Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Cultural theorist superstar Slavoj Žižek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema) for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Žižek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: What hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter's They Live ("one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left"), Titanic, Kinder Eggs, verité news footage, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek's stimulating, provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic-cinematic rant.

Isabelle Eberhardt (1991)

Isabelle Eberhardt is a 1991 Australian-French biographical drama film directed by Ian Pringle. The film follows the adult life of Isabelle Eberhardt and was filmed in Algiers, Paris and Geneva. It stars Mathilda May as Eberhardt and Peter O'Toole as Hubert Lyautey. It received financial backing from the Film Finance Corporation Australia and was nominated for three awards at the 1991 Australian Film Institute Awards.

Isabelle Eberhardt was screened at the 1991 Melbourne International Film Festival and was also released in cinemas in Australia, though did not have a home media release. The film received generally negative reviews.

La Controverse de Valladolid/Dispute in Valladolid (Eng Subs)

Dispute in Valladolid is a TV movie released in 1992 and directed by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, which is a fictionalized account of the real “Valladolid debate”.

The director was Jean-Danielle Veren, Jean-Pierre Marielle played Las Casas, and Jean-Louis Trintignant acted as Sepúlveda.

The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) was the first moral debate in European history to discuss the rights and treatment of an indigenous people by European colonizers. Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was a moral and theological debate about the conquest of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism, and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World. It consisted of a number of opposing views about the way natives were to be integrated into Spanish society, their conversion to Catholicism, and their rights.

Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order despite their practice of human sacrifices and other such customs, deserving the same consideration as the colonizers. Opposing this view were theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the human sacrifice of innocents, cannibalism, and other such "crimes against nature" were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible including war.

Commander Arian, a history of women, war and freedom (Kurdish, Spanish subs)

 

In this story of emancipation and freedom in the face of the Syrian war, Commander Arian guides a women's battalion towards Kobane with the mission to liberate the population living under the yoke of Daesh (ISISIS). Arian, who when very young witnessed the viscous treatment that victims of sexual violence received, does everything possible to make her comrades discover the true meaning of their struggle: freedom for the next generation of women. After living for months with the commander and her troops, filming with an unprecedented intimacy that includes raw sequences of Arian's slow recovery from wounds, Sotorra makes a fascinating portrait of a woman on a mission.

2018 Duration: 77 min.

País: España

Dirección:Alba The Warrior Guion: Jesper Osmund, Alba Sotorra, Steffano Strocchi

Kashmir the story full documentary (The history of Kashmir) : India, Pakistan and China

The history of Kashmir is intertwined with the history of the broader Indian subcontinent and the surrounding regions, comprising the areas of Central Asia, South Asia and East Asia. Historically, Kashmir referred to the Kashmir Valley.Today, it denotes a larger area that includes the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir (which consists of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, and Ladakh), the Pakistan-administered territories of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan, and the Chinese-administered regions of Aksai Chinand the Trans-Karakoram Tract.

In the first half of the 1st millennium, the Kashmir region became an important centre of Hinduism and later of Buddhism; later in the ninth century, Shaivism arose. Islamization in Kashmir took place during 13th to 15th century and led to the eventual decline of the Kashmir Shaivism in Kashmir. However, the achievements of the previous civilizations were not lost.

In 1339, Shah Mir became the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir, inaugurating the Shah Mir Dynasty. For the next five centuries, Muslim monarchs ruled Kashmir, including the Mughal Empire, who ruled from 1586 until 1751, and the Afghan Durrani Empire, which ruled from 1747 until 1819. That year, the Sikhs, under Ranjit Singh, annexed Kashmir. In 1846, after the Sikh defeat in the First Anglo-Sikh War, and upon the purchase of the region from the British under the Treaty of Amritsar, the Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh, became the new ruler of Kashmir. The rule of his descendants, under the paramountcy (or tutelage) of the British Crown, lasted until 1947, when the former princely state became a disputed territory, now administered by three countries: India, Pakistan, and the People's Republic of China.

Kashmir the story is a documentary which gives an insight into the conflict-ridden region, showcasing facts as they are. The purely observational piece of storytelling is an honest attempt to showcase life in the valley.

Stealing Africa - Why Poverty?

Rüschlikon is a village in Switzerland with a very low tax rate and very wealthy residents. But it receives more tax revenue than it can use. This is largely thanks to one resident - Ivan Glasenberg, CEO of Glencore, whose copper mines in Zambia are not generating a large bounty tax revenue for the Zambians. Zambia has the 3rd largest copper reserves in the world, but 60% of the population live on less than $1 a day and 80% are unemployed. Based on original research into public documents, the film describes the tax system employed by multinational companies in Africa.

Director Christoffer Guldbrandsen
Producer Henrik Veileborg
Produced by Guld­brandsen Film

Benjamin Zephaniah on Windrush, anarchism and his time in North Korea

Poet, writer and activist Benjamin Zephaniah talks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy about the Windrush scandal, how the political system should be torn down and why he spends so much time in China. 

Warning: offensive language.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

A portrait of two different voices whose demands for black equality gave rise to gains in American civil rights.

A half-century after their deaths, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X remain two of the world's most revered political activists. They were both respected leaders of the American Civil Rights movement, struggling for racial equality and freedom. But at the start of the 1960s, the media were constructing a conflict that stirred the civil rights debate: Malcolm X versus Reverend Martin Luther King.

While King advocated non-violent direct action and passive resistance to achieve equal civil rights, Malcolm X was the spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI), the black Muslim movement which violently rejected white America and its Christian values, and preached the supremacy of blacks over whites.
He promoted a segregationist approach that sought to instil in blacks a pride in their African heritage, whereas Martin Luther King believed that self-respect would come through integration.

"King was working to take down signs that prevented black people from riding buses where they wanted to, and to ride in trains, public transportation, preventing them from voting, and all of those things that black people were prevented from doing in the south. In the north, blacks always could vote, but as Malcolm said 'You may have the vote but you ain't no voting for nothing because they've already decided that you are not going to have any power'," explains historian James H. Cone.

King once told the press that "the method of non-violent resistance is one of the most potent, if not the most potent weapons available to oppressed people and their struggle for freedom."

However, for Malcolm, turning the other cheek was a weak strategy that was unacceptable.

"Malcolm comes from a black nationalist tradition that does not believe that you can get your freedom, your self-respect, your dignity by simply letting somebody beat up on you, and you do not try to defend yourself. That's why Malcolm emphasised self-defence. But King emphasised non-violence because if blacks had responded, tried to defend themselves, that would have brought the police department down on those demonstrators and whites would have loved to have the chance to kill black people indiscriminately. So King and Malcolm had that tension," says Cone.

Malcolm X regularly criticised King, accusing him of bowing to whites and subjugating blacks to the very culture that had historically denigrated and abused them.




"The white man pays Reverend Martin Luther King, subsidises Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther King can continue to teach the negroes to be defenceless. That's what you mean by non-violent: be defenceless. Be defenceless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken a people into captivity. That's just the American white man," Malcolm X said.

In Washington, King continued his political work with a group of senators sympathetic to his ideas. He opened historic collaborations with the white community - joining the debate on the civil rights draft bill initiated by President John F Kennedy - that culminated in the March on Washington in 1963 and the signing of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964.

'Blacks, Blues, Black! Episode 1: Positive Africanisms | KQED Arts

Episode 1 of a 10-part TV series made by Dr. Maya Angelou for KQED in 1968 called Blacks, Blues, Black!, which examines the influence of African American culture on modern American society. As Dr. Angelou puts it: "What is Africa to me?" Includes scenes of Dr. Angelou in the studio discussing "positive Africanisms": children's games, dance, poetry, religion and the blues. She states: "The preachers and the blues singers are the poets of the black American world." Also features views on location of children playing street games, of Rev. WR Drummer and Rev. JL Strawther preaching at the Little Zion Baptist Church in San Francisco and of B.B. King performing on-stage and being interviewed by Dr. Angelou. This episode was written by Dr. Angelou and produced by Tony Batten.

Prime Minister Paul Keating on Mabo - Talk Back Radio - John Laws 1992

Anyone interested in Australia should watch this. The then Prime Minister Paul Keating taking live on air questions in 1993 about the so-called Mabo Decision (Mabo v Queensland (No 2)) that was made by the High Court in 1992. Keating fields questions on the John Laws radio show. He responds with intelligence and patience, while attempting to explain what had actually happened.
The Mabo decision should be considered historic as a legal decision on an international level as;

"The High Court held that the doctrine of terra nullius, which imported all laws of England to a new land, did not apply in circumstances where there were already inhabitants present - even if those inhabitants had been regarded at the time as "uncivilized". Consequently, the Court held that the rules of reception of English law that applied were not those applicable where the land was barren and unhabited, but rather the rules that applied where an existing people were settled."

Mabo was eventually curtailed by the Native Title Amendment Act 1998 introduced by the John Howard led Liberal Government. Since then there have been large Native Title claims granted but even they often contain lease hold clauses that allow for continued economic exploitation by non-Native, and more lately non-Australian, interests (e.g. the current Adani Mining Carmichael Coal venture is being made possible by the extinguishing of Native Title) . Furthermore, Native Title can be extinguished by state governments in Australia if claims are considered to be contrary to 'the national interest'. What is more 'in the national interest' than the people themselves, the majority of whom have long supported the recognition of Indigenous dispossession.

Mabo really was a missed opportunity. The results of the ultimate failure to work with the High Court decision (i.e. finally confirmed by the Native Title Amendment Act of 1998) and all the ideas and history it represented are still developing as potential impacts and consequences. Just the current Adani Mining Carmichael Coal Mine and Rail Project is one example of how unsustainable economic interests are being imposed on people (i.e. THE national interest) via the Native Title Amendment Act 1998. It has been 25 years this new year of 2017 since Mabo 2 and it remains in the interest of all Australians to implement the original High Court decision and overturn the 1998 Act, organise a national tribunal that represents the relevant actors and formulate a new Act that will bring about both sustainable development within Native Title Lands and the recognition of Indigenous Dispossession.

Manufacturing Dissent

Manufacturing Dissent from Radical Times on Vimeo.

The story of the far right government of Queensland, Australia from 1968-1989. Nineteen years of conservative rule, made possible by a electoral gerrymander, corrupt police, corrupt politicians and a system of intimidation and violence that permeated all dimensions of society. My parents were politically active against the government in Queensland in the 1970s, as a result our phone was tapped and we were harassed by police and government officials.

This video presentation is a documentary-based analysis of the role of the media in the political strategy of former Queensland Premier, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen.

The video documentary was submitted as part of a thesis for a Master of Arts degree at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in July 1997.

The documentary was compiled by Debra Beattie, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Sources include:
The Sunshine System (1986) Quentin Dempster and Ross Wilson (50 minutes)
The Moonlight State (May 1987) ABC Four Corners, Chris Masters (reporter), Andrew Olle (presenter) and Peter Manning (executive producer) (59' 59")
The Battle For Bowen Hills (1975) Peter Gray and Garry Lane (Crowsfoot Films) (21 minutes)
Earth First (1987) Gaia Films Jeni Kendall (director/producer) and John Seed (producer) (54 minutes)
If You Don't Fight, You Lose (1978) Leslie Mannison, Joseph Monsour and Ian Curr (24 minutes)
The Whole World Is Watching (1982) Amanda King and Peter Gray (25 minutes)
Friends And Enemies(1987) Tom Zubrycki, Jotz Productions (88 minutes)
Portrait Of A Premier (1978) Brian Benson
State Of Shock (1989) David Bradbury
Joh's Jury (1993) ABC Television, Ken Cameron (98 minutes)
Bruce Dickson footage (1977)

Laurie Anderson's "The Dream Before" is sung by Christine Johnson, recorded at one of the early performances of Women In Voice at the Sitting Duck (cafe and performance venue) in Brisbane in the early 1980s.

Lyrics: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin
Lyrics by Laurie Anderson
Performed by Christine Johnson

Paul Gilroy’s 2015 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture – “Offshore Humanism”

Prof. Gilroy delivered the lecture in Exeter in September. He is Professor of American and English Literature at King’s College London, having previously been Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths (1995-1999).

Prof. Gilroy’s research interests include postcolonial studies, particularly with regard to London, postimperial melancholia, and the emplotment of English victimage; the cultural politics of European decolonisation; African American intellectual and cultural history, literature and philosophy; the formation and reproduction of national identity, especially with regard to race and “identity”; and the literary and theoretical significance of port cities and pelagics. He has also published on art, music and social theory.

His many publications include “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Unwin Hyman, 1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993), After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge, 2004) and Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010, Harvard University Press).

The Antipode Foundation and Antipode‘s publisher Wiley sponsor sessions at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG). These annual international conferences are widely seen as vital venues for the exchange of cutting-edge ideas, and we invite presenters who represent both the political commitment and intellectual integrity that characterise a radical journal of geography.