Tag Archives: film

‘Riot From Wrong’ Film Screening

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This post was contributed by Fraser Alcorn, an LLB Law student and member of the Birkbeck Law Society.

The media coverage of the riots that swept through London last August may have decreased in the past few months, but the realities of many of the social injustices that brought them about are still being felt. ‘Riot from Wrong’ is a documentary film created by a group of 19 young people that intends to get to the underlying issues that led to the widespread social unrest and to challenge the perception and media representation of those involved. Birkbeck Law School and student Law Society hosted a screening of the film and a Q&A with the filmmakers at the Birkbeck Cinema on Saturday 24 November.

Primarily focusing on the local community in Tottenham where Mark Duggan’s shooting at the hands of police began four days of mass civil disobedience, but bringing in stories from across London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, the documentary is unique in gathering perspectives from those involved in rioting and looting alongside interviews with politicians and journalists. The filmmakers have succeeded in producing a slick and insightful examination of the complex realities behind the riots, moving the focus away from the rhetoric of a ‘feral youth’ and onto the unfair and prejudiced treatment of whole communities. Citing the 75% cuts to Youth Services budget, police mistreatment and stereotyping of young people through ‘stop and search’ procedures, as well as tracing the Thatcherite obsession with the individual to the detriment of society, the film provides a strong condemnation of the short-minded policies that produced and continue to produce a young population with few opportunities. That BBC News had commissioned the young filmmakers to produce a piece for broadcast – the first time this has ever been done – should stand testament to the quality of their work.

L-R: Teddy Nygh, Alex Simpson, Kye Taliana, Philli Glenn, Eddis Ozcelik.

Four of the team involved in making the film kindly joined us for a Q&A after the screening; Alex Simpson, Kye Taliana, Eddis Ozcelik, and Philli Glenn, along with director Teddy Nygh. Feedback from the audience was resoundingly positive and the team proved to be an engaging and thoughtful bunch to talk with. Considering that they experienced the beginning of the riots first-hand while filming, and put the film together as blame was being piled upon an unfairly demonised youth, their level-headed and considered opinions were heartening. That’s not to say they shied away from demanding that the powers that be need to take responsibility for their actions, and with around 30 screenings under their collective belts, including one at the Houses of Parliament, their direct approach is making waves in the right places. Far from resting on their laurels though, they talked about their desire to get more young people motivated in their cause with their ‘Million Youth Movement’, together with plans to shoot a new film explaining how to get involved in local politics with the intention of giving more voice to young people in Britain.

The ‘Big Society’ is a horrible term that suggests that people need to be reminded to care about our own communities. It too easily takes ownership of the positive work of a few and claims it as proof of the value of a valueless government initiative, where in fact that work has happened despite the absence of state support. This film is the product of a group of young people coming together in the most positive way possible to create something truly informative and perceptive, and it would be quite wrong for it to be held up by government as an example of how the young ‘should’ behave; Britain’s youth should hold it up to government to demand to know why they are having to address and resolve issues they had no hand in creating.

The next public screening is at The Salisbury in Tottenham on Sun Dec 9th. For more information follow the team on Twitter @UKFullyFocused & @RiotFromWrong . Watch the trailer here.

Follow Birkbeck Law Society @BirkbeckLawSoc or contact us at birkbecklawsociety@gmail.com

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE! Spanish media representations of violence against women

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This post was contributed by Barbara Grut, a research student in Birkbeck’s Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies.

On Friday 2 November 2012, I attended a Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS) lecture given by Visiting Professor Dolors Comas d’Argemir, from the University of Tarragona, on a subject that is close to my heart: the media representation of violence against women in Spanish society.

Violence against women (and its representation in Spanish films) had been my chosen subject for my MA dissertation with Birkbeck’s Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies in 2011, and whilst I have chosen a different (and less harrowing) subject for my MPhil this year, listening to Professor Comas’ lecture in some ways felt like coming home. She made me realise how strongly I still felt about the issue – and indeed, it is difficult to remain dispassionate about the issue of gender-based violence.

I was particularly impressed not only by Professor Comas’ academic research into this field, but also by her political commitment to the issue. As a member of Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds, Dolors Comas has been both a City Councillor and a Member of the Parliament of Catalonia, and in that capacity, she has worked on various pieces of legislation to advance women’s rights. She is living proof that the old clichés about academics sitting in their ivory tower and politicians having lost touch with reality need not always be true – at least not in Catalonia!

From impunity to retribution: a long journey

In her lecture, Professor Comas gave an overview of how violence against women has been perceived by Spanish society over the course of history. For a long time, it was considered just a private issue: isolated domestic incidents between a man and his wife, behind closed doors. The male perpetrators went unpunished, and the female victims were to some extent “blamed” (she must have done something to deserve this?).

As women began to occupy positions of authority and responsibility in Spain’s post-dictatorship Transición, they started raising awareness about what were clearly not just isolated private incidents, but rather a fairly widespread societal phenomenon: the concept of “battered women” was born. Shelters were put in place. Women were identified as the victims of this phenomenon, but the perpetrators remained a nebulous entity.

However, a sea change took place around 1997, with the spine-chilling case of Ana Orantes, an ordinary housewife who appeared on television to talk about her experience of domestic violence, and who was beaten and burned alive by her husband a few days later. The brutality of the case rocked the nation, arguably because Spanish society could relate the phenomenon of violence against women to a real human being, with a name, a face, and an articulate voice – not just to a statistical figure.

In 2004, the statute books finally recognised that this was a form of violence overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against their female partners. Female victims could henceforth seek protective measures (such as restraining orders) and male perpetrators were brought to justice.

The media’s role: an ambivalent position

Having established that violence against women had become “an affair of state”, Professor Comas then went on to examine media representations of the phenomenon. She noted, first of all, an increase in the amount of reporting (all fatal incidents are now reported in the news), as well as a more informed way of representing the problem (looking not only at individual cases, but also investigating the root causes behind this societal phenomenon).

However, Professor Comas also drew the audience’s attention to some decidedly unhelpful media tactics, such as bringing victims and violent perpetrators together “for a reconciliation” on day-time chat shows (one such case in 2007 led to a young woman, Svetlana Orlova, having her throat slit by her jilted boyfriend, whose wedding ring she had refused on live television), or newspaper columnists who on occasion showed “understanding” for the formerly-humiliated-now-turned-violent boyfriend (Salvador Sostres “Un chico normal” article for El Mundo in 2011 had to be pulled, following public outrage).

With her recent experience as a member of the Audiovisual Media Council of Catalonia, Professor Comas concluded that media self-regulation had its pitfalls – an argument her audience could but agree with.

Cross Dressing in Silent Film: Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man! (Ich mochte kein Mann sein!, Germany, 1918)

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This post was contributed by Rosalyn Croek, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Cultural Studies

Birkbeck Arts Week 2012 was a chocolate box of assorted events for an arts enthusiast to pick from, a platform for students and tutors across the arts courses to engage in a more open setting, tutors expressing the very latest research through a particular theme or object for their session.  At the close of the week, this event doubled as good old-fashioned Friday night entertainment, wine and a silent comedy screening which resounded to much laughter in the room at 43 Gordon Square.

Silke Arnold-de Simine introduced the film, this event in part a launch for the book she has co-written with Christine Mielke on cross dressing in German film comedies from 1912 to 2012.  The book is only available in German but others can consult a chapter Silke wrote in the most recent Blackwell’s Companion to German cinema, about Weimar cross-dressing comedies and their Hollywood remakes. Did you know Some Like It Hot has a German original?

Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man! (Ich mochte kein Mann sein!, Germany, 1918), centres on tomboy Ossi who enjoys poker, smoking, and drinking, shunning the delicacy expected of her and mocking the authority figures of her uncle, her strict and corseted governess, and new male guardian Dr Kersten.  Her preferred activities denied to her as a female, she decides to dress up as a man, making for a humorous scene when she is fitted out for a tailcoat at the shop.  Her disguise is actually completely successful; she revels in female attention and in a twist drinks with Dr Kersten at a nightclub – with the two sharing a kiss. The comedy owes much to Ossi’s ‘physical and exuberant acting style’.

Director Ernst Lubitsch went to Hollywood, Silke explained, but star actress and producer of cross dressing cinema in her own right, Ossi Oswalda, real name Oswalda Stäglich, sadly died in poverty in Prague. 

Silke explained the mechanism of cross-dressing comedy in film and prior to that popular theatre by asking us to think of familiar film Mrs Doubtfire (1993), where, as well as gender, variables age, class and nationality are also changed.  ‘The comedy stems from the accumulated and exaggerated discrepancies between appearance and behaviour, on the one hand, and the allegedly authentic identity on the other hand’.  She continued, ‘stories centring around disguise and mistaken identity can be seen as playfully countering anxieties concerning the successful fulfilment of social roles and mobile identities.  They can equally be geared to subvert or to provide symbolic reassurance, questioning or confirming the boundaries of social conformity’.

Nowadays, Silke reminded, we are more accustomed to men cross dressing as women but in the early twentieth century, women cross dressing as men was also prevalent, roles played by Weimar stars like Asta Nielsen and Elisabeth Bergner.  Men dressing as women was considered problematically associated with homosexuality, but women dressing as men was more socially acceptable and even becoming quotidian as women had taken over some men’s jobs during World War 1. That social change could feel threatening to men however, particularly to already-defeated German men, and thus well a time at which ‘I don’t Want to Be a Man’ might ring true – certainly Ossi learns that being a man has its difficulties. Silke also highlighted an alternative interpretation, centring on Magnus Hirschfeld’s widely-accepted contemporary theory The Third Sex, that ‘I don’t want to be a man’ could be read as ‘I don’t want to be a heterosexual’.

The film, Silke closed, was a success with critics and cinemagoers at the time, and was certainly successful with us too.

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Charleys Tanten und Astas Enkel. Hundert Jahre Crossdressing in deutschen Filmkomödien (1912-2012). Trier: WVT (Filmgeschichte International. Ed. by Uli Jung)

Cross-dressing and National Stereotypes: The German-Hollywood Connection. In: Companion to German Cinema. Ed. by Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2012, pp. 379-404.

The Representation of Brazil in the 1920s through Silvino Santos’ Camera

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This post was contributed by André Reyes Novaes, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Nottingham and Lecturer in the Department of Geography, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).

Cinema and national pride have been articulated in very different contexts. As a kind of national allegory, films can become a monument and participate in the construction of identities by highlighting national virtues. These ideas were the starting point for the analysis of the representation of Brazil in 1920s cinema by Professor Eduardo Morettin, presented in the seminar series organized by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies at Birkbeck.

Eduardo Morettin is a Professor of Audiovisual History in the School of Arts and Communication (ECA) at the University of São Paulo. His paper focused on three specific films: 1922: a Exposição da Independência (1970, Arno Konder and Roberto Kahané), No país das Amazonas (1922, Silvino Santos and Agesilau Araújo) and No Rastro do Eldorado (1925, Silvino Santos). Each film was analyzed taking into account their historical context and their functions. Morettin’s talk provoked active participation of the audience chaired by the discussant, Dr Luciana Martins, who has also published on Silvino Santos’ films.

Documenting the Brazilian Centennial Exhibition

The first film discussed by Morettin was 1922: a Exposição da Independência, which was made during the Brazilian Independence Centennial World Fair (1922-1923), the first international exhibition that took place in Rio de Janeiro after the World War. The filmmaker Silvino Santos, who was at the exhibition for the screening of his film No país das Amazonas, took the opportunity to film the event, which was intended to celebrate Brazilian independence (1822). Santos was a photographer and cameraman of Portuguese origins who lived most of his life in the Amazon region in Brazil. His films represent an important record of the transformation of many Brazilian landscapes.

1922: a Exposição da Independência displayed a newly transformed area of Rio de Janeiro that was opened up by the leveling of the Castelo hill at the heart of the city. Outdoor and indoor scenes of the temporary pavilions and permanent buildings provide a picture of the city that celebrated Brazilian modernity. The visitors of the exhibition – mostly white and well dressed – promenaded on the exhibition’s boulevards, while in the interior of the pavilions Santos’ camera showed several products and scientific innovations.

Amazon and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century     

Screened at the Amazonas State pavilion, No país das Amazonas was very successful in terms of public and critics, as Morettin argued. The film was produced by the commercial company of J. G. Araújo, which had business in the city of Manaus, the capital of Amazonia State, and across the Amazon region. No país das Amazonas thus worked as a visual catalogue of local products and their productive processes. According to Morettin, the film was an invitation for foreign investments in the region.

By comparing the representation of the film with earlier paintings, such as the painting by Felix Emile Taunay (Mata Reduzida a Carvão, 1830), Morettin suggested that the film reproduced a familiar visual trope in the context of the Brazilian nation’s iconography, ‘the submission of our exuberant nature to the purpose of civilization’. The beginning of the film, with urban landscapes from Manaus and the emphasis on industrial activities, demonstrates the intention to construct this dichotomic image between the forest and the modern activities. In an important scene of the film, Santos evoked the famous scene of the Lumière brothers, showing workers leaving the factory. 

Scientific Exploration and Indigenous Representation

Although the main goal of J. G.Araújo was to show a modern and developed state in the Amazon region, Santos’ camera focused repeatedly on people working: fishermen, rubber tappers, Brazil nut peelers in the factory, and many other characters were highlighted, showing different elements of Brazilian modernity. In contrast to this emphasis on activities related to the commercial and industrial context in the Amazon, the last movie shown by Morettin displayed a more typical vision of the region, that of the jungle. In No Rastro do Eldorado, the film by Santos on the expedition of the American physician and geographer Alexander Hamilton Rice to the interior of the Amazon Basin, the emphasis was on indigenous people.

Invited to make the record of a modern expedition, which used new technologies such as a hydroplane and radio, Santos produced a film that showed the exuberance and the beauty of the Amazon forest. According to Morettin, in addition to focusing on the scientific activities and the potential of the region, No Rastro do Eldorado also showed the explorer’s routine, observing the native Indians with empathy. Santos’ film provided a more complete picture of the Amazon region, which went beyond the rational and economic discourse present in Alexander Hamilton Rice’s writings.     

By analyzing these pioneering Brazilian films, Morettin explored different aspects of the representation of the country during the 1920s. In a period characterized by the absence of documents and records, the films by Santos are an inestimable register of Brazil and deserve the attention of researchers from many different areas. This seminar offered to the audience a glimpse on the tensions and contradictions of Brazilian modernity during the 1920s.