Seth Rosenfeld: A Secret History of America in the 60s

Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts.

Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good."

Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government."

Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director.

The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. And after Reagan emerged as a leading conservative spokesman in the fifties, Hoover went beyond the bounds of his jurisdiction and secretly gave him personal and political help. He even lent Reagan a hand in keeping track of his own wayward children, Maureen and Michael. Now the long courtship between the FBI director and the former movie star would pay off for them both.

The FBI would become deeply involved in the clash over free speech at Berkeley between the social forces represented by Reagan, Kerr, and Savio. Each of these men had a transforming vision of America and exerted extraordinary and lasting influence on the nation. By tracing the bureau's involvement with these iconic figures, this book reveals a secret history of America in the sixties. It shows how the FBI's dirty tricks at Berkeley helped fuel the student movement, damaged the Democratic Party, launched Ronald Reagan's political career, and exacerbate the nation's continuing culture wars. Above all, it illustrates the dangers that the combination of secrecy and power pose to democracy, especially during turbulent times. (7-8)

Rosenfeld, Seth. Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Shortbus (USA: John Cameron Mitchell, 2006: 101 mins)

"In the old days, when you couldn't show sex on film, directors like Hitchcock had metaphors for sex (trains going into tunnels, etc). When you can show more realistic sex, the sex itself can be a metaphor for other parts of the character's lives. The way people express themselves sexually can tell you a lot about who they are. Some people ask me, 'Couldn't you have told the same story without the explicitness?'. They don't ask whether I could've done Hedwig without the songs. Why not be allowed to use every paint in the paintbox?" --John Cameron Mitchell, "How to Shoot Sex: A Docu-Primer" (2007): Shortbus Region 1 DVD release (Th!nk Film)



Shortbus (USA: John Cameron Mitchell, 2006: 101 mins)





"The character of any age is tellingly revealed in the popular representation of intimacy. For all the sexualisation of our culture, we live in strangely repressed times: a late-night, infrared fumble on Big Brother is front-page news. While the online porn industry, with its humourless siliconed stereotypes, is worth a reported $10bn a year - more than the cumulative box-office receipts of Hollywood - real human sexual relationships, vulnerable and fun, are hardly anywhere to be seen." -- Tim Adams (2006)


Adams, Tim. "Everybody's Doing It..." The Guardian (November 26, 2006)

Barounis, Cynthia. "Queerness Meets Disability in Shortbus." In Media Res (February 2, 2011)

Benton, Michael Dean. "American Sex and Sexuality 2.0" Dialogic(May 27, 2010)

---. "Gender and Sexuality at the Carnegie Center." North of Center (January 29, 2010)

---. "Getting off on John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus: American Sex and Sexuality." North of Center (March 30, 2011)

---. "Review of Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up." North of Center (October 13, 2010)

Borges, Anna. "43 Unspeakable Sexual Fantasies People Actually Have." Buzzfeed (March 16, 2017)

Browning, Barbara, et al. "The Lure and the Blur of the Real." Philoctetes (March 13, 2010)

Brunsting, Joshua. "For Criterion Consideration: John Mitchell's Shortbus." Criterion Cast (February 25, 2014)

Cannon, Kristopher L. "Hedwig leaves her stain on the Shortbus." In Media Res (February 1, 2011)

Chan, Karen B.K. "Should Sex Be Like Jazz." Sociological Images (March 4, 2013)

Crowell, Steven. "Existentialism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Revised edition: 2010)

Dargis, Manohla. "Naughty and Nice in a Carnal Carnival." The New York Times (October 4, 2010)

Dino. "Penetration in Shortbus: Trauma, Representation, and 9/11." Synoptique #14 (May 2010)

Dubowski, Sandi. "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret: John Cameron Mitchell pushes the sexual boundaries once again in Shortbus." Filmmaker (Fall 2006)

Elizabeth, Heather, et al. "Sex, Truth and Audio Tape: Shifting identities on a changing sexual landscape (Part 1)." Ideas (October 25, 2017) ["It's often been said that everything in the world is about sex, except sex itself — sex is about power. So what are we to make of today's sexual landscape, where we see the most diverse range of orientations and expressions of sexuality in history? Lesbian, gay, queer, cis, pansexual, leather daddies, stone butch, asexual... the list keeps growing. And there is entrenched push-back against that expansion. So who gets to say what about whom? And as the sexuality landscape broadens, what will it mean?"]

---. "Sex, Truth and Audio Tape: What does consent really mean? (Part 2)" Ideas (November 1, 2017) ["The Harvey Weinstein story has unleashed a veritable tsunami of sexual assault and harassment claims. And there's a huge gender gap at work: overwhelmingly, men are the accused perpetrators; women, the victims. IDEAS producer Mary O'Connell explores the motivations, conscious and unconscious, behind this disturbing dynamic. "]

Escoffier, Jeffrey, ed. Sexual Revolution. NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003. (BCTC Library HQ 21 I85 2003) ["What does "sexual revolution" mean? When, how, and why did it begin? What, if anything, did it change? And what hope do we have that its ideals of equality and pleasure can be realized? From Susan Sontag's "Pornographic Imagination" to Al Goldstein's notorious review of Deep Throat, Sexual Revolution explores the cultural, economic, political, and moral consequences of new ways of sexual thinking and behaving — reclaiming the female orgasm and challenging the double standard; celebrating open marriage and homosexuality; and defying taboo and censorship. With Anne Koedt's classic "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" and Norman Mailer's "The Homosexual Villain;" Helen Gurley Brown to Lenny Bruce — to name a few — this book features the voices of those who registered and provoked popular consciousness and transformed how we think about sex. Today, Dr. Phil talks about oral sex among grade-schoolers and porn star Jenna Jameson gets a six-figure advance for her memoirs. Something has changed, but Sexual Revolution reminds us that our sexuality remains a bitterly contested battleground. This collection includes selections by Erica Jong, Lawrence Lipton, Masters and Johnson, Betty Dodson, Gayle Rubin, Timothy Leary, Henry Miller, Huey Newton, Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others."]

"Existentialism." Wikipedia

Fauth, Jürgen. "Shortbus." About (No Date)

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." (This text, entitled "Des Espace Autres," and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967.)

Harris, Mark. "Revisiting the Tryouts for the Orgy: Could John Cameron Mitchell’s gleefully sexual 2006 film Shortbus get made today?" Vulture (January 26, 2022)

Hudson, David. "Sex in the Movies." Green Cine (2005)

---. "Shortbus in 2006 - and in 2022." The Current (January 27, 2022) [Rewatching Shortbus, Harris decides that the film probably could not be made today, 'not because of its sexual explicitness, although that would doubtless be scrutinized through a stern contemporary lens of power dynamics and problematics and representation but could probably survive all that and maybe even wink at it, but because of its optimism. It’s a movie full of joy and delight—not just in sexual discovery and self-discovery, but in the awkward, itchy, uncomfortable, embarrassing stuff, in the fact that sex is messy because people and their feelings are messy. In a way, the movie’s conviction that the mess is part of the fun seems like its most transgressive aspect.'"]

Jhally, Sut. "Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Popular Culture." (Media Education Foundation, 2009) [documentary--available online]

Lewis, Jon. "Real sex: aesthetics and economics of art-house porn." Jump Cut #51 (Spring 2009)

Macio. "Redefining Our Relationships: An Interview with Wendy-O Matik." Revolution By the Book (February 19, 2010)

Mayer, Sophie. "In Praise of Soft Cocks." cléo 5.1 (2017)

Mitchell, John Cameron. "Let's Talk Dirty." The Independent (November 26, 2006)

---. "Why My New Film Has Real Sex In It." Landmark Theatres (2007)

Oshima, Nagisa. "Sexual Poverty" Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima. The MIT Press, 1993

"Polyamory." Wikipedia (No Date)

Popova, Maria. "Alain de Botton on How to Think About Sex More." Brain Pickings (February 14, 2013) [“The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.”]

Rivard, Ryan. "Shortbus: I, Prisoner." Letterboxd (March 23, 2017)

Sellberg, Karin and Michael O'Rourke. "John Cameron Mitchell's Relationscapes." In Media Res (January 31, 2011)

"Sexual Orientation." Wikipedia (No Date)

Shaw, Richard. "Are the U.S.A.'s Independent Films a Distinct National Cinema?" The Film Journal (2002)

Sobchack, Vivian. "What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh." Senses of Cinema (April 2000)

Stone, Jay. "Sook-Yin Lee's film debut definitely not CBC fare." Ottawa Citizen (May 22, 2006)

Wark, Mackenzie. "Charles Fourier's Queer Theory." Verso (February 26, 2015)

Williams, Linda. "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess." Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2-13.

---. "Hard-Core Art Film: The Contemporary Realm of the Senses." Quaderns portàtils #13 (2008)

Wypijewski, JoAnn. "Sexual Healing: Carnal Knowledge." The Nation (September 9, 2009)

Williams, Linda. "Hard Core Art Film: The Contemporary Realm of the Senses." Quaderns Portatils #13 (2008)

Karen B.K. Chan: Should Sex Be Like Jazz?

[via Lisa Wade at Sociological Images. ENG 282 students this relates to tonight's screening of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006).]

David Simon on The Wire (2002-2008)

Instead of the usual good-guys-chasing-bad-guys framework, questions would be raised about the very labels of good and bad, and, indeed, whether such distinctly moral notions were really the point. The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually root themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. (36)

The Wire depicts a world in which capital has triumphed completely, labor has been marginalized and monied interests have purchased enough political infrastructure to prevent reform. It is a world in which the rules and values of the free market and maximized profit have been mistaken for a social framework, a world where institutions themselves are paramount and every day human beings matter less. (36)

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek Tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It's the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. (37)

David Simon, quoted in Watson, Garry. "The Literary Critic, the Nineteenth Century Novel and The Wire." Cineaction #84 (2011): 32-40.

David Parkinson: Oshima's Passions

Oshima's Passions
by David Parkinson
Movie Mail



Nagisa Oshima, who died last month, is best known for In the Realm of the Senses, a powerful tale of sexual obsession that retains much of its power 40 years on. David argues it becomes even more powerful when viewed with its less well-known sequel.

Nagisa Oshima, who died on 15 January at the age of 80, made several important films, yet he will probably be best remembered for one. During the nuberu bagu or new wave of the 1960s, he produced a clutch of furiously subversive denunciations of Japanese society that drew heavily on actual events and suggested that defeat in the Second World War had done little to discredit attitudes that had governed the national psyche since feudal times.

In later years, Oshima also achieved commercial success with the prison camp drama Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983) and also proved himself adept at the samurai movie with Gohatto (1999). But, while his canon is admired for it trenchancy, artistic integrity and political courage, it is In the Realm of the Senses (1976) that commands the most attention. There is no question that it still has the power to compel, challenge and shock nearly four decades after its release. But this contentious picture, which has still to be shown in its entirety in Japan, acquires its greatest potency when seen in conjunction with Empire of Passion (1978), which similarly explores the ramifications of an intense amour fou, but does so with an increased control, maturity and compassion.

At the height of what might be deemed his 'angry young man' phase, Oshima produced a succession of uncompromising features for his own Sozo-sha company. As the traditional Japanese studios went into decline, Death By Hanging (1968), Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968), Boy (1969), The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970) and The Ceremony (1971) matched anything being made in Europe for socio-political intrepidity and stylistic audacity.

To Read the Rest

Films We Want to See #25: Let Fury Have the Hour (USA: Antonio D'Ambrosio, 2012)

Film Website

“Let fury have the hour/
Anger can be power/
Do you know that you can use it?”
– “The Clampdown,” The Clash

Rough, raw and unapologetically inspirational, LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR is a charged journey into the heart of the creative counter-culture in 2012. In a time of global challenges, big questions and by-the-numbers politics, this upbeat, outspoken film tracks the story of the artists, writers, thinkers and musicians who have gone underground to re-imagine the world – honing in on equality, community and engaged creativity – in exuberantly paradigm-busting ways.

Writer/director Antonino D’Ambrosio unites 50 powerful, of-the-moment voices –from street artist Shepard Fairey to rapper Chuck D to playwright Eve Ensler to musicians Tom Morello and Billy Bragg to novelist Edwidge Danticat to filmmaker John Sayles to comic Lewis Black – who share personal and powerful tales of how they transformed anger and angst into provocative art and ideas. Mix-mastered with historical footage, animation and performances, D’Ambrosio presents a visceral portrait of a generation looking to re-jigger a system that has failed to address the most pressing problems of our times . . . or human potential.

The story begins in the 1980s with the rise of Reagan and Thatcher — and a cultural shift towards fierce individualism and rampant consumerism. Coming of age in a world seemingly gone mad or at least gone shopping, some kids started searching for something more authentic. This was the start of a renegade movement D’Ambrosio calls “creative-response.” It was a hybrid, haphazard collective of skateboarders, punk rockers, rappers, street poets, feminists and graffitists whose reaction to this brave new world was not to turn away, but to turn up the volume and have their say.

Now that generation is coming to the fore, sparking a global movement focused not just on pushing the boundaries with guitars, paint, dance, storytelling, graphics and subcultural style – but on coming together around real reasons for hope.

Set to a stirring soundtrack from the film’s artists – including Rage Against The Machine, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg, Gogol Bordello, MC5, DJ Spooky and Sean Hayes – LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR is a fast and furious trip into the grass roots of art and activism, 21st Century style. The film is written and directed by author and visual artist Antonino D’Ambrosio in his feature debut. The producers are D’Ambrosio and James L. Reid and the executive producers are Jonathan Gray, Brian Devine, Rob McKay, Mark Urman and Chaz Zelus. The film features original music from composer and MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer. A CAVU Pictures release.

Gabriella Coleman: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking; Steve Vittoria: Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal

Law and Disorder Radio


Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking



In the past 2 years, we’ve discussed in many interviews and updates, the attacks on whistle-blowers and hackers. The emerging movement of programmers, hackers, open source software, online communities has challenged and exposed corporate and government control and surveillance, making them targets of prosecution. As many may know, our own Michael Ratner has represented whistle-blower Julian Assange, computer activist Jeremy Hammond, and has been a legal adviser to many others including the late Aaron Swartz. Today we talk with author Gabriella Coleman about her recently published book Encoding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. It’s a good place to start for those learning about the political significance of free software, intellectual property and the morality of computer hacking.

Guest – Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, she researches, writes, and teaches on hackers and digital activism.

Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal

The new documentary, “Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal,” is premiering across the country. The film includes interviews from Cornel West, Alice Walker, Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, Amy Goodman, Michael Parenti, writers Tariq Ali, and Michelle Alexander. This film beautifully captures the importance of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life as an American journalist, and radical. He published seven books in prison including the best selling “Live From Death Row.”

In Chris Hedges’ review he points out what Cornel West says in the film: “The state is very clever in terms of keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones that are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em, dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition to ’em.”
Guest – Steve Vittoria, the writer, director, producer and editor of Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal. The film premiered in theaters in New York City earlier this month.

To Listen to the Episode

Imogene Sara Smith: The Music of Words - Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films

The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
by Imogene Sara Smith
Bright Lights Film Journal



"In my films, images are everything," Michael Powell declares in his autobiography; "words are used like music to distill emotion." Powell was justly proud of tour-de-force sequences that rely exclusively on visuals, scoring, and editing, like the Red Shoes ballet or the climactic attempt by Sister Ruth to murder Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus. These forays into what Powell called the "composed film" culminated in a feature-length cinematic opera, Tales of Hoffman (a film that, I must confess, I find airless.) With all respect, I would argue Powell's claim is too one-sided, and puzzling in some ways as well. What, for instance, does he mean when he says that the trial in heaven in A Matter of Life and Death — which involves extended speeches, battling wits, and even battling radios — is "essentially a silent film"?

For cinephiles, the silent era (when Powell got his start) can be a kind of lost Eden, a paradise of "pure cinema" from which the talkies have fallen. The conquest by sound, and the deadening limitations it initially placed on cameras, inspired many to reassert the primacy of images. Yet, given Powell's visual bent, it is striking how many scenes in earlier films by The Archers (as he and Emeric Pressburger named their filmmaking partnership) allow words to stand almost alone: Anton Walbrook's four-minute, single-take speech in the refugee office in Colonel Blimp; the anti- and pro-Nazi speeches by Walbrook and Eric Portman in The 49th Parallel; Portman's history lecture in A Canterbury Tale, Nancy Price's description of the Highland gathering at Oban in I Know Where I'm Going! While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don't-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers' films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what's not there.

Powell and Pressburger both contributed to the scripts of their films, but Emeric Pressburger did the bulk of the writing. He is perennially overlooked and undervalued by fans of The Archers, partly because he was more retiring than Powell (spending his late years quietly in a cottage while his erstwhile partner hooked up with Scorsese and Coppola and produced his monumental autobiography), but also because the qualities he brought to their films were harder to define. Pressburger was a genius at structuring stories, a writer whose words have an extraordinary, multidimensional life, and who also knew when to use no words at all. David Low, creator of the Colonel Blimp character that inspired Pressburger's favorite Archers film, praised the screenwriter's "phenomenal power of story-telling," quipping, "He left Scheherezade standing." (Macdonald, 209) Scheherezade preserved her life by leaving her stories tantalizingly incomplete. Part of Pressburger's genius was to build into his screenplays chasms that the mind must leap, and blanks that the imagination must fill. These leaps of the mind create much of the joy and surprise you feel watching The Archers' movies: the thrill lies not in the arrow or in the target, but in the flight through space.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Colin Stokes: How Movies Teach Manhood

Colin Stokes: How movies teach manhood
TED Talks

When Colin Stokes’ 3-year-old son caught a glimpse of Star Wars, he was instantly obsessed. But what messages did he absorb from the sci-fi classic? Stokes asks for more movies that send positive messages to boys: that cooperation is heroic, and respecting women is as manly as defeating the villain.

To Watch the Talk

Democracy Now Headlines: Palestinian Filmmaker Behind "5 Broken Cameras" Detained at LAX Ahead of Oscars

Palestinian Filmmaker Behind "5 Broken Cameras" Detained at LAX Ahead of Oscars
Democracy Now



A Palestinian filmmaker and his family were detained at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday after arriving to attend this weekend’s Academy Awards. The filmmaker, Emad Burnat, is nominated in the Best Documentary category for "5 Broken Cameras," which documents the growth of a resistance movement to the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in. In a series of Twitter messages, the filmmaker Michael Moore said immigration officers told Burnat he would not be allowed to enter the country even after he showed them his Oscar invite. Burnat and his family were eventually released after Moore phoned Academy attorneys. Moore quoted Burnat as saying: "It’s nothing I’m not already used to. When [you] live under occupation, with no rights, this is a daily occurrence."

Link to Today's Headlines

Saturday Night Live: New Tarantino Movie "Djesus Uncrossed"

Films We Want to See #24: Occupy Love (Canada: Velcrow Ripper, 2012)

Matte Hjort: Film ... has an extraordinary capacity to expand our reality

Film matters, among other things, because it has an extraordinary capacity to expand our reality, to deepen our moral sensibility, and to shape our self-understandings, sometimes by moving us closer to cultures, problems, and realities that are distant from those we know well. That said, I think it is far from being the case that all films matter. The task, I think, for film scholars in the future will be to help to ensure that films that genuinely do matter continue to get made, and that they receive the attention they deserve.

Matte Hjort, "Film ... has an extraordinary capacity to expand our reality." Why Does Film Matter (Intellect Books, 2008)

Films We Want to See #23: Hannah Arendt (Germany/Luxembourg/France: Margarethe von Trotta, 2012: 113 mins)

Films We Want To See #22: The House I Live In (Netherlands/UK/Germany/Japan/Australia/USA: Eugene Jarecki, 2012: 108 mins)

Little Atoms Interviews of Journalist/Filmmaker Adam Curtis

"Adam Curtis is a producer, writer and director of television documentaries such as Pandora's Box, The Mayfair Set, The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and The Trap. Curtis' programs, though always about serious issues, maintain a sense of tongue-in-cheek humor and are characteristic in their extensive use of archive footage. In his film making, Curtis strives to find meaningful connections between historical situations and often focuses on the impact different ideologies have had on modern society. Adam's latest series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace..."

Link to the Two Interviews at Little Atoms

More resources:

Pt 1 of the Little Atoms Interview explores his earlier documentaries, including his influential The Power of Nightmares



The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear

Is the threat of radical Islamism as a massive sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to ‘unite and inspire’ people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies?

To Watch the 3 Part Series

Part 1 — Baby It’s Cold Outside

The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism and draws the parallels between the two of their “optimistic visions to change the world”. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting the US to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through consumerism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernisation and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite “vanguard” to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser’s jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he influences the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted not only by their western-inspired leaders, but Muslims themselves have been affected by jahilliyah and thus both may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him. They continued to have the belief that a vanguard was necessary to rise up and overthrow the corrupt regime and replace with a pure Islamist state. At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson’s “Great Society”. They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, came to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of “Team B”, they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods…

Part 2 — The Phantom Victory

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December 1979 gives a common cause to an extraordinary alliance of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and around the world and to the neo-conservatives in the US, as a key battleground of the Cold War. As the United States provides funding and arms–including even Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Soviet helicopters–to Islamic Mujahideen fighters who would fire them, a young wealthy Saudi called Osama Bin Laden is among the many foreigners drawn to Afghanistan. When the Soviets eventually pull out and when the Eastern Bloc begins to collapse in the late 1980s, both groups falsely believe they are the primary architects of the “Evil Empire’s” defeat. Back in America, the Neo-Conservatives’ aspirations to continue to use the United States military power for further destruction of evils are thrown off track by the ascent of George H. W. Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, attempt to ‘demonise’ Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality, but to their disappointment, the American people do not turn against Clinton. The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support. Zawahiri and bin Laden flee to the sufficiently safe Afghanistan and declare a new strategy; to fight Western-inspired moral decay they must deal a blow to its source — the United States.

Part 3 — The Shadows In The Cave

This final episode addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda, in particular by examining the United States’ role in its creation: After their failed revolutions, bin Laden and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a serious complex organisation of terrorists, and were dependent upon independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad. In order to prosecute bin Laden for the 1998 US embassy bombings, US prosecutors had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden was the head of a massive terrorist organisation called “al-Qaeda”. With the September 11th attacks, Neo-Conservatives in the new Republican government of George W. Bush use this created concept of an organisation to justify another crusade against a new evil enemy, leading to the launch of the War on Terrorism. But after the American invasion of Afghanistan fails to uproot the alleged terrorist network, the Neo-Conservatives focus inwards, searching unsuccessfully for terrorist sleeper cells in America. They then extend the war on “terror” to a war against general perceived evils with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The ideas and tactics also spread to the United Kingdom where Tony Blair uses the threat of terrorism to give him a new moral authority. The repercussions of the Neo-Conservative strategy are also explored with an investigation of indefinitely-detained terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, many allegedly taken on the word of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance without actual investigation on the part of the United States military, and other forms of “pre-emption” against non-existent and unlikely threats made simply on the grounds that the parties involved could later become a threat…


Pt 2 of the Little Atoms Interview above is about his documentary series: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace



All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is a series about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built — “Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.”

To Watch the 3 Part Series

Part 1 — Love and Power

Part one explores the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy. The film tells the story of two perfect worlds. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s. Many of them were also disciples of Ayn Rand. They believed that the new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone could follow their own desires, yet there would not be anarchy. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand. He became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism. But the dream of stability in both worlds would be torn apart by the two dynamic human forces – love and power.

Part 2 — The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

Part two shows how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components–cogs–in a system. But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has again become the model for utopian ideas of human “self-organising networks”, with dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory. This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counter-culture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world. But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But it was too late, the dream of the self-organising network had by now captured imaginations…

Part 3 — The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

This episode looks at why popular culture finds this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed, meaning the retreat into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure. At the heart of the film is Bill Hamilton, a scientist. He argued that human behaviour is really guided by codes buried deep within us–a theory later popularised by Richard Dawkins as the “selfish gene”. It said that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure the codes are passed on for eternity. This final part begins in 2000 in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda, where Hamilton is to help prove his dark theories. But all around him the Congo is being torn apart. The film then interweaves the two stories–the strange roots of Hamilton’s theories, and the history of the West’s tortured relationship with the Congo and technology…


Adam Curtis: Journalist and Filmmaker (Dialogic Archive)

The Expert Witness Show: Richard Stratton - The Capture of Whitey Bulger

[From 2011, Bulger still hasn't been brought to trial. A few days ago Johnny Depp agreed to star in a film directed by Barry Levinson about Whitey Bulger.]

The Capture of Whitey Bulger
The Expert Witness Show

After 16 years on the lam, James “Whitey” Bulger – a notorious Irish mobster from Boston, who was number 2 on the FBI’s most-wanted list for over 14 years – has finally been captured by the FBI.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with noted author Richard Stratton, who has not only researched and written about Bulger, but actually met the man face-to-face when Bulger acted to save Richard from a Mafia hit contract. We’ll talk about Bulger’s history, his turning of FBI agents, the methods used to bring him in, whether or not he’s responsible for a whole string of armed robberies as the infamous “geezer bandit” in Orange County, California…and what secrets he still may have to tell about a thoroughly corrupt FBI that aided him in murdering his rivals.

To Read the rest of the show description and to listen to the interview

Nagisa Oshima: "The concept of 'obscenity' ..."

“The concept of ‘obscenity’ is tested when one dares to look at something that he has an unbearable desire to see but has forbidden himself to look at. When one feels that everything that one had wanted to see has been revealed, ‘obscenity’ disappears, the taboo disappears as well, and there is a certain liberation.”

--Nagisa Oshima, quoted in Oshima in Words and Images

Mumia Abu-Jamal: "The United States Is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth"; Noelle Hanrahan & Stephen Vittoria: "Long Distance Revolutionary" - Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Journey from Black Panthers to Prison Journalist

Mumia Abu-Jamal: "The United States Is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth"
Democracy Now



In a rare live interview, Mumia Abu-Jamal calls into Democracy Now! as the new film, "Long Distance Revolutionary," about his life premieres in New York City this weekend. After 29 years on death row, he is now being held in general population at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution – Mahanoy. "How free are we today, those who claim to be non-prisoners? Your computers are being read by others in government. Your letters, your phone calls are being intercepted," says Mumia Abu-Jamal. "We live now in a national security state, where the United States is fast becoming one of the biggest open-air prisons on earth. We can speak about freedom, and the United States has a long and distinguished history of talking about freedom, but have we exampled freedom? And I think the answer should be very clear: We have not." In 1982, Mumia was sentenced to die for killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He has always maintained his innocence and is perhaps America’s most famous political prisoner. In 2011, an appeals court upheld his conviction, but also vacated his death sentence. It found jurors were given confusing instructions.

Guest:

Mumia Abu-Jamal, former death row prisoner. For decades, Abu-Jamal has argued racism by the trial judge and prosecutors led to his conviction for the killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Last year, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside his death sentence after finding jurors were given confusing instructions that encouraged them to choose the death penalty rather than a life sentence.

To Watch the Interview

"Long Distance Revolutionary": Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Journey from Black Panthers to Prison Journalist

The new documentary, "Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal," premieres today in New York City. We play an excerpt of the film and speak to writer, producer and director Steve Vittoria, as well as Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio, who has interviewed Abu-Jamal many times over the years. The film features many supporters of Mumia, including actress Ruby Dee, writer Tariq Ali, and author Michelle Alexander.

Guests:

Stephen Vittoria, longtime documentary filmmaker. Most recently, he is the writer, director, producer and editor of Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal. The film premiers in theaters in New York City Feb. 1-3. We recently featured his 2005 documentary, One Bright Shining Moment, about Senator George McGovern.

Noelle Hanrahan, director of Prison Radio and a producer of Long Distance Revolutionary.

To Watch the Conversation

Nick Turse: Kill Anything That Moves - New Book Exposes Hidden Crimes of the War Kerry, Hagel Fought in Vietnam

"Kill Anything That Moves": New Book Exposes Hidden Crimes of the War Kerry, Hagel Fought in Vietnam
Democracy Now



Two of the leading figures nominated to head President Obama’s second-term foreign policy establishment have their political roots in the Vietnam War. If confirmed, Chuck Hagel will become the first Vietnam War veteran to head the Pentagon, while John Kerry will helm the State Department after becoming one of the most prominent veterans to oppose the Vietnam War upon his return from duty. Although Vietnam is far behind them, Kerry and Hagel will now have to contend with the longest-running war in U.S. history: Afghanistan. We’re joined by Nick Turse, managing editor of TomDispatch.com and author of the new book, "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam." The title is taken from an order given to the U.S. forces who slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians in the notorious My Lai massacre of 1968. Drawing on interviews in Vietnam and a trove of previously unknown U.S. government documents — including internal military investigations of alleged war crimes in Vietnam — Turse argues that U.S. atrocities in Vietnam were not just isolated incidents, but "the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military."

Guest:

Nick Turse, author, journalist, and managing editor of TomDispatch.com. His new book is Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Other books include The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan and The Complex.

To Watch the Episode

Tim Parks: In Praise of the Language Police

[Tim Parks is talking about translation of literary texts, but I think it is also useful in considering the translation of subtitles in cinema]

In Praise of the Language Police
by Tim Parks
New York Review of Books

...

By the same token, very little is said of the mediating work of translators, even though we know that where a great piece of literature has been translated more than once, the various versions can sound quite different and obviously owe a great deal not just to the technical expertise but also the personality and mindset of people we usually know nothing about. In general, we don’t like to think of creative writing as a joint venture, and when it emerges, for example, that Raymond Carver allowed his work to be drastically edited, our appreciation of him, and indeed the work, is at least temporarily diminished. We want to think of our writers as geniuses occupying positions of absolute independence in relation to a tediously conventional society. Conversely, we abhor, or believe we abhor, the standard and the commonplace.

Yet nobody requires the existence of a standard and a general pressure to conform more than the person who wishes to assume a position outside it. It is essential for the creative writer that there be, or be perceived to be, a usual way of saying things, if a new or unusual way is to stand out and to provoke some excitement. So when D. H. Lawrence in Women in Love writes of Gudrun’s insomnia after first making love to Gerald that she was “destroyed into perfect consciousness,” he needs the reader to sense at once that this is syntactically anomalous; a person can be “transformed into,” “turned into,” “changed into” but not “destroyed into.” The syntactical shock underlines Lawrence’s unconventional view of consciousness as a negative rather than positive state, which again is emphasized by the unexpected use of the word “perfect,” rather than a more immediately understandable and neutral “intense.”

Naturally, anyone writing with this level of creativity needs a copy editor willing to accept that rules can be bent and broken. But that doesn’t mean such editors have no role. It is important that the “special effect” stand out from a background of more conventional prose, and that a deliberate departure not be mistaken as something merely regional, British perhaps, or simply that there not be so much clutter around it of one kind or other that it is hardly noticed. George Orwell, a champion of strict grammar as a vehicle of clear thinking, memorably begins 1984 with a very simple, almost embarrassingly conventional novel-opener of a sentence in order that the anomaly constituted by the last word pack a big punch: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” In a different field, David Hume, when presenting his radical and unconventional philosophy, did everything to remove from his writing any indication of his Scottishness, sending drafts to friends to have them check his writing for “Scottishisms.” It was not that he thought standard English superior, just that he did not want a reader’s attention to be distracted from his main purpose.

The editor’s job then becomes one of helping the writer to see where an unessential, perhaps unconscious departure from the norm is actually draining energy away from places where the text is excitingly unconventional. That is, the editor reminds an author that to construct a coherent identity he has to remember his relationship with society and with the language we share and cannot express ourselves without. To go out on a limb linguistically, accepting no compromise and creating an idiolect that really is entirely your own, may win awed admiration, as did Finnegans Wake, but will likely not attract many readers, and arguably does not allow for the communication of nuance, since all the ordinary reader will understand is that you are indeed off on a trip on your own; even Joyce’s hitherto staunch supporter Pound had no truck with it.

...

To Read the Rest of the Essay

University of Kentucky: 2013 Greek Cinematography - Critical Approach and Discussion

The University of Kentucky and the College of Arts & Sciences, under the initiative of Prof. Haralambos Symeonidis, are inviting you to a series of Greek films with discussion, screened on 3 Sundays at 5.00 p.m. at the UK Athletic Association Auditorium of the William T. Young Library. The screenings are free of charge.

This event is sponsored by the UK College of Arts & Sciences and the Greek Orthodox Church of Lexington.

January 27th: Stella (Greece: Mihalis Kakogiannis, 1955: 90 mins)

February 24: A Touch of Spice (Greece: Tassos Boulmetis, 2003: 108 mins)

March 31: El Greco (Greece: Yannis Smaragdis, 2007: 119 mins)

Films We Want to See #21: War Witch (Canada: Kim Nguyen, 2012)

Films We Want to See #20: No (Chile/France/USA: Pablo Larraín, 2012)

Democracy Now: The Invisible War -- New Film Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic in U.S. Military

[The Invisible War has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary this year.]

The Invisible War: New Film Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic in U.S. Military
Democracy Now



On the heels of a new military survey that the number of reported violent sex crimes jumped 30 percent in 2011, with active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21 accounting for more than half of the of the victims, we speak with Trina McDonald and Kori Cioca, two subjects of "The Invisible War,” a new documentary that examines the epidemic of rape of soldiers within the U.S. military, which won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. "Not only was I astounded by the numbers, but when I started talking to the women and men who had experienced this, I was just so devastated by their stories," says the film’s Academy Award-nominated director, Kirby Dick. "These are women and men who are very idealistic. They joined the military because they wanted to serve their country. They were incredible soldiers. And then, when they were assaulted, they had the courage to come forward, even though many people advised them not to," Dick says

Guests:

Kori Cioca, formerly served in the U.S. Coast Guard, where she was beaten and raped by her supervisor and then charged with adultery because he was married. Cioca is one of the main subjects of the new documentary, The Invisible War.

Trina McDonald, was drugged and raped repeatedly by the military police on her remote Naval station in Adak, Alaska. McDonald is one of the subjects of the new documentary, The Invisible War.

Kirby Dick, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and director of The Invisible War, which just won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

To Watch the Episode

After Words: Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick - The Untold History of the United States

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, "The Untold History of the United States"
hosted by Michael Kazin
After Words



Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick argue that U.S. leaders must chart a course for the future by first honestly facing what they call the country's troubling history of drifting farther away from its democratic traditions. They talk with Michael Kazin, Georgetown University history professor and co-editor of Dissent magazine.

Oliver Stone is the Academy Award winning director of such films as "Platoon," "Wall Street," "Born on the Fourth of July," and "JFK."

Peter Kuznick is a history professor at American University and director of its award-winning Nuclear Studies Institute. He is also in his third term as a distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians.

To Listen to the Episode

To Watch Episodes of the Showtime series The Untold History of United States on Youtube

Daniel Kasman: Notebook's 5th Writers Poll - Fantasy Double Features of 2012

Notebook's 5th Writers Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2012
by Daniel Kasman
Notebook (MUBI)

Looking back at 2012 on what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2012—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2012 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2012 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.

How would you program some of 2012's most interesting films into double features with movies of the past?

To Read the Choices and the Descriptions

Peter Staley and David France: "How to Survive a Plague" - As ACT UP Turns 25, New Film Chronicles History of AIDS Activism in U.S.

[MB: Nominated by the Oscars for Best Documentary]

"How to Survive a Plague": As ACT UP Turns 25, New Film Chronicles History of AIDS Activism in U.S.
Democracy Now



This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — an international direct action advocacy group formed by a coalition of activists outraged over the government’s mismanagement of the AIDS crisis. We speak with ACT UP founding member Peter Staley, one of the longest AIDS survivors in the country; and David France, director of the new documentary "How to Survive a Plague," which tells a remarkable history of AIDS activism and how it changed the country. "I’m alive because of that activism," Staley says of the triple drug therapy he was able to take. "This was a major victory this movie tells about getting these therapies. But that was only the beginning of the battle. Now we have these treatments that can keep people alive, and there are still two to three million dying every year. There are more dying now than when we actually got the therapies to save people. So it’s a huge failure of leadership internationally. And it shows a failure of our own healthcare system."

Guests:

Peter Staley, HIV/AIDS activist featured in How to Survive a Plague. In the mid-’80s, Staley was diagnosed with AIDS. He left his job as a bond trader in New York to work as a full-time activist. He became a founding member of ACT UP in 1987 and served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research until 1991.

David France, director of the new AIDS activism documentary, How to Survive a Plague.

To Watch the Episode

'Zero Dark Thirty' Is bin Laden's Last Victory
by Matt Taibbi
Reader Supported News (Originally published in Rolling Stone)



...

There's no way to watch Zero Dark Thirty without seeing it as a movie about how torture helped us catch Osama bin Laden. That's why I was blown away when I read this morning that Bigelow is now going with a line that "depiction is not endorsement," that simply showing torture does not amount to publicly approving of it.

If Bigelow really means that, I have a rhetorical question for her: Are audiences not supposed to cheer at the end of the film, when we get bin Laden? They cheered in the theater where I watched it. And is Maya a good character or a bad character? Did she cross some dark line in victory like Michael Corrleone, did she lose her moral self and her humanity chasing her goal like Captain Ahab, or is she just a modern-day Sherlock Holmes (or, hell, John McClane) getting his man in the end?

It seemed to me more the latter than anything else. I barely caught a whiff of a "moral journey/descent" storyline in this film - the closest they came to that was in the first scene, where Maya looks a little grossed out by Clarke's methods. A few minutes later, though, she's all street and everything, wearing a hijab and getting some henchman to throw fists at her suspects on command. She went from queasy to hardass in about ten seconds and we didn't linger on the transformation at all.

Bigelow is such a great storyteller that she has to know, deep inside, that the "depiction is not endorsement" line doesn't wash. You want audiences gripped to the screen, you've gotta give them something to root for, or against. This was definitely not a movie about two vicious and murderous groups of people killing and torturing each other in an endless cycle of increasingly brainless revenge. And this was not a movie about how America lost its values en route to a great strategic victory.

No, this was a straight-up "hero catches bad guys" movie, and the idea that audiences weren't supposed to identify with Maya the torturer is ludicrous. Are we really to believe that viewers aren't supposed to be shimmering in anticipation for her at the end, as she paces back and forth with set-fans whooshing back her beautiful red hair, waiting for her copter to come in? They might as well have put a cape and a Wonder Woman costume on her, that's how subtle that was.

Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal clearly spent a lot of time with sources in the CIA who were peddling a version of history where the "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" program, though distasteful, scored us the big prize in the end.

In Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's agonizing and affecting documentary about EIT called Taxi to the Dark Side, he talks about the phenomenon of "force drift" in torture, when interrogators start using harsher methods when the permitted ones don't work. Well, in journalism, what happened with Boal and Bigelow is what you might call "access drift" - when you really, really love the drama of the story you're hearing, you start leaning in the direction of your sources even if the truth doesn't quite cooperate.

Obviously, torture does produce some information, maybe even some good information. If you really squint hard, it may very well be that, technically speaking, there's a lot of truth in the plot of Zero Dark Thirty. It may be that we wouldn't have found bin Laden without torture. And as such, any movie about the hunt for bin Laden that excluded scenes of torture would have been dishonest.

But that's not what's messed up about this movie. The problem had nothing to do with the fact that Bigelow showed torture. It was the way she depicted it - without perspective, and in the context of a pulse-pounding thriller where the audience is clearly supposed to root for the big treasure find.

For one thing, Gibney put out a compelling argument in a Huffington Post piece that the ZD30 storyline is not accurate in the sense that it excluded crucial information. He points to several facts that Bigelow and Boal chose to ignore (and remember, this was supposed to be a "journalistic account," according to Bigelow), like for instance:

Mohammed Al-Qatani, the so-called "20th hijacker," who may have been some part of the inspiration for the "Ammar" character who was tortured in the opening scene, might have been the first detainee to mention the name of bin Laden's courier. But as Gibney points out, al-Qatani gave that information up to the FBI, in legit, torture-free interrogations, before he was whisked away to Gitmo for 49 days of torture that included such insanities as forcing him to urinate on himself (by force-feeding him liquids while in restraints), making him watch a puppet show of him and bin Laden having sex, making him take dance lessons, making him wear panties on his head, and making him wear a "smiley-face" mask, along with the usual sleep and sensory deprivation, arm-hanging, etc. In other words, the key info may have come before they chucked our supposed standards for human decency.

The CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, and throughout this "enhanced interrogation," the former al-Qaeda mastermind continually played down the importance of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man who led the CIA to bin Laden. But the CIA was so sure KSM was telling the truth under torture - so sure waterboarding was a "magic bullet," as Gibney put it to me - that they discounted the lead. So torture may have actually delayed bin Laden's capture.

The CIA took another detainee, Ibn al-Sheik al Libi, and duct-taped his head, put him in a wooden box, shipped him off to Cairo to be waterboarded, and got him to admit under torture that there were links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden. This "intel" became part of Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. on the need to invade Iraq. So while torture might have found us bin Laden, maybe, it also very well might have sent us on one of history's all-time pointlessly bloody wild goose chases, invading Iraq in search of WMDs.

A more accurate movie about the torture program would have been a grotesque comedy that showed grown men resorting to puppet shows and dance routines and fourth-rate sexual indignities dreamed up after spending too much time reading spank mags and BDSM sites - and doing this thousands of times to thousands of people, all over the world, "accidentally" murdering hundreds of people in the process, going to war by mistake at least once as a result of it, and having no clue half the time who they're interrogating (less than 10 percent of "terror suspects" at places like Bagram were arrested by American forces; most of the rest were brought in by Afghanis or other foreigners in exchange for bounties).

...

To Read the Entire Response

Ray McGovern: Excusing Torture, Again

Excusing Torture, Again
by Ray McGovern
Common Dreams



...

The Downside of Torture

Besides the moral opprobrium that the practices brought upon the United States, the CIA’s use of torture alienated many Muslims who otherwise would have felt no sympathy for Islamic extremists. For example, U.S. military interrogators report that the vast majority of jihadists who came to fight against U.S. forces in Iraq were motivated by the disclosures about torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

FBI interrogators also have said their rapport-building techniques with an early detainee, logistics specialist Abu Zubaydah, were succeeding in eliciting important information from him before the CIA interrogators arrived and insisted on applying their brutal methods.

Author Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side writes that the two FBI agents, Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin, “sent back early cables describing Zubayda as revealing inside details of the [9/11] attacks on New York and Washington, including the nickname of its central planner, ‘Mukhtar,’ who was identified as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad [KSM]. …

“During this period, Zubayda also described an Al Qaeda associate whose physical description matched that of Jose Padilla. The information led to the arrest of the slow-witted American gang member in May 2002, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. …

“Abu Zubayda disclosed Padilla’s role accidentally, apparently. While making small talk, he described an Al Qaeda associate he said had just visited the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. That scrap was enough for authorities to find and arrest Padilla” who was suspected of plotting a “dirty bomb” attack inside the United States (although he was never charged with that offense).

In 2009, Soufan broke his personal silence on the topic in an op-ed in the New York Times, citing Zubaydah’s cooperation in providing information about Padilla and KSM before the CIA began the harsh tactics. “It is inaccurate … to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative,” Soufan wrote. “Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.” [NYT, April 23, 2009]

Nevertheless, Bush administration defenders have cited the information wrested from Zubaydah — who was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 — as justification for the interrogation tactics that have been widely denounced as torture.

The problem of eliciting false intelligence was demonstrated by the handling of another al-Qaeda captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who responded to threats of torture by fabricating an operational link between Saddam Hussein’s government and al-Qaeda. It was exactly the kind of information that the Bush administration had been seeking to justify its desired invasion of Iraq.

By Feb. 11, 2003, as the countdown to the U.S. invasion progressed, CIA Director George Tenet began treating al-Libi’s assertions as fact. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Tenet said Iraq “has also provided training in poisons and gases to two al-Qa’ida associates. One of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.”

But the CIA’s promotion of al-Libi’s information ignored the well-founded suspicions voiced by the Defense Intelligence Agency. “He lacks specific details” about the supposed training, the DIA observed. “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.”

The DIA’s doubts proved prescient. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his statements and claimed that he had lied because of both actual and anticipated abuse. In September 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee criticized the CIA for accepting al-Libi’s claims as credible. “No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war,” the committee report said.

Al-Libi ended up in a Libyan prison during the period when Col. Muammar Gaddafi was cooperating with the U.S. in hunting down “terrorists.” Al-Libi “committed suicide” just two weeks after being visited in the Libyan prison by a team from Human Rights Watch in April 2009.

‘No Good Intelligence’

The al-Libi case demonstrated one of the practical risks of coercing a witness to talk. To avoid pain, people often make stuff up, an obvious point that other truth-tellers also have noted. On Sept. 6, 2006, for example, Gen. John Kimmons, then head of Army intelligence told reporters at the Pentagon, in unmistakable language:

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Gen. Kimmons is a rare species – a general officer with guts, not to mention an intelligence career focusing mostly on interrogation practices. He was well aware that President George W. Bush had decided to claim publicly, just two hours later, that the “alternative set of procedures” for interrogation – methods that Bush had approved, like waterboarding – were effective.

So the real experts say one cannot acquire “good intelligence” from torture, i.e. an empirical reality upon which to base sound policy. But what about bad intelligence, especially preferred bad intelligence? If your goal in 2002 and 2003 was to make a case showing operational ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq – when none existed – well, then, torture works like a charm.

Yet, Jose Rodriguez now seeks to rewrite this sordid chapter in the CIA’s history and put his own complicity in a more favorable light.

One could say his first major move in this cover-up came in 2005 when he ordered the destruction of videotaped evidence of these “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Surely, it is easier to soft-pedal the cruel reality of waterboarding and other abusive tactics if people can’t actually see the human suffering.

And, the Washington Post, which once basked in the glory of its investigation of the Watergate cover-up, now gives generous space for a practitioner of both waterboarding and destruction of evidence to make excuses without challenge.

Just think how Official Washington’s attitude toward respect for the law has degraded over the past three decades or so. Not even President Richard Nixon dared to destroy the incriminating tapes of Watergate, even though he knew only too well that the evidence on them would be his undoing.

Yet, Rodriguez never faced criminal charges for destroying 92 videotapes recording hundreds of hours worth of CIA black-site interrogation footage. Rodriguez ordered the tapes destroyed at precisely the time when Congress and the courts were intensifying their scrutiny of the CIA interrogation program. Yet – surprise, surprise – nowhere in Sunday’s Post is there mention of that felony fact.

Indeed, as Rodriguez and his torture-friendly colleagues seek to use the occasion of the new Hollywood blockbuster to burnish their image, they are getting a helping hand from neocon newspapers like the Washington Post.

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Henry A. Giroux: Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal Violence - Pulp Fiction and Other Visual Tragedies

Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal Violence: Pulp Fiction and Other Visual Tragedies
by Henry A. Giroux
Social Identities 1:2 (1995): 333-354

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Violence, Race, and the Politics of Realism

I have no more of a problem with violence that I do with people who like bedroom comedy versus slapstick comedy. It's an aesthetic thing. -- Quentin Tarantino

Extreme violence in Tarantino's films represents a central element in his cinematic style. Tarantino first generated a great deal of controversy through the comic-book style of torture in Reservoir Dogs, gruesomely played out by Michael Madsen who cuts off a hostage policeman's ear and then holds it in his hand while talking to it. Pulp Fiction continues the tradition of hyperreal violence, for example, when Jules just for effect shoots a defenseless college kid. This act of sudden violence is not aimed at some wooden, Hollywood gangsta. On the contrary, the victim is a scared kid and his random murder is senseless and disturbing. Of course, the effects are no less shocking when Vincent accidently blows off the head of a black kid who appears to be barely 17 or 18 years old. These are disturbing representations of violence, endorsed by a director who appears to have "turned murder into performance art."

Tarantino makes no attempts cinematically to rupture or contest the patterns of violence that his films produce or claim to represent. On the contrary, he empties violence of any critical social consequences, offering viewers only the immediacy of shock, humor, and irony as elements of mediation. And none of these elements get beyond the seduction of voyeuristic gazing so as to demand critical involvement. In this sense, the facile consumption of shocking images and hallucinatory delight that is provoked undercut the possibility of educating audiences to "comment on the image instead of allowing it to pass," there is virtually no space in which the audience can unsettle the "`moment of violence' [to allow it to] resonate meaningfully and demand our critical involvement."

Tarantino employs cruelty, humor, and postmodern parody to parade visually his extensive knowledge of film history and to rewrite the dynamic of repetition and difference. For example, the male rape scene in Pulp Fiction does homage to the classic film, Deliverance (1972), but in the end Tarantino's use of parody is about repetition, transgression, and a softening the face of violence by reducing it to the property of film history. In this case, aesthetics is about reordering the audience's sense of trauma through a formalism that denies any vestige of politics. This is violence with an escape hatch, one that suggests that violence is a "force over which we have no control" based on a aesthetics that promotes the false assumption that "violence can be distanced from reality through its apparent autonomy of signs." This is what Tarantino suggests when he claims that:

Violence in real life is one of the worst aspects of America. But in movies-It's fucking fun! One of the funniest, coolest things for me to watch. I get a kick out of it-all right?

Tarantino's comments reveal more than a hip aesthetics that infantalizes violence by reducing it to an arid formalism and slapstick humor, it is also about a cinematic amoralism which separates the representation of violence from real life. His films offer no language for rendering ruthless violence dangerous in its ability to numb us to the senseless brutality that has become a part of everyday life, especially for children and youth. Tarantino justifies his graphic representations of violence through an appeal to realism. He argues that his violent depiction and deceleration of pain is about "stopping movie time and playing the violence out in real time. Letting nothing get in the way of it and letting it happen the way real violence does." But "real" violence comes from somewhere; it is neither innocent, nor does it emerge outside of existing historical contexts and social relationships. More fundamentally, representations of violence, regardless of how realistically they are portrayed, do not rupture or challenge automatically the dominant ideologies that often justify or celebrate violence in real life. An uncritical appeal to realism does not allow audiences to think imaginatively about ways to disrupt conventional patterns of violence. Tarantino's celebration of realism does not offer any normative grounds on which to challenge violence or to resist power that is oppressive and brutal; on the contrary, the aesthetic of realism serves pedagogically to justify abstracting the representation of violence from the ethical responsibility of both filmmakers and the audience to challenge it as an established social practice.

Tarantino's view of violence represents more than bad politics, it also breeds a dead-end cynicism. His films are filled with characters who have flimsy histories, are going no where, and live out their lives without any sense of morality or justice. In Tarantino's celluloid world, the pursuit of happiness is a bad dream and violence is one of the few options for exercising any sense of human agency. Tarantino acknowledges that his own twenty-something sense of the world was informed less by the social and political events of the `60's and `70s than by French thrillers and Hollywood gangster movies: "The attitude I grew up with was that everything you've heard is lies." In the end, violence for Tarantino submits to the demands of a publicly celebrated, stylized formalism, but the price that is exacted exceeds instant notoriety. What Tarantino ends up with are films in which ultra violence serves as a gateway to sadistic humor at everyone's expense, a chance to depict brutality while assuring the audience that its own complicity and involvement, whether in symbolic terms or in real life, can be avoided.

Tarantino's fame, in part, is due to his willingness to substitute an aesthetic radicalism for a political and moral one. For all of his technical, cinematic virtuosity, he cannot escape the surfacing of his own politics and values conveyed through his storytelling and the dialogue he gives to his characters. What betrays Tarantino's attempts to render the underbelly of society on its own terms is the overt racism that informs his films, evident on a number of registers. First, there is the racist language that streams forth from his characters in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Racist slurs and verbal assaults abound in these films, especially in Pulp Fiction. There is a disturbing quality to this language, especially in a film that represents a cinematic tradition that Amy Taubin calls a "new acceptable white male art form." The use of supposedly naturalist, racist language aimed largely at white audiences appears to have a jokey quality about it, a kind of porno subtext that suggest that as whites "we're saying something really nasty and really evil, and let's share this secret thrill." This form of verbal racist violence did not escape Allen and Albert Hughes, the black film directors behind Menace II Society , who challenge Tarantino's repeated use of the word "nigger" in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino has defended himself against the use of racist language in his films. He response is worth quoting at length:

My feeling is the word nigger is probably the most volatile word in the English language. The minute any word has that much power, as far as I'm concerned, everyone on the planet should scream it. No word deserves that much power. I'm not afraid of it. That's the only way I know how to explain it.

What Tarantino fails to acknowledge is the history that informs the term and how the power of the word "nigger" is tied to the power of white dominant groups who traditionally control how meanings are produced, circulated, and rewarded. The point being that the term is powerful for a set of complex reasons that cannot be left unexplained. Moreover, the use of the terms by different groups of whites and blacks has different connotations. The rapper, Ice Cube, makes this clear in his comment "Look, when we call each other nigger it means no harm, in fact in Compton [CA] it is a friendly word. But if a white person uses it, it's something different, it's a racist word." Similarly, as Robin Kelly points out in Race Rebels the word "nigger" has multiple meanings in black history and in the current context of black popular culture. Unaware of the complex nuances associated with the different contextual uses of the word "nigger," Tarantino parades the term unself-consciously before audiences for whom the signifying power of the term is far from open-ended. For many whites, the word "nigger" is deeply inscribed in their memories and minds less as a term of cultural resistance than as an expression of their support for racist discourse and values. Bell hooks captures the racist implications of the use of the word nigger by white men in films such as Pulp Fiction. She writes:

Yet the film (via these...white men) can also legitimate racist folks by providing a public space where suppressed racist slurs and verbal assaults can be voiced and heard. No one seemed to worry that the film would offer white folks license to verbalize racist aggression.

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Merriam-Websters' Word-of-the-Day: mise-en-scène

mise-en-scène \meez-ahn-SEN\

noun

1 a : the arrangement of actors and scenery on a stage for a theatrical production

b : stage setting

2 a : the physical setting of an action (as of a narrative or a motion picture) : context

b : environment, milieu

"Rick Owens creates worlds more than fashion. His shows are famous for their otherworldly ambience, from the mise-en-scène (from foam to fire to electrifying light shows) to the soundtrack." — From a post by Matthew Schneier on Style.com's Style File blog, November 5, 2012

"Studio pictures tend to have a more controlled and artificial mise-en-scène no matter how elaborate and detailed the setting. The lighting is, after all, unnatural, space is confined, and locations are constructed. The emphasis is more on the interaction of characters and less on the interaction of character and environment." — From Ira Konigsberg's 1987 publication The Complete Film Dictionary

Erin Aubry Kaplan: 'Django' an unsettling experience for many blacks

'Django' an unsettling experience for many blacks
by Erin Aubry Kaplan
LA Times

Quentin Tarantino's slave-era spaghetti western has some questioning the propriety of using a still-festering period of U.S. history as a platform for a bloody, profanely comic pop entertainment.

Tracey White's initial impression of "Django Unchained," Quentin Tarantino's new slave-era shoot-'em-up extravaganza, could be summed up in three words: smart, funny and ugly. Sitting through a recent screening in Beverly Hills, the L.A. costume designer was mostly absorbed and found herself laughing aloud at particularly outrageous moments.

But White, who is black, said her feelings evolved significantly. Two days after reflecting on the matter of slavery and Tarantino's treatment, she pronounced the movie mostly ugly.

"He [Tarantino] gets a good product out of it in terms of wit and a visual look," said White. "But when it was over I found myself wondering, 'What is he trying to do?' I enjoyed the movie when I was in there, but I still have a problem with Tarantino when he deals with our race."

White will certainly not be alone among African Americans in her ambivalence about the gleefully outrageous film. While "Django" has nabbed almost uniformly warm reviews and four NAACP Image Award nominations (including for best picture), the fact is that it is an extremely Hollywood-ized vision of a critical black American experience.

Some blacks are already calling the revenge-fantasy movie, especially its graphic and highly stylized violence, insensitive, exploitative and ahistorical. Filmmaker Spike Lee, a longtime critic of Tarantino, said this month that he refuses to see the movie, and calls his spaghetti-western approach to slave history "disrespectful."

Many moviegoers will know something of what they're getting into. Violence and the liberal use of black idioms and so-called urban culture are Tarantino hallmarks, notably in early films such as "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown," and they've always stirred controversy. But this movie is different because it mines slavery, the complicated source material for so much black culture and fountain of violence in American history.

It is an institution whose horrors need no exaggerating, yet "Django" does exactly that, either to enlighten or entertain. A white director slinging around the n-word in a homage to '70s blaxploitation à la "Jackie Brown" is one thing, but the same director turning the savageness of slavery into pulp fiction is quite another.

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Cecil Brown: Tarantino's Django: Unchained - Hollywood’s Nigger Joke

Tarantino's Django: Unchained: Hollywood’s Nigger Joke
by Cecil Brown
Counterpunch



In order for a joke to work, Mary Douglas, the eminent British anthropologist, wrote that one had to have a social context for it to operate in. “We must ask what are the social conditions for a joke to be both perceived and permitted,” she asked in her wonderful little essay, “Jokes.”

“My hypothesis,” she writes“is that a joke is seen and allowed when it offers a symbolic pattern of a social pattern occurring at the same time.”

With Django: Unchained, the symbolic pattern–I’d call it historical context–is Hollywood itself. “If there is no joke in the social structure,” Mrs Douglas observed, “no other joke can appear.” In Hollywood, there are lots of jokes in the system!

The social pattern that allows Quentin Tarantino’s “Nigger joke” to work is set in the South, two years before the Civil War, but my point is that this is only a pretext for Hollywood itself.

Some critics, like Betsy Sharkey in the Times, think this film is a masterpiece. Sharkey calls it, “the most articulate, intriguing, provoking, appalling, hilarious, exhilarating, scathing and downright entertaining film yet.”

African American critic Wesley Morris hated it. He called it “unrelenting tastelessness — [...] exclamatory kitsch — on a subject as loaded, gruesome, and dishonorable as American slavery.”

Ishmael Reed, the novelist, pointed out how the Weinstein Company promoted an advertising campaign to get a black audience by promoting Jamie Foxx as the star. In fact, Foxx is only one of the stars, along with Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio. As Reed points out, Foxx spends most of his time looking at Mr.Waltz and then looking at Mr. DiCaprio, with a puzzled look on his face, as if to say, What’s dese white folks, talkin ‘bout?

My aim in his essay is to examine the way in which the symbolic system is a reflection of the social system. “What are the social conditions for a joke to be both perceived and permitted,” Mrs Douglass wrote in that little essay, “Jokes.”

What are the social conditions that would permit Django to be the big howling, empty nigger joke that it is?

One of these social conditions, certainly, involves the relationship between black actors and Hollywood as a symbol of the plantation system.

In his review of the film, for example, Mr. Reed said that Sam Jackson, in the role of the conniving, omnipresent, evil slave, is “playing himself.”

If Jackson had not dominated the Hollywood system in such a sly way, then his role as Stephen, the master-worshipping house slave to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) would not have its loaded, edgy, uncanny realism. The plantation is called CandieLand (Candyland) and is meant to refer to Hollywood itself as a producer of entertainment (Candy). Get it?

If Jamie Foxx is not known in Hollywood as a resourceful hustler, who will play almost any role, then his part as the “bad nigger” Django would not be so compelling (and lubricous). If he was not the “New nigger on the block,” then the confrontation between him and Sam Jackson’s character, Stephen, the off-the-hook house slave, the scene would not be powerful (and dumb) at the same time.

The dramatis persona forms a homology with the enacted characters on the screen. The key that unlocks Tarantino’s sensationalistic mosaic is that it reveals the inner game of how the Hollywood studio and the plantation slave institution exploited black people.

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