Avuncular American

Valentino's Ghost: Hollywood & TV Imagine Arabs

This post first appeared in TALIM Director's Blog.

You have to be dedicated, or perhaps suffering jet lag, to get up to watch Michael Singh's excellent documentary at 08:00 on a Sunday morning.  The time was a function of the setting: this was the annual conference of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, and Valentino's Ghost was making a debut showing.

It's all good fun, at least at the outset.  Rudolf Valentino dashing off to conquer some blond.  Rudy was good for several sequels, that stallion-mounted Sheik of Hollywood imagination.

Singh proceeds from silent film to talkies, so we then have lots of Beau Geste French Foreign Legion desert shots, this time of Bad Arabs being mown down by heroic white Legionnaires, usually in defense of those same damsels that Valentino made swoon a decade or so before.  But it's all oldies, and good fun.

Then we have the more complex portrayal of Arabs in David Lean's classic Lawrence of Arabia.  Hard to fault this almost perfect film, though the focus of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks is mostly on T.E. Lawrence, the great white hope of the hopelessly "little people, silly people" as the British officer calls the disputatious Arabs.

It was still possible in the 1962 film to portray Arabs as noble (think Omar Sharif).  A decade later, after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, and the images in film and on video are almost entirely negative.  And it's this image which still informs - if one can use such a term - most coverage, both fictional and news, of the Arab world.  From Bullfrog Films, the distributor:

Valentino's Ghost takes viewers on a chronological journey through more than a century of images of Muslims, Arabs and Islam in the U.S. media, from the early 20th-century fantasies of romantic sheiks to today's damaging stereotypes as evil fanatics. Through interviews with Robert Fisk, Niall Ferguson, and John Mearsheimer amongst others, the film shows the way in which the changing image of Arabs and Muslims has mirrored America's political agenda in the Middle East.

But chronology would be boring, and so Singh gives us themes.  "The Arab as Indian" (as in Cowboys & Indians), the Arab as devious cheater, etc.  All the stuff of what any other ethnic or religious group would have long ago succeeded in banning from Hollywood.

Michael Singh has apparently made his film with PBS in mind.  Such an important subject does deserve an audience beyond specialist Middle East studies showings.  He feels that it is urgent:

Even our educated American colleagues appreciate orientation on the subject, partly because our subject has never been shown on television: PBS has broadcast films examining media images of Blacks, Jews and Asians, but not Arabs or Muslims. We contend that this lack of knowledge has contributed to widespread ignorance, stereotyping, fear and hatred of those of Middle Eastern heritage or the Muslim faith, including American citizens, and has also bolstered public support for a long line of fictions about the Middle East.

Last year, in India Abroad, Singh voiced doubts that PBS would go through with his film:

One PBS executive has told me personally that he will do everything he can to prevent the film's broadcast.  He has not even seen the film, but realizes that the politics as discussed in the film, especially about our relationship with Israel, is like nitroglycerin.  I think PBS is afraid of angering audiences who, unlike network audiences, directly donate money that is critical for PBS's survival.

If that is the case, then maybe you too will have to wait until some classroom near you shows it... at 8:00 in the morning.  Not-ready-for-prime-time, the US-Israel relationship and the skewing it does to American views of Arabs?

US To Lose Its World Focus

On April 2, to be precise.

That's when PBS channel WNET will broadcast the final airing of its international TV news program World Focus.  Full disclosure: Avuncular American is on World Focus' "Blogwatch" roll, and I'm not sure what will become of its eclectic and world-spanning collection of blogs.  Like the TV program, the Blogwatch people at World Focus sought out blogs from every corner of the world.

These days, interesting websites come and go - Baghdad Burning and The Hegemonist were two excellent blogs 'til they just stopped in their tracks - with such regularity that some people might not get worked up about the loss of a TV news program.  The difference being the international focus of WF, and that it was on American TV screens.  American audiences have already seen the steady diminution of international coverage from the heydays of network news in the 60s and 70s, when the Big Three of CBS, NBC, and ABC fielded correspondents across the globe.

The sad announcement from World Focus explained that it was all about money: great concept, growing audience, but expensive to produce in recessional America, when all kinds of great ideas must scrounge for dwindling philanthropic resources.  How many former donors were burned by Bernie, or lost it all with Lehman?

Worked up about a TV program that I don't even watch (my capacity for video streaming in a two-inch square box is limited to cute kitty videos that last 90 seconds)?  No, it's especially about a lost opportunity for Americans to learn more about the world than breathless anchor coverage of Haitian disasters can provide.

Next lost opportunity to mourn: the world's ability to learn about America through sites like the New York Times, which, after an apparently unsatisfactory pay-as-you-go experience a couple of years ago, is going to give it a go again.  Yes, I know that journalists have to be paid and the lights kept on, but readership will inevitably shift to those papers, like The Guardian, which plan to remain free.  I love The Guardian, and it has excellent coverage of US topics through columnists like Gary Younge and Michael Tomasky.  But it's a UK-based paper.

World focus, both inbound and outbound, is an activity that also needs to have its US practitioners.

Image: FocusTestChart.com

Man Of the 20th Century, Walter Cronkite

When legendary BBC/PBS commentator Alistair Cooke died a few years ago, it was like losing your grandfather, whose wisdom you would now have to do without.  Now we've lost Walter Cronkite, who told us every night "And that's the way it is."  Great was the impact of these authoritative chroniclers of the Twentieth Century.

Cronkite, who hosted a weekly documentary series "The 20th Century" as well as two decades' worth of the evening news for CBS, epitomized the best of broadcast journalism.  His presence was reassuring, even if the news he was relating was of the most jarring sort: war (Vietnam), assassination (the Kennedys, MLK), or revolution (Iran, and the ensuing hostage crisis).

In TPM, David Kurtz provides a touching remembrance of a childhood influenced by this father figure.

The passing of Walter Cronkite also reminds us of the demise of The News, as in "did you see The News last night?"  It was mainly a reference to Cronkite's CBS Evening News, and it invariably included reports from a string of American correspondents positioned across the globe.

Cronkite and his international team are now gone, replaced by pretty boy (or girl) anchors who rely on technicians whose prowess with pixels cannot patch over the lack of depth or analysis.  Cronkite had an amazing team of journalists, reporters like him who had covered World War II with Edward R. Murrow: men like Eric Severeid, who died in 1992, and Richard C. Hottelet, whose work had landed him in a Nazi jail.  Cronkite and his colleagues were literate, homespun, authoritative, and must have been appalled in ensuing years by the downward spiral of TV "journalism" that is embodied by the likes of Fox News.

Readers in the US will be able to watch the CBS tribute, "That's The Way It Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite" (image), tomorrow Sunday 19 July at 7:00 PM EST; for the rest of us, they have put up a nice page of text and video here.

Walter Cronkite, the original "avuncular American."

"Fauxtography" - Errol Morris, Hany Farid, & Charles Johnson

The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph. Photoshop is not the culprit. It is the intention to deceive.

Errol Morris, "Photography as a Weapon," New York Times 11 August, 2008

Anyone remotely concerned with propaganda, public diplomacy, disinformation, public relations, agents provocateurs, communications, information operations (you get the point: the use and misuse of images and information) should read Errol Morris in the NYT.  Yes, it's an erudite discussion between Morris (most recent film: Standard Operating Procedure, about Abu Ghraib) and Charles Johnson (who unmasked Iranian photo-manipulation of its missile launch in his blog "Little Green Footballs") and Dartmouth's Hany Farid, an expert on digital fraud.

But most fun are the digital illustrations throughout the piece, with prize-winning doctorings of the Iranian fauxtograph.  Be sure to read the footnotes too, plus all the links to Johnson's and others' work.

It's good fun, but deadly serious.  After all, staged "incidents" have launched and justified wars from the British land grab of Zulu territory to the Gulf of Tonkin... to Colin Powell's "Curve Ball" moment at the United Nations.  Next time you hear about Iranian speedboats harassing American aircraft carriers, think of Errol Morris and his friends, reserve your judgment, and check the pixels.

Culture Wars, European Style - May '68

I would be remiss in my duty as an observer of the European scene if I let the month of May pass without a comment on May 1968.  Since I was a pimply teenager in Pennsylvania at the time, I cannot speak from personal experience.  But you cannot be alive in Europe in the spring of 2008 without being bombarded with documentaries, books, commemorations - nostalgia of the most maudlin to the intelligently reflective.  At most recent count, 100 books (!) have been published in French alone.

One of the most thoughtful TV programs (now out on DVD), one of the few to put the street protests in France into their international context, is Patrick Rotman's "68."  Francophone readers can listen to an RTL radio interview with Rotman here.  Rotman, as a 19 year old student at the Sorbonne, was a participant and witness.  It was definitely a turbulent year, worldwide.

Anniversaries, especially those ending in round numbers like 40, are fair game for reflection.  Especially when many "soixante-huitards" (in the States, we would say baby boomers) are themselves in their sixties.  In France, there is a particularly contemporary - political - slant to these recollections: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an anti-68, conservative politician, in a country where the dominant intellectual strain grew up in the shadow of the May '68 protests.  Shadows of the US, where "what did you do during the Vietnam War?" continues to fuel political debate, and where the Republican Party would like to program the national DVD player to skip the tracks between Eisenhower and Reagan.

But just like America's boomer hippies have morphed into Wall Street lawyers and Washington politicians, so too have many soixante-huitards joined the establishment.  Probably the best example of a student leader keeping his youthful ideals while succeeding in the political world is "Danny The Red" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament for Germany's Green Party, though he has as much of a profile in France (born there while his parents fled Nazi persecution, he's perfectly bilingual and bi cultural).  Cohn-Bendit was recently shown chatting with the long-retired chief of the Paris police, who he credits with saving lives (and perhaps French democracy) by holding his fire during the student/labor protests.

"'68" is perhaps most resonant now because of the current existential crisis in the world economic system, with financial, food supply, environmental, and societal (immigration, aging, unemployment) pressures causing many to question the way the Western world organizes itself.  It's another nostalgia "industry," for sure.  But without necessarily offering answers, this season's European retrospectives serve a purpose in forcing introspection of the most useful type.  For the US too, this will be most evident once the Democratic Party finally sorts out its candidate to face John McCain.  Will it be '60s vs. '70s? (age, not decades).  Or will it be McCain national-security-means-guns vs. Obama's more inclusive definition of security through diplomacy, economic strength, and inclusiveness?  The Culture Wars in the United States are not over yet.