Tag Archives: Film

Wanna Fly Like Superman

Neil Gaiman, who has given some thought to the nature of heroes and myth in his time, takes on “The Myth of Superman” with Adam Rogers in Wired this month. Unlike other comic book superheroes (or, in Cory Doctorow’s preferred usage, “underwear perverts”), they write, who have remained purely the creatures of their writers, Superman transcends his depiction in comic books, TV shows, radio shows, movies, and Atari games, and “…has evolved into a folk hero, a fable, and the public feels like it has a stake in who Superman ‘really’ is.”

Gaiman and Rogers track the appeal of Superman, the mythic quality, to the “internal war between Superman’s moral obligation to do good and his longing to be an average Joe” – a tug-of-war between doing the right thing and playing along, embodied respectively in Superman and his nebbishy alter ego, Clark Kent.

Other heroes are really only pretending: Peter Parker plays Spider-Man; Bruce Wayne plays Batman. For Superman, it’s mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent that’s the disguise – the thing he aspires to, the thing he can never be. He really is that hero, and he’ll never be one of us. But we love him for trying. We love him for wanting to protect us from everything, including his own transcendence. He plays the bumbling, lovelorn Kent so that we regular folks can feel, just for a moment, super.

I disagree, though. Continue reading →

The Tribe of Barbie

I once read, though I forget where, that being Jewish consists mainly in asking what being Jewish means. As the somewhat frequent displays of Jewish anxiety here at Savage Minds might suggest, this isn’t too far off the mark. Many contemporary Jews face an identity crisis, or rather several identity crises, as they grapple with the meaning of a label that encompasses both Paul Wolfowitz and Jerry Seinfeld, Superman and Benny Goodman, Albert Einstein and Harvey Weinstein, Matisyahu and Ariel Sharon, muscle-bound Israeli soldiers and hide-bound New York accountants, rock stars and astrophysicists, atheists and mysticists and regular synagogue-goers and High Holiday Jews and hannukah bushes and $50,000 bar mitzvahs and poetry slams and klezmer and…

Tiffany Shlain’s short film The Tribe, now available on the TriBeCa Film Festival’s website, explores the sense of membership in, exclusion from, and indifference to that shape modern notions of Judaism, particularly in the US. Shlain takes as her central focus the figure of Barbie, the Grand Poobah of shiksas conceived by American Jewess Ruth Handler and named after her equally Jewish daughter Barbara (do I need to mention her son’s name was Ken?)

Of course, Barbie is not Jewish. Not even remotely Jewish. She is, like Marilyn Monroe (who actually was Jewish), the antithesis of Jewishness — the negation of Jewishness, even. For the Jewish student of popular culture, then, the question is: why did a Jewish women design a doll that is so un-Jewish? If Barbie stands as a role model for young girls, why set the Ideal so very far from the way Jewish women look? Blonde where Jewish women are dark-haired; straight-haired where Jewish women are curly-haired; button-nosed where Jewish women… aren’t; svelte where Jewish women are zaftig. To create an America where Barbie was the norm would require the literal erasure of Jewishness. Continue reading →

The Tablet Computer and the Native Girl

This wacky Taiwanese computer ad features a Westerner with a tablet computer encountering Aborigines in Taiwan’s forest. My students pointed out that the Aborigines are wearing Tzou inspired outfits, dancing Amis dances, and living in Paiwan houses. But somehow they didn’t think it was strange that the Aborigines are living in the past, while the Westerner has a fancy computer. (And I’m not even getting into the strange sexual narrative.) In fact, my guess is that Taiwan’s Aborigines have more computers and cell phones than your average town in rural America.

Via Wandering to Tamshui, who also has a nice post on the surprising economics of “spirit money” in Taiwan.

Welcome Guest Blogger: Michael Wesch

I’m happy to announce our next guest blogger: Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University.

Mike was mentioned previously on SM in relation to his hypermedia project, Nekalimin.net. However, what caught our attention and led to him being invited on as a guest blogger was a news story about his innovative teaching practices. Specifically, a role-playing game he uses with his large intro-level courses:

Wesch has created a “World Simulation” project, where students are placed into 15 to 20 small groups, and have to survive in their environment by building their own culture, as different components are discussed in class.

“Everybody in the world is profoundly interconnected,” Wesch said. “Processes of globalization send products, ideas, media, money, and people everywhere throughout the world, connecting us all. This creates great promise, but also tremendous challenges. The ‘World Simulation’ allows me to challenge students to begin thinking about the world and our role within it.”

We look forward to learning more about his teaching methods and his use of multimedia!

Below is a brief bio/self-intro by Mike:
Continue reading →

Grass

Few people know that before they made King Kong in 1933, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack were documentary filmmakers. Their first film was Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, made in 1925, made just a few years after Nanook. The film documents the harrowing migration of the Bakhtiari in Western Iran.

GRASS

I regret not having had a chance to see this film. Fortunately, in honor of Peter Jackson’s forthcoming King Kong remake it will be screened on Turner Classic Movies next Tuesday. Here is their description of the film:
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The Land Has Eyes gets Oscar nod

In Honolulu, “Vilsoni Hereniko”:http://www.hawaii.edu/oceanic/rotuma/Images/hereniko/herenikohome.htm is a well-known academic who is known for combining his cultural heritage with his academic and creative work. His film “The Land Has Eyes”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/ is set on (and in) Rotuma, a Polynesian outlier that is part of Fiji (for more on Routma check out Alan Howard’s “Rotuma website”:http://www.hawaii.edu/oceanic/rotuma/os/hanua.html which contains literally EVERYTHING about Rotuma including, if I remember correctly, minutes of the local school board). Now NPR reports that The Land Has Eyes is the “first Fijian film to be in the running for an Oscar”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4990901. Congratulations to Vili and everyone associated with this film on a job well done and to the recognition that this film richly deserves.

Margaret Mead Highlights (and a Brief Rant)

Writing my dissertation I didn’t have time to make it to the Margaret Mead Film Festival the past few years, so I was happy to catch a few films this time around. While there were a few duds, I was pretty happy with most of the films I got to see. I thought I’d write about my three favorites.

I especially liked The Concrete Revolution by Xiaolu Guo. This Chris Marker-inspired visual essay was quite thoughtful and managed to pack a punch as well. From a peasant village herself, Xiaolu’s legal status was changed when she enrolled in university, putting her in a different category from the construction workers she interviews. Under the watchful eye of their managers, the workers won’t say anything except for propagandistic phrases about the wonders of progress and the glory that the 2008 Olympics will bring to their nation. However, as the film proceeds we slowly see through this rhetoric: a woman is being evicted from her home, a worker cries because he hasn’t been paid in three months, and even the guy in charge of evictions seems to wish for a better life. While I never found the film boring, many scenes end with a sense of finality which give you a false sense of closure, thus making the film seem to drag on longer than you expect.

Another highlight was the new film by Dennis O’Rourke, of Cannibal Tours fame: Land Mines, a Love Story. While more of a traditional documentary than Xiaolu Guo’s film, this too had the feeling of a visual essay/meditation on the effects of land mines, and yet it was done without any voiceover narration by the filmmaker. Shot in Afghanistan in 2002, at the film’s heart is the relationship between two land-mine victims:
Continue reading →

Eskimos and “Hippie-Yippee Philosophy”: An interview with Asen Balikci

through-these-eyes-01
[Asen Balikci in, Through These Eyes, by Charles Laird.]

In the December issue of American Anthropologist Jay Ruby reviews Charles Laird’s 2003 film: Through These Eyes, a film which interestingly seems to locate the origins of the current culture war in the Cold War era:

At the onset of the space race in the 1960s, the U.S. government feared its educational system was slipping behind the Soviet Union’s. A controversial science initiative grew out of its response, Man: A Course of Study [MACOS], a program with the ambitious goal of teaching American children what it was to be human. At the program’s core was a benchmark of visual anthropology, the Netsilik Film Series, capturing a year in the life of a small Inuit community on the cusp of contact.

Continue reading →

Acting Like a Thief

Since I became involved with India’s Denotified Tribes, or DNTs, I’ve been trying to encourage anthropologists to study them. There is have been some good writings about DNTs, but the literature is still relatively sparse. Almost all of it is historical, with very little in the way of contemporary ethnography.

So I’m proud to announce the release of Acting Like a Thief! A short documentary film I shot and co-produced with Shashwati, who did an amazing job editing it.

Acting Like a Thief
We are releasing the film as a free BitTorrent download for all those tech-savvy people (the less tech-savvy can get a DVD for a $50 donation to our next project). I hope that this short piece will help raise awareness about DNTs and maybe even encourage some grad students who are still thinking about what they might like to research for their dissertation. If you think you might like to do such research, please contact me and I can help arrange some introductions.