COINTELPRO 101 (USA: Andres Alegria, et al, 2010: 56 mins) ["A secret illegal project from the 1950s, 60s and 70s called COINTELPRO, represents the state’s strategy to prevent resistance movements and communities from achieving their ends of racial justice, social equality and human rights. The program was mandated by the United States’ FBI, formally inscribing a conspiracy to destroy social movements, as well as mount institutionalised attacks against allies of such movements and other key organisations. Some of the goals were to disrupt, divide, and destroy movements, as well as instilling paranoia, manipulation by surveillance, imprisonment, and even outright murder of key figures of movements and other people. Many of the government’s crimes are still unknown. Through interviews with activists who experienced these abuses first-hand, COINTELPRO 101 opens the door to understanding this history, with the intended audience being the generations that did not experience the social justice movements of the 60s and 70s; where illegal surveillance, disruption, and outright murder committed by the government was rampant and rapacious. This film stands to provide an educational introduction to a period of intense repression, to draw many relevant and important lessons for the present and the future of social justice."]
Davis-Cohen, Simon. "Court Orders Nonprofit Law Firm to Pay $52,000 to Oil and Gas Company for Defending Local Fracking Waste Ban." Desmog (January 17, 2018)
Hinojosa, Maria. "The Importance of Journalism for a Functioning Democracy." UO Today #685 (October 9, 2017) ["Journalist Maria Hinojosa, host of NPR’s Latino USA, and president and CEO of Futuro Media Group. Hinojosa discusses her career and the importance of journalism for a functioning democracy. She also talks about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the federal response to the hurricane disaster in Puerto Rico."]
Howard, Kate. "Film Incentive Program Among Bevin's Proposed Budget Cuts." Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (January 17, 2018)
Kenny, Glenn. "Personal Shopper: Freedom 2016." Current (October 24, 2017)
Longo, Regina. "A Conversation with Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover on Queer Cinema in the World." Film Quarterly 70.2 (Winter 2016)
Schwarz, Gabrielle. The Complaint of Female Subjectivity: On Brent Morgern's Jane." Another Gaze (January 18, 2018)
Phillip Wohlstetter on Zero Dark Thirty: "How does a film think? Recall the famous experiment of Lev Kuleshov. Start with the shot of an actor’s face. Vary the shots adjacent to it: a coffin, a plate of soup, a seductive woman lying on a divan. The actor’s expression will be read, alternately, as sadness, hunger, or lust. For the audience, juxtaposition creates meaning. A film is an arrangement of moments, shorter or longer, but every narrative moment is brought into relief by a significant before-moment and a significant after-moment that frames it. Let’s look at the first torture sequence in Zero Dark Thirty to see how this meaning-effect works. Significant before-moment: the powerful opening sequence, dark screen, the terrified voice of a woman trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11, realizing there’s no help coming, she’s going to die. Central narrative moment: a detainee is water-boarded in the next scene, forced to crawl in a dog collar, hung up naked by the arms, etc. After-moment: the face of Maya, wincing as she watches the torture. I’m cheating on this last. Obviously it’s a reaction shot within a scene, but in terms of meaning, it provides a bookend to the torture moment just as surely as the 9/11 sequence bookends it from the other side. To see the truth of this, imagine an opening with the before and after moments removed. We would be watching a brutal torture scene with no comment whatsoever—that is to say, we’d be in a neo-realist film that lets us observe and come to our own conclusions, that avoids (ideally) telling us what to feel. Instead, the torture moment is framed as a reaction to 9/11, an over-reaction maybe but understandable in context and perhaps in the end—we have to entertain this possibility—excusable. Now let’s look at the work of Maya’s reaction shot (remembering that it’s precisely the reaction shot, a way to locate the audience member in the movie by offering him/her a surrogate who reacts to events the way we would given the chance—it’s precisely this key device of classic Hollywood Film that Neo-Realism rejected because it lulled us so easily into unthinking). Maya winces. We would too, humanists and democrats that we are. But she stays in the room, gritting her teeth, going against her nature. Sometimes, the film whispers, you have to make hard choices, to take hard measures—a celluloid lesson in ‘dirty hands’ moral philosophy."
Wypijewski, JoAnn. "Zero Dark Thirty, Snuff Film." The Nation (January 30, 2013) ["The film’s torture scenes do not excuse or glorify torture; they do something worse: draw the audience into accommodating it."]
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