Miss: Exploring Venezuela's Beauty Industry

Edward Ellis, an anthropologist who worked as production coordinator for Oliver Stone’s South of the Border, and Flor Salcedo, a Venezuelan activist on women’s issues, are working on a film to explore the beauty industry’s grip on the country.

Venezuela has won more beauty contests than any other country. But while it might have six Miss Universe crowns, it only has two shelters for victims of gender violence. One reality hides another. The beauty industry in Venezuela has struck deep social roots and is highly organised. Girls are taught from very young to aspire to be a “Miss”, a beauty queen. Beauty pageants for even little girls are highly sexualised.

An astonishingly large number of women do breast implants and it is not that unusual for proud fathers to buy breast implants for their daughters when they turn fifteen. Venezuela is also the highest per capita consumer of cosmetics, as the filmmakers point out. The “Misses” of Venezuela are white women. Many of them end up as TV anchors in the private channels, from where they both spew hate for the socialist government and reinforce the extreme objectification of Venezuelan women.

The Venezuelan beauty industry sits comfortably with a macho culture. In 2008, 10,000 gender violence cases were registered but local activists think it is only a ninth of the actual number. The newly-constituted Bolivarian police have had some success in reducing this in parts of Caracas but, like violence generally, it is an enormous and lingering problem.

The big boss of this industry is Osmel Sousa, a particularly dislikeable man who deserves a whole documentary to himself as a crude misogynist. Some of the scenes where he clinically measures up young aspirants could be straight out of a cattle market. Which is probably what it is.

Here is another documentary on Venezuelan obsession with beauty. 

So What Are Documentaries All About?

Not many of you will have heard of the ânûû-rû âboro festival– it means shadow of a man or image of a man in Païcî, the language of the Kanak people – or of Paul Néaoutyine, Président de la Province Nord, New Caledonia, who delivered this speech at the festival’s opening, but here is an excerpt from an inspiring account of what documentaries are all about :

"The choice to stage this ânûû-rû âboro documentary film festival owes nothing to chance. It stems from a political commitment clearly expressed by the Northern Province to give Peoples a chance to make their voice heard through the medium of film. To have a voice is to assert your existence, your self-respect and your right to influence events. Such is the inalienable right of a People, to be free in its own country, to run its own country itself and to establish equal relationships with other countries, including the former colonial power.

"The films that you have made and the films that you are going to watch are invitations to think again and to question the world in which we live, a complex world far from received or simplifying ideas, a world in motion moulded by forces of domination and forces of resistance.

"The documentary film genre that our Province supports sides with the forces of resistance.  The philosophy of the ânûû-rû âboro Festival is to screen documentaries that respect the people filmed, that do not mutilate their message in the editing suite and that do not stifle their voices under a tide of commentary telling us what to think, as if we were not adult spectators capable of thinking for ourselves.

"These films do not comply with the formatting conventions imposed by most television channels worldwide.

"These films are an opportunity to free ourselves from the straitjacket and they open up a space of freedom for you.

"Those who trumpet the merits of the free market would have us believe that globalisation is the only path to prosperity.

"That we have no choice and that the economy, services and culture should bend to market rules and that we should kneel before the new all-powerful God of merchandise.

"Images have become a marketable product and a formidable weapon. We are submerged in images from morning until night, more and more of them, moving quicker and quicker.

"To go fast, you have to be brief, to be brief, you have to be simple. But can our world and its peoples' realities be packaged into simplistic television approaches formatted for maximum audience ratings?

"Documentaries are clearly a lifeline in the general stifling of critical thought by the totalitarian market. Where sensationalist society organises a simplified mock portrayal of reality, the documentary approach is an attempt to grasp and question a complex world."

WikiRebels: Documentary On Wikileaks

By Rady Ananda

“What we have here is a new breed of rebels, IT guerrillas without a national base.”

Sweden’s public service television, SVT, is about to broadcast a deeply-moving, one-hour documentary chronicling the history of WikiLeaks, after having followed the crew for six months. An uninterrupted rough cut of the film has been put out on You Tube.

In WikiRebels, we learn about the early hacker life of Julian Assange, and his later decision to form an organization where whistleblowers can anonymously pass information that documents crime and immorality. His stated goal is to expose injustice, and nothing exemplifies this more than the leaked film entitled “Collateral Murder.”

Published in April of 2010, the military video drew global attention for the callous reaction of the US soldiers who shot unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007, even killing a father who happened upon the murder scene while driving his children to school. WikiRebels shows other films released by WikiLeaks, and catalogs the most significant leaks since its 2006 inception, including the Iceland banking scandal, Kenya corruption and death squads, and toxic dumping in Cote D’Ivoire.

Assange’s stated hope was that alternative media would disseminate the leaks – amounting to over a million documents to date – in a way that would drive positive change. In the film (and in various interviews), he expressed disappointment that alternative media has mostly been unable to adequately analyse and synthesize the data contained in the massive data dumps. So, the whistleblower organization turned to corporate media, with its deep pockets. The Guardian (UK), Der Spiegel (Germany) and the New York Times (US) brokered a deal to publish their analysis of the documents at the same time.

Though this controversy is not mentioned in the rough cut of WikiRebels, such a move launched widespread suspicion that the group is part of a carefully contrived psychological operation. I discount this in Criminalizing Whistleblowers: Wikileaks and America’s SHIELD Legislation. Speculation about the source of the documents is much easier than analysing the thousands of released documents.

One independent news source, IndyBay.org, reports that Assange accepted payment from Israel to delete any U.S. diplomatic cables that portray Israel poorly (as if anything could mar its reputation any worse than it already is). The source of this information, however, is Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former disgruntled employee of WikiLeaks.

WikiRebels gives Domscheit-Berg plenty of face time to present his views on WikiLeaks, and to voice his complaints about Assange. The most salient complaint might be the decision to release tens of thousands of documents at once, instead of a slower and more careful release, “to grow the project.” Domscheit-Berg promises to start a new whistleblower site that will pass leaked material to the media, apparently in an amount and at a rate that he believes the public can digest.

The film clearly makes the point that, regardless of the controversies, the WikiLeaks disclosures benefit democracy. One web comment articulates this most succinctly: “Secrecy is the cloak behind which too many crimes are hidden these days.”

Even Domscheit-Berg admits, “What I really learned in the last three years is that a difference can be made bottom up, and not only top down.”

At the end of WikiRebels, Iceland TV journalist, Kristinn Hrafnsson concludes, “Democracy without transparency is not democracy.”

 Source: CounterCurrents
[An earlier posting of Julian Assange speaking at Frontline club]

'Stolen Land' Wins Cuban Top Prize, Colombian Indians Criticize Documentary Approach

Colombian filmmakers Margarita Martínez and Miguel Salazar have won the 2010 “best documentary of the South” award at the 32^nd Cuban film festival that ended in Havana recently.

The documentary depicts the story of how “a fiercely proud people, the Nasa, [in the south-eastern Colombian district of Cauca] fight for the land stolen from their ancestors while fending off the violence encroaching on their nation. Their charismatic leader is Lucho Acosta, 39, an imposing tactician descended from Indian warriors. He knows from experience that violence only breeds more violence. But facing nearly insurmountable odds, Lucho’s beliefs are tested to their very core. The future of the Nasa hang in the balance”.

The dispossession of native Indians and Afro-descendants is a huge social problem in Colombia. The country has the second highest number of internal refugees, something like a tenth of its population. The biggest land grabbers are large agro corporations that grow African palm trees and the big individual landlords, both of whom hire paramilitaries to drive peasants off the land. These paramilitaries, in turn, have close ties with the military and the government, local and national. Resistance, peaceful or otherwise, by the Indians have been met with severe violence, though the Nasa community keeps to peaceful struggle.

However, indigenous groups doing the fight have put out an unusually strong statement criticising the filmmakers, saying that “this entire documentary revolves around one person. All is done by him and for him. This portrayal is not an error insofar as it is the on-screen construction of a narrative. However, what is serious is that it is done in the name of a process, the costs of which the whole process will pay. Margarita Martinez and Miguel Salazar acquired the permission of the indigenous authorities to make a documentary about the indigenous process in Cauca. In the end, they created one against it. It was a trick. The simple fact of fabricating an individual figure that shines above a collective struggle, appropriating it, is a fault against a collective and centuries-old struggle”.

John Pilger's The War You Don't See: The Corporate Media As Propagandists

[Pablo Navarrete, documentary maker,interviews John Pilger]

PN: Your new film 'The War You Don't See' focuses on the media's role in war. I'd like to start by asking you why you felt you wanted to make this film.

JP: Television is most people's principal source of information. In Britain, much of television journalism is devoted to a mythology of 'objectivity', 'impartiality', 'balance'. The BBC has long elevated this to a self-serving noble cause, allowing it to broadcast received establishment wisdom dressed as news. This helps us understand why propaganda in free societies like Britain and the United States is far more effective than in dictatorships. While 'professional' journalists, especially broadcasters, present themselves falsely as a neutral species, truth doesn't stand a chance. This is most vividly demonstrated when imperial power -- that is, America with Britain in tow -- invades countries it wants to control, regardless of international law. This lawlessness is seldom a yardstick used in the coverage and selection of news. I didn't really understand this early in my career. Perhaps it was my arrival in Vietnam in the 1960s that helped me understand. ‘The War You Don't See’ is a product of that, and of routinely deconstructing almost every news item I see, hear and watch.

PN: In an interview with Venezuelan academic Edgardo Lander, he argued that countries that do not have a democratic media cannot be called democratic. Why is a functioning democratic media system so important for democracy in general?

JP: I agree with Lander. Thomas Jefferson said, “Free information is the currency of democracy.” It's simple. No free flow of information; no democracy. Without an informed public, political or corporate authority -- any authority -- cannot be held to account, and if it's not held to account, it's very soon corrupted.

PN: The British-based media watchdog website Media Lens argues that the increasingly centralised, corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for corporate and other establishment interests. This is a damming verdict on mainstream journalism, but is it a fair one?

JP: Yes, it's entirely fair. Again, take the issue of war. The United States is a 'warfare state' with the most stable and powerful part of its economy devoted to the manufacture of armaments. It sells these armaments, and planes and munitions, to hundreds of countries. Go to any arms fair, and it's clear these have to be 'market tested' in wars. The cluster bombs that rain down on people in Iraq and Afghanistan were tested in Vietnam; the Napalm that has been refined to burn beneath the skin was tested in Korea. Each new war is a laboratory. Much of the media and the arms companies are augmented; in the case of NBC, this is explicit. NBC is one of the world's biggest news organisations and its parent company, General Electric, is one of the world's biggest arms manufacturers. In the message of its news, the BBC is not very different. A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, about the BBC's role in the run-up to the Iraq invasion found that the corporation's coverage was found to have been overwhelmingly supportive of the government -- a government then engaged in serious lying, as we now know and as journalists ought to have known at the time. There are of course a number of honourable exceptions -- but think of an 'establishment' interest, then consider how it is propagated, directly or indirectly, in the so-called mainstream media; and by 'indirectly' I also mean a censorship by omission. This surely must explain why so many in the media could barely contain their fury at Wikileaks; how dare these unclubbable types get in the way of the media's right to be used and flattered and lied to. In ‘The War You Don't See’, a former Foreign Office official describes in detail how easy it is to manipulate 'lobby' journalists.

PN: Your film begins with shocking images from a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians which first came out via the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks. Last week Wikileaks released more than 250,000 classified US embassy cables which have since dominated the global news agenda. How important do you think the work of Wikileaks is and how big a threat does it pose to governments wishing to keep information about their foreign military operations secret from their citizens?

JP: I hesitate to use the word 'revolution' but the entry of Wikileaks does represent a revolution. Digital technology has made it possible for governments to read our emails, but it also means we can read theirs. Is this a 'threat' to established power? Yes, because, again, information is power. It gives an undemocratic elite its power and secrecy perpetuates this power. When we know the nature of official machinations and deceptions, we the public can act. As the historian Mark Curtis says in my film, “the public is a threat that has to be countered.” When the beans are spilled, the “countering” is all the more difficult.

PN: In your film you also recount how Edward Bernays invented the term public relations and pioneered the modern-day system of propaganda. And you show how the US government used Bernays’ techniques to recruit US citizens to join the First World War. Are governments such as the US still using these techniques today, and if so can you give some concrete examples of how this works?

JP: Edward Bernays said, “The intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in this country.” The same techniques are still being used, such as the creation of what Bernays called “false realities” and the rituals of patriotism devoted to justifying war-making. What's different these days is that the propaganda is not working. Look at the panic in the responses of governments to Wikileaks' disclosures. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are opposed not only throughout the world but in the US and Britain. The world wide web has given people a way of finding out without turning on the TV or the Today programme. I write a column for the ‘New Statesman’, which has a modest circulation. Once it goes out on the web, it can reach an audience of several million.

PN: Finally, what would be the best way to make the mainstream media’s reporting of war less subservient to government interests and are you hopeful about the internet’s ability to provide alternative reporting of major events such as war?

JP:The mainstream media will not change until its structure changes. A Murdoch newspaper or TV channel will always reflect the rapacious interests of Murdoch. However, journalists and broadcasters collectively have power, as does the interested public. I would like to see established a 'fifth estate' in which journalists, and those in media colleges who tutor aspiring journalists, and the public, unite to begin to change practice from within. During the invasion of Iraq, there were small mutinies in the BBC, but they weren't co-ordinated. The potential is there. As for the internet providing an alternate reporting of war, that's already happening. Most of the best reporting of Iraq was on the web -- from the likes of Dahr Jamail and Nir Rosen, and 'citizen journalists' such as Jo Wilding. And it's already happening where it probably matters most: at the seats of power, where, it seems, almost everything is leaking on the web; and long may it continue.

Source: http://www.levelground.info/#/featured-interview/4539991314

New Documentary on East Timor

Almost 20 years ago, Peter Gordon, then working for Yorkshire Television, travelled to East Timor to make a documentary on the occupying Indonesian regime’s atrocities against the local population. The documentary, Cold Blood, was telecast on national television. Something like a third of the East Timorese people were killed by the Indonesians and a reign of terror was suffocating that part of the island. Peter Gordon’s documentary, which captured the infamous cemetery massacre in the capital Dili that year, contributed to the outcry against the Western-backed Indonesian military junta.
Peter Gordon is now making another documentary on the effect the first filming had on the crew. There was Max Stahl, who did most of the filming, especially the cemetery killings when he came close to being killed. Max remains an outspoken critic of the Indonesian role. Kirstie Sword was an Australian researcher who deflected suspicion from the film crew, all posing as tourists. She later married Xanana Gusmao, who is now Prime Minister of East Timor.
Other interesting characters in the documentary include a dying man in the cemetery attack and someone straddling him. The dying man recovered later and his helper is interviewed in much the same spot for the new documentary. Gusmao and others speak at length of their memories and some of the personal and political dilemmas they had to confront in East Timor’s struggle for independence. The documentary is more a look at – the tired jargon be excused – the “human interest” angle than at the overall politics. Peter Gordon organised the screening of this pilot for the Ilkley Documentary Group.