Stock Footage Research Articles

Entextualizing History through Archives: Representation of Muslim Identity in Post 9/11 Documentaries

Representation of Muslims in media post the Sept 11 attacks in the US largely focused on themes of terrorism and extremism. Such homogenized representation was particularly problematic in non-fiction media such as news and documentaries which use archival footage to create ‘reality’. The consequent circulation of these images across the globe is one of the many examples through which Muslim representation has been constructed through stock footage and sourced media images in media post the 9/11 attacks. In this paper, I examine stock images in documentary films in the form of archives to examine the representation of Muslim identity in the post 9/11 world. Using Malitsky’s framework of entextualization to analyze archival material in post 9/11 documentaries, I argue how stock images create a power differential between the East and the West (Said, 1979) reinstating imperial domination. Therefore, this paper intends to examine the use of archives that have been entextualized and re-present history to shape representation of Muslims across spatial and temporal differences through documentary films. To do so, I critically examine two post 9/11 documentaries – Secret Pakistan (2011) and Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) – to study how these films position the role of Pakistan as an Islamic nation in the Global War on Terror.

Catharsis after the hangover

Catharsis after the hangover

Cinematic Spaces of Istanbul Through the Foreign Lens: Hollywood Studio Era, Spy Films and Touristic Experience

As a connecting point between the Orient and the Occident, the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul has inspired foreign filmmakers for decades. Hollywood studio films from the 1930s to the 1950s fabricated the image of Istanbul as an exotic city of espionage. These films were produced in Hollywood studios which later added landscape stock footage during editing. With analyzing five films: Stamboul Quest (1934), Background to Danger (1943), Journey into the Fear (1945), Flame of Stamboul (1951), and 5 Fingers (1952), this study intends to show how foreign filmmakers created the image of Istanbul in Hollywood studio era and continued to use the same images later in films produced on location. Selected films which use Orientalist imagery offer the spectators a virtual touristic experience. Similar to the immersion of the tourists within the cultural authenticity that is staged and performed for them, cinema can offer a “distant immersion” for the spectators (Corbin, 2014). Although the city’s representation transformed to a certain degree depending on the dominant ideological views of the international setting, the iconic images of Istanbul in early spy films from the 1930s continue to appear in contemporary productions of the genre in an attempt to offer a familiar pleasure in a new context.

Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption

Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption Kimberly D. McKee (bio) Kori A. Graves. A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 328 pages. ISBN 9781479872329 (cl); 9781479815869 (ebook). Allison Varzally. Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 222 pages. ISBN 9781469630908 (cl); 9781469630915 (pb); 9781469630922 (ebook). Susie Woo. Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 336 pages. ISBN 9781479889914 (cl); 9781479880539 (pb); 9781479827169 (ebook). Photographs shape how American middlebrow culture remembers the earliest transnational adoptions from South Korea and Vietnam. Heartwarming human-interest stories and profiles of adopted children and their parents filled the pages of magazines like Life and Ebony, in addition to local newspapers. Yet these celebratory tales of rescue and assimilation into American society glossed over the losses involved in transnational adoptions. Recent Critical Adoption Studies scholarship goes beyond the reductive understandings promoted in contemporary media to offer a more complex picture of adoptees' biological families' losses, the incongruities and contradictions of the adoption process, and the children and women whose lives were inextricably linked to the adoptees. Kori A. Graves, Allison Varzally, and Susie Woo join scholars who interrogate the limits of adoption and how these particular family formations came into being. In their investigations of the treatment of mixed-race Asian adoptees and their mothers, Graves, Varzally, and Woo reveal the hypocrisy and contradictions of the US military and government. These orphans were simultaneously embraced as mascots or seen as children in need of rescue, even as their military fathers were not required to establish paternity and Asian women encountered difficulty in accessing US citizenship for their children. These monographs reveal what happens when children are simultaneously cast aside and embraced, their affective labor used to further a particular narrative of US humanitarianism. [End Page 231] Moving chronologically, Susie Woo's Framed by War situates the Korean adoption project and adoptees in relation to Korean War brides—women who married American GIs in the wake of the Korean War—and the women whose sexual labor supported the rebuilding of the nation in the post-Korean War period. Some of those women who engaged in sex work were the mothers of mixed-race Korean children sent abroad for adoption. Other children resulted from consensual relationships between Korean women and military men. Susie Woo's monograph disentangles these overlapping threads—adoptees, war brides, sex workers—to offer a nuanced depiction of adoption's lingering effects and its intersections with other facets of US foreign policy. Focused on the intimate encounters between Koreans and Americans, Woo traces the contours and limits of these relationships while exploring the juxtaposition between Korean children's innocence and Korean women's purported deviance. Woo calls attention to the ways Korean children and women were cornerstones to American empire building in the early Cold War. Their affective and, in the case of Korean women, sexual and reproductive labor proved instrumental in US foreign policy efforts to contain communism. Yet they are often overlooked or seen as a footnote in Cold War history. The American public was first introduced to Korean children via rescue scripts with curated narratives emphasizing the children's salvation. These depictions in Department of Defense stock footage and national magazines featured American GIs forging relationships with Korean children, particularly boy orphans who became military mascots or houseboys. Coupled with media appearances and concerts of the Korean Children's and Korean Orphans' Choirs, the images humanized Korean children in accessible ways, whereby Americans could visualize them as part of their families. American GIs were, in turn, transformed through depictions of them forging familial bonds with Korean children. The girls in the two choirs promoted a feminized, innocent image of childhood warranting American paternalism. These media portrayals of Korean children made Americans see them as worthy of rescue. American missionaries were integral in working with US government efforts to rebuild South Korea, and they were also instrumental in shaping narratives of Korean children abroad. Their efforts ranged from World Vision's sponsorship of the...

“First there is the creative decision, then there is the dollar decision”: Information-Seeking Behaviors of Filmmakers Using Moving Image Archives

ABSTRACT Despite being passionate users of and advocates for moving image archives, filmmakers are an understudied demographic within archival literature. This study seeks to broaden archivists' awareness of the search behaviors and information needs of filmmakers engaged in archival research to understand how moving image archives can better serve these researchers from outside the academy who are interested in using archival content in creative and/or commercial works. We hope the framework used will inspire the development of further studies on the topic. The data presented are drawn from ten phone interviews with filmmakers about their search behaviors, barriers they encounter when attempting to access and license archival content, and their general impressions of using archives versus for-profit stock footage companies.

Parallel Editing, Double Time. Mad Men’s Time Machine

This article looks at the way Matthew Weiner deploys double vision in his historical re-imagination of the 1960s in Mad Men. At issue is both the way the past haunts the present on the diegetic level in the form of flashback sequences, as well as the way Weiner performs simultaneity by virtue of parallel editing, especially in the closing sequences of individual episodes. At issue also is the way stock footage of key historical events such as the moon landing is deployed so as to offer a further juxtaposition of present and past.

Schizophrenic Aesthetics in Music Videos about the LRA Atrocities in Northern Uganda

ABSTRACTThis article examines the use of what I term ‘schizophrenic aesthetics’ in memory construction and the search for justice, peace, and reconciliation in contemporary music videos about the LRA war. I seek to establish how the deep memory of trauma is packaged in videos that have disturbing content due to the use of B-roll and stock footage of war, yet they are also highly entertaining through their use of music, dramatic performances, and erotic young female dancers often referred to as ‘queen dancers’. ‘Schizophrenic aesthetics’ is used in this article in reference to both the trauma represented and the syncretised and disjunctured form of the music video in a postmodernist context. The heterogeneous clash between the oral and written words on the one hand, with the images on the other, is examined as traumatic subject matter is interrogated in the context of brisk entertainment. These song videos are produced by a younger post-war generation of artists who problematise postcolonial African trauma using diasporic music forms like hip-hop and reggae. While examining the subject matter of these videos, a parallel analysis shows the complex relationship between the message of the songs, performativity, and the cinematic apparatus. This article deploys schizophrenic aesthetics to examine how the wordscape, soundscape, and imagescape of the selected music videos collaborate to convey the poetic message and essence of the songs and how memory is constructed in a post-war context as therapy and entertainment.

Representando la ausencia en la Argentina de la postdictadura. Reformulaciones del álbum familiar en los proyectos fotográficos de hijos de desaparecidos.

Las secuelas sociales y culturales que la última dictadura militar dejó en Argentina persisten con toda su fuerza a día de hoy. A finales de los años noventa muchos hijos de desaparecidos comenzaron a releer fotográficamente ese capítulo negro de la historia nacional. Vinculados al pasado de manera diferente a sus padres, estos fotógrafos y cineastas produjeron una serie de obras que aportan una nueva voz a la lucha por la memoria. Y precisamente lo hacen repensando los usos de las fotografías familiares que les hablan de aquel pasado que ellos casi ni recuerdan. El presente artículo pretende abordar tres ejemplos muy significativos al respecto: las instalaciones fotográficas Arqueología de la ausencia (Lucila Quieto, 1999-2001), Tarde [o temprano] (Clara Rosson, 2006) y Fotos tuyas (Inés Ulanovsky, 2000-2001). Mediante la creatividad y la reflexión estas obras han podido salvar las imágenes del doble peligro que amenaza las sociedades hipermodernas: por un lado, el riesgo del esteticismo, que convierte la imagen en un atractivo (pero superficial) sustituto de la ausencia que representa; y, por otro, el peligro del escepticismo obcecado, que, al considerar que toda imagen es fetiche, la rechaza y la condena al reino de la mentira y la perversidad.

Report, de Bruce Conner: contestando Camelot

Once again, as he had been forced to do in making A Movie five years earlier, Bruce Conner began creating his “report” with stock footage and appropriated sound. Report was worked, reworked, and reworked again by Conner for more than three years, and he created eight different versions of the film. As the artist confessed in 1968 at a session devoted to his work at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, “I was obsessed... I didn’t want to stop the changes”. It was in the end less a question of getting the film right than of finally accepting the original intention of the project: coming to terms with President Kennedy’s death.

Rasquache aesthetics in Alex Rivera’s “Why Cybraceros?”

This paper studies Rivera's 12-year-old spoof outsourcing website, with particular attention to the 4.5 minute 1997 video that served as its original point of departure (he is now best know for his 2008 feature film, Sleep Dealer.). Rivera’s work in general involves a practice he calls a “rasquache aesthetic” of filmmaking. In a recent interview he defines this concept more precisely, commenting on how Latinos/as channel the creativity that responds to necessity, as people with limited resources turn to repurposing and recycling for their original work. In the hands of Latino/a artists associated with rasquachismo, like Guillermo Gomez Pena, Lalo Alcaraz and Coco Fusco, all of whom have influenced Rivera profoundly, this practice of collage becomes a conscious and conscientious cultural practice. In a parallel manner, in Rivera’s work, the tearing apart and rebuilding of cultural images adds texture and depth, and both his fiction and documentary films include stock footage, rough animation, public domain google map images, and a variety of other materials.

Making Virginia Durr Less Blue: Preserving <em>Eyes on the Prize</em>

I 2011, the Wash ing ton University Libraries Film & Media Archive, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, began the arduous task of preserving the first six episodes of the seminal documentary series, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement, 1954 to 1965 (1987) and the approximately seventyfive hours of never before seen outtakes from more than the one hundred interviews featured in these episodes. Over the course of four years, the series negatives—known as A and B rolls—and origi nal interview camera negatives, were transferred from highly unstable acetate stock to stable polyester stock, allowing for future digitization and reassembly of the complete interviews. Eyes on the Prize creator Henry E. Hampton Jr. (1940−1998) was a St. Louis native and Wash ing ton University alumnus. In 1968, he founded Blackside, Inc., which grew to become one of the most successful Af ri can American production companies of its time. Blackside primarily produced industrial training and government sponsored films, until 1978, when Capital City Communications requested series proposals from minorityowned production companies. Traveling from Boston to Selma in 1965 to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Hampton had witnessed firsthand the courage of those fighting for equality and the resulting violence that would take the life of his friend, Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb. It was this experience that inspired Hampton to propose a series chronicling the civil rights movement, through telling the stories of those who lived it. Blackside won the contract and began filming interviews, gathering stock footage, and conducting research. However, it became clear early on that Hampton and Capital City had very different visions. Eyes on the Prize scriptwriter Steve Fayer recalls,

The “image bite,” political language, and the public/private divide

Voice-overs with muted images, often known as the “image bite,” have become an increasingly used but understudied format of political language by the television news media. Because the media can use images to fit many contexts and purposes of commentary, the media images are susceptible to continuous de-contextualization and re-contextualization. Drawing from theories of feminist critical discourse analysis and gender performance as well as scholarship on the public/private divide, we examine the commentary of one U.S. television news organization’s (NBC) re-contextualization of the same stock footage of Hillary Clinton over 10 newscasts spanning 20 months from August 1998 to June of 2000. NBC re-enforces the public/private binary in conventional masculine terms. Yet it also worked, at times, to unify the binary when covering Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign; on those occasions at least, NBC revealed the potential erosion of gender stereotypes and a small but still significant role for human agency in the study of gender ideology.

Summarizing Rushes Videos by Motion, Object, and Event Understanding

Rushes footages are considered as cheap gold mine with the potential for reuse in broadcasting and filmmaking industries. However, mining “gold” from unedited videos such as rushes is challenging as the reusable segments are buried in a large set of redundant information. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for stock footage classification and summarization to support video editors in navigating and organizing rushes videos. Our approach is composed of two steps. First, we employ motion features to filter the undesired camera motion and locate the stock footage. A hierarchical hidden Markov model (HHMM) is proposed to model the motion feature distribution and classify video segments into different categories to decide their potential for reuse. Second, we generate a short video summary to facilitate quick browsing of the stock footages by including the objects and events that are important for storytelling. For objects, we detect the presence of persons and moving objects. For events, we extract a set of features to detect and describe visual (motion activities and scene changes) and audio events (speech clips). A representability measure is then proposed to select the most representative video clips for video summarization. Our experiments show that the proposed HHMM significantly outperforms other methods based on SVM, FSM, and HMM. The automatically generated rushes summaries are also demonstrated to be easy-to-understand, containing little redundancy, and capable of including ground-truth objects and events with shorter durations and relatively pleasant rhythm based on the TRECVID 2007, 2008, and our subjective evaluations.

Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? (review)

Reviewed by: Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? Thomas Prasch Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? (2008). Directed by Barbara Caspar. Distributed by Women Make Movies. www.wmm.com 84 minutes. Somewhere near the middle of Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker?, Barbara Caspar's celebratory documentary about the experimental writer Kathy Acker (1947-1997), her agent, Ira Silverberg, declares: "Kathy was a woman who probably lied a great deal about her life story, but the lies were as important as whatever the truth was." It is a good line, witty and provocative, consistent with the tenor of incendiary indifference to conventional canons and codes that characterized Acker's own work. But for anyone interested in actually understanding the arc of Acker's career, such disinterest in the actual facts of Acker's biography, a disinterest broadly shared by the filmmakers, is less than fruitful. Nor will someone interested in the broader contexts within which Acker's work was received—say, concerned with the ways her borrowings from the canon corresponded with contemporaneous photographers' appropriationist strategies, or poststructuralist theories of the self and art, or even the punk movement's defiance of conventions—likely find much in this film beyond general broad-brush sketching and a general sense of her cultural milieu, shaped through the assortment of talking heads interviewed about Acker—including experimental writer Gary Indiana, collaborator Mel Freileicher, poststructuralist thinkers Avital Ronell and Sylvia Lotinger, performance artist Carolee Schneeman, punk rocker Richard Hell, and ex-lover (if that is the right word) Alan Sondheim). Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? is, ultimately, less interested in situating Acker or her work than in celebrating it, bringing new attention to it without asking many hard questions. [End Page 131] As celebration, the film has clear virtues. It skillfully weaves its talking-head interviews (which, aside from her personal acquaintances, include a group of awed women students fresh from a late-career reading by the writer) and its archival footage with engaging animated and acted accompaniments to excerpts from most of her major novels) and a range of stock footage. Between Acker's pronouncements (mostly in British television interviews) about her intentions and influences and the extended excerpts from her fictions, Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? provides a reasonably clear glimpse of the author's published work and artistic aims. For anyone unfamiliar with Acker's work—who missed the moment when, in the early 1980s, following the lead of the punk musicians with whom she was keeping company, her work broke into the mainstream, widely circulating on college campuses, hailed in London while being banned in Germany—the film may provide a useful introduction to the artist and her work. For those, however, who already know Acker's work, the film offers few surprises. The tone of celebratory praise becomes frequently excessive. "No one had really done it," Silverberg asserts of the sort of work she was producing; later, he insists she was "the person coming from the states who could alter the way we speak about literature." Sometimes the tone becomes comically hyperbolic, as when Lotinger says of New York in 1973: "It was difficult to live here. You could be killed any second." Some of the interviewees do discuss Acker's problematic sexuality:. Sondheim recalls of The Blue Tape (a pornographic film he and Acker did together), that "neither of us was really that comfortable with the sexuality"; Acker herself laughs about feminists' ambiguous response to the sexual dynamics in her work; Sheree Ross (identified as an "ex-dominatrix") discusses Acker's role as a "bottom"; and editor Amy Scholder recalls going along when Acker had her labia pierced and noticing she seemed indifferent to the pain. But none of this amounts to anything like a full exploration of her sexual identity. Controversies provoked by her work—over pornography, plagiarism, even her rejection of traditional medicine in fighting the breast cancer that killed her in 1997—are mentioned, but seldom fully analyzed. And the tone of glowing praise for her work leaves little room for a serious discussion of the importance of her literary work, either in terms of its immediate impact or its continuing importance. Those...

Collectie Nederlandse Natuurfilms

Dutch nature and wildlife filmmaking has a long history, starting with the pioneering work of the wealthy Swiss ornithologist Ad Burdet (1860-1940). Directors of international renown such as Bert Haanstra (1916-1997) and Hugo van Lawick (1937- 2002) were active alongside filmmakers who remained largely anonymous to the public. Many of the nature filmmakers who are still active have built up a considerable oeuvre and have collected a library of stock shots. Young filmmakers still find nature films a worthwhile proposition and a number of amateurs are also making active contributions. Compared to the Anglo-Saxon world nature films in the Netherlands have a low status and modest production budgets. There is no association to look after the particular interests of the Dutch nature filmmakers and prestigious awards can only be won abroad. There is no catalogue for nature films and stock footage, nor for historic or contemporary images. Furthermore, it isn’t clear where these films are being kept: in the offices of the filmmakers concerned, or of the nature protection organizations that commissioned the films, or in the audiovisual archives (Sound and Vision, Film Museum). In order to fill this void, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the National Natural History Museum Naturalis have started the project Dutch Nature Film Collection. The collection will not only bring together data on nature films past and present, but will also offer access to films and stock footage via a digital platform. Nature protection organizations and broadcasters alike have shown considerable interest in this initiative.

Conference Report: Orphans Take Manhattan: The 6th Biannual Orphan Film Symposium, March 26–29, 2008, New York City

Conference Report: Orphans Take Manhattan:The 6th Biannual Orphan Film Symposium, March 26–29, 2008, New York City Devin Orgeron (bio) The Orphan Film Symposium biannually reminds attendees of the vast, unexplored range of moving images that transcend the commercial, aesthetic, or philosophical categories that have defined film studies for several decades. The meticulous Orphans Web site (http://www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/) defines an "orphan film" as a motion picture abandoned by its owner or caretaker. More generally, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, unreleased films, industrial and educational movies, independent documentaries, ethnographic films, newsreels, censored material, underground works, experimental pieces, silent-era productions, stock footage, found footage, medical films, kinescopes, small- and unusual-gauge films, amateur productions, surveillance footage, test reels, government films, advertisements, sponsored films, student works, and sundry other ephemeral pieces of celluloid (or paper or glass or tape or . . .). This list, which itself is only partial, begins to illustrate the immensity of this emerging and important subfield in moving image studies, and each Orphan Film Symposium has effectively served to expand the boundaries further still. In any given year, one might expect to hear a paper on a collection of home movies; view and participate in a discussion of recently unearthed Hollywood screen-tests; listen to experts describe the restoration of a particularly rich bit of newsreel footage, and then view that footage; puzzle over the rhetoric of mid-century classroom films; view a contemporary film made from damaged archival films; or discuss the means by which banned film and video materials might reach viewers via the Internet. Part academic conference, part professional trade meeting, part lesson in archiving and preservation, part festival, the event coalesces around a now-traditional and largely informal last-night finale screening where a friendly and amusing element of one-upmanship and surprise prevails. Veterans of the Orphan Film Symposium approached the 2008 meeting in New York City with mixed emotions. Since 1999, these gatherings have established [End Page 114] a reputation for being the conference where theorists, historians, artists, archivists, activists, preservationists, lab experts, projectionists, collectors, and enthusiasts can spend a long weekend together, from dawn 'til well after dusk, and come out smiling, edified, and energized by the experience. The University of South Carolina was the symposium's previous and original home, and some of us wondered, half-jokingly, if there was something about Columbia, South Carolina, that held this delicate blend of ingredients in suspension. Was it the ineffable magic of Southern hospitality? Were conference organizers slipping something into the traditional sweet tea that graced our tables at lunch? What, we asked, would Manhattan do to Orphans VI? South Carolina's curious charms and intimacy were missed this year, but the elements that make this symposium unique and vital to our field remained. One of these is a longstanding commitment to broadening the "film studies" conversation to include the litany of participants listed above. Since the symposium's inception, Dan Streible, chief organizer and spokesperson, has sought to assemble a staggeringly varied lineup of speakers, screenings, and discussions. Far from being a preservationist's soapbox, the symposium's intention from the start has been to provide a forum for the consideration of film from a number of perspectives within the film community at large, with an eye toward understanding and negotiating the quite real physical legacy cinemania leaves in its wake. Community is the operative word here, and few conferences strive for (much less achieve) anything even approaching the communal spirit of this biannual meeting. Since 1999 there have been no simultaneous panels, and participants spend most of their days and most of their meals (which come with the registration) together. This results in something like a festival atmosphere, minus the schmoozing and deal making, and the mood catches quickly. New York, it seems, is an ideal home for the meeting. The city's energy echoes the energy the symposium generates on its own. Hosted by New York University's Cinema Studies department and its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, the event took place at the Cantor Film Center and other buildings scattered around...

`I do not Attach Great Significance to it': Taking Note of `The Holocaust' in English Case Law

The first part of this article traces the history of the word `holocaust' and the phrase `the Holocaust' in English judicial discourse, both in cases where the mass killing of Jewish Europeans in the early 1940s was a relevant issue, and the many more cases where it was not. The second part of the article returns to a selection of the recent cases, arguing that when the Holocaust is referred to in contemporary judgments it tends to be spliced in as a form of stock footage, and suggest that this routinized manoeuvre succeeds in misremembering the past, rather than contributing to any substantive comprehension of the events the phrase is intended to describe. More than this, however, the uses of the Holocaust by the judges may also reinforce particularly English understandings of Jews and Jewishness. Far from acting as a mnemonic device to recall atrocity, the Holocaust can in fact act as an aid to remembering what it is `the English' find distasteful and alien about `the Jew'.

England, My England: The Story of Henry Purcell, and: Rachmaninoff, The Harvest of Sorrow (review)

England, My England: The Story of Henry Purcell. DVD. Directed by Tony Palmer. West Long Branch, NJ: Distributed by Kultur International Films, 2007. D4221. ISBN: 0769785387. ISBN: 9780769785387. $24.99. Rachmaninoff, The Harvest of Sorrow. DVD. Directed by Tony Palmer. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2007, 1998. D4223. ISBN: 0769785395. ISBN: 9780769785394. $24.99. No one, not even Ken Russell, has made as many films about classical music as Tony Palmer, writer-director of documentaries or dramatizations about Benjamin Britten, Maria Callas, Yehudi Menuhin, Giacomo Puccini, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, and others, employing a variety of stylistic approaches. While Rachmaninoff, The Harvest of Sorrow, his portrait of Sergei Rachmaninoff, is a conventional documentary, England, My England: The Story of Henry Purcell is anything but conventional. The Harvest of Sorrow offers footage from Rachmaninoff's silent home movies, stock footage of Russia and New York City, a visit to the Russian home from which he reluctantly fled in 1917, passages from the composer's letters and other writings read by John Gielgud, fragments of performances of his works by the orchestra and chorus of the Mariinsky Theater, conducted by Valery Gergiev, and several Russian pianists, and interviews with Gergiev and Rachmaninoff 's grandson and niece. As the title, drawn from an early song, indicates, the portrait is rather melancholy. Palmer looks at how religion, his family, and his first love affairs affected the themes of Rachmaninoff's music. The biggest influence, however, was Russia itself. Palmer excels at illustrating Rachmaninoff's melancholy soul by juxtaposing his words and music to underscore his sense of a lost homeland and the unfulfilled promise of his country. He is bitter at having to abandon his composing for years during his exile in New York, Los Angeles, and Switzerland so that he could support his family through concerts, a task that left him especially bitter because he never felt he played well enough and cut short performances when he sensed the restlessness of his audiences. While much is known about Rachmaninoff, there is little documentary material about Henry Purcell. Palmer and his screenwriters, John Osborne and Charles Wood, address this dilemma by making it film, originally produced as a motion picture in 1995, jumps between dramatizations of Purcell's time, concentrating on the court of Charles II (Simon Callow) and the historical events of the day, and the 1960s when an actor (also played by Callow) portraying Charles II in a clunky stage production decides to write a play about Purcell. This approach works because it obviates the need for a detailed biography and because it demonstrates how Purcell's music was a product of his time and place, reflecting the personalities and events of life at court. …

Small Screen, Smaller Pictures: Television Broadcasting And B-Movies In The Early 1950s

The exhibition of B-movies on television in the early 1950s is an area that has largely gone unnoticed in most literature surrounding the origins of television. Perhaps the most thorough account of...

Made in Thailand (review)

Reviewed by: Made in Thailand Jane Kiser Made in Thailand, videotape by Eve-Laure Moros and Linzy Emery. 1999. 30 minutes. This videotape, using a quasi-documentary style, presents the viewer with the words and images of Thai women organizers and the women factory workers they seek to mobilize - against strong odds. These are powerful images, and inspiring, when one considers the probable consequences for any worker who expresses an interest in union representation or engages in any kind of collective action. We see a rally of women workers, wearing red banners of protest around their foreheads and responding enthusiastically to their leader as she blasts their employer's likely closing of their plant. But what employer was this? We aren't told. In another segment, we see others protesting outside a government ministry. Why? It wasn't very clear to me. Throughout the video there are excerpts from interviews with several women who have worked in factories in Bangkok and gone on to do labor organizing (though with no explicit background information). They describe abuses: long hours, heavy lifting, repetitious motions that cause injuries. This dialogue is interspersed with scenes of factory work, stock footage, it appears. As the video progresses, the viewer begins to realize that one organizer is talking about a particular workplace: the Kader Toy Company, which burned in 1993, claiming the lives of 188 employees, most of them women who were trapped inside because management had locked doors to fire escapes. Later, another survivor of the fire, surrounded by cutesy Disney stuffed animals, describes the horror of leaping from the building onto the bodies of her friends who had jumped before, and footage is shown of burned and mangled bodies. The video intermingles the stories of the Kader fire and the stories of other unsafe, unpleasant, and unhealthy factory work to paint a bleak picture of oppression. At one point, the daily wage of toy workers ($3 in 1999) is compared to the average price of one doll ($25), leaving the viewer to conclude that surely these workers could be paid more and treated better than they are —while still earning a profit. Mostly, this video is impressionistic. That may be what you want in a video for some situations: setting the stage for a discussion of the ethics of the practices of multinationals who locate production in Thailand and other low-wage countries to export to the U.S. and other wealthy countries, and our ethics in buying things that are made under such conditions. But if you want more information, you will have to turn elsewhere. You do not learn what U.S. corporations are doing business there, what the status of labor law in Thailand is, whether there are Thai labor unions that are making headway, or whether any progress at all is evident since Thailand emerged in 1996 from four years of military rule. You do not learn who to contact if [End Page 100] you want to learn more or what organizations are involved in international solidarity actions to pressure the Thai government to adopt internationally recognized labor standards. There is insufficient history and analysis provided by the video. Because of these limitations, this video, in my opinion, despite its powerful images, is not nearly as good as it could have been. If you have a limited budget for videos, you might look elsewhere for videos that teach about the effects of globalization and women in the global economy. Made in Thailand, videotape by Eve-Laure Moros and Linzy Emery, may be ordered for $195 from Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10013, 212.925.0606, www.wmm.com Jane Kiser Division of Labor Studies Indiana University Northwest at Gary Copyright © 2006 the West Virginia University Press, for the United Association for Labor Studies