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.

National Cinema in a Transnational Mediascape

One of the fascinations of the Century of Cinema series produced by the British Film Institute is its global ambition to represent the diversity of cinema. As a result it's easy enough to gripe about all of the omissions and exclusions and 'problematic' representations in the series. As series producer Colin McCabe, faced with the massive task he had set for himself, put it: 'The solution came with the decision to abandon the quest for a total history, to opt instead for individual essays... and trust that from an incredible variety of approaches something of the complexity of the century of cinema would emerge.' An interesting wager - but what strikes me about many of the resulting sixteen films of the Century of Cinema series is how often they present simplistic reactions to, rather than complex responses to, globalization. What I think we can see in the Century of Cinema are some clear examples of how economic and political pressures on media production support certain ways of negotiating a marketable identity but compromise critical reflection on the meaning of the nation and the role of media in our lives.

Kurosawa's Economic Growth Ethical Deathtrap

Akira Kurosawa's reputation as a world-class director is based first of all on his samurai films in general and two films in particular that many rate in the top echelon of film classics: 'Rashomon' (1950) and 'The Seven Samurai' (1954), both historical dramas of medieval Japan and fascinating studies of human behavior using the conventions (and pretensions) of the warrior genre. Perhaps less well-known are his social realist films, including 'High and Low' (AKA 'Tengoku to jigoku,' or 'Heaven and Hell'), which provides a commentary on the history of globalization and reflects changes in the workplace. On the surface 'High and Low' is a kidnapping film, but transcends its police procedural genre because of its economic and cultural weight.

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.

The American Documentary Phenomenon

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.

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America

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.