Here are the videotape summaries:
State of Fear
State of Fear is a 2004 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton concerning eco-terrorists who attempt mass murder to support their views. The main villains in the plot are environmentalists. Crichton supplies a personal afterword and two appendices that link the fictional part of the book with real examples from his thesis. The novel’s critical stance towards global warming has led to climate scientists disputing Crichton’s science as being error-filled and distorted. Scientist Naomi Oreskes and science producer Gene Rosow discuss how Hollywood and the news media portray global warming and what responsibility scientists have to educate the public about global warming.
Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land
The US Media and the Israeli – Palestinian Conflict
Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land is a 2004 documentary which according to the film’s official website – “produces a striking comparison of the U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in the U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: and which “analyzes and explains how – through the use of language, framing and context – the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media.”
The film argues that the influence of pro-Israel media watchdog groups. such as CAMERA and Honest Reporting, has led to distorted and pro-Israel media reports and that foreign policy interests of American political elites – oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported. The documentary raises questions about the ethics and the role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.
Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!
The film takes its title from a book written by filmmaker Edmund Carpenter in 1972 about his engagement with media in Papau, New Guinea. In the film, several filmmakers discuss the introduction of media, and film in particular, to native cultures. Media has the ability to help native peoples document their own cultures, but it also has the power to encroach upon those cultures and irreversibly alter them.
The film relates the ways in which native people engage with media, from the Biami who proudly developed the “Big Wink” to learn how to properly focus a camera. to the Kandagan people who changed the rules of a thousand year male initiation ceremony to allow a woman camera operator to document the ceremony. At issue is the way media “swallows cultures” and the benefits and dangers of introducing preliterate societies to Western modes of communication and expression.
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I don’t want to use up all these tapes so I was thinking of supplementing them with something from popular culture – like Batman or 2001 Space Odyssey (I also got these from the same person). Batman could act as a Julian Assange figure – fighting for justice although he sometimes has to play the villian. Or 2001 Space Odyssey deals with themes of technology, evolution, change, the future, and it also has a monolith. In an article I found it said the monolith strangely resembled Anne Truitt’s hardcastle. Here are two of her sculptures that take the same form as what I’m thinking (monolith and casket):
