ADMC Sport and English Premier League football satellite details and receiver information

ADMC Sport on Nilesat and Badr satellites

Abu Dhabi Sports 2010-2011, ADMC Sport Barclays Premier League Football & Showtime Showsports

Abu Dhabi Media Company is one of only a few satellite broadcaster available in Europe to offer all, yes all 380, English Premier League football games, all LIVE. And in High Definition.

(Contrary to what some other "installers" are saying ADMC Sports are not

Sky Sports 3D football fixtures for this season

Sky has just released the list of 3D football fixtures for this season.

An Ipsos MORI survey has shown that 63% of viewers feel closer to the live action when watching Sky 3D, 67% say they would visit a different bar if it had Sky 3D, while 68% of viewers say they will watch 3D football in future.

Upcoming 3D fixtures include:

• Sunday August 1, 1.30pm, AC Milan v Lyon

• Sunday August 1,

2010 Ryder Cup live in 3D on Sky Sports

Sky Sports will screen The 2010 Ryder Cup live in 3D. The broadcast will be the first event to be shown on Sky 3D, Europe's first residential 3D TV channel, which will launch on October 1, 2010.

The Ryder Cup will form the cornerstone of Sky 3D's launch weekend's schedule, with key holes from The Twenty Ten Course at Celtic Manor broadcast in 3D.

Sky 3D is now available in more than 1500 pubs

Sky Sports faces schedule clash over Ryder Cup and London derby

Sky is set to screen the London derby between Arsenal and Chelsea and the final day of the Ryder Cup at the same time.

Sports fans who have Sky Sports as part of their digital TV packages face a tough decision on October 3rd 2010.

The bundle provider is set to broadcast both the final day of golf's Ryder Cup - in which Europe's best take on the US - and the north London derby between Arsenal

ITV HD channels to go subscription???

An inducstry source has said that ITV was looking at announcing some form of pay-TV deal around high definition versions of ITV2, 3 and 4. It is not clear how this would work, but it is understood that the deal would not involve the standard-definition versions of ITV's digital portfolio or the HD version of the flagship ITV1.

MOre information on this
ITV2 HD, ITV3 HD and ITV4 HD to go on Sky

How To Decide For Yourself Who The Best Rated Satellite Tv Provider Is

How To Decide For Yourself Who The Best Rated Satellite Tv Provider Is

Live UK Championship Football on BBC games announced.

The BBC have announce the first batch of English Championship football matches they will broadcast this coming season, starting with Leeds United's match against Derby County on August 7.

BBC Sport will also air Burnley versus Preston North End on September 11, Doncaster Rovers against Sheffield United on October 23, Cardiff City versus Swansea on November 7 and Norwich against Ipswich Town on

baby's dream...

Sky 3D channel for subscribers on October 1

Sky has confirmed that its new 3D channel will become available to residential subscribers on October 1, after the service launched to pubs and clubs in April.

The Sky 3D channel will be offered at no extra charge to Sky's top-tier customers on the HD pack. It will work on all existing Sky+ HD set top boxes, but users will first have to buy a new 3D-ready TV set.

Sky 3D will be compatible with

good work to see "The VITAL EP"

Nice mood, Nice space ambient feeling, Nice music...

The VITAL EP x Horizon Variations By Adrien Dezalay from VITAL on Vimeo.

good work to see "A day in PARIS"

A day in PARIS from Benoit MILLOT on Vimeo.

UK Football in Spain on Satellite Digital+

Digital+ matches for the first weekend of the English Premier League:

Tottenham - Manchester City - Saturday 13:45
Aston Villa - West Ham - Saturday 16:00
Wigan - Blackpool - Saturday 16:00
Chelsea - WBA - Saturday 18:30
Liverpool - Arsenal - Sunday 17:00
Manchester United - Newcastle - Monday 21:00

For more information please visit:

The Sat and PC Guy - Digital Satellite and Terrestrial

Nature By Numbers

Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

valueAtTime and yRotation

delay = 2; //number of frames to delay

d = delay*thisComp.frameDuration*(index - 1);
thisComp.layer("2_17").transform.yRotation.valueAtTime(time - d)

Strange Channel 4 reception in the Costa Blanca the last few weeks.

Contrary to some other installers who have said that just over a week ago transponder 41, frequency 10714 h, that carries the freesat / free to air FTA version of Channel 4, did experience some problem. Unconfirmed reports suggest it was some form of power drop.

Channel 4 reception on the Costa Blanca Spain was much weaker than normal and on this one day Channel 4 on this frequency was lost in

Antena Nitro New channel on TDT in September

Announced a few weeks ago, Antena.Nitro is one of the future TDT channels that has raised more expectations among all that have been presented so far.

Antena.Nitro will be a channel devoted exclusively to male viewers, thus completing the group's offer Antena 3 on TDT that already has Antena.Nova (female audience) and Antena.Neox (young audiences).



To get you started, the group has decided to

ADMC Sport - English Premier League Football programme details

Abu Dhabi Media Company said on Sunday that football fans from across the GCC can now subscribe to its coverage of the English Premier League, adding that a website dedicated to would-be customers had gone live.

John Dykes, formerly a presenter with ESPN Star Sports, and Mark Pougatch, who has presented Match of the Day in the UK, were named as two of the faces of ADMC’s live English-language

Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

To the filmmaking community, Trinh T. Minh-ha is best known as the Vietnamese-born director of a number of experimental documentary films: 'Reassemblage,' 'Naked Spaces - Living Is Round,' and 'Surname Viet, Given Name Nam.' Visually stunning, poetic, and highly idiosyncratic, these works radically question and reopen ethnographic and documentary film languages. Her films represent one part of a much larger project, loosely organized around the 'problem' of how to represent a Third World, female Other. As well as making films, Trinh studied ethnomusicology and West African vernacular architecture, composes music, and has written a number of books. Many of these trends in her work are represented in the 1989 book, Woman, Native, Other.

As the title indicates, Trinh T. Minh-ha's book is as much about writing as it is 'about' any of its other areas of research: postcolonial culture, feminist theory, anthropology, deconstructionist philosophy, narrative. Like her films, Trinh's writing represents a critical engagement with a number of what she terms 'master discourses,' the languages of human sciences that the West has used to represent itself and its Others. In the four essays published here, Trinh works to interrogate these languages and interrupt their claims to authenticity, transparency, and universality.

Rather than constructing a clear-cut counterdiscourse - a Third World feminist criticism pose in relation to First World male-dominated criticisms - Trinh's writings employ a very different tactic, working inside these discourses to allow other readings, other responses, impersonating them in some instances, playing with them, exposing their limits and contradictions. This makes for a very mobile ride, as Trinh shifts discourses, speaking positions, and stances, moving in and out of a number of languages of authority and resistance. She describes her method as a form of storytelling.

'From jagged transitions between the analytical and the poetical to the disruptive, always shifting fluidity of a headless and bottomless storytelling, what is exposed in this text is the inscription and de-scription of a non unitary female subject of color through her engagement, therefore also disengagement, with master discourses.'

At times phrases or quotes reappear from one essay to another, as their paths intersect around certain recurring paradoxes. Writers like Roland Barthes, Zora Neal Hurston, and Audre Lorde reappear throughout the book. Trinh seems particularly intrigued by Hurston, the African American novelist and 'insider anthropologist' sent by Franz Boas to collect Black folk tales, as a figure in the intersecting stories of ethnography, language, literature, and race probed in Woman, Native, Other. Hurston's fluid prose - her ability to play with her audience and benefactors, communicating African American experience while evading languages of truth and transparency - makes her a suggestive model for Trinh's use of language. Trinh's text reads as a search for a way of speaking about power and domination that doesn't extend its operations. Fundamentally, hers is an approach to writing that is always strategic, always positioning itself in relation to other utterances, both silent and spoken.

Trinh works within a postcolonial framework that understands modern forms of power as functioning primarily not by brute force, visible mechanisms of power, or the military interventions and imposed governments of the colonial period, but through invisible, internalized relations of power that operate via consent. This perspective intersects with many feminist analyses of power as well as the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who discerned the emergence of a modern liberal form of power that makes social regulation tolerable by masking its operations and incorporating opposition. In more familiar terms, Foucault's work proposes a critique of pluralism and cooptation. Similarly, Trinh refuses to describe herself, the Other, the woman of color, in Western languages designed for her submission or annihilation. A strategy of inclusion, she implies, only reinforces hegemonic power by incorporating the Other into its own language of difference as essence, division, or inferiority - what she calls 'an apartheid kind of difference.'

In the book's initial essay, 'Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,' Trinh explores the role of the Third World woman writer and investigates the possibility for a nonsubmissive, active relationship between writing and political struggle. The essay examines a number of propositions, from Sartre's model of the 'engaged writer' with its discussion of 'freedom' and 'responsibility' to Western ideas of 'art for art's sake,' as well as other politically meaningful stances. Trinh works with a range of references, largely drawing from French philosophy and anthropology juxtaposed with writings by U.S. women of color and other Third World women. Unusual selections sit side by side, illuminating and informing each other, almost as if Trinh stages a series of conversations, between Roland Barthes and Toni Cade Bambara, Mitsuye Yamada and Julia Kristeva. Like the layered voices she orchestrates in Naked Spaces, this approach operates like a musical composition, with none of the elements subordinated but playing off and with each other. This strategy shifts in the book's second chapter, 'The Languages of Nativism: Anthropology as a Scientific Conversation of Man with Man.' Like Trinh's first film, 'Reassemblage,' in this essay she undertakes a more explicit attack on anthropological-ethnographic studies and their support of Western cultural hegemony. Most controversially, she criticizes many of the contemporary attempts to formulate 'progressive' anthropological methods - 'insider anthropology,' 'shared anthropology,' and various efforts to 'give voice' to the Other - which mask and prolong the relations of power between Western 'experts' and Third World subjects, rather than unsettling them. Critiquing anthropology as a 'discussion between old white men' about the Other, Trinh deploys one set of old white men - Barthes, Jacques Derrida, at times Claude Levi-Strauss, against another - Bronislaw Malinowski, Clifford Geertz, and others:

'One of the rules of my games is to echo back his words to an unexpected din or simply let them bounce around to yield most of what is being and has been said through them and despite them. I am therefore not concerned with judging the veracity of his discourses in relation to some original truth.'

Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, Trinh implicates anthropology in the ideology of 'development,' the latest in a long line of Western definitions of the outsider where the underlying dynamics remain constant: the barbarian, the pagan, the infidel, the wild man, the native, the underdeveloped. In such a context, debates over the terms of representation all to easily function to update and relegitimate underlying power relationships, questioning how the Other is represented - 'positive image' vs. 'negative images,' 'stereotypes vs. 'realistic depiction' - without considering who controls the definitions.

One of the cornerstones of Trinh's work is a radical rethinking of concepts of identity and difference from the standpoint of postcolonial experiences of displacement and cultural hybridization, which overlaps and complements the work of many contemporary cultural critics like Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and Hazel Carby. Despite their sometimes disparate interests and methods, these writers - along with Trinh - have all contributed to rigorous reconceptualizations of ethnic, gender, and sexual differences, often questioning notions of an 'authentic' or 'true' identity in the process. At stake in these theoretical discussions are notions of identity that have long been taken as the foundation of political resistance. A very different model of identity, based on recognition of the interpenetration of First and Third Worlds, implicitly suggests the need for different forms of political action and intervention. As Trinh very succinctly and poetically states in her introduction to an issue of the journal Discourse (No. 8, Fall/Winter 1986-87), 'What is at stake is not only the hegemony of western cultures, but also their identities as unified cultures; in other words, the realization that there is a Third World in every First World, and vice versa.

Her third chapter, entitled 'Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue' (originally written for Discourse and revised and expanded here), represents a search for language acknowledging differences but resisting tendencies toward both universal explanations of systems of difference and the imposition of rigidly-defined differences, for instance, those represented by the token and the exception. In this context, she again turns to writings by various women of color, particularly works from 'marginalized' and 'feminized' genres - prose fiction, poetry, autobiography - although she reads these texts as philosophy and theory as well as literature. Her own writing, too, incorporates poetic language and forms and a personal, although never explicitly autobiographical, voice. Continually self-reflexive, Trinh's method offers not so much a systematic analysis as a circling around the questions she interrogates - a 'text which recognizes its own instability.' Such an attention to the various languages and theoretical utterances leads her to poetics of silence and the unsaid as a potential language of resistance:

'Silence as a refusal to partake in the story does sometimes provide us with a means to gain a hearing. It is voice, a mode of uttering, and a response in its own right. Without utter silences, however, my silence goes unheard, unnoticed; it is simply one voice less, or more point given to the silencers.'

In her final text, 'Grandma's Story' (reprinted from the anthology Blasted Allegories), Trinh explores storytelling as an expression and repository of historical consciousness. In this mode of representation, which she sees as a function of community, Trinh develops a discourse that allows difference to emerge without domination, articulating different positions without opposition. Tracing the separation of 'literature' and 'history' as distinct narrative practices in Western culture, she proposes their reintegration. Working with texts by Teresa Hak Kyung Cha and Maxine Hong Kingston, Trinh explores the overlapping effects of storytelling: passing on information, inspiration, a sense of history, and emotional bonding, what she terms a 'living female tradition.' In many instances, she refers to traditional cultures as sites of cultural space that is female, gendered, but not subordinated; a postcolonial reappropriation of 'women's space' against the movement of 'genderless hegemonic standardization.'

Although genre-crossing in what's categorized as literature may be acceptable nowadays, it is still quite suspect when the writing is theoretical. But this is precisely the territory of Woman, Native, Other. Located at the boundaries of a number of discourses and disciplines, Trinh's book explores the various resistances produced by their interplay. Her intense awareness of how languages construct political and institutional positions, her attention to silence, and her resistance to a fixed and marginalized identity as a Third World woman writer suggests a powerful strategy for politically engaged writing. Hers is a dense text, inviting readers to tease out different strands and lines of thought, often without explicitly spelling out the implications of her ideas or arguments. Although not directly addressing questions of cinema, it sketches a provocative context for such work. For those interested in a more pointed discussion of film, her article 'Outside In, Inside Out' in Questions of Third Cinema (Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds., London: British Film Institute, 1989) offers more topical application of her ideas to problems of representation and documentary filmmaking.

[This is a slightly edited version of an essay originally published by Liz Kotz, at the time a writer and curator in San Francisco, in the monthly film and video journal The Independent, Vol. 12, No. 10, December, 1989, pp. 21-22. Images from Trinh T. Minh-ha's 1989 film 'Surname Viet Given Name Nam' are borrowed from Art Torrents, and her 1991 film 'Shoot for the Contents' is on UbuWeb.]

TDT 40 Latino to be replaced by Canal+ on TDT in Spain

As reported on here earlier, Sogecables new Pay TDT channel will be launching on August 23rd 2010.

Canal+ is the TDT terrestrial version of the Canal+ channel available on Sogecables D+ satellite TV in Spain. It is also thought that Canal+Dos will also launch at a later date, and focus on movies and sport, allowing people wo watch premium satellite TV via TDT.

The new channel will replace

嬰兒長到2歲前 爸媽每天少睡4小時

From the news
許多奶娃娃的爸媽會說，他們願意用任何東西交換在床上安安穩穩的睡上一個小時。數據顯示，到娃兒滿兩歲時，他們苦命的爹娘差不多已經少睡半年的量。

許多新生兒的爸媽每晚要無數次的起來哄娃娃餵奶，平均每天睡眠不足四小時。一個成人兩年間的正常睡眠時間應達3,650小時，但許多每天睡不足四小時的爸媽，在孩子出生的頭兩年，睡眠量只有2,738小時。

在兩年中少了912小時的睡眠，相當於半年的量。使得這些爸媽一直在累積所謂的「睡眠債」──這讓他們一直感到疲憊、情緒擺盪、心緒憂鬱。而且造成易怒、夫妻間常爭執等狀況。甚至有四分之一的媽媽說，她們會因為另外一半看起來筋疲力盡而憤怒。情況嚴重的，夫妻就此仳離。

專家建議，這些新生兒的爹娘每天至少應該在不受打擾的情況下睡個四小時，以維持身心健康。

Silentnight bed company 的睡眠專家Iftikhar Mirza說：「對成人而言，至少要睡足基本量是很重要的。」 否則不管在家裡或外面，都容易出意外，也會影響工作和夫妻的和諧。「許多人不知道，睡眠不足才是他們生活中面臨的許多不順利的主因。」

Five sold to Richard Desmond for GBP 103.5million

Five sold to "Northern and Shell" owned by Richard Desmond for GBP 103.5million
Desmond owns the Express Newspaper group.

UPdated:

RTL Group announced at shortly after 5pm that it had signed an agreement for the sale of Five Group to Desmond's Northern & Shell.

Gerhard Zeiler, the chief executive of RTL, said: "With a significant recovery of the UK TV advertising market and Five performing

it really thinking out of box...OFFF Paris 2010 Sponsors Titles

OFFF Paris 2010 Sponsors Titles from OFFF on Vimeo.

Cool stuff to see "How to make a Daft Punk helmet?"

More pictures here...

Daft Punk - HARDER BETTER FASTER STRONGER (Alive 2007)

ADMC Frequencies for Nilesat and Badr / Arabsat Premier League football

ADMC Sport have the rights for all 380 plus English Premiership football matches.

For this you will require a ADMC receiver, that has a 12 month subscription built in.

You may also need to have your satellite dish realigned.

Reception of ADMS Sport on the Nilesat / Atlantic Bird satellites on the Costa Blanca Spain requires a satellite dish of at least 1.25m, and even larger depending on your

MTV on TDT in Spain - for free to watch

The music channel MTV will join the TDT in Spain from September and will do free to air with no subscription it has announced. Viacom, owner of MTV, and NET TV has announced having signed an agreement for MTV to be available for free on terrestrial digital television. Until now the Spanish version of MTV could only see through pay TV. The network's programming will be the usual music, comedy

TDT in Spain - Digital Terrestrial Television (Spains version of UK Freeview) frequency changes timetable

Digital Terrestrial Television (TDT in Spain) providers will have to change the frequencies before January 1, 2015.

Users will also be required to re-tune and adjust their TV reception systems and probably community TV distribution systems, although not required to install new decoders and antennas.

This was stated by the Deputy Director General of Planning and Spectrum Management, Ministry of

Digital Satellite TV

Televisions have changed a lot since they were first launched to people. From that old fashioned black and white graphics to this of digital satellite TV services the viewing capacity has changed. For getting this sort of high-quality TV viewing there are varied suppliers that you can lookup.

With these various vendors it is important to consult them for information of the deals everyone can purchase. For the reason that the package will contain movies, sporting events, children’s programs, cooking tv shows and many more, the value regarding these deals must be found. In most cases you can get packages where the digital satellite TV programs can be seen on TVs which are found in more than one location.

For all of these packages the digital satellite TV is required just one single satellite dish to be set up on your place premises. Initially the satellite supplier will set up this satellite dish for you they will initially verify to see if your own residence has all of the required criteria for a satellite dish installation. Now that this issue has been achieved your new satellite dish can be set up and pointed to the southern skies.

As long as there aren't any interferences, intense rain or snow storms you can expect to have the opportunity to savor hours of awesome TV. As opposed to the past the brand new digital satellite TV dish could very well be mounted in your backyard garden, on the veranda, roof, and even on the balconies of homes. With this last housing method you will need to obtain authorization for the apartment proprietors to set up a satellite dish.

As soon as you have identified your satellite TV offer and the satellite dish has been installed you can look at the wide variety of TV and music programs which are available for your delight. You is going to be able to hear a number of wonderful digital music from hundreds of music programs and the sound will be remarkable.

Due to the choice range you'll be able to see countless helpful programs. These types of plan choices can include science fiction, fashion, sports, cooking, news, the weather, and even movies. You are likely to have the option to choose from programs from many other states and also look at local network programs.

With this vast collection of program products you certainly will have the ability to maintain your full family having fun as there is certainly something to be found for everyone. Unlike cable TV with digital satellite TV you have a lot more to watch for a good deal. So why wait any longer find out more about the variety of benefits which you can obtain. Enjoy hours of clear sound and pictures. You will not regret the decision.

English Premier League Football - ADMC Sport - HD - All games.

The English Premier League Football is available on ADMC Sport - Abu Dhabi Media Company won the rights to the EPL for the next three seasons, and are amongst the few operators that have the rights to ALL premier league matches, including 3pm kickoffs. Previous rights holders were Showtime / Orbit.

ADMC is transmitting the games in HD, and is starting up some new HD channels for this.

These new

Get Free HD For Life From The Best Rated Satellite Tv Provider

Get Free HD For Life From The Best Rated Satellite Tv Provider

Satellite TV Online

Other than working there are actually other sorts of benefits for your home pc. These types of benefits include enjoying video games and playing tunes. The additional use which you will have for a personal computer is that of enjoying satellite TV. To let you have the TV watching experience of your life you can find particular computer – TV cards you can get. Having these you will have the ability to see your satellite TV online.

You should initial insert the cards into your computer and the other one into your USB slot. The digital receiving set and satellite dish are often installed near to the monitor of your home pc. Using this tool you can look at plenty of various channels on the pc. There's at the same time one more facet to viewing satellite TV online.

This specific aspect is actually the ability to enjoy your preferred TV program while you are working at the same time. You'll in addition be able to have more amazing music not simply to hear but in addition to watch. The sounds from the satellite TV online are as very much the same to watching these music programs with your regular TV.

From the satellite TV online program selection the only thing that you'll need to do is to access the net when you intend to view a program. You can also download various programs onto your computer’s hard drive. It will make it quick for you to select the TV program or movie that you want to see and watch it later on if you want.

There are several different satellite TV providers whom you can get in touch with to enjoy the channels you wish. These are mainly DirecTV, Dish network, Voom, . Each of these suppliers will have many package deals you can pick from. The price of those products is also different.

The satellite TV online option is not just limited to a single choice of computer satellite service. You can find many others and all of them operate in a different way. As an example there's one satellite TV online service where you have no need to install any pc TV card. What you will need to see any type of satellite channel is an internet connection. This connection will allow you to see from a massive variety of programs from all around the globe.

The best part in regards to this online satellite TV is that you are free from the constraints of service providers. With this satellite TV online software, you will need to pay about $50 for the software. This is the only cost that you will ever need to spend. After that you will be able to savor all of the great shows on satellite TV online and absolutely free!

Portable Satellite Tv

While many of us watch TV from our homes there are actually several individuals who will need a portable satellite TV. With this TV alternative the selection of programs is visible from any where in the country. Getting this sort of take along TV device helps people who are departing on holiday to still have fun with their favorite channels.

The use of a portable satellite TV system is one which you will need to ask your service provider for details. The different programs and range limits of the satellite require to be checked out. The range of watching is recommended as you might encounter inferior image quality in various locations. Mainly in town areas this inferior reception can be an issue.

As soon as you have looked into this type of problems and fully understand the road safety rules concerning a portable satellite TV you will have the ability to look at the several satellite tv dishes. These dishes can be found in loads of shapes and sizes. You will have to watch out for one that you can also afford. Because this continues to be a relatively innovative technology, the fee for the mobile satellite TV is rather steep.

But if you can afford to purchase such a portable satellite TV there are actually numerous benefits to be experienced. The biggest advantage is that of the hours of amusement your family can get for long distance journeys. The amount of numerous channels that you will have the ability to find, also the sound and picture quality of these portable satellite TVs makes them a delightful acquisition for the extended voyage plans.

As with the normal satellite TV the portable satellite TV will likewise have the ability to catch the reception of international music, sports, fashion, children’s cartoons and movies. There are also the great sounds of hundreds of digital music to be heard when you're driving a car. Considering the improvements of technology have made it available to look at TV while you're in the vehicle you will be able to have a peaceful trip even with your own little ones traveling in the back.

The one downside at the current portable satellite TV is that of the poor reception which usually you can sometimes encounter. This specific poor reception will happen while there is any major and bad climate conditions that might block the signals coming from the southern satellites. Apart from this, driving in the city while your portable satellite TV is on is also impossible.

The numerous buildings in the city will obstruct the reception you will get. These obstacles aside the portable satellite TV will allow you to look at any program you would like. As you are traveling this can be an amazing accessory to your car comforts. The portable satellite TV moreover opens the door to numerous unique options for vacationing.

Direct Tv Satellite

The Television provides us with many hours of entertainment. For helping us receive a remarkable viewing pleasure there are actually various types of service providers. Of these types of service sellers you will see that Direct TV satellite to the best one. The channels which a person are able to enjoy received from this particular TV service are actually far advanced compared to that of other suppliers.

You will be needing to purchase or rent a satellite dish from Direct TV satellite service. The price range for these dishes is dependent on the specific functions that are part of the offer that you can choose. Apart from this your dish reception needs to be seen clearly, with the dish facing the southern direction.

You will find plenty of positive aspects that can be available with watching TV from the Direct TV satellite service in your location. Through the installation of their dish you will be able to decide on the perfect type of programs to watch. The variety of programs will encompass many channels from known and obscure TV channels

You will in addition have the power with direct TV satellite networks to pick a great number of international channels too. The programs from national and international stations will include social programs, science fiction programs, cooking, children’s cartoons and even sports.

Furthermore you will find that your direct TV satellite provider can offer you with the means of viewing all of your most desired sporting events. Those events will include the seasonal, regional and specialty sports from just about every country.

Direct TV satellite networks will let you to watch these programs in other languages. You can hear these TV programs in the Spanish, Chinese, French, Dutch and even Italian languages. In addition listening to your program options in the international languages you will receive a clear sharp graphic top quality a result of the hi-def feature which is built into the satellite receiver.

As expected the enjoyment is not going to stop here. You will in addition be able to find out so many films on diverse programs. These are committed to providing people an unsurpassed options of the most current and the classical films to watch. You will at the same time have the option to listen to wonderful audio sounds from the plenty digital music channels which are given by your direct TV satellite provider.

These kinds of music channels will have numerous styles of music like Jazz, Rock, Classical, and even the Blues. The best fact about listening to music on a direct TV satellite channel is the commercial free part.

The countless fantastic music channels and TV options to search through will provide you with tons of enjoyment. The clear sound and pictures will always make you feel just as if you were in the middle of the action itself. This reason is all that is needed for you to see about getting direct TV satellite installed.

Sky Sports News HD - Launch Date....

Sky has confirmed that Sky Sports News HD will launch next month on August 23

On August 23, the high definition channel will become available to Sky+ HD subscribers offering a range of new features, such as a "fresher feel" in widescreen, along with sharper graphics and side panel videos to complement the main story.

The launch of Sky Sports News HD is part of a new pay-TV strategy for Sky

Sky Sports on Freesat - options being considered

Freesat is looking to take advantage of Ofcom’s Wholesale Must Offer rules, offering a pay-TV package, even though many of its set-top boxes don’t feature the necessary conditional access smart card slot.

Managing director Emma Scott told The Guardian that the option of offering subscribers the ability to sign up for Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2 was currently being discussed at board level. However, no final decision has been made, and there are concerns that any pay offer might run counter to the Freesat brand

In order to offer pay-TV services, however, Freesat would require the approval of the BBC Trust, and the move would also run counter to its brand name.

Freesat, launched by the BBC and ITV as a joint venture in May 2008, has built a customer base of 1.25 million, ahead of expectations, and is projected to reach 2 million by the end of switchover in 2012. It offers more than 150 channels, high definition and access to the BBC iPlayer.

More than half its customers are former Sky homes, followed by Freeview homes upgrading, with the majority opting for high-definition boxes.

"There is a real gap in the market for people who love and want free television," Scott said.

The British TV market is currently delicately poised, with half consisting of free-to-air homes and half of pay-TV subscribers, principally through BSkyB and Virgin Media. Freesat is financed by a £10.7m annual budget, which comes from shareholders and revenue.

For more information please visit:


The Sat and PC Guy - Digital Satellite and Terrestrial Installations and Maintenance for the Costa Blanca

or the forum

The Sat and PC Guy FORUM - Digital Satellite and Terrestrial Installations and Maintenance for the Costa Blanca

Freesat considers pay-TV offering - Sky Sport1 and Sky Sports 2

Freesat is looking to take advantage of Ofcom’s Wholesale Must Offer rules, offering a pay-TV package, even though many of its set-top boxes don’t feature the necessary conditional access smart card slot.

Managing director Emma Scott told The Guardian that the option of offering subscribers the ability to sign up for Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2 was currently being discussed at board level.

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English Football Premier League - Games on Sky and ESPN - Costa Blanca Spain

Live fixtures up to the end of November (ESPN games in italics):



AUGUST

Sat 14 Tottenham vs Man City 12.45pm

Sat 14 Chelsea v West Brom 5:30pm

Sun 15 Liverpool vs Arsenal 4pm

Mon 16 Man United vs Newcastle 8pm

Sat 21 Wigan vs Chelsea 5.15pm

Sun 22 Newcastle v Aston Villa 1:30pm

Sun 22 Fulham vs Man United 4pm

Mon 23 Man City vs Liverpool 8pm

Sat 28 Blackburn vs Arsenal 12.45pm

Sat 28

Television and Commercial Culture

Citizens of many modern industrial societies, and in American society particularly, seldom think twice about referring to themselves as ‘consumers,’ accepting the terminology from the world of media and advertising constructed for them by large corporations. Yet in the lives of their grandparents, ‘consumption’ referred to a debilitating disease, and nineteenth century dictionaries equated it with destruction and pillage. Only during the last century did advertising succeed in normalizing what was once an aberration. This is not to say that people are unaware of this process. Many are beginning to wake up to how their lives are packaged and processed; how they are ‘branded’ as children with product loyalties; how their behavior is manipulated by slick advertising campaigns; and how their public spaces have become commodified by the messages of advertising to buy, buy more, and buy again. The problem is that few people know what to do with this realization, or how to respond. Although one would never know it from watching corporate television, there is a global anti-consumption movement afoot. In street demonstrations, classrooms and other public and private gatherings, as well as by way of alternative media and non-corporate sources of information, the movement is growing. In recent years a number of books have begun to question consumer culture, ranging from psychological analysis of advertising to evaluations of the environmental impact of the all-consuming lifestyle.

The 1999 book Consuming Environments by Mike Budd, Steve Craig and Clay Steinman (with a foreword by George Gerbner) contributes to this discussion with the full benefit of previous works, and in a sense it brings together much of the contemporary literature into an analysis of consumer culture that reads at times like a handbook or workbook. In other words, Consuming Environments is meant to be used, not just read, and toward this end the authors provide a methodology for dissecting advertising and outline a conceptual framework for understanding consumerism, along with suggestions to help consumers become activists. In his foreword, media studies scholar George Gerbner surveys the way in which television has entered homes, schools and workplaces and how it has become the main storyteller of the culture, and how this is a profound but little understood change in human civilization. He calls upon readers to reclaim storytelling in their own cultural environment, to help ‘reveal how things work,’ ‘describe what things are,’ and tell people ‘what to do about them.’ With television having almost completely taken over this function in advanced consumer societies like America, the process has increasingly become global. Realizing the pervasiveness of consumerism, Gerbner sees a long hard struggle ahead, but one that can succeed; the first step, he suggests, is to turn ‘apathy and cynicism into action.’

The authors take up this charge and begin by describing the environment created by television, and how this man-made imaginary environment fuels a culture that is destructive of the natural environment. They suggest that the first step in developing this understanding is to view television not as a neutral form of technology but rather as an ‘apparatus’ that is designed with goals in mind in order to accomplish specific tasks. They specify four levels of the apparatus of television: its ‘technical base,’ the ‘conditions of spectatorship,’ the cultural ‘texts’ it broadcasts, and the ‘mental machinery’ at work when viewers turn these components into meaningful stories. Turning next to a related analysis of television economics, the authors provide concise overviews of how the cable and satellite industries work, and who are the financial interests behind the storytelling apparatus of commercial television. Especially useful are the charts and lists that show how a few mega-corporations control many aspects of media culture. For instance, Time Warner, one of the largest media cartels in the world, owns, operates or has major controlling interests (as of 1999) in: Warner Brothers, Time Warner Cable, Lorimar, Time-Telepictures, Castle Rock Entertainment, the HB Production Company, the WB television network, Home Box Office (HBO), Cinemax, Time/Warner Sports, the Cartoon Network, E! Entertainment Television, CNN, Headline News, and Turner Programming Services. Time Warner is also a partner in a major satellite company and sells 20,000 hours of TV programming in over 40 languages in 150 countries each year. One mega-corporation has become a global multinational force to be reckoned with, not for its military or economic power but rather for its ‘soft power,’ its ability to shape perceptions and habits. Although Time-Warner is only one such entity (there are important rivals, including SONY), in terms of media and entertainment the world is literally carved up among a few large trans-national corporations.

In a chapter on ‘Advertisers and their Audiences,’ the authors help readers to analyze how advertising manipulates audiences and persuades them to consume more, and how advertisers help producers trade audience segments according to shifting but well-controlled criteria. From this discussion, it becomes clear that when consumers watch television they are being carefully crafted into products, which are then bought and sold in the advertising marketplace. Television producers work hard to cultivate specific audience tastes, and then buy and sell these audiences like any other manufactured product. This marketplace is carefully monitored by way of audience surveys, and also increasingly by analyzing viewing habits through TV set-top boxes that can ‘watch’ a viewer’s every move, when a channel is switched, what is on, for how long, and during what hours people watch. These findings are collated with demographic information from postal codes, phone records, credit cards and other data that consumers obliviously leave behind as they live their lives.

After similarly analytical chapters on ‘Signification, Discourse, and Ideology,’ ‘Television Realisms’ and the ‘Flow of Commodities,’ the authors turn to the task of helping viewers make the transition ‘from consumers to activists.’ They forecast an emerging social division of the near future, not based on the traditional divisions of class, wealth or social standing, but ‘between those who cannot give up the drive for more and those committed to its end.’ Drawing upon the ‘uncooling’ of cigarettes as a case study in which a once-desirable product is now widely associated with addiction and disease, activists of the future will work to form similar negative associations with other wasteful and destructive products, beginning with luxury automobiles and junk-foods.

Many academics and activists have made connections between the lifestyle of industrial consumerism and the growing ecological crisis. As the consumer lifestyle expands and the natural environment deteriorates, ‘the ranks are sure to grow of those prepared to commit themselves to getting out of this fix, seeing connection to those already disaffected.’ Consumers-turned-activists will begin to insist on answers to tough questions, such as: What will the environmental movement of the future look like? How much overconsumption do we need? What about the rest of world? What about the poor at home? What right do earlier consumers have to limit the consumption of later ones in the name of environmentalism? Why should the Third World forswear what the industrial world has benefited from in the past century? Who will have the right to consume and pollute in the future? How can the planet possibly survive the efforts of transnational corporations to hook everyone and everything possible into cycles of want and waste? How can people retrieve time lost to watching television and consuming?

In order to help answer such questions, the authors urge readers to seek out alternatives to the advertising-driven apparatus of consumer television. Toward this end, they introduce a number of media organizations that are non-profit, which not based on consumerism, and which have different sets of stories to tell than the corporate media sources. They recommend supporting different forms of ‘media advocacy in the public interest’ and developing styles of ‘media literacy’ that will help viewers to manage television-time, develop critical analytical skills, and look behind the scenes of the television industries. Given the availability of affordable video and computer equipment, and the relatively easy means of distribution, the authors suggest that consumers turn to producing their own images and telling their own stories, and distributing them on the internet or via public-access television. They also suggest that consumers-turned-activists get involved in environmental organizations, find like-minded people, and seek strength in numbers. The book concludes with contact-information for a number of alternative media organizations and environmental groups, including useful telephone numbers, emails, and websites, which can no doubt be updated and expanded in each locale.

As more and more people wake from the slumber of consumerism and begin to realize that the once sought after ‘American way of life’ is destructive and no longer tenable, or even cool in the USA or anywhere else, the message of books like this – which might have seemed far-fetched or impractical in the recent past – will become commonplace in the near future. The anti-consumption movement is already gaining momentum among youth, who are disillusioned with the waste and want of their parents generation in the affluent West, and who in the rest of the world are beginning to see that the glitter of the American style consumer lifestyle blinds people to the realities of a wholesome, meaningful and spiritual life within a healthy and prosperous environment. This growing realization, coupled with activism, might enable peoples outside the industrial consumer societies to bypass consumption altogether and avoid the contortions and laborious self-flagellation that Americans seem to need in order to cure themselves of their self-inflicted diseases.

From the Book

Page 3: Many of us would describe the experience of television as entertainment, as an escape and diversion from the stress of the world and its work. Noticed or not, the experience of television is also one of the simulated abundance. Through the TV screen pours a cornucopia of images and sounds, of situation comedies, ads, soaps, ads, game shows, ads, promotions and ads, movies, news, ads, talk shows, and more ads. A new immigrant from a developing country might well identify the United States more with commercial abundance, overflowing supermarkets, and cable channels by the dozen than with values of democracy and freedom. Or abundance and democracy might seem intrinsically associated. Indeed, companies such as 7-11 and Burger King have campaigned on ‘freedom of choice,’ equating the diversity of similar products to the political franchise. Internationally and at home, the television screen has become the vanguard of commercial culture, as socioeconomic form that encourages more people to become consumers every year. Every year, too, experienced consumers find themselves shopping to meet more needs, or what seem to be needs, and spending more time working to pay for them. This is good for everyone, according to the values of commercial culture. The leading financial and political forces in the West have argued for the last century that the expansion of this culture at home and in less industrialized parts of the world improves the lot of humankind. It ‘develops’ the planet, transforming what is not human to human ends, radically altering the environment in the process.

Page 16: Commercial culture saturates identity in the United States, sometimes in ways not normally in view. As it has at least since the 1920s, this culture asks people to think of themselves as individuals in need who require commodities to become who they are, as private competitors for plenitude in interpersonal and economic markets. Although other social forces continue to define identity, the entertainments of commercial culture model this individuality. To do so effectively, as Lynn Spigel suggests, advertising early on adopted the ‘voice of an imaginary consumer.’ It learned to speak in terms meaningful to those it would target for sales. This has been key to commercialism’s hegemonic power. Not surprisingly in an individualistic culture, advertising on television and elsewhere has tended to adopt a voice that feels like an individual motivated not by a commercial system by personal desire, for a sense of generosity in oneself as well as for accumulation. Advertisers conceive this voice in the image of a shopper whose personal choices shape private life experience as well as the operations of the market. This is the imaginary voice television viewers are invited to assume for hours a day, so much so that it can seem like second nature, especially in combination with the print adds, billboards, and radio pitches that have survived earlier eras.

[This essay was extracted from J. Progler, Books for Critical Consciousness: Forty Reviews (Penang, Citizens International, 2010), pp. 52-58. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture by Mike Budd, Steve Craig and Clay Steinman, with a foreword by George Gerbner (Rutgers University Press, 1999) is available for online preview reading here.]

Sky Sports - new season of Sports advert campaign

BSkyB has struck back at BT's attempt to lure sports fans to its TV service at heavily discounted prices, recruiting Eric Cantona for one of its biggest advertising campaigns of the year.

The "no compromise" campaign, which starts with TV advertising breaking today, features Cantona appearing to walk right through famous moments in sport such as Liverpool's comeback to win the Champions League

SunTalk on Bay Radio close down

Bay Radio, an English language radio station for the Costa Blanca, will no longer broadcast SunTalk with John Gaunt.

The Sun has decided to scrap its Jon Gaunt-fronted internet radio station SunTalk after just over a year in operation.

The station, which described itself as "the home of free speech" when it launched in April last year, aired every weekday for three hours. SunTalk was also

Popular questions about UK TV in Spain and Sky TV in Spain

Popular questions asked on search engine sites for Sky TV in Spain and Enligh Television on Costa Blanca

"english tv satellite frequencies for the costa blanca"

The satellite frequencies used by Sky and Freesat in Spain are exactly the same frequencies used for reception of Sky and Freesat in the UK. The signals are transmitted from the same 4 satellites, Astra 2a, Astra 2b, Astra 2d and

Electric Sofa to launch 3 channels on Sky

New broadcaster Electric Sofa has confirmed plans to launch three new entertainment and movies channels on Sky in the autumn.

The company intends to launch a film channel devoted to showcasing British-funded or produced movies, along with "rarely-seen gems".

It will also launch a general movies channel screening blockbusters, premieres and classic titles aimed at the 16 to 34-year-old audience

壹傳媒動畫 (NextMedia Animation) 創作動畫 - 倒帶人生 - 倒帶人生，絕不消磁~

壹傳媒動畫 (NextMedia Animation) 創作動畫 - 倒帶人生 - 倒帶人生，絕不消磁~

it remind me the "Run Lola Run"
If have another chance to run life again, what would you like to do?????

Israeli Cinema and the Politics of Representation

Israeli cinema, while achieving a certain measure of success and accomplishment, is often overshadowed by the other giants of the Middle Eastern film industry. The remarkable thing about Ella Shohat's Israeli Cinema (University of Texas Press, 1989) is that it manages to not only sustain but even pique our interest in films we might not necessarily want or even have the opportunity to see. She accomplishes this by using the films as raw material for the subtext (and subtitle) of her book: 'East/West and the Politics of Representation.' By doing this, Shohat has produced an impressively 'representative' work, one whose ostensible subject - Israeli film itself - by no means limits its significance. With its combination of condensed plot analysis deftly exposing the ideological significance of recurring images, and its skillful weaving of social, cultural, and political history, the book serves as a model for the intelligible presentation of any national cinema.

This effect in no way detracts from the very specific imagery and problematic that Israeli film, and Shohat's presentation of it, encompasses. The very real implications of these representational battles, in political and human terms, make Shohat's book an essential guide to ground constantly being pulled out from under us as the conglomerate image-making machine relentlessly reduces the ever dwindling pool of reality available to a larger audience. Serving as a virtual warehouse of no less loaded but larger issues, the scene from which Israeli film emerges is much more dense and textured than the films would ever intimate. As Shohat points out in her introduction:

'A veritable palimpsest of historical influences, Israel stands at the point of convergence of multiple cultures, languages, traditions, and political tendencies. Israeli cinema, as the mediated expression of multiplicity, is necessarily marked by the struggle of competing class and ethnic discourses, of conflicting ideological impulses and political visions, most obviously by the conflict with Arabs generally and the Palestinians in particular, as well as tensions between Oriental Sephardic Jews and Europe-origin Ashkenazi Jews, between religious and secular, between the "left" and "right." Geographically set in the East, the dominant Israeli imaginary constantly inclines toward the West.'

It is precisely this constant interplay between the finished images and the scene from which they emerge, often seen through the eyes of the audience, that marks the sensitivity and range of Shohat's project. Beginning with film itself (the fascination with 'exotic' footage of the Orient, an intriguing look at the development of movie theaters in Palestine, and conflicting attitudes toward cinema), the book ends with a detailed survey of the latest group of Israeli movies, 'the Palestinian wave.' Between these two poles, Shohat manages to categorize virtually all the Israeli films extant (at the time of her writing) in groupings that are never reductive but always provide the reader with a context that serves to illuminate both the films themselves and the particular circumstances that have dictated the choices and strategies employed to frame their subjects. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from her analysis of 'Hill 24 Does Not Answer' (1955), one of the films from what Shohat dubs 'The Heroic-Nationalist Genre':

'Seen largely within combat circumstances, the Arabs are almost always presented in long shot. When the battles take place at night, the spectator is completely distanced from their humanity. Their great numbers, in soldiers and tanks, contrast with their minimal impact on the spectator... Although set during the British Mandate over Palestine, when the British were seen as enemies and violently resisted by Jewish underground movements, the film has British soldiers exert more presence than the Arabs and treats them more sympathetically. This appointing of sympathy and interest reflects a broader attention given to European history and culture, completely marginalizing that of the Arabs, an orientation continuous with policies outside of the cinema.'

The issues raised by Shohat here and elsewhere, however particular they might in each case (whether relating to the conflict between Arabs and Jews, tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Oriental Jews, or the formation of a national ethos), all come back to the question of power and control, imagery and its intended audience. The continued relationship between production and consumption makes Israeli Cinema not only an accurate social history but a remarkably nuanced look at history in the making, a trip, as it were, into the editing room of officialdom, to see both the outtakes as well as the frames banished from consciousness.

A most cogent example of this can be seen in an extremely powerful chapter recounting the representation and misrepresentation of Oriental Jews on the Israeli screen. Here, Shohat has forged an approach that any critic or scholar dealing with popular culture, its stereotypes, and the reception of that culture by the very subjects of it imagery would find worthy of emulation. Reading her descriptions of the 'bourekas' genre, a particular form of Israeli kitsch aimed at the Sephardi/Oriental Jewish public I was reminded again and again of the African American painter Robert Colescott's stunning depicting of a Black family attentively listening to the 'Amos 'n' Andy Show' at the same time spellbound and horror-struck at the notion of participating in their own degradation. The readings Shohat offers of these films are both humorous and moving without ever losing sight of either the intent of the imagery or the humanity of their viewers. In fact, it is the generosity of all of Shohat's interpretations - sometimes for films one would almost feel a moral obligation to vent spleen at - that makes the utopian allusions concluding her book all the more powerful and credible:

'The filmmakers take for granted the Zionist rejection of the Diaspora without offering any deeper analysis of the Israeli Jew as a multidimensional precipitate of millennia of rich, labyrinthine syncretic history lived in scores of countries. One is struck by a kind of cultural superficiality in Israeli cinema, a lack of reflection concerning issues that have preoccupied Jews over the centuries, issues which often have cinematic resonances... True cinematic polyphony will emerge, most probably, only with the advent of political equality and cultural reciprocity among the three major groups within Israel - European Jews, Oriental Jews, and Palestinian Arabs. But until the advent of such a utopian moment, cultural and political polyphony might be cinematically evoked, at least, through the proleptic procedures of 'anticipatory' texts, texts at once militantly imaginative and resonantly multivoiced.'

Having applied an unyielding gaze, Shohat seems to have cleared the ground for these highly evocative suggestions. The very thoroughness of the project, and the fact that such few films emerge untainted by the ideological consensus, adds a whole other dimension to her intent - that of artistic possibility within the boundaries of seemingly unyielding constraints.

As Shohat whittles away at received ideas to recuperate and construct an alternative history, she stands neither inside (as a polemical partisan) nor outside (in a vacuum of supposed 'objectivity'), but alongside her subjects, always ready to point out avenues of possibility, to delineate the space available for a critique (and a self-critique) that can lead to empowerment, and to reassert the value - in an all too bookish world - of the book as tool and weapon. It i only at this point that both filmmakers and film viewers can finally begin to see, and then construct, that whole plethora of images so conspicuously absent from these particular collective screens. Placing herself smack within those vast regions (the never metaphysical but always concrete geo-political, economic, and cultural relations between the 'central' and the 'marginal,' whether under the rubric of the Promised Land and the Diaspora, East and West, North and South, Israel and Palestine) that have become the forbidden territory of a dominant mode of contemporary Jewish discourse whose influence often stretches for beyond its means, Shohat has established a reading that should cause film critics, scholars, and viewers to rethink their own politics regarding the accepted imagery of the contemporary Middle East.

[This is a slightly edited version of Ammiel Alcalay's review of Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation by Ella Shohat (1989). It was originally published in the film and video monthly journal The Independent, Vol. 12, No. 10 (December 1989), pp. 19-20.]

Optical Illusions

Amazing Animated Optical Illusions!

Greatest optical illusion ever

Rubiks Cube Poster Illusion!

Crazy Cube Illusion!

This is New York City!

American Media Culture in the Atomic Age

After nearly four of decades of Cold War conflict, accompanied by apathy and acceptance of the general population, the ‘no-nukes’ movement finally arose in the early 1980s to protest the ongoing threat of nuclear conflagration. Or so goes the pious orthodoxy that Margot Henrikson seeks to problematize in Dr Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (University of California Press, 1997), a cultural history of the Cold War years in America. On the contrary, she postulates that a long-standing resistance to nuclear weapons and warfare is evident in a ‘culture of dissent’ born with the first blast of the atomic bomb during World War II, and that this wide-ranging dissent is found in all walks of society, but primarily in works of film, art, music, television and literature during the period from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s, preceding the no-nukes movement. The American culture of dissent challenged ‘the dominant culture of consensus and its vision of a new order of atomic security, defense, and prosperity.’ Henrikson’s goal in pursuing this legacy is to highlight ‘the changed forms of cultural expression which challenged the serenity and order of the atomic consensus with a new cultural chaos that mirrored the disruption of matter achieved in the technology of the atomic bomb.’ Her work seems primarily geared toward refuting the consensus historians who have claimed that Americans were generally apathetic or disinterested in the threat posed by the atomic bomb until president Ronald Reagan re-invigorated the Cold War in the early 1980s.

Henrikson shows that after physicists succeeded in splitting the atom, the resulting use of their discovery to destroy two Japanese cities caused a rift among the scientists that was mirrored in American culture. Some of the physicists involved in developing the bomb later dissented against their own discovery, most notably the head scientist of the Manhattan Project, Robert J. Oppenheimer, who challenged the Truman and Eisenhower policies of nuclear diplomacy and who was eventually stripped of his security clearance in the anti-Communist climate of the 1950s. As revealing as this may be of dissent to the bomb, Henrikson gives short shrift to the millenarian proclamations of other scientists who also worked on the bomb, some of whom saw the bomb as twisted form of salvation to bring a lasting peace on earth. More useful is Henrikson’s treatment of the culture of dissent in its popular and media induced forms. In fact, much of the book consists of synopses of films and novels that demonstrate to one degree or another the culture of dissent. So while her work on the scientific community is a bit facile or short sighted, the real value of the book is in her understanding and explication of the multiple ways, subtle and distinct, that terror and ambiguity toward the atomic bomb infused American culture. In this she has succeeded in refuting her colleagues, and her work also gives pause for reflection on the ways in which the bomb gave rise to a half century of troubled and divided society and culture in America.

Soon after World War II, several spy drama films highlighted an aspect of the Cold War that historians have only recently begun to take seriously. Movies like ‘The Stranger’ or Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious’ develop the theme of post-war Nazi intrigue in America, foreshadowing later revelations that American (and Soviet) officials gave immunity to Nazi scientists and intelligence experts in exchange for their contributions to the nuclear arms race and Cold War intelligence apparatus. The case of Klaus Barbie still embarrasses American officialdom, and Henrikson shows that cultural dissent to the issue, in the form of spy drama films, arose almost immediately within the post-war film industry.

During the 1950s, as American officialdom began to escalate the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a genre of science fiction movies reflected a growing sense of anxiety and terror toward the bomb by way of films about flying saucers and giant or mutated monsters. Movies like ‘Them!’ and ‘The Thing’ focused on the terrors of invaders from space and creatures born of the bomb who wreak havoc and destruction on humanity. Similarly, and more ironically, the Japanese film industry adopted this genre to offer their own take, producing in 1954 ‘Gojira’ (aka ‘Godzilla’) about a giant monster that tramples Tokyo into rubble, much like the American bombs did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade earlier.

Henrikson finds in these 1950s science fiction films two tendencies of the Cold War era: fear of the bomb and anxieties about the McCarthy era hunt for ‘un-American’ activities, the latter targeting several filmmakers and writers. Henrikson notes, ‘This merging of antiatomic and anticommunist fears – particularly in the form of attack or invasion from outside forces, often tainted with radiation – became a relatively standard device in cold war science fiction films, and the representation of anticommunist anxieties helped to make the identical representation of atomic anxieties more acceptable to scrutinizing studios and law-and-order committees.’ She also finds more deeply seated cultural feelings toward unleashing the anti-human and destructive power of the bomb. For example, she outlines the contradictions found in many science fiction films that portray mutant creatures as the result of nuclear testing, who are then destroyed by the same technologies that created them. The bomb is both the destroyer and redeemer. In such films, Henrikson suggests that ‘their sensibility to guilt and remorse and their recognition of the crime against nature and man that is the essence of atomic and hydrogen bombs coalesce into an effective indictment of the atomic base of American power.’

These more or less direct depictions of nuclear war and its results, no matter how fantasized or stylized, are not the only aspect of the culture of dissent that Henrikson reviews. In fact, she locates relevant contradictions and even psychoses in a variety of films and novels of the 1950s, ranging from the senseless murders of ‘In Cold Blood’ to the youthful rebellion of ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’

Henrikson links the growing fascination with violence and chaos to the moral dilemma of the Cold War, that the key to peace lies in promulgating weapons of mass destruction on a global scale. This is best outlined in the second section of the book, about ‘the emergence of a schizoid America in the age of anxiety.’ One of the most engaging chapters in this section is on civil defense. During the late 1950s, the US government sponsored a series of films and other public relations ploys to convince Americans that they ought to build and learn to live in bomb shelters. This reflected a growing acceptance within the Eisenhower administration and officialdom in general that the only key to survival in the world of the bomb would be to shelter the population in the rapidly growing suburban sprawl around most large cities. Such a policy considered cities as lost causes, since they would be the first targets of Soviet nuclear strikes. It also addresses the problem of masses of people fleeing from destroyed cities into the outlying suburban areas, shining new light on the promotion and growth of American suburbia. The bomb shelter craze led to all sorts of depraved and schizoid behavior, including, for example, a 'civil defense' film that features a proclamation by a priest that it was acceptable for Americans to kill each other in defense of their private shelters. But the culture of dissent responded to such lunacy in a variety of ways, including a series of articles in periodicals like The Nation, and as reflected in the plots of television shows like ‘The Twilight Zone,’ which directly or indirectly criticized the cruel ironies and moral bankruptcy of these official policies.

The culture of dissent also responded to the increasingly growing and noticeable psychological and emotional problems of Americans, giving rise to widespread practices like the use of medication to ease the tension of living in terror of the bomb. As Henrikson suggests, ‘The surface complacence of the Eisenhower years, perhaps in part artificially induced by the security network that promoted conformity, may also have been medicinally aided by the billions of tranquilizers ingested by Americans in the postwar era. Adding to the complexity and ambiguity of this era’s surface calm was this new reality: mental health had become the number one medical concern of the nation.’ This problematizes the narrative of conservative historians who write off the 1960s as a time of social stupor induced by illicit drug use among the American youth; in the 1950s, the drug-induced stupor was prescribed by doctors. Henrikson continues: ‘While the mainstream American culture of consensus and Eisenhower’s politics of tranquility continued to uphold the image of a secure and contented American society, the culture of dissent shifted its attention to this coexistent underground America of anxiety, where tranquility and satisfaction dissolved into tension and conflict.’ The growing atmosphere of repressed tension and conflict in the 1950s gives birth to the tumultuous 1960s, with its mass youth rebellion, the movement for Black liberation and the murderous American adventure in Vietnam.

Henrikson derived her title from an early 1960s film, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,’ by Stanley Kubrick, who was a key figure in the culture of dissent. The strange love of Kubrick’s apocalyptic film is love of the bomb above all else. Peopled with sick technocrats, venal politicians and insane war mongers, the startling imagery of the film brought to the screen many of the tensions and conflicts that had been seething under the seeming calm surface as the culture of dissent gained momentum in the 1950s. Kubrick’s dark and macabre comedy ends with impending nuclear holocaust, providing an irreverent warning to those who flirt with the bomb.
The culture of dissent continued to question all that was sacred in the American culture of consent, culminating in questions about the existence of God. By the late 1960s, even mainstream publications like ‘Time’ magazine asked, ‘Is God Dead?’ Many Americans saw the gross contradictions of nuclear diplomacy, the Vietnam war and continued repression of Black liberation as signs of a total moral breakdown in mainstream American society, leading to the growing infusion of atheism into the culture of dissent.

At the same time, public intellectuals like Lewis Mumford urged humanity to rediscover moral values and abandon scientific claims to objectivity ‘with its traditional lack of concern for the social consequences of its discoveries.’ While atheism was becoming pervasive among some segments of the culture of dissent, other people sought refuge in Eastern religions and philosophies, still rejecting the American culture of consensus but from within a framework informed by varieties of faith and spirituality. The opposition between faith and atheism points to another of the many contradictions in the postwar American society, and forms a key generative tension in the culture of dissent. As Henrikson develops this aspect of her thesis, she begins to tie together some of the previous elements of her argument into what amounts to a fresh perspective on the 1960s. She locates some of the tensions born of the bomb in the civil rights movement, with its opposition between non-violence (as embodied by Martin Luther King) and self-defense (which Malcolm X advocated), or in the hippie movement with its opposition between passive ‘flower power’ and the Weather Underground’s calls for violent revolution, or the popular sentiment to ‘make love not war.’ Ultimately, as Henrikson shows, the Watergate scandal was a major turning point in American history, in that the ‘widespread alienation from American authority represented by Nixon reflected the consummation of the long-term cultural suspicions about the American atomic age system of power and its figures of authority. The Watergate scandal gave true credibility to the cynicism and disdain for corrupt and immoral authority which had developed in the awakened and rebellious culture of the 1960s and early 1970s.’

Henrikson concludes this important and wide ranging work by suggesting a resolution of the multifarious tensions manifested in the culture of dissent: ‘The culture of dissent, whether with a violent or peaceful counterforce of protest, had kept the tension in American culture and society high and had ultimately promoted the alternative peaceful and humanist values that helped to control the destructive values of the system.’ An odd ending, perhaps, for an enlightening book, since she finds a benefit in the decades of hysteria, death and destruction that become more apparent once one places her story in a global context. This oddly anti-climatic conclusion points to perhaps a key shortcoming of the work, which arises from her adherence to a particular methodological orthodoxy of American scholarship. Henrikson, an American historian, infuses her work with the insights of cultural studies – a welcome addition to a discipline that all but ignores culture – but in so doing she concedes almost completely to the rigid and limiting periodization and localization faddish among historians. While the book, as a result, lacks breadth, it is nevertheless a worthwhile synthesis that provides a much needed insight into the ways in which the atomic age created its own uniquely tragic cultural history for Americans.

[This essay is extracted from Books For Critical Consciousness: Forty Reviews by J. Progler (Citizens International, 2010), pp. 81-87. For more about atomic bomb films and culture, see this blog entry. Dr Strangelove's America is available for preview reading here, and a collection of other atomic bomb film clips and movie trailers can be viewed here.]

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America

There are number of important book length studies in Latin American Cinema: one thinks of Carlos Mora's Mexican Cinema (University of California Press, 1982), Michael Chanan's Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (British Film Institute, 1983) and The Cuban Image (BFI/Indiana University Press, 1985), Randal Johnson's Cinema Novo X 5 (University of Texas Press, 1984) and The Film Industry in Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), Gaizka de Usabel's The High Noon of Latin American Films in Latin America (UMI Research Press, 1982), and Randal Johnson and Robert Stam's Brazilian Cinema (Associated University Press, 1995). Julianne Burton's Cinema and Social Change in Latin America (1986) is another important addition to this field. Consisting of 20 interviews with key directors, actors, critics, and media activists from Latin America, the book indirectly offers a historical overview of three decades of socially-conscious filmmaking as practiced in a wide diversity of countries.

The opening essay orients the reader by providing a succinct survey of the evolving conditions of Latin American filmmaking. Cinema in Latin America, Burton argues, is a 'politicized zone,' deeply immersed in historical process. The New Latin American Cinema forms an integral part of a post-war era of increasing militancy and nationalism. This introduction sketches the broad features of this cinema: its passionate rejection of the compartmentalized, hierarchical Hollywood production system, the search for a new kind of interaction between film and audience, the theorization of an alternative anti-colonial thematic and aesthetic. She also outlines the changing political circumstances which conditioned production: the general democratization of the immediate postwar period, the tendency toward coup d'etats and repression beginning in the sixties and culminating in the seventies, giving way, finally, to a redemocratization in the eighties which breathed new life into film culture, especially in Argentina.

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America is divided into three sections: 'The Documentary Impulse: The Drama of Reality,' 'Fictional Filmmaking: The Reality of Drama,' and 'Behind the Scenes.' The first two sections classify the filmmakers interviewed according to whether their work has been primarily fictional or documentary, but as the subtitles - the 'drama of reality' and the 'reality of drama' - suggest, one of the most provocative contributions of New Latin American Cinema has been precisely the fusion of these two modes. New Latin American Cinemas has also demonstrated an exuberant diversity of styles, ranging from the grittiest kind of documentary realism to the most fantastic allegory and 'quotidian surrealism,' the common denominator being a rejection of 'entertainment as usual.' The interviews feature proponents of a wide spectrum of approaches, from relatively 'straight' documentaries (Fernando Birri, Helena Solberg-Ladd), through mixed documentary-fiction modes (Nelson Pereira dos Santos), to tropical allegory (Glauber Rocha), and absurdist reflexivity (Raul Ruiz).

The third section supplements the comments by filmmakers with details of work 'behind the scenes,' i.e., the labors of film-related professionals such as actors, distributors, publicists, critics. In this sense the book transcends auteurism - an approach that would have been preoccupied only with adding a few third world cineastes to a preexisting first world 'pantheon' - by putting the centrality of the author-director in context and establishing the relationship of the director of other film workers. In this section we observe Latin American Cinema from the perspective of the actor (Nelson Villagra), the politically-aware distributor (Walter Achugar), the filmmaker-theorist-bureaucrat (Julio Garcia Espinosa), the historian-teacher-activist (Alfonso Gumucio Dagron), and the television critic (Enrique Colina). Nelson Villagra explains the theory of acting - a synthesis of Stanislavski and Brecht - that undergirds his performances in such films as 'Jackal of Nahueltoro' (1969) and 'The Last Supper' (1976) and expands on his opposition to what he considers the overly rhetorical and declamatory style employed in many Latin American films. Uruguayan Walter Achuga speaks of his role in promoting Latin American cultural collaboration as head of the Third World Cinematheque. Enrique Colina details his efforts as TV film critic on a show called '24 Times/Second' - a kind of radical Cuban version of 'At the Movies' - where he tries to provide Cuban audiences with the tools for 'decoding' the popular entertainment films currently being screened.

Julio Garcia Espinosa, a founding member of ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute), cultural activist, and government official relates his provocative experiments in popular culture, most notably his attempt to revitalize and 'dialecticize' the Cuban cabaret tradition degraded by commercialism and the Mafia. These popular forms, Espinosa argues, have utopian potential. People don't really want to be cooped up watching television: 'They have an organic need to go out, to participate, to communicate with one another not through packaged images but through live activities.' (Anyone who has been to Cuba knows just how good Cubans are at the 'live activities.') Espinosa speaks as well of the profound musical culture of the Cuban people and of his attempts to subvert the compartmentalization of tastes and genres. (One such experiment, a program entitled 'Concert in B Major,' grouped composers such as Bach, the Beatles, Benny More, and Leo Brouwer solely on the basis of the initial letters of their names.) Given the centrality of music Cuban culture, Espinosa argues, every Cuban filmmaker should be required to do at leas one musical just as every Hollywood hack was required to do the obligatory western.

Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, finally, speaks of the travails of an itinerant media activist from Bolivia. Dagron managed to reconstruct the buried history of Bolivian cinema by searching, without the help of index cards or microfilm, through all the newspapers published in Bolivia since the turn of the century. Given the absence of photocopying machines, Dagron had to photograph al the items, one by one, to create what he calls a 'monstrous archive.' Burton's interview with Dagron provides a glimpse not only of the tremendous obstacles confronting a Latin American media-activist, but also of the crucial need for such work, insofar as films in Latin America, as everywhere, are dependent on a kind of discursive ecology, a support-system furnished by history, criticism, and cultural promotion.

Cinema and Social Change is worth reading for the anecdotes alone. Fernando Birri describes working in flooded areas of Argentina, with heavy equipment sinking the filmmakers in mud up to their knees. Jorge Sanjines speaks of the subtle problems involved in winning the confidence of Quechua Indians who had every reason to be suspicious of the white 'gringos' from the cities. (The situation was eased when the filmmakers submitted to the authority of a 'yatiri' who read the coca leaves to discern the quality of their intentions.) Patricio Guzman tells of the brutal repression unleashed in Chile by Pinochet, resulting in the presumed death of two of his collaborators on 'Battle of Chile.' We virtually hear the gunfire as we accompany the Sandinista guerillas on their Naranjo offensive along with filmmakers Emilio Rodriguez Vazquez and Carlos Vicente Ibarra. Raul Ruiz explains how three of the major films of the Allende period were made at the same time and with the same camera. (Ruiz would finish work on 'Tres Tristes Tigres' in the morning, Aldo Francia would pick up the camera to make 'Valparaiso Mi Amor,' after which Miguel Littin would pick it up for the 'Jackal of Nahueltoro'.) But their anecdotes are not usually whimsical or self-serving. Rather, they make a point or underscore a theme: the unfavorable circumstances of third world filmmaking, the realities of political repression and exile, the dangers of paternalism, the need to collaborate with the 'people' whom on claims to serve.

Another leitmotif that emerges from the interviews is the theme of cultural difference within unity - i.e., each Latin American country has a specific cultural personality, yet feels itself to participate in a large collectivity of 'Latin Americanness.' Mario Handler speaks of the Uruguayan tendency to 'hypercultivation' in the arts. Sanjines emphasizes the strong amerindian strain in Bolivian culture. Espinosa stresses the centrality of dance, of conga and rumba, in Cuban life, while Pereira lauds the contribution of Afro-Brazilian religion to Brazil's cultural mix. Yet all these diversely formed peoples identify with the larger Latin American entity. As Ruiz puts it, 'The Latin American experience is of being outside (or inside) European culture in general, whereas the European is within one specific culture or another.' The interviews also highlight the cultural differences (and parallels) between Latin America and the United States. Tomas Gutierrez Alea mocks the inability of critics such as Andrew Sarris to understand revolutionary films like Memories of Underdevelopment, given the visceral anticommunism and the tendency to identify completely with alienated intellectual 'heroes' on the part of these critics. Helena Solberg-Ladd argues that Latin Americans are more accustomed to metaphorical language which allows for 'more permeable boundaries between the imaginary and the real.' The Latin American documentarian working in the United States, she complains, must always 'start from scratch,' without assuming 'any knowledge on the part of the viewer.' Still, she appreciates the opportunity of being a cultural mediator, able to present an 'insider's view' to North American audiences.

Burton has been ambitious in attempting to survey three decades of Latin American filmmaking theory and practice, including that in most of the major filmmaking countries, but privileging Cuba and Brazil at the expense of Mexico and Argentina. (One laments, for instance, the absence of certain key figures such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the seminal theorists of 'third cinema.') Within diversity, however, Burton has managed to maintain an overall unity based on thematic continuities: the Multi-fronted struggle against colonialism, the search for an alternative aesthetic, the attempt to transform the modes of production, distribution and exhibition.

The personal histories of the interviewees also reveal certain commonalities of experience. Most of the filmmakers were middle-class people who only gradually identified with the oppressed classes and national struggle. Most travelled to Europe only to discover themselves, paradoxically, as Latin Americans. Most experienced political repression. What is striking, in the main, is their political coherence and dedication, as well as their intellectual sophistication. (How many Hollywood directors, one wonders, would sprinkle their conversation with references to Hegel, Brecht, Gramsci?)

A reading of Cinema and Social Change in Latin America ends with a feeling of gratitude, both to the editor of the volume and to the figures interviewed. In a field which too often resorts to recycling the same cliches, this book constitutes a substantial and welcome contribution.

[This is a slightly edited version of a review by Robert Stam, originally published in the film and video monthly journal The Independent, Vol. 10, No. 9, November 1987, pp. 30-31. Stam is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the coauthor of Brazilian Cinema (1995) and the author of Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1992), and coauthor of A Companion to Film Theory (2004).]