Television and Commercial Culture

Citizens of many modern industrial societies, and in American society particularly, seldom think twice about referring to themselves as ‘consumers,’ accepting the terminology from the world of media and advertising constructed for them by large corporations. Yet in the lives of their grandparents, ‘consumption’ referred to a debilitating disease, and nineteenth century dictionaries equated it with destruction and pillage. Only during the last century did advertising succeed in normalizing what was once an aberration. This is not to say that people are unaware of this process. Many are beginning to wake up to how their lives are packaged and processed; how they are ‘branded’ as children with product loyalties; how their behavior is manipulated by slick advertising campaigns; and how their public spaces have become commodified by the messages of advertising to buy, buy more, and buy again. The problem is that few people know what to do with this realization, or how to respond. Although one would never know it from watching corporate television, there is a global anti-consumption movement afoot. In street demonstrations, classrooms and other public and private gatherings, as well as by way of alternative media and non-corporate sources of information, the movement is growing. In recent years a number of books have begun to question consumer culture, ranging from psychological analysis of advertising to evaluations of the environmental impact of the all-consuming lifestyle.

'The Choice' in Egyptian Cinema

Any discussion on the adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz's body of work to cinema needs to mention the film that represents the cooperation of two giants of the international and Arabic art scenes: Mahfouz and Youssef Chahine. The film in question is 'The Choice,' respectively written and directed by the two, and is a riposte to the defeat of the Egyptian army and the Arab states in the face of the Israeli military onslaught of 1967. But 'The Choice' stands alone in Mahfouz’s cinematic contributions in that it is not an adaptation of any text or novel. Rather, it is clearly a text written with the intention of being shot as a film, a collaborative effort between Mahfouz and Chahine, which took place during the war. Like many intellectuals, at the end of the war both tried to rationalize the reasons behind the Arab defeat and were we to take the message in 'The Choice' at face value we will find that the Egyptian intellectual and his schizophrenia is the main (though perhaps hidden) cause of the defeat.

Indian Cinema between Calcutta and Bombay

During the nineteenth century, writers, social reformers and intellectuals in India fought the impact of colonialism by turning aggressively to their own cultural traditions, even if in some cases it meant the unconscious absorption, and the duplication, of attitudes introduced and perpetuated by the colonizers themselves. An analogous situation developed in the persistence of certain 'high-cultural' attitudes to the cinema in the early years after independence. Parag Amladi has called it the 'All India/Regional film paradigm' in which the cinema of a particular region, Bengal in this instance, and the films of Satyajit Ray in particular, was seen as the genuine thing and culturally rooted, while the Bombay film came to be regarded as un-Indian, escapist and extravagant. Indian film criticism seems to provide a cracked mirror-image of the 'nationalist' debates and conflicts of definition.

Satyajit Ray on the 'Calcutta Trilogy'

Satyajit Ray began his career with the poetic 'Apu Trilogy,' made between 1955 and 1959 as the study of a young man's attempt to find himself and come to terms with the eternal conditions of life and its two opposite poles: love and death. Three of Ray's films made between 1970 and 1971 in effect form another trilogy, the main characters being seen this time in relation to their work. It is a political trilogy, about how we are being shaped, and perhaps misshapen, by our working conditions. 'Days and Nights in the Forest,' the least direct of the three, shows a group of city executives on a country weekend, away from the suffocating atmosphere of Calcutta. 'The Adversary' returns to Calcutta, where a young man revolts against the inhuman conditions attached to his search for a job. And the third film, 'Company Limited,' once more takes the audience round the other side of the desk to show the manipulations and status-seeking at the top of a big firm. In the following 1972 interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, Satyajit Ray discusses the 'Calcutta Trilogy' and other aspects of his work.

Inuit Community-Based Filmmaking

While residing in one of the most challenging environments on Earth, with a total population of only about 2,500, the Inuit of the village of Igloolik have produced three feature films, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, and Before Tomorrow. This community's ways of working may prove inspirational to other Indigenous communities seeking to make feature films while using their own traditional cultural practices. Zacharias Kunuk, the Inuit director of both Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, first became interested in making videos out of a desire to record his father's hunting stories. He began moving away from his successful work as a soapstone carver to become an employee and eventually a manager of the Canadian-government-operated Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) station in his home village of Igloolik.

Triumph of the Image in the Persian Gulf Oil War

While the 2003 American invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, initiated by then president George W. Bush, raised a global protest movement against the growing imperial aspirations of the USA, to many observers the previous 1990-91 Persian Gulf Oil War, waged by George Bush Sr., inaugurated the so-called ‘New World Order,’ in which the US with its interests and allies would attempt to reign supreme and remain unchallenged. One of the key features of implementing such imperial aspirations was control of media and information sources, and in this way it would 'not be another Vietnam,' as Bush the Father was often quoted to say. As such, the 1990-91 Iraq war remains an important turning point for how tight control of information sources can be pressed into service to create the illusion of multilateral support for a supposedly ‘clean’ unilateral action.

Thinking Critically about Terrorism in the Media

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa once said, 'We have wondered why it was that Dr. Savimbi's Unita in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua were "freedom fighters," lionized especially by President Reagan's White House and the conservative right wing of the United States of America, whereas our liberation movements such as the Pan-African Congress were invariably castigated as terrorist movements.' Dr. Savimbi is a freedom fighter and Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Movement (PLO) is a terrorist movement, but the Shah of Iran is a statesman. Mandela is a statesman, but so is Saddam Hussein. Hezbollah is a terrorist movement, and Iran supports terrorism, but Arafat is a statesman. The Contras are freedom fighters, and Syria is on the list of states supporting terrorism. Osama Bin Laden is a freedom fighter and Arafat is a terrorist, again. General Musharraf is a statesman, but Saddam now supports terrorist movements. The Irish Republican Army is a terrorist movement, the Taliban are statesmen, but Bin Laden is now a terrorist. Arafat is a statesman, again, but the Taliban are terrorists. Ariel Sharon and the king of Saudi Arabia are statesmen, while Hezbollah is still a terrorist movement. For those of us who get our news from the mainstream media like CNN and the BBC, it is difficult enough to keep track of the shifting and often contradictory images and sound bites used to describe complex political events, so how, in such a climate, can we ever learn to think critically about terrorism?

The Sovereign Cinema of Alanis Obomsawin

What are the attributes of a cinema of sovereignty that can be teased out of Alanis Obomsawin's long career for the benefit of other indigenous media producers? What qualities have allowed her to connect with audiences both in small Native communities and at elite film festivals? The first is that her work is the product of a sovereign gaze, one that is imbued with the self-respect and unique ambitions of a self-defined sovereign people, even if this sovereignty carries with it a complex and contested legal status. Rejecting the encroachment of external media nationalisms, her cinematic vision reflects an indigenous sovereign gaze, a practice of looking that comes out of Native experience and shapes the nature of the film itself. The gaze is sovereign, I argue, when it is rooted in the particular ways of knowing and being that inform distinct nationhoods. It is sovereign when cultural insiders are the controlling intelligence behind the filmmaking process, no matter how much non-Natives might help in various capacities. It is sovereign when Native people have, as Atsenhaienton puts it, the ability to use 'our terminology to express our self-determination—how we will exist, how we relate to each other and to other people.' And it is sovereign when it works against what one scholar has dubbed the '"whiting out' of the Indigene—the projection of white concepts and anxieties about the primitive on to the Aboriginal Other—effected by the white camera eye' in Hollywood and Canadian feature films, mainstream documentaries, and traditional ethnographic cinema. By focusing attention on that which has been overlooked, concealed, or distorted in the mainstream media, Obomsawin’s cinema of sovereignty provides an ideological rebuke to dominant practices of looking at Nativeness and, in this sense, troubles the visual impulses of white settler cultures in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

Israeli Cinema and the Politics of Representation

Israeli cinema, while achieving a certain measure of success and accomplishment, is often overshadowed by the other giants of the Middle Eastern film industry. The remarkable thing about Ella Shohat's Israeli Cinema (University of Texas Press, 1989) is that it manages to not only sustain but even pique our interest in films we might not necessarily want or even have the opportunity to see. She accomplishes this by using the films as raw material for the subtext (and subtitle) of her book: 'East/West and the Politics of Representation.' By doing this, Shohat has produced an impressively 'representative' work, one whose ostensible subject--Israeli film itself--by no means limits its significance. With its combination of condensed plot analysis deftly exposing the ideological significance of recurring images, and its skillful weaving of social, cultural, and political history, the book serves as a model for the intelligible presentation of any national cinema.

Michael Moore's Look at American Healthcare

With his 2009 film 'Capitalism: A Love Affair,' Michael Moore once again demonstrated a knack for locating and highlighting the plight of the nameless, faceless ordinary Americans who are virtually ignored by the mass media and most politicians, and who have few if any opportunities to tell their stories. He honed this skill in several previous films and it has become more or less formulaic. This review takes a look at Moore's previous film, 'Sicko' (2007), in which he examines the contentious issue of health care in America. Although nearly 50 million Americans have no health insurance and thousands will die every year because they are uninsured, ‘Sicko’ is also about the 250 million American citizens who do have health insurance, but for whom the system is tragically dysfunctional, and point often lost on the interminable election year debates about healthcare.

Indonesian Workers Expose Globalization

The 2002 documentary video 'The Globalization Tapes' originated as an unusual collaboration of the Indonesian Independent Workers' Union of Sumatra Plantation Workers (Perbbuni); the International Union of Food, Agriculture, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers' Association (IUF); and the London-based Vision Machine Film Project. For the most part, the professionals turned the filmmaking over to the plantation workers themselves. They traveled to various work sites and villages to listen to their fellow workers detail harsh working conditions and also to offer their analysis of the principal causes for much of this distress.

The Multiversity Higher Education Project

The Multiversity Higher Education Project was launched in 2004 in Penang with a workshop on the redesign of social science curricula in Third World universities. A number of academics, activists, and teachers from Africa, Asia, and the Americas contributed papers and lectures reporting on the state of social sciences in their respective locales and how to move beyond the Eurocentric models of the social sciences prevalent in the formerly colonized world. Since then, there have been several conferences on related themes, such as Decolonizing Universities, Resisting Hegemony, and Academic imperialism. TV Multiversity runs in parallel with and is informed by many of the ideas presented in these conferences and workshops, clips from which are available on the TV Multiversity channels on YouTube, Vimeo, and TVU Networks (see the links provided below), and readers can learn more about the Multiversity Higher Education project through Multiworld India.