Is the end of UK TV Online in Spain coming to an end.....

This is from a case in the UK.

TVCatchup is an online TV service, that allows registered users access to TV programms from the UK broadcasters that they may have missed. At the moment, they cannot, under UK law, provide this services outside the UK.

However, the UK broadcasters say that what they are providing in the UK is illegal, and against their intellectualt property rights, by

Apolitical Alienation in 'The Passenger'

Recently re-released in North America and Europe, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 film 'The Passenger' (also known as 'Professione: Reporter') represents a crystallization of the subjectivist themes and attitudes that characterize much of his previous work. Instead of portraying the alienation of the times dialectically, against the background of social, economic and political interconnections, the film presented a static depiction of stylized despair - angst packaged for popular consumption. At another time in history such an approach could have been easily dismissed, but at the time of its release the treatment of alienation as a purely subjective phenomenon carried an extraordinary credibility with contemporary film audiences.

The narrative begins with David Locke (played by Jack Nicholson), a British correspondent, traveling by jeep through the streets of an oppressively hot, North African village. Locke appears bleached out, confused and in search of something or someone. He tries to make contact with the natives, but they respond indignantly either by walking away from him or gesturing for a cigarette and then refusing to talk. His frustration appears to be mounting when he mysteriously finds an English-speaking guide who agrees to lead him to a clandestine group of guerrillas. But the guide is soon frightened off by a passing patrol of soldiers and Locke disconcertedly returns to the jeep alone. The jeep gets stuck in the desert sand; Locke gets out and kicks the tires and hollers what appears to be his first coherent insight into his thoughts and feelings, 'All right, I don't care!'

 

The motif of Locke's alienation and personal suffering slowly begins to come into focus, but not before he dejectedly wanders back to his hotel and finds that a recent acquaintance, David Robertson, has died of a heart attack in his bed. Locke seizes the moment and begins an act of self-transformation. He decides to kill himself metaphorically by assuming David Robertson's identity. Locke switches the pictures of their respective passports and puts on Robertson's clothes. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, David Locke is deceased. Using Robertson's air ticket, which appears to be made out for most of the major capitals of Europe, and a date book filled with mysterious appointments, Locke begins a journey that is as whimsical as the fatalism that seems to have motivated it. He arrives in London first to check out a locker with a key he had discovered among Robertson's possessions. He finds a briefcase filled with diagrams of guns, but has no clue as to their meaning. Soon thereafter, Locke is approached by two men who think he is Robertson; they reveal themselves as agents of a guerrilla force fighting somewhere in North Africa. Locke hands the gun diagrams over to them, finding himself in the role of a political gunrunner inadvertently committed to the cause of national liberation.

Locke then flies from London to Munich to Barcelona in an effort to keep up with Robertson's 'appointments.' It is in Barcelona where he coincidentally meets The Girl (played by Maria Schneider). We learn little about her except that she is a student of architecture who suddenly abandons whatever plans she has in order to join Locke. He persuades her to help him escape from his former wife and director-friend who frantically searching Barcelona for 'Robertson' because they believe he was the last person to have seen David Locke alive. The Girl complies readily, neither protesting nor explaining her decision.

They travel through Spain together to Robertson's various 'appointed' destinations, only to find that time after time there's no one to meet them. Locke knows that everyone is catching up with him - his wife, his director, the police and the past identity from which he is trying to escape. He keeps on, resigning himself to his ill-fated future while doing nothing to alter the predictable course of upcoming events. Locke and The Girl finally end up in a small, dismal, hotel; the fantasy seems to have played itself out. He tells The Girl to leave him, and in her absence he is killed by agents of the established colonial government that David Robertson had opposed by shipping guns to the local guerrillas. The Girl returns long enough to identify the body of David Robertson. Locke's former wife appears on the scene only to claim that she has never seen the man before. Thus, David Locke dies as meaninglessly as he lived, and the film ends without any sort of hope that could be translated into political terms.

Antonioni's refusal or inability to portray anxiety and insecurity as products of history leads him throughout the film to utilize devices that clearly fail to legitimize alienation as part of the human condition. He uses flashbacks, for instance, in order to lend some depth to the personality and character of David Locke. While the flashbacks do lend coherency to the initially disjointed images of the film,they never provide us with adequate insight into the psycho-social dynamics behind Locke's life or the milieu of which he is a product. They serve as little more than simplified connections that allow us to follow the story.

The dialogue throughout the film is banalized by the weight of the existential malady it so strongly tries to project. At one point in a hotel room, for instance, Locke reveals to The Girl the depth of his angst through a story he tells about a blind man. The blind man, it seems, regained his sight at the age of forty, only to see how poor and filthy the world actually was. When he had been blind, he had been able to cross the road with a stick, now that he had his sight, he was afraid to leave his house. He finally killed himself. In another scene, Locke is sitting in a Barcelona park where he meets an old man. The old man looks at the children who are playing nearby and tells Locke that the ninos are so sad because everything for them will simply be a replay of history, and isn't it unfortunate that they will have to grow up and relive the oft-repeated tragedies of the past. Dialogue of this sort strains too hard to fit comfortably within the contours of the film's philosophical message and ends up hollow and barren of any concreteness, reduced to nothing more than alienating and alienated verbiage.

The characterizations follow suit. Although some critics have suggested that Locke is a man who years to walk amidst the risks and dangers of life, such a suggestion presupposes a quest to live, regardless of how that quest may translate itself. There is nothing Locke's character to indicate that for him living is anything more than what Sartre called 'a senseless passion.' Lock appears to be the paradigm of a single, undiluted message - make an end with things as they are, to end it quickly, and in this case to wait for the moment of final release, the liberating act of uncontested death. As The Girl, Schneider seems miscast, projecting little or no feeling at all for the part. The character's devotion to Locke appears fatuous and unrealistic and so she fails to provide any sort of ideological or explanatory counterweight to Locke's development. While she does query Locke about his immediate circumstances, she never attempts to question the ethical, political or philosophical basis of his action. She doesn't appear to care either.

Whatever element of revolt is present in the chief characters is vitiated by formless despair and evasive, non-militant individualism. Locke and The Girl are one-dimensional participants on the world stage. Their horizons are limited by their immersion in the moment, a moment divorced from both history and authentic rebellion. This rebellion remains a purely private affair and therefore it exists innocuously in the face of brutalizing social reality - it has no lasting consequences. There is never the choices they make, or whether they have attempted to understand the nature of the alternatives with which they were faced - they seem empty of any content.

Nevertheless, some critics have claimed that there is an element of rebellion in the film. They are right, but it is more poetic than practical. Herbert Marcuse rightly commented on the nature of such 'rebellion' - 'It is divorced from reality inasmuch as it creates a world of beautiful illusion, of poetic justice, of artistic harmony and order which reconciles the irreconcilable, justifies the unjustifiable.' In other words, it doesn't contain the truly negating power of political art. Thus, although throughout 'The Passenger' one encounters a strategy of defeatism and failure, most of the important scenes are presented against stunning visual imagery and color. Against the despair of David Locke we have incredibly beautiful shots of the desert; against the hollowness of personal resignation in the face of a world waiting to be transformed we have the colorful street life of Barcelona and the stark, alabaster villages of North Africa. The sense of alienation as a primary force in the film blends into a brilliant montage of color, imagery and style. Style, in successfully subordinating the message of 'eternalized despair' to its own laws of beauty.

But in the end it is Antonioni's perspective on alienation that rakes across the viewer's intellectual and political sensibilities. this perspective determines in the final analysis the narration, distinguishes the important from the trivial, and gives shape to both the episodic and the superficial aspects of the film. All this adds up to a film narrative that is far from new - people are alone facing the abyss that overwhelms their desire to live. Such a theme may seem shopworn to some, but the fact is that people are in trouble, and the trouble is ominous; such a theme should be seen as neither shocking nor foolish. But the real questions that become important in such a film are the subordinate ones - How is their trouble to be explained and described? What should people do about it? These are the questions that Antonioni not only fails to answer properly, but he falls back upon a sloppy existentialism that weds people to the politics of despair.

To simply depict the alienation of the contemporary West, without explaining its social and historical roots, represents a political methodology that seems to fly in the face of Antonioni's recognition of the need for change. He utterly fails to go beyond the mere apprehension or depiction of angst. Instead of placing it critically in the system of relationships  within which it exists, he isolates it and reduces it to an ontological fact. By defining his characters as ahistorical and asocial, Antonioni has deprived them of their right to participate in their own history. David Locke and The Girl live in a social and political vacuum punctuated only by the immediacy of the moment. Authentic engagement in 'The Passenger' is never portrayed. the film is filled with the motif of flight - flight from family, a society, and a general emptiness which is felt to be catastrophic. Between the personalized anguish and boredom, we are given glimpses of the catastrophes of our times - guerrilla war, bloodshed, torture, fear and cruelty. The world appears to be dark, and for Antonioni's characters there seems to be only one solution - to retreat into one's own psychic wilderness.

Antonioni's 'The Passenger' shares a common theme with the works of Camus, Beckett and the young Sartre, who also set out to divorce man from society and to portray him as the mysterious agent of 'timeless despair.' Such a position clearly reveals Antonioni's political roots and places him squarely in the existential camp. People are certainly more than the mere mask of their social character, but the tendency to turn them into formless actors in a play of cosmic mysteries is to blot out their social and individual identities while leading them into a world of nothingness. Such a world has never existed, except in the minds of those who erect their fortunes on the foundations of an oppressive status quo.

There is one scene in 'The Passenger' in which the 'real' Locke is on assignment, interviewing a Western-educated, African witch doctor. Locke queries the man with a series of humiliating questions until the witch doctor points out to Locke that his questions expose a great deal more about himself than any answers might expose about the witch doctor. Antonioni's film may be judged the same way. If we are to hold Antonioni responsible for making films about his time, then it follows that he cannot be exempt from political judgment concerning the consequences of his work. Antonioni has not only failed in this film to retrieve people from the 'culture of silence,' he has also reneged on his ethical responsibilities be perpetuating the mystification of an oppressive order. The themes of the 'The Passenger' are quite clear - life is absurd, we are all victims, communication is worthless, everyone is alone, etc. In a necrophilic manner, Antonioni has transformed isolation, despair and alienation into eternal and incontrovertible verities.

Man is a social being and represents more than the eternal cycle of birth, pain, anguish and death. Antonioni's rejection of man's ability to transcend the limitations of his time is the bulwark of political ignorance, not progressive change. Herein lies the failure of both Antonioni and 'The Passenger.'

[This is a slightly edited version of an essay written by Henry Giroux that was originally published in the journal Cineaste, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1975, pp. 37-39. Giroux has subsequently written widely on media and education, including a 2001 book on Disney entitled The Mouse That Roared, and he has explored similar themes of alienation in a recent book on Youth in a Suspect Society (2009).]

What does Electric Cost in Cairo Egypt-update for 2010

I have updated this post as found the actual electric bill calculation on the Electric Company Website (I did not know existed), The calculation is shown below. It's a bit confusing but easy if you work through. My graph after this sheet shows the total rate, for various consumption rates. Also I found a portal that claims one can pay the electric bill online - which I will try but you need someone who reads Arabic as site is only in local language. I'll post the results after going through the exercise. Note: you can click on the images below to enlarge for readability.

 

If you have, or thinking about a commercial business that uses lots electricity, then pay attention to thee rates below compared to residential

Electric rates increased 25% from 2008 to 2009. Electric man told us it would increase again this year (2010) by 35% but so far have not seen this.  Of course such information is not distributed to the public - such increases just happen out of the blue. Click on pic to enlarge. Note: the higher the usage the higher the unit rate and thus your bill.

If don't know how to read the electric bill, cause you don't know Egyptian numbers, see my previous post (link).

For newbies coming to Cairo - the monthly cost for electric is obviously dependent on your situation. AC's are standard and mostly required for comfort in summer. Some heating is required in winter. A family of four in large 250m2 apartment with 6 AC's can plan to spend a range between 500LE during fall and spring to 2000 LE/month during summer Quite a range as during hot months it really depends on how much you use AC's and how efficient they are.

A quirk that folks need to realize is when man delivers electric bill, he will take meter reading. So bill you pay is not for month your in but one previous. For instance you receive a bill Nov 15th. The bill is really for billing period Sept 15 to Oct 15th.

Warning - Egypt does not have an electrical grounding system for residences. Seriously consider to install "Earth Fault Leakage Detector" in your main fuse box.

Sony PMW-F3 test shoot

compulsion - teaser from Jason Wingrove on Vimeo.

And here is another one:

Sony PMW F3 Camera Test from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.

超越單眼錄影-Sony推出PMW-F3交換鏡頭攝影機

Triumph of the Image in the 1991 Oil War

While the 2003 American invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, initiated by then president George W. Bush, raised a global protest movement against the growing imperial aspirations of the USA, to many observers the previous 1990-91 Persian Gulf Oil War, waged by George Bush Sr., inaugurated the so-called ‘New World Order,’ in which the US with its interests and allies would attempt to reign supreme and remain unchallenged. One of the key features of implementing such imperial aspirations was control of media and information sources, and in this way it would 'not be another Vietnam,' as Bush the Father was often quoted to say. As such, the 1990-91 Iraq war remains an important turning point for how tight control of information sources can be pressed into service to create the illusion of multilateral support for a supposedly ‘clean’ unilateral action.

The 1990-91 American war against Iraq was famous for the sound bites offered by George Bush Sr. When he proclaimed that the war would 'not be another Vietnam,' he seemed to be saying that there would be no images permitted that might sway public opinion against the war; no nightly lists of dead US soldiers; no images of pain, suffering and death; no public acknowledgment of civilian casualties; no media coverage of domestic opposition to the war. When he said that the US would never again ‘fight with one arm tied behind its back,’ Bush had to be implying that the US military machine would have total freedom to engage in wanton destruction without being accountable to anyone (with millions of people killed by the US in Southeast Asia, it is hard to imagine what would have happened if the US fought with 'both arms'). Another difference with Vietnam was the highly touted technical advances in warfare, many tested for the first time against hapless Iraqis. Remove the human dimension from war and one is left with the video game-like televised images of ‘smart bombs,’ ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘collateral damage’ witnessed in media coverage of the 1990-91 war upon Iraq.

Published a year after the war, Triumph of the Image: The Media's War in the Persian Gulf assembles a collection of essays and press excerpts from journalists and scholars who collectively consider the role of the media in the 1990-91 American war against Iraq. The book consists of three parts, the first on background to the war from a media perspective, the second part on analysis of news reports from various regions during the war, and the third part includes several interpretive essays. In an introductory essay in Part One, ‘Roots of War: The Long Road of Intervention,’ co-editor of the volume and then president of the International Association of Media Research Hamid Mowlana provides a useful background essay in which he discusses European control of communications in the Persian Gulf as a necessary part of maintaining global empires during the 19th century, the subsequent American inheritance of those media networks, and the role of the media as ‘a supporter of the status quo.’ Mowlana concludes by noting that the 1990-91 war was a ‘cultural testing ground between the West and the Islamic East,’ but that an ‘accounting of the cultural impact’ of the war remains to be written. Another highlight of Part One is Noam Chomsky’s essay ‘Media and the War: What War?’ in which he notes that by all reasonable definitions, the US-led murderous assault upon Iraq barely qualifies as a ‘war,’ but that ‘when the guns are firing, even if only in one direction, the media close ranks and become a cheering section for the home team.’ In his usual sharp-edged critical style, Chomsky emphasized that the decision to go to war was made in an entirely anti-democratic fashion, and that ‘the president offered no reason for going to war – no reason, that is, that could not be demolished in a moment by a literate teenager.’ Other essays in Part One by media studies luminaries Andre Gunder Frank and Herbert I. Schiller provide further necessary background for understanding the role of media in times of warfare.

Part Two features a collection of short essays and news reports from various sources around the world. Writers from Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia represent the Muslim world. Taken collectively, these essays provide a useful summary of international efforts to cope with and struggle against US domination of information sources. Hamid Mowlana notes that the Islamic Republic of Iran maintained a neutral stance in the conflict, that ‘Iranian editorialists viewed many of the Persian Gulf crisis events within the Islamic and historical context,’ and that the Iranian media quickly dubbed the conflict as an ‘Oil War.’ Other Muslim reporting tended to side with Saddam Hussein, either as the defender of Arabism and Third World nationalism, or as the lesser of two evils. The book also includes a variety of European and other perspectives on media and the war. Farrel Corcoran, of Dublin City University, notes how difficult it was for Ireland to maintain its stated neutral position in the war. While the Irish press was able to maintain an independent and neutral status, the Irish government had to give in to United Nations demands for using Irish air bases as refueling stations for long distance bombing runs. Corcoran also makes the useful point that the ‘new world order’ is about western domination, and he outlines the reasoning behind this: US military superiority equals modernity, and modernity in turn equals moral superiority. This is echoed later in an essay by Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins, who state that the primary message of the conflict was ‘might is right.’

Several essays in Part Two emphasize the difficulty in getting accurate news stories due to the near total control of information from the region by the US military censors. Stig Nohrstedt recalls how Swedish correspondents in the war zone often noticed the complacency of American journalists toward the US government position. He also notes how participants in the pool system often censored one another, and that independent reporters were intimidated by US soldiers. Noting an interesting alternative to the flood of official US news, Finnish professor of journalism Heikki Loustarinen comments on how Finnish television stations used official US war video, but that they did not adopt the official US interpretation, and at times even publicly ridiculed the official interpretation. Japanese media activist Tetsuo Kogawa concludes that a major purpose of the war was to keep the world dependent on oil in order to undermine development of alternative energy sources. Turkish journalist Haluk Sahin reveals that the Turkish media censored CNN reports of US planes taking off from Incirlik airbase in Turkey. Rune Ottesen of Oslo reveals how news stories about US pilots watching porno movies before embarking on bombing missions were censored by the military, but that racist epithets referring to Iraqis as ‘cockroaches’ were allowed as 'official news.' Overall, this section of the book provides a valuable survey of global perspectives on the 1990-91 American war against Iraq.

The authors contributing to Part Three try to look at future implications of the war and its media coverage. International law expert Richard Falk contributes an essay on how the UN charter was twisted to suit US goals, and asks whether or not the UN can be salvaged at all after such a dismal performance. In a chapter entitled ‘More Viewing, Less Knowledge,’ media studies scholar Sut Jhally and colleagues at the Media Education Foundation present the results of a survey they conducted with consumers of American news reporting during the crisis. They conclude that, among other things: the more Americans consumed news, the less they knew about the war and related events; the American public is ‘alarmingly’ ill-informed; Americans had little or no basis for understanding the connection between the war against Iraq and the occupation of Palestine; public understanding of the facts that led up to the 1990-91 war amount to ‘a remarkable rewriting of history’; and that American consumers of news are being selectively but systematically misinformed. Additional chapters in this section explore the cultural dimensions and implications of the war and the associated media imagery.

Beyond informing readers of the role of media in the 1990-91 American war against Iraq, Triumph of the Image points to the necessity of finding alternatives to the domination of global news reporting by such agencies as CNN and BBC. While several alternatives have been developed in the wake of the 1990-91 war, such as Arab media outlets like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya, it remains important to remember that virtually everything shown on American and to some extent British based global media sources remains tightly controlled and serves very narrow interests, and that these outlets are also dominated by advertising as their primary source of revenue, which applies particularly to CNN. This  raises an additional point worth further reflection. While it is important for Third World peoples to keep informed on what is happening around the world and to develop their own sources of information, the danger exists that regional media outlets will follow the lead of the major Western media outlets, both in form and content. In fact, some readers of Triumph of the Image might be tempted to conclude that the only option is to avoid the major media outlets altogether. This may prove difficult, however, as these outlets are pervasive. Perhaps a better strategy, supported by many of the writers in Triumph of the Image, is to watch actively and selectively and to supplement consuming media images with reading, research and discussion. Toward that end, the book remains a valuable critical resource.

[This is a slightly edited version of an essay from Books for Critical Consciousness: Forty Reviews by J. Progler (Penang, Malaysia: Citizens International, 2010.]

Sky Sports 3d - 3d football matches on Sky Sports December 2010

Sunday 5th December 2010

English Premier League

West Brom vs Newcastle United - 1330 - Sky Sports, Sky Sports HD, Sky Sports 3D

Sunderland vs West Ham - 1600 - Sky Sports, Sky Sports HD, Sky Sports 3D

Monday 6th December 2010

English Premier League

Liverpool vs Aston Villa - 2000 - Sky Sports, Sky Sports HD, Sky Sports 3D

Monday 13th December 2010

English Premier League

Manchester United

Sky has confirmed the closure date for the Bravo channels

Sky has confirmed the closure date for the Bravo channels as the 1st January 2011.

Sky acquired the Bravo / Living group of channels in June as part of the £160m deal to purchase the Living TV Group.

From January 1 next year, the Bravo family of channels - including Bravo, Bravo+1 and Bravo 2 - will cease broadcasting on all digital TV platforms, including Sky and Virgin Media.

Sky has decided

I miss NYC---NYC lights

A very enjoyable music video that recall lots memory in nyc....

On Melancholy Hill - NYC Lights from Chateau Bezerra on Vimeo.

Music Video shot just using lights in New York City.

Director: Chateau
Cinematography: Alpha Smoot
Song: Melancholy Hill by Gorillaz
Shot on Canon 5D II and Canon 40D. Finished in After Effects

what a music from????? it also full of imagination
Melancholy Hill by Gorillaz

Doctor Who christmas special 2010 preview

A sneek peek at this years Doctor Who Christmas Special 2010, first shown during the BBC Children in Need show.



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

I miss NYC

New York City - Timelapse from stimul on Vimeo.

I miss Mountain Dew....

i3dg turns iphone into 3d display

Review of 'Dance and Human History'

Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist and folklorist known for collecting and bringing to public attention a wide variety of folk music from the United States, Europe and Latin America. He was an early proponent of what is today commonly referred to as 'multiculturalism.' He received numerous awards and honors, including the Library of Congress Living Legends Award in 2000, two years before his death at the age of 87. In addition to his work in music Lomax was interested in dance, for which he developed the theory and method of 'choreometrics,' which was designed to observe and interpret the relationship between dance and social structure. Although the social sciences, particularly anthropology, have moved away from what came to be known as structuralism, Lomax produced a number of enduring works as part of the choreometrics project, including the documentary film 'Dance and Human History.'

Alan Lomax's Dance and Human History can be a most stimulating teaching tool for as many reasons as Joann Kealiinohomoku criticized it in the journal Ethnomusicology (Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 169-76). That is, the film, used together with the written theory, goals, methods, analyses, and criticisms of choreometrics is an excellent way to introduce students to the major issues, problems, and methods in dance ethnography or (as Kealiinohomoku calls the field) ethnochoreology. In an introductory dance theory course, I've used the film in precisely this manner. The students read two other theoretical overviews that attempt a cross-cultural synthesis of dance, Maria-Gabriele Wosien's Sacred Dance: Encounter with the Gods (1974) and European Folk Dance: Its National and Musical Characteristics by Joan Lawson (1962). They then read the chapters on choreometrics in Folk Song Style and Culture (Lomax 1968). They also read "Cross Cultural Study of Dance: Description and Implications" by Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay (1970), the effort/shape experts who worked out the movement coding system for choreometrics. Then they read the critical reviews of Lomax's approach, project, and method by Kealiinohomoku, Drid Williams, and Suzanne Youngerman published by the Committee on Research in Dance in 1974. To this list I will now add Kealiinohomoku's review in Ethnomusicology. Students read from among several ethnographic studies that place dance and other arts in the context of their own culture. They then write an analysis of the issues and problems in this growing field by comparing the two methodological viewpoints, dance in its specific cultural context and dance from a cross-cultural perspective. So, used carefully, Lomax's attempt to study dance and human history can be made understandable to students.

When Lomax showed the film at the Society for Ethnomusicology Conference in October 1975, he introduced it as a teaching film. He indicated that the purpose of the film was to demonstrate how to see 5 of the 100 or more "motion qualities" specifically identified for study in choreometric coding procedure. In Four Adaptations of Effort Theory in Research and Teaching (1973), Bartenieff and Paulay summarize the range that these observations encompass:

"(a) body parts habitually involved, (b) the body attitude, (active stance), (c) the shape and dimension of movement, (d) the way direction changes in movement, (e) movement qualities such as relative smoothness and tempo, (f) torso-unit relationship, (g) the degree and kind of synchrony between movers, and (h) features of group formation."

Seeing the swift array of sections of entire dances race by as they do in the film tends to dislodge from the viewer's mind the idea that only 5 features of movement are being highlighted. Lomax made the film to train the viewer to see these dimensions of dance action. This goal is similar to the purpose of the cantometrics training tapes, designed to teach the listener to hear the components of music that Lomax identified for study. When presented with this training-to-see goal, the film and its narrative script imply less of an "A causes B" message. In Lomax's final generalization that dance movements "represent the interplay of economic productivity and climatically-influenced division of labor," he suggests that these factors are closely related, not necessarily causally related.

Preparatory reading surely enables students to understand the purpose of the film. The students benefit by analyzing Lomax's method. First, he brings to this mass of dance material an hypothesis as stated in Folk Song Style and Culture: "We are comparing dance to everyday movement in order to verify the hypothesis that danced movement is patterned reinforcement of the habitual movement patterns of each culture or culture area" (1968, p. xv). Thus students are aware that he is operating deductively, not inductively, and they know that he is studying gross cultural features on a large scale. In the film, Lomax shows part of the results.

My students question the juxtaposition of entertainment, ceremonial, recreational, folk dance, etc. Lomax says in Folk Song Style and Culture that his visual association is deliberate:

"there has been no means of description suitable to comparative study and no body of theory to explain how dance and culture are linked in all societies and in all stages of development. The aim of the present investigation, therefore, becomes one of recording and noting regularities and contrasts in movement pattern sufficiently frequent and gross to produce units universally applicable in cross-cultural studies."

(I am aware that Lomax's phrase "stages of development" reflects an outdated evolutionary premise of cultural history, and alert students to this issue. Lomax, in answer to my question, admits that he read no other comparative dance theory before or during his study, so was unaware that Curt Sachs had suggested this work-dance connection in his 1937 book World History of the Dance.)

Students aware of the problems intrinsic to filming any type of dance, question Lomax's use of the existing films available to him as data. Again the answer is found in Folk Song Style and Culture (1968, p.263):

"The cinema has thus far served the ethnologist largely as a way to supplement and preserve observations already recorded in his notebooks, or relationships already analyzed out of his field work... Choreometrics, however, is an attempt to employ film as a source and a tool in the comparative and historical study of culture and of human behavior. We regard the vast, endlessly provocative, prejudice-laden, existing sea of documentary footage as the richest and most unequivocal storehouse of information about humanity."

Adding introductory remarks to the film, clearly stating that the 200 films drawn on are not a random sample would undoubtedly clarify that the film demonstrates a method of study, and the conclusions are based on the limited sources used. Lomax clearly states his perspective, that of looking for universal positive relationships among dance patterns around the world. His general and broadly comparative viewpoint differs vastly from many dance ethnographers whose perspective is specific cultural description and analysis. Their major methodological challenge is to understand the interrelationships of a single culture's components with as little simplification and distortion as possible. Therefore Lomax's attempt at such a large cross-cultural synthesis appears undisciplined. Anya Royce, in The Anthropology of Dance (1977), discusses Lomax's cross-cultural method. She uses it to illustrate the problems of such a large scale study when the new field of dance ethnography is just evolving updated systematic techniques. She compares Lomax's study with the outdated work of Curt Sachs, as did Suzanne Youngerman in 1974 for the Committee on Research in Dance. Royce notes that Lomax uses "appropriate statistical tests for reliability and inter-coder agreement," whereas Sachs "produced essentially impressionistic statements about styles" (1977, p. 138). Royce does credit the choreometric coding method as useful, however (1977, p. 60):

"The coding sheet and the explanations of the abbreviations used in it could profitably be used by field researchers who are concerned with recording the gross structural features of a dance or dance complex. A less comprehensive set of features may also be used as a preliminary step, scoring the dance, for example, only in terms of three major features: body attitude, body parts most frequently articulated, and dimensionality of movement path. It must be emphasized, however that neither the Choreometrics coding sheet nor the preliminary version of it will provide a complete description of a particular dance. They are designed to pick out gross features and they do it well. For some kinds of research, this is perfectly adequate, and in some field situations it may be all that one can record."

The choreometric method of seeing features of dance in cross-cultural context is basically what Dance and Human History is about. Used for teaching part of the coding scheme and to illustrate problems of cross-cultural analysis using a variety of types of available film footage, Lomax's film can sink students directly into the center of the exciting, self-critical, and challenging field of dance ethnography. Used with a number of cautions, it can be stimulating, to say the least. Certainly the sample of dances of the world, put side by side, is enriching and may entice students to investigate any of the number of questions Lomax's commentary raises.

Since I personally value the style of thinking and resulting projects that work toward a synthesis of large quantities of ideas, material, or information, I enjoy (intellectually and emotionally) the type of work Lomax is doing. I also want to go on record to say how much I respect and value Kealiinohomoku's work and expertise in ethnochoreology. I am a teacher of dance and dance theory, not an expert in dance ethnography - though I am carefully enough informed to teach about it at an introductory level. This alternate review can only reflect my limited perspective. I use the film as a teaching tool and by-pass the distorted, exaggerated, and as yet unfounded theoretical ideas scattered through the film script. I think the script does not represent the choreometrics project adequately, because Lomax oversimplifies his long range goals of understanding dance in relation to culture and cultural history by drawing conclusions too soon.

I understand that there are students successfully using the choreometrics coding scheme to study dance in specific cultures: so in spite of Lomax's "outdated" theoretical framework, the method he helped to initiate is indeed a useful research tool.

[This is a slightly edited version of a review written by Judith Alter that originally appeared under the title 'Another View of Lomax's Film Dance and Human History' in the journal Ethnomusicology, Vol. 23, No. 3 (September 1979), pp. 500-503. A selection of Alan Lomax's films can be viewed online at Folkstreams, which also provides useful biographical information and links to other related works.]

ITV1+1 coming soon to satellite TV

It looks like ITV1+1 will be launching soon.

New test channel have been appearing on the ITV transponders on Astra 2d.

There will not be all the ITV1 regions on there, but ITV1+1 will have 6 regional variations:

London
South East (encompassing Meridian and Anglia)
West (encompassing Wales & West and Westcountry)
Central
Yorkshire/Tyne Tees (encompassing Yorkshire and Tyne Tees)
Granada/

ITV3 HD and ITV4 HD launch on Sky HD

ITV has launched high definition versions of ITV3 and ITV4 exclusively on Sky, following the recent launch of ITV2 HD on the satellite platform.

From 5pm on Monday 15th November 2010 ITV3 HD started broadcasting on channel 226 on Sky's electronic programming guide, while ITV4 HD will be available at position 227.

The channels will broadcast a range of programmes in native high definition. The

今周刊／電視生態沉淪下的文化大危機

Thanks JL's info:
今周刊／電視生態沉淪下的文化大危機

The African and Afro-American Cinemas

Historically, African cinema and Afro-American cinema can and should be located within the same social space of the Third Cinema-Third World Cinema. In broad terms, however, the former can be characterized by the search for and interrogation of origins, while the latter can be defined by its fight for positions and identity. African cinema seeks to establish methods and systems of production, distribution, and viewing, while Afro-American cinema is produced within diverse political and cultural national contexts. Afro-American cinema  is situated within a particular national culture, albeit one governed by complex and nuanced historical, social, and economic factors. The movement of historical events is the primary - although not the only - preoccupation of African cinema, while the examination of social mechanisms is central to Afro-American cinema. In both cinemas, however, oppression, liberation, struggle, and hope inform thematic structures and references.

In a statement of the utmost significance, Ousmane Sembene, the pioneer of African cinema and its outstanding exponent, has said that the importance of cinema in Africa is equivalent to education, science, and other institutions essential to the definition and sustenance of a vibrant and vital culture - and should thus be given the corresponding recognition. Indeed, Sembene's observation accords supreme responsibility to African cinema, since it is an artistic instrument that can play a prominent role in demystifying and eradicating certain obstacles that have hindered or deflected the development of many African countries. And, correspondingly, African cinema has examined the structures and coordinates of African history in order to analyze these same obstacles. In pursuing this endeavor, African cinema has confronted a set of cultural realities: for centuries European national histories superimposed themselves on African national histories through force and ideological distortion. This process has traumatized African national and ethnic cultures, an consequently many of them began to disintegrate, although many others were able to repulse this assault. In the process, some African intellectuals and artists lost their sense of direction and responsibility to their peoples. Films like Sembene's Ceddo (1978, Senegal), Haile Gerima's Harvest: 3000 Years (1976, Ethiopia), and Med Hondo's West Indies (1979, Mauritania) attempted - and in many was succeeded - to overcome these obstacles by treating African history and herstory as an integral whole and by embellishing narrative structures with African oral narrative modes, thus establishing links between a traditional culture and modernity. These crucial contributions to African cinema enabled Sembene to take the position cited above.

A primary aim of African cinema up to the present has been to reintroduce the African into history. The political imperatives of this project are historical in range and sociological in depth. That African cinema addresses the problem of history is hardly surprising, since for approximately four centuries Africans had been expelled from its domain by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. For the most part, the heterogeneity of African political, economic, and cultural structures was inverted by European colonialism into the supposed homogeneity of our African backwardness. The imperatives of cultural and political struggle have given African cinema the task, among many others, of retrieving and rehabilitating the uniqueness of African national cultural patterns. Ceddo and Harvest fulfill this eminent task in an exemplary fashion. At the same time, these two films - and others that could be included in this profile - have attempted to define African history: its thematic structures, its patterns and configurations, its unities and contradictions, and its meanings and significations. Whether in presentations of conflict and struggle between imperial history (of whatever colonial power) and African national history as in Ceddo or in the examination of class struggle in African feudal society as in Harvest, these films effect a demystification of the ideological biases of European colonial historiography and, more importantly, attempt to locate the proper place of Africans in history, within a global culture of nations. In bringing these interrelated themes together, Ceddo and Harvest belong within the African philosophical space opened and dominated by the theoretical writings of Amilcar Cabral (whose writings occupy a position within our national cultures comparable to that of Antonio Gramsci's work in European cultures), who articulated the theoretical concepts, the cultural forms, and the modes of armed struggle by which we Africans should re-enter African history and world history. Both films embody the lesson of the inseparability and indissolubility of politics and culture, the central construct of the conceptual framework of Cabral's writings.

While the lineage of African cinema is relatively short, the genealogy of Afro-American cinema is more extensive and different in character. Using Gramscian metaphors - while the African cinema wage a 'war of movement' on the historical plane in order to expel and defeat imperialist cinematic images of blacks, Afro-American cinema has been waging a 'war of position' within the U.S. cultural landscape in order to gain acceptance for its independent status and to dispel the negative images of blacks which Hollywood has perpetrated - from D.W. Griffith's Birth of Nation in 1915 to Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple in 1985. That independent Afro-American cinema, defining itself in class terms against the dominant white American cinema, has produced major figures - from Oscar Micheaux to Gordon Parks (although his position is problematic within the American black cinema) - is undeniable. At the same time, it is utterly incomprehensible how Richard Roud's 1,095 page two-volume study, Cinema, A Critical Dictionary: The Major Filmmakers (1980) a major standard reference work, mentions not even one important black American filmmaker, let alone an African filmmaker, whether Ousmane Sembene or Yousef Chahine. This outstanding omission underlines yet again the fact that integration of Afro-Americans into institutions that influence U.S. democracy remains a fundamental issue in that culture.

The founding of Afro-American cinema was characterized by two phenomena which effected its development and are in evidence today. In ideological terms, these films articulate historical forms of self-identification, that is, they chart, trace, and map on the landscape of dominant white consciousness authentic poetic forms of black subjectivity. And, sociologically, Afro-American cinema has existed in opposition to the Hollywood film industry's monopoly of economic institutions (production channels, distribution networks, and exhibition forums). From the perspective, it was the establishment in 1916 of Noble and George Johnson's Lincoln Motion Picture Company in Los Angeles that we can date Afro-American cinema. Their first motion picture, The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, not only portrayed black people as complex individuals (in contrast to Hollywood stereotypes), but was the first film to specifically address a black audience (not, however, excluding a white audience). Other films followed this route from 1917 onwards. For instance, Booker T. Washington and his secretary Emmett J. Scott (both of the Tuskegee Institute) attempted to establish a black foothold in Hollywood, in reaction to the racism and Afrophobia of Birth of a Nation. Their Hollywood film, The Birth of a Race (1919), failed financially and with it their larger ambition of creating a place for black producers and directors in Hollywood failed, too. The same fate befell the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Lincoln's Dream (1920). Perhaps poor performance of these two films was because they were not produced from a truly independent base.

The fully-formed structures, concrete practices, artistic expressions, and political manifestations of an independent Afro-American cinema (as distinct from Afro-American cinema conforming to the practices and forms of the film industry) can be traced to the films of Oscar Micheaux and his independent production formed in 1918, the Micheaux Film and Book Company. Micheaux also established an important method for financing his independent films - securing advances from theater owners for his films, which ensured that he could work within modest budgets without jeopardizing distribution of his films. This financial dimensions is crucial, as noted by Haile Gerima (from a private conversation in Berlin on 18 March 1986), because one of the important present tasks of the black American independent cinema is to struggle against the artificially inflated high costs of film production in the U.S.; in fact, the survival of the Afro-American independent cinema hinges on this struggle. That is why Micheaux is central, because it could be argued that his contribution lay not so much in the artistic achievements of his films, many of which pandered to fashionable prejudices devoid of serious cultural critiques, but rather in his persistent efforts to establish an independent black cinema. Whatever the limitations of his ideological and political culture, however, Micheaux's films - from The Homesteader (1918) to The Betrayal (1948) - were in accord with the beliefs of W.E.B. DuBois, who identified racism as the central problem of the twentieth century, although Micheaux was never able to take this question beyond the class boundaries of the black bourgeoisie.

Nevertheless, Micheaux introduced many of the thematic spheres within which Afro-American cinema has since concerned itself. The themes of Micheaux's films were far-reaching, ranging from the problems of interracial romance to the traumas of collapsing black marriages to the corruption of the church. But unlike Eisenstein, his contemporary whose films revolve around a central thematic object - the glorification and celebration of the past - or Vertov, who attempted to explain and clarify the struggle of the present moment, Micheaux's work lacks a conceptual center or philosophical object that would have established their coherence and rigor. This absence, in addition to the effects of imposed technical limitations, tends to make his films appear fragmented. However, one contribution to Micheaux's great credit was his casting of Paul Robeson in Body and Soul (1924), the first step in Robeson's film acting career. In retrospect, this is especially significant because the theatrics, metaphysics, and poetics of a particular tradition of American acting, epitomized by Marlon Brando and carried on in the work of American actors like Al Pacino, Gloria Foster, Robert DeNiro, Anne Bancroft, and James Earl Jones, originated with Paul Robeson's early film performances - an enduring and brilliant tradition.

It was approximately twenty years after the death of Oscar Micheaux that the black independent cinema was reinvigorated and reanimated by Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song (1971). In the interregnum, Hollywood films about Afro-Americans, such as Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949), Robert Rossen's Island in the Sun (1957), and Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), held sway. With the great commercial success of Van Peebles' film, Hollywood took note and began producing a cycle of black-exploitation films, including well-known successes like Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly (1972), and The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972). In contrast to the fifties, when black independent cinema had fallen in to eclipse, in the seventies an often sharp and uncompromising contest between Hollywood and Afro-American independent producers erupted, and - in artistic terms - in the early eighties the black independent cinema tentatively prevailed. Van Peebles, then, is important historically for having shown that an independent black film could challenge Hollywood's hegemony over the U.S. film market rather than for any intrinsic contribution he made to the enlargement and development of Afro-American aesthetics.

From the mid seventies until the mid eighties, however, several films appeared that confirmed the vitality of Afro-American cinema and contributed significantly to its development - Gerima's American film Ashes and Embers (1982), Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding (1982), both independently produced, and Gordon Parks' Leadbelly (1976), a studio-financed production. A common element in all three films is that each, in its particular way, elaborates the meanings of Langston Hughes' poem 'Justice':

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we blacks are wise:
Her bandages hid two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.

In Leadbelly Parks attempts to retrieve a unique moment of Afro-American cultural history through a portrait of the great blues singer. That Hollywood effectively destroyed the film by refusing it wide distribution is not accidental, as recalled by Parks in an interview in The Cineaste Interviews (1983, pp. 173-180), since the film is highly political in its preservation of the cultural richness of the Afro-American heritage. Burnett's My Brother's Wedding, on the other hand, uses the indecisiveness and hesitation of Pierce, a troubled young man who vacillates between attending his brother's wedding and friend's funeral, to enact a metaphor of the complex and unstable dialectic of class and race for Afro-Americans in relation to social institutions in the U.S. The uniqueness of Gerima's Ashes and Embers is that it successfully transposes an African oral narrative form into cinematic narrative. From this synthesis emerges an epic film that symbolizes issues broader than the specific historical drama it portrays. As Gerima explained in a 1985 interview:

Next, there is the idea of struggle. My characters must struggle, both to define themselves and to overcome their oppression and exploitation... For instance, in Ashes and Embers, I wanted to present a generation in struggle through a character who had an extreme experience - fighting in Vietnam - that has left him scarred. He must fight; he must struggle to understand himself and his relationships with those around him so that he can be transformed.

These three films, then, using very different means, mobilize and give direction to a politicized cultural consciousness which, at the time when they were made, was in danger of exhaustion as the conservative social agenda of Reaganism became institutionalized in the U.S.

Returning to the comparison with African cinema, the longer lineage of independent Afro-American cinema can be described as two distinct periods: the first, stretching from 1924 to 1948, the period of Oscar Micheaux's productions, was characterized by psychological representations that marked an effort to come to terms with racism in U.S. culture; during the second, from the demise of the Second Reconstruction (signaled by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968) to the present, the dominant approach has been sociological or, more appropriately, a manifestation of sociological imagination. These two tendencies developed cumulatively and successively. African cinema, on the other hand, has been simultaneously informed by two structures of meaning. In part, this can be attributed to its recent formation, dating from 1963, the year when Sembene's first film, Borom Sarret, was made. Hence, the organization of meaning according to political themes seen in more recent African cinema - exemplified by Sembene's Xala (1974) and Soulemane Cisse's Baara (1978), among other films - is adjacent to and contiguous with the historical structuring evident in Gerima's Harvest and Sembene's Ceddo. This is hardly surprising, since the affinity of the earlier films exhibit affinities with the philosophy of Frantz Fanon, while the historical work of the late seventies - Ceddo, Harvest, West Indies, et al. - can be aligned with that of Cabral. In Fanon we encounter a desperate and brilliant attempt to violently restructure African political systems and philosophies that emerge in the wake of anticolonial wars, while in Cabral we are presented with a reshaping and remapping of the social geography of African history. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, the emergence of African Marxism can be traced to the writings of Cabral and Fanon.

Although it's doubtful that Gerima, Sembene, and Cisse have not read the works of these two major figures in the emergence of African Marxism, I do not mean to imply that their films are simply cinematic translations of their philosophical texts. Rather, I mean to indicate that the full aesthetic and historical meaning of these films can only reveal their originality within the 'dialogism' between Fanon's political philosophy and Cabral's philosophy of history. Although these films indicate their unity on this continental plane, they equally differentiate themselves from each other by simultaneously articulating national cultural patterns, national ideological conflicts, and national class confrontations. Nonetheless, it is possible without engaging in a complicated argument to discern an affinity between Fanon's critique of the national bourgeoisie in The Wretched of the Earth and the political structure of African cinema in the seventies. For example, in Xala the impotence, profound stupidity, and nervelessness of the African national bourgeoisie is conveyed in its true tragic dimensions. The politics of the film could be summarized by the following thesis from The Wretched of the Earth:

The national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor; it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type. Its innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket... Seen through its eyes, its missions has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neocolonialism.

Baara, too, in which the national bourgeoisie betrays the national interests, imitates new cosmopolitan fashion, and lacks imaginative appreciation of its own national treasures, could be seen in terms of Fanon's formulations, also from The Wretched of the Earth:

The struggle against the bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries is far from being a theoretical one. It is not concerned with making out its condemnation as laid down by the judgment of history. The national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries must not be opposed because it threatens to slow down the total, harmonious development of the nation. It must simply be stoutly opposed because, literally, it is good for nothing.

In conclusion, the analysis and interpretations offered here concerning distinctions within Afro-American cinema and within African cinema, and those between them, are intended to suggest some directions for criticism that takes as its point of departure the material reality of each. Certain important processes, events, and factors in both Afro-American and African cinemas have not been mentioned because of their analytical complexities. For instance, I have not dealt with the contributions of Paulin Vieyra in relation to African cinema and William Greaves in the Afro-American context. What I have tried to establish, however, is that the structural coordinates of African cinema and black American independent cinema show how important it is to situate their dialectical movement within the politics of Pan-Africanism - the very Pan-Africanism represented by two names in modern black film culture, Paul Robeson and Haile Gerima.

[This is a slightly edited version of an article by Ntongela Masilela, a black South African independent filmmaker who at the time of its writing was residing in exile in Berlin and a member of Fountainhead Dance Theater. It was originally published in the film and video monthly journal The Independent, Vol. 11, No. 1, January/February 1988, pp. 14-17.]

Deep Image Compositing/ No more edge artifacts please!

http://www.deepimg.com/

The waiting in finished.... finally....finally....finally-Trapcode Particular for Nuke

看到這個CG news, 眼淚差點就要流出來了.... 感謝 Red Giant Software的努力......特此發文慶祝

The NEWS from Foundry....
and 30mins traning video from Red Giant software.....

Trapcode Particular for Nuke Tutorial v1 by Steve Wright from Hieronymus Foundry on Vimeo.

Racial Stereotypes in American Entertainment

The documentary film 'Ethnic Notions' played on American Public Television in the late 1980s and quickly sank into the limbo reserved for fine works of broadcasting that happened not to have stirred some sort of splashy attention. Curiously, in a supposedly post-Gutenberg era, the moving images intended to convey important ideas as printed texts never could have done are quickly lost from the view of all but 'media' specialists. This is a particularly sad fate in the case of 'Ethnic Notions' because not only was it a neat piece of television but also it remains a sharp teaching tool.

This hour-long history of black (exclusively so, despite its title) stereotyping is a marvel of coherent, linear argument in a medium not known for its linearity, of pungent generalization by historians not given to speaking in the byte-sized unit made obligatory by TV editing, and of well used artifacts from Jan Faulkner's collection of black icons of popular culture. Marlon Riggs pulled together a coast of San Francisco Bay notables - historians Lawrence Levine and George Frederickson of Berkeley and Stanford, respectively; Barbara Christian of Berkeley; America's hidden national treasure, the mime Leni Sloane; the nation's oldest active black filmmaker, Carlton Moss (he wrote the Signal Corps film 'The Negro Soldier' in 1943); and others - all held together by Esther Rolle's voiceover.

Without resort to academic cant and nonce-words, 'Ethnic Notions' shrewdly introduces its general audience to the complex ideas of the 'Frankfurt School' of media critics, particularly T.W. Adorno's assertion that popular culture always serves the interests of the status quo by formulating the terms under which they oppressed agree to tolerate their oppressors. As Rolle says, stereotyping provided a graphic mediation between the two facts of American life, 'the profound contradiction' of the coexistence of slavery and freedom. Later, during Reconstruction, after the terms had changed, 'the old stereotypes adapted to new politics' the stakes of which were the making of new social controls to replace the slave-system. Black typology readily opened to include a benign Negro-as-minstrel as well as 'Negro as beast' in need of white dominance as a check against lapsing into savagery and committing 'offense[s] against civilization.'

Riggs draws the aural and visual evidence that carries the argument from all sorts of casually-wrought popular culture: vaudeville and minstrel shows, traveling 'Tom shows,' movies from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1903) to the energetic cartoons of World War II, advertising logos, postcards and souvenirs, mechanical toys, and sheet music. The most magically compelling sequence, however, is an excerpt from Sloan's own homage to minstrels in which he honors the memory of the black mime Bert Williams and struggles with the 'irony' (he says) of black minstrels for whom black face was their only 'doorway' into the 'theatrical workforce.' He delivers a tragicomic monologue (as Williams) as he puts on the makeup that transforms him from courtly gentleman into grotesque clown, liver-lipped, pop eyed, imprisoned, and weeping under his paint.

Almost as touching is an editor's contrivance which conveys the notion (already established by Levine's speaking of World War I as a black 'watershed') that major events cause change, even in deeply embedded ideologies and the stereotypes that provide their casual rhetoric. Ethel Waters, toiling over a washtub, sings 'Darkies Never Dream,' intercut with stills of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. In turn, this progressivist bit of cutting is reinforced by a sequence of evolving Aunt Jemima logos in which her visage on pancake flower boxes grows from mere grimace into maternal smile.

'Ethnic Notions' fails only as a result of the unremitting demands of its medium. Already rendered too busy by too many talking heads, it could not take up subtleties such as audience-reception. To take only one instance in 'The Birth of a Nation' (1915), when a white maiden leaps to her death rather than face the advances of a black officer, the film follows the lead of generations of critics who presumed the sequence a rape rather than a humble proposal of marriage that ends in suicide because of her racism rather than his assault, a good moment to show how every portrayal carries an added burden, a back story in the form of audience expectations created by past racism. We could also do with a detailed credit crawl - visual footnotes for the generalist.

[This is a slightly edited version of a review by Thomas Cripps that was originally published in Cineaste (Vol. XVII, No. 1, April 1989, pp. 21-22). 'Ethnic Notions' is available on DVD from California NewsReel and a transcript of the audio is available here.]

Your Passports Lost in Cairo Egypt !!!!! - Get Ready for a Nightmare

Flying in from Canada one is pretty tired, but made a critical mistake. So whether passports were "lost" or "stolen" is not the issue - mine and younger daughter's went missing.

Scenario is easy - got the airport taxi, loaded bags, hand carried computer bag which had passports inside, and off to home. At home Van taxi was blocking traffic so we rushed a bit to get bags out, give tip of course, and stagger into house for "hello's" and a sleep.  But, computer bag not with us.

Too late to do anything that night so next morning called taxi company and was surprised 1. they answered  2. advised they would check with driver (I had the receipt). 3. driver did not see any computer bag?


OK we cannot give up, so off to airport to see staff at taxi company. Pursued event more and offered substantial reward. Come to know after my trip the taxi was passed on to second driver. He was sleeping. We had no choice but to then go to airport tourist police.  Have any idea where this drama is going yet????

Nightmare 1 - Airport Police
Made out our police report and the police officer said he wanted to question both drivers, as maybe we should be making a theft report. Well seven hours later I succumbed and said let's just make this a "lost passport" case. Otherwise they arrest the two drivers and hold them for four days downtown, for some serious investigation, and we have to go and make more reports out. So, in end, they had a book that they wrote report in, and told to come next morning to a different office to collect the official police report.

Next morning off to Terminal 1, Hall 1 and find the so called office. If one lives here they know Government Offices are renowned for "ugly". The book with report in was not there - so phone calls were made and asked to wait. What a surprise.  Lo' and behold they find book and fellow does a hand written report of same information. But, officer with the stamp is not at work that day. Told to come back tomorrow.

This is now third trip to airport and again man with stamp not a work.  After some discussion they called a young boy (low rank servant class) and told him to take to another officer in another building to get stamp. After another hour waiting - got the hand written piece of paper with unreadable stamp. You cannot get a replacement passport without the police report.

Waiting Period......
In some ways local thieves have a good side to them. It is not unusual for them to keep money and computers, or what ever they stole, but will mail documents to you as even they know the "hell" of replacing important  documents.

Embassy
This part is fairly straight forward but not without some agro. Canadian passports require special photo size which is best obtained at Mogama (ground floor - they do it correctly). And you need a professional to sign form he knows you and also to endorse a photo on back saying it is a photo of me.

Then off to Embassy and submit papers and it takes about 3 weeks to receive replacement.  Of course this is now three trips downtown - one to Mogama, and two to Garden City.

Mogama for new visa and entry stamp...
Here is where the nightmare really begins. But to summarize - 7 trips, biggest headache in world place, some lost tempers and serious discussions with senior officers (takes some doing even to get to this level), and month later, got the visa replaced and entry stamp.

Moral of story: Jeez mate - take care that damn passport