Global Violence and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales

World Becoming Less Violent: Despite Global Conflict, Statistics Show Violence In Steady Decline

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/22/world-less-violent-stats_n_1026723.html

Read this article. According to UN statistics and the research of Harvard psychologists, the world is not as bad as we think it is.

- The rate of genocide deaths per world population was 1,400 times higher in 1942 than in 2008.

- There were fewer than 20 democracies in 1946. Now there are close to 100. Meanwhile, the number of authoritarian countries has dropped from a high of almost 90 in 1976 to about 25 now.

- Murder in European countries has steadily fallen from near 100 per 100,000 people in the 14th and 15th centuries to about 1 per 100,000 people now.

Without disregarding our violent past, the truth is that violence really is in the past. For Those Who Can Tell No Tales studies the implications of a post-violent Europe as seen by the previously devestated country of Bosnia. One in which a warring history is the greatest threat to present day peace. There is disagreement over the solution to the problems of unpunished perpetrators, and unavenged victims. The film's American tour guide refuses to mark a Bosnian hotel as the sight of the raping of 300 women or the murder by drowning of thousands. He claims there are enough obstacles to the Bosnian tourist industry without heaping on doses of unwanted history.

Ignoring this history, however, comes at a cost. There are still victims – both direct and indirect – occupying the towns and feeling the burden of the terrible crimes of the civil war. Furthermore, it can be hard for a country to build its morale as a whole when some great injustice lies just below the collective consciousness. That the film's protagonist, a journalist/tourist who stumbles on this mass murder site, is taken into custody and threatened by the Bosnian police reveals one of the main issues with Bosnian denial of wrongdoing. As the journalist is threatened and asked to leave, we can interpret a subtle acknowledgement by the Bosnians that there is something to remain hidden and a broad hope that the public's eye will wander before whatever there is to discover is brought to light.

Her candle honor to the 300 victims of rape in the hotel where she sleeps reveals our modern day heightened sensitivity to violence. It is so prevalently discussed in modern media. We can assume that this is not because Americans have grown desensitized to violence, but rather that the lack of violence must be balanced out by our cultural acceptance of violence in cinema.

The Cannes Film Festival - the Convergence of Cinema

Last summer I traveled to Cannes through the Creative Mind Group - the same organization that is sponsoring Ilya and Heliya's travels this semester.

http://thecreativemindgroup.com/

While most of my trip to Cannes was spent producing the 5 minute short film How to Have Ever https://vimeo.com/97507357 I spent a lot of time exploring the town of Cannes.

The Festival is, without exaggeration, one of Europe's most prestigious and anticipated events. That said, the screening schedule was primarily occupied by American films. Even "How to Train Your Dragon 2" made it to the Jury. Many other Jury films, such as the French "Two Days One Night" and British "Mr. Turner" starred actors well known to American audiences; Marion Cotillard and Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew in Harry Potter).

As an international event, the language spoken at the festival is English. To get by in the town of Cannes, French is helpful, but unnecessary. As a filmmaker scouting locations, a workable French vocabulary went a long way towards winning favor with the locals, but a tourist could go the entire Festival without a single bonjour and never realize he'd left the states.

The Cannes Film Festival, historically, has always been the haunt of America's biggest celebrities. However, the sheer infiltration of the highest cinematic honors at Cannes by American cinema remind us not just that the medium is dominated by American culture, but that European reception of American cinema is highly important to Hollywood. In an age where the most important market is the global one, festivals like Cannes accommodate not just the international marketing needs of the film industry, but the cultural exchange that allows for profitable and universally appealing narratives.

As a filmmaker then, it is incredibly important to visit the Cannes Film Festival and other festivals of its sort in Europe/Asia/Africa/South America. It not longer works to be ignorant of the cinema culture
of other countries. As influential as American films are, the most commercially successful ones take advantage of their knowledge of foreign markets.

Immigrant Identity: The Mask of the Political Refugee

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, pictured above, is an employee  of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank designed:

 "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism—limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate" 

Her political career in the US is only the latest chapter of an incredibly long international journey that began in 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia. The child of a deeply religious traditionalist mother and a politically powerful reactionist father (a leading figure of the Somali revolution) she was often torn between the high demands of her clan and an educated understanding of her human rights. 

She bounced back and forth between a strict adherence to the burkha and a rebellious pre-marital relationship, an obedient submission to her physically abusive mother and a hidden collection of Western literature. She bounced around geographically as well, her family forced to flee Somalia due to her father's prominence in the fight against the country's military dictator Major General Mohamed Siad Barre. She grew up exposed to all sorts of variations on Islamic and African life – extremist Islam in Saudi Arabia, intolerant anti-Islamic sentiment in Ethiopia, to a comfortable upperclass life in Nairobi, Kenya.

Her childhood, charmed by the wealth and resources of her important father, was decorated with both religious and academic education. While the girls at her school in Nairobi steadily abandoned their education for marriage, Ayaan developed the conviction to avoid this fate, to not simply marry the much older gentleman her father selects for her and raise his children as one of his many wives and run his house. Her decision brought her, against the strong will of her clan, to the Netherlands, where she requested political asylum to escape the clan members who pursued her.

She received a residence permit within three weeks of arriving in the Netherlands, although it was typical for applicants at the time to have to wait eight months for a decision. How? She had the gift of education. She knew how to frame her story to appeal to the powers that be, to concoct a story of danger, real physical need for asylum. The gatekeepers of the Netherlands (a country with a far more liberal border than most) can only allow for so many political refugee immigrants. Like Okwe and Senay in Dirty Pretty Things, Ayaan developed the identity that was expected of her. While not in direct danger, Ayaan did face a life of oppression underneath a husband she didn't want. It does not meet the standards of an immigration council who is trying to protect hunted individuals from death. However, Ayaan was able to play the system.

Unlike Okwe and Senay, who had truly dangerous circumstances awaiting them in their original countries and seemingly no hope for upward mobility or even personal security in their host country of Britain, Ayaan did manage to enter herself into the education system of the Netherlands, and eventually into the political spectrum. Ayaan became a member of the Dutch parliament acting as a resource for female empowerment and the injection of human rights into traditional clan Islam's treatment of women.

Her memoire is a fascinating bildungsroman about the journey of an oppressed girl over the obstacles of tradition and the laws of immigration to her free, empowered, adult womanhood.

BLACK GIRL La Noire De

As a complete my senior year at USC there was a lasting thematic overview Francophone African films that I wanted to offer to the class. Unlike Hollywood, these flux of African art cinema were far from glamorous, escapist or jungle melodramas present colonialism of American films and French films. African Art cinema  like Black Girl were realistic thoughtful low budget films that reflect a variety of issues affecting contemporary Africa.  As tribute to the films political issue and colonial possession given the mood of the character Diousana she fights with domestication and with the Madame over a mask that threatens her losing her identity, I believe the director Osamene Sambene highlighted the cultural identity of many Africans repressed by colonial attitudes. In the film as Diousnana packed her masks, her clothes, braids her hair, gives back the apron and the money given to her for her services then proceeds to commit suicide in the bathtub with a razor. Her naked black body floats in the bloody bath water as the last shot of the sequence is of her back suitcase and African mask. Next the film’s perspective shifts subsequent scene of French white people on the beach eagerly sun bathing to darken their skin like Diousana. As they read her article Others are untouched by her death.   Sembene color schemes of Diousana blood and the sunbathing as the African essence that is still suffering from the post colonial repression by the French.  Maybe her transformation back to her African identity and the blood stands for the blood spilled as she is liberated from her French employers rule.  In this matter Ousmane displays the visual medium to comment on the social and political conditions still not resolved in Senegal by the French occupation.  But what stands more as a sufficient motif in the film is the mask.  

As Diosana's French male employer return Diousana’s suitcase and mask to Dakar the theme of the music transport us back to African.  As he travels in the sun’s heat through the African village, native culture surrounds his white European stature as he carries the burden of the mask and suitcase through the slums of Dakar.  As the mother refuses his money and the young boy dons the mask the voice of distrusted seemly follows the Frenchmen back from where he came.

Don’t Look Now

Don’t Look Now is a Nicolas Roeg movie made in 1973. This movie is a psychological thriller/drama, an independent British-Italian film. As an Art cinema Movie it was one of the interesting Italian art cinema movies i have watched. This movie is was adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier. It follows the story of a married couple who travel to Venice after the accidental death of one of they young children, their daughter. The husbands job is to restore churches, so he gets an offer in venice and they move. when they arrive to venice they meet two sisters, one being blind who were psychics, had a power to talk to souls of the dead and see, feel, and all to spirits. One day when the couple are having lunch the two sisters tell the wife that they can see the spirit of their dead daughter siting haply in between the couple. After that day the wife started hanging out with the two sisters but the husband did not like this idea because the wife was emotional and psychologically not stable from the traumatic experiences of loosing her daughter. The two sisters tell them that the daughter is trying to contact them and warn the from danger. The husband starts seeing his daughter in her red coat running around. The director used the color red that represents blood to make the movie more intense. This movie had a lot of hallucination in it that it was a little bit hard to follow. It kind of reminded me of Cache, because some parts was not clear if the husband was hallucinating or the event was actually happening. For example there is a scene were the husband sees his wife in a black dress on a boat standing next to a coffin. But the wife was suppose to be out of town so he tries to reach out to his wife and he finds out that she is actually back in venice and it turned out that the wife wasn't in venice. But then at the end of the movie we see the same scene again, the wife in a black dress standing on a boat next to a coffin, which is his husbands coffin because he passes away at the end of the movie.  This means that earlier in the movie the husband had seen the future, hi wife standing next to his coffin when he dies. The husband is killed by a creature whom we do not know anything about, what she was or what she wanted. An old short lady in the dead daughter's red coat.

It is a very interesting film and i really do recommend it if anyone is interested in thrillers and psychological movies. 

The Conformist

Recently I saw The Conformist with some friends. The film is a political drama with a very dense plot that's easy to get lost in. So this film is definitely worth an additional watch. The best part of the film is the cinematography. Every shot is beautifully composed. Perhaps some of the best cinematography I've seen in films during its time. I can watch the film and ignore the plot so I can just fathom how well choreographed each shot is. The film also uses many different locations. The use of many extravagant places makes the film's world appear to be endless. The film is worth watching if you enjoy political films that present a lot of information. However, the film never gets boring, and I think writing is very clever. I'd stay away from this film if you easily tune out from too much dialogue. This film requires a lot of patience, and the right mood in order to really enjoy this one.

Neorealism in Zentropa and Lamerica

Looking for a comparative angles between Zentropa and  Lamerica it might seems perverse to propose that both films established strong sense of naivety in the roles of the protagonist who are both from elsewhere but not far from anywhere close.  On the one hand Lar Von Tier creates offbeat noir German translation layered in with convention of a horror-thriller genre thats’ instigated by a femme fatale constructing dark to white element of romance and intrigue.  While on the other hand Gianni Amelio narrates his own auteur impression with a mise-en-scene shots that strips his character of his identity alienating him in a continuity of post-modern Neorealism.  Both films use a travel motif as desire for each character to confront their problems. In comparison there is not so simple relationship they each share with their visiting nation.

The is a tentative feeling by both characters to implant their own alternative ideas to the sub-national state of Albania and supranational state of post- World War Germany. The contrasting dark spatial image of Germany, infiltrated by an American and the ease of mobility by the Italian within Albania move the narrative from a national space to an international perspective. Projecting some major similarities the films question the integrity of each characters central of point of reference and the integrity of their double occupancy. In a state parallel existence each scene gives a visual inquiry to the ruins of Frankfurt and the ruins of the Albanian countryside as metaphor that ruptures their lives.  The protagonists become embroiled in scenes where “the image (of Germany and Albania) becomes projection by others onto a divided and uncertain space” (Glat184).  This is a profound statement but what is translated by  the narrative can be translated as how Neorealism is foreground in each film. As a relationship is constructed between the spectacular and the geopolitical each film communicates stages of European-ness as a contextual problem by definition.  These films inherit the periods of 1945 and 1994 but they also map the cinematic space and time of a European psyche connect to Germany film theory.