‘long 1950s.’ Booker locates an essential tension of the era in these works, in that ‘science fiction captured something very crucial about the first decade in which it was clear that science had given humanity the power to destroy itself virtually at the touch of a button,’ which was countered by ‘a certain faith in the ability of science to make life better on all levels.’ This contradiction is found in several science fiction films, such as ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ (1953), in which the monster is both created and destroyed by nuclear power. Booker develops this sense of ‘doubleness’ into a broader take on the ‘beginnings of late capitalism and of an incipient postmodernism, regardless of the seeming lack of postmodern formal elements’ in such works. Once he establishes this trope, he runs it through a range of science fiction novels, such as the works of Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and films, many of which have not been thoroughly analyzed in previous works, such as lesser known works like ‘Rocketship X-M’ (1950), ‘The Day the World Ended’ (1955), and ‘World Without End’ (1956). Booker’s scope is wider because his more directly concerned with science fiction films, of which bomb films are a sub genre. The relevant films are those that explore the end of the world through nuclear destruction, otherwise known as the apocalypse, although in doing this Booker is more firmly rooted in the material world, avoiding the metaphysical overtones of Shapiro. Another theme in Booker’s work is the role of the Cold War in shaping the proto-postmodernism he seeks to reveal: ‘While the science fiction novels and films in the long 1950s are transparently related to their context in the Cold War, it is clear that most of the characteristics of American science fiction during this period can be understood as consequences of the globalization of capital, with any direct reference to the Cold War.’ The value of Booker’s work, regardless of its theoretical standpoint, is in broadening the scope of the study to include literature along with films, which points to another important development in the scholarship of atomic bomb films, that of linking films with other forms of media.

This development is further evident in the 2004 edited collection by Scott Zeman and Michael Amundson, Atomic Culture. Like Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future, Atomic Culture casts its net wide to include not only films, but also comics, civil defense artifacts, tourism and souvenirs. However, the risk run by such works is that they can become diffuse, but the editors of this slim volume attempt to draw together these diverse sources into a framework that takes into account previous work and which offers a new periodization for the field. Early works relied on rough chronologies that take on some characteristics of periodization, but in Atomic Culture an effort is made to draw the lines more distinctly. The first period is ‘early atomic culture,’ which begins in 1945 with the first detonations of nuclear weapons and continues through 1948. The second period begins with the Soviet detonation of a nuclear device, launching the period of ‘high atomic culture,’ which includes an odd mixture of atomic themed farcical comedies, such as ‘The Atomic Kid’ (1954), as well as many of the science fiction and giant monster films previously noted, but which also includes the escalation of the arms race culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The third period, ‘late atomic culture,’ begins with the release of the political satire ‘Dr Strangelove’ in 1964 and carries on through to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, including not only the bomb as a theme but also the emergence of no nukes themed films fueled by several nuclear reactor accidents. Following this periodization we are presently in the era of ‘post atomic culture,’ which has no clear boundaries and is characterized by a partial dissolution of the genre, as environmental disaster films begin to gather more audiences than nuclear themed films, although the latter lurk in the shadows with a series of ‘rogue state’ and ‘nuclear terrorist’ films. While useful for surveying the sixty odd year development of a genre, any possible proposed periodization is only as good as the number of people who adopt it, and that remains to be seen. Beyond its contribution to periodization and insights about possible dissolution of the genre, Atomic Culture has some useful chapters, in particular those that look at the place of atomic themed sites and landscapes in American culture, ranging from a study of ‘code switching’ in suburban Los Alamos to the bizarre proposed nuclear waste site marked with symbols, such as a ‘spike field,’ designed to impact a distant future when English may no longer be understood but when nuclear waste will still remain deadly.

As these works suggest, there is at present a wide ranging, topically and theoretically diverse, body of scholarship on atomic bomb film and related subjects. However, several areas remain less well studied, or even ignored. If the present body of work is any indication of English language literature, then certainly one major area in need of much further work is Japanese atomic bomb films and nuclear culture. Several of the works allude to this potential, with Shapiro making a real effort to redress this imbalance, but the field appears to be wide open for further studies, not as appendages to American studies, but as studies of Japanese nuclear culture and films in their own right. Beyond the rich, and understandably obvious, potential for further study of American and Japanese films and other nuclear media, there is virtually no work done on atomic themes in other international arenas. A study of Soviet and Eastern European cinema, alluded to in Broderick (1991) seems necessary, as is an attempt to unearth for English speakers elements of the genre in other contexts, which again is alluded to by Broderick’s filmography, which includes reference to a 1955 Arabic film entitled ‘My Mother-in-Law is an Atomic Bomb’ (1952). Another area in need of further study is documentary films and educational shorts, including television, which was proposed and tentatively studied by Shaheen but then more or less ignored, except for a couple of virtually unknown works that are mentioned, but not reviewed in any depth, by Broderick (1991). Even if Zeman and Amundsen are correct, in that the genre may have dissipated as a vibrant cultural force at the present, there is still plenty of work to be done on the past works. However, a word also needs to be said about access to materials for study, in particular films. While several of the films mentioned in these works are released on DVD, many films are not available, such as ‘Ladybug, Ladybug’ (1963). Similarly, some films are inaccessible due to industry region encoding or lack of subtitles for other languages, which is a for English speakers studying films in Japanese (or Arabic, for that matter). Similarly, many of the documentaries and short educational films noted in the above works are either very expensive to purchase or out of print, and thus inaccessible. In this way, atomic bomb scholarship is perhaps limited by market forces that seem reluctant to enter some of the important works into general viewing, which seems necessary for the discussion of themes film to be carried forward beyond the few who are lucky or privileged enough to see them. With the opening up of digital pathways to potentially create a more free flowing access to such works, the scholarship in this field could gain a new lease on life if the content owners and academic community could reach some sort of fair use agreement.

[This essay is by J. Progler and part of a longer work in progress. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Additional clips and trailers from several other atomic bomb films are available here.]

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America

2011-12-15T06:04:00.000+09:00

There are number of important book length studies in Latin American Cinema: one thinks of Carlos Mora's Mexican Cinema (University of California Press, 1982), Michael Chanan's Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (British Film Institute, 1983) and The Cuban Image (BFI/Indiana University Press, 1985), Randal Johnson's Cinema Novo X 5 (University of Texas Press, 1984) and The Film Industry in Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), Gaizka de Usabel's The High Noon of Latin American Films in Latin America (UMI Research Press, 1982), and Randal Johnson and Robert Stam's Brazilian Cinema (Associated University Press, 1995). Julianne Burton's Cinema and Social Change in Latin America (1986) is another important addition to this field. Consisting of 20 interviews with key directors, actors, critics, and media activists from Latin America, the book indirectly offers a historical overview of three decades of socially-conscious filmmaking as practiced in a wide diversity of countries.

The opening essay orients the reader by providing a succinct survey of the evolving conditions of Latin American filmmaking. Cinema in Latin America, Burton argues, is a 'politicized zone,' deeply immersed in historical process. The New Latin American Cinema forms an integral part of a post-war era of increasing militancy and nationalism. This introduction sketches the broad features of this cinema: its passionate rejection of the compartmentalized, hierarchical Hollywood production system, the search for a new kind of interaction between film and audience, the theorization of an alternative anti-colonial thematic and aesthetic. She also outlines the changing political circumstances which conditioned production: the general democratization of the immediate postwar period, the tendency toward coup d'etats and repression beginning in the sixties and culminating in the seventies, giving way, finally, to a redemocratization in the eighties which breathed new life into film culture, especially in Argentina.

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America is divided into three sections: 'The Documentary Impulse: The Drama of Reality,' 'Fictional Filmmaking: The Reality of Drama,' and 'Behind the Scenes.' The first two sections classify the filmmakers interviewed according to whether their work has been primarily fictional or documentary, but as the subtitles - the 'drama of reality' and the 'reality of drama' - suggest, one of the most provocative contributions of New Latin American Cinema has been precisely the fusion of these two modes. New Latin American Cinemas has also demonstrated an exuberant diversity of styles, ranging from the grittiest kind of documentary realism to the most fantastic allegory and 'quotidian surrealism,' the common denominator being a rejection of 'entertainment as usual.' The interviews feature proponents of a wide spectrum of approaches, from relatively 'straight' documentaries (Fernando Birri, Helena Solberg-Ladd), through mixed documentary-fiction modes (Nelson Pereira dos Santos), to tropical allegory (Glauber Rocha), and absurdist reflexivity (Raul Ruiz).

The third section supplements the comments by filmmakers with details of work 'behind the scenes,' i.e., the labors of film-related professionals such as actors, distributors, publicists, critics. In this sense the book transcends auteurism - an approach that would have been preoccupied only with adding a few third world cineastes to a preexisting first world 'pantheon' - by putting the centrality of the author-director in context and establishing the relationship of the director of other film workers. In this section we observe Latin American Cinema from the perspective of the actor (Nelson Villagra), the politically-aware distributor (Walter Achugar), the filmmaker-theorist-bureaucrat (Julio Garcia Espinosa), the historian-teacher-activist (Alfonso Gumucio Dagron), and the television critic (Enrique Colina). Nelson Villagra explains the theory of acting - a synthesis of Stanislavski and Brecht - that undergirds his performances in such films as 'Jackal of Nahueltoro' (1969) and 'The Last Supper' (1976) and expands on his opposition to what he considers the overly rhetorical and declamatory style employed in many Latin American films. Uruguayan Walter Achuga speaks of his role in promoting Latin American cultural collaboration as head of the Third World Cinematheque. Enrique Colina details his efforts as TV film critic on a show called '24 Times/Second' - a kind of radical Cuban version of 'At the Movies' - where he tries to provide Cuban audiences with the tools for 'decoding' the popular entertainment films currently being screened.

Julio Garcia Espinosa, a founding member of ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute), cultural activist, and government official relates his provocative experiments in popular culture, most notably his attempt to revitalize and 'dialecticize' the Cuban cabaret tradition degraded by commercialism and the Mafia. These popular forms, Espinosa argues, have utopian potential. People don't really want to be cooped up watching television: 'They have an organic need to go out, to participate, to communicate with one another not through packaged images but through live activities.' (Anyone who has been to Cuba knows just how good Cubans are at the 'live activities.') Espinosa speaks as well of the profound musical culture of the Cuban people and of his attempts to subvert the compartmentalization of tastes and genres. (One such experiment, a program entitled 'Concert in B Major,' grouped composers such as Bach, the Beatles, Benny More, and Leo Brouwer solely on the basis of the initial letters of their names.) Given the centrality of music Cuban culture, Espinosa argues, every Cuban filmmaker should be required to do at leas one musical just as every Hollywood hack was required to do the obligatory western.

Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, finally, speaks of the travails of an itinerant media activist from Bolivia. Dagron managed to reconstruct the buried history of Bolivian cinema by searching, without the help of index cards or microfilm, through all the newspapers published in Bolivia since the turn of the century. Given the absence of photocopying machines, Dagron had to photograph al the items, one by one, to create what he calls a 'monstrous archive.' Burton's interview with Dagron provides a glimpse not only of the tremendous obstacles confronting a Latin American media-activist, but also of the crucial need for such work, insofar as films in Latin America, as everywhere, are dependent on a kind of discursive ecology, a support-system furnished by history, criticism, and cultural promotion.

Cinema and Social Change is worth reading for the anecdotes alone. Fernando Birri describes working in flooded areas of Argentina, with heavy equipment sinking the filmmakers in mud up to their knees. Jorge Sanjines speaks of the subtle problems involved in winning the confidence of Quechua Indians who had every reason to be suspicious of the white 'gringos' from the cities. (The situation was eased when the filmmakers submitted to the authority of a 'yatiri' who read the coca leaves to discern the quality of their intentions.) Patricio Guzman tells of the brutal repression unleashed in Chile by Pinochet, resulting in the presumed death of two of his collaborators on 'Battle of Chile.' We virtually hear the gunfire as we accompany the Sandinista guerillas on their Naranjo offensive along with filmmakers Emilio Rodriguez Vazquez and Carlos Vicente Ibarra. Raul Ruiz explains how three of the major films of the Allende period were made at the same time and with the same camera. (Ruiz would finish work on 'Tres Tristes Tigres' in the morning, Aldo Francia would pick up the camera to make 'Valparaiso Mi Amor,' after which Miguel Littin would pick it up for the 'Jackal of Nahueltoro'.) But their anecdotes are not usually whimsical or self-serving. Rather, they make a point or underscore a theme: the unfavorable circumstances of third world filmmaking, the realities of political repression and exile, the dangers of paternalism, the need to collaborate with the 'people' whom on claims to serve.

Another leitmotif that emerges from the interviews is the theme of cultural difference within unity - i.e., each Latin American country has a specific cultural personality, yet feels itself to participate in a large collectivity of 'Latin Americanness.' Mario Handler speaks of the Uruguayan tendency to 'hypercultivation' in the arts. Sanjines emphasizes the strong amerindian strain in Bolivian culture. Espinosa stresses the centrality of dance, of conga and rumba, in Cuban life, while Pereira lauds the contribution of Afro-Brazilian religion to Brazil's cultural mix. Yet all these diversely formed peoples identify with the larger Latin American entity. As Ruiz puts it, 'The Latin American experience is of being outside (or inside) European culture in general, whereas the European is within one specific culture or another.' The interviews also highlight the cultural differences (and parallels) between Latin America and the United States. Tomas Gutierrez Alea mocks the inability of critics such as Andrew Sarris to understand revolutionary films like Memories of Underdevelopment, given the visceral anticommunism and the tendency to identify completely with alienated intellectual 'heroes' on the part of these critics. Helena Solberg-Ladd argues that Latin Americans are more accustomed to metaphorical language which allows for 'more permeable boundaries between the imaginary and the real.' The Latin American documentarian working in the United States, she complains, must always 'start from scratch,' without assuming 'any knowledge on the part of the viewer.' Still, she appreciates the opportunity of being a cultural mediator, able to present an 'insider's view' to North American audiences.

Burton has been ambitious in attempting to survey three decades of Latin American filmmaking theory and practice, including that in most of the major filmmaking countries, but privileging Cuba and Brazil at the expense of Mexico and Argentina. (One laments, for instance, the absence of certain key figures such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the seminal theorists of 'third cinema.') Within diversity, however, Burton has managed to maintain an overall unity based on thematic continuities: the Multi-fronted struggle against colonialism, the search for an alternative aesthetic, the attempt to transform the modes of production, distribution and exhibition.

The personal histories of the interviewees also reveal certain commonalities of experience. Most of the filmmakers were middle-class people who only gradually identified with the oppressed classes and national struggle. Most travelled to Europe only to discover themselves, paradoxically, as Latin Americans. Most experienced political repression. What is striking, in the main, is their political coherence and dedication, as well as their intellectual sophistication. (How many Hollywood directors, one wonders, would sprinkle their conversation with references to Hegel, Brecht, Gramsci?)

A reading of Cinema and Social Change in Latin America ends with a feeling of gratitude, both to the editor of the volume and to the figures interviewed. In a field which too often resorts to recycling the same cliches, this book constitutes a substantial and welcome contribution.

[This is a slightly edited version of a review by Robert Stam, originally published in the film and video monthly journal The Independent, Vol. 10, No. 9, November 1987, pp. 30-31. Stam is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the coauthor of Brazilian Cinema (1995) and the author of Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1992), and coauthor of A Companion to Film Theory (2004).]

African Aesthetics in the Films of Ousmane Sembene

2011-12-06T08:41:00.000+09:00

In the 1960s, several African directors of the francophone region launched their filmmaking careers. Their films mark the pioneering of genre films that portray Africa through African lenses. The most well-known director among them is Ousmane Sembene, who achieved fame through the prominence of his films, 'Borom Sarret' (1963) and 'La Noire de...' (AKA 'Black Girl,' 1967). As we assess Sembene's film practice, it becomes clear that he is a gifted griot, an artist who has developed a unique cinematic method of 'Africanizing knowledge' - to paraphrase V. Y. Mudimbe. Africanization of knowledge hereby implies the creation of indigenous aesthetics, and this aesthetic orientation can be traced to two different traditions: the tradition originating from the conventions of dominant film practices, and that of traditional narrative style indebted to the African oral tradition.

Borom Sarret is Ousmane Sembene's first film, and also the first professional film made by a black African. It achieved international acclaim when it won a prize at the 1963 Tours International Film Festival - the second African film to do so after Mustapha Alassane's Aoure (Marriage, Niger, 1962). At first glance, it is possible to dismiss Borom Sarret for its simplicity and amateurish photography. A closer examination of its structure, however, reveals a uniqueness that is non-Western, non-European and non-conventional, signalling a different mode of representation, and introducing indigenous aesthetics.

Sembene exposes the dichotomy between the urban rich and the urban poor of Dakar by transforming a series of vignettes into a microcosmic representation of African neocolonial society. The film's explicit indictment of neocolonialism, coupled with Sembene's expressively detailed delineation of its virulent impact on society, represents the creation of a unique ethos that has contributed to the film's special place in African film history as an indisputable masterpiece.

Sembene juxtaposes a linear chronology of events interspersed with fragmented episodes presented as coded political messages to illustrate and educate. In this encoded structure, we find an intense critique of the new African elite, who are presented as recreant and even more treacherous than the former colonial administrators. Although the specific content is Senegalese, Borom Sarret represents an African universe; the same story could have been filmed anywhere in black Africa, because the nature of the socio-economic and geopolitical experiences represented have been a constant feature from the colonial period to the neocolonial present.

Sembene believes that a filmmaker should strive beyond using the medium simply to inform. Rather, a filmmaker should stimulate individual consciousness and political awareness. In effect, the role of film in the African context must be construed as a modern form of enlightenment media capable of transcending, as he puts it, 'artificial frontiers and language barriers.' Sembene began as a writer, and moved to film as a medium for addressing that part of his audience prevented from experiencing his written works by illiteracy in French. Hence, in Borom Sarret, Black Girl, and in many sequences of his other films, he appears to appropriate silent film techniques to achieve clarity This can be seen in his painstaking attention to detail, as when the camera is made to assume the function of sound, a voice-over, or an observer. For Sembene, therefore, cinema is an educational tool, and its content must be made explicit. This strategy of emphasizing image over sound, cutting across 'artifical frontiers and language barriers,' is pertinent to understanding Sembene's coded political messages. By interweaving detailed indigenous images and explicit ideology, Sembene creates a unique aesthetic that his African audience can claim as their own.

Sembene and other African filmmakers, including Med Hondo, Safi Faye and Souleymane Cisse, believe in the reciprocity of ideas: ideas flowing from the artist to the audience and vice versa, unencumbered hierarchical barriers. The manifestation of this tangible objective can be seen in Sembene's filmic process. Borom Sarret and Black Girl, for example, resonate with character delineation, masterful use of monologue, and documentary voice-over narration. The narrative and stylistic component are fashioned to inspire the audience to participate in the experience of a typical routine of the cart driver and those of Diouana. By extension, the viewer is compelled also to think about the ironies of the newly-independent Senegal in transition. This is forcefully presented in Borom Sarret by Sembene's repudiation of formal closure, compelling the viewer to identify and reflect upon the cart driver's ambiguous life and the rapid dissipation of post-Independence promises. It is worth noting that Sembene leaves the endings of all his films open so as not to impose solutions, and to allow viewers so continue the discussion after film has ended.

Both Borom Sarret and Black Girl are structured to produce an emotional impact upon the viewer.This impact, however, derives not only from the historical significance of Sembene's pioneering opposition, but also from ideology - the African filmmakers' commitment to the use of the film medium as a timely and plausible cultural document for posterity. Since what is documented has an historical and a cultural function, there is concern for accuracy in presenting a realistic view of the content. This is what makes African film practice different from many foreign cinematographic representations of Africa that only glorify exoticism.

Third world and African film practices seek to develop an aesthetic deemed appropriate for their own cultural environment. Sembene, for example, usually depends on linear structuring and the explication of minute details, allowing events to happen in a natural time continuum. He has argued that this strategy enables him deliberately to slow the pacing of his films in pursuit of spectator-participation and for the benefit of his audience, who might not experience the full impact of the message if bombarded with a rapid succession of images.

Sembene's works force us to reflect upon the present period, when the Western media continue to expand as an enterprise of acculturation, and to ask: Can Africa be awakened through its own media to recover its own lost cultural heritage? Can this happen when Africans themselves are heartily embracing the cultural assimilation imposed first by colonialism, then by neocoloniaism, while vigorously pursued by the predatory claws of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank? In other words, how can the screen and other channels of information be completely decolonized to serve African interests? Who and what are the priorities?

[This is a slightly edited extract from the chapter 'The Creation of an African Film Aesthetic/Language for Representing African Realities,' originally published by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike in the book A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene, edited by Sheila Patty (Praeger Publishers, 1996), pp. 105-107, 110, 115. For further insights into the work of Ousmane Sembene, readers may wish to consult Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). Clips from some of Sembene's other films can be viewed here.]

Reflections on Ethnic Music

2011-11-21T08:00:00.035+09:00

This is a brief meditation on ethnicity as a source of all powerful musical styles, as a kind of curse in the contemporary world of nation states, and as an ever more complex puzzle for every student of popular music to solve. Browsing through the Wilfrid Mellers classic, one can browse a long time before finding much on ethnicity or class as foundations for musicking. Music in a New Found Land simply extends the high culture worldview used in writing about Bach or Beethoven or Orpheus to generously include the best of popular music in a civilization that is ever broader but always universal. Mellers writes from on high, a heavenly perspective, in which sympathetic judgments of everything musical under the sun are dispensed with gusto and St. Peter is encouraged to let all kinds of quality pass the gates, or perhaps we should describe it as an Olympian-situated knowledge that savors the foibles and idiosyncrasies of all the music makers below because the gods and mortals share so many passions. I know I have enjoyed this recent browsing greatly because I share in almost all the judgments: the appreciation of Thelonius Monk’s fingerings, the disgust with Stan Kenton’s mechanization, the appraisal of Menotti’s emptiness, the disappointments of so many ‘third stream’ syntheses. Mellers gets it right in phrase after phrase, page after page, but almost always by listening intelligently from the top down.

A theoretical or interesting quotation from Mellers on ethnicity per se is hard to find. While he does not 'pronounce' on ethnicity, he does have a lot to say about musics which are often thought of as ethnic - and not only Africans-American and country but other 'primitive' or 'prime' musics of the world as well. The primacy or firstness or originality of these musics seems to be taken for granted as varieties of grist for a universal mill in which 'serious' music, perhaps, is the miller. A few years ago I would have been very offended by this. After all, 'ethnicity' has been an axiom in most of my work, phrased as nationalist perspective in Urban Blues (1992), combined with classlessness in Tiv Song (1979), with class in Polka Happiness (Keil et al., 1992), with class and caste in our work on Greek Macedonian Gypsy musicians (The Instruments with A. V. Keil, in progress). All along, and especially in My Music (Crafts et al., 1993) I have been working from an ethnographic, bottom-up or culture-constituting point of view - where does the music come from? or in My Music how does each person fit music into a life? - rather than from a critical or interpretive, 'here is how I hear it' perspective. At the moment , however, I am very sympathetic to the Mellers variety of intelligent listening to everything from aloft, and more than a little ambivalent about my own past prediction for snipping out identities, both ethnic and idiocultural, from the social fabric, in order to celebrate them.

Much of this ambivalence has grown out of our Gypsy research. Mulling over interviews with the most senior musicians of Iraklia's neighbourhood, it is clear that despite having been settled in this one town for well over a century, the oldest people can think of themselves as having had at least three ethnic identities in addition to being Roma or Gypsies. In the interviews these ethnic identities are presented as choices made or not made in the midst of historical crises. 'When the Turks left this town in 1922 during the exchange of populations we could have gone with the Turko-Gyftoi because we certainly spoke Turkish fluently.' 'When we were starving during World War II and the occupying Bulgarian forces asked us if we were Bulgarian we probably should have said yes because more of us would have lived and we certainly spoke Bulgarian fluently. I served for two years in a Bulgarian army band playing for the officers.' 'All of our people have been Greek for as long as anyone can remember.' 'We Rom really have no music or folklore of our own, our deepest music for our own weddings is really Turkish.' 'The people who love our music the most are "the pained peoples," the Pontic Greek refugees from around the Black Sea, the Vlachs (a Rumanian speaking minority), the Slavic speaking minority.' I have made up these sentences and I could either make up more or patiently extract from our interview transcripts dozens of similar examples of people testifying to the flexibility of 'ethnicity' in Greek Macedonia.

This may be an extreme case of multiple or overlapped identities, but I suspect that just about every person you or I meet in the street is less mono-ethnic and much more complicated musically, historically, culturally than we think. Who has four grandparents from one tribe any more? Who listens to fewer than a dozen styles music?

From a Gypsy point of view and also from a universal or xenographic perspective outside all specific cultures (assuming for a moment, incorrectly, that such a xenographic vantage point exists), the quite recently invented states, with brand new and variably fascistic definitions of ethnicity in hand, have forced people to join their 'bundle' with defined borders if they want to claim land and citizenship. What had been flexible, fluid, complex, mosaicised identities for both individuals and groups suddenly assume a fixed and layered look as the big lie of a mono-ethnic nation-state becomes naturalized. The Gypsies of northern Greece can choose at times of war, whether or not to be Greek, Bulgarian or Turkish (and may yet be offered these choices again) but they cannot choose to be Rom. Or put it this way, they have less chance of choosing a Rom identity than 20 million Kurds have of choosing a Kurdish identity. Over a hundreds other peoples united on their territories are struggling for states ahead of the scattered Gypsy populations. Only a planned and peaceful reduction of populations in world-governed loose federations might eventually have room for Rom qua Rom, both settled and roaming.

What does all this have to do with 'ethnic' music in the USA? Well, in the past all music has been coming from tribes or 'ethnic groups' until very recently (remember Phrygian, Dorian and Lydian describe how those tribes sang in the era before homer, and rap was strictly a Bronx street corner phenomenon fifteen years ago). In the future I have the deepest desire to restore Gaia's world of maximized cultural and species diversity. But at this historical moment, as the 'cleansing' continues unopposed in Bosnia and the Third World War (Nietschmann, 1987) continues inside dozens of other states, my original title for this essay presented a sequential analysis within the parentheses - '(Black music, country music, others all)' - that is both very logical and completely problematic. Logical because 'Black music' has become virtually all of American music as jazz suffused pop and rhythm and blues became rock; 'country' is the next biggest music in America; 'other' could include every thing from Latin or salsa to the six varieties of polka; and finally, one could argue, 'all' of our music is ethnic - as 'James' puts it My Music, 'everything you hear comes from some kind of ethnic background, and from somewhere. So why do you want to be narrow?' (Crafts et al., 1993, p. 180).

But from ethnographic perspectives 'ethnicity' is completely problematic, too. Black musicians and leaders usually do not want to be considered 'ethnic' because it lumps the black experience within all the other immigrant experiences as if everyone volunteered to come over here; glossing over the middle passage, slavery and racism is the last thing they want to do. Country musicians would probably scratch their heads in puzzlement over the 'ethnic' label since country is just plain old everyday American music; hell, Charlie Pride sounds like a good ol' boy, ain't nothin' ethnic about it, we're singin' the songs of the unsilent majority. Most of the 'others' - German-Americans, Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Slovenian-Americans, etc. etc. - have been leaving the ethnic urban neighborhoods for the more anonymous suburbs just as fast as they can get the money together to buy a home and a monocultural lawn (no dandelions or clovers please). We are certainly 'all' ethnic, but it is ironic to realize this just as the 'all' has disappeared into the shopping mall.

Should analysts, both humanist and social scientific, continue to draw tight circles around people and call them members of a culture or subculture? We have just published a book about Polish-American polka music (Keil et al., 1992) but only two or three per cent of the Polish-Americans in western New York are enthusiastic enough about Polka dances to go to one every so often; have we falsely characterized this community by putting Polka music in an emblematic pose, the soul music of an ethnic working class community? When I drew a circle around the fans of B.B. King, Bobby Bland and Junior Parker in Chicago circa 1963 I did not pay any attention at all to other musicians and musics they were hearing and loving; no notice of Motown, a word or two for James Brown, and I hate to think how many of B's fans could have talked to me eloquently about country music if I has asked. In other words, reifying culture and simplifying the identities of people has been standard practice in the American academy for a long time now.

So perhaps I should quit my unannounced and largely unfought battle with the British critics and the cultural studies movement over people's music as something different from high, mass or folk music (see Feld and Keil, 1994, chapter 5); something different from the various fusions of high, mass and folk that Mellers in his closing pages (1964, pp. 436-7) wants to hear consummated in the new found land. It has long seemed to me that British and Canadian colleagues are always talking about mass culture or popular culture, sometimes in relation to high culture, but almost never talking about people's culture and music: brass bands, singing in pubs, amateur string quartets, and so forth. The universalizing, the globalization of culture and the trend toward a single civilization is certainly moving along at an ever-quickening pace; scholarship celebrating what people do for themselves in any given locality does seem more and more folkloric and quixotic. Postmodernists have been assuring me that globalization and localization of culture go hand in hand, the global economy eroding the old nation-sate identifies and leaving space for local communities to reassert themselves. I do not see or hear it in Buffalo yet. Each new mall in the suburbs is bigger and more appalling than the one before; the city shrinks and there is less and less live music. I find it harder and harder to locate local cultures and to do this ethnographic or documentary work in many other parts of the world. And conversely, it seems more and more urgent to participate in local musicking with the aim of creating a culture or cultures for this watershed, this echo-niche, that will do what music used to do so well - bind people, their beliefs and the natural world together in a specific time and place.

I think of the work we do at MUSE (Musicians United for Superior Education) Incorporated as experiments in ethnogenesis, culture creation, retribalisation, planting the seeds for new ethnicities. We raise money and send teams of African-American, Afro-Latin, Native American musicians and dancers to schools and community centres on a regular weekly basis to see if they can instigate self-sustaining music-dance styles in which the older children are able to teach the younger ones the traditions of their particular school or centre. After a few years of this work I cannot say with complete confidence that a new tradition has been invented or taken hold at a school yet, but suddenly there is a circle dance at an earth day celebration at one school or a demand from students at another school for an afterschool club that would let the bomba really blossom. Will the earth day celebration be repeated with variations next year? Will the afterschool club continue and spawn new lyrics, new dance steps, new events that become annual? Cultural invention is one thing; reliable transmission and annual rites take a lot of time to establish themselves.

I have no idea if my own musicking or these muse incorporating experiments will work, but high culture art has seemed dead to me for decades by now, mass culture commodities are ever more spectacularly stultifying, and the diverse people’s musics increasingly either ratified, commodified or marginalized as residual, ethclass folk music. In any case, it is more fun to invent oneself as a possible ancestor of new tribes than to document the pain and repression of the old ones.

References
Crafts, S., Cavicchi, D. and Keil, C. (1993). My music: Explorations of music in daily life. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Feld S. and Keil, C. (1994). Music grooves: Essays and dialogues. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Keil, C. (1992). Urban blues. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Keil, C. (1979). Tiv song: The sociology of art in a classless society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Keil, A. V., Keil, C. and Blau, R. (1992). Polka happiness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Mellers,W. (1964). Music in a new found land: Themes and developments in the history of American music. London: Barrie and Rockliff.
Nietschmann, B. (1987). The third world war. Cultural Survival, 11(3), 1-16.

[This essay was written by Charles Keil and was originally published in 1994 under the title '"Ethnic" music traditions in the USA (black music; country music; others; all)' in Popular Music (Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 175-78). It has been slightly edited for reprinting here. Keil is a recent recipient of the Koizumi Fumio Prize for his achievements in ethnomusicology. A full text of his prize lecture is available here.]

Toward a Militant Cinema

2011-11-10T00:48:00.000+09:00

In 1970, the Italian cinema was represented at the Cannes Film Festival by Elio Petri's 'Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.' The star of the film was Gian Maria Volonte. The following year, the official Italian entry at Cannes was Guiliano Montaldo's 'Sacco and Vanzetti,' which also starred Gian Maria Volonte. And in 1972, two Italian films, Francesco Rosi's 'The Mattei Affair and Elio Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven', tied for the Grand Prize of the Cannes Film Festival. The star of both films: Gian Maria Volonte. The dominance of Gian Maria Volonte at this level of international film competition is no accident. He is a consummate performer, with a background in classic and contemporary theatre, and, on the commercial level, was one of the top film stars in Italy until his death in 1994. But Volonte was also an actor who chose, on artistic and ideological grounds, to engage himself through his work in contemporary social and political struggles.

Gian Maria Volonté was born in Milan on April 9, 1933. After graduating from Rome's national academy of dramatic art in 1957, he entered upon a professional theatrical career, distinguishing himself in a wide range of productions, from the classics, including Shakespeare and Racine, to contemporary works such as "Sacco and Vanzetti" and Hochhuth's "The Deputy." He subsequently received critical acclaim for a series of TV performances, including productions of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot."

Volonté's first major film roles were in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Un Uomo da Bruciare (1962) and Gianfranco de Bosio's Il Terrorista (1963). The best known of his early screen performances, however, are those as the villains in the Sergio Leone "spaghetti westerns," A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), although his name appears in the credits under the anglicized pseudonym of "John Welles." But then, at that early date, even Sergio Leone was known as "Bob Robertson." It was the international financial success of these films which established Volonté ‘s commercial status and later allowed him greater choice in his film roles.

From the mid-1960s, Volonté worked with some of the foremost leftist directors in Italy and France - with Elio Petri on Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971), with Jean-Luc Godard on Wind from the East (1970), with Yves Boisset on The Assassination (1972), with Marco Bellocchio on Slap the Monster on Page One (1972), and with Francesco Rosi on Many Wars Ago (1970), The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973). Volonté also worked in Mexico, where he completed a starring role in Actas de Marusia (1976), a historical film on Chile (with contemporary parallels) directed by exiled Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin.

The following interview, conducted by Guy Braucourt (who has deleted his own questions), originally appeared in the French publication, Ecran, and has been translated for Cineaste by Renée Delforge.

THE ACTOR AND SOCIETY
I don't really choose my roles - I either accept a film or not according to my conception of the cinema. And I don't intend here to give a definition of political cinema, a category I don't believe in anyway because every film, in a general manner, is political. An "apolitical cinema" is an invention of poor journalism. I only hope that the films I make say something about the mechanisms of our society, that they engage in the research for a bit of truth. For me, it is essential to consider the cinema - as well as theatre and television - as a means of mass communication.

It is true that I have made films, particularly westerns, that do not exactly correspond to this conception. But at that time I was at a stage in my career when I had to establish myself on the market, especially because the films "with content" that I had shot - Un Uoma da Bruciare (A Man to Burn) and Il Terrorista (The Terrorist) - were ignored by the distribution system and the public. A Bullet for the General (1966), the western directed by Damiano Damiani, was a different case since that script actually dealt with north American imperialism and the role of the CIA in Latin America. But generally speaking, the western is a tiring genre for an actor and one which personally doesn't interest me.

Being an actor is a question of choice which poses itself first on an existential level - either you express all the conservative structures for the society and content yourself with being a robot in the hands of the establishment, or you turn toward the progressive elements of the society and try to establish a revolutionary rapport between art and life. From that point, it is obvious that the fact of being a star gives me the objective possibility of choosing my films, but I see no contradiction between my conception of the cinema and this status. Without a doubt I'm worth anywhere from 100 to 120 million lire per film [approximately $160,000-$200,000] but I don't indulge myself in the typical life-style of a movie star. And then, as Petri says, we are ready to accept a lower salary if the other financial aspects of the cinema are also diminished. Otherwise, who would profit from the reduction of the salaries of actors and directors - the producers, distributors, and others who exploit them, in short, the bosses!

I don't believe in the definition of political cinema fostered by bourgeois critics, but rather in the existence of a politics of the cinema. In Rome, for example, there is a businessman who owns 60 movie theatres, and distribution in Italy is so concentrated that the fate of films is totally out of the hands of the creators. The Working Class Goes to Heaven didn't do well because it was poorly distributed, while The Mattei Affair was as successful as a James Bond picture. The situation of the cinema is very different in socialist countries where the business is nationalized. And, essentially, there isn't all that much to do in this area beyond taking away the power from the producers, distributors and other businessmen, from those who enrich themselves at other's expense.

Even the politics of "art" cinema, though useful, is not sufficient, these theatres are situated in the centers of big cities and therefore reach only a circumscribed public, small circles of two or three hundred people, mainly intellectuals. On the other hand, a distribution circuit with immense possibilities is that of A.R.C.I. [Italian Cultural and Recreational Association] which is tied to the left unions and parties and which consists of several thousand movie theatres throughout the country which are independent of the commercial circuit. But these theatres are poorly utilized and have again one confronts the problem of decentralization which so heavily stamps Italian cultural life.

FROM ROSI TO PETRI
The investigation pursued by Rosi in The Mattei Affair consists of analyzing the political line of the Mattei character - his struggle with the oil-producing countries against the U.S. monopoly, his contracts with the Eastern countries, his support of the politics of nationalization. He is a character, however, who is seen critically - he's a man who, despite his political line, eventually yields to a certain demagogy and who mistakenly thinks he can struggle by him self. Moravia has written accurately that there has never been a sufficiently enlightened bourgeoisie in Italy to support such a man and such a dialectical process between capitalism and the state.

The Working Class Goes to Heaven by Petri is also a dialectical film, not a propaganda film. It is a critical analysis, somewhat expressionistic, of the situation of a "non-conscious" working class. We tried to make an X-ray of working class reality, in its professional surrounding (the factory) and its private one (women, children, leisure). The communist critics criticized the film for misrepresenting the relationship between the workers and the party, but this is a dimension we intentionally overlooked in favor of another aspect of the problem - the worker taken in by the traps and seductions of consumer society, whose goals are limited to the car, the TV, the sports on Sunday, and who even in times of union conflict doesn't get involved politically. I think the film reflects a particular aspect of reality today - it is a critical discourse on consumerism as an attempt to lull one's consciousness to sleep. The worker character that I play is not conscious of this process but he continually pays with his self and each time he plays he discovers another aspect of his condition.

Petri is without a doubt the director who has the least hierarchical conception of cinematic work, and the one who establishes the best dialectical relationship with all the members of the crew. For him, a film is a collective in which everyone contributes in terms of ideas; and it's an economic collective, too, the crew actually being the owners of the film.

Generally speaking, I develop my characters in the fashion of an investigator who collects all the possible documentation on the issue which interests him. My presentation, then, is done more on a journalistic than on a dramatic level, and utilizes the same material the writer collects and uses to construct his subject. I worked this way, for instance, in creating the inspector in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion - his way of walking, his attitudes, his language, even the way he combs his hair, which corresponds to a specific custom in Italy, one which goes back to the time of the bourbons and which one still sees today in the ministries. For the worker in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, I talked at length with factory workers about illnesses specific to their condition such as neuroses, deforming arthritis and pulmonary diseases.

The next stage is a sort of critical, analytical preparation of the character, of his psychology, to determine the general attitude I must have in the film. Then comes the normal dialectical relationship between the actor and the director - we get together and talk until we reach a common view of the problem to be solved, it being understood that the director always has the final say. The psychological analysis of the character is also involved at the level of the dialog, line for line. I think this sort of analysis is part of my work as an actor even in everyday life, that is, on a continuous basis.

GODARD AND FRENCH CINEMA
The French cinema suffers, I believe, from two illnesses - its inspiration is too literary and it is produced by directors from well-off backgrounds. It is a cinema of the bourgeois class. In Italy the relationship of the film-maker to the political dialect of the society is more direct, the social problems are too vital to make a cinema which doesn’t take into account what is happening around us.

Godard, of course, is a separate case. When I worked with him on Wind from the East, he was at a stage of his career when he was questioning himself. He was really trying to do the impossible - to negate himself as a director and see what would happen. He experimented with the possibilities of interaction between the traditional relationships within a film crew and the need for a less authoritarian and more collective work process, but to the point that he wanted to just give the camera to anyone to let them do their part of the film. For me, Godard is the last bastion of a bourgeois conception of the cinema, a bastion who is at one and the same time the most enlightened and the most masochistic of his class. He is too preoccupied with only one type of problem - his problems - which makes him forget the essential - the function of the cinema as a means of communication with the masses, the relationships between creation, production and distribution.

Our contracts were quite limited. He would plant the camera there, and me in front of it, supposedly representing the symbol of American imperialism. His goal was to break the actor, to destroy this form of mediation with the viewer. and he was constantly asking me questions like whether Stalin or Mao contributed most to destroying democracy, to which I answered "Harlequin," and since one doesn't break Harlequin... I think that, in the end, it will be for his contributions in the area of cinematic language and not ideology that Godard will be most noted.

FOR A MILITANT CINEMA
Neither TV nor the commercial cinema in Italy are doing any serious information work , addressing themselves to the whole country. In fact, to take only one example, when Sacco and Vanzetti was broadcast on TV, the word "anarchist" was not used once, instead they would say "radical." So it has become necessary to provide real information - in fact to counteract the official information - and disseminate it through the parallel distribution circuits such as the ARCI theaters.

It was in this spirit that about five years ago an anti-repression film committee was established which brought together about half of the directors, both from the left, such as Nelo Risi, Nanni Loy, Petri, Damiani, and from the right, such as Visconti - yes, I know that Visconti says he's a Marxist, but it's not what you pretend to be that really matters! For the same reasons, the film December 12 was made collectively after the bombing attempts in Milan in December 1969 and the "suicide" by the police of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. It's a film made on the spur of the moment perhaps a bit rashly, and is no doubt quite naïve, but it's something that had to be done quickly to tell and show people what TV and the newspapers were hiding from them.

Another example of this sort of counter-information is the one-hour documentary, La Tenda in Plazza, that I myself filmed in 16mm in the factories occupied by the workers in Rome. It's a film which allowed us to establish a new type of information between the workers in the unions which work throughout the country, sometimes even in the same town, without any contract with one another, and also between this class in struggle against capitalism and other social categories, such as students, to whom the film was shown in certain universities. But I had to produce this film myself, outside the capitalist production/distribution system, whereas it should have been up to a worker’s organization to undertake this kind of cinematic information work! There are so many people and things in this area to agitate around. Another form of action for me as an actor consists of going into the streets to organize provocation performances, to force people to look, to listen. I've been practicing this type of theatre which has become the cultural artifact of a class, and which I think a critique by our group has accurately defined as the "sad nocturnal rites of the bourgeoisie."

But even without engaging in this form of militant art, the actor can assume his role in society by his choice. when I played Sacco in the theatre, then Vanzetti in the cinema, it is evident that I didn't content myself with merely a professional participation. Which doesn't mean either that I was concerned at a personal political level, because I'm not an anarchist and I have never been tempted by this doctrine, but it so happens that the anarchists are currently the militants most exposed to repression. Likewise, December 12, the film on Pinelli and Valpredra, was not actually conceived as a film on anarchism but more on justice and the free functioning of democracy.

In any case, as a militant of the communist party, I don't pose this kind of dogmatic problem for myself. I'm fighting above all for the freedom of expression and for the causes which I feel important to support, without worrying about adhering to party lines or having to give an account of myself. For me, in the same way that the actor's job is only one means among others to do political work within society, being a communist means defending as well as possible the values of democracy.

[This is a slightly edited version of 'Gian Maria Volonte Talks About Cinema and Politics,' originally published in Cineaste (Vol. VII, No. 1, pp. 10-13). The movie stills accompanied the original article.]

The 'Arab Terrorist' on American TV

2011-10-22T20:04:00.001+09:00

One of the ideological assumptions found in the motion-picture-made-for-television genre is that an Arab is a terrorist. Although this has become a tired cliché, and the influence of any single film is limited there is a dangerous, cumulative effect in repeated stereotyping. Fixed images, left unchallenged, inform or ‘disinform’ the values and perceptions of individual citizens, even those in government service, for negative stereotypes do not exist in a vacuum. Viewers need to ask themselves who benefits when an entire culture is characterized as violent, cruel, blood-thirsty, and anti-American?

The growing diversity among American television networks during the 1980s was not translated into a diversity of Arab portraits and scenarios. Whether the product is Hostage Flight (NBC, 1985), Sword of Gideon (HBO, 1986), Under Siege (NBC, 1986), The Taking of Flight 847 (NBC, 1988), or Terrorist on Trial: The United States vs. Salim Ajami (CBS, 1988), the results are similar. Arabs are depicted in the images of Hitler’s SS and Attila’s hordes. The Arab lurks in the shadows with AK-47, bomb, or dagger in hand to seduce, beat, rape, and murder innocents. Summing up these diabolical others, a passenger in Hostage Flight says, "These bastards shot those people in cold blood. They think it's open season on Americans."

The message to American viewers on whom to love and whom to hate is hardly subtle. There can be only one reaction when viewers witness Muslim fanatics blowing up the White House and slaughtering Americans in Under Siege. There can be only one reaction when in Terrorist on Trial Ajami, a Palestinian Arab captured in Lebanon by an elite American military unit and brought to trial in the U.S., boasts of ordering the deaths of American women and children abroad. Sitting in the witness chair, Ajami states that if he possessed nuclear weapons, he would use them: "We will strike at them in their home country as well as overseas. Long live Palestine!"

To government officials, American soldiers, and the average citizen, Ajami is the symbol of the heartless fanatic opposed to peace. One of the protagonists in Terrorist on Trial explains that Palestinian Arabs prefer "to walk up to unarmed people and shoot them." An enraged American Marine slaps Ajami around in his cell because, "You don’t kill kids."

George Engund, the producer of Terrorist on Trial, has defended his work by saying, “In court (Ajami) is given his say - the first time a Palestinian has had such a forum on TV." Despite this assertion, the net effect of Terrorist on Trial is to perpetuate the tradition of dehumanized Arabs, particularly Palestinians opposing Israel, as grasping, greedy terrorists with severe mental problems. A journalist in the film feeds the myth by asserting that Arabs are more violent and more primitive than other people: "They are very clever; first thing they do is corrupt the language. They appeal to our sympathy by calling themselves guerrillas or freedom fighters. They’re not." Ajami's own defense attorney asks the jury to view him as "someone who might as well have been from another planet."

The film also includes scenes of shabby Arab-Americans who demonstrate in favor of Ajami, leaving viewers with the impression that the Arab-American community sympathizes with terrorists. A government official is outraged: "They’re marching for a man that murdered at least 20 or 30 people." These Arab-Americans are so hapless and un-educated that not one of them is capable of defending Ajami in court. That task falls to a liberal Jew who is a supporter of Israel but will defend the terrorist because, as a champion of civil rights he supports the "rule of law." A justice department official underscores the supposed lack of Arab-American legal talent by saying, "A fact is a fact. There are no qualified American-Arab attorneys to defend Ajami."

Under Siege had spread the mud on Arab-Americans even thicker. It focused on an Arab terrorist cell working out of the Detroit suburb, Dearborn, where in fact some 20,000 Americans of Arab descent lived at the time of its production, including a number of Lebanese Shi'ites. The story is pure fiction, the setting and the name of the terrorist group are not. This fact/fiction blur can only suggest that such cells may truly exist, and suspicion of such political activity may feed the assaults, bombings, and killings that have already afflicted various Arab-American communities and organizations.

The thrust of Under Siege is what it would be like if Arab terrorists, aided by their Arab-American brethren, launched attacks in the United States. The film begins with a stolen military truck being blown up in the middle of squads of young soldiers - more than 200 are killed. A White House oracle says, "They're Shi'ite terrorists... we all knew they would hit us at home." There follow sequences in which the terrorists, led by Abu Ladeen, strike at innocents throughout the country: on street corners, in restaurants, at airports and throughout the Capitol area. The FBI official charged with locating the terrorists orders his men to check out "every Middle East community... he’s got to have a safe home. There's a large Shi'ite community in the Detroit area." Super-imposed on the screen: Dearborn, Michigan, followed by shots of stores with Arabic names and signs with Arabic lettering.

Throughout Under Siege Iranians are interchangeable with Arabs, and the dialogue is racist. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Iran's ambassador, "People in your country are barbarians." The FBI director goes one better by telling an associate, "Those people"- Arabs - "are different from us. It's a whole different ball game. I mean the East and Middle East. These people have their own mentality. They have their own notion of what's right and what's wrong, what's worth living for and dying for. But we insist on dealing with them as if they're the same as us. We'd better wake up." Co-written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Bob Woodward, Under Siege conveys the warning that the Arabs are coming to terrorize the United States and Arab-Americans are going to help them.

What is so disquieting about such films is that they effectively portray Arabs and Arab-Americans as being at war with the United States. Nicholas Kadi, an Iraqi actor who has made his living playing terrorists, is uneasy about his work. As an Arab terrorist in The Last Precinct, Kadi says, he did "little talking and a lot of threatening looks, threatening gestures, threatening actors. Every time we'd spit. There are other kinds of Arabs in the world besides terrorists. I'd like to think that someday there will be an Arab role out there for me that would be an honest portrayal."

Clearly there are Arab terrorists and certainly terrorism is a legitimate theme for films. One could argue, however, that for all the television time spent on the subject, the theme of terrorism has never been seriously addressed, only exploited. No TV film remotely approaches the complexity of the terrorist bombings depicted in The Battle of Algiers or the kidnapping-execution in State of Siege. Moreover, the TV images are monochromatic. Viewers see Arabs only as perpetrators of violence, never as victims, especially not of the kind of state terrorism seen on the West Bank. There are no images of Arab arms being broken, Arab homes being blown up, Arab demonstrators shot dead. Nor are there many apolitical images. Viewers do not see the Arab mother singing to her child. They do not see an Arab doctor tending the ill, an Arab teacher giving a lesson in algebra, an Arab programmer working with a computer. An Arab man never embraces his wife. Families do not gather to go to mosque or church.

The sins of omission and commission in spite of network broadcast standards and executives charged with monitoring programs for images that denigrate entire communities. CBS-TV's Alice Henderson says, "There is no intent by CBS... to unfavorably stereotype individuals of any ethnic origin." ABC TV's Tom Kersey insists that, "One of the most sincere promises this department can make is the inclusion of minorities in positive portrayals in all of our programming." NBC-TV's Broadcast Standards manual states, "Television programs should reflect a wide range of roles for all people... and should endeavor to depict men, women, and children in a positive manner, keeping in mind the importance of dignity in every human being." As of 1988, when this article was written, network practice has yet to follow stated network policy.

Some individual professionals are keenly aware of the unfairness of the Arab image on American television and have worked for change. Producer Alan Rafkin has written, "When I see a Jew portrayed a Shylock, I want to cry. So I know how an Arab feels when he is described as a killer." Howard Rosenberg, Pulitzer Prize winning critic of the Los Angeles Times, has written, "One day there will be an American TV drama viewing Arabs through the eyes of Arabs. One day in the very distant future, probably - for Hollywood is a stubborn child clutching a Linus blanket when it comes to relinquishing such ragged stereotypes as the Arab who is bloodthirsty."

In a letter published in the newsletters of the Writer's Guild and Screen Actor's Guild, writer-producer Ted Flicker, identifying himself as an American Jew, wrote, "Arabs are portrayed as crazy billionaires, terrorists, devious voluptuaries, barbaric white slavers, etc., ad nauseam. Dear fellow writers, on behalf of my Arab cousins, I say to you, think before you write that Arab... I think honor requires that we, the makers of our nation's myths, consider the plight of these people... and help get rid of the Arab stereotypes." Way back in 1951 comedian Milton Berle, at the height of his fame, said it very simply when he told fellow comedian Danny Thomas, "There is no room in this business for prejudice." No room, indeed.

[This essay was written by Jack Shaheen and originally published in Cineaste (Vol. 17, No. 1, 1989, pp. 10-12). It has been slightly edited for reprinting here. The images above are from the same article. Shaheen has gone on to become an internationally acclaimed media critic. He is the author of Reel Bad Arabs (2009) and is featured in the documentary film of the same name, which is available for viewing on YouTube. You can also watch a recent lecture featuring Shaheen speaking on a similar topic.]

Review of Borhan Alaouie's Film 'Kafr Kassem'

2011-10-08T14:04:00.000+09:00

In the 1975 film 'Kafr Kassem,' the Lebanese director Borhan Alaouie exposes several contradictions of the Arab world while describing the actions of his brothers in other countries, thus providing viewers with a truly historical representation of his reality. Kafr Kassem is a small Palestinian village situated within 12 miles of Tel Aviv. The action of the film takes place between July 23rd and October 29th, 1956. The first date commemorates the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the second the night of the historic massacre when 49 people were killed by Israeli troops. That day the Israeli command had decreed a curfew for 4:30 p.m. knowing that it was physically impossible to warn the workers in the fields who, as usual, returned to the village around 6:30 p.m. From the discussion of the Israeli officers, viewers understand that the massacre was clearly premeditated, the orders clear and precise - shoot on sight all those discovered after the curfew.

Beyond the massacre, which is minutely reconstructed, without sentimentality or false humanism, Alaouie analyses the implacable genocidal mechanism of the Zionists against the Palestinians. Apart from a certain bitterness, the film is a coldly lucid analysis, materially and historically speaking, of the state of the Arab world at the time. 'In 1956,' explains Alaouie, 'Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel, France and England prepared the "tri-partite" intervention because they saw in the nationalisation of the Canal an attack against them. As Nasser explained it, the Egyptians had built the canal with their own sweat and blood and now were only taking back what rightfully belonged to them. Why, then, did Israel become involved in this intervention? This is what clearly demonstrates the neo-colonial nature of Israel. After three months of nationalisation, during which time each had its own tactics, Israel thought that it was necessary to prevent the Arabs in the occupied territories from reacting or acting. They wanted to make an example, a preventative example, and so a premeditated massacre was chosen as a form of intimidation.

Significantly, the film opens with Nasser's anti-colonialist speech announcing the nationalisation of the Canal, thereby providing a progressive introduction but also pointing out a tactical contradiction. Nasser proclaims that m 'Palestine is the heart of Arabia.' But at that historical moment it is already a divided Arabia, divided by an opponent who, fearing an uprising the Palestinians, forced them to become 'Israelians,' and then staked themselves on a historical situation which would take several years to level out. To the Nasserian communists who were jubilant because of Nasser's action, Alaouie contrasts a consideration of the course of history, which in 1967 will end up in the Six Day War.

Alaouie explains the situation in these terms: 'At that time [that of Israelisation] there was within the Israeli Communist Party, to which was attached the Arab Communist Party, a difference of analysis. Some (revisionists) pretended that what separated the Arab workers from the Israeli workers was Zionism. They believed that the problem of the Arab workers would be resolved once the class struggle began. The Arab workers would then have to be in solidarity with the Israeli workers. The others (Nasserians), on the contrary, refuted this analysis because the Palestinians were not in the same class struggle situation. These two theses were debated within the Communist Party. It has been proven that this was an historical debate and a little later those of the first tendency identified themselves with the national liberation struggle.'

'Kafr Kassem' also shows us the process of dispossession employed by the Zionists on the Palestinian frontiers. Alaouie speaks in his film of Palestinian land which fell under the 'fallow land' law. Land which belonged to peasants, often their only means of subsistence, was expropriated without compensation when it was judged essential to the security of the Zionist state because of its proximity to the border. The land was left uncultivated and so became fallow. After a year, the plots fell into the public domain and were recuperated in this way, serving as buffer zones, a sort of 'no man's land,' at the borders. In this way, one by one, several Palestinian villages were dispossessed, the land going to Israeli immigrants arriving from Europe to found the kibbutz. As Alaouie explains: 'The Arab political movement formed in 1960, appropriately called "El Ard" ( "The Earth"), was based on the need to recover the Palestinian land in occupied territory. The Zionists clearly knew that without land the Arabs were deprived of their roots. They tried to obtain this land through two laws - the first was the application of the "fallow land" law, which the film analyses. There was also the "absent" law, however, which was much more terrible - through this, the Arab peasant became unemployed or an employee assigned to work for the new colonialists." It was exactly those unemployed and employees who were living in Kafr Kassem and who were massacred by the Israeli troops in October, 1956.

[This essay was extracted and slightly edited from an article by Andre Paquet, 'Toward an Arab and African Cinema: The 1974 Carthage Film Festival,' which was originally published in Cineaste, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 19-20 (Fall 1975).]

Films on Schooling and Education

2011-09-25T10:03:00.000+09:00

Schooling has become more or less universal in the contemporary world, with schools found in virtually every corner of the globe. The pervasiveness of modern schooling is remarkable in that it was for the most part introduced globally within the past century. Visitors to schools the world over would be struck by their similarities, the focus on rigid schedules marked off by bells, their age segregation, the arrangement of desks facing the teacher at the front of the room, behind whom is a blackboard and above which is a clock and the national flag. While everyone attends school, few analyze its origins and impacts, with most concerned with getting ahead in the system. One way to wedge open a discussion on schooling is compare and contrast it with education. Although used interchangeably, schooling can be thought of as the institutionalized side of education, which then points to questions of the impact of this institution on cultures and communities and the alternative views on education.

Indigenous and aboriginal peoples were not often served well by schooling, in particular during the late 19th and early 20 century when various racist government policies informed the schools they often forcibly attended. A famous example is depicted in an episode of 'The American Experience' TV series that focuses on the schools set up by Richard Henry Pratt, famous for his statement 'kill the Indian to save the man.' The title of the 1992 episode, In the White Man's Image, sums up the story well. Pratt's plan to civilize the Indians involved making them more like white folks by shearing their hair, changing their clothes and forbidding their language. This was done after kidnapping children from their tribal families and shipping them hundreds of kilometers away to boarding schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where in addition to be stripped of their Indian identity they were also trained in various menial tasks, perhaps testimony to the attitude of the schools toward their potential. The irony of these policies, and other similar policies the world over, was that even if one accepts the premise to use schooling to make native peoples more white, they would still not be accepted into white society until racist attitudes and cultural beliefs were corrected, suggesting perhaps that for such policies to be truly effective white people would have to also be 'civilized' into accepting racial, cultural and other forms of diversity on an equal footing.

In addition to this documentary feature, Indian and Aboriginal schools have been the topic of a couple of films. The 1997 Canadian film The Education of Little Tree includes a telling scene in one such school. The title character, Little Tree, an aboriginal boy being raised by his grandparents, is taken by court order to an Indian School. Upon arrival, he is told that once he enters the gates of the school he shall not 'speak Indian' again. When Little Tree meets the school headmaster, he is told that 'Americans don't name children after objects,' and is given a new name randomly selected from a book: Joshua. When asked if he understands this, a bewildered 'Joshua' replies, 'no sir.' He fares no better once classes begin. During a biology lesson, when the teacher asks the students to describe a picture of two deer, students mechanically drone 'running' and other half-hearted barely conscious responses. But Little Tree enthusiastically calls out that the deer are 'mating,' which he no doubt recognized from living in the forest with his grandparents. But for offering this answer in the class (which is actually correct), he is beaten by the teacher and brought to the headmaster. While walking the boy to an attic room for solitary confinement, the headmaster asks, 'do you know what you have done?' Little Tree again replies, 'no sir.' He has no idea that he has done anything wrong, because he is not yet acclimated to the ways of schooling, although he is eventually bludgeoned into submission like the other students. These scenes suggest that the knowledge Little Tree brought to school is a liability in the white man's world and that the goal of the school is to do as Pratt recommended, 'kill the Indian to save the man.'

A similar story is told in the 2002 Australian film, Rabbit Proof Fence. In this case, three aboriginal girls are forcibly removed from their families by court order and sent hundreds of kilometers away to a boarding school, where they will be taught to serve white folks as maids and seamstresses, again in the name of the white man's civilizing mission. In one telling scene, the director of Indian affairs visits the school and examines one of the girls to see if she qualifies to be taken to a special advanced school. The examination consisted of lifting her shirt to examine her skin color, which being a rich brown meant she failed the 'exam.' Based on a true story, the film points out that schools such as this were part of government policy in Australia for until the mid 20th century but which were eventually closed, with their tragic result of having created a 'lost generation.' This idea of being lost as an aboriginal person in the dominant white society is a factor of colonialism in general, and one could find similar instances of both internal colonialism (as in the US and Australia) and external colonialism (as is in Africa, India and Latin America) wreaking havoc on the communities and cultures of indigenous peoples.

While these films focus on the outcomes of racist policies, often highlighting the tenacity of individual Native Peoples to survive in such a system, these films were more or less produced to inform, and especially entertain, White audiences, making the rounds on the festival circuit and garnering several awards. However, there are also a number of less well known instances of communities redressing the imbalances and healing the damages of colonized institutionalized schooling. For example, a series of films produced by Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas (PRATEC) in Peru focuses on the regeneration of indigenous knowledge and communities. The 2005 film 'Iskay Yachay: Two Kinds of Knowledge' focuses on the attempt by peasant farmers in the Andes to reclaim their rich ecological and agricultural wisdom from the halls of government run schools that undermine local knowledge in favor of Spanish language and the usual slate of school subjects. But what is unique about these communities, as suggested by the title of the film, is that they are not simply rejecting the 'modern knowledge' of the schools part and parcel. Rather, they want the schools to teach 'two kinds of knowledge,' that their children should have the option to remain in the Andes and live a traditional agro-centric life, which has its own requisite knowledge that is ignored in modern schooling with its focus on urban life and language. At the same time, they should also not be impaired if they feel the need to migrate to urban areas, which requires Spanish language and facility with reading, writing and arithmetic. It's a good antidote to the usual sad story of schooling creating an alienated class of people neither here nor there, and the work of PRATEC is exemplary for the close collaboration between schools and communities.

It is this dual attitude toward knowledge in a cooperative relationship that makes PRATEC interesting and worth following, and their work has been the subject of the 1998 book The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development. Other films made by PRATEC, including 'Loving Teacher' and 'Culturally Sensitive Education,' focus on the role of teachers among the indigenous communities. In Perus as elsewhere, with a Ministry of Education system in control of schools, urban college graduates are sent to rural areas for two years before they can qualify for jobs in the cities, a common policy where state subsidized education is in a sense 'paid back' through service in places where there are shortages. The problem is that these teachers have no connection to the communities in which they are placed, and are often at best indifferent to the local culture, and at worst hostile toward it. PRATEC sought to intervene in this bad ecology of knowledge by helping local communities have a say in the way their own schools are run and recruiting teachers who are either from the communities or who at least would be sympathetic to the concerns of the community.

Beyond this question of the impact of schooling on indigenous peoples, the topic of modern schooling as a global phenomenon in general has received a great deal of attention in the mainstream media, in particular through the efforts of the BBC in conjunction with the Open University, through a four part documentary series: African School, Chinese School, Indian School and, most recently, Syrian School. Each series consists of five one hour episodes or ten half hour episodes profiling a selection of schools in each of the four regions. While fairly wide ranging and covering many issues related to the politics and economics of schooling and the ongoing social changes in each region, the four series share an emphasis on competition as a defining feature of schooling. Several episodes of each series focus on the high stakes examinations that still define formal schooling in many places, although the emphasis is on those who succeed in the competitive marketplace at the expense of those who do not. The series would be more useful, and representative, if it also had something to say about the losers within this system of high stakes schooling, which in many cases would likely outnumber the winners. Perhaps it is to be expected to applaud the few who succeed, given the source of these programs in the former colonial powers and hosted by over educated white folks, but it's also tragic to ignore the consequences of these successes for the many who are failed by the system. This aspect of schooling as a lopsided and biased social sorting mechanism, which was identified long ago by Martin Carnoy in Education as Cultural Imperialism, needs as much attention as the success stories of the few.

The sorting function of schooling works internally, as in the above examples, but it also operates internationally, where nations compete for prestige, wealth and power, the road to which often passes through the halls of modern schooling. A common theme in recent American documentaries about schooling is how the USA is losing its political and economic edge in the world, with the blame being laid at the doorstep of schooling. As an example, the documentary Two Million Minutes, which spawned several sequels, compares schooling the US, India and China, and using math and science as a criteria for success shows how American students are falling behind their Third World rivals.

Two Million Minutes can be seen as a form of scare mongering, in some sense along the lines of the 1980s discourse that emerged with A Nation at Risk and several similar reports that also decried Americans losing ground to their rivals, which at the time was focused on Japan. In fact, this discourse could be traced back to the infamous Sputnik launch in the 1950s, which also caused a great deal of hand wringing on the part of American politicians and educational technocrats, who saw the early Soviet success in the 'space race' as an indication that the USA was falling behind. Some interesting quasi-agitprop pieces emerged from that era, such as the ABC television report Meet Comrade Student, which took post-Sputnik American viewers into Soviet Schools. But all this emphasis on competition, economics and politics, emphasizing ideological battlegrounds and focusing mainly on the question of winners and losers, almost as if schooling is a competitive sport, neglects other bigger questions, such as those posed by Ivan Illich in his influential and classic work on Deschooling Society. Rather than just winners and losers, crucial questions revolve around what kind of person is created by schooling. While this question may have no definitive answer, it needs constant asking.

Sometimes the focus in the winner/loser dyad is on the losers, and there are a number of documentaries that focus on the disenfranchised and downtrodden, mainly women and children, who are unable to attend school and who are instead locked into lives of poverty and despair. A recent BBC series entitled Hunger to Learn focuses on the difficult lives of children in conflict zones, and how school is ironically a respite from the lives made difficult by the mis-educated adults around them. Similarly, the TVE program Educating Lucia focuses on the limited options for girls in a male dominated society that prefers to educate its sons over daughters. In addition to its function in reproducing social ills, the oppressive structure of schooling has been the focus of several films. Most notable perhaps is Abbas Kiarostami's documentary Homework, which consists of interviews with schoolboys on the role of homework in their lives. When asked what happens if they did not do their homework, they all said they were punished by an older sibling or parent. Kiarostami then asks the children if they know the meaning of the word 'encouragement' and none do. Punishment without encouragement, not by teachers and principals, but in the home in what amounts to an extension of the authority of schools beyond their walls. One wonders again what type of person is created by such a system, irrespective of grades and successes. In contrast, the award winning Japanese documentary Children Full of Life profiles a 4th grade teacher who took the radical step of encouraging his students to get in touch with their emotions.

Why this is seen as radical, of course, speaks reams about the oppressive nature of modern Japanese schooling, which forces conformity and high stakes testing upon students to such a degree that suicide is common a way out for increasing numbers of youths. While emphasizing in various ways the dark side of society and schooling, these programs subtly offer up the possibility of hope through entering mainstream schooling. In Homework, a parent intervenes in one of the interviews with a short speech about the need for reforming Iranian education. While no sane person would be against helping the unfortunate and making the lives of children better, by relying on schooling (either more of the same or by tweaking the system) as the primary answer to poverty and alienation, many of these programs reinforce the hegemonic grip of schooling over minds and bodies that cannot conceive of other ways to live and learn. In fact, to the privileged white viewers of the European and American networks who watch such programs, they also serve the additional function of having viewers feel thankful for their schooling. What is missing from all this talk of the haves and have-nots is the question of alternatives.

While the mainstream news media are constantly emphasizing the successes and failures of modern schooling, meaningful alternatives are almost completely absent from their programming. However, this neglect, or ignorance, of alternatives should not be confused with an absence of alternatives. If they are unable or unwilling to locate alternatives and instead obsess on the closed dyad of the haves and have-nots of schooling, the onus is on viewers to seek out the meaningful alternatives that don't rely on the 'more of the same' treatment that Ivan Illich decried in Deschooling Society. Before getting to those, it might be worth reviewing some of Illich's main points. In fact, the title is in some way misleading, if it is taken to mean closing down schools. Illich had a far deeper plan in mind, which could be better described as the de-institutionalization of society, but since schools play a major role in the 'schooled society,' it's worth dwelling for a moment on the possibility of life without schooling.

Rid society of school? The mere proposition that Illich suggests in Deschooling Society may seem preposterous, even treasonous, to many people. How can we live without school? Where will our children go? What will they do about jobs? When will they learn the heritage of their civilization? Civic values? Literacy and numeracy? But such questions only prove Illich’s rule: we are addicted to schooling. And this addiction is to such an extent that it seems unthinkable to question the very existence of schooling. But is it really so hard to imagine society without school? After all, modern schooling is less than a century old in most parts of the world, and a little over a century old in its birthplaces in Europe and America. Prior to schooling, communities often found various ways to answer all the above questions, ways that were meaningful in their own cultural, historical and social contexts. Young people learned language, religion, cultural values, and social responsibility by living life. Apprentices learned trades by practicing them with those who had more experience. Education was often casual and informal, and such an education was part of life, which was a life of learning.

Modern schooling arose with other institutions of modern society, first in the West and then around the globe with colonialism. As Foucault suggested in Discipline and Punish, prisons, schools, hospitals, asylums, armies and other institutions of modern society are all of the same mind set. They are places of social control and conformity to order, they are places where others decide what to do, when to do it, and for how long, and they are places that created, in Illich’s words, a ‘schooled society,’ which is a society that expects not a life of learning but lifelong subservience to a system that is beyond their reach and control. At the core of Illich’s analysis of the schooled society lies consumerism, not the narrow form of consumerism that one finds proliferating in shopping malls today, but the broader idea of consumerism, that people can no longer think or do things for themselves, that they are addicted to consuming ideas, habits, practices, as well as products, from professional producers. Such a society is one that has ceased to think for itself, and it has ceased to be creative. Illich would perhaps say that it has even ceased to be human. The schooled society can only do one thing: seek more schooling. While this may benefit the bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians that control modern societies, its benefits for the multitude are dubious, and, in Illich’s view, downright alienating and even destructive.

Of course, there are perceived benefits of schooling. The commonest defense of schooling is that it prepares one for citizenship and the world of work. Yet the irony of this defense is that schooling in most modern societies has become a holding zone for those unable to find employment or who are unemployable, which in the end is only a way of deferring the inevitable condition of joblessness. Even those who succeed do so only at the expense of the majority of their peers in the system. So, if jobs are scarce at graduation – while remaining the main reason for schooling – then why submit children to twelve or more years of schooling? Similarly, what passes as citizenship education is in many ways nationalist indoctrination. In the film Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, a community elder notes how the imposition of schooling divided along religious and ethnic lines, and which emphasizes competition and fighting as the way to solve problems, has created schism in the city of Leh and may be even implicated in sectarian violence. These are no doubt serious complex social problems, but the inability to conceive or effectively deal with such questions and observations beyond recommending further institutionalization may only prove Illich's point about schooling.

Fortunately, there are a number of places in which alternatives to conventional schooling are taking shape. A good place to begin a survey of alternatives to schooling is India. Several independent films have highlighted a variety of efforts at coming to terms with the detrimental and destructive aspects of schooling and finding ways to participate in alternatives rooted in communities that are pursuing different strategies. Leaving school altogether is the subject of several independent documentaries produced by Shikshantar and Abhivekti. For example, the 2004 film 'Walkout,' accompanied by an occasional newsletter entitled Swapathgami, tells the stories of young people who have been failed by modern schooling and have taken it upon themselves to walk out and find other ways of living and learning. The 2002 Unfolding Learning Societies meeting in Udaipur is profiled in the film 'If the Shoe Doesn't Fit,' which includes interviews with young people who are exploring alternatives to modern schooling and the institutionalized lifestyle. Similar conversations about imagining life without schools, which took place at the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, are documented in the film 'Other Worlds of Power.' These works raise a second question, that besides the reasons for people walking out of schooling, there need to be viable alternatives to walk into. The work of Arvin Gupta and others has promoted the creation of children's toys made from natural or found objects, even at times trash, as an antidote to the dependency on products built by others. Some of these are highlighted in the short collection 'Homemade Toys and Natural Playthings' and 'Toys from Everyday Stuff.'

Inspired by Krishnamurti, whose books and lectures suggested new ways to think about life and learning, the film 'School Without Walls' highlights a community of self directed learners in Andhra Pradesh. Influenced by the 1976 publication Danger! School, the animated short film 'Do Flowers Fly' focuses on what is lost by the overly restricted regimentation of modern schooling, which seems more geared toward creating domesticated automatons than enabling whole persons. This works suggest that one way to humanize schools is to integrated them more deeply with community life and development and create settings where students can learn by doing. This approach is profiled in the documentary 'Development Through Education,' which focuses on the Vigyam Ashram learning community near Pune. Similar community based experiences can be found in Kerala, such as those depicted in the 2001 film 'Kanavu Malayilekku: To the Dream Mountain.' This sampling suggests that there are viable and diverse alternatives to conventional schooling, even if they are ignored by mainstream officialdom.

One could find many kindred efforts in the Americas as well, such as the work of PRATEC in Peru to integrate local culture and communities with education, as noted above. In Mexico, the Universidad de la Tierra was established by Gustavo Esteva in Oaxaca as a place where young people can explore learning with one another and from artisans and experts in various fields in a free-flowing, supportive and self-directed environment. Students articulate their experiences at UniTierre in the film 'Nuestros Caminos,' which also includes interviews with Esteva, who is also the author of Escaping Education.

In North America, an important example of a truly humanistic educational experience is Black Mountain College, which operated from 1933 until 1957. An outgrowth of the progressive education movement, it centralized the arts in its curriculum and featured luminaries such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller on its faculty, and counted among its alumni the painter Harrison Begay and the poet Jane Mayhall. The college has been lovingly portrayed in the 2008 documentary film 'Fully Awake,' which features interviews with former students and teacher interspersed with archival materials. Black Mountain College has also been the subject of a number of books, including Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, which features an extensive collection of photographs, and the definitive account by Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College.

Universities have also been the subject of a number of films and videos, in particular on questions of reform. At a 2005 international workshop held in Malaysia, a number of academics and activists met to discuss reform of social science curricula in Third World universities. Excerpts from the workshop assembled into a video as part of the Multiversity project feature a variety of perspectives on this question, including the late Malaysian thinker Syed Hussein Alatas revisiting his work on the 'captive mind' and discussing its implications for ethics within social science curricula. Vinay Lal from India spoke on the 'disciplines in ruins,' focusing on the 'mathmetization' of political science at the expense of other possibilities such as exploring grass roots movements, which are virtually ignored in contemporary political science departments. There was considerable discussion on the prospect of 'walking out' or 'dwelling in the ruins,' as posed by Yusef Progler from Dubai, with participants weighing in on both sides. Claude Alvares of India and Wasif Rizvi of Pakistan advocated walking out of universities and into alternative learning spaces. Fred Chiu of Hong Kong disagreed with the notion of walking out, as it smacked of 'escapism,' and suggested instead that academics remain in the system but learn to 'create viruses' of different ideas and perspectives from within, while Clemen Aquino and Farid Alatas outlined efforts at localizing the social sciences in their respective universities in the Philippines and Singapore.

[This article is extracted from a longer work in progress by J. Progler. It first appeared on TV Multiversity in June 2010 and has been bumped to correspond with 'back to school month' 2011.]

Music and the Media Industrial Complex

2011-09-09T21:28:00.000+09:00

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was engaged in a collaborative research project headed by Charles Keil on the question of 'participatory discrepancies' in music. Keil contended that the engaging elements of music were in the subliminal, subsyntactical, micro-timed details, that these minor variations or, as he put it, discrepancies, are evident over the course of a performance in the interactions between players. This offered a new way to think about music that was not tethered to the conventions of Western musicological scholarship and I was thrilled to be involved in a project that was questioning the status quo in academic research on music. Keil asked if I could demonstrate that these 'PDs' existed by using then current analog to digital converter technology to visually observe musical performances on the micro-timed level. The resulting research was published in 1995 in a special issue of the journal 'Ethnomusicology,' for which the editors solicited responses from a number of noted ethnomusicologists and rejoinders from Keil and I to those responses. What follows is my rejoinder, which begins by referring to the responses but then veers in another direction.

In my reply, I chose to address how participatory discrepancy research might be related to the commodification and homogenization of musical diversity through technology. This reply was inspired in part by responses to the research from Waterman and Kippen, but also by some recent and relevant developments at the time in these areas. I will frame this discussion with some brief reflections on two other general issues: first, the relationship between ethnographic and technical work, and second, the implications of participatory discrepancies theory for music education.

In other responses to the research, Monson and Locke stress the continuing importance of situating music in its cultural context through ethnography, with Monson noting that technical work can be an important part of a multiple research method. Shepard and Kisliuk also commented on the possible relationship between technical and ethnographic work, with Shepard noting that participatory discrepancies research could play a role in helping to determine exactly how people and music interact. Meadows has begun to explore the potential of participatory discrepancies research in generating research questions. This emerging consensus suggests that participatory discrepancies research could be the catalyst to help provide balance in the methodology employed by ethnomusicologists, since there is some concern that music research has begun to neglect how music works. For example, Winkler notes that, with a few exceptions, 'most popular music scholarship still treats music itself as a kind of "black box" - undiscussed, unknown, perhaps unknowable' (1994, p. 2).

The study of micro-timed phenomena may help us to say important things about musical change. Waterman notes that something similar to participatory discrepancies research has suggested that 'the timing gaps of Wolof social dance drumming are compressed in Parisian studio recordings of mbalax music, sucked up against the equal pulse base by the gravitational field of Worldbeat aesthetics.' He also points out that participatory discrepancies research can help us figure out 'the musical correlates of culture change and imperialism.' I am in complete agreement here, but also believe that there is another aspect to this issue. It seems clear to me that the 'media-industrial complex' (Crawford 1994, p. 22) is working hard and fast to figure out how participatory discrepancies work. While I agree to an extent with Kippen that the subtleties of musical 'feeling' will remain 'beyond the reach of computers for a long time,' this does not mean that computer technology cannot create compelling grooves and inflict serious damage on musical diversity worldwide. We cannot sit back and blissfully claim that the feelingful parts of music are beyond the reach of the media-industrial complex. We need to do something.

Technicians at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, pronounced 'Karma') are in the process of developing a synthesizer which they claim will be able to 'sing like Pavarotti,' among other things (Clark 1994). Yamaha has already made much money from Karma's research in the 1970s and 1980s, with Karma and Stanford pocketing $20 million from the incredibly popular DX7 frequency modulation synthesizer alone. Surely someone is envisioning the next fortune to be made from Karma's latest 'ultimate musical synthesizer.' The new technology is called 'waveguides,' and it 'mathematically recreates the expressive signatures of instruments - the flutter of a flute, a saxophone's squawk or the scrape of a bow on a string' (Clark 1994). Interwoven with this research is the assertion that 'with certain permissions, a [synthesized] singer could sing works that had not been composed in his or her lifetime' (Clark 1994). These 'certain permissions' spell patents, and that assertion amounts to an admission that if computers ever can 'sing like Pavarotti,' there will be legal mechanisms to assure that whoever controls the Pavarotti-like waveguides will be doing it for big profit. There is not as much money in making a synthesizer sing 'O Sole Mio' as there is in getting it to reproduce the grooviest grooves and then patenting them.

It is not clear if the technicians at Karma are doing groove work yet, but it is clear that they have control of some timbral PDs. What next? CEOs determining the precise PDs for the most sellable groove? Global McMusic studios controlled by entertainment megacorporations? Or, worse yet, a redefinition of the human grooves of many musics with a quasi electronic cybergroove? Perhaps the most worrisome prospect is having patentable grooves become the criteria for good musicking the way scores did with other kinds of music.

If the patents are being designed by those who know what makes grooves groovy (at least to some extent) then we need some people who also know how grooves work but who are not in the service of the groove barons. This seems to be an immediate necessity since the McMusic merchants are already making headway toward patenting musical diversity.

A useful cognate to this discussion is the issue of patenting DNA. Shiva points out that 'scientists accept that in the future, goals of biotechnology research will be for profit and not for public interest (1989, p. 136). For now, there are still some scientists who do not accept this, and they are working together with farmers to resist the patenting of seeds. Idris notes that in India, centuries of farmer know-how is being incorporated into exclusive corporate patents by way of high tech gene splicing, and that scientists are joining with farmers in protesting this kind of takeover (1993, p. 30; see also Piller and Yamamoto 1985 for similar protests in a somewhat different context). The point is that those who know the inner workings of genes and DNA are taking part in both exploitation and resistance to exploitation.

Ethnomusicologists may find themselves at a similar juncture sooner than they think. This should involve taking as stand. Taking no stand, or denying that there may be a threat on the horizon could amount to tacit approval. Neither Keil nor I, nor most other ethnomusicologists I would imagine, will claim that developing PD theory and practice is intended to sell patents to Yamaha. Yet by asserting the music is beyond quantifying, we are in a sense giving in to those who want to turn a profit on culture, even if what they clone is not the 'real thing.'

There is a lot of talk lately of cyborgs, with some noting their liberating aspects (Haraway 1991, p. 149-81), and others their tragic aspects (Christie 1993). The consensus on cyborgs is not in yet, but it is clear to me that if the media-industrial complex has its way, all of the 'cybersurfing' that computers make so easy may simply be paving the way for us all to become 'cybersurfs' (Shell 1994). Tagg may have already flagged some of the early stages of musical cybersurfdom in some of the questions he is posing about 'rave' and 'techno' music (1994, p. 219). It is in this context that coopted PD research can be most dangerous. According to Tagg, rave music producers are already doing what sounds like PD manipulation, in their 'quantised,' 'offset,' 'delayed,' 100-percent-synthesized songs (Tagg 1994, p. 214). It seems timely - if not urgent - for ethnomusicologists to participate in PD research, not simply to 'prove' whether or not they exist, but to equip ourselves for the challenges that the media-industrial complex will surely pose for the musical commons.

Perhaps what I have outline above suggests a worse case scenario. I agree with Jerry Mander that technology is often only viewed in terms of best case scenarios, and that this is a dangerous and potentially destructive tendency with all sorts of implications for cultural survival (Mander 1991, p. 37-51). But if we are willing to at least consider a few worst case scenarios, then it becomes important to consider alternatives.

One alternative involves education. The media-industrial complex would not appear as threatening were it not for the general failure of compulsory schooling to produce engaged and responsible individuals. Gatto believes that most schooling ends up imparting seven general lessons to students: confusion class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and the notion that one is always being observed (1992, p. 1-21). PD theory may provide a way to counteract or alleviate some of these tendencies. Small, Harwood, and Cowdery all note the importance of the processual and participatory aspects of PD theory, with Cowdery stressing the potential for music education on the macro level. I agree, but also believe there is a role for micro-level research to help us bring out-of-awareness culture into awareness, at least in the way we think and talk about music. Hall makes important distinctions between 'learning' and 'acquiring' culture, and stresses that acquiring culture takes place 'totally out of awareness' (1992, p. 225). He believes that children live in an 'acquired world' until about the age of six (which is about the time that the learned world of compulsory schooling takes over), and that 'it is in the process of playing with the material of that world that they are able to master the unwritten, unspoken rules controlling their world' (Hall 1992, p. 226). All of this suggests to me that if we are even half correct about the amount of musical power and core cultural transmission that is going on subliminally and out of awareness as little children acquire drumming and dancing, singing and chanting by participating, then we might want to rethink the benefits of learning about the noun music, or worse yet, learning to appreciate the object music.

References
Christie, John R. R. (1993, Friday 6 May). A tragedy for cyborgs. Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 171-96.
Clark, Don (1994). Making a synthesizer sing like Pavarotti. The Wall Street Journal, B1, B3.
Crawford, Rick (1994). Techno Prisoners. Adbusters Quarterly: Journal of the Mental Environment, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 17-23.
Gatto, John Taylor (1992). Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Philadelphia, New Society Publishers.
Hall, Edward T. (1992). Improvisation as an Acquired, Multilevel Process. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 223-35.
Haraway, Donna (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.
Idris, S.M. Mohamed (1993, November). Doublespeak and the New Biological Colonialism. Third World Resurgence, Vol. 39, pp. 30-31.
Piller, Charles, and Yamamoto, Keith R. (1985). Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies. New York: Beech Tree Books.
Shell, Barry (1994). Will We Be Cybersurfers or Cybersurfs in the Information Age? Adbusters Quarterly: Journal of the Mental Environment, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 28-9 80.
Shiva, Vandana (1989). Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books.
Tagg, Philip (1994). From Refrain to Rave: The Decline of Figure and the Rise of Ground. Popular Music, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 209-22.
Winkler, Peter (1994). Writing Ghost Notes: The Poetics and Politics of Transcription. In Kassabian, Schwarz and Siegel (Eds.) In The State of the Art: Refiguring Music Studies. University of Virgina Press.

[This is a slightly modified version of J. Progler's rejoinder to the responses to his and Keil's research, originally published in a special issue of the journal Ethnomusicology (Vol. 39, No. 1, Winter 1995, pp. 21-54) dedicated to Keil's theory of 'participatory discrepancies.' Progler's main contribution to that issue was a research article focusing on jazz swing, and his update and expansion of the ideas presented in this rejoinder were published in the online journal First Monday (vol. 4, no. 9, September 1999).]

Women and Allegory in Sembene's 'Xala'

2011-08-28T07:20:00.002+09:00

Allegory places a significant role in the films of Ousmane Sembene. Its presence may in part be accounted for by the allegorical nature of African oral and written literature as well as by Sembene's emphasis on the importance of the link between history, politics and culture. When 'Xala' opens, images of a drummer and a dancer are enlarged into a company of musicians and dancers celebrating the independence of Senegal from its French colonial rulers. White statues are ejected from the Chambrede Commerce, and black men take over, but the reality of post-colonial politics is not far behind.The white men reclaim the statues and depart, only to return instantaneously to deliver brief cases filled with cash to the new black government ministers. Thus, the allegorical treatment is introduced early in the film. And particularly with the obvious equation between the council president and the Senegalese president, Leopold Senghor (whose picture we see), the audience is alerted to read subsequent events in the film in allegorical fashion.

In particular, the four women in the film represent specific stages in Senegalese history as well as specific aspects of the history of sexual oppression. El Hadji's eldest wife, Awa Adja, like the older women in Sembene's novel, God's Bits of Wood, represents the traditional Islamic phase of Senegalese history and the contradictory role of women within that context. According to Francoise Pfaff, 'Awa truly appears as the embodiment of African traditions even if her environment is no longer purely traditional.' Awa also dramatizes how traditional ways are ill-adapted to the exigencies of modern Senegal. Her philosophy is characterized by her most trenchant comment in the film, 'If patience could kill, I'd have been dead long ago.' In the film, Awa expresses submission and resignation to fate. Her dignity is admirable, even to the beggars, although they admonish her that she 'knows nothing of life.' While Sembene's analysis of Awa is sympathetic, he acknowledges that her knowledge of the world is truncated,that her emphasis on religion and conjugal and domestic responsibility does not confront contemporary reality. Her sense of duty and loyalty may have been the mainstay of her existence in the past and necessary for the maintenance of her self-esteem, but they are also the sources of her oppression. Through the character of Awa, Sembene seems to be indicating, like Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks and Cabral in Return to the Source (1973), that the retreat to Africanity is delusory. He does, however, later in the film bring Awa into the present, along with her daughter Rama, to share vicariously in El Hadji's ritual of purification.

El Hadji's second wife, Oumi N'Doye, is more westernized than Awa Adja. Through her, Sembene portrays the further breakdown of traditional customs and the encroachments of western ideology and consumerism. Oumi wears European clothes, wigs, makeup and dark glasses. She reads fashion magazines and follows the lives of movie stars. She feeds her romantic fantasies by reading pulp romances. Her competition with and jealousy of El Hadji's first wife and with his new young wife, N'Gone, makes her peremptory and demanding, her demands taking the form of sexual seduction and financial extortion of El Hadji. If Awa's treatment of El Hadji is submissive and resigned, Oumi's is abusive and tyrannical. In her tyrannizing of El Hadji, she seems to exemplify the European myth of female domestic tyranny which she seeks to emulate. At the same time, Sembene's portrayal of Oumi as second wife also reenacts the traditional conflict between wives under polygamy and the role of the dominant wife. In this way Sembene explores the failure of superimposing western practices on traditional customs when the anastomosis merely reinforces attitudes detrimental to social relationships. Oumi's and El Hadji's marriage is specialized around the exchange of money and services, representing his harsh judgment of economic conditions and social relations under colonialism and neocolonialism.

While the first two wives are individuated and treated with empathy, in spite of their shortcomings, El Hadji's third wife is barely substantial. Much more a fetishistic object than a person, N'Gone has few lines in the film. Her mother undresses her as if she were a lifeless mannequin. During the wedding celebration she appears more like an advertisement in a bridal magazine, or like the white figure of a bride on the sumptuous wedding decoration examined closely and contemptuously by Oumi N'Doye than as a person. N'Gone is lighter than the other two wives; indeed, each of the wives appears to get lighter. N'Gone is also identified by her photograph on the wall,seen as she is being undressed with her back to the camera, while her mother lectures her on the importance of making one's husband feel dominant, if not be dominant. Two photographs, one of her clothed and one unclothed, are more visible to the audience than N'Gone is herself. In effect, she is a body without a face, as we view her later in bed, and a visage ventriloquized by her mother. Ultimately, she is reduced to the clothing on the broomstick that reappears in the ultimate scenes of El Hadji's humiliation. She does not take revenge, however,and is presumably unaware of the final act of the drama that has overtaken her. The one symbol of her aspiration to prominence, the car that is to be her wedding present from El Hadji, is never unwrapped. In short, Sembene portrays N'Gone as the result par excellence of neocolonial society, a technical fetish, with no identity, no substance, no voice, no language, a symbol of the consequences of cultural impotence.

But not all the women in the film are stunted. Rama, Adja's eldest daughter, represents the desirable union of European and African cultures. Her room marks the complexity of her interests. It contains a poster of Chaplin and of Amilcar Cabral, books, and the disheveled appearance of an active life. She actively supports the Wolof language as a mark of her identification with the struggle for independence from European culture. When she visits El Hadji in his office, Sembene places her before a map of Senegal, and Rama's outfit conspicuously reproduces the colors of the Senegalese flag. El Hadji later adopts Rama's position regarding the use of the Wolof language in his confrontation with the other ministers. El Hadji asks the ministers' permission to address them in Wolof for his final speech before the Chamber, but permission is denied to him much as he had chastised Rama for speaking to him in Wolof. He is told to speak French. El Hadji's action accentuates changes that have taken place in him that signify positive linkages between Rama and himself. Nevertheless, Rama is not fully developed as a personality as she is in the novel. She is not so much the heroine of the film as a symbol of potential. Indeed,the secretary and clerk who seems to run El Hadji's business is a counterpart to Rama, a figure who is waiting and learning rather than doing and teaching. The final scenes of the film propel the allegory into the speculative realm of the future.

[This essay was extracted from 'Political Allegory and "Engaged Cinema": Sembene's "Xala",' written by Marcia Landy with Ousmane Sembene and originally published in Cinema Journal (vol. 3, no. 23, Spring 1984, pp. 31-46). The complete film 'Xala' with English subs is available for multi-part viewing on YouTube.]

Orientalism and Gender in American Cinema

2011-08-23T06:38:00.002+09:00

Hollywood has not been kind to Arabs. Their negative portrayal has existed from the advent of filmmaking. From the beginning, American cinema has been intertwined with stereotypes of Arabs, typically those of buffoons, villains, sexual predators, and more recently, terrorists. Abdeen Jabara, writing in 1989 in the journal Cineaste (vol. 17, no. 1, p. 1), put it this way: 'From harem girls, lusty sheiks, and flying carpeteers through mummy lovers, greedy oil billionaires and sinister terrorists, films have reinforced misconceptions and stereotypes of the Arab people.'

In my 1995 film 'Hollywood Harems,' I examine Hollywood's portrayal of women in films with Orientalist themes and characters. Orientalism, defined by Edward Said as 'a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient' (Orientalism, 1979, p. 3), emanated from and in turn influenced the historical circumstances in which Arab and Islamic culture was regarded with fear and fascination by western Europe. Said continues: 'The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences' (1979, p. 3).

From its inception, American cinema has been caught up with the mystique of the Orient. It adopted the narrative and visual conventions, as well as the cultural assumptions, on which Orientalism was based. I compiled an extensive filmography of over a hundred titles of Hollywood productions, historically until the present. The criteria in selecting these feature films, as well as animations, is that they all contain Orientalist themes involving female characters.

I made the hour long documentary as a montage, assembling clips from as many of these films as I was able to procure. The sequence of the montage is arranged by juxtaposing images according to categories (specified below), along with their audio track; that is, without an outside narrative 'voice.' I have decided to group images according to the following categories, all of which involve women or girls in the following situations: seduced, abducted, and sexually harassed; groomed and socialized for wifehood and motherhood; veiled; dancing; sold as slaves or concubines; concerned with finding a man and/or 'love and happiness for ever after'; objectified sexually through the male gaze; covetous of material possessions and wealth; jealous or competitive for male attention; temptresses, bitches, or vamps.

Historically, the Arab world was a familiar cinematic backdrop for romance and adventure. From four to six romantic and action productions set in North Africa were distributed annually between 1910 and 1920. In the 1920s, there were at least 87 American films produced with 'Arab' themes, according to Lawrence Michalak's 1989 article 'The Arab in American Cinema' (Cineaste, vol. 17, no. 1, p. 3).

Hollywood fabricated an eroticized and exoticized Orient, titillating audiences with adventure and lust in the untamed desert landscape. The Arab stereotype in films in the 1920s was mostly an unsavory concoction of exoticism, abduction, banditry, revenge, and slavery. The plots invariably made Arabs the adversaries, pitting them against Western good guys. The most famous of the early 'Arab' films was The Sheik (1921), which catapulted Rudolph Valentino into stardom. The blockbuster hit is a prime example of miscegenation (sex relations between whites and non-whites) where Valentino as the lusty sheik sets out to seduce a young, fair woman. A New York Times reviewer reassures readers that, 'You won't be offended by having a white girl marry an Arab, for the sheik really isn't a native of the desert at all' (cited by Michalak, p.4). At the end of the film, the sheik is revealed to be the son of an English lord, so miscegenation is averted and consummation is OK.

So successful was The Sheik that it inaugurated more hotblooded, swashbuckling melodramas and prompted reviewers' claims that the film's primary 'machinery of excitation... was that delicious masochistic appeal of the fair girl in the strong hands of the ruthless desert tyrant,' as noted by Bernstein and Studlar in Visions of the East (Rutgers University Press, 1997, p. 102). Seduction and abduction are common motifs in these films. Typically, women are chased around, often in tents, or hoisted on shoulders, flung on horseback and taken off to be sexually harassed. The Sheik managed to lump Arabs - Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Algerians, Saudi Arabians, and others - together. Thus, a collective Arab emerged, undifferentiated by location or cultural plurality. This blurred delineation of an ethnic group is conducive to separating 'them' from 'us,' consequently, making them the quintessential 'Other.'

In the early 1900s, the orientalized 'vamp' made an appearance on the screen. Fashion, opera, and dance lay the Oriental iconographic groundwork for Hollywood's vamps who came to represent the 'New Woman.' On screen, the archetype was represented by Salome who used her sexuality to dominate men. As Bernstein and Studlar (1997, p. 116) observe: 'Associating the moral disorder of the East with female power was resonant with cultural fears that men were on the verge of capitulating to the sexual and social demands of women. To many conservatives, modern women were the metaphorical daughters of Salome because they were increasingly destructive and dominating in their sexuality.' No actress better epitomized the orientalized vamp than Theda Bara, who starred in A Fool There Was (1915). Born Theodosia Goodman in Ohio, she wore Arabian robes, pretended not to speak English, and was driven around in a white limousine with Nubian footmen. Her hotel suites were draped in black and smelled of incense and perfume. In an interview, Bara exonerated the vamp's actions: 'Believe me, for every woman vamp there are ten men of the same men who take everything from women - love, devotion, beauty, youth - and give nothing in return! The vampire that I play is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters' (as quoted by Sumiko Higashi in Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers, Eden Press Women's Publications, 1978, p.61). Other films featuring orientalized vamps were Cleopatra, The Ten Commandments, and Blood and Sand.

The usual setting for Hollywood's Orient is the desert. In addition to being 'undeveloped and primitive,' and therefore in need of 'Western civilization,' the desert provides an erotic dimension, that of what Shohat and Stam refer to as 'exposed, barren land and blazing sands, which metaphorized the exposed, unrepressed 'hot' passion and and uncensored emotions of the Orient...' (Unthinking Eurocentrism, Routledge, 1994, p.148).

In King Solomon's Mines, the topography is blatantly compared to a woman's body. The camera tilts down a nude female sculpture - supposedly a map leading to the legendary twin mountains - the Breasts of Sheba; below is the cave hiding King Solomon's diamond mine. The female body becomes the object of the Western male gaze, in this case specifically of the archeologist and antique dealer, and on a broader vicarious level, of the movie audience.

We can now see that Orientalism is a praxis of the same sort, albeit in different territories, as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in metropolitan societies: the Orient was routinely described as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem and the despotic - but curiously attractive - ruler. The tendency to project the East as feminine can be seen in the depiction of ancient Babylonia and Egypt, in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. de Mille's Cleopatra (1934). In Intolerance, Babylon symbolizes sexual excess and similarly, and in Cleopatra, Egypt is a site of carnal delights.

In the thirties, the initial Mummy film made its debut followed by several incarnations. Abduction and attempted miscegenation were prevalent in this enduring genre. And in the forties, the screen adaptation of Arabian Nights garnered millions of box office dollars. It spawned several movies including Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the Sinbad series, and Cobra Woman, all featuring the predictable fare of harems, dancing girls, and odious tyrannical characters. Hollywood studios reproduced this successful formula and mutated it into biblical epics such as Solomon and Sheba. The raunchier renditions of these productions were even referred to as 'T and S' (tits and sand) movies at the studios.

After World War II, Hollywood continued to produce comedies and musicals with Oriental settings. In 1965, Elvis Presley starred in Harum Scarum, which had harem-like nightclubs. The rock star sang: 'I'm gonna go where the desert sun is; where the fun is; go where the harem girls dance; go where there's love and romance, out on the burning sands, in some caravan' (Quoted in Shohat and Stam, 1994, p. 161). In the early sixties, Exodus and Cast A Giant Shadow started a new cinema genre generated by the Arab-Israeli conflict. The good Israelis were seen pitted against the bad Arabs, who were depicted primarily as kidnappers, terrorists, and murderers.

According to the American Film Institute, if the most frequent themes in the 87 Middle East films from the 1920s and the 118 Middle East films of the 60s are tallied it becomes apparent that Hollywood's Middle East had become a more sinister place. As noted by Michalak (1989, p. 6), in the sixties, murder escalated from twenty-seventh place to second place. Slavery, theft, and abduction all moved into the top ten, and new negative characteristics appear: explosion, prostitution, treason. Hollywood's portrayal of Arabs does not appear to be improving. Black Sunday, Rollover, Protocol, Ashanti, Father of the Bride Part II, Aladdin, and Paradise are examples of recent productions that continue to denigrate Arabs.

The persistence of the negative Arab image in American cinema, as in other popular culture, fuels racism. In addition, this negative stereotyping helps foster the United State's domestic and foreign policy against the Arabs. In the current climate of political correctness in which deliberate efforts are being made in representing multiculturalism in the mass media, it is ironic that Arabs continue to be disparaged without impunity. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hollywood films. Through re-contextualization and juxtaposition of footage taken from Hollywood films, I hope to induce viewers to reassess the representation of Arabs in American cinema; and thus make them aware of the existence of disparaging stereotypes and their insidious repercussions.

[This essay was written by Tania Kamal-Eldin, director of Hollywood Harems, and has been edited for inclusion on TV Multiversity. The original version is at Microsillons. Further information is on her website and she has a similar article here. The film is available on VHS and DVD (for institutional rent or purchase only) from Women Make Movies.]

Politics and Femininity in 'The Chess Players'

2011-08-15T00:35:00.003+09:00

Like most great Indian myth-makers of the last two hundred years, Satyajit Ray is at his most creative when dealing with problems of women and femininity. There can be no better way of acknowledging his 'presence' in the contemporary Indian consciousness than by recognizing the social criticisms his construction of womanhood offers. I shall try to give some flavour of this presence by partly re-reviewing a film of his which is apparently concerned only with men and with a 'manly' pursuit, politics. This film, 'Shatranj Ke Khilari' ('The Chess Players'), is based on a famous short story by Munshi Premchand and is Ray's only full-length Hindi film, directed at what may be called a pan-Indian audience. That it failed to reach its intended audience is of course well known. We do no know how far the failure was due to the film itself and how far to the structure of the Indian film industry, but that is not a specially relevant question in this context. For my concern in this re-review is to show that there is not only a politics of statecraft but also a politics of culture, and that all great artists have to deal with the second kind of politics, even when overtly refusing to challenge its basic axioms.

Second, I hope to show that both as a pioneer of the Indian art cinema and as a self-conscious representative of the nineteenth-century 'renaissance' of India culture, Ray cannot but venture a criticism of both the West and the East; and that his criticism of the East cannot but bear the imprint of values popularized by the modern West. I also hope to show that the film's attempt to give expression to Indian cultural values and to the struggle for cultural survival is incidental Ray's artistic purpose. This is because Ray's critique of the modern West is internal to modernity and does not use India traditions, which in Shatranj happens to be the culture of the victims, as the baseline for the film's implicit theory of oppression.

My point of departure is a controversy that was reported some years ago in the pages of a popular weekly, in which Satyajit Ray and the film critic Rajbans Khanna debated a central character in 'Shatranj Ke Khilari,' Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. The original piece by Rajbans Khanna was published under the title 'Ray's Wajid Ali Shah' in The Illustrated Weekly of India (22 October 1978, pp. 49-53), and the reply by Satyajit Ray was published as 'My Wajid Ali is not "Effete and Effeminate,"' also in The Illustrated Weekly of India (31 December 1978, pp. 49-53). As is well known, Wajid ruled over Awadh till his kingdom was annexed by the British in 1856. To the utter contempt of most contemporary British historians and Indian nationalists, he gave up Awadh without firing a shot. In his critique of Ray's film, Khanna tries to be more fair than Ray to the defeated Nawab. Khanna argues that Wajid was not an effeminate feeble ruler, devoid of political acumen and military sense, that Ray had depicted Wajid as such following biased British historians and their Indian factotums, ignoring the views of more reliable chroniclers. Ray, always pugnacious when faced with hostile criticism, replied that his political history was sounder than Khanna's; that his Wajid was a more complex figure than Khanna made out and was, in essence, truer to historical fact, as a personification of the feudal decadence and timidity that helped establish the British empire in India.

Actually, despite Ray's defensiveness, the 'truth' of Shatranj is not dependent on the 'historical truth' of the personality of Wajid. Khanna partly misses the point of a story built around two apolitical aristocrats who are members of the political elite of Awadh. Being compulsive chess-players, they spend their time placidly playing chess while the forcible annexation of Awadh to the British empire takes place. The movie shows how the players make a mess of their lives because of their addiction to the game; how they, after being momentarily disturbed by the more serious political chess going on in their society, prepare to go back to their private game. It seems to be Ray's argument - and also Premchand's - that the easy carelessness of the two protagonists, both about their own lives and about public life in general, reflects their and their kind's distorted sense of reality and their unconcern with the fate of their people.

The 'real' personality of King Wajid - primarily a poet, musician, bibliophile, dancer and lover - is incidental to such a story. He forms part of the feudal backdrop against which the game called British colonialism in India was played, which in turn is the backdrop against which the private game of the two aristocrats has been portrayed. In any case, for his purpose Ray has every right to defy history and depict Wajid as a feudal prototype, a king who fails to perform his kingly functions, who is first an aesthete and only then a ruler. And that is how Ray as a creative artist and a historically self-aware commentator on colonial India consciously depicts his Wajid. At this plane, Ray's commitment to the value of masculine kingliness is no less than Khanna's. He merely differs from this critic in his estimate of Wajid's conformity to these values.

However, the film-maker Ray is more sensitive than the political historian Ray and the psychological and political issues which he raises in his movie are deeper than the historical issues he debates with Khanna. Statecraft, measured by masculinity and skill in realpolitik, and the politics of cultural clash, within persons and outside, are the two intersecting themes that give Shatranj its touch of poetry as well as critical content. General James Outram, British Resident at the Court of Awadh and the man who negotiates the surrender of Wajid, is certainly, as depicted by Ray, more cognizant of these themes than Ray himself. Ridden with more doubts, Ray's Outram knows that the British are flouting their treaty with the Nawab and trying to oust him from the throne of Awadh. Outram makes peace with his conscience by reminding himself that Wajid dances with dancing girls, writes poetry and sings. What could be more unkingly, decadent and - this remains half-articulated - unmanly. At one place in the movie, Outram upbraids his English ADC for being infected with the dangerous virus of the oriental concepts of rulership and with sympathy for a king popular with his subjects for his artistic creativity and scholarship, a king willing to forego martial hypermasculinity to actualize his authentic, more androgynous self. But at the same time, Outram sense the fault lines in his own monolithic concept of politics; he suspects that somehow the king, depite losing his kingdom, has articulated a deeper and more healthy concept of governance.

The denouement comes when James Outram faces Wajid Ali Shah for the final negotiations; in effect, to deliver the ultimatum for surrender. Wajid, determined to avoid bloodshed, takes off his crown and offers it to a highly embarrassed Outram. Outwardly, modern statecraft wins but, against the historical judgment of Satyajit Ray, the traditional vision of the public realm reaffirms its moral stature. And that through the primary agent of modern statecraft, Outram himself.

It is possible to argue that, unknown to Ray, Shatranj is an essay on the clash between two perspectives on womanhood, power and culture. These perspectives arise not from two irreconcilable sets of cultural categories represented by the East and the West; they provide an element of contradiction within each of the two confronting cultures too. Wajid borrows from the indigenous concept of self-realization which equates saintliness with the ability to transcend the barrier of gender. But he also deviates from the dominant concept of kingship in Indian Islam as well as in the Hindu tradition of Ksatriyahood. Most of his courtiers and many of the ordinary citizens of Awadh know this, and Wajid occasionally appears to be a lonely man fighting a lonely battle with less than complete sanction for his lifestyle in his society. However, ever if only partial, the sanction is there. In his culture, he could create a legitimate space for himself in the public realm.

In Outram's world, too, the legitimacy of hypermasculinity and pure politics is not complete. As his ADC's ambivalence shows, in the jungle of colonial politics persists a vague British disapproval of overt aggression, an almost pathetic attempt to justify the intervention in Awadh in terms of the rules of fair play, a hesitant cognitive respect for the creative androgyny of Wajid, and an uncomfortable ambivalence toward softness femininity and poetry. In spite of the needs of colonialism, the demands of civilisational mission and masculine Christianity, there remains in the English characters of the movie a certain self-doubt, an awareness of elements of their culture that have become recessive but are not entirely dead. Even Outram, that redoubtable hero of British colonialism, is not free of this doubt. There is an unspoken dialogue between him and Wajid which transcends the barriers of culture.

This dialogue reveals the common predicament of the principal antagonists. Both Wajid and Outram are torn men. Apparently, Wajid has full confidence in his own way of life and kingly identity. 'Can your Queen write poetry like me,' he asks a perplexed Outram, 'and do people sing her lyrics the way they sing mine?' But he also nurtures the feeling that he has failed as a man, that perhaps his is not the correct model of kingship. There is a long monologue in the movie where the kind accuses his court of political and administrative failure. The criteria by which he judges his officers are not different from the criteria by which he himself is judged by Outram and Ray.

At this plane, Shatranj holds Wajid responsible for not living up to his own declared values of masculine statecraft. In fact it underscores these values by connecting the Wajid who admonishes his court to the colonial-bureaucratic self of Outram through a speech by the Queen Mother of Awadh to Outram, in which she invokes the principles of fair play and statesmanship. For Ray, there is a domain of discourse in which Indian passivity and cowardice meet their match in British power politics and perfidy, and the Queen Mother's vision of politics marks out that domain. He therefore tries, through the uncharacteristic use of Wajid's and his mother's long speeches, to make peace with his overt values and to deny the alternative political statement that his creative self makes throughout his movie. For if there are two Outrams here, there are two Satyajit Rays, too.

Himself a self-conscious product of the dialogue between East and West absentmindedly brought about by colonialism, Ray depicts Outram's ethical discomfort as if it mainly involved modern concepts of justice and treaty obligations. Yet he hints at Outram's fear that not merely his ADC but he himself might become 'soft' towards the king's androgynous political style. If Wajid is guilty of trying to transcend the 'rightful' divisions between male and female, work and leisure, pleasure and responsibility, the soft and the hard, the political and non-political, Outram is no less guilty of wavering in allegiance to the dominant motif of his culture and the ideology of colonialism. His moral discomfort is even more patent, given the minimal sanction he gets from his own immediate environment, the British-Indian colonial culture, to defy the historical and cultural role imposed on him.

[The foregoing was written by Ashis Nandy and was extracted from the longer piece 'An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema,' originally published in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 209-14). The remaining parts of 'The Chess Players' are available on YouTube.]

Notes on Decolonising Universities (Part Two)

2011-07-28T11:32:00.011+09:00

On 27-29 June 2011, Multiversity held its fourth international conference in Penang, Malaysia, on the topic of 'Decolonising Our Universities.' Hosted by Citizens International and Universiti Sains Malaysia, the conference brought together academics, activists, journalists and students from throughout the Global South to address the problem of Eurocentrism in university curricula and governance. Going beyond criticism of colonialism, many participants shared experiences in decolonising higher education, reporting on local initiatives from Asia, Africa and the Mideast. Sessions and excerpts are being aired throughout July and August on TV Multiversity, and a book of the proceedings is forthcoming later this year. In this second of a two part conference report, we bring our readers highlights from Days Two and Three of this landmark event.

Day Two opened with the Fifth Session of the conference, which featured C.K. Raju, visiting professor of mathematics at Universiti Sains Malaysia, who noted that math and science as taught today are ‘full of superstitions.’ He outlined how the Arabic and Islamic knowledge was sanitized in the West and that the purpose of the university was to make that knowledge fit the doctrines of Christian theology. In the Western world, he continued, all knowledge had to be either from the Greeks or it had to conform to Christian theology, and the resulting falsification of history 'wrote minds' of the West. He suggested that these falsifications are maintained through the process of refutability and the 'piling on of hypotheses.' Referring to Einstein as ‘the god of science,’ he explained that Einstein was in fact unreliable but that he is still believed because there is no method to refute his work and few people have the background to decide the truths of science. Suggesting that the laws of physics are not based on science but based on belief, he pointed out that what remains is trust in superstitions and it has become the job of universities to keep people from knowing and instead basing their awareness of the truth on trust. Truth, he continued, is a decidedly Western endorsement of the many false gods of science, such as Euclid, Ptolemy and Newton. In order to decolonise universities, Raju insisted that it is necessary to understand how they were colonised, that the key to this is to move beyond denouncing colonialism and realizing that a sort of soft power is at work, and that Eurocentrism is a very deliberate strategy of mind control for which stories are invented to defend the indefensible. He gave the example that while the world is non-reversible Newton's laws are reversible, that, in other words, Newton's world is mechanistic. He went on to note that Newton didn't invent calculus, he misunderstood it, and his misunderstanding led him to conceive of time in metaphysical terms. This was necessary, he suggested, because math had become in the West the language of eternal truths, with eternity being the religious component of math that needs to be exorcised. Getting into the necessary technical background, and referring participants to his books on the topic for the details, he pointed out that because infinite series cannot be summed set theory handles infinity metaphysically, and that therefore this metaphysics is religiously biased. He next asked why metaphysics has been accepted instead of empiricism in science, pointing out that logic is not universal and that, for example, Buddhist logic allows for contradictions. He further explained that infinity is not necessary to send a man to the moon, which needs 9 decimal points, or 16 to be safe, but that formal math demands infinite precision and therefore requires metaphysics. To decolonise math, he concluded, its applications can remain but its understanding will have to change and this will necessarily involve the elimination of the superstitions.

Session Five then turned from science to the topic of law. Shad Faruqi, Emeritus Professor of Law at Universiti Teknologi MARA in Malaysia, spoke on legal education and noted that it is profession oriented and text based, but that it ought to be people related and experience based. He observed that syllabi for courses on legal studies in Malaysia ‘blindly ape’ Western approaches, and pointed out that the legal profession does not require knowledge of the Malaysian constitution. This results in issues of constitutional law being evaded, and to illustrate this he reminded participants that in 53 years of independence there have been very few cases of parliamentary review. He suggested that indigenisation of knowledge will assist in true globalisation, because diversity is necessary for meeting many of the social challenges of the day. He further observed that external reviews, governing bodies and sources of teaching are all Western and concluded by urging scholars of the Global South to compile the 'treasuries of our thought.' Shadrack Gutto, Director of the Institute for African Renaissance Studies, continued on several of these themes by noting that both small and large legal cases in Africa are sent to the European courts. At the same time, he pointed out that although there is an international criminal court, the USA and Israel are not part of that justice. Furthermore, he observed, international laws are often used in a way to depict Africans as criminals, while the real criminals are those who make the laws, and insisting that 'we have laws but no rule of law, we have constitutions but no constitutionalism.' He concluded by suggesting that lawyers in general are only 'half educated' and asked if it is really necessary to maintain the traditional academic disciplinary structure of universities when it comes to legal education, since many legal cases will often require interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from science, sociology and other areas of expertise.

Massoud Shadjareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission chaired Session Six, which focused on language, literature and the arts. Roghayeh Rostampur Maleki, Head of the Arabic Language and Literature Department of Al-Zahra University in Tehran, opened the session by speaking about 'The West in Arabic Literature.' She asked why the Nobel Prize should be awarded only to those who are approved by the West, and gave the example of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz who denigrated the Prophet of Islam. She concluded that the main aim of the West is to eliminate religion from literature, and that this is related to Arabic today being separated from its Quranic authority. To remedy this, she suggested, scholars and literary figures ought to be accustomed to the language of the Quran. Mahdi Hamidi Parsa opened the following presentation with a quotation from the Islamic sage Imam Sadiq, who said that 'Guide people not by talk.' He suggested that teachers ought to be honest and faithful, because they influence others, and noted that teaching in circles reduces hierarchy among learners. Speaking from his experience as Vice-President of the Islamic School of Art in Qom, he recalled that master learners live in a group and learn together and that teaching art is by doing art in a workshop environment. Building on the spirit of the quote from Imam Sadiq, he suggested that acting is more important than talking, that explanation is not necessary, and that teaching is by doing. He also reminded participants of the role of the sacred in education, giving the example of Muslim architects who fast and pray for a month before they begin work on building a mosque, because it will be a place in which people will seek to be close to God and so the architect ought to be close to God, too. To decolonise universities, he concluded, it is crucial to return to local tradition and part of that involves students and teachers living, learning, and traveling together so as to know one another. Session Six concluded with Sue-San Ghahremani Ghajar of Al-Zahra University and Seyyed Abdolhamid Mirhosseini of Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran offering ways to decolonize language education research in Iranian universities. Ghajar noted that that researchers have to be conscious of how they talk about their work and how they feel about what they are doing, and Mirhosseini added that research pervades the work of academia and that this is related to questions of relevance and publication. He observed that the sources of legitimation in research are not people but rather institutions or ideas, such as 'the West,' concluding that there is a form of 'captive research,' being that which is largely irrelevant to the needs and concerns of a locality.

The afternoon of Day Two began with Session Seven, which was chaired by Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University in the US. Erwin Soriano Fernandez, Director of the House of Pangasinan Studies in the Philippines, opened the session by speaking about neo-colonialism in the university, providing a review of how much decolonisation has actually taken place in universities, the people associated with it and at what level it is occurring, taking note of the obstacles, often self-imposed, that prevent furthering the work of decolonisation. He was followed by Zhou Li, Professor of Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University in China, who enumerated the of traps of academic studies as the uncritical and ideological use of theory, and the pervasive culture of Eurocentrism. He noted that the division of thought into traditional and modern was a one way movement with no return, giving the example of modernization theory. He also cautioned against the responses to this predicament that often resort to a kind of provincial and self-centered localism, warning that 'if we jump from one trap, we may fall into another.' He observed that in modern China, beating down Confucianism was followed by dependency on German Marxist thought. For most of modern history, the social sciences have been occupied by Western sources and the adoption of various social and natural science indices are a form of self-colonisation. Courses in development, he gave as an example, are based on comparing theories of the Western world. He jokingly noted that, 'you have to lay many eggs' to get promoted in Chinese academia by publishing in the right indexed journals. He concluded by suggesting that decolonisation needs to come about through ‘our utterances as well as in our college lectures.’ Cheng-Feng Shih, Professor of Political Science from Taiwan, continued this line of thought by noting that after colonising bodies was achieved, colonizing minds was necessary 'so that we can learn to be happy slaves.' He noted the irony of the situation of Taiwanese professors, who are asked by their institutions to publish in US journals to 'gain recognition' but that US editors say that their works 'lack audience' and send them back. Evaluations of faculty, he continued, are based on quantitative notions of 'productivity' as the basis for promotions and bonuses, and that the standards are biased toward the natural sciences. The result is that young scholars frequently lose interest in the social and political problems of their country and indigenous peoples are deprived of identity in Taiwan. Session Seven concluded with Ibrahim Pur of Gazi University in Ankara, speaking about the impact of Westernization on the Turkish educational system, illustrating this by listing the Eurocentric curriculum content of a typical degree program in Turkish universities. He also reported on the case of Imam Hatip schools that teach the usual academic subjects along side of religious subjects as a sort of compromise, noting that Muslim parents in Turkey want moral education as well as academic subjects and that Imam Hatip schools produce graduates recognized for both their morality and ethics as well as their academic achievements.

Session Eight, chaired by Shaikh Abdul Mabud of the Islamic Academy in London, began with Abdolhossein Khosropaneh, a teacher and research at Islamic seminaries in Iran, speaking about a model of the social sciences from a Muslim perspective and providing an overview of relevant theories from the Islamic tradition. Mohideen Abdul Kader, Chairperson on Citizens International, spoke next about universities failing to rise to the task of addressing the systems that are destroying the world, noting that the knowledge they are teaching is part of the destructive mentality, and that it is materialist and lacks any sense of the sacred. He observed that philosophy departments are often closed down because they have no utilitarian purpose, that scientists have become ensconced in the market, and that most universities produce graduates with 'tunnel vision.' He concluded that universities need to introduce moral and ethical values into the curriculum but that there are obstacles to this prospectus. Giving the example of Universiti Sains Malaysia, he noted that compulsory economics courses are based on the capitalist model while Islamic oriented courses are optional. The result of this, he observed, is that graduates come out with only the increasingly irrelevant and already destructive mindset of the capitalist economic model but that there is a complete absence of ethics and justice in economics, pointing out the implications that 'our minds have become captive to those who are trained in this way.' Mohammad Reza Aghaya, Vice President of the University of Religions and Denominations in Qom, Iran, turned to the question of integrating the knowledge domains in the Islamic seminary, suggesting that in Islamic seminaries today there is a 'focus on God words but on God books,' and that there needs to be a return to a system in which knowledge can be modelled on that of the prophets and imams. Arif Ersoy, Secretary General of the Economic and Social Research Center in Ankara, concluded the session by recalling that while Turkey was indirectly colonized in the past, today's colonisation is worse than before because it is mental and cultural colonisation. Drawing upon the wisdom of the Islamic mystical tradition, he observed that in the mineral and plant worlds there is harmony of function according to their instinct and nature, but that human beings have four faculties that need to be aligned in order to bring about harmony and sociability. The session, and the day, concluded with a lively discussion of the previous themes featuring comments from the floor.

The third and final day of the conference featured two sessions in the morning and then an afternoon of reflection and planning. Session Nine, chaired by Mani Shankar Aiyar, began with Molefi Kete Asante, professor of Africology at Temple University, reminding participants that the USA was born with two ‘birth defects,’ genocide and slavery. After pointing out that Africa was the original home of the human species, he suggested that the experience of Europeans has colored the views of Asians toward Africans. He went on to point out that the curriculum of African universities is much like those of the West, that the regional universities are 'imitation European universities.' Part of the way to rectify this problem is to acknowledge chronology, which he insisted was crucial. For instance, he showed that it is important to realize that Nubia and Kemet (the original African name for Egypt) are the China, India and Greece of Africa and that the pyramids were already up 5000 years ago, long before Greece and Rome. Given that, he asked why African universities begin their studies of history with ancient Greece. Similarly, he continued, Africans had highly developed philosophies long before Greece, pointing to the Egyptian polymath Imhotep. If it is necessary to refer to the Greeks, then he suggested checking Herodotus to find out how much the Greeks learned from Africa. The modern university, he observed, was promoting a Eurocentric version of world history, and that ‘there was a Greek on every corner.' Yet the truth is, he insisted, that the Greeks sat at the feet of Africa, and it is therefore necessary to re-integrate the ancient history of Africa. Unfortunately, he continued, there is no African foundation to today's African universities. Drawing upon forty years of teaching in universities, he observed that if you see 'origin unknown' in any references or sources then it means that it must have come from Africa. In other words, it may have been unknown to Europe, but that doesn’t preclude peoples of the Global South from having a look. He also noted that the way we talk about the world is part of self-colonisation, in that while Europeans have ‘philosophy,’ other peoples have myths, tales, stories and religions. He concluded by reminding the conference participants that Africology is the Afrocentric study of Africa and that it proceeds from the agency of the African people, not the Europeans imposing their agency. Building upon these themes, Samuel Tindifa from Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University in Uganda delivered a paper prepared by Babuuzibwa Mukasa Luutu, Vice Chancellor of Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University, on the topic of bringing community back into the university. Based upon the teachings of Marcus Garvey, he suggested that peoples’ traditions are fundamental pillars of learning, concluding that Africology is the study of the scientific development of humanity, that it is a liberation theology drawing its legitimacy from Africa as the cradle of humanity. Session Nine was followed by an extensive and lively discussion around the question of what it means to be Afrocentric and what might be the relationships between Afrocentrism and a similarly configured Sinocentrism or Indocentrism or others, and in turn if these were all dependent on Eurocentrism.

Session Ten, chaired by Omar Farouk Bajunid of Hiroshima City University, began with Yusef Progler, Professor at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan, speaking on the challenges faced by higher education undergoing an imposed transition in many locales from the national university to the corporate university, pointing out that the structure and outlook of business has undermined higher education’s traditional encounter with culture. In the event that elite minded researchers collude with money minded managers to close the doors of universities to all but the privileged, he suggested using the Internet to construct online learning communities and repositories of knowledge to fulfill Ivan Illich’s prospectus for deschooling societies. James Campbell, Lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University in Australia, spoke next on the problem of mimicry in today’s university, pointing out the role of international university ranking systems in perpetuating a colonialist hierarchy of knowledge and value. Claude Alvares, coordinator of the Multiversity Project, followed up on these presentations and summarised many of the previous ones by providing an overview of Eurocentrism in universities, with an emphasis on the social sciences. He noted that beyond the curriculum, the structure of university learning is also colonised and destructive, suggesting that compulsory attendance needs to be eliminated, textbooks have to be abandoned, and lecturing ought to be banned, replacing these with an environment in which self-learning is encouraged and made to flourish. Building upon these later points and also noting ways and means of learning outside the academy, Manish Jain of India-based Shikshantar: The People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development concluded the session with a presentation on the recently founded Swaraj University in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Inspired by Gandhian notions of self-sufficiency, he noted that the hidden curriculum of modern universities has a far greater impact on minds and learning than the written curriculum. He suggested that the alternative is to see the world as a classroom, and outlined a paradigm for moving away from schooling and toward self-organizing learning communities, pointing to the example of Swaraj University, which operates as a two year learning program that provides opportunities for young learners to develop the ‘skills and perspectives they need to create viable green-collar enterprises and to support healthy and resilient local communities.’ The session then turned to a series of several exchanges between the conference participants and the presenters.

The Concluding Session of the conference, on the afternoon of Day Three, featured Anwar Fazal, a Penang-based activist and organizer and founder of the Right Livelihood College, leading a plenary discussion to chart a roadmap for decolonising during 2011-2012. In an aspect that is often excluded from typical academic conferences, the session began with a series of presentations from the student rapporteurs responding to the conference themes. The session concluded with Anwar Fazal asking each of the conference participants to commit themselves to a specific activity to bring the conference themes to fruition in the coming year. The conference was brought to a close by S.M. Mohammed Idris, Chairperson of Citizens International, and Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Vice Chancellor of University Sains Malaysia, who thanked the participants and urged them to keep alive the diverse proposals and prospects presented.

The conference was attended by several local journalists, and along with reports and reflections from conference participants a number of articles have appeared in the Malay press. Zainon Ahmed wrote in the Sun Daily that 'decolonisation of universities begins with us.' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak wrote about decolonizing our minds in the New Straits Times and conference participant Shad Saleem Faruqi wrote on 'decolonising our universities' in the The Star Online. Additional media coverage is reported at the USM homepage on the Multiworld website, and C. K. Raju is archiving media reports on his blog. Further information about the conference is available on the conference page at Multiworld and videos featuring excerpts as well as full sessions are available for viewing and downloading at the TV Multiversity channels on YouTube, Vimeo and TVU Networks.

[This report was written by Multiversity co-creator Yusef J. Progler, who was a participant in the Penang conference and who presently works as professor of Media, Culture and Society at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. It is the second of a two part report. Part one is available here.]

Notes on Decolonising Universities (Part One)

2011-07-14T21:55:00.008+09:00

On 27-29 June 2011, Multiversity held its fourth international conference in Penang, Malaysia, on the topic of 'Decolonising Our Universities.' Hosted by Citizens International and Universiti Sains Malaysia, the conference brought together academics, activists, journalists and students from the Global South to address the problem of Eurocentrism in university curricula and to develop alternatives and pathways of resistance. The conference went beyond critique with many participants sharing their experiences in decolonizing higher education by reporting on local initiatives from throughout Asia, Africa and the Mideast. The event was live streamed and also recorded. Complete sessions and excerpts are available on the TV Multiversity internet television channels and a book of the proceedings will be forthcoming later this year. This first of a two part report offers highlights from Day One.

In the Opening Session, S.M. Mohamed Idris, Chairperson of Citizens International, gave the welcoming address. He reminded participants that colonialism is not just a political and economic system; it is a 'malady' that has 'afflicated' the Global South on the level of culture, and the so-called 'independent' ruling elite has continued to operate without dismantling the old colonialist ways of thinking. Multiversity was launched a decade ago to reverse this tendency, and specifically to redesign curricula and resist Western hegemony. He called for participants to create 'socially useful sciences' and avoid meaningless hybrids. The next speaker, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Vice Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, noted that previous educational systems are becoming dysfunctional and that it was necessary to create something new, different and concrete to replace the present system. An advisor to the Iranian Ministry of Higher Education, Asghar Zarei, was the third speaker. He observed that imperialism and education have implications for developing states, and that imperialism is about hegemony and gain. The Third World is on a road map drawn up by imperialist powers seeking hegemony, he insisted, and this involves channeling global scientific knowledge to serve the needs of the imperialists. He also noted that students who go abroad are part of the problem by working for research agendas established in the Global North. In his inaugural address, Malaysian Deputy Minister of Higher Education Saifuddin Abdullah suggested that there is a need to develop indigenous knowledge systems of the Global South, including university curricula and teaching methods. He also noted that the ranking of universities is a way of preserving the hegemony of knowledge of the Global North. He concluded the session by suggesting that the Global South is not lacking in terms of talented people, but that ways have to be found to put an end to dependency of Western ideas, theories and methods.

The Second Session featured a keynote address by Pavan Varma, Ambassador of India to Bhutan, who emphasized a point made by Idris Mohamed, that the deepest colonization is that of the mind. Drawing upon the Indian experience, he continued that the 'culture of the ruled' was systematically devalued and that European colonialists were completely dismissive of all that was part of Indian culture, and that there was a systematic denigration of all that was other than their own. This had two results: an alienation of oneself and a sense of awe toward the colonialists. Noting that the first thing the colonisers took from the ruled was language, he added that, 'Language is a window to your culture... you close that window and a culture ceases.' He suggested that global languages have their place, but not at the expense of local languages, cautioning that, 'We cannot become a nation of linguistic half castes.' Varma concluded his address by observing that while the Global South can be proud of its doctors and engineers, the humanities are stunted and in a shambles.

The keynote address was followed by commentary from several conference participants. Hossein Doostdar of the Center for International Scientific Studies and Collaboration in Iran pointed out that the spirits of Macaulay and Churchill may be alive but they themselves are dead, emphasising that the Global South has to also be aware of the living forces in its midst that are perpetuating the thinking of the former colonisers. Ashis Nandy of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi made the point that Euro-centrism was a limited way to understand what was happening, and that the former colonised world is more universal and multicultural than the West and the colonisers. He further noted that notions of 'progress' and 'revolution' have not served the Global South very well in the past 200 years. The first phase of colonialism was about money and Christianity, he recalled, and the second phase proceeded from the African slave trade. But the first half of the the 19th century brought a new phase when enlightenment and moral values changed this old colonial model. The early colonisers wore local dress, married local women, and feared local gods. But this changed in the 1830s, Nandy continued, with the entry of the British middle classes into India, for whom Social Darwinism became the dominant value system. This enabled the rulers to strike a posture of 'stern schoolmaster' and 'despotic father' in their campaign to shape the local people into citizens of the modern nation state. Mani Shankar Aiyar, member of the Upper House of Indian Parliament, observed that there has always been a thesis and anti-thesis in the colonial era's interaction between Britain and India. He turned the old adage that 'Nalanda was the Harvard of India' on its head by suggesting that Harvard ought to be seen as the Nalanda of the US. He insisted that the Global South can stand on its own feet, 'With the winds of the world blowing around us, but we cannot be blown over,' and that there has always been a productive interaction. The Macaulay 'Minute on Indian Education,' he concluded, was the 'suicide note of the British in India,' since once the English ideas were accepted they were turned against the West. Other respondents to Varma's address included: Joan Valenzuela of the Philippines, who noted that dismantling colonialism needs to consider the Global South's own complicity in Western systems; Ahmad Merican of Malaysia, who reminded participants to reclaim the discourse of the Global South's own history; and Lee Seunghwan, Director of the Asia Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding, who suggested that education should be for cooperation rather than competition and that the Global South needs less education and more cooperation. Varma replied to the commentators by noting that colonialism was not a level playing field, that the people of the Global South must be clear about the destruction wrought by colonialism and they ought to avoid excessive benevolence toward the colonizers.

On Monday afternoon, Session Three and Four focused on the state of the social sciences in the Global South. Session Three was dedicated to discussion of the World Social Science Report (WSSR) published in 2010 by UNESCO. The session began with Daryl Macer of UNESCO Thailand summarizing the report, admitting that the idea of social science in the report is closest to that of the West and that UNESCO believes that social sciences need to support a global agenda of development goals. He added, however, that knowledge cannot be suppressed, especially that which challenges the dominant viewpoints. One of the concrete outcomes of the conference was a memorandum to reform the WSSR, which Macer agreed to deliver to UNESCO on behalf of the participants. Shyam Singh of the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore responded that the WSSR is about knowledge from the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, its relevance to those who didn't have that experience was dubious. Vishram Gupte, a Goa-based writer, noted that the WSSR had 'impeccable research methods' and is a 'meticulous collection of data,' and that its point about the 'knowledge divide' is a useful admission that holds out a possibility of hope. However, he stressed that the 'knowing heart' and the 'language of intuition' is missing from the WSSR. The guru model as developed in India, he continued, is based on heart-to-heart talking to develop knowledge, but that in most universities today the liberal exchange is ruled out and replaced with authority-based lectures as the normative mode of instruction. In his response to the presentations, Hazim Shah of the University of Malaya added that the Global South needs to avoid superficial universalism inherent in global reports, that the WSSR has little recognition of other ways of knowing and that there's no attempt to produce independent thinking outside the market orientation. Srinivasan Ramani, an editor at the Economic and Political Weekly, suggested that journals need not cater to the impulse toward indexing and impact factoring. He offered the example of the Dalits in India who use poetry to reflect their social experiences, and asked if there was room for alternative ideas about apprehending reality and experience. Rajaram Tolpadi of Bangalore University noted that social science often provides a 'gloomy picture of what is happening in the non-West,' and asked participants to evaluate what was included as social science, and that in the end it might be better to forget the WSSR.

Building upon the critique of the WSSR in Session Three, the fourth session of the day was dedicated to alternative curricula and methods. Farid Alatas, professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore, began by noting that there is a general neglect of ideas that originated from the non-West. He gave the example of Ibn Khaldun, who is often seen only as a source of knowledge but not as a source of social theory. He outlined two interrelated tasks. First, a step toward decolonizing Eurocentrism would be to ask what of Marx, Durkheim, and other Western thinkers can be salvaged. He suggested that the goal should be to critique but not abandon, and that there can be a focus on aspects of Western thinkers that are neglected in Europe and America, such as the views of Marx and Weber on Islam and Asia. Second, the Global South needs to introduce non-Western thinkers of the same period, such as Jose Rizal of the Philippines, whose works are virtually ignored in the region but who was doing a critique of Eurocentrism before it was recognized as such. He blamed the structure of 'academic dependency' and the 'captive mind' for not moving from critiques to concrete reforms. Most importantly, he urged participants to recognise that besides imperialism there are problems in the Global South that need to be addressed, such a lack of standards or government interference in curricula. He concluded by asking what social scientists are doing to fight the abuses and corruption in their own countries and whether the social sciences can confront the problems of Asia today.

The next speaker in Session Four was Vinay Lal of the University of Delhi, who reminded participants that, despite what Eric Wolf wrote in Europe and the People without History, all peoples today insist they have a history and so what is therefore necessary is an epistemological critique of history. Offering the example of James Mill's History of British India (1818) to illustrate that periodisation was already well established by that time but that Mill used Hindi, Muslim and Modern for his periods, Lal pointed out the 'sleight of hand' between the second and third periods, which relied on the negative connotations of the Medieval period in the West to suggest that Britain had somehow transcended religion. He then asked about the categories used to write history, noting that this same movement from Medieval to Modern is implicit in the discourse of development, which hijacks the past as well as the future. Chaipraditkul Napat, a researcher at the Eubios Ethics Institute in Thailand, spoke next about the philosophy of education and the need to develop wisdom. She noted that in terms of scholarship 'they keep writing and we keep citing,' and asked if the Global South can learn to write its own histories. Reporting on the potential of developing African psychotherapies in African universities, Augustine Nwoye from the University of Dodoma in Tanzania outlined the benefits of drawing from the best practices of African and Western models of affecting psychological healing. In outlining an African derived course in psychology, he emphasised that decolonising is worthy but needs care. Continuing on the theme of psychology, Akomolafe Adebayo Clement of Covenant University in Nigeria asked about relevance of the social sciences in Africa. He suggested the need to develop nosologies and classifications that come out of community narratives in order to move away from the idea that universities need to look like Harvard. Giving the example of Swaraj University, he noted that a student need not be defined as some one sitting in a classroom. Stressing the importance of stories and narratives or myths, he reported on the development of a local storytelling circle to generate narratives, asking that if psychology is a form of storytelling practice, it's important to focus on what stories are being told and by what myths people may be living. Session Four concluded with comments from the floor that raised several points, including that religion and spirituality play an important role in the Global South and that more local grounding is needed before doing criticism of Eurocentrism.

The conference was attended by several local journalists, and along with reports and reflections from conference participants a number of articles have appeared in the Malay press. Zainon Ahmed wrote in the Sun Daily that 'decolonisation of universities begins with us.' Vice Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia and conference co-host Dzulkifli Abdul Razak discussed 'decolonizing our minds' in the New Straits Times and conference participant Shad Saleem Faruqi reflected on 'decolonising our universities' in the The Star Online. Additional media coverage is reported at the USM homepage and on the Multiworld website, and C. K. Raju is archiving media reports on his blog. Further information about the conference and participants is available on the conference page at Multiworld, including a selection of conference papers, and videos featuring excerpts as well as full sessions are available for viewing and downloading at the TV Multiversity channels on YouTube, Vimeo and TVU Networks.

[This report was written by Multiversity co-creator Yusef J. Progler, who was a participant in the Penang conference and who presently works as professor of Media, Culture and Society at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. Part two of the report, featuring notes on Day Two and Three of the conference, is available here.]

The 'New Time Religion' of Advertising

2011-07-10T06:03:00.004+09:00

One of North America's foremost media theorists, Sut Jhally is professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and founder and director of the Media Education Foundation. He has written numerous books and articles on advertising, social communications and cultural politics. In the following interview with Kalle Lasn and Nicholas Racz, conducted in the Vancouver offices of 'Adbusters' magazine in 1993, professor Jhally suggests that modern advertising has become a cultural force resembling a religion. He implicates this 'new time religion' in the culture of consumerism threatening to bring about environmental collapse on a planetary scale. The way out of this mess, he suggests, is to mount a 'reformation' in attitudes toward ourselves.

Adbusters Quarterly: You talk a great deal about advertising as religion. Please elaborate on that.

Sut Jhally: Advertising has increasingly come to provide answers to those same questions that religion often raises. How does the world work? Where do I fit in? What is a moral life? But I don't think advertising is a religion in the same way that Catholicism or Islam are religions. The religion of advertising operates at the level of the everyday. It's close to the kind of religious practice called fetishism that existed in West Africa, in which people believed in God but also worshipped magical spirits that populated the ordinary places in which they lived. Those spirits can influence, not the big problems, but the small problems. They can influence the question about how to get better, how to heal yourself and how to enhance your sexual, romantic and family lives. That's where advertising fits in. It creates a world in which goods come to play all kinds of magical roles in our daily interactions. The religion of advertising is based upon a magic in which goods instantly can cure us of all kinds of ailments, instantly make you more attractive or act as a love potion. Buying the right good can act as a sort of passport into a magical world of consumption, a magical world of style.

AQ: Which religion is more powerful?

SJ: I would say it's the religion of advertising. We pay lip service to these other religions, we may go to religious services for an hour or two a week, but they don't dominate our lives. We live in the media culture 24 hours a day. This other vision is pumped at us constantly from all the media. Advertising is so powerful because it recognizes the real things that people want, the things that make people feel: friendship, love, security, some kind of autonomy. Advertisers use our real desires, our need to belong, for identity, for love, for friendship. That's why those images are so powerful.

AQ: But most people don't believe that advertising has that kind of power.

SJ: I think North Americans live in the most powerful and most effective propaganda system in history. Especially in the United States, people really believe that the media are free. A propaganda system only works if people think that they're in a free system. So if you know you're in a propaganda system, it ceases to work, which is why the Soviet Union fell apart overnight.

AQ: You make it feel like an eminently solvable problem, that all we have to do is simply make our propaganda system apparent to more and more people.

SJ: Except that you have to have access to society, and those media channels are already monopolized.

AQ: Did this propaganda system, this new time religion, just creep up on us? How did it happen?

SJ: It happened as a result of struggle - people struggling to see who would control public space, who would control cultural institutions and the public airwaves. There was a battle in the U.S. in 1934, which resulted in the Federal Communications Act in which commercial interests got the best airwaves. The people with other visions of broadcasting - were shunted off into the salt mine. Now that was the the result of a battle, and it's a battle that in Europe still goes on.

AQ: How do we get back on track?

SJ: Through democratization of the media. The big problem we now have is monopoly control of the media. We live in a very sensitive media society where vast corporations control everything. And it's their interests that structure our vision. The way to fight that is to fight for access and argue for diversity. It was one in the 1930s, but we lost.

AQ: Hasn't this battle been fought since 1934?

SJ: No. And it's very difficult to fight in the U.S. because historically, it's tied to another issue, which is anti-communism. Freedom in the U.S. is tied up with the freedom from government. It's a very specific American notion. I've always been struck by that. Americans have a very narrow definition of freedom. They think that if you can be free from government then somehow you're free. There seems to be no way of conceiving that there might be other entities as well that could pose threats to freedom. I think what's required is an enjoining battle over what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution really means. The First Amendment is a very interesting document, because it links up three freedoms - freedom of beliefs, freedom of speech and freedom of action. This supposes that when different ideas are expressed, then consensus will automatically develop from this free exchange. That 'Congress shall make no laws...' is no longer enough. We need to realize that there are now other powerful ways to limit free expression and debate.

AQ: In the underground art circles there is already a powerful realization that our mass media, especially television, are not free.

SJ: But it's on the fringes. The key question is how to get this realization from the periphery into the mainstream.

AQ: So how do we do that? How do we see through this religion and catalyze a 'reformation'?

SJ: It's an important question, because I actually believe the survival of the human race is at stake. We're now coming to a stage in human history when that notion of unlimited growth can no longer go unquestioned. The physical limits of the planet are literally bursting at the seams and if we keep producing at this rate, the planet will destroy itself. What we need now is a vision of society that is not based upon ever increasing numbers of goods. The 'reformation' will be a questioning of the very nature of economic growth, the health of our society, what we want it to do and how to organize it. The growth ethic is about consumption. It says happiness is connected to the number of things a society produces and the number of things individuals have. But having said that, I don't know how to do it. We can talk and analyze the situation, but when it comes to constructing that new vision, I don't know how to do that. The advertising vision has mobilized people around a set of social relations in which they ultimately lose, but with which they identify very strongly. It provides answers to questions that they ask. For the first time in human history, huge numbers of individuals are able to experience and explore their own needs and wants. It's not just manipulation, and it's not just a question of showing people that they're being fooled. Unfortunately, what we don't have yet is an alternative vision, an alternative way of thinking about ourselves. I think for the future of the planet, we need to develop that alternative vision and mobilize people around it. That's the challenge.

[The foregoing was originally published as 'An Interview with Sut Jhally' in Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment, Vol. 2 No. 3, Winter 1993, pp. 22-25. Portions of the interview were excerpted from Media and Values, No. 57, Winter 1992. More at Sut Jhally's homepage and the Media Education Foundation.]

Thoughts from an Autochthonous Center

2011-06-24T06:42:00.004+09:00

For approximately five hundred years, European civilizations subjugated or destroyed peoples around the world. By the 1890s, about 85% of the land mass of the earth was either a colony or a former colony of Europe. During the long period of conquest, Europeans developed an intensive and impressive body of ideologies to explain their success as the inevitable result of the inherent superiority of the culture and at points even their biology, although the expansion actually the result of military success. The psychological and social foundation of this period of conquest and colonization is found in the ability to coerce the peoples of the world to accept the rules by which European politics and ideologies claimed the power to determine what is legitimate about the human experience.

Other cultures have expanded and conquered, but none has expanded so far and so powerfully. At each stage of the expansion, European culture adopted new and more effective utopian ideologies which have proven powerful forces in motivating people either to support aggressive expansion and exploitation of others or to stand docilely in the face of such aggressions. The original utopia, the Garden of Eden, served as a model of coercive powers of the state.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans justified the plunder of the Caribbean and Central America on the premise that Christianity was the "true" religion and that they were doing subjugated peoples a service by forcing them to it. At one point the Spanish decided that because they were purveyors of God's message to "new" worlds, they should be exempt from physical labor and other people should do all the menial work. This kind of thinking became the foundation of racism in the modern world. People who can convince themselves they have solutions to all humankind's problems tend to do whatever is necessary to effect what they consider the desired ends and are almost always the privileged beneficiaries of those ends.

European utopian visions have been used to rationalize a range of criminal behaviors including the enslavement of millions of Africans and the annihilation of entire American Indian peoples as the (sometimes) regrettable but necessary consequences of the construction of some kind of future state of human perfection. Sometimes these visions suggested that the state of perfection would be realized on earth, sometimes in heaven, but always Europeans imagined themselves as its agents. This led to a sense of America as a "high civilization" that would motivate the world's people's to democracy, and always there were historians who wrote history to conform to such ideologies.

During the nineteenth century and the early decades of this century there was an intellectual movement to identify and make the world safe for an idealized biological human. Scientific racism paved the way for an attempt to eradicate certain types of humans who were deemed biologically inferior from the face of the earth. These movements and a great many others created the context for what has been called the modern era. Since around the middle of the twentieth century, however, European expansion has stalled and its influence has declined.

European flags fly over fewer and fewer colonial capitals. Indeed, where Europeans once invaded the lands of brown and black peoples, today brown and black peoples emigrate in large numbers to European-dominated lands. African, North African, and Middle Eastern populations are established and growing faster than European populations in North America. The unchecked expansion of Europe and European populations that was the defining condition of the modern era, has ended. The world has now moved to an irreversible condition of postmodernity.

None of the movements that characterized the five hundred years of European expansion has disappeared, but recent decades have seen counter-movements which have caused Europe's utopian ideologies to be exposed, deconstructed, and in the intellectual life of the West, discredited. Post modernism, a movement which announces the abandonment of Western utopian ideologies, should be seen as a consequence of the halt of five hundred years of European expansion. It is an interesting phase of development of Western ideology that signifies not so much "the end of history" or even "the end of Eurocentric history" as the intellectual collapse of European ideologies constructed around utopian visions.

Post modernism and cultural studies seek to develop theory concerning the changing conditions, consciousness, and opportunities and the legacies that domination and exploitation have wrought. Kuan-Hsing Chan has stated that both discourses seek to "bring the repressed voices of history back into the historical agenda." Both share

(o)n the level of cultural politics... the attempt to decenter or decentralize politics and recenter "culture." But this does not mean that politics has gone. Quite the contrary, in both positions, culture is pervasively politicized on every front and every ground, hence a cultural politics. Both discourses conceive of cultural practices as collective; cultural politics is empowering and endangering, oppositional and hegemonic; culture is neither the "authentic" practice of the "people" nor simply a means of "manipulation" by capitalism, but the state of active local struggle, everyday and anywhere.

For the purposes of this discussion it may be useful to conceptualize "post modernism" and "cultural studies" as distinct discourses with similar goals. Post modernism, in this context, might be seen as the development of the theory of how the dominant culture dominates and might include literature that seeks to demystify and deconstruct those channels of domination. Cultural studies might be seen as the discourse about what must be conceived or constructed to replace and accelerate the demystification of the dominant ideologies. The "limits to what we are able to utter and conceive" are cultural in nature. The lived experiences of people in a culture are different from those of people occupying a distinctly different culture, and the more distant the cultures, the more different the limits.

More and more peoples are responding to the reality of domination on ways that can be echoed throughout the world. More and more indigenous and formerly colonized people are realizing that even after their colonizer has returned home, hegemony remains

through the body of British texts which all too frequently still acts as a touchstone of taste and value, and through RS-English (Received Standard English), which asserts the English of southeast England as a universal norm, the weight of antiquity continues to dominate cultural production in much of the post colonial world. This canonical hegemony has been maintained through canonical assumptions about literary activity.

Canonical hegemony has been maintained through a wide range of other disciplines as well. Very little of the Euro-centered canon can be considered non-hegemonic, value-free knowledge. Economics cannot make such a claim, and certainly not science and technology, not history, not literature. Within the framework of emerging definitions can be found strategies for escape from the cultural domination of the West, and in the emerging literatures and strategies that deny Eurocentered hegemony can be strategies useful to people in the dominant centers.

Philosopher Terry Eagleton has stated that it is possible to view dominant ideologies as factors that support the interests of the rulers and that such ideologies

help to unify a social formation in ways convenient for its rules; that it is not simply a matter of imposing ideas from above but of securing the complicity of subordinated classes and groups.

The idea that the process by which individuals in societies are socialized to "norms" and that the definition of "normal" is a political question was developed by post modernist philosopher Michel Foucault. Eagleton finds:

[I]n the view of Michel Foucault and his acolytes, power is not something confined to armies and parliaments: it is, rather, a pervasive, intangible network of force which weaves itself into our slightest gestures and most intimate utterances.

Lorraine Code, speaking from the perspective of the development of feminist theory, urged that this kind of thinking is unproductive:

there is no point in embarking on such an assessment unless one can assume that people can never intervene in their lives and take charge of the processes that shape them. Indeed, the idea of autonomous agency is appealing precisely because it promises maximum intervention and control. In its liberal articulations it appears even to eschew biological determinism and to offer individuals the freedom to make themselves what they will. Both Marxists and post modernists insist, however, that these are false promises, that choices are themselves constructed by sociocultural-economic circumstances in which people are intrinsically enmeshed.

According to Eagleton, Raymond Williams, one of the founders of cultural studies, strongly dissented from Foucault's theory:

Every social formation is a complex amalgam of what Williams terms "dominant," "residual" and emergent forms of consciousness, and no hegemony can thus ever be absolute. No sharper contrast could be found than with the later work of Michel Foucault, for whom regimes of power constitute us to our very roots, producing just those forms of subjectivity upon which they can most efficiently go to work.

Williams takes the view that resistance is always present, that the ideological constructs that serve to quiet the masses while the privileged few loot the planet are always under pressure and that the rulers are always "running scared." Eagleton states:

Williams acknowledges the dynamic character of hegemony, as against the potentially more static connotations of "ideology'"; hegemony is never a once-and-for-all achievement, but "has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified."

Both views, that of Williams and Foucault, are informative. Foucault's views are exposed to the criticism that they are not productive, but Edward Said was able to use Foucault as a model in his Orientalism (1979) in which he deconstructs a British academic discipline. In the social environment described by Foucault it is difficult to take advantage of the dynamics described by Williams toward the ends desired by Code because social change within the confines of Western thought and experience is a problematic. A problematic is "a particular organization of categories which at any given historical moment constitutes the limits of what we are able to utter and conceive."

Ideology and culture, in some contexts, have similar definitions. It is difficult to imagine a culture that has no ideology. A practical alternative to the kind of one-answer utopian ideology of the period of European expansionism is a pluralism that acknowledges many different versions of reality that are legitimate across a wide range of contexts. Pluralism proposes that a society incorporates or at least is open to sets of ideas associated with more than one culture. Pluralism makes sense of the world through interrogation and rejection of the idea that a singular discourse can have a monopoly on answers to what creates the conditions for the perfection of humankind, or that such conditions are even possible. This is accurate even though pluralism promotes discussion of its own definition, its rules, and its exceptions to its rules. It accepts not only that people experience the world in the context of a diversity of versions of existence, but that both social and extra-social realities arise from random convergences.

Postmodernism and cultural studies emerge in the context of centuries of practice of domination/subjugation, of "high culture/low culture," of the war of rich against the poor, white against black and brown, of top-down histories, and so forth. Both are positioned in opposition to domination and therefore both seek to support the reversal of conditions of oppression. In essence this requires the encouragement of channels of communication and invigoration of the powerless and at a minimum requires a politics that proclaims the right of everyone on earth to enough food to eat, enough clean water to drink, freedom from political repression, torture, and dictatorship. To encourage diversity of discourse, postmodern cultural studies must hear the ideas of communities of people distinct from themselves and therefore must promote the acceptance of divergent "voices."

This requirement raises an interesting dilemma. The very complexity of human societies places limits on how much a person from one society can know about the inner realities of people of a different culture. The more two cultures differ, the greater the limitations. If we assume that the practitioners of cultural studies are serious about re-empowering the powerless, that they are not simply seeking informants from diverse culture to expand the self-identity of a Cultural Revolution or a New Age, we must then expect that the new rules around "legitimacy" will respect the limitations of such ambitions. At the same time, some of the views of the culturally distant may help review some of the dominant-centered ideology of the West. Vandana Shiva, a woman scientist from India, finds science to be a Euro-centered ideology:

the parochial roots of science in patriarchy and in a particular class and subculture have been concealed behind a claim to universality, and can be seen only through other traditions - of women and non-Western people. It is these subjugated traditions that are revealing how modern science is gendered, how it is specific to the needs of impulses of the dominant western culture and how ecological destruction and nature's exploitation are inherent to its logic. It is becoming increasingly clear that scientific neutrality has been a reflection of ideology, not history, and science is similar to all other socially constructed categories.

All over the world European powers brought the children of their colonies to the Western education process where the propaganda of Western legitimacy was installed in the minds of a cultures of these budding local elites. When the Europeans finally folded up their flags and went home, they left behind cadres of elites socialized to the European discourses of power and these elites continue to act in the interests of the colonizers at the expense of their own poor.

Colonized peoples have three choices in response to cultural colonization. They can become "good subjects" of the discourse, accepting the rules of law and morals without much question, they can be "bad subjects" arguing that they have been subjected to alien rules but always revolting within the precepts of those rules, or they can be "non-subjects," acting and thinking around discourses far removed from and unintelligible to the West. Both "good subjects" and "bad subjects," although able to point to a process of struggle with their former captors, tend to impose the West's social conditions of domination and hierarchy which they learned from the colonizers upon their own poor and downtrodden. In a world composed of fewer than a dozen distinct civilizations (including the metropolitan West) plus 3,000 to 5,000 distinct indigenous societies, the range of possible experiences (other "voices") is very great indeed. These are the autochthonous peoples whom such luminaries as Arnold Toynbee wrote entirely out of human history. Much of what remains of the range of human potential for creating versions of reality exists in the framework of the arts, stories, oral traditions, music and other cultural manifestations of these peoples. Their lived and dreamed experiences are the world's richest sources of exploration of the human potential.

Gaining access to these experiences will not be easy. Not only are the voices of these distinct "others" remote, the channels of communication are practically non-existent. Few individuals from tribal societies write novels or history texts.

The people who represent these societies to the West are, almost without exception, those we can identify as cultural "marginals," people with considerable experience in two or more cultures. As the movement in support of cultural integrity and diverse cultural legitimacy gains momentum, it is logical that people who lay claim to being "non-subjects" of the West, people who are closer culturally and spiritually to the autochthonous centers, will increasingly support alternative (non-Western) discourses of reality that legitimate entirely unfamiliar stories and versions about how the world works. They can be expected to do this in their own languages using images not derived from the West, and under rules which even the most progressive people in the West will find impenetrable. They will continue a culture of resistance to the West which, in its forms of analysis and criticism, will provide some windows of cross-cultural understanding while maintaining and even strengthening the fact of "otherness." We have already begun to see this happening in the form of rainforest peoples appearing on American television to defend their homeland.

This process, surprisingly, embodies a possibility of resolving some of the dilemma which E. P. Thompson mentioned in The Making of the English Working Class and which Michel Foucault developed in Discipline and Punish. The processes of socialization that invade consciousness of class interest and create docile populations are in some degree absent in many of these cultures. The beneficiaries of hierarchy are always in fear that the subject populations will revolt and construct new non-hierarchical social conditions. These beneficiaries have for centuries constructed elaborated institutions to control and limit the possibilities of both thought and action, but they are vulnerable to movements that can challenge their legitimacy. We are at time and place in the intellectual history of the West when new theories about what can possibly be conceived and uttered within the West's discourses are being constructed and politicized. It's about time.

[This article was written by Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and John C. Mohawk. It was originally published in Akwe:kon Journal (Vol. 9, No. 4, 1992, pp. 16-21) and Cultural Survival Quarterly (Winter 1994, pp. 33-35) under the title 'Thoughts from an Authochthonous Center: Post Modernism and Cultural Studies,' and was recently reprinted in Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader (2010). John Mohawk, a Seneca Indian, organic farmer and captivating public speaker, was editor-in-chief of Akwesasne Notes from 1978 to 1983, which was then the largest English-language indigenous publication in the United States. He also served as the editor of Daybreak, a national Indian news magazine. Mohawk lectured in American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and was director of the Indigenous Studies Program. Yvonne Dion-Buffalo lectured in American Studies at SUNY, Buffalo.]

Buddhist Stories in Korean Cinema

2011-06-18T18:45:00.007+09:00

Films with specific Buddhist content do not make up a significant percentage of Korean cinema, and among them not many can be confirmed as the products of self-conscious Buddhist religious practice. Rather than relying on the self-understanding of the filmmakers, however, I read the 'Buddhist film' within the historical lineage of a specific cultural tradition of popular oral performances, as well as its derivative tradition of popular narratives. Seen in this light, the thin trickle of films joins forces with a well-established and traditional deployment of art as religious practice. Hence, rather than isolating the films withing their modern temporal framework, I instead view them as the contemporary evolution of a process that began as far back as the eighth century.

This strategy allow us to gain a diverse perspective on Korean cinema as well. Korea's film industry has been, for most of its history, an ideological battleground define by twentieth-century history. During the ear of Japanese colonial rule (1910-45), the film industry was monitored for nationalist sentiment and utilized for pro-Japanese propaganda. After the north-south division of the country, which began with the Soviet-U.S. occupation (1945-48) and which solidified after the civil war (1950-53), the ideological standoff between the two Koreas intensified the political use of film on both sides. While North Korean cinema is a state-controlled affair, from production to distribution, the South Korean industry has been only slightly better off, being constantly subject to ideological control and censorship. The Korean Motion Picture Act (1962), for example, suppressed any portrayals of poverty and economic conflict, promoting instead narratives of prosperity tied to the Park Chung Hee regime (1961-79). Since the 1980s, the easing of political pressures has given rise to the use of film as a medium of social criticism - a freer yet equally political utilization. Concurrently, more films have been produced for the international market in the pursuit of national prestige as well as of cultural identity.

The Buddhist film makes its appearance largely since the 1980s and is well represented in the category of the international export film. Its relative novelty can lead one to interpret it as the outcome of contemporary social needs. Hence, the turn to religious themes is read by Hyangjin Lee in Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics (2000, p. 61) as a 'search for a moral vision of society,' particularly in the midst of rapid modernization. Im Kwontaek's Mandala (1981) and Come, Come, Come Upward (1989), and Bae Yonggyun's Why Has Bodi Dharma Left for the East? (1989), in fact, all exhibit a social consciousness that is the hallmark of South Korea's 'new wave' filmmakers, and they utilize a Buddhist filter in order to address contemporary concerns about class and poverty, as noted by David James in Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema (2002). The Buddhist film also reflects the vogue of traditional culture and folkways as a subject of Korean cinema, made most explicit in such films as Im Kwontaek's Sopyanje (1993) and Festival (1996). This new interest in the past bespeaks the contemporary yearning for identity and cultural pride. In addition, the nostalgia for traditional and folk culture can be read as a politics of aesthetics which 'traditional Koran culture' is marketed to the international film community as a way of gaining currency in the global cultural arena.

Bearing these contemporary dynamics in mind, our view of these films can be significantly broadened if we place them within the lineage of Buddhist religious practices. To illustrate this, I will examine 'Passage to Buddha' as exemplary of the tendency of Buddhist scriptures to be co-opted into more popular and accessible formats. Passage to Buddha is the English translation of the Korean film title, Hwaomkyong, which is the Korean name of the Avatamsaka Sutra (Chinese: Huayanjing). The film borrows its narrative from the final chapter of the sutra, which also exists independently in the Sanskritic tradition as the Gandavyuha (entry into the realm of reality). In this text, the central character - a young boy named Sudhana - sets off on a pilgrimage to attain enlightenment from 53 successive teachers. These 'enlightening beings,' who are the subject of the first half of the Gandavyuha, have two notable qualities. First, they take a multitude of human forms: mendicants, priests, scholars, scientists, doctors, merchants, ascetics, entertainers, artisans, and craftsmen (The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, 1993, p. 1169). This variety embodies the Mahayana view that all beings are bodhisattvas who have a role to play in the weal of other beings. It also underscores the concept of 'expedient means' (upaya), and the idea that different people respond to different kinds of teachers. The enlightening beings take on different forms for that reason. This is also related to their second notable quality, which is that they are 'phantom' beings who appear to people according to the latter's need: 'Having pervaded the cosmos with their emanations, they enlightened, developed, and guided sentient beings' (The Flower Ornament Scripture, p. 1168). As phantom manifestations, the enlightening beings demonstrate the Mahayana view that illusion can be a form of benevolent magic.

The human diversity and the skillful magic of the enlightening beings lend themselves to narrative description. the idea that all kinds of beings can function as spiritual guides sets up the possibility of many kinds of narrative scenarios. It offers a leave, if you will, to enter into any number of human predicaments for their inherent dramatic interest. In Passage to Buddha, the pilgrim is an 11-year-old boy names Sonje who wanders through modern-day Korea, particularly its social margins. The film opens in a crematorium where the body of Sonje's father, too poor and inconsequential to be identified, is rendered into ashes. Beginning with the loss of his father, who is never seen or named, Sonje proceeds in the rest of the film to search for his mother, who apparently abandoned him as an infant. The themes of orphanage and homelessness, as we will see, are ubiquitous Buddhist tropes. They pervade the medieval biographies of eminent monks and surface in both our films.

Sonje's search for his mother is overtly conflated with Sudhana's search for Buddhahood, as the former declares that his mother can be found in any 'good person.' The interchangeability of mother and Buddha as objects of yearning is depicted in one Oedipal dream sequence in which Sonje encounters a beautiful older woman who makes love to him. At the end of the film, Sonje has another vision, this time of his mother, who declares to him that she is the mother of all beings, including the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The ultimate convertibility of signs, or manifestations, is a pointed declaration here, very much in the spirit of the Gandavyuha's teaching that enlightening beings take any and all forms. The specific conflation of Buddha and mother, who is also depicted as a love object, makes the further point that the traditionally antipodal realms of religion and domesticity are oppositions that must be overcome. Interestingly, Sonje has difficulty accepting this lesson in his own life, when he rejects marriage to the young woman he has impregnated in order to continue his spiritual pilgrimage.

Sonje's succession teachers include a doctor, a blond beggar woman, a political prisoner, an astronomer, and a lighthouse keeper. In keeping with its namesake text, the film narrates a deliberate process in which each teacher sends Sonje on to the next, indicating the each as a particular teaching to give and that a variety of encounters are necessary to attain the full Dharma. The idea that each human encounter imparts a spiritual boon is denoted by the deep bow that Sonje renders to each character before moving on. The one personage that weaves in and out of Sonje's journey is the apostate Buddhist monk, another abiding trope of East Asian narratives. At the very beginning of his travels, Sonje encounters the monk in a restaurant, eating meat and drinking wine. The monk appears again midpoint in the film to exhort Sonje to marry the little girl - now a young woman whom Sonje initially met at the crematorium. In the final encounter, Sonje sees the monk working with the village women, gutting fish in order to earn money for wine. The meeting culminates Sonje's sense of hopelessness and confusion, triggering a suicide attempt and the ultimate turn toward understanding, as signified by the aforementioned vision of his mother.

The world-embracing monk, with his decidedly nonmonastic ways, is a familiar figure that reaches back to the popular Buddhist text the Vimalakirtinirdeua Sutra. The text is named for its principle character, Vimalakirti, a noncleric who indulges in worldly activities yet who bests the most renowned Buddhist disciples in Buddha wisdom. This second-century Mahayana text was extremely favored in East Asia for its emphasis on the value of lay life. The critique of monastic reclusion that is implicit in the wold-embracing monk is a prominent theme in Korean Buddhist films. To be sure, Passage to Buddha's overall focus on the social fringes - each of Sonje's teachers bear the pain of a personal or social lack - manifests a political consciousness that is the imprint of post-1980s Korean cinema. The concordance of religious practice and social service, however, is a theme explicitly emphasized throughout the Avatamsaka, which embraces worldly activity and skills 'guided not by the personal desires of the practitioners but by the current needs of the society that they are serving, according to what will be beneficial' (The Flower Ornament Scripture, p. 41).

In simply co-opting the title of a significant Buddhist text, Passage to Buddha declares its lineage. Beyond lifting its plot line from Sudhana's famous pilgrimage, the film plays on the theme of enlightening illusions. One method it employs is a classic use of dreams as a way of advancing the tale - as well as Sonje's spiritual knowledge. Both dream episodes entail encounters with mother figures that are emotionally and religiously loaded. In the first, Sonje's Oedipal encounter with his mother/lover abruptly and rather disturbingly ends when she falls from a cliff during a post-coital excursion. In the second, Sonje finally has a vision of a woman who calls herself his mother, as well as the mother of all beings. the dream sequences mark significant noes in the plot/journey - at the point of maximum loss and absence and at the point of maximum attainment and presence. The ability of dreams - which, after all, are illusions - to function so meaningfully in the course of Sonje's journey can be paralleled to the medium of film itself. This is pointedly suggested by a curious detail in Passage to Buddha: The boy Sonje never ages despite the passage of many years. This detail explicitly invokes the conceit of the Buddhist-derived short dream, as I have discussed elsewhere in Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in the Dream of the Nine Clouds (1996, pp. 85-107). When such dramas are told as stories or acted out as films, the efficacy of the former is extended to the latter genres as functional equivalents. These 'transformations,' which offer a distilled and potent experience of life, are better vehicles of instruction than the distracted experiences of waking reality.

Passage to Buddha is a secular telling of a story derived from Buddhist narratives and tropes. In that sense, this film continues the tradition of oral storytelling performances, which are themselves derived from religious storytelling practices - both Buddhist and shamanic. In this lineage of performance, entertainment is a logical aspect of religious practice because the ability to 'entertain' a reality made present by art is a necessary step to religious truth. Passage to Buddha is overt and didactic about linking religion and art, paralleling the religious journey of Sudhana with the film journey of Sonje, and by using the dream trope to implicitly question the distinctions between dream, reality, and film. The qualitative performance of the religious question in the medium of film enables one to transcend the distinctions between the religious, the secular, and the aesthetic as merely functional qualifications of the greater truth of presence.

[This essay was written by Francisca Cho. It was extracted and slightly edited from her chapter 'The Art of Presence: Buddhism and Korean Films,' which was originally published in Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making (2003), pp. 107-119. Aside from the short clip above, Passage to Buddha turns up on YouTube from time to time and separate English subtitles are available here.]

Traditional Music of Southern Laos

2011-06-12T14:39:00.001+09:00

Between the time when French musicologist Jacques Brunet recorded the music of Southern Laos in the early 1970s and the re-issue of these recordings on CD in 1992, Laos (by that time having become the People's Democratic Republic of Laos) had experienced war trauma, the flight of great numbers of people, isolation, and the beginning of healing. During the Vietnam war the United States dropped unimaginable quantities of bombs throughout the south (along the so-called 'Ho Chi Minh Trail') and in much of the northeast. In some provinces, virtually every town and sizable village were destroyed. Economic and social development were also stopped or rolled back. Provinces which once had running water and electricity, at least in the main town, ceased to have either. Where tourists formerly visited (e.g., Vat Phu near Champassak), there were only abandoned restaurants and a little-used hotel. In 1991 modern tourist hotels remained under construction just as they had been when workers walked off the job in 1975. Travel within Laos by both Lao and non-Lao was strictly regulated by the government; consequently, few were able to visit formerly familiar sites such as Luang Phabang, Vat Phu, or the Bolovens Plateau. Therefore, this set of recordings has a strange air of nostalgia, especially since it had been re-issued with the same notes used in the original Phillips recording of 1973.

Unfortunately, offering criticism of Jacques Brunet's mainland southeast Asian musical recordings has all the challenge of shooting fish in a barrel. As Jarernchai Chonpairot and I pointed out in a 1979 review ('Review-Essay: The Problems of Lao Discography.' Asian Music 11/1 (1979): 132-34), there were numerous problems with regard to both selections and annotations. These have not changed; indeed, considering the time gap, they are now greater. Southern Laos, which includes much of the lowland area of Laos (the terrain in which the mainstream Lao live) runs along the Maekong River just across from Thailand. To the east, however, is the Annam Cordillera, a chain of mountains which is both home to numerous non-Lao upland groups and the former site of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A collection of music surveying this region should include several of the lowland Lao regional genres of lam (repartee) singing accompanied by khene and other instruments; it should also include music of representative upland groups. In this the collection falls short.

Of the eight selections, five represent the lam/khene tradition of the lowland Lao, two the survival of the court music tradition of the former kingdom of Champassak, and one the upland tradition. Among the first group, three are instrumental and two are vocal. All three of the Lao non-classical instrumental sections (1, 5, and 8) are played on the khene, a free-reed aerophone with fourteen or sixteen bamboo tubes arranged in raft form in a wooden windchest and sealed with a black insect product called khisut. Since khene players normally improvise within one or five (or sometimes six) modes called (in northeast Thailand) lai, it is odd to hear more than one player perform at a time, as we do in the opening selection, 'Pheng phi fa (this is evidently a fixed melody). Brunet remarks that 'The title of this piece, like many others, cannot be translated ..., [it is now only a string of] words ... handed down traditionally, the meaning of which is now forgotten.' To the contrary, pheng means 'piece' (of music) and phi fa is the animistic 'sky spirit.' In a ceremony, a medium singing to the accompaniment of a khene attracts the phi fa to inhabit her/his body and answer questions, usually as to why someone has become ill. The present performance, in which small cymbals called sing are also used, is the ceremony's accompaniment without a singer/medium.

Selection 5, played by the late master khene player, Thao Phet Sananikhone, is a medley of three pieces whose order Brunet has confused and whose titles are left unexplained. The first selection is his 'ma it thiet lo hat' (a small female dog walks along the beach), and improvisation which alternates between the two modes that both have a D2 as the 'tonic' pitch: lai noi (d fga c) and lai soi (de gab). The second piece should properly be called 'sut sa naen,' not 'sut sa men'; it uses pitches ga cde. The third piece, 'tit sut noi,' refers to closing a certain pipe, which is the drone common to both lai soi and lai noi (d), with khisut. The pitch system used here assigns pitch A to the lowest pipe, making the tuning system A, B, c, d, e, f, g/g, a, b, c', d', e', f', g', a' (See Terry E. Miller, Traditional Music of the Lao: Kaen Playing and Mawlum Singing in Northeast Thailand, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). The third khene selection (8), 'lot fay tay lang [the train runs along the track], is puzzling; while this kind of piece used to be common in northeast Thailand where there are two rail lines (terminating at Ubon and Nong Khai), to my knowledge there has never been a railroad in Laos. Unless the player had travelled to Thailand (or had come from there), it seems unlikely that he could have imitated something he had never heard. Nonetheless, the performance is effective, with the addition of a convincing whistle.

Two selections claim to represent the vocal styles of southern Laos; however, only one does, in fact, do so. Although item 2, 'Lam sithandone,' should be the local style of Pakse and Champassak, the singers perform part of a lam klon cycle from northeast Thailand; they sing lam nyao, the second of three parts, and lam toey, the final one. Furthermore, the male singer has a memory lapse during the performance. The khene player, evidently not familiar with these singers, tried to lead them in both toey pamah and toey hua non tan, sub-types of toey; unfortunately, however, the singers did not know the songs and oculd not continue. The second selection, 'Lam of Savannaket' (7), is, in fact, genuine lam khon savan from Savannakhet. It is sung by one of the greatest singers of Laos, Bunthong Insixiengmai, but without his usual female partner, Somwang, who is mentioned in his poetry (Bunthong has lived in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA, since at least 1979). The khene player does not seem to be totally comfortable with the accompaniment; he may, in fact, have come from the other side of the Maekong.

The two 'classical' examples on this compact disc are both played by amateur musicians who live in village near the former Kingdom of Champassak. this small court, one of three such entities in Laos (the others being Luang Phabang and Vientiane), once controlled most of southern Laos and part of what is now Cambodia. this fomer kingdom of Champassak was under Siamese control in the nineteen century, before the French came to dominate Laos. The pinphat selection (3) reflects influence from Siamese court music in that the composition came from Bangkok. Some Cambodian influence is seen as well, however, since the ensemble's last teacher had come from Phnom Penh around 1960.

The following observations, made by a learned Thai classical musician/teacher Panya Roongruang, formerly of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and who is currently a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at Kent State University, indicate how far this performance has deviated from its original source. According to Panya Roongruang (personal communication, 1993), while the performers seem skilled, they do not play the melody in the usual instrumental idioms (thang), which normally create heterophony or polyphonic stratification; instead, they play more or less in unison. the cymbal (sing) player has the pattern reversed, ending on a 'sing' rather than 'sap.' The musicians seem to have forgotten a good percentage of the piece; they have mixed sections and patched together a version of 'pheng kom' that is far removed from the Siamese/Thai one. The second piece, 'Pheng soysonthat' (6), is played by a wedding ensemble which, according to the notes, consists of two khene, so-duong (two-stringed cylindrical fiddle), and so-u. All play in unison and repeat the melody without variation. The drum pattern is nathap lao, but in Thai practice it would have been nathap brop kai song chan. These examples represent what certain surviving classical musicians play today, and, while their continued existence (I recorded the phinphat in 1991) testifies to their seriousness, they must technically be accepted in the context of an isolated Lao town and not compared to the great ensembles of Bangkok.

An annual buffalo sacrifice takes place at the ruined Khmer temple, Vat Phu, which is located eight kilometer south of Champassak, near the western bank of the Maekong. While this may be of importance to the lowland Lao, the music is evidently provided by the lao thung (upland Lao, formerly called kha, a pejorative label) from Salavan province in the interior. Lao thung is a collective term for people, 'who live on the slopes' (and not the highest mountains, such as the Hmong). In this case, it probably refers to either the Loven or Tauoi, both of which are Mon-Khmer groups (See Frank M. Lebar et al., Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press, 1964, pp. 143, 151). Their instruments are distinctly upland (drums and gongs), and the language of the singing is evidently upland Khmer.

In conclusion, I expect that having this album available is better than not having it at all; however, to reissue it without correcting the annotations seems a waste. The music of the little-known country of Laos remains shrouded in mystery; this is partly due to the lack of materials and partly to documents such as this which misrepresent and distort the traditions.

[This essay was written by Terry E. Miller and originally published in Ethnomusicology, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 1995, pp. 162-65. It has been slightly edited for inclusion on TV Multiversity. Further information about the recordings discussed in the this essay can be found here and here, and there are numerous videos featuring the instruments mentioned in this essay, especially the khene, currently available on YouTube.]

Nutritional Wisdom in a Korean TV Drama

2011-06-03T03:14:00.000+09:00

Since its production in 2003, 'Dae Jang Geum' or 'Jewel in the Palace,' the 54 episode Korean TV drama, gained popularity around the world. Part of the 'Korean Wave' of TV dramas, it has been dubbed into several languages and has aired on TV in Japan and China, among other places. In 2007, millions of people in Iran watched a Farsi dubbed version on national TV. Unofficial 'fansubbing' has provided access to the series in countless languages, from Arabic to Tagalog. On the surface, the series tells the story of the first female physician who earned the special title of 'the Great' in the kingdom of Korea in the first half of the 16th century, dramatizing an era of Korean history in a way that makes it appealing to people who live in different parts of the world today. Although it focuses on how society and religious authorities were against the presence of a woman in high ranking positions, and includes the requisite love story for productions of this sort, an important aspect of the series is its emphasis on a traditional system of nutrition and medicine.

The first part of the story takes place in the royal kitchen and emphasizes cooking skills based on the health characteristics of food, along with the careful preparation and selection ingredients. This traditional medical knowledge and its relationship with food becomes clearer when Jang Geum begins to study medicine and eventually becomes the King's private doctor. Her success in medical practice is related to her background in food preparation and her artistry in combining them is demonstrated in numerous scenes, such as for example when she creates an edible form of medicinal garlic for one of her patients.

Another important aspect of the series is in the names and titles used for diseases and medicines, which are in the common language spoken and understood by everyone in Korean society (although if this carries over through the multiple translations would need to be investigated). Even though there were medical institutions and pharmacies, people of the day also learned about medicine and about finding and preparing medicinal herbs from the countryside and the mountains by themselves. Rather than separating people from medical knowledge, as the academic works in the field tend to do today by way of specialized jargon, the health system depicted in the series suggests that traditional Korean medical knowledge and nutritional wisdom was understood by ordinary people as well as by the specialized practitioners.

The series also emphasizes a method of disease diagnosis from the traditional health care system that looked first and foremost at diet and nutrition. In the climax of the series, for example, Jang Geum carefully investigates from where the special food for the ailing king had come, and through that she finds out that drinking milk from cows that drank water from a sulfuric lake introduced arsenic into the patient's body, which in turn lead to his chronic illness. On another occasion, when there was an epidemic in different parts of the kingdom, the cause was traced to a vegetable blight. These aspects of the series bring to mind such modern maladies related to food, such as mad cow disease and avian flu. The difference is, however, that with today's eating habits increasingly dominated by the giant food industries, identifying and solving health problems related to food has become politically and economically inviable, if curbing unhealthy food intake can be construed as a barrier to trade or economic growth and thus liable to litigation, as was seen the McLibel Trial.

The ordinary people depicted in 'Jewel in the Palace' understand what they eat, the herbs, spices, vegetables and other ingredients in their foods. In addition to identifying ingredients, cooking skills are also related to subsidiary issues such as the change of seasons and knowledge of local flora and fauna. Even though it is a historical drama, it depicts a traditional medicine and food culture that is still part of the East Asian life and culture today, in many cases side by side with the modern sciences, which can be considered as part of the rich culture of the past that every human being can enjoy in every era. The series and its immense popularity today gives pause for reflection on the socio-economic aspects of health and indirectly suggests that the medical and nutritional wisdom of the past remains relevant.

[This review is by Yusef Progler and was originally published in 2008 as a media report in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 41-42. It has been edited for reprinting here. The original article is available as a PDF at the JRMS website and there are dozens of clips from the series on YouTube.]

Redefining Black Independent Cinema

2011-05-22T09:23:00.002+09:00

In August 1984, the Los Angeles Times first-string film critic, Charles Champlin, devoted his column to the subject 'A Black Film Bonanza Hollywood Ignored.' He - and the Los Angeles filmgoing audience - were discovering for the first time the wealth of Black cinema that had been produced in recent years. Beneath the facade of Hollywood'd glitter and Southern California's 'me' culture, Los Angeles is becoming a city of color. The largest ethnic group in its public schools is Latino, and it has one of the largest Asian populations in the US. It is a city with a long history of organizing for affirmative action in the workplace and schools. Los Angeles has been the source of some of the most pioneering and important independent works in recent years, much of which has been produced in these Third World communities.

The event which inspired Champlin's article was the First Annual African and Black American Film Festival at the Fox Theatre, which was held over for two extra weeks because of the unexpected audience response. The festival was something of a milestone for Los Angeles' Black independents. Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts and Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding, which have both been making successful rounds of international festivals, had their homecoming and United States theatrical premiere there. Also on the bill was Ashes and Embers by Washington, DC-based Haile Gerima, who, like Burnett and Woodberry, was trained in UCLA's film school. Another former classmate, Iranian filmmaker Rafigh Pooya (In Defense of the People), organized the showcase. He bought and refurbished the Fox Venice theatre with borrowed money, added a small cafe, and dedicated its programming to independent films from all over the world.

My Brother's Wedding and Bless Their Little Hearts are representative of the cooperative efforts of a group of Los Angeles-based Black independents who have worked together for years. Theirs is not a production cooperative in the same vein as Visual Communications, a group of Asian American Filmmakers that grew out of the Asian American movement. Rather, it is a network of directors - who also crew - that 'rallies each other's projects,' according to filmmaker Julie Dash (Four Women, Illusions). Among the films that have drawn from this pool are Alile Sharon Larkin's Your Children Come Back to You, Ben Caldwell's Babylon Is Falling, Barbara McCollough's work-in-progress Horace Taproot: Musical Griot, John Rier's Black Images from the Screen, as well as films by Dash, Woodberry, Burnett, Bernard Nicholas, and others. Added to this group are the many other Black independents working in Los Angeles - Carrol Blue (Varnette's World, Conversations with Roy de Carava), Roy Campanella, Jr. (Pass/Fail, The Thieves, Impressions of Joyce), Stan Lathan (Go Tell It on the Mountain), and Bill Duke (The Killing Floor). These filmmakers represent a major force in independent cinema that is changing the image of the Black experience on the screen.

During the 1970s, Hollywood discovered an antidote to its lagging box office in the Black youth market. The Stepin Fetchits were replaced by blaxploitation pimps and superdudes. (Thus one studio could re-edit Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess into the vampire movie Blood Couple). Needless to say, the project ideas of the new Black independents departs from such standard Hollywood fare. These independents are creating realistic glimpses of Black life - defined by Black characters, articulated by Black writers, and interpreted by Black actors and actresses. These filmmakers have embraced the breadth of the Black experience: families, women, artists, traditions, identity, political concerns, Africa. Dash and Larkin portray Black women who are neither street-smart whores nor background scenery to white plots, but complex characters who take control of their lives. Blue moves beyond Hollywood's fleeting interest in Black singing and dancing to document Black visual artists. Woodberry and Burnett explore men in relation to their families - and the families they portray don't consist of welfare mothers and troubled teenagers. 'The subject matter I work in doesn't lend itself to commercialism,' said Burnett, who wrote the screenplay for Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts, a portrayal of a family's struggle to cope with the father's loss of his job. 'If you go to producers and say, "I want to do a story about a Black man and his family," no one's interested. Dope, sex, drugs - that's what's marketable.

Some of these independent films also depart significantly from the typical Hollywood aesthetic of glossy photography and fast-paced editing. Burnett's Killer of Sheep, the story of a slaughterhouse worker, and Woodberry's Little Hearts eschew such commercial signposts for a leisurely, almost ultra-realistic pace, emphasis on character rather than plot, and black-and-white cinematography.

Many in the group began their careers at UCLA, during or following the Ethno-Communications period, the affirmative and social action program which trained a generation of Third World filmmakers, as profiled in The Independent (March 1984). There, they learned every aspect of the craft - and also confronted the lingering racism of the industry. Ben Caldwell remembers being one of two Blacks, out of hundreds of students, sitting through a film genre class screening of Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs by the noted animator Steven Kranz. 'Here was Kranz showing it and saying, "This is a tribute to Black people." And we said, "Hey, it isn't." But the rest of the class looked at us and said, "Ah, come on, you guys are always complaining." They actually booed us. I felt so humiliated.'

workstyle. 'Because of the UCLA method,' he explained, 'you crewed on other people's films. That carried over [when we left school], because we often don't have the funds to pay people. You do people a favor and they return it.'

Due to the realities of Hollywood where, as McCullough says, 'Racism is alive and well and keeping people from working,' the need for mutual assistance was reinforced. 'We all know how to do everything,' Dash pointed out. 'We all can shoot, do gaffing, electrical - right down to getting lunch. One minute you're a porter and the next minute you're a director of photography.' They crew for each other for little or no pay. Says McCullough, 'I think that, given our lack of resources, we do a hell of a lot, and our work says something.'

Los Angeles has no low-cost film equipment/facilities access centers like New York's Young Filmmakers/Film Video Arts or Minneapolis' Film in the Cities, so independents there must rent from high-priced rental houses used to dealing with huge Hollywood budgets (although the Long Beach Museum of Art and EZTV provide access for videomakers). Therefore, they help each other out by sharing access to equipment when they have it (although they do not own equipment themselves). Julie Dash - who has felt the double whammy of racism and sexism - must rent equipment through a male friend, because the rental houses wouldn't give her an open account. 'They told me I could only rent through him, even though I was the filmmaker, and he only needed a light meter once in a while.' the group has also developed networks of talented Black actors and actresses around Los Angeles. One young star who has emerged is Charles Burnett's niece Angie Burnett, who has appeared in Bless Their Little Hearts and Your Children Come Back to You.

Despite their accomplishments at UCLA (among others, Burnett won the coveted Louis B. Mayer prize of 10,000USD for best film, Larry Clark's Passing Through won first prize at the Moscow International Film Festival, and Gerima won a special award from the National Endowment for the Arts), the doors that opened for talented white students were often closed to them. 'You became and independent because you didn't have a choice,' said Burnett. 'You're either independent or you just don't make a film, period. No one was beating down my door to make a major motion picture.'

While Black independents in Los Angeles resist the pressures of Hollywood, they do respond to it in varying ways. 'When I first started, I had a desire to make films for special audiences,' explained Carroll Blue. 'When I worked for Jane Fonda at IPC Films, I got to see how to make films for a mass audience. Now I'm trying to reach that audience plus have my own special way of seeing things, like [Euzhan Palcy's] Sugar Cane Alley - that's the kind of film I'm trying to make. It's universal, but within a certain culture.' Blue's latest film, Conversations with Roy de Carva, which won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival, is a polished, highly visual, and tightly-cut document of the photographer's life which does not fail to discuss the racism that defined his career.

Caldwell, whose innovative Babylon Is Falling and I and I merge music and documentary imagery, regards the proximity to 'the beast of Hollywood' as a positive challenge. 'It makes independents who work on the periphery more intent and less compromising. It makes for good and different work.' Caldwell places the range of approaches in Los Angeles' Black film community in a historical context. 'The Black independents involved in media are rebuilding from the 1940s,' he explained, referring to the pre-war surge of Black cinema which had its peak during the 1920 Black renaissance, led by filmmakers Oscar Micheaux and Noble Johnson. 'There is a gap since then, a missing generation. So we are redefining Black film.'

The true measure of this process of redefinition has been in the work itself. Films by Los Angeles' Black filmmakers have been screened at major festivals and aired on television around the world, and have won numerous awards. For example, in 1981, the Berlin International Film Festival forsook prizes to any films in competition, but gave special recognition to Burnett's first feature Killer of Sheep.

But many group members realize they are now ready to move on. As young filmmakers developing their craft, it was easy to keep justifying the free shoots as a learning experience. But now they all have years of experience, and some have the added pressures of family. McCollough must work temp jobs (after a two-year stint at a special effects house), Woodberry works in the UCLA film school equipment room, Dash is staying home to write and core for her newborn baby. 'I'd like to do a film sometime where I'm paying people,' said McCollough. 'Working on eachother's films - it just can't happen anymore. We are professional people looking for work. We have to survive. We have projects of our own that we want to do.'

'We need an institution of a foundation,' said Dash, 'some kind of place where we can get equipment. It would be nice if we had a Black Filmmaker Foundation out here.' There have been several attempts to organize a more formal structure. After the Third World Cinema Conference at Howard University in 1981, a coalition of Third World filmmakers was launched in Los Angeles. According to Burnett, 'We met for awhile, but we're all filmmakers, so we had to kind of come and go, and the organization became secondary.' The Black filmmakers have tried over the years to form an organization, but have remained an ad hoc group coming together for shoots and around specific lobbying issues. In 1979, Caldwell refurbished a small house and turned it into a screening room with editing facilities and a writers' space in an effort to develop a creative home for local independents. It lasted until 1981, when his marriage fell apart, and he left for Washington DC to teach film at Howard (he has since returned to Los Angeles). 'When I had my place it was used to showcase peoples' work,' Caldwell explained. 'If people want critical analysis now, they have to get a screening room from AFI or UCLA. But there's a lack of consistency. Black independents need a place of their own.' Caldwell is discussing the possibility of reviving the Third World coalition idea with Chicano and Asian American filmmakers. And Rafigh Pooya's new Fox International holds a great potential for providing a center for local independents. He plans to hold seminars and bring filmmakers in to meet their public as well as give theatrical runs to independent films.

'My personal belief,' says Caldwell, 'is that this whole group of us has just started - most of have only done three or four works on our own. As we're developing the network is developing. We're just starting to have enough blood to pump into the system.'

[This is a slightly edited version of an article entitled 'Nothing Lights a Fire Like a Dream Deferred' by Renee E. Tajima and Tracey Willard that was originally published in The Independent (Vol. 7, No. 10, November 1984, pp. 18-21). At the time of its writing, Renee Tajima was an associate editor of The Independent and Tracey Willard was a writer and poet in Los Angeles.]

Three Films by Ousmane Sembene

2011-05-17T11:48:00.000+09:00

Popular narratives, world war, Marxism and Modernism, Khrushchev’s Moscow, African working-class life: a rich education for any artist. Over four decades of film-making, Ousmane Sembene has deployed this formation to extraordinary effect. If he has focused consistently on the social relations of Africa’s distorted development, the sheer breadth of his aesthetic— the disorientating combination of African ritual and modes of speech with expressionist set-pieces, domestic naturalism, epic choreography, social satire, sexual comedy or farce - projects his work on to a broader, more universal canvas. The complexity of his films eschews surface slickness: narrative realism can be undercut by jarring moments of melodrama, flashbacks, non-professional acting; which yet contribute, as in Brecht, to an epic sense. There is no dogmatic closure in Sembene’s work: elements of didacticism are undermined by the revelation of fresh complexities, endings are characteristically freeze frame, the final outcome still unsure. Contested relationships remain open - as in the trickster tales: Brer Rabbit's forerunner Leuk the Hare may get away this time, but that doesn't mean he's safe.

Sembene’s first film, a mere 19 minutes long, contains many of the elements - though not the humour - that would characterize his future work. Borom Sarret (1962) sees Dakar through the eyes of a cart driver - the bonhomme charette of the film’s title - who narrates the voice-over, in French. Starting off from the crowded working-class quarter, he is hired to take a well-dressed passenger up to the deserted, tree-lined streets of the Plateau, where carts like his are banned. The stark, black-and-white documentary style, reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, is heightened to a more melodramatic register by the effect of non-professional actors and the use of post-synchronous sound. The sense of excess - of antirealism - is intensified by the soundtrack, the music of the traditional xalam giving way to the strings of Salzburg as we reach the Plateau.

Stopped by a policeman, the borom sarret tries to pull his papers from his pocket; as he does so, his war medal falls to the ground. His hand reaches out to grasp it, but the policeman’s boot stamps down first. We see a subjective shot of his tormentor, towering above. At another point, the driver is pulled up by a traditional gewel, who starts to sing the praises of his ancient family name in hope of cash. As the flattery continues on the soundtrack, the camera turns to a shoeshine boy who has found a new customer among the audience; but as soon as he’s finished, the sharp-suited fellow kicks the boy’s box away and leaves without paying—the sort of story the new gewel could tell. The end is still more damning. When the borom sarret returns home empty handed, his wife passes him their child and walks out, promising: ‘Tonight we will have something to eat’. Here as elsewhere - Guelwaar, for instance - prostitution is provocatively postulated as the economic basis of Senegalese life.

Six years later in his fourth film, Mandabi, or The Money Order, Sembene would again map out the socio-geography of the streets of Dakar. In between he had made Niaye (1964) and La Noire de . . . (1966). Initially he had planned to make the film in black and white, wanting at all costs to avoid any element of the picturesque- ‘J’avais peur de tomber dans le folklore’. Instead, the colour is servant to the drama - emphasizing the comically oversized sky-blue boubou of Ibrahima Dieng, for instance, the central character: a man dwarfed by his own vanity, the sleeves of his magnificent robe obstruct his hands. The film opens with the rhythmically sweeping blades of a group of roadside barbers, shaving customers beneath a shady tree; their dextrous movements are underscored by the kora soundtrack. But rising to his feet to pay, Dieng - played by Makhourédia Gueye, one of the few professional actors Sembene works with - finds that his shave has left him penniless, and must return home to his two grumbling wives. The money order sent home from Paris by Dieng’s nephew Abdou seems to offer salvation: ‘You will kill us with hope!’ Dieng’s wives assure the postman. An ironic shot shows young Abdou street-sweeping beneath the Eiffel Tower.

The series of obstacles that Dieng now confronts recalls the list of impossible tasks the trickster must perform, to escape from deadly danger. But while Leuk the Hare will succeed in duping the leopard of his skin or the elephant of his tusks, Dieng’s attempts end in repeated failure. At the Post Office, he learns he cannot cash the money order without an ID card; at the Police Station, he can’t get a card because he doesn’t have a birth certificate; at the City Hall, he is turned away again, for not knowing his exact date of birth; even his own origin becomes unobtainable. Dieng’s self-regard - the respect due to a devout Muslim elder - crumbles before the Western bureaucratic structures with which the increasingly elusive money order is hedged. Long shots of the blue boubou’d Dieng as an anonymous figure, lost in Dakar’s crowded streets, cut to close-ups of his deeply worried face - the image informed, as Fredric Jameson puts it in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London 1992, p. 2.), ‘by its non-visual systemic cause’. The mandat becomes a socially corrosive force: family and neighbourhood relationships begin to crumble; Dieng’s encounters with the corner shopkeeper, quack photographer, sharp-suited conman, deteriorate into brawls or end in humiliation. Finally one of his relatives cashes the cheque but pockets the money, explaining to an incredulous and desperate Dieng that he’d been robbed.

In counterpoint to the filming of Mandabi, Sembene was fighting his own battle for and against money from France. The Minister for Culture Malraux had secured the funding for Sembene’s previous movie, La Noire de . . ., the story of an African girl taken back to France by a white family; but at the price of having voice-over and dialogue spoken in French. Since it is an explicit premise of the film that Diouana can barely speak the language, this was a radically inappropriate form for the interior monologues through which she voices her experience of Europe, her alienation and her fears. In trickster fashion, Sembene managed to turn the linguistic tables on his metropolitan funders by using Toto Bissainthe’s beautifully modulated French-Caribbean tones to deliver Diouana’s thoughts in voice-over - the non-French speaker articulating, as the white family cannot, a fluent and complex vision of the world.

With Mandabi, Sembene managed to extract enough funding to cut both a Wolof-language and a francophone version, Le Mandat, also released in 1968. But this was the last time he would be dependent on French state funding, or make a wholly French-speaking film. Henceforth, language in Sembene’s films - high or low, formal or intimate, Wolof or French - would be a function of dramatic requirement, not producers’ diktat. Later films would receive funding from Senegal and, in the 80s, from Channel 4 and Canal Plus. In any case, the Pompidou government could hardly have been expected to welcome his next project.

In the context of intensifying struggles against Portuguese rule - Amilcar Cabral’s troops would play as extras - Sembene returned to his native region of Casamance to explore, in Emitai (1971), transformations in mass consciousness in the course of anti-colonial resistance. The atrocities perpetrated by French forces requisi tioning rice in the region during the Second World War had first been denied by the authorities, then blamed on a handful of Rightists installed by the Vichy regime. In fact, there was an essential continuity of personnel throughout the period. A recurrent pattern in his work, Sembène juxtaposes two socially defined spaces: white military rituals are shown in counterpoint - sometimes ironic, often chilling - to the animist practices of the Diola people, whose fetishes and sacred grove mirror back the flagpole and parade ground of the Army camp. But the heart of the film dwells on the contradictions that confront the villagers, as their traditional deities fail to protect them from the French.

In desperation, their chief Djiméko leads the young men out to battle against the superior occupying force. He falls wounded and is carried back to confront his gods in the great gnarled tree where they dwell. In an extraordinary scene, they claim that he must die for refusing to make the proper sacrifices. Djiméko raises his voice to them: ‘I must die, but so will you’. Resistance is taken up by the village women, singing together in defiance of the white commander, in scenes that are intercut with the fatalistic rituals of the defeated menfolk. The men now play the female role, carrying rice to the French, while the women pick up the spears they’ve left. Just before the massacre - the villagers have been given one last chance to reveal the women’s store important news reaches the Army camp. The photograph of Pétain that stands behind the commander is silently replaced by one of de Gaulle. At the end, the screen goes blank. The shots ring out. Under French pressure, the scene that showed the troops shooting down the villagers was cut by the Senegalese authorities. French troops are still stationed in Senegal. ‘You don’t tell history to get revenge, but to root yourselves in the ground’, Sembène would explain when the French ambassador stormed out of a Dakar showing of Camp de Thiaroye (1988), based on a historical, postwar incident in which thirty-five tirailleurs sénégalais were slaughtered and many more wounded as the French Army suppressed a revolt over pay and conditions. ‘I didn’t want to indicate what the exact date was—whether de Gaulle was taking power in Senegal, or in France’, Sembene has said in an interview with Guy Hennebelle (‘Ousmane Sembene: “En Afrique noire nous sommes tous gouvernés par des enfants mongoliens du colonialisme”,’ Les Lettres françaises, 6–12 October 1971, p. 16.): ‘I wanted to suggest that for us Africans, there was no difference between the two regimes—the methods changed a bit but the objective was still to maintain the French Empire.’

[This essay is extracted from 'An African Brecht: The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene' by David Murphy, which was originally published in New Left Review, Vol. 16 (July-August 2002, pp. 117-21.]

'La colonia penal,' a Film by Raoul Ruiz

2011-05-04T11:33:00.000+09:00

A journalist arrives on the Latin American island of Captiva, where a dictatorial President rules capriciously over a society that seems to consist mainly of males in military uniform, speaking a polyglot language. We learn from a voice-over that the island was first turned into a penal colony by Ecuador in the late nineteenth century, then occupied by the United States from 1899-1920, until it achieved independence and once again became a penal colony. In 1954, the United Nations assumed responsibility for it as an experimental society and it has been independent since 1972. The President is evasive and apparently anxious about the report that the journalist will deliver. At her hotel, she is importuned by a poet, who is exposed as a pickpocket by the ever-present troops. The President's behaviour becomes even more eccentric, and he vehemently denies that there is any torture on the island. A party of troops serenades the journalist before she is unceremoniously bundled off to the prison to witness scenes of punishment. A native woman recites a bizarre fable about a man who is bewitched, drowned and reborn in Europe as a little girl, only to have 'her' husband murder her daughter, at which point the whole continent sinks into the sea.

The journalist challenges a soldier (who may also be a writer) about a series of improbable coincidences between disaster and atrocity stories reported first from other Latin American countries, then mysteriously repeated or exaggerated in Captiva. She finds that her baggage has been searched by the soldiers and when she protests to the President, he accuses her of having already written lies about the country. The President tries to shoot himself, but is restrained by the troops; he addresses a gathering of distinguished visitors to thank them for their support. Soon after, while broadcasting to the island by radio, he is assassinated. The journalist inspects a number of bodies in the morgue and assures a soldier that the grant requested should soon come through. In a closing voice-over, she says that her report was favourable and was accepted by a majority of press agencies.

Like a message in a bottle from Allende's Chile, 'The Penal Colony' reaches Britain after a series of adventures too complex to detail here, in a version that lacks all credit titles and which may be some seven minutes short. In this state, which is almost certainly the best achievable, it is not a film to be approached without some contextual information. Even more than most of Ruiz's work, it stands in a perversely oblique relationship to its ostensible script and subject. It is certainly doubtful whether the innocent spectator would deduce from a single viewing that the basic industry of Captiva is the manufacture of news on behalf of international press agencies. Yet only this realisation lends coherence and satirical point to the otherwise erratic sequence of events and encounters that constitute the main body of the film. It explains the ambiguity of the scenes of torture and execution, which appear both playful and savage, and the range of stereotyped attitudes struck by Luis Alarcon's President for the benefit of the visiting journalist, a declared "specialist in underdeveloped countries".

The sequence of the the night-time prison visit, where some form of torture seems to be in progress (off-screen), ends with an enquiry as to whether she is impressed, which is probably only comprehensible if one already appreciates that she is in search of the quintessential Latin American news stories of repression and atrocity. One deduces that the soldier to whom she complains about the plagiarised Captiva news must be a correspondent with some responsibility for 'producing' the island's staple export. But then the converstation takes a more precisely ironic turn when the journalist claims to have just witnessed a scene straight out of one of the soldier's novels; to which he replies that this is just what 'Garcia Marquez and that other lad Fuentes did.' Magic realism indeed! The general strategy of 'The Penal Colony' is in fact common to all of Ruiz's Chilean films: deceptively casual reportage of the fantastic seen in everyday terms. In his first feature, 'Three Sad Tigers,' violence and self-deception were shown as elements in the everyday life of many Chilean marginals. For the film that came immediately after, 'Nobody Said Anything,' a story by Max Beerbohm about a pact with the devil served to structure a study of a group of minor intellectuals 'who live in their own reality and believe that it is in fact Chile.'

Here the starting point was Kafka's parable about a famous explorer called upon to witness a model execution in a remote settlement, which ends with the condemned man escaping and the officer in charge destroyed by his own execution machine. Ruiz displaces Kafka's central irony of the 'perfect execution' into a more complex ironic commentary on Latin America's strenuous efforts to conform to the stereotypes by which it is commonly represented abroad. Ruiz has since reflected that his concern at this time with torture and military dictatorship now seems something of a presentiment of what was soon to happen in Chile and other Latin American countries. Now that we also know his European work better than his Chilean career, 'The Penal Colony' can clearly be seen to foreshadow his recent deadpan irony and play of stereotypes, while many of its more bizarre and mysterious details - the rattling of sabres, a swordfight reflected in a window, the President singing for his guest - recall Ruiz's beginnings as one of Chile's first playwrights of the Absurd.

[This review was written by Ian Christie under the title 'La colonia penal (The Penal Colony) (1971)' and was originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, 52: 612/613 (1985), p. 18. An extract is available online at Rouge Press. Information about the director Raoul Ruiz is available on Mubi and the film is briefly mentioned in South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography by Tim Barnard (University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 224-5.]

Cinema Criticism and Social Class

2011-04-27T09:41:00.003+09:00

Art films, middle cinema and commercial films in India all depend on the middle classes for legitimacy and critical acclaim. Even those producers and performers who stridently proclaim the supremacy of popular taste, or denounce the elitism of the art-film critics, are on the defensive when there is a sharp criticism of their wares in the media. Indeed, the way the producers of each of these kinds of movies try to win friends and influence middle-class opinion give the lie to their declared dependence on only the opinions of the 'common Indian.' The common Indian is rarely influenced by what Kumar Shahani says of Manmohan Desai. But Desai was distressed when Shahani took him on while Shahani in turn resents that his films do not get the patronage or support of those for whom is radical hear bleeds, whereas Desai mobilizes such support with casual ease. Nevertheless, there are clear differences in the cultural thrusts of the three; to gauge the appeal or lack of appeal of any of these forms, one must first identify the thrusts.

First, the commercial film tends to reflect and be protective towards the implicit cultural values of the society. If it criticizes traditions, the criticism tends to be indirect, latent or unintended. if for instance there is criticism of untouchability, it is grounded on the traditional concept of a humane society; if there is criticism of religious violence, the criticism invokes not so much the secular values of a modern polity as the perennial values of the religions involved.

Of course, the emphasis on cultural self-expression or cultural self-defense is also simultaneously a defiance and unwitting criticism of middle-class values. The commercial cinema in India does tend to reaffirm the values that are being increasingly marginalized in public life by the language of the modernizing middle classes, values such as community ties, consensual non-contractual human relations, primacy of maternity over conjugality, priority of the mythic over the historical. But even such indirect criticism of middle-class values is cast not in the language of social criticism but in that of playful, melodramatic, spectacles.

In art films and middle cinema, on the other hand, the emphasis on the expressive function of art of the reaffirmation of cultural values tends to be muted. High-brow films usually provide sharp criticisms and deep analyses of the social pathologies associate with tradition, which contrasts markedly with their shallow or superficial criticisms of the violence and exploitation associated with modern institutions. The high cinema in India has never been particularly sensitive to the growing threats to lifestyles, life-support system and non- modern cognitive orders, or for that matter to the values those in the 'survial sector' of the society - a sector not primarily concerned with the goal of a good life (as it is defined by modern Indian), but with mere survival and the protection of whatever little the survivor has by way of access to the global commons, traditional technologies, knowledge of health care, and community self-sufficiency outside the monetized sector of the economy. The feelings, attitude and values associated with the survival sector are the ones that the commercial cinema consciously or unconsciously exploits but in the process also unwittingly supports, even if only partially and even while mouthing the slogans of the dominant culture of politics. Commercial cinema romanticizes and, given half a chance, vulgarizes the problems of the survival sector, but it never rejects as childish or primitive the categories or worldviews of those trying to survive the processes of victimization let loose by modern institutions. The makers of commerical cinema cannot indulge in the luxury of such rejection, given the kind of audience they seek. (This tacit refusal to reject cultural values and embrace modernity uncritically also partially explains the enormous popularity of the Indian commercial cinema in parts of the erstwhile Soviet Block which had rich native traditions of art cinema patronized by the state.)

Second, the middle cinema is - some may say was - the true heir to pre-Independence popular cinema and its occasional, mostly unsuccessful attempts to be arty (by which I simply mean the scattered attempts by some movie-makers to turn cinema into a new artistic medium of cultural and personal self-expression in India). P.C. Barua, V. Shantaram, Debaki Bose, and Bimal Roy did not make art films, nor did they lay down the basis for future directors of art films. (Satyajit Ray has often claimed that he learnt little from these makers of what were popularly seen as clean, socially relevant, technically competent films; he had virtually to create his own medium and style.) Though the middle cinema is often viewed as a compromise between art and commerical cinema, it could be more appropriately seen as a further development of the style that once catered to the middle-class culture of the 1930s and 1940s. The middle cinema has in fact a tradition to build upon, the tradition of the 'good popular cinema' of yesteryears.

Indeed, the middle cinema can claim to originate from an even wider cultural current - the current represented by a galaxy of well-crafted, less-than-great creative products, from the work of Ravi Verma to Premchand, Girish Chandra Ghose to Prithviraj Kapoor, from Marathi stage music to K.L. Saigal. Viewed thus, the middle cinema caters to that part of the middle-class consciousness which has during the last century and a half played a creative role in Indian society by sustaining a dialogue at the popular plane, however imperfect, between the traditional and the modern, the East and the West, the classical and the folk.

What we call popular cinema today is certainly popular but its links are now weakening with the pre-war popular cinema and the middle-class experiences that sustained that cinema. Popular cinema now (for the sake of clarity I shall stick to the term commercial cinema) has more links with the growing mass culture in India. However, though these links are getting stronger every day, they do not monopolize commercial cinema; nor are they likely to do so in the near future. So do distinctive ways of telling a story, the styles of acting, and the set-piece interactions of stereotypes. Above all survives a structure of myths that has proved remarkably resilient to all demands for change.

Third, commercial cinema has to take an instrumental view of cultural traditions and worldviews and present them theatrically and spectacularly. To do so, it has to generalize the specific problems of its different audiences and then exteriorize the psychological components of these problems. To this extent such cinema is anti-psychological: it presents conflicts as if they were conflicts among social types or products of a unique conjunction of external events. This point is further explored in Ashis Nandy, 'The Popular Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles,' India International Centre Quarterly, 1981, 9, pp. 89-96; and The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New Delhi: Viking and Penguin, 1989), Ch. 1.

Thus, for instance, the grandiloquent stylization of the Muslim aristocratic traditions of north India, Goan Christian simplicity and love of a good life, Rajput valour, Bengali romanticism; they are all essential to the basic style of the commercial cinema. Thus also the dependence on stereotypical 'external' events or situations to sustain its story-line. Together they allow commercial cinema to 'spectacularize' and de-psychologize everything it touches - violence, dance, music, death, dress and love - and subject every sentiment and value to the judgment of the market. On commercial film as a spectacle in Roland Barthe's sense of the term, see the above cited article, 'The Popular Hindi Film.'

I sometimes suspect that this double-edged 'sensitivity' to culture is one of the few valid grounds for a social criticism of popular movies, not the violence and sex they depict nor what urbane critics say about their irrationality, crudity and use of stereotypes. In fact, the lack of realism and the dream-like quality - the 'cultural dream work,' one may call it - is deployed to deal with the concerns of low-brow viewers, concerns which most art films and middle cinema do not touch upon. The basic principles of commercial cinema derive from the needs of Indians caught in the hinges of social change who are trying to understand their predicament in terms of cultural categories known to them. The strength of the commercial cinema lies in its ability to tap the fears, anxieties and felt pressures towards deculturation and even depersonalization that plague a growing number of Indians who do not find the normative framework of the established urban middle-class culture adequate for their needs and yet have been pushed to adopt it in everyday life.

There can, of course, be political and aesthetic criticism of films catering to the mass culture. But it is possible that public lamentation about the alleged aesthetic and moral failure of the commercial film only reinforces its appeal for its audience which is unconcerned about the aesthetic and the ethics, the absurdity of 'immorality,' because it has the secret code by which to decipher the film's latent social message in the context of its life-world. It is actually willing to read such lamentations as final and satisfactory proof of the commercial film's defiance of culturally alien aspects of middle-class morality.

Fourth, there are differences in the way art films and commercial films, so to speak, see themselves and see each other. The main difference is that for the art film there is a clear artistic break between it and commercial films; for the commercial film there is only a commercial break. The partisans of art films see themselves as champions of a proper medium of individual and cultural self-expression; to them, commercial films are technically competent, high-paying financial ventures with no artistic legitimacy or social relevance. When the votaries of art cinema grant social relevance to the commercial film, they do so in negative terms, seeing the commercial cinema only as an index of social pathology.

To the partisans of commercial films, on the other hand, art films constitute an artistic continuum with the commercial cinema. They hold that the art-film maker is usually careless about the producer's money and can therefore afford to indulge in useless, baroque detailing as a private ego trip at public expense. The applause the art-film maker receives is primarily the work of pedantic film critics pretending to be entertained when they are actually bored to tears. Such art films are distinguished mainly by their cultural inability to gauge public sentiment and their ability to fail at the box office. The situation is actually more complicated. Like Hindu nationalists who constantly speak of themselves as representatives of Hindu sentiments but have never managed to get more than one-fifth of the Hindu vote, commercial filmmakers are not great prognosticators of the public taste. As already mentioned, according to informal trade estimates, in India 80 percent of all commercial films fail at the box office; another 15 percent barely recover their costs. Less than 5 percent are hits. Obviously, there is no one-to-one relationship between popular taste and commercial cinema. To get an idea of what popular taste may be reading into commercial cinema, see Nandy, 'The Popular Hind Film.' There is also the fact that many famous and commercially thriving film producers have, at some stage of life, approached distinguished directors of art cinema, such as Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, to make films for them.

The two kinds of film-makers also regard censorship differently. Commercial film-makers dislike censorship for the same reasons that businessmen hate social controls on business. They are out to sell their wares to the public and they feel that censorship, reflecting middle-class prudery, interferes with entrepreneurial freedom. Like other sections of the corporate world, they are convinced that what is good for the commercial film is also good for India. However, there is in them a deeper acceptance of censorship, as is evident from their frequent attempts to justify their films by pointing out how standard family values and politically correct public norms are upheld in them and by their spirited denial that their films include pornographic elements and anti-women attitudes of that they promote consumerism and violent vigilantism. Commercial film-makers never argue openly for great freedom to express eroticism or realistic violence or political dissent. They only argue that they are even more conventional in these respects than many others (such as the makers of low-brow Hollywood films that get past the Indian censors).

Art-film makers, in closer touch with the haute bourgeoisie, take a different line. They feel that their work need not be censored, for all art films by definition have mature and responsible viewpoints, unlike the commercial films which are (by definition again) infantile, irresponsible and deserving of censorship. True, art-film makes would like the censorship not to be too prudish or anti-political. But, on the whole, they consider the makers and consumers of commerical films to be eminently educable in matters of public morality and they believe censorship to be an instrument of discipline and socialization. The partisans of art cinema do not deny that they appeal of the commerical cinema lies precisely in its 'immaturity' and 'childishness'; they merely deny that immaturity can be defiance and regression rebellion, for they equate the child with the primitive waiting to be civilized and educated. The champions of the art film cannot afford to keep a space in the public realm for the undersocialized self of the viewer that registers, however imperfectly or crudely, the political presence of Indians at the margins of modern India.

[This essay was extracted from 'An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema' by Ashis Nandy and originally published in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 202-207.]