Aerial Shots Research Articles

Electric Eyes

In 1977, U.S. Border Patrol Pilot George Watson praised the latest addition to the agency’s fleet in a photo-essay for INS Reporter. “A new dimension in enforcement capability began with the Hughes 500 helicopter,” he vowed. To illustrate the fruits of modernization, Watson included aerial shots of an arrest in the San Ysidro desert. “Before,” he explained, “aliens” would “sweep across” the border. Now, “Fox Trot’s light in the sky is bad news. Migrants hit the deck. They cannot escape.” Less than a decade later, the magazine admitted that, for the first time, one million “illegals” had been apprehended in a single year. Despite the slew of surveillance technologies at its disposal—helicopters, infrared scopes, night-vision goggles, low-light television systems, and “electric eye” ground sensors—the Border Patrol was outmatched. This article mines interviews, memoirs, promotional materials, and archival photographs from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) History Office and Library to flesh out the intimate links between visuality, surveillance, border policing, and xenophobic nationalism. Amid hysteria over unauthorized migration in the wake of the Bracero Program (1942–1964), the Border Patrol began to represent sovereignty on the U.S.–Mexico line as a visual project. It resurrected rudimentary tools (e.g. sign cutting) and adopted increasingly sophisticated optical devices. To advertise its vigilance, the agency turned to the camera. Via publicity and commemorative projects, the Border Patrol crafted an institutional iconography that showcased its prescient, scientific oversight even as it displayed the U.S.–Mexico boundary’s persistent insecurity. Throughout, it positioned the undocumented as invasive enemies. Ultimately, the Border Patrol leaned on a visual culture that glorified surveillance to justify the state’s sovereign right to police mobility. Insidiously, it fueled xenophobia by othering Mexican migrants. And it reimagined the U.S.–Mexico border as the site of a forever war: a perpetually vulnerable zone where perfected observation was a required—but never finished—pursuit.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS IDENTITY OF THE FIRST FRUITS OF RIOBAMBA. DESIGN OF INTERACTIVE DIGITAL REPOSITORY

The objective of this work is the conservation by modern digital means of the architectural firsts located in the city of Riobamba, an interactive photographic repository was designed in which 360° aerial shots were used. A mixed methodology was used, both qualitative and quantitative, employing methods such as documentary, descriptive, population and survey techniques, interview and observation sheets, investigating the first fruits for their historical relevance and social impact, subsequently, a buyer persona was developed to determine the user who occupied the repository, official data and information from government entities was sought with the use of the interview, The data obtained were analyzed in order to facilitate the photographic taking and move on to the creative phase, formulating guiding ideas that gave feasible solutions in the design of the proposal. With what was learned in the experimentation, the final design was started, the photographs went through a process of digital development, colorization and digital stitching; In addition, a third process of composition - punctual edition, all equirectangular shots were transferred to the panoraven platform, facilitating the creation of the repository with a contribution of interactivity, a hotspot tour and informative texts were used with the option of infospot, to reinforce the interactivity a map was added so that people know the location of the scoops and a gyroscope to create a better experience on the cell phone and adaptability on various platforms. These processes resulted in an interactive digital photographic repository of easy access, dissemination, functional and with the logo "Riobamba city of the first fruits" this identifying resource of the city was preserved, finally it can be concluded that the use of new technologies is essential to reach new generations, being essential that government entities invest in these cultural resources, which enhance tourism and consequently activate the economy of the city of Riobamba.

‘Come: It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man’: The re-enchantment of Scotland through Wicker Man tourism

The location filming of The Wicker Man (1973) used a number of places to invent the Pagan Scottish island of Summerisle. In the film, Summerisle feels like a timeless place in the Inner or Outer Hebrides. The actual locations are well-known in fan and academic literature. The film begins with aerial shots of the plane carrying Sergeant Howie passing over the dramatic mountains of Skye. But the rest of the film was shot somewhere else. In this article, I will explore how fans online make sense of the construction of the film, and how that feeds into wider academic debates about horror films and outsiders, and Scottishness and Gaelicness. I will then discuss my own pilgrimage tourism to the location sites in Scotland and use my own pictures and reflections to argue that while all tourism is a highly contested leisure activity, Wicker Man tourism allows tourists to find themselves off the map. It also allows people to re-enchant Scotland, and make meaning of Scottish landscape and history, even if the film draws on English folklore and music and The Golden Bough as much as Scottish folklore and music.

An Ecological Context That Scars: Reflections on Three Nature Documentaries of 2020

An Ecological Context That Scars: Reflections on Three Nature Documentaries of 2020

Baghdad Twist

Baghdad Twist

드론의 비행안전 및 사생활보호 등에 관한 법적 고찰

A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle included in the ultra-light vehicle category under the Aviation Act. Recently, as the number of people who own and use drones is rapidly increasing, legal problems such as drone flight safety issues and invasion of privacy are frequently occurring. Accordingly, around 2021, the Aviation Safety Act was amended to classify drones, that is, unmanned ultra-light flying devices, into four categories according to their weight, and in all cases, the qualification conditions were mandatory so that they could fly only after obtaining a pilot’s certificate. Many users are not aware of this fact, and if they fly without a license, they will be fined at least 3 million won. Drones, which are considered a promising industry in the future, require strict regulation as they can be used for various personal crimes including unqualified flight problems. First of all, drone users must obtain a license according to the type of drone in accordance with the Aviation Safety Act, and all commercial flying devices, regardless of weight exceeding 2 kg or weight, must be reported to the Drone Management Office of the Korea Transportation Safety Authority. In addition, the enforcement rules of the Aviation Safety Act include prohibition of dropping objects, prohibition of flying that may pose a risk to human life or property in the sky over a densely populated area, prohibition of flying in a no-fly zone, prohibition of flying at night, prohibition of flying while intoxicated, etc. The prohibition of flying is stipulated as a regulated user compliance requirement. Drones usually have cameras installed to take pictures of the scenery seen from the sky, but unspecified numbers of people can be photographed, so you should use them with caution about personal information. If a scene with another person's face is uploaded to a social networking service or YouTube without consent, depending on the situation, it may be involved in a lawsuit for damages or defamation under the criminal law due to infringement of the right to portrait. To prevent this, you should try to protect the privacy of others by taking aerial shots rather than close-up shots in public places where there are people. Advances in science and technology such as information and communication technology (ICT) are also changing the means and aspects of terrorism. In particular, drones, which are widely used for low-cost general use, industrial and military use, have a very high risk of being abused for terrorism against key personnel or important national facilities, as well as invasion of privacy such as illegal filming. Drones can be used for crime or terrorism in various safety accidents at any time, so it is virtually impossible to prevent existing threats with the legal system alone. Accordingly, when a drone flying in a prohibited place or time zone or an unmanned aerial vehicle operating abnormally is discovered, it is necessary to detect and block it at an early stage. In addition, ordinary citizens who use drones for hobbies such as video shooting are urged to carefully read the contents stipulated in the law and use them safely to protect the lives and privacy of others. Police and national defense use the face recognition system on drones to search for missing persons and to recognize and intercept terrorists, a national risk factor, are expected to play a major role. As a healthy and developing drone industry is expected in the future, individuals must also follow the rules to avoid infringing on drone flight requirements and privacy of others. There are two key issues in drone legal issues: flight safety issues and invasion of privacy. In this article, we would like to consider improvement measures that can ensure the safe flight of drones, suppress the occurrence of human damage, and effectively prevent invasion of privacy.

ROLE OF UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE IN CINEMATOGRAPHY

(Unmanned aerial vehicle has been used to any type of cinematography activities. It is widely used for today's time where in most of cinematography activities used drones for aerial shots, that is more convenience and easy to use than man power. Controlling a drone while lining a cinematography activity such as movies, dramas, action and also photography. On the other hand, it is typically requiring a large number of skilled human operators. To optimize shooting creativity and efficiency while minimizing production costs, it must be untextual aware and adaptive. This purpose necessitates the use of drone vision. It is at its core, an investigation of how to improve human creativity, expressiveness, and experience sharing. This study aims to determine and to Find out the minor and major function of unmanned aerial vehicle in terms of cinematography as drone plays vital role to the history of cinematography together with the intelligent and abilities behind drones. This paper introduces the usage, data analysis, the drones used and the data collected throughout the study. The result presented in this study shows how unmanned aerial vehicle is important to any indu strial sector especially in cinematography when it comes to the roles in cinematography world. Here we also see about the comparison of drones between cinematography and other sectors.

»Erez Israel from the Air 1937–38«

Abstract In September 1938, German-Jewish merchant, publisher and patron Salman Schocken, who emigrated to Palestine in 1934, presented an album of 40 aerial photographs of the Land of Israel as a sign of gratitude to the well-wishers on his 60th birthday the previous year. The pictures were taken by Hungarian-Jewish photographer Zoltan Kluger, who had worked in Berlin since the 1920s and became the »chief photographer« of Keren Hayesod and the Jewish National Fund after his immigration at the end of 1933. There is only little information about their collaboration on this extraordinary project and the album of which a copy has been preserved in the Archives of the National Library of Israel. »Erez Israel from the Air 1937–38«, as the album is also known, with Klugerʼs stunning aerial shots, shows a unique view of historical and biblical landscapes, the Judean Desert and the Jordan Valley, but first and foremost they are a visual record of the architectural history of the Yishuv: starting with the settlements of the First Aliya, the founding of Kibbutzim and Moshavim, the urban development of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, up to the Stockade and Tower settlements since the outbreak of the Arab revolt in 1936. They are presented in the following article. Readers are invited to view the whole album and the photographs at a higher resolution online here: https://rosetta.nli.org.il/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE38046962.

People counting using visible and infrared images

We propose the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for counting and positioning people given aerial shots of visible and infrared images. Our data set is entirely made of semi-artificial images created from real photographs taken from a drone using a dual FLIR camera. We compare the performance between the CNNs using 3 (RGB) and 4 (RGB + IR) channels, both under different lighting conditions. The 4-channel network responds better in all situations, particularly in cases of poor visible illumination that can be found in night scenarios. The proposed methodology could be applied to real situations when an extensive data bank of 4-channel images is available.

Competing with Urban Verticality: Cinematic Landscapes in Seediq Bale and Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above

Abstract While buildings strive to reach higher and higher, cities are obsessed with a visible expression of verticality. Seediq Bale (2011) and Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (2013) represent a new development in Taiwan’s cinematic use of landscape that challenges the dominance of urban verticalism. Seediq Bale sets up an alternative vertical dimension of mountainous areas that puts into dialogical relationship the dichotomies of civilised/barbarous, advanced/primitive, and vertical/horizontal. Audiences no longer experience space in a traditional manner, as eventually Mona Rudao’s graveyard is undiscovered/undefined. Beyond Beauty, on the other, asks viewers to ‘go higher’, encouraging a break with ordinary experience for a more spiritual quest like aerial shots. As both offer a sense of disorientation and alienation, what does the spatial metaphor address to aesthetics, ecocriticism, politics of identity, and sovereignty in geography? What are the implications as cinematic landscapes extend into a real-life environment that is ready to be consumed?

Diversity of scoring, ingenuity of striking, art of flying — conceptual and systematical identification of soccer scoring techniques

The terms of soccer scoring techniques (SSTs) used in practice and research have been remaining confusing; even dramatic, we still do not know how many SSTs available for the game. This scenario hinders not only the scientific studies on some unique SSTs but also the development of novel coaching methods for learning these SSTs. The current paper aims to bridge the gap by establishing a SST terminology system. The system is built based on goal repeatability, selected anatomical & biomechanical parameters, and analyses of 579 attractive goals from international professional tournaments. The results have revealed that there are 43 SSTs existed in current soccer practice. Some SSTs can be identified by preliminary parameters (i.e. anatomical parameters, the ball vertical position at the shot and the hit-point on the ball), but most of them need additional biomechanical examination on the movement control in frontal & transverse planes, jumping control, and trunk orientation at shots in order to identify uniquely. Further, the new SST terminology has disclosed that soccer attractiveness is linked to the diversity, ingenuity and artistry of shots. The most attractive type of scoring awaited by millions of spectators is aerial shots. Lastly, the most important contribution of the new SST terminology system is to help researchers and practitioners launch target-orientated studies that would provide a practical and convincing scientific coach-method, clear definitions, and means to reevaluate and improve SSTs in practice.

Toward a Cinema of Contact Zones

Dubai is often defined by aerial shots of its landmark architecture in Bollywood and Hollywood films. By activating fantasies of seeing the whole city, the lived social realities of the city’s inhabitants fade from view. With Ali F. Mostafa’s City of Life (Dar al-haya, 2009, United Arab Emirates) as an example, this article explores the possibility of a cinema of contact zones, drawing upon Dubai’s historical interconnections with the world through intersecting globalizations. The film offers parallel narratives about different classes of residents that overlap, mingle, compete, align, and realign in spaces that are experienced differently. Stories of Emirati best friends, Indian taxi drivers and businessmen, East European flight attendants, and British “expats,” as well as other less visible residents, convey how lives entangle but do not entwine into community. Rather than reducing the film to an example of “national cinema” or “world cinema,” it is more productive to understand it as a film about a city that is itself produced through relationships to multiple places. The film invites audiences to think about noticing connections, rather than take comfort in confirming assumptions. It does not reward audiences with voyeuristic consumption of the city in its totality. More than a conflict zone, as the Middle East is often conceived, Dubai is a contact zone. City of Life acknowledges that Dubai is neither free of social inequities nor defined by them. Dubai is a place of possibilities and risks. It is a contact zone with all the contradictions that contact zones always contain.

Impact of road construction on the distribution of <i>Crocodylus suchus</i> (Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 1807) in urban park Bangr-Weoogo (Burkina Faso)

In contrast to other anthropogenic activities, little is known about impact of road construction on reptile’s distribution in urban areas. Therefore, the present study aimed at quantifying impact of road construction on C. suchus distribution. It was conducted from February 2016 to May 2018, in the urban Park Bangr-weoogo. C. suchus populations were counted day by used binoculars pairs and night by spotlight. The different observations were carried on foot. Every time, we observed crocodile, we visually estimate its size class. When we couldn’t appreciate the size of an individual, it was just noted as eyes only. About road works, direct observations have been done and noted. To have mapping of the dynamics of crocodile habitats in the park, aerial shots were taken during road construction. We used QGIS version 2.18.2 to establish map distribution of crocodiles. A total of 145 crocodiles including 10.34% of hatchlings, 17.93% of juveniles, 31.03% of subadults and 24.14 of adults were counted before road works. While during road work, 202 crocodiles were counted, whose 5.45% of hatchlings, 19.8% of juveniles, 30.69% of subadults and 37.62% of adults. Road work has led to a loss of crocodile habitat.Keywords: Protected area, habitat, abundance.

The Aftermath

The Aftermath Allison Schmidt The Aftermath 2019 Directed by James Kent Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theaftermath/ 109 minutes "They're not like us," warns a Briton in a German cafe, echoing propaganda shown to Allied forces before they entered post-World War II occupation zones. Anyone familiar with postwar history knows this skepticism quickly gave way to fraternization between Allied occupiers and Germans. The Aftermath (2019) illustrates this change through Rachel Morgan (Keira Knightley), a British colonel's wife, who joins her husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), stationed in Hamburg. They self-consciously inhabit the requisitioned house of an architect (Aleksander Skarsgaard) and his daughter, Freda (Flora Thiemann), whom Lewis allows to stay. Rachel loathes the Germans for the death of her son, who died during the bombing of Britain. Her husband has a nearly opposite reaction as he attempts to connect with the locals and reconstruct the city (and society) from ruins. Their inability to cope with the loss of their son divides them. Eventually, Rachel finds mutual comfort in the arms of the architect, who lost his wife to the bombing of Hamburg. Colonel Morgan realizes he does not have the grateful, docile populace he had hoped and that some of the systemic violence inherent to fascism remains even once the fog of war has lifted. The first hour is promising as a historical drama, if a bit pedestrian. Aerial shots of the skeletons of scorched Hamburg buildings (and human skeletons within) touch upon historical debates surrounding the ethics and necessity of the Allied strategic bombing campaign. Displaced persons walk alongside train tracks. Riots erupt due to food shortages. The most historically intriguing scene concerns the architect Lubert's attempts to procure a Persilschein, or a certificate of clearance that he was not a member of the Nazi party or supported their actions. "After 1933 we built what we were told to build," Lubert says before the denazification review committee to justify his designing houses for Nazi officials. It's a common refrain of the Mitmacher who may not have agreed with the policies but went along with the implementation because what else does one do under a totalitarian state (it turns out there are a number of counterexamples of people who walked away for ethical reasons without repercussions). Unfortunately, after the Persilschein scene, the film mostly abandons the issue of perpetrator, collaborator, and bystander. The words "Jew" or "Antisemitism" are never mentioned in the film, though pictures of concentration camp victims are shown. Obviously, a movie cannot and should not include everything, and other post-World War II films such as Operation Finale (2018) have addressed culpability in the Holocaust. However, whether intentionally or not, the movie ultimately equates the endurance of fascism with Hitler's cult of personality. When a Hitler-loving insurgent falls through ice on the Elbe, the film seems to imply that the problems of the past die with him. The scene becomes ethically intriguing for another reason: the colonel prevents Freda from saving him. The question of the "banality of evil" remains largely untouched as does any contemporary parallel. The Holocaust is, of course, a unique historical event. However, as more and more eyewitnesses pass away, it is hard not to see a correlation with the worldwide rise of strongman leadership or racialized rhetoric regarding immigrants from "shithole countries." The Aftermath could go deeper, and this is where the film, especially as a potential teaching tool, falls flat. Instead, the second half of the movie focuses exclusively on the personal dynamics of the love triangle. All three main actors give great performances. Skarsgaard adeptly plays a variation of a recent cinematic archetype, the hunky WWII German with a heart of gold, featured prominently in Suite Française (2014) and The Exception (2016). Humanizing a Nazi character can serve as a warning that anyone can fall prey to hateful ideology, but, especially in The Exception, "He's not like those other [End Page 46] Nazis" is a problematic message in itself. The Aftermath largely sidesteps this issue by emphasizing, or in so far that the audience is told, that Lubert was not a party member and despised the ideology...

The impact of drones in documentary filmmaking: Renaissance of aerial shot.

Steen L. Christiansen writes his book Drone Age Cinema (2017), “Contemporary cinema is entering the drone age…What will cinema be in the drone age?”. A very economical alternative way of capturing aerial shots for (low budget) documentaries, prosumer drones became available in Turkey and globally in 2015 and were quickly integrated into documentary film production. Before the emergence of prosumer drones, aerial shots were a luxury unaffordable for all but a few high-budget documentary film productions. Drones created a threshold in Turkish documentaries: gaze (exploration of geography-nature-life-people) from above, a Renaissance of the aerial shot. In this presentation / paper I will discuss the response to this new way of seeing in Turkish documentary cinema, and the ways in which drone shots have changed the cultural and technological environment of Turkish documentary cinema.

Sound and Fury on the Move: A Critical Exploration of the Self and Metamorphosis in Road Movies

A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering their perspective from their everyday lives. A road movie is technically defined as a movie that starts at geographic point A and travels through various pit-stops along the way before reaching geographic point B, the final destination. Road movies are noted for their vivid, dynamic and picturesque narration. Normally the protagonist or traveler is a male and the purpose of journey is self-discovery. Characters’ internal conflicts and transformations are highlighted. The characters in road movies often experience new realities on their trip and often explore the intensity of their alienation and solitude on a possibly long road trip to a remote destination. In road movies, the protagonist is usually considered as on the move. The present paper explores the theme of oppression, rebellion, escape, self-discovery and the metamorphosis of the protagonist as depicted in Frank Capra’s movie It Happened One Night and the Easy Rider by Dennis Hopper. The paper, on a further note, examines the emotional transformations of the protagonists as they sail through varied personal, emotional and social experiences on the way to their destinations. Montage sequences, travelling shots, aerial shots and diegetic music are some of the technical peculiarities employed in road movies. The road movie entered a political phase in the late 1960’s influenced by the low budget biker movies and Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. The narrative is somewhat picaresque in almost all road movies that sequentially present certain pertinent events that culminate in a good or bad ending.

Wainwright's West Yorkshire: Affect and Landscape in the Television Drama of Sally Wainwright

Over the past two decades RED Production Company's key presence in British television drama has been grounded in its regional focus on the North of England. It shares this commitment with Sally Wainwright, whose work with and outside of RED is built around a strong affective engagement with its characters’ experiences. These stories offer intimate explorations of family dynamics and female relationships, situated within and interwoven with the spaces and places of West Yorkshire. From her adaptation of Wuthering Heights in Sparkhouse (BBC, 2002) to her 2016 Christmas biopic of the Brontë sisters To Walk Invisible (BBC, 2016), through Last Tango in Halifax (BBC, 2012–16) and Happy Valley (BBC, 2014–) these are distinctly regional narratives whose female-led familial melodrama, psychodrama and romance are embedded within and return to the landscapes of the region, spaces which blend the stolid and torrid. Wide and spectacular aerial shots follow cars that track through the green and brown expanses between the Harrogate and Halifax families of the elderly couple in Last Tango, the beauty of the Calder Valley pens in the stark bleakness that is foundational to Happy Valley, and the Brontë sisters stride across heathered hills and are silhouetted against grey skies in To Walk Invisible. This article explores the visual dynamics of Wainwright's work and her engagement with the landscapes of the region in both her writing and direction, evoking their numerous literary and cultural connotations in her interweaving of West Yorkshire's stark, dynamic beauty with her stories of intimate female affect.

Deep reinforcement learning for controlling frontal person close-up shooting

Drones, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, are capable of capturing spectacular aerial shots and can be used to aid several cinematography-oriented tasks. However, flying drones in a professional setting requires the cooperation of several people, increasing the production cost and possibly reducing the quality of the obtained shots. In this paper, a generic way for formulating cinematography-oriented control objectives, that can be used for training any RL agent to automate the drone and camera control processes, is proposed. To increase the convergence speed and learn more accurate deep RL agents, a hint-based reward function is also employed. Two simulation environments, one for drone control and one for camera control, were developed and used for training and evaluating the proposed methods. The proposed method can be combined both with methods capable of performing discrete control, as well as with continuous control methods. It was experimentally demonstrated that the proposed method improves the control accuracy over both handcrafted control techniques and deep RL models trained with other reward functions.

Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez

Reviewed by: Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez Freya Schiwy Agribusiness, California, Cesar Chavez, Collaborative Media, Documentary, Farm Workers, Futurism, Gaze, Gender, Labor Struggle, Performance, Race, Unions, Visual Field, Freya Schiwy, Curtis Marez marez, curtis. Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance. U of Minnesota P, 2016. xi 210 pp. Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance compellingly brings into view a plethora of visual and audiovisual interventions in a contested mediascape. Curtis Marez's superb critique traces the history of agribusiness's speculative imaginary and farm workers' appropriation of visual technologies from the 1940s to the present. Bracketed by a substantial introduction and an extensive afterword, Farm Worker Futurism's three detailed chapters offer nuanced readings of the narrative, visual, and audiovisual creations, performances, popular culture, and advertisements that have been a part of the labor struggle in California. Marez clearly articulates complex intersections between capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy as he reads against the grain of the polished imaginary created by agribusiness capitalism, but also exposes the at times contradictory effects of farm worker struggles on the visual field. This analysis is anchored by two key concepts: the visual field and futurism/futurity. Reading agribusiness as well as farm worker projections in the visual field illuminates mediations and struggles over power that occur at the level of what is apparent and what is inferred. When Marez opts to speak of futurism, rather than futurity, he draws attention to the dominant physical and symbolic practices of white patriarchal agribusiness that have projected a high-tech fantasy, cleansed of workers of color and their antiracist labor struggles, but also to the limitations and contradictions of union interventions in the visual field. Marez begins with an analysis of the dominant futurist imaginary of agribusiness advertisements, exemplified by the International Harvester Company and the TV documentary The Big Land (1967). Projecting pastoral family farms into a future evolving before the audience's eyes, images of streamlined machines and buildings visually evacuate material labor conditions and contemporary labor conflicts. Technology did not, however, actually replace working bodies. Rather, as Marez argues, it enabled the concentration of agricultural corporations, the disciplining of the workforce, and the deskilling of labor. As labor was subordinated to the technical proficiency of the machine, capital externalized its risks. Increased profits came at the expense of lost limbs and other severe worker injuries. Marez notes that the struggle in the visual field included, as well, agribusiness's physical alterations in the Central and San Joaquin Valleys through irrigation channels, industrial wells, and the presence of new agricultural machines. Images of the changed environment were again projected in film and on television. State university researchers, in turn, colluded in the idolization of machines and chemical farming as they expanded from wartime pesticide research to applications in [End Page 258] defoliants and agricultural pesticides and the reengineering of fruits and vegetables adapted to handling in bins. Farm workers and those sympathetic to labor struggles contested this visual field with a range of counterimages, including documentaries like Poverty in the Valley of Plenty (1947), Fighting for Our Lives (1974), and Wrath of Grapes (1986). The latter highlighted crop-dusting helicopters that contemporary viewers readily associated with the Vietnam War and the US military presence in Central America. Marez argues that the film successfully opened the horizon from the visually depopulated agricultural fields of central California to the global, neoimperial context of capitalist warfare on brown bodies. El Teatro Campesino's performances and the art and graphics of the artist collective Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) further strengthened this counternarrative. RCAF's work, in particular, builds on the visually impacting spectacle of mass marches led by the United Farm Workers (UFW) that made the labor struggle visible by counting on news coverage's aerial shots. RCAF also created futuristic images of Chicano technologies in flight and on the ground, thus allowing for farm worker futurist alternatives to agribusiness idealization of technology in the service of labor exploitation. With his focus on futurism, Marez's sophisticated reading avoids easy binaries. He emphasizes the ethnic and gender diversity of farmworkers that complicates the reduction of labor struggles to a single ethnic...

Xicanisma Prophecies Post-2012] / Putin's Puppet

[Xicanisma Prophecies Post-2012] / Putin's Puppet Ana Castillo (bio) is not Aryan (or a golden-hair-Thor) but through & through as close to yellow as it gets.A flim-flam man claiming billions no one sees. He & the Czarhad a chat at the Ritz, in a bar,over Red Bull, vodka, coke and complimentary chips,served up by naked women who took American Express and rubles in I.O.U.s.One rat said,You take the East. I'll snatch the West.It's all for the taking for swines like us and our friends (ha-ha,like 'we' have friends), rapacious and sly,unconcerned with who or how many die as we take the planet. Don't worry, man.Forget the jaundiced Chinese & Rocketman (we'll send to the moon.)France can eat escargot. Palestinians must go. We'll suck the earth dry. You & I,pillage until we are down to two. We'll compete for the universe.Fair enough? (Haw, one said. As if we define fair by anyone's terms.) [End Page 177] I, the poet, rest my head on a pillow or a rock, the throb is the same,my brain doesn't stop its slideshow of doom.Viewing Dr. Strangelove scenes,reruns play & no new plots.No breathtaking aerial shots of an Aston Martin headed along the coast toward thevillain's hideout.No soundtrack. (We are all silent, not censored, not yet, but quiet, waiting.)No scientific facts in this version of a world for the taking.No historical reference without revisiones. . . [stop](No Spanish allowed or you may be arrested.)They are watching, legions in camouflage, hoods or riot gear, ready to take you out.On your mark and get set. Putin's Puppet doesn't read books—a novel or a memoir,sit through films or listen to a symphony or even the Top Twenty.He doesn't look at art.Consequently, he has shut beauty down.Putin's Puppet knows one color, said his son, and that is green. [End Page 178] I will disagree. Putin's Puppet does see color and it revolts him.Blacks belong in Africa, he opines, and Muslims must stay in the Mid-East.Mexicans are the scourge.He doesn't want us on his turf.It's as simple as this: racist.Race in the second decade of the 21st century to him exists . . . like with his father,his father before him and so on—it serves one purpose.Servitude or genocide.As for women, we are unimportant.You kill a rhino for sport or for its horns. [You keep a woman only if she enhancesyour life.]He's the big man on campus with a loyal fraternity, he thinks.Instead, I see anarchy merged with insanity, a fake man wrapped in a dictator's cloak.How did we get here? How did we, indeed.Not without concessions, not without greed. Down the rabbit holethe nation went into Wonder-less slime.We are in it deep this time.When I can't sleep, I spot the devil pissing in the dark.I've lost feeling in my hands and feet.I am an indian woman off the reservation,as they say now, in racialist double-speak.But in this country where democracy remained an aspiration, not a reality,we still do reservations for the original peoples of the land.Take a moment—this poet asks—take a moment to think on that. [End Page 179] Ana Castillo Ana Castillo is a celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator, and independent scholar. Born and raised in Chicago, she has contributed to periodicals and online venues and national magazines. Her writings have been the subject of scholarly research and publications. Among her bestselling titles are So Far from God (1993); Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999); The Guardians (2007); and the volume of poetry I Ask the Impossible (2001). Her novel Sapogonia (1994) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been profiled and interviewed on National Public Radio and History Channel, and was a radio-essayist with NPR in Chicago. Castillo holds an...