Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

La société du spectacle

This is a must see, although the book is of course a lot better...

Language: French/ English subtitles
IMDB Rating: 7./ 10

Plot: The 90 minute film took a year to make and incorporates footage from The Battleship Potemkin, October, New Babylon, Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Johnny Guitar, and Confidential Report, as well as Soviet and Polish films, industrial films, American Westerns, news footage, advertisements, and many still photographs. Events such as the muerder of Lee Harvey Oswald (who assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963), the revolutions in Spain in 1936, Hungary in 1956 and in Paris in 1968, and people such as Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon, and the Spanish Anarchist Durruti are represented. Throughout the movie, there is both a voiceover (of Debord) and inter-titles from "Society of the Spectacle" but also texts from the Committee of Occupation of the Sorbonne, Machiavelli, Marx, Tocqueville, Emile Pouget, and Soloviev. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the subtitles (which exist even in the French version) but that is part of Debord’s goal “to problematize reception” (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active (wiki).




In addition to the above film material, I think it is also perhaps worth checking this more contemporary version of the spectacle.


Monday, June 30, 2008

Mindwalk

Language: English
IMDB Rating: 7.4/ 10

Plot: A US politician (Sam Waterston) visits his poet friend (John Heard) in Mont. St. Michael, France. While walking through the medeival island discussing their philosophies of life they happen upon Sonja (Liv Ullman), a scientist in recluse, who joins in their conversation. The two men listen to the ideas of this brilliant woman and discuss how her ideas can work in their own politician and poet lives (IMDB).


Saturday, June 28, 2008

Why we Fight

Language: English
IMDB Rating: 8.2/ 10

Plot:He may have been the ultimate icon of 1950s conformity and postwar complacency, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was an iconoclast, visionary, and the Cassandra of the New World Order. Upon departing his presidency, Eisenhower issued a stern, cogent warning about the burgeoning "military industrial complex," foretelling with ominous clarity the state of the world in 2004 with its incestuous entanglement of political, corporate, and Defense Department interests (IMDB).

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Trap

Language: English
IMDB Rating: 9.1/ 10
IMDB website

Plot: The Trap: 'What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom' is a BBC documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March 2007. The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom."


PART I


PART II


PART III

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Derrida on Religion and more

Perhaps you want more on Derrida, in that case I also found an interesting seminar given by Derrida on religion. Please click to listen: Part I and Part II (right click to save).


Summary: This extended interview with Jacques Derrida was conducted by John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart, and Yvonne Sherwood as the plenary session of the 2002 joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). The interview gives Derrida the opportunity to speak on a range of subjects from his secret life of prayer, to the Judeo-Christian heritage of deconstruction, to sacrifice, belief, faith, secularization, atheism, finitude, and beyond. But what pervades throughout is a certain feeling of anxiety, reserve, and humility, which to those already familiar with Derrida's work, should be of no surprise. However-given the audience at the annual meeting of the AAR/SBL, many of whom had long heard of Derrida but had never read him or seen him in person, given the reality of how Derrida's reception in the field of religious studies had come full circle from the original reading and employing of Derrida as the post-Enlightenment successor to the hermeneutics of suspicion to the more recent sentiment that positions Derrida as a quasi-Enlightenment pietist driven by an affirmative religious passion, and given the fact that it was only a short time afterward that Derrida would be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which meant that this would be one of his last major public appearances before his dteah in 2004-it is interesting to note Derrida's continued hesitation combined, as always, with a sense of urgency.

To download the ebook: "Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida by John D. Caputo" please click here (torrent) or buy it here.

Summary: Responding to questions put to him at a Roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up with clarity and eloquence such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, the distinction between the messianic and the concrete messianisms, and his interpretation of James Joyce. Derrida convincingly refutes the charges of relativism and nihilism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics, and sets forth the profoundly affirmative ethico-political thrust of this work. The Roundtable is annotated by John D. Caputo, the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, who has supplied cross-references to Derrida’s writings, where the reader may find further discussion on these topics. Professor Caputo has also supplied a commentary which elaborates the principal issues raised in the Roundtable.

Derrida - The Movie

Language: French with English subtitles
IMDB rating: 6.6/ 10

Plot: An odd portrait of Jacques Derrida, one of the most polemical and influential theorists of the end of the 20th century. The filmmakers 'deconstruct' the French thinker's private and professional life, in an attempt to capture the processes of an inquisitive and iconoclastic mind which has greatly influenced our way of understanding the limits of language (official site).


Monday, June 16, 2008

Hearts and Minds

Language: English/ French/ Vietnamese - English subtitles where needed
IMDB Rating: 8.5/ 10
Prices won: Oscar (1974)

Plot: This film recounts the history and attitudes of the opposing sides of the Vietnam War using archival news footage as well as their own film and interviews. A key theme is how attitudes of American racism and self-righteousness militarism helped create and prolong this bloody conflict. The film also endeavors to give voice to the Vietnamese people themselves as to how the war has affected them and their reasons why they fight the United States and other western powers while showing the basic humanity of the people that US propaganda tried to dismiss (IMDB).

"Possibly the best documentary ever made" (Source)

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Chomsky


Most of you might recognise his face. Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. However, he is just not only that. He also is the much necessary critical voice in the country of supposedly endless freedoms.

The below documentary is a lecture by Chomsky on the war on terror delivered at Harvard University in 2002. The script of which you can find here.




If you are in for me Chomsky (he can become repetitive at times), the below documentary (Power And Terror) focuses in greater detail on the 9/11 events.

Plot: Whether Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist and political philosopher, is the most important intellectual alive, as the New York Times once famously called him, is open for debate. But without a doubt, Chomsky, now 73, is one of the most straight-talking and committed dissidents of our time. A steadfast critic of United States foreign policy for decades, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, his profile took a quantum leap as he provided much-needed analysis and historical perspective to concerned citizens throughout the world. In the months that followed, he gave dozens of talks on four continents, conducted scores of interviews, and wrote a book 9-11 that was published in 22 countries and became a surprise bestseller in many of them, including Japan. Chomsky's voice may be unpopular, but his incisive arguments, based on decades of research and analysis, are heard and considered in this chronicle comprised of interview footage, and various talks he's given. Chomsky places the terrorist attacks in the context of American foreign intervention throughout the postwar decades--in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Beginning with the fundamental principle that the exercise of violence against civilian populations is terror, regardless of whether the perpetrator is a well-organized band of Muslim extremists, or the most powerful state in the world. Chomsky, in stark and uncompromising terms, challenges the United States to apply to its own actions the moral standards it demands of others (IMDB).


Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Candidate


I have been lazy since the completion of my "First Year Review" which is why I will use the following posts to update this blog a bit.

First, a movie. The Candidate (1972). A Robert Redord flick about the pointlesness of American Politics (how appropriate for a Politics PhD student!).

Plot: Californian lawyer Bill McKay fights for the little man. His charisma and integrity get him noticed by the Democratic Party machine and he is persuaded to run for the Senate against an apparently unassailable incumbent. It's agreed he can handle it his own way, on his own terms. But once he's in the race and his prospects begin to improve, the deal starts to change (IMDB).

In other words, a movie that fits the current situation in the Democratic Party.


Wednesday, April 23, 2008

One Nation Under CCTV

When talking of politics and art, you cant avoid mentioning Banksy. The self-styled 'street revolutionary' hit the news some days ago with his "One Nation Under CCTV" signature (see above). Where? Right in the centre of London...

"Banksy pulled off an audacious stunt to produce what is believed to be his biggest work yet in central London. The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera. Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on ‘Big Brother’ society"(Daily News)


This is not of course the first time Banksy's work created public tumult. His legendary Abu-Ghraib entry has even brought reality into Disney's fantasy lands.

Nadia Plesner

Nadia Plesner is a Danish artist, making politically controversial artwork. Her latest line of work, "Simple Living" shows the absurdity of modern life. The ongoing conflict in Sudan plays a central role in her illustrations, in which she depicts how certain segments of society live their lives in a constant stage of denial.

The provocative messages of her pictures have led Louis Vuitton to sue her over copyright issues. Naturally this has only enhanced the message hidden in her work.




Saturday, April 19, 2008

Images from the past

Well worth a watch...

Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment)

Plot: Sergio, a wealthy bourgeois aspiring writer, decides to stay in Cuba even though his wife and friends flee to Miami. Sergio looks back over the changes in Cuba from the Castro revolution to the Cuban missile crisis, the effect of living in an underdeveloped country, and his relations with his girlfriends Elena and Hanna (IMDB).

English subtitles


Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl, Diie (Power of image: Leni Riefenstahl)

Plot: This documentary recounts the life and work of one of most famous, and yet reviled, German film directors in history, Leni Riefenstahl. The film recounts the rise of her career from a dancer, to a movie actor to the most important film director in Nazi Germany who directed such famous propaganda films as Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. The film also explores her later activities after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945 and her disgrace for being so associated with it which includes her amazingly active life over the age of 90. (IMDB)

Part I (English subtitles)


Part II

Friday, March 07, 2008

Revolutionary Love

I always believed that love as a political instrument is a vastly under-researched concept in both journalism and among academics. I hate to sound like a hippie, but I reckon that with a reconceptionalised experience of love and what it is (and perhaps what love should be), the world could be a better, i.e. more democratic and equal, place.

Love as immanence so to say. Like in a poem of Pessoa:

I'm nothing.
I'll allways be nothing.
I can't even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I've got all the world's dream inside me.

I think this is what Hardt is arguing (or what he tends to argue) for in the uploaded video files below. I am sorry I should explain who that is. Hardt is a neo-Marxian theorist, who wrote together with Negri the manifesto for the anti-globalisation movement: "Empire". If you are up for it, you can find your free copy here.

Enjoy the lecture (about 30 mins)

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6

Monday, March 03, 2008

They want War

While Venezuela is on the verge of a war with Colombia, Burma finds its support in Rambo (and the world looks away), Israel bombs Gaza naked (100 Taed so far), Kenya is desperate for stability (though killing remains a popular thing), Kosovo's independence splits the world in two, Armenia is thinking about a civil war, it has just been said that Russia's elections have been a total scam (what a surprise!).

European observers this morning condemned Russia's presidential election, won overwhelmingly by Dmitry Medvedev, as "not fair" and a denial of the "democratic potential" of the country's voters (Guardian).

Wake-up call for the 'peoples of the press', Russia has never been democratic not in the last 800 years. Did anybody seriously think different when Mr. Dmitry Medvedev received 70 (!) percent of the votes yesterday? Of course, it it a 'Farce', Mr. Kasporov (the greatest Chess player just behind Fischer), but what can we do? Go to war? Isolate Russia? Come on, seriously now, what can we do?

Oh before closing, tomorrow is big day for the Yanks. Obama or Clinton? Well does not really matter, neither one will 'change' the world or even the US for that matter.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Medvedev, Russia's new President


Russia has a new President, say hello to the new Putin. More of the same (?) ... 'Dmitry Medvedev'. The legality of the electoral voting is already disputed or perhaps better "When everything is clear from the start, the story is not very sexy":
Mr. Medvedev declined to debate his opponents, and his campaign was conducted largely through staged public events that were widely broadcast on the Kremlin-controlled television networks. His three rivals on the ballot received far less coverage, and they rarely if ever attacked either Mr. Putin or Mr. Medvedev by name, as if they had been warned about how far they could go (NYT).

Israel-Palestinian Art

I normally refrain from posting messages on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Why? Well, its a bit like putting your heard in a bag of razor-sharp needles. Everybody seems to have a opinion about the conflict, which is exactly one of the obstacles for resolving it in the first place. It is not just an arena of hate (a matter which in many instances, I believe, comes forth from pure ignorance), but also of continuous judgment of what is considered to be 'Good' and what is deemed to be 'Evil'. A lot of Europeans wearing Palestinian scarfs believe that their (fashionable) resistance, which matches the rest of their trendy clothing, can actually be justified on the basis of the knowledge they receive from their televisions or from what their friends say. However, the moment when those same people are confronted with the Other in its direct form, they shiver and are anxious to be robbed from what they define as the "Freedom Expression'.

Yes, I have been to the West Bank, and no, that does not make me more of a specialist (or more knowledgeable) than the people actually living on either side of the borders. Should we remain passive? I don't think so, but blaming the conflict on one side would be downright foolish and ignorant of the historical and social inheritance of the country at hand. What to do then to bring both sides back to the negotiation tables? To make sure that brighter days are coming. I can think of a couple of solutions, a powerful one is bringing the two sides together through a cooperation in the arts.

Progressive poster for the 40th birthday of Israel; morphing Herzl into Arafat

Distance from childhood memories in the form of dust which is to change into a storm.

*Pictures with the courtesy of the Um El fahem Gallery and Liberation Graphics - both of which are well worth a visit and a bit of your time.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Jailhouse rock

I want to quickly mention a report that came out in the New York Times, which reads:

"For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars... Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails... Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars... One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34...."

When reading such figures, many things come into mind. First, one wonders why the US is trying so hard to pursue even more 'criminals' outside its borders. Second, the prison business (food, housing among other things) must be a million (billion?) Dollar producing-machine. Third, the US is losing economic power from this potentially massive labour force, which they rather see inside than outside.

Sure you could argue that these people also work, through mechanisms of privatisation, in mines or in manufacturing assembly lines. But as US unions and entrepreneurs are well aware, China is increasingly becoming the only economically viable production hub. Privatised prisons are thus forced to exploit labour to a maximum in order to compete with the cheap labour from China. Moreover, the more people are in prison, the less 'brain' there is to compete economically with the rest of the world. The US industry relies on its technological know-how and superiour flows of information. However, what happens when more and more people are forced into prisons?

Well, besides the fact that society slows in its developments, you create enormous (income, racial, gender, etc) inequalities. In especially the latter, but also the former, one could thus expect social uproar or other forms of class struggles that emerge from the ashes of a self-fulfilling social division in US society.

Bottom line, having one on every hundred citizens is not good for social cohesion, political stability, economic development or external/ foreign relations. Finally, a question that comes into mind:

"are US citizens really that criminal in nature or is there something more fundamentally wrong in its society"?

* courtesy of NYT

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Goodbye Fidel

Dear compatriots:


Last Friday, February 15, I promised you that in my next reflection I would deal with an issue of interest to many compatriots. Thus, this now is rather a message.

The moment has come to nominate and elect the State Council, its President, its Vice-Presidents and Secretary.

For many years I have occupied the honorable position of President. On February 15, 1976 the Socialist Constitution was approved with the free, direct and secret vote of over 95% of the people with the right to cast a vote. The first National Assembly was established on December 2nd that same year; this elected the State Council and its presidency. Before that, I had been a Prime Minister for almost 18 years. I always had the necessary prerogatives to carry forward the revolutionary work with the support of the overwhelming majority of the people.

...

The path will always be difficult and require from everyone’s intelligent effort. I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis the self-flagellation. We should always be prepared for the worst variable. The principle of being as prudent in success as steady in adversity cannot be forgotten. The adversary to be defeated is extremely strong; however, we have been able to keep it at bay for half a century.

This is not my farewell to you. My only wish is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas. I shall continue to write under the heading of ‘Reflections by comrade Fidel.’ It will be just another weapon you can count on. Perhaps my voice will be heard. I shall be careful.

Thanks.



Fidel Castro Ruz

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Research abstract

Today not a movie, but my updated research abstract! Please dont be shy and comment when you dissagree or when you think that something is not clear (enough). I intend to provide this (probably with some ammendments) to compete for a scholarship at my uni.

Thanks a lot for any comments!

Introduction

My interest in analysing China’s post-modernity (through a progressive political-economic framework) is the logical consequence of the position I fulfilled as an urban planner in Changzhou (Jiangsu province). During my employment for the Chinese and German government I became aware of the intrinsic relation between China’s changing landscape and its paradoxical political-economic apparatus. This area of study has however been largely neglected by both economic sociologists and anthropological political-economists. I believe that an in-depth and progressive study on the functioning of capitalism and the effects it has on China’s modernisation project could allow for a greater understanding of its impact on the country’s urban society.

Background

China’s contemporary development towards a stage of modernity is in this research considered to be taking place under a dynamic, yet contradictory synthesis of a deceased communist ideology and a political apparatus which increasingly relies on a capitalist logic. A paradoxical situation, described as an ‘authoritarian state capitalism’, which compels the country to increasingly transition into spaces of modernity and post-modernity. These historical stages, which are understood to be temporal transitions within the expansive rationale of capitalism, have provided an environment for both an increasing commodification of the natural word and a cognitive instrumentalisation of human perceptions and aesthetics.

Hypothesis

The discussion on the country’s long and still ongoing twentieth century, characterised by its questioning of how to modernise, will serve as the key to an unlocking of the hypothesis that China’s integration in the world economy (and its concomitant embrace of the capitalist logic for the purpose of political stability) fundamentally alters the landscape of China into layers of a reproductive post-modernity. The validity and nature of this presupposition will be tested empirically on the basis of the increasing influence of European architecture on China’s urban landscape. The simulacrum of ‘Europeanness’ into an ever growing number of Chinese cities marks the growing estrangement of inhabitants from their local habitat and underpins the growing influence of capitalist Reason into the consciousness of China’s population.

Epistemology

The epistemological approach of this research finds its origin in the historical transcendence of the dialectic which is central to the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of capitalism and its instrumental reasoning. This historical narrative finds its support in a robust theoretical framework, which from the very onset of this research will conceptualise both the dialectics of capitalism and its role in the path to modernisation and post-modernity. Evidently, this causes the necessity to revaluate Marxism along lines which would enable it to come to terms with
China’s internal contradictions in a world which is said to be increasingly ‘globalised’. The intended makeover, which will find its support in the works of progressive and philosophical Marxian theory, is not a rejection of Marxism, but rather a recognition and acceptance of its validity over the deterministic economic base that is increasingly intertwined with its super-structure.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Fidel

I was always fascinated by Cuba, I guess like everybody else... Beautiful women (and also men), vivid colors, pre-historic pop artish cars and all the rest of it. However, my interest has also been aroused by the legacy of Fidel. How on earth has that man managed to keep in power? The below documentary helped me to gain some insights - plus some anti-US rhetoric all in one free package of conspiracy!

Plot: Dollan Cannell's documentary on the hundreds of alleged plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, and a look at the evolution of Cuban politics.

Part I


Part II

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