On the Matter of Film
As film making and viewing increasingly become identified with digital media — storage in bits and invisible streams that manifest as cinematic experiences in our classrooms, theaters and living rooms — it is easy to lose track of the concrete materials, processes and spaces that make these viewing experiences possible. Easy, that is, unless your […]
Sebastian Junger’s The Last Patrol, A Dialogue
War does not simply shape, shepherd, and injure bodies, or mold and undermine psyches in a unidirectional fashion. Through countless contradictory and incomplete processes, war excites bodies, cultivates capacities, gives value to things, provokes subjective interpretations of surprising behaviors, and forms connections. —Kenneth T. MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood The first things I noticed […]
Bollywood and Violence
Irfan Ahmad, a political anthropologist, writes in Al-Jazeera about Bollywood and violence in India: On July 31, a shocking incident took place at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of South Asia’s top universities. In a dastardly attempted murder, shortly before noon, Akash Kumar, 23, and a student of Korean studies, entered the classroom […]
Refusing to Look Away: The Act of Killing and the Indonesian genocide of 1965
The Act of Killing (2013). A Film by Joshua Oppenheimer. In the mid 1990s I was conducting transcultural psychiatric research in Bali, Indonesia, exploring the relationship between Balinese culture, individual experience, and the long-term outcome for severe mental illness. Engaging in person-centered ethnography, I interviewed a number of individuals on a weekly or monthly basis […]
The Language of Superman
What does a language sound like when it only exists in written symbols? The producers of this summer’s blockbuster Superman movie, Man of Steel , ran into this problem when it comes to the native language of Krypton, the fictional and faraway planet where Superman was born. So they turned to the Okanagan Valley, where University of […]