Ethical Media and Social Reconstruction in China

In December 2004, I found myself in a meeting room at Guangzhou's Guangdong Film Distribution Corp., participating in a discussion about the difference between a 'communist' and a 'party member' with the producer, director, cinematographer, and distributor of the independent documentary Soul of the Nation (Guohun), which tells the stories of China's nationalist and communist revolutionary heroes by touring their tombs and memorials throughout the country. Zhao Jun, the producer, recalled that his elementary school teacher had explained that whereas a communist was a true believer in communist ideals, a party member was somebody who had joined the Communist Party as an organization. Although I was interested in researching independent media production outside the party-state and I have read quite a lot about independent documentaries that exposed the dark sides of the party's history in the Western and Diaspora Chinese media, I did not expect to meet a group who jokingly self-identified themselves as 'Bolsheviks outside the party' in 2004, making and distributing a 'red theme,' independent documentary in Guangzhou, the frontier of China's 'reform and openness' and globalized commercial popular culture.

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.

Child Development in the Media Age

In 'Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood,' educational theorists Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg assemble a collection of essays on children and the commodification of identity. They bring together a number of contemporary scholars of education, psychology and sociology into an interdisciplinary study of children’s popular culture and its implications for schooling and child development. Steinberg and Kincheloe introduce the essays with a chapter entitled ‘No More Secrets: Kinderculture, Information Saturation, and the Postmodern Childhood.’ The basic premise in their introduction is that the ‘information age’ has radically altered childhood, especially in the US but also in places adopting the American way of life, to the point that even the most basic assumptions underlying education and psychology are hopelessly outdated.

African and Afro-American Cinemas

Historically, African cinema and Afro-American cinema can and should be located within the same social space of the Third Cinema-Third World Cinema. In broad terms, however, the former can be characterized by the search for and interrogation of origins, while the latter can be defined by its fight for positions and identity. African cinema seeks to establish methods and systems of production, distribution, and viewing, while Afro-American cinema is produced within diverse political and cultural national contexts. Afro-American cinema  is situated within a particular national culture, albeit one governed by complex and nuanced historical, social, and economic factors. The movement of historical events is the primary--although not the only--preoccupation of African cinema, while the examination of social mechanisms is central to Afro-American cinema. In both cinemas, however, oppression, liberation, struggle, and hope inform thematic structures and references.

Satellite Television on the West Bank

Living under Israeli occupation can be quite boring at times, especially during lock downs and blockades such as those commonplace on the West Bank and in the Gaza strip. But have no fear, satellite television is here to 'occupy' all your idle hours. In large Palestinian towns like Ramallah, most people who can afford it subscribe to one or another of the various satellite TV services. The oldest and most popular is 'ArabSat,' which offers about 20 channels of broadcasting from various Arab countries. ArabSat has not included channels from Libya, Iraq, Morocco, or Qatar, but some of these can be seen on other, smaller satellite services. There are also European services with dozens of stations, including Turkey and, when it's not jammed, Iran.

Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

To the filmmaking community, Trinh T. Minh-ha is best known as the Vietnamese-born director of a number of experimental documentary films: 'Reassemblage,' 'Naked Spaces-Living Is Round,' and 'Surname Viet, Given Name Nam.' Visually stunning, poetic, and highly idiosyncratic, these works radically question and reopen ethnographic and documentary film languages. Her films represent one part of a much larger project, loosely organized around the 'problem' of how to represent a Third World, female Other. As well as making films, Trinh studied ethnomusicology and West African vernacular architecture, composes music, and has written a number of books. Many of these trends in her work are represented in the 1989 book, Woman, Native, Other.

American Public Diplomacy in the Mideast

At the height of its military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and concurrent with its ongoing 'war on terror,' the US government launched a public diplomacy campaign in the Arab world. It was ostensibly intended to project a cooler, kinder, and gentler image of the USA, even as American policies continued to wreak havoc in the region. Utilizing a variety of media, including news and entertainment in audio, video, and print, the efforts were linked by what appeared to be a common goal of attempting to win the hearts and minds of Arab youth.

TV and the Irreproducibility of Reality

Time for a swim. I ease myself down from the rocks into the chilly water, feeling the mud between my toes. I stand for a minute, aware of the line on my calves between the cold of water and warmth of sun, and then dive in a taut stretch. I can feel the water rushing past my head, smoothing back my hair. As I stroke out to the middle, I'm conscious of the strength and pull of my shoulder blades. I haul myself out onto a rock in the middle of the pond, and sit there dripping. A breeze comes up, and lifts the hairs on my back, each one giving a nearly imperceptible tug at my skin. Under hand and thigh I can feel the roughness and the hardness of the rock. If I listen, I can hear the birds singing from several trees around the shore, and a frog now and again, and from the outlet stream a few hundred yards away a faint burbling - always changing and always the same. If I listen without concentrating, it's mainly the wind that I hear, a steady slight pressure on the leaves. I can see a hundred things - the sun reflects off the ripples from my passage and casts a moving line of shadow and sparkle on the rocks that rise up at the water's edge. I can smell the water. I can taste the water too - not the neutral beverage you drink because there's nothing in the fridge, but wet, rich, complete. As it drops into the corner of my mouth there's the slightest tang of salt from the trail sweat in the afternoon. I can feel my weight - feel it disappear as I slip into the water, feel it cling to me again as I drag myself back onto the rock.

The Uniqueness of Kon Ichikawa

Although the long and distinguished film career of the late Japanese director Kon Ichikawa dated back to the 1930s and included many award winning films in Japan, he gained international attention in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of anti-war films, including 'The Burmese Harp' (nominated for an Academy Award in 1957) and 'Fires on the Plain' (winner of the Golden Sail at Locarno in 1961). It was during this period that a short symposium on his work was published in Japanese, which was subsequently translated into English for publication in the now defunct journal Cinema. Although Ichikawa began by saying that, 'I really don't know myself, so I'll just smile,' the symposium provides an early insight into the mind of the director and how he feels about his own work. Part of a series of symposia designed to reveal unknown aspects of films by Japanese directors, the following interview was conducted by two other Japanese film directors, Kyushiro Kusakabe and Akira Iwasaki.

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.