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Thank God for Miyazkai
I just got back from my Cities 229 class, on Colonialisim.
For those of you who don't know my professor's method of introducing a topic, he usually shows a film--something more or less guaranteed to make you think, but usually something more than slightly disturbing. Rush and I, who took one of his classes last year, would routinely walk out chatting about how he couldn't possibly show anything more disturbing, and then next week wonder where he'd dug up this film.
I just finished watching a more-or-less solid hour of the movie The Battle of Algiers. It's a film that was done 'like' a documentary, about the bloody revolutionary battles fought in Algeria against the French in the 50's and 60's. It was banned when it first came out in France; it was too new, too raw; and, generally, the French people as a whole hadn't had time enough between the event and the film.
I can see why. I came out of the classroom feeling literally sickened; I can stand to watch some things, and not others, and this fit into the category of "things I can't watch." Except I had to.
And we're only halfway through the film.
I came back into my room, washed some dirty dishes, and sat down to watch the Miyazaki music video that Sei had sent to me back when I was helping her copy all her old files over from her dying computer at the end of last year.
Maybe it's naive of me to smile and think about tadpoles and cats and all the sun and goodness in the world, right after watching another film so profoundly depressing.
I think we need both types of films, don't get me wrong.
But I wish the world was more Miyazaki, and less Battle of Algiers.
For those of you who don't know my professor's method of introducing a topic, he usually shows a film--something more or less guaranteed to make you think, but usually something more than slightly disturbing. Rush and I, who took one of his classes last year, would routinely walk out chatting about how he couldn't possibly show anything more disturbing, and then next week wonder where he'd dug up this film.
I just finished watching a more-or-less solid hour of the movie The Battle of Algiers. It's a film that was done 'like' a documentary, about the bloody revolutionary battles fought in Algeria against the French in the 50's and 60's. It was banned when it first came out in France; it was too new, too raw; and, generally, the French people as a whole hadn't had time enough between the event and the film.
I can see why. I came out of the classroom feeling literally sickened; I can stand to watch some things, and not others, and this fit into the category of "things I can't watch." Except I had to.
And we're only halfway through the film.
I came back into my room, washed some dirty dishes, and sat down to watch the Miyazaki music video that Sei had sent to me back when I was helping her copy all her old files over from her dying computer at the end of last year.
Maybe it's naive of me to smile and think about tadpoles and cats and all the sun and goodness in the world, right after watching another film so profoundly depressing.
I think we need both types of films, don't get me wrong.
But I wish the world was more Miyazaki, and less Battle of Algiers.
no subject
Class
We're reading Fanon, and things of that sort. It's odd: I'd taken an English class on the same topic my freshman year, and find myself liking the more analytical approach to this topic I'm getting with the Cities program much more than that I got through English. (Not to criticize the English dept. here, they're brilliant too.)
Currently we're talking about the divisions in the colonial city that are taken for granted by certain groups of people; soon we get to write our first papers (yippee...). My personal interest right now is the political uses of public art in Hong Kong.
Re: Class
The course I did was Colonial and Post-Colonial Texts. I found the theoretical approach of post-colonialism quite interesting, and got to follow up on it a a little in the Sociology class I took. Somehow I found the integration of a textual approach and a political-economic one stimulating.
What sorts of divisions are those (in the urban landscape or other divisions in the populace?)?... I suppose public arts do become rather political in a colonial context... I'm thinking of Carnival and masquerade in the Caribbean, but I never thought of them as public arts before. Hrm... I should really pull the resource book out for that course.
Also, I'll dig up a paper by Helen Tiffin on 'species boundaries' that I found quite interesting, and that deals with issues of therianthropy/anthropomorphism/theriomorphism. That was when I first began to think of these things in that political sense...