Two Books on Third World Cinema

Any discussion of Third World films should begin with definition of the concept of the Third World. Roy Armes in Third World Film Making and the West (University of California Press, 1987), defines Third World countries as those once colonized nations that are still underdeveloped because of their economic exploitation by the West. This, I assume, accounts for the rather strange title of this book since the emphasis here is given to the relationship between Third World filmmaking in particular, and the West in general. Yet, I did not find that this emphasis was reflected in the writing. And for good reason, since the primary concern of a Third World filmmaker is not his relationship to the West (although this may be one of his concerns) but his country and his people. It seems to me that the title points to an uneasiness that Roy Armes feels in writing about this subject. It is hard to pinpoint why he feels so uneasy.

Eyes of the Journey Alternative World Premier

September 21 is the alternative world premiere of a new film Eyes of the Journey, a visual poem in Quechua from director Rodrigo Otero Heraud and and producer Maya Tillmann Salas of Asociacion Cuyay Wasi in Peru. Several organizations, people who are interested, and cinema clubs in several countries around the world who will show the film on that day to spread the energy of the film around Mother Earth on the same day. The film is like a prayer in Quechua and its makers know it will have a magic effect. The film originates in Cusco, Peru, where it will be projected on the 21st to an audience of 600. Cusco is the home of the film's protagonist, the Quechua shaman Hipolito.

The New Time Religion of Advertising

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.

Two Ethnographic Films on Muslim Music

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.

C. K. Raju interviewed by Claude Alvares

TV Multiversity is proud to present a five part series featuring Professor C. K. Raju interviewed by Claude Alvares. Professor Raju brings to bear his immense knowledge of mathematics, history, and philosophy in providing a systematic deconstruction of the Eurocentrism of mathematics as currently conceived and taught. Beginning with a discussion of why mathematics has become so difficult to learn, the interviews proceed through the myths surrounding the 'heroes' of Western science, from Euclid to Einstein. They also cover the transmission of mathematical knowledge from India through the Islamic world into Europe, where it was initially misunderstood but then coopted and corrupted by the Holy Roman Empire. One of his most startling conclusions is that mathematics is essentially religious or spiritual in nature, but he offers a way to think about and practice mathematics shorn of its theological assumptions and Eurocentric historical accretions. Professor Raju has developed this material over a series of books, ranging from 'Time: A Consistent Theory' (1994) to his latest work, 'Euclid and Jesus' (2012). Conducted in Penang, Malaysia, during June 2013 and totalling over nine hours of material, these exclusive new interviews were produced and distributed on behalf of the Multiversity Project for the Multiworld Network and are presented here for the first time.

The Nature of Tibetan Buddhist Medicine

A 2006 television documentary, ‘The Blue Buddha: Lost Secrets of Tibetan Medicine,’ introduces the Tibetan Buddhist medical tradition and the relationship between Buddhist teachings and medical knowledge, emphasizing that the founder of Buddhism considered himself as a healer, rather than as a god or a prophet, and that he presented his teachings not as doctrines but as remedies intended to heal the body and mind. These teachings form the basis of Buddhist oriented medicine today, with regional variations, and so the documentary begins by surveying its historical development in Tibet.

Healing Arts in an Ancient Indian Tradition

‘Ayurveda: Art of Being,’ a 2001 documentary film by Pan Nalin, opens with an elderly man collecting and washing plants by a riverside, begging pardon from the Lord for uprooting them, saying that they are necessary for medicine. That single scene encapsulates the main message of this film, echoing Hindu cosmology, that for Ayurveda ‘everything in and around us are one and single existence.’ Dr. G. Gangadharan of the Medicinal Plant Conservation Centre in Kerala, India, elaborates on this principle: ‘The microcosm, the body in which we are living, or that of all the living beings, and the macrocosm around us, are all part of one unit. And the role of the physician is merely the role of a conveyer belt between these two, where he may be processing something so that the body can easily assimilate it. Other than that, there is nothing. He is doing nothing other than substituting things which are lacking in the system by things which are available externally.’

Trinh T. Minh-ha on Images and Politics

Trinh T. Minh-ha is a Vietnamese independent filmmaker, post-colonial theorist and feminist thinker whose work is widely shown internationally, and who has taught at various universities in the United States, and also in Japan and Senegal. Her work as an artist, teacher and writer consistently engages questions of hegemony, methodology and patriarchy. Her 1982 film 'Reassemblage,' made as part of her ethnographic research in Senegal, challenges the dichotomies of self/other, object/subject, and maker/viewer. Rather than reproducing the authoritative narrative voices and linear story lines of documentary film, for 'Reassemblage' she offered virtually no narration and employed a disorienting editing style of constantly shifting images, musical snippets and occasional silences that challenge the conventions of representation. In this essay, she uses her films as a point of departure for a discussion on the necessity of making films politically, the task of interrogating various forms of repression, and the ongoing struggle to move across and beyond boundaries so as to work, think and act differently.

Toward a Semiotics of Third Cinema

Third World filmmakers and scholars should not be forced always to think in a sign system that is not theirs. The question is whether the categories that inform Western semiotics are fully relevant to the analysis of non-Western sign systems. Western semiotics has presumed that its categories can travel across cultures and languages. But language is saturated with the values of its own culture. To think in a language other than one's own is to experience a peculiar form of alienation--a kind of self-exile. Besides, Western semiotics has not developed a strategy to explain the specific mode of transformation required by the Third World context where semiotics should be an instrument of political action. This has been largely ignored and underdeveloped. It is now imperative to formulate Third Cinema semiotics in terms of its relation between Third World concepts and its own artistic mode to develop forms of explanation that account for its specificity.

An Ethnobiographical Film by Jorge Preloran

Jorge Preloran (1933-2009) was an Argentinian-American filmmaker who developed a unique style of ethnobiographical documentary film during the 1960s. One of his most well known works in this genre is Hermogenes Cayo, the Spanish language version of which he made in 1969. A year later, Preloran collaborated with American Anthropologist Robert Gardner to produce an English language version of the film under the title Imaginero. In this film we have the sensitive and human portrayal of a folk artist living on the puna of Northwestern Argentina. The subject of the film, Hermogenes Cayo, is a self made man with a deep dedication to both folk Catholicism and the plastic arts. His creativity and ingenuity reveal a self confidence rarely found in descriptions of Andean lifeways.

Challenging the Norms of Documentary Filmmaking

'Two Laws/Kanymarda Yuma' is a film made by the Borroloola Aboriginal Community, who live in the Northern Territory of Australia. The film was shot by two Sydney filmmakers, Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan, but because of the Borroloola community decisions over the choice of subject matter and methods of filming 'Two Laws' is described by its distributors as 'an epic story told by the Borroloola people.' The film is in four parts, each dealing with different moments in the history of white Australian institutional attempts to coerce the Aboriginal people into the acceptance of white law and white custom. Part One--Police Times--re-enacts a round-up and forced march which took place in 1933; Part Two--Welfare Times--deals with the process of settlement and the imposition of government policies of assimilation during the 1950s; Part Three--Struggle for Our Land--is concerned with more recent fights for the recognition of Aboriginal land and law in the Land Claims courts; and Part Four--Living with Two Laws--describes the movement back to traditional Aboriginal lands. The film therefore represents an attempt by the Borroloola people not only to talk of their own history, but also to decide how that history would be represented. It is a directly political project, as its title suggests, in its efforts to reconstruct and remember white institutional coercion and Aboriginal struggles against it.

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.

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.

Haile Gerima on Independent Filmmaking

Haile Gerima was born in the town of Gondar, Ethiopia. His father, a playwright and storyteller, authored dramas about cultural or historical figures and topics, and traveled throughout Ethiopia with a theatre troupe that presented his work. The younger Gerima came to the United States in 1967 to study at Chicago's Goodman School of Drama. He received his M.F.A. in film from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1976, and has been a professor of film at Howard University in Washington DC since 1975. He established an independent distribution company, which has released several of his films, including 'Sankofa' (1993), 'Adwa' (1999) and 'Teza' (2008). In the following interview with Rob Edelman, Gerima speaks about his early films, establishing the distribution company, teaching film at Howard University, and his outlook on independent filmmaking. Rob Edelman also provided the introductory biographical material (slightly updated for this article).

Re-examining Amartya Sen

It has been reported that after Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, parents in West Bengal began to name their baby boys after him. Among contemporary Indian intellectuals, he has a wider readership in the Anglophone world than any of his peers; and though at least one other Indian economist, Jagdish Bhagwati, has often been mentioned as a possible Nobel Laureate in economics, among Indian economists Sen has a reach that is without comparison. One cannot think of many contemporary eminent economists who write on politics, literature, and cinema with apparent ease, and one of his former students, Harvard history professor Sugata Bose, assures the viewers of Suman Ghosh’s documentary film, 'Amartya Sen: A Life Re-examined,' that Sen has also made invaluable contributions to the study of Indian history. Those economists, such as the late John Kenneth Galbraith, who were viewed as departing from the extraordinarily rigid protocols of the discipline, which has been singular both in its insistence that it is an exact and complete 'science' and in its contemptuous repudiation of theoretical trajectories -- among them, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, postmodernism, and feminism -- that have in some measure informed other social science disciplines, soon found themselves ostracized by their fellow economists. In this respect, at least, Amartya Sen may have the unique distinction of having retained a following in his own discipline while continuing to gain adherents among other intellectual and educated circles.

Some Recent Indian Political Documentaries

Though "Bollywood" has become synonymous with Indian cinema to the uninitiated, there are an ample number of other traditions of filmmaking in India, not least of which is a tradition of political documentaries. The Indian independence movement, led in the 1920s and 1930s by Mohandas Gandhi, was the subject of the first concentrated phase of documentary filmmaking. The bulk of these films, however, never received any public screening. The Cinematograph Act of 1918 introduced censorship in India, and the Indian Cinematograph Committee of 1928, while urging the censors to curb their enthusiasm for bringing films before the cutting board, unequivocally reaffirmed the moral necessity of censorship, especially in a country among whose natives, as many Britishers believed, passions reigned supreme. The various regional censor boards did not only certify Indian films for exhibition, but also regulated the entry of foreign films into India and their public screenings. Indeed, "cheap American films," which were viewed (in the words of one English clergyman) as engaging in outright sensationalism, proliferating in "daring murders, crimes and divorces," and, more pointedly, as degrading white women in the eyes of Indians, were especially targeted for censorship. By the mid-1930s, Gandhi had become a figure of worldwide veneration; moreover, the Government of India Act of 1935, which allowed some measure of autonomy to Indians, implicitly recognized that the Indian objective of full independence was no longer a mere utopian dream. Consequently, numerous documentaries that had been banned were now made available for public screenings, among them Mahatma Gandhi's March for Freedom (Sharda Film Co.), Mahatma Gandhi's March, March 12 (Krishna Film Co.), and Mahatma Gandhi Returns from the Pilgrimage of Peace (Saraswati).

Mardi Gras Made in China

In 1978 two seemingly unrelated but momentous events occurred: Deng Xiaoping put an end to Maoism by endorsing the 'capitalist road' for China (although only old-line Marxists called it that) but said, 'It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice' and women in New Orleans began flashing their breasts during Mardi Gras parades to score more beads from passing floats. David Redmon's film 'Mardi Gras Made in China' is the clear and damning story of how Chinese capitalism and globalization have created the Tai Kuen Bead Factory in a tax-free Special Economic Zone in Fuzhou. Hundreds of teenagers, mostly girls, work up to sixteen hours a day for ten cents an hour to make the millions of beads that Mardi Gras revelers need for the bodacious New Orleans parade scene. The girls also make assorted other souvenirs, including little porcelain figures with exaggerated sexual organs.

A Selection of Videos from PRATEC

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 her films have been screened at international festivals. PRATEC has more recently worked with Sachavideos based in Lamas, Peru. Collectively, these videos offer a unique view of Andean peasant communities and their cosmovision that sees life in a reciprocal relationship with nature, where human beings are nurtured by nature, and in return nature is nurtured by human beings.

Review of 'The Battle of Chile'

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.