Lawrence of South Dakota

Well, here we go again. The ol' silver screen is alight once more with images of Indians swirling through the murky mists of time, replete with all the paint, ponies and feathers demanded by the box office. True, we are not confronted in this instance with the likes of Chuck Conners playing Geronimo, Victor Mature standing in as Chief Crazy Horse, or Jeff Chandler cast in the role of Broken Arrow's Cochise. Nor are we beset by the sort of wanton anti-Indianism which runs so rampant in John Ford's 'Stagecoach,' 'Fort Apache,' 'She Wore a Yellow Ribbon' and 'Sergeant Rutledge.' Even the sort of 'rebel without a cause' trivialization of Indian anger offered by Robert Blake in 'Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here' - or Lou Diamond Philips in 'Young Guns' and 'Young Guns II' - is not at hand. Yet, in some ways the 1990 'Indian movie,' a cinematic extravaganza packaged under the title 'Dances With Wolves,' is just as bad.

An Interview with Ousmane Sembene

A slight but sturdy Senegalese, Ousmane Sembene is a charming and provocative conversationalist, a committed revolutionary. He is also a Third World film-maker of major force and accomplishment, whose international reputation as Africa's most important director is based remarkably on a total output of five films by the early 1970s, though he was previously well known as a novelist. As a leading spokesman of sub-Sahara's black artistry, Sembene travelled the world personally, projecting his films and spreading his basic message of pride and confidence in the heritage and culture of Africa's native peoples. On such occasions in America and on the Continent, the films of Sembene have been heralded. In Africa, however, these volatile works are often banned, typically through pressure brought by the French government, which maintains a vigilant watch over its former colonies. By the mid 1970s, only Sembene's first full-length feature, 'Mandabi,' had been widely distributed outside of Senegal.

Review of Satyajit Ray's 'Charulata'

'Charulata' is a 1964 Bengali film by Satyajit Ray based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore. The story takes place in the nineteenth-century during the period of what is called 'The Bengal Renaissance.' Western thoughts of freedom and individuality are ruffling the age-old calm of a feudal society. Charulata's husband, suited, bearded, pince-nez-wearing Bhupati is inspired by the gospels of Mill and Bentham, by ideas of freedom and equality. He spends his feudal wealth and all his waking hours on the propagation of these through 'The Sentinel,' an enterprise which is destined to flounder by the very fact of the single-minded idealism of its editor. But the winds of change are not only stirring him; unknown to herself, his good Hindu wife, conveniently childless, is no longer capable of treading the beaten path of the ideal woman who wants nothing of life but her husband's happiness.

A Film on Music in the Trobriand Islands

The Trobriand Islands are usually assumed to be well known, thanks to the research of Bronislaw Malinowski and numerous subsequent anthropologists. But in spite of the abundant documentation of other cultural components, the music of the area had been little studied and is almost inaccessible aurally to listeners outside of Papua New Guinea. Therefore, the film 'Kama Wosi' ('Our Songs' in Kilivila language), shot in 1975 by Les McLaren and released in 1979, was a very welcome addition to knowledge of this area. What immediately strikes the viewer familiar with Malinowski's photographs of Trobriand life from 1915-1918 is that few things seem to have changed in 65 years. Even traditional music had not been supplanted by string bands, as the opening credits reveal: 'Although some music was performed expressly for the film, it still functions integrally to Trobriand society.'

Old-Time Cuban Music on Film

A friend of mine, a Cuban film director, wrote to me about visiting the Salzburg Festival. After enjoying operas by Berlioz and Mozart, he said, the big surprise was the Festival’s closing event, a concert by the Cuban old-timers La Vieja Trova Santiaguera, chosen by the Festival’s special guest of the year, the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. ‘It was tremendous. Austrians in elegant dresses and tuxedos cutting a caper and going crazy with the rhythm of one of the most traditional of our musical styles. Everyone danced and enjoyed themselves till the early hours. I can only tell you,’ my friend added, ‘that wherever I go I find this incredible popularity of Cuban music.’ The international popularity of Cuban music is not, by any means, a new phenomenon. One need only think of the Latin jazz of the 1940s, when the Cuban drummer Chano Pozo was Dizzy Gillespie’s drummer and George Russell wrote ‘Cubana Be Cubana Bop’ for Gillespie and Charlie Parker; or the rise to fame in the 1970s throughout Latin America of the singers of the Nueva Trova like Silvio Rodrìguez and Pablo Milanès; then of Afro-Cuban jazz groups such as Los Irakere in the 1980s, followed by the salsa boom of the 1990s. But, in the mid to late 1990s a new twist emerged.

Ways of Looking at Ethnographic Film

In 1970, at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Diego, Robert Gardner screened 'The Nuer' to a large anthropological audience for the first time. Probably everyone in the audience knew the Nuer from Evans-Pritchard's ethnographies. When it was over and the lights came up, we sat stunned. People said, 'Evans-Pritchard had never told us that the Nuer were like this!' A picture is worth a thousand words. What can that mean? Can one second of a movie (at 24 frames per second) be worth 24,000 words? No. But one could easily use 1,000 words to describe and analyze what is happening in a picture. The notion of 'seeing anthropology' is important, for both still photographs and moving images can complement the words anthropologists use to describe how culture works. Just as the words need to be studied, so the images must be thought about carefully.

The Image of Gandhi in 'Gunga Din'

In a most significant display of contempt and cynicism the 1939 Hollywood film 'Gunga Din' cast the 'mad guru' in the physical mold of Mahatma Gandhi. From his slight physique to his austere sartorial look wearing just a loin cloth and a chaddar (a large cotton shawl) draped over his shoulder or head, the demented villainous guru recalled the unmistakable figure of Mahatma Gandhi. Except for the head gear (turban), this was the dress which Gandhi wore during his visit to England for attending the Round Table Conference. Adopted from 1921 onwards, this dress contributed substantially in endearing him to the peasant masses of India. It was widely familiarized to the Western public through the visual media.

Television as a Selling Machine

In 1922, an American farmer and electronics tinkerer by the name of Philo T. Farnsworth invented a scanning device that would lead to the development of television. Farnsworth’s ‘image dissector’ solved many of the problems faced by European and American technicians who sought a way to electronically transmit images, and control of Farnsworth’s invention would chart the course of television development. In 1939, Farnsworth licensed his device to American media mogul David Sarnoff of RCA. At the time, TV was a novelty but by the late 1950s it had grown into a powerful form of mass communications. When later asked what he thought about how his invention had progressed, Farnsworth, who died in obscurity in 1971, said he refused to watch TV and expressed disgust at its crass commercialization and the manipulation of the medium by the advertising industry. During Farnsworth’s lifetime, creeping commercialization came to infect every aspect of TV, and consumerism had become a way of life for most Americans, and increasingly the world over.

Review of 'Dance and Human History'

Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist and folklorist known for collecting and bringing to public attention a wide variety of folk music from the United States, Europe and Latin America. He was an early proponent of what is today commonly referred to as 'multiculturalism.' He received numerous awards and honors, including the Library of Congress Living Legends Award in 2000, two years before his death at the age of 87. In addition to his work in music Lomax was interested in dance, for which he developed the theory and method of 'choreometrics,' which was designed to observe and interpret the relationship between dance and social structure. Although the social sciences, particularly anthropology, have moved away from what came to be known as structuralism, Lomax produced a number of enduring works as part of the choreometrics project, including the documentary film 'Dance and Human History.'

An Exhibition of 1980s Latin American Video

Oliver Stone's 1986 film Salvador might remind some viewers of just how often the reading of Latin American experience in North America has to slog its way through the troubled characterizations of self and other alive in the minds of many North Americans, of whatever political stripe. Stone's leading men traverse a dark night of the soul in El Salvador, using the political circumstances of that country to determine just who they are and who they are not. However favorable or controversial the film's political take on El Salvador might be to the viewer, the film remains in its essence a feverish meditation on the state of mind among some North American white males - presumably a marketable way to introduce the consequences of U.S. interventions in the the Third World to the public at large. A pragmatic approach to U.S. media politics might suggest that those of us interested in justice in Central and Latin America should be pleased at Hollywoodish renderings of situations south of the Rio Grande that cast any favorable light on combatants swathed in the the U.S. government's red paintbrush. The other hand suggests that such renderings are a surreal usage of complex, succinct political realities - like the circumstances of the rape and murder of Jean Donovan and three other American nuns in El Salvador in 1980 or Charles Horman's demise as portrayed in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film Missing - to heighten the horrors experienced by U.S. expatriates. The assumption is that we won't understand it or be interested unless it happens to our anti-heroes.

End of an Era for Arab Music in the USA

On 26 September 2010, Rashid Sales, the premiere source for Arab music in the US, held its grand closing. Amidst Middle Eastern grocery stores, shops and restaurants, Rashid Sales had been a mainstay of the Atlantic Avenue Arabic cultural scene in Brooklyn, New York, for decades. But due to dwindling sales of CDs and other physical media, which the owners attribute to availability of music on the internet, the shop can no longer make ends meet. They will, however, migrate part of their business to the internet and offer some of their wares for sale online. It was just a few short years ago that the shop was hailed as a 'Musical Oasis' in Brooklyn, and so in honor of that legacy TV Multiversity is reprinting here a 2004 article from the pages of Aramco World magazine. We wish Rashid Sales all the best in their new endeavor and hope that they can continue to bring Arabic music to the masses.

Toying With Science With Arvind Gupta

Arvind Gupta has a B.Tech degree from IIT Kanpur and has been working at the Children’s Science Centre of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, since October 2003. He has been UNESCO’s consultant on science teaching, has been associated with the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme and has conducted workshops for children in more than 1,500 schools throughout India. He has written several books on science for children and translated several more. But, perhaps he is best know for making simple, inexpensive and educative toys from scrap and taking science out of sanitised labs and onto the level of the underprivileged child. Yet, the weight of all the laurels and recognition he has received rests gently on Arvind Gupta’s head.