Justin Vicari: Colonial fictions: Le Petit Soldat and its revisionist sequel, Beau Travail

Colonial fictions: Le Petit Soldat and its revisionist sequel, Beau Travail
by Justin Vicari
Jump Cut



Strip-mining profitable seams for their last-ditch stores of gold nuggets, the movie sequel, that Hollywood Frankenstein, is synonymous with commercial exploitation. Among art films there are hardly any sequels. Each successive wave of young filmmakers seems under its own Poundian obligation at least to Make It New, if not utterly to tear down the vaunted icons of the previous generation. By their nature, commercial sequels typically conform to an aesthetic status quo, if they can even be said to have an aesthetic. Leftovers, retreads, proofs of formula and “sure-thing” bankability, sequels throw nothing into question and, whatever improbable shapes they do take, are rarely new departures.

For all of these overly familiar reasons, a term like “revisionist sequel” or “art-film sequel” sounds like a barely conceivable oxymoron. We would find it questionable if we heard about a sequel, for instance, that reunites the ennui-sufferers of L’Avventura for yet another vacation where someone else goes missing, or examines the adult married life of the young couple from Blue Velvet, or sets Travis Bickle down on some Kansas farm. Indeed, the more complete and satisfying a cinematic statement, the less we can conceive of a different director coming along and adding his or her own vision to it. And yet, Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (Good Work, 1999) is a kind of sequel, nearly forty years later, to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1960), in that Denis borrows the hero of Godard’s film, Bruno Forestier. These two French films from disparate decades enter into a conversation with each other through the common link of this recurring character, who is even played by the same actor, Michel Subor.

One of the least cited films in Godard’s early canon, The Little Soldier takes place during the French-Algerian war, but far from the war’s official battleground, in the thick of its peripheral action in Geneva, where Bruno works as a young French secret agent against an Algerian terrorist network. Although Bruno is a pro-France conservative, he experiences qualms of conscience when asked to shoot Palivoda, a prominent radio figure and rebel leader. “If I killed him,” Bruno says in voiceover, “I’d feel like a loser . . . No one can force a soldier to kill.” Bruno’s sinister and jingoistic commander, Jacques (Henri-Jacques Huet), begins to suspect him of disloyalty.

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This is What Democracy Looks Like (USA: Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, 2000)

Big Noise Films

The real story of what happened in the streets of Seattle during the 1999 WTO protests. Shot by over 100 cameras in the streets of the Seattle WTO protests, it is a beautiful, passionate and stunning look at a moment that changed global movements forever.

Hell on Wheels (USA: Bob Ray, 2007: 90 mins)

Watch it Online: Hell on Wheels (USA: Bob Ray, 2007: 90 mins)

Ann Turner: Labor Day by the Numbers

Labor Day by the Numbers by Ann Turner (Economic Policy Institute)

Chris Hedges: Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire

(I will be there... come, join us, in defiance)

Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire
by Chris Hedges
Truthdig

...

What are we now? What do we believe? What economic model explains the irrationality of looting the U.S. Treasury to permit speculators at Goldman Sachs to make obscene profits? How can Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, tout a “jobless recovery”? How much longer can we believe the fantasy that global markets will replace nation states and that economics will permit us to create a utopian world where we will all share the same happy goals? When will we denounce the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When we will we realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the bitter enemies of freedom and the common good?

Corporations are pushing through legislation in the United States that will force us to buy defective, for-profit health insurance, a plan that will expand corporate monopolies and profits at our expense and leave tens of millions without adequate care. Corporations are blocking all attempts to move to renewable and sustainable energy to protect the staggering profits of the oil, natural gas and coal industries. Corporations are plunging us deeper and deeper as a nation into debt to feed the permanent war economy and swell the military budget, which consumes half of all discretionary spending. Corporations use lobbyists and campaign contributions to maintain arcane tax codes that offer them tax havens and tax evasions. Corporations are draining the treasury while the working class sheds jobs, sees homes foreclosed and struggles to survive in a new and terrifying global serfdom. This has been the awful price of complacency.

Protests will begin several days before the summit. Many of the activities are being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. There will be a march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the center’s Antiwar Committee stated, “has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. … ” There will be at least three tent cities, in addition to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days later will march on the Convention Center. The encampment and the march are being organized by Bail Out the People Movement (BOTM). The Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), Pittsburgh United and other organizations will host events including a panel on corporate globalization featuring former World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a “People’s Tribunal.” There will be a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

But expect difficulties. The Secret Service has so far denied protesters permits while it determines the size of the “security perimeter” it will impose around the world leaders. Pittsburgh has contracted to bring in an extra 4,000 police officers at an estimated cost of $ 9.5 million. Activist groups have reported incidents of surveillance and harassment. The struggle to thwart the voices of citizens will be as fierce as the struggle to amplify the voices of the criminal class that is trashing the world’s economy. These elites will appear from behind closed doors with their communiqués and resolutions to address us in their specialized jargon of power and expertise. They will attempt to convince us they have not lost control. They will make recommitments to free-trade agreements from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, which have all thrust a knife into the backs of the working class. They will insist that the world can be managed and understood exclusively through their distorted lens of economics. But their day is over. They are the apostles of a dead system. They maintain power through fraud and force. Do not expect them to go without a struggle. But they have nothing left to say to us.

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Mike Dawson: Is Scream a Parody, Pastiche, or Post Modern Thriller?

Is Scream a Parody, Pastiche, or Post Modern Thriller?
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema



In December 1996 Scream, a film written by Kevin Williamson, and directed by Wes Craven was released for its American audience to see. The film had a unique element, which distinguished it from other horror movies that proceeded it. It was aware of the existence of other horror films. The film follows a group of teenagers in a small Californian town as they are killed one by one by a serial killer. The central characters all watch horror movies, and constantly draw ironic reference from their experiences or what they’re doing to what has happened in the horror movies they’ve already seen. Scream has been referred to as many things, a parody is one of the most common. Critics such as Kim Newman and Barry Norman have described it as a parody, but is this a correct application of the word. Is Scream a parody of previous horror films? The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a parody as: “A mocking imitation…ridiculing the stylistic habits of an author…by exaggerated mimicry.” (Baldick, 2001, 185) This definition gives very specific criteria for a parody, and not all of these criteria are met in Scream. It does mock horror movies, which have preceded it and ridicules the conventions that their authors have created. “They’re all the same, some stupid killer stalking some big breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door, it’s insulting.” (Williamson, 1996) But as the above quote illustrates the film mostly mocks through the characters references to the horror films, not through imitation. The imitation is done in the film as seriously as the horror films it imitates. It is not exaggerated either, if anything the imitation of films from the Halloween series or the Friday the 13th series is scaled down in comparison, and made more realistic. Both these series of films feature the invincible killers Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees who can be shot, decapitated, blown up, fall from great heights and still come back for more. The killers in Scream are grounded in reality because of their own mortality. The body count reaches ten including the killers. This is substantially lower than most slasher horror movies. Friday 13th Part VII The New Blood gets up to twenty three by its conclusion. It is also approximately thirty minutes longer than the average slasher horror film giving the plot line longer to develop. “Unlike most horror movies, Scream was made on a decent budget and stars people you’ve heard of.” (Hicks, 1997)

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PR Watch: Soft Drink Industry Using Smokin' PR

Soft Drink Industry Using Smokin' PR
PR Watch
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 2009

Soft drink companies are joining the list of corporations scrambling to use tobacco industry public relations tactics to influence legislation, in this case to scuttle a proposal to tax sodas and sugary drinks to help fund health care. A front group formed and funded by the beverage industry called Americans Against Food Taxes (AAFT) says on its Web site, NoFoodTaxes.com, that it is a "coalition of concerned citizens" including "financially strapped families," but its members are the world's biggest soda pop and sugary-drink manufacturers, along with the nation's biggest convenience store and fast food chains. AAFT is running TV ads in the Washington, D.C. area that show a slender adult couple and their children on a family camping trip while a voice-over says, "This is no time for Congress to be adding taxes on the simple pleasures we all enjoy. ... We all want to improve health care, but taxes never made anyone healthy. Education, exercise and balanced diets do that." Yale University researcher Kelly Brownell says the soft drink companies are using the same tactics that the tobacco industry uses to ward off taxes: promoting personal responsibility as the answer, offering "healthier" versions of their products that have negligible benefits, abdicating responsibility for abuse of their products and claiming a tax on soda would be an attack on free choice.

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Gabriela Martinez: Nation

I define nation as a cultural community made up of people who live within the same territorial boundaries, share a common set of cultural myths, national language or languages, obey the same laws of the land, and respond to the same symbols created by the state for unifying and identifying their nation-state (following Fossum, 2003: p. 5). An important aspect of understanding national identity, especially in the 20th century, is the concept of nation building — the process of integrating marginal people into the national societal and economic framework. Nation building includes forging social cohesion, national unity, and solid national institutions within a stable political system, and also promoting development and other economic and cultural processes aimed at establishing a certain recognizable national identity for most citizens of the land (Martin-Barbero, 1993; Koonings and Kruijt, 1999).

Latin American societies began their nation building process in the 19th century after gaining independence from Spain and Portugal; and throughout the 20th century, nation-states have been trying to consolidate their national identities. Today the process continues accompanied by the political, economic, and social conflicts that have persisted throughout the 20th century. In many countries during the 20th century, governments first used cinema and later television in nation building processes where goals of modernization significantly intertwined with goals of strengthening national identity (López, 2000; Simis, 2002). However, since cinema arrived in Latin America as an import from Europe and the United States, it has also contributed to fostering neocolonial economic, technological and cultural dependency. Not only in terms of media but also in many other ways, newly independent countries have continued as peripheries of European powers and the United States (Paranaguá, 1985; Shohat and Stam, 1994; Miller, Govil, McMurrin, Maxwell, and Wang, 2005).

---Gabriela Martínez, "Cinema law in Latin America: Brazil, Peru and Colombia." (Jump Cut #50: Spring 2008)

Works Cited in this excerpt:

Fossum, J.E. (2003). The transformation of the nation-state: Why compare the EU and Canada? ARENA Working Papers WP 01/19 www.arena.uio.no/publications

Koonings, K. & Kruijt, D. (Ed.) (1999). Societies of Fear: The legacy of civil war, violence and terror in Latin America. New York: Zed Books.

López, A.M. (2000). Early cinema and modernity in Latin America. In Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 (pp 48-78). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Martin-Barbero, J. (1993). Communication, culture and hegemony: From the media to mediations. London & New York: Sage.

Miller, T., Govil, N., McMurrin, J., Maxwell, R., & Wang, T. (2005). Global Hollywood 2. London: British Film Institute.

Paranaguá, P. (1985). Cinema na América Latina: Longe de Deus e perto de Hollywood. Porto Alegre, Brasil: L&PM.

Shohat, E. & Stam, R. (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge.

Simis, A. (2002). Movies and moviemakers under Vargas. In Latin American Perspectives 2002; 29; 106 (pp 106-114). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Michelle Orange: Taking Back the Knife - Girls Gone Gory

Taking Back the Knife: Girls Gone Gory
by Michelle Orange
The New York Times



...

For the most part, except for a few breakouts like “Shaun of the Dead” (and remakes of still-vital foreign horror films), mainstream American horror has become, like pornography, mainly a cinema of graphic escalation. Though often associated with exploitative fare, the director Rob Zombie, whose recent release, “Halloween II,” revamps another 1970s proto-slasher (and one of the original “final girls,” the character Laurie Strode), says the genre’s indulgence has been its undoing.

“The ’80s are the decade that ruined everything for everybody,” he said. “The soul went away, and it became gore for the sake of gore, and kids were cheering at killings and yelling and screaming. It became a roller coaster ride. And of course once something becomes a roller coaster, all you can do is build a bigger, more extreme roller coaster. That’s where I think horror movies really got perverted.”

One feminist who would agree with that is the novelist Rita Mae Brown, who wrote a slasher sendup called “The Slumber Party Massacre” (1982). Under the auspices of the producer Roger Corman, however, the movie was denuded of its satiric trimmings. Ms. Brown, reached at her home in Virginia, is philosophical about the experience. “Horror films are one of the last places where women will make progress,” she said, “because they go to the root of adolescence. They attract adolescence, on some level, even if you’re 50.”

Twenty-seven years later Ms. Cody’s similar attempt at subversion led to pressure simply to tow the slasher line. “That temptation was there,” Ms. Cody said. “I think there were some people involved who would have liked to have made a straight horror film.” Ultimately, however, Ms. Cody’s script prevailed intact. The risk of mixing things up a little was mitigated, it turns out, by the fact that women are currently helping to prop up hard-core horror releases.

It is a development that has confounded even those buying fake blood by the barrel. Mr. Zombie is baffled by the trend. And so is Debbie Liebling, the former president for production at the recently dissolved Fox Atomic, a studio that was dedicated to low-budget, teen-oriented genre films like “Turistas.”

“I’m not sure what the attraction is, psychologically, for females,” she said in a recent interview. “I would love to know why girls are going to see ‘Saw,’ because I have no idea.”

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The Fourth World War (USA: Rick Rowley, 2003)

To Watch The Fourth World War

Left Field Cinema: Review of Lars von Trier's Antichrist

Left Field Cinema: Review of Lars von Trier's Antichrist

On the Media: Cover Ups

Cover Ups
On the Media (WNYC)

Should reporters lie or misrepresent themselves in order to get an important story? Undercover reporting has long been an effective, exciting and, some would argue, necessary journalistic tool. But at a time when the public's trust in the press is waning, can journalists afford to lie? In a piece that originally aired last fall, Brooke Gladstone talks with undercover reporters and their critics.

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On the Media: Report Card

Report Card
On the Media

Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper serving U.S. armed forces worldwide, reported this week that the military is in effect screening journalists who wish to embed with troops. Triggered in part by an interview on this program, Stars and Stripes confirmed that a Washington PR firm has provided evaluations of reporters’ relative degrees of positivity. Stars and Stripes senior managing editor Howard Witt explains. Meanwhile, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, military spokesperson for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, says official DOD policy forbids restricting access to reporters based on their past coverage.

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Ted Rall: CIA Atrocities Revealed to a National Shrug

(Courtesy of Dandelion Salad

CIA Atrocities Revealed to a National Shrug: We Have met The Nazis, And They Are Us
By Ted Rall
Information Clearing House

Godwin's Law be damned--it's impossible to read the newly-released CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of the Third Reich.

Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in Lhasa, that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out criminals' eyes and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities were stylistically distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians or the Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war crimes were characterized by methodical precision, the application of "rational" technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality and the perversion of medical science.

Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told the latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong.

"The CIA's secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy," observed The New York Times. We have much in common with the Germans.

"In July 2002," the declassified report reveals, a CIA officer "reportedly used a 'pressure point' technique: with both of his hands on the detainee's neck, [he] manipulated his fingers to restrict the detainee's carotid artery." Another agent "watched his eyes to the point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out; then…shook the detainee to wake him. This process was repeated for a total of three applications on the detainee."
The CIA's rinse-lather-repeat approach to torture is reminiscent of Dr. Sigmund Rascher's experiments at Dachau and a parallel project conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army's infamous Unit 731 in occupied Manchuria in 1942-43. Rascher, who was tried for war crimes after World War II, froze or lashed detainees nearly to death, then revived them over and over. German and Japanese doctors developed detailed protocols governing the severity of exposure to which inmates could be subjected--protocols seized by U.S. occupation forces and turned over to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA.

So it was in the CIA's prisons at Guantánamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia, eastern Europe, Thailand and elsewhere.

(Or, to be more accurate, so it is. Bush publicly banned torture in 2006, but we know it was still going on as of 2007. Obama supposedly banned it again earlier this year, but then his CIA director Leon Panetta told Congress the agency reserves the right to keep doing it. Until the entire secret prison network is dismantled and every single prisoner released, it would be absurd to assume that torture is not continuing.)

Among the verbal treasures in the CIA papers is the "Water Dousing" section of the "Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention," which "allow for water to be applied using either a hose connected to tap water, or a bottle or similar container as the water source." Ah, the glorious war on terror. Detainees may be soaked in water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as 20 minutes--no longer, no colder.

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Mike Dawson: World Cinema Masterpiece - L'Atalante (France: Jean Vigo, 1934)

World Cinema Masterpiece: L'Atalante
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema



Much has been written and spoken about this film in the many decades since Jean Vigo’s short but fruitful career came to an abrupt end. A French director who’s complete cannon of work includes three short films and one feature all made in the 1930’s. Given the quality of this work, had the man lived beyond his twenty-nine years he would have quite possibly delivered a substantial number of films which we would have come to consider classics. The cynic amongst us might argue that Vigo’s status is in fact due to his untimely death not in spite of it, and had tuberculosis not taken him, then he wouldn’t be remembered in such a rose tinted light. For the cynics there is simply one thing left to do – watch L’Atalante. Any debate as to the films value is rendered null and void, whether you enjoy the film or not its qualities are difficult to deny.

The film is a lyrical and romantic story of a pair of young newly weds, Juliette and Jean who immediately after marrying begin to settle into their new life aboard a working boat heading to Paris by the canal. Jean is the skipper, and under him are two deck hands Jules and Le Camelot. All four live together on the relatively small, and claustrophobic boat which is filled with not only themselves but the crews belongings including the vast collection of traveling memorabilia which Jules has acquired from the many nations he has visited. Problems emerge quickly as each of the occupants become irritated with the other, and the heartfelt stability of the newly weds begins to crumble as the couple squabble and bicker over petty issues and a lack of personal space. Juliette soon comes under the spell of a Parisian peddler, who attempts to court her affections, given the difficulties of the marriage his maneuvers are effective and she soon leaves Jean in search of a more exciting and tolerable existence away from the reclusive squallier she’s been calling home.

The story is fairly simple; its execution is where the films reputation stems from. Firstly it is exceptionally honest with its charmingly simple characters. Neither Jean or Juliette are completely to blame for the disintegration of their relationship, and equally neither of them are completely innocent. There is also something tender and natural about Vigo’s direction, even in the films most heightened sections like a brief bar room brawl are played relatively naturalistically for the time. A surprise comes later when the film very briefly and subtly merges realism and surrealism, the beautiful and touching moment is set up by the films romantic notion that you can see the one you love when you put your head in water and open your eyes, Juliette tells Jean that this is how she knew she’d marry him, because she saw him in the water. Later after Juliette has left him Jean in a moment of despair drops himself off the barge and into the murky canal waters below, whilst under he sees the ghostly figure of his estranged wife and decides to resurface. There is something endlessly watchable about L’Atalante, it is riddled with beautifully simple moments which warm the heart, be it Juliette’s amusement at a ghastly puppet Jules has acquired in his travels, or a man pretending that a tattoo of a face his smoking a cigarette, using his navel as a mouth, or just simply the energy with which everyone moves around the boat, or the humour in their superficial conflicts. It also presents the differences between country and city living in a subtle and not manipulative manner as Juliette wanders the metropolitan that are both unfamiliar and frightening to her sheltered existence.

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Tim Robbins: "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine"; On Activism in Hollywood from the 1930s to the Present."

Robbins, Tim. "Actor, Director Tim Robbins Takes Up Historic Vietnam War Protest in Production of “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.” Democracy Now (August 27, 2009)

---. "On Activism in Hollywood from the 1930s to the Present." Democracy Now (August 27, 2009)

Crude (USA: Joe Berlinger, 2009)

Matt Taibbi: The Great American Bubble Machine

The Great American Bubble Machine: From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again
by Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

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Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs
CounterSpin

Goldman Sachs, Wall Street profiteering and... vampire squids. Wait, what was that last one? Journalist Matt Taibbi wrote a long takedown of the venerable Wall Street firm in Rolling Stone. Business journalists pronounced themselves mostly unimpressed with Taibbi's analysis, and troubled by his language—like calling the company 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.' Subtle it is not. But what should we make of the reaction to the piece, from Wall Street and from other reporters? And does reporting like Taibbi's shine a different sort of light on the financial industry, or—as some of Taibbi's critics have it—distract us from more important matters?

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Also:

Matt Taibbi: The Big Takeover (Rolling Stone)

Matt Taibbi: Inside the Great American Bubble Machine (Video)

Katherine Harmon: Role of physicians and psychologists in interrogation of terrorism suspects reexamined

(Courtesy of Rob Sica)

Role of physicians and psychologists in interrogation of terrorism suspects reexamined
By Katherine Harmon
Scientific American

Physicians and psychologists played a larger role in the use of torture in interrogation of terrorism suspects than previously asserted, according to a report released yesterday by the nonprofit organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

"Health professionals were involved at every stage in the development, implementation and legitimization of this torture program," the report's authors wrote.

The paper, based on an analysis of the Inspector General's August 24 report into the treatment of detainees after 9/11, describes interrogation techniques beyond those that had been addressed before, including hooding, confinement in a box, mock execution and liquid diets. The so-called enhanced interrogation techniques "represent clear violations of well-established medical ethics governing the behavior of health professionals," the PHR authors note.

A 2004 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) memo about the treatment of "high value" detainees noted, "The goal of interrogation is to create a state of learned helplessness and dependence conducive to the collection of intelligence," Reuters reported.

Authors of the new analysis, however, did not find such practices to be appropriate. "Health professionals were complicit in selecting and then rationalizing these abusive methods whose safety and efficacy in eliciting accurate information have no valid basis in science," they write.

The organization also raises questions about the ethics of medical note-taking during some of the interrogations. "Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation," Scott Allen, lead study author and PHR medical advisor, said in a prepared statement.

Although members of the medical community oversaw many of the interrogation techniques, their presence did not necessarily prevent torture, according to the report authors. "The required presence of health professionals did not make interrogation methods safer, but sanitized their use, escalated abuse, and placed doctors and psychologists in the untenable position of calibrating harm rather than serving as protectors and healers," Steven Reisner, PHR's psychological ethics advisor, said in a prepared statement.

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Ayumi Suzuki: A Nightmare of Capitalist Japan - Miyazaki's Spirited Away

A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away
by Ayumi Suzuki
Jump Cut



...

Miyazaki’s sophisticated art lies not in creating marketable child-friendly animation, but in presenting social criticism through child characters in his animated films. On this point, Miyazaki shares something with a cultural critic of a previous generation, Walter Benjamin (1936). Both Benjamin and Miyazaki have faith in two things, storytelling and children.

Stories can transmit knowledge by integrating that knowledge in a fantastical tale. In this way, listeners can learn not just through receiving information but also by internalizing knowledge as experience. Benjamin explains that there's a new form of communication made possible by new media, which in his time consisted of radio, photography and cinema. This new kind of communication transmits information, which has timeliness and does not leave room for listeners to expand their imagination or capacity for interpretation, because this transmission of information requires that explanations be given at the same time. In contrast, stories provide informational cues that trigger creative interpretations on the part of their listeners, and each different interpretation, as it's created, becomes a personal experience which lasts in the listener's mind. For that reason, Benjamin distinguished storytelling from information giving, and in this vein, Miyazaki is a storyteller who uses his films to bequeath his social knowledge.

Another common element between the two thinkers is their faith in children, and they admire the quality of youthful minds to be filled with curiosity and stay free from the task-minded business of modern day living. Miyazaki believes in the cunning and the high spirits in children; therefore, he utilizes adolescent characters in his films to explore a "mystical"world, which in fact is a fantasized version of social reality. In this way, his films echo thoughts of Benjamin (1936), who says, “The wisest thing – so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day – is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits” (p.11).

This concept of representing a reality through a veil of fantasy can also be found in a Japanese traditional art, Ukiyo-e. Japanese animators have inherited visual aesthetics from the style of the art of Ukiyo-e (Murakami, 2000; Looser, 2006). Cavallaro (2006) points out that Miyazaki, in particular, has an aesthetic similar to Ukiyo-e in terms of his use of two-dimensional drawing and water color. There may be a further philosophical connection between Miyazaki’s animation and Ukiyo-e. As a term, Ukiyo-e is usually translated as "images of the floating world"; literally [Uki: float]+[Yo: world]+[E: pictures].

Ukiyo refers to the world without Buddhist enlightenment; that is to say, the world filled with consciousness of mortality. Buddhist teachings warn against craving for anything that is ephemeral or not eternal. People suffer when they lose something they crave, and that moment of loss must come because nothing stays the same. Without enlightenment, people will continue to find this ever-changing world the very source of grief. Our world of grief is Ukiyo.

Ukiyo-e artists depict scenes from "pleasure quarters" (the floating world) such as Kabuki stars, beautiful women, or scenes from a play, namely as objects that people crave. As one desires those objects in Ukiyo-e, or as they experience that desire in Ukiyo itself, s/he must know that one day those objects will disappear, causing suffering. Ukiyo-e’s plays on dual senses where “fantasy is pleasure” and “reality is grief”; this is the kind of dual world that Miyazaki always establishes in his films. On the one hand, he elaborates an animated reality based on a contemporary postindustrial culture, complete with the latest technology and products, that eventually transforms into a nightmare. Second, he also establishes a world out of his own fantasy in which a child encounters the vanity of materialism and learns to balance materialism with a need for spirituality there. For him, animation inhabited by children as characters is a radical form that he can use to speak out against the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism — radical because animation is a by-product of modern technology and because children are a special target of capitalist marketing. By using narratives with child characters moving through an animated world, the director aims his vision at a more general audience immersed in a lifestyle of hedonistic consumption.

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