Indian documentary films (an interesting listing)
Documentary films can be a powerful source for building awareness and campaigns. Below is an interesting list of alternate documentary films from the TISS in Mumbai. If you know of any other interesting alternative Indian documentary films, please let me know at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Encourage Indian documentary film-making (it's booming currently, as technology and costs make it more accessible to make a film) by buying a VCD for yourself. More about Indian alt documentary at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/docuwallahs2 -FN Frederick Noronha (FN)Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia Freelance Journalist P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436 http://www.livejournal.com/users/goalinks http://fn.swiki.net http://www.ryze.com/go/fredericknoronha http://fn-floss.notlong.com Difficulties to send email across? Write to fredericknoronha at vsnl.net - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - UNIT FOR MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS Tata Institute of Social Sciences SYNOPSES OF VIDEO PRODUCTIONS HEALTH AND DISABILITY >From the Diary of a Genetic Counsellor -- 30 mins, English, 1991, Directed by K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro The programme takes up two cases of Down's syndrome, with different genetic profiles (Trisomy 21 and Translocation 14- 21) and traces the counselling process involved in each case. The aim is to highlight the counselling strategies that could be adopted to help clients to come to terms and deal with the genetic disorder. This programme would be of use to medical practitioners as well as other professionals and paraprofessionals involved in work with the mentally challenged Prerna -- Slide-sound on video, 30 mins, English and Marathi versions, 1991, Directed by Neelam Kshirsagar This programme presents a profile of the health worker, who, in the course of her regular community visits, helps in the detection of mental disability. The slide show traces the process of genetic counseling, through case studies of Down's syndrome. It stresses the importance of early intervention and rehabilitation. The aim is to present, for the health worker and the lay-person, the counselling process, with specific reference to Down's syndrome. Pramila and Parvati -- 35 mins, English, 1993, Directed by Shilpa Ranade The video explores, in depth, the perceptions of two visually challenged women, who speak of their experience of childhood, getting an education, finding employment, marriage and child rearing. In a candid account, the friends discuss the trials they face everyday in meeting the challenge of parenting their sighted children. Their children's perception of visual disability and their aspirations for the future are also presented. Perspectives on Mental Health -- 60 mins, English, 1991, Directed by Shilpa Ranade Mental Health services in India are offered by mental hospitals, psychiatric units attached to general hospitals and voluntary agencies. The video traces the history of mental health services in the country and the changing paradigms of mental illness, treatment and rehabilitation, underlying these interventions. The models and approaches adopted by various institutions are explored, in the light of the need for low-cost, appropriate and accessible interventions in the Indian context. ENVIRONMENT/ NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Pani Panchayat -- Part I & II, 50 mins., English and Marathi versions, 1986, Directed by Anjali Monteiro Documents a water cooperative movement of small farmers in a drought-prone block of Maharashtra. In the first part, Pani Panchayat is juxtaposed with the State's promotion of large irrigation projects. The second part is an appraisal of Pani Panchayat and the extent to which it presents an alternative model. Magra Mewar Vikas Sanstha -- Part I & II, 68 mins., English, 1991, Directed by K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro MMVS, based in Ajmer and Bhilwara districts of Rajasthan, is a co-ordinating voluntary agency of village committees that have taken up sustainable development of their common property resources based on the principles of contributory voluntary labour and equitable distribution of produce. The video evaluates these efforts in the context of the on-going ecological degradation of the Central Aravallis and governmental initiatives to re
Re: Will Rational Exuberance Prevail?
No doubt the thing to do is to relax, don't overly fret about the US election outcome, why bother to organize, do legwork, serve on dreary election committees, seek out and listen to those who you've never spoken to as an equal to learn from them what's eating their gizzards, to hear what they think of laid-back thinkers and indolent fingerpointers and supremacist whiners and ever so condescending shits, sure, best to herdishly blame those who do these get together and work hard to elect their own kind. It's smart to stay clear of the mess, that way there's no culpability, no risk, no need to give up prejudice about the consumerist luts, easy to lay low and work the previleged angles of those who really love the sweatless perks. That's the aristocratic way, argue the finer points of powedered wigs, the curve of calf, the vulgarity of the ingrate peasantry. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
BUSH CAMPAIGN COMES OUT FOR KERRY
October 27, 2004 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Website: http://www.yesbushcan.com/ Act: http://www.yesbushcan.com/act.shtml BUSH CAMPAIGN GROUP ENDORSES KERRY "Yes, Bush Can" now says "no, Bush can't!" Yes, Bush Can, an independent group dedicated to communicating Bush policies directly to the public, has abandoned its campaign and is officially endorsing John Kerry for President. Before changing sides, the Yes, Bush Can team drove around the country supporting the President in a campaign bus they had equipped with sound and light systems, confetti cannons, and various props and costumes. They gave dozens of stump speeches, distributed campaign videos and "USA Patriot Pledges," and performed patriotic songs to audiences across the country. (See http://www.yesbushcan.com/media.shtml and http://www.yesbushcan.com/pledge.shtml.) Last week, the group officially split with Bush. "In the course of our travels, we ended up learning more about Bush's policies than he wanted us to know," said Harmon Spellmeyer, one of the Yes, Bush Can team. "We came to see that this administration is a catastrophe for most people." Before breaking with Bush, the Yes, Bush Can team worked earnestly to support him. They went to the Pacific Northwest to promote Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative--and discovered it was enabling the logging industry to cut down our last old-growth forests. They visited a nuclear power plant in Ohio to promote Bush's domestic security policies--and found no one in the guard booth to meet them. In western Pennsylvania, while promoting the President's energy policy, they learned that it allows coal emissions which kill 23,000 people a year. Finally, while defending Bush's war on terrorism, they found out that even Donald Rumsfeld feels the Iraq War has made the world a more dangerous place. After many similar discoveries and much internal turmoil, the Yes, Bush Can group arrived at the difficult conclusion that they could no longer continue their work. At a press conference Tuesday, in order to demonstrate how profoundly they are rejecting their former boss's ideas and policies, the team defaced and abandoned the bus they had purchased and outfitted. Until the election, the former Bush campaigners will be doing all they can to make sure that Bush is prevented from winning the presidency. They will be joining many thousands of others in going door-to-door to "get out the vote" in cities throughout Florida-- beginning with Jacksonville, a mostly Black city where 11,000 votes were never counted in 2000. (Statewide, 179,000 votes weren't counted, more than half of them Black. 90% of Blacks voted for Gore.) The former Yes, Bush Can team recommends the following websites to those who wish to help "get out the vote": http://acthere.com/ http://drivingvotes.org/ http://www.democrats.org/roadtrip/ http://volunteer.johnkerry.com/traveler/ http://www.moveonpac.org/lnvb/travel/ http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/politics/volunteernow.cfm To canvas by phone, visit http://www.partyforamerica.org/phone/ or http://calls.johnkerry.com/. Send a "vote" eCard at http://www.aflcio.org/familyfunresources/ecards/. To offer financial support to "get out the vote" efforts, visit http://acthere.com/gotv-contribute/ or https://www.democrats.org/support/. Finally, visit the Yes, Bush Can website to follow the Yes, Bush Can team as they join thousands of others in helping make sure that Bush can do no more damage to America's economy, security, and dignity. # 30 # # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Warporn warpunk! Autonomous videopoiesis in wartime
"Warpunk is a squadron of B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical images into the heart of the Western imagery." Full version edited by Arianna Bove and Erik Empson. Web, Pdf, italian and spanish translations here: www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2364 --- Matteo Pasquinelli WARPORN WARPUNK! Autonomous videopoiesis in wartime Grinning monkeys How do you think you can stop war without weapons? The anti-war public opinion that fills squares worldwide and the cosmetic democracy of International Courts stand powerless in front of the raging US military. Against the animal instincts of a superpower reason cannot prevail: a homicidal force can be arrested only by another, stronger force. Everyday we witness such a Darwinian show: history repeating itself through a cruel confrontation of forces, whilst what rests is freedom of speech exercised in drawing-rooms. Pacifists too are accomplices of instinctive forces, because animal aggressiveness is inside us all. How do we express that bestiality for which we condemn armies? Underneath the surface of the self-censorship belonging to the radical left (not only to the conformist majority), it should be admitted publicly that watching Abu Ghraib pictures of pornographic tortures does not scandalize us, on the contrary, it rather excites us, in exactly the same way as the obsessive voyeurism that draws us to videos of 9/11 videos. Through such images we feel the expression of repressed instincts, the pleasure rising again after narcotized by consumerism, technologies, goods and images. We show our teeth as monkeys do, when their aggressive grin looks dreadfully like the human smile. Contemporary thinkers like Baudrillard and Zizek acknowledge the dark side inside Western culture. If 9/11 has been a shock for Western consciousness, Baudrillard puts forward a more shocking thesis: we westerners were to desire 9/11, as the death drive of a superpower that having reached its natural limits, knows and desires nothing more than self-destruction and war. The indignation is hypocrisy; there is always an animal talking behind a video screen. On the videowar battleground Before pulling the monkey out of the TV set, we have to focus on the battleground on which the media match is played. The more reality is an augmentation of mass, personal, and networked devices, the more wars become media wars, even if they take place in a desert. The First Global War started by live-broadcasting the 9/11 air disaster and continued with video-guerrilla episodes: everyday from the Iraqi front we received videos shot by invaders, militiamen, and journalists. Every action in such a media war is designed beforehand to fit its spectacular consequences. Terrorists have learnt all the rules of spectacular conflict while imperial propaganda, much more expert, has no qualms about playing with fakes and hoaxes (for instance the dossiers on weapons of mass destruction). Bureaucratic propaganda wars are a thing of the past. New media has generated guerrilla combat, opening up a molecular front of bottom-up resistance. Video cameras among civilians, weblogs updated by independent journalists, smart-phones used by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison: each represents an uncontrollable variable that can subvert the propaganda apparatus. Video imagery produced by television is now interlaced with the anarchic self-organized infrastructure of digital networked media that has become a formidable means of distribution (evidenced by the capillary diffusion of the video of the beheading of Nick Berg). Today's propaganda is used to manage a connective imagery rather than a collective spectacle, and the intelligence services set up simulacra of the truth based on networking technologies. The videoclash of civilizations Alongside the techno-conflict between horizontal and vertical media, two secular cultures of image face each other on the international mediascape. The United States embodies the last stage of videocracy, an oligarchic technocracy based on hypertrophic advertising and infotainment, and the colonization of the worldwide imagery through Hollywood and CNN. Nineteenth century ideologies such as Nazism and Stalinism were intimately linked to the fetishism of the idea-image (as all of western thought is heir to Platonic idealism). Islamic culture on the contrary is traditionally iconoclast: it is forbidden to represent images of God and the Prophet, and usually of any living creature whatsoever. Only Allah is Al Mussawir, he who gives rise to forms: imitating his gesture of creation is a sin (even if such a precept never appears in the Koran). Islam, unlike Christianity, has no sacred iconographic centre. In mosques the Kiblah is an empty niche. Its power comes not from the refusal of the image but from the refusal of its centralizing role, developing in this way a material, anti-spectacular, and horizontal cult. Indeed, o
Re: Will Rational Exuberance Prevail?
hi randall i was thinking the same thing in the weeks before the liberal/national coalition with john howard as prime minister was re-elected here in australia a fortnight or so ago. it is a similar situation: this government has in many proven cases lied to the electorate, led us into another us backed war, locked refugee children in detention centres, stripped funding from public health and education, aligned itself with right-wing christian fundamentalists, etc etc etc. why, i thought, would anyone vote for these people, given the so evident reasons not to? surely the labour party and greens offer the best way for the public good? but, the electorate did vote for them, and not only that, they gave them an increased majority. so now both houses of parliament will be controlled by the coalition, and they are going to be able to put through any bit of legislation they want, and they probably will. there was a lot of soul searching from the left (and centre for that matter) on why the right won such a victory. basically it all comes down to greed and apathy. with interest rates low, the consumer class have bought huge amounts of consumer goods with borrowed money. any increases in interest rates will make their lives difficult due to repayments, and the incumbent government ran a scare campaign that the labour party would put them up. everything else, iraq, refugees, environment, people couldn't give a fig about. as long as they can buy a four wheel drive and watch a plasma screen tv, it's all ok. so buy yourself a crate of expensive red wine, and on election night ask some friends over, put on some music and drink it. ben = ben moretti e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] w: http://www.geocities.com/benmoretti t: +61 0438 822 196 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
