by Salman Hameed

It has been uber hectic for the past couple of weeks, and hence the lack of posts here. There is a backlog of fascinating and relevant articles - and I will try to post some of those in this coming week. In the mean time, I have reviewed two recent sci-fi (or for the cool kids: Sy Fy) films, Europa Report and Gravity, for the journal Science. Both of these films take science seriously. But perhaps, more importantly, they both understand the spirit and desire for space exploration. Here is are some excerpts from the review, but if you want to read the whole review, you can find it here (pdf):

The Joy and Fear in Space Exploration

NASA's human space program is currently adrift. The space shuttle has been retired, and American astronauts now hitch rides to the space station. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the next big program will land people on the Moon (again), a nearby asteroid, Mars—or perhaps, for the foreseeable future, nowhere at all. Desperate, space enthusiasts have to settle for high-budget science fiction coming out of Hollywood showing aliens fighting with robots or a dumbed-down and militarized Trek universe that abandons the idealistic spirit of exploration created by Gene Roddenberry. In this context, two new films, the low-budget Europa Report and the visually stunning Gravity, offer a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Set sometime in the middle of this century, Europa Report recounts the journey of a multinational team of six astronauts to Jupiter's moon Europa. The mission is sponsored by a private company that mixes the adventure of space exploration with some of the exploits of reality television. Sebastián Cordero's film falls in the “found-footage” genre. From the beginning, we know that something went wrong with the mission. Cameras installed in the spacecraft provided footage of the astronauts' journey that allows us to piece together their fate.

A mission to Europa, one of Jupiter's four large moons, makes sense. Beneath its ice-covered surface lies an ocean of water (1) kept liquid through subsurface volcanism fueled by the tidal forces of Jupiter. Conditions near the volcanic vents, thought to be similar to those found here on Earth, may provide a fertile environment for the origin and sustainability of life.

The film and its characters have a restrained quality. The astronauts are all depicted as competent, rational individuals making hard decisions under high pressure, but they are also willing to sacrifice their lives to advance scientific knowledge. Watching Europa Report reminded me of the trials of Ernest Shackleton and other early-20th-century polar explorers. The film tries to balance the fear and the joy of the unknown, and it largely succeeds. 

And here is the beginning of the section related to Gravity:

Europa Report largely takes place inside a spaceship. The beauty of space itself is more clearly on display in Gravity, which tells a relatively simple story. Two astronauts on a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)—yes, this is an alternative

universe in which astronauts still ride space shuttles to the telescope—are left on their own when debris from a Russian satellite damages the shuttle beyond repair and kills the crew members who had remained on board.

On its surface, this is a high-brow disaster film. However, director Alfonso Cuarón provides a spectacular immersive experience, with enough suspense to keep you at the edge of your seat throughout the film. The breathtaking 17-minute opening sequence (shot in a single take) warrants the full price of a 3D admission. Commenting to the New York Times about this sequence, Cuarón explained “[w]e wanted to slowly immerse audiences into first the environment, to later immerse them into the action, and the ultimate goal of this whole experiment was for the audiences to feel as if they are a third character that is floating with our other two characters in space” (2). Indeed, for most of us, this is as close as we can get to experiencing outer space. 

I did not have space to reference it, but there is another scene in Gravity which is just breathtaking. Sandra Bullock's character at one point relaxes in the confines of the space station. She is out of spacesuit but then she gets into a fetal position, and rotates because of zero gravity. The scene is gorgeous, and this is spectacular film-making. So is a scene where a tear from her eye floats in the space station. 

There is a bit more in the review about the balance between artistic freedom and scientific accuracy etc. You can read the full review here (pdf).

You should check out the website of Europa Ventures - the company that sponsored this human space mission to Europa. And by the way, you can watch this whole film via Amazon. Here is the preview of Europa Report: 

Europa Report from drsalmen on Vimeo.

And here is the preview of Gravity:

‘Gravity’ Trailer 2 from Daniel Kibblesmith on Vimeo.

And here is a discussion with Alfonso Cuaron about the sound of Gravity:

SoundWorks Collection: The Sound of Gravity from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

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by Salman Hameed

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the radio broadcast about Martian invasion that spooked many (how many?) Americans in 1938. Below is pretty good American Experience episode that provides the background on the panic and on the genius of Orson Welles. I do think that the word "genius" is quite appropriate for Welles, as he transformed theater, radio, and then movies - all before the age of 26! He is the Einstein of the entertainment industry. Okay - I digress.

But while you watch the show, also read this Slate article that claims that the stories of widespread panic following the broadcast are a myth, created by the newspapers, and they criticize this PBS documentary as well. I think they have a compelling argument for reducing the size of the myth, but I think the documentary is more than just about the panic, and presents a broader cultural context as well as caveats in estimates about the freakouts. One thing I did not like in the documentary: Actors performing actual comments from listeners at the time. Annoying and distracting. The real story is so good that you don't need gimmicks to keep viewers' attention.

You can also listen to the original radio broadcast on OpenCulture, where they have also included the video of a press conference following the panic - and it contains an amusingly brilliant performance by Orson Welles.

Here is American Experience - War of the Worlds (it is about an hour long).

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by Salman Hameed

Here is an intriguing short film (about 20 minutes): Giordano Bruno in Conscious Memory. Bruno, of course, has come to stand in as a symbol for free speech etc., but that is a later construction (see this earlier post: Why was Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake? But this movie, takes it in another direction and presents his broader influence, including on the writings of Shakespeare (they were contemporaries - and some have suggested this connection. I don't know anything about this to comment on it). Despite the acting and some limited camera work, I like the ambitious nature of the short film. Enjoy!

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by Salman Hameed

Since I'm no longer 4 (sigh!), it is hard for me to say how Burka Avenger is connecting with kids. It will be very interesting to look at the impact across different socio-economic groups, as well as across the urban-rural divide. I hope someone is doing that. If nothing else, the intentions of the show are all in the right place (even if the creator of the show, Haroon, is also the "much-anticipated" buff cartoon pop star at the end of the first episode), and it takes sufficient swipes at the Taliban.

Here is episode 1 - with english subtitles:

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by Salman Hameed

This was created for BBC 2 (tip from Open Culture). Enjoy!


P.S. Note that in a little over four minutes, it also resolves the tension(s) between science and religion. 

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by Salman Hameed

Our usual Film Autopsy is on hiatus for the summer, so I thought I'll suggest a few films to save you from summer monsters and superheroes. Some of these films have a tengential connection to the blog but two are relevant for their connections to politics impacting the larger Muslim world.

So here we go:

Science Fiction
Europa Report:
At a time of big-budget but dumb science fiction films, Europa Report is a breath of fresh air. I have a review coming up later, but I should say that the filmmakers have done their work in terms of science and they present a (relatively) realistic scenario of a mission to Jupiter's moon, Europa and the potential of life there. Europa, of course, is one of the best (or perhaps the best) locations in our Solar system to find life. We know that there is a salty liquid water ocean under the ice sheet of this Jovian moon. Furthermore, there are underwater volcanoes that may provide the necessary energy for lifeforms to survive and thrive. Some of these  conditions mimic the underwater volcanoes here on Earth.

The film uses a mock-documentary format to present us with details of this mission to Europa. This is a low budget film but they have done a good of creating Europan landscapes and of utilizing images from the Galileo spacecraft. The tone of the film is a bit dour and some better developed characters would have helped. But these are small quibbles for a good science fiction film that embraces the spirit of scientific discovery. Here is the preview of the film:

Relevant for the current geopolitical debates:
Dirty Wars:
This is a documentary that follows accomplished journalist, Jeremy Scahill. The movie is centered on night raids in Afghanistan, missile and drone strikes in Yemen, and the mercenary war in Somalia. This is not a sensational demonization of the US government nor does it contain exaggerated claims. Instead, it shows how Scahill pieces his reports together and finds out about US military operations that are often not reported in the newspapers.

The film opens with a case in Afghanistan and it has a chilling conclusion. But worse, Scahill finds that such operations are taking place 30-40 times a night - with accompanying civilian casualties. In Yemen, he tracks down the damage of one of the first missile strikes - with casualties including mostly women and children. A Yemeni reporter who wrote about it, ended up in jail. Scahill also interviews the father of Anwar al-Awlaki - the first American citizen targetted and killed by a drone strike - both before and after the killing. Even more chillingly, Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year old son was also killed in a drone strike soon after the killing of his father.

Dirty Wars is rich with information and avoids the pitfalls of being polemical. However, it is unnecessarily stylized by the director. I think the strength of the documentary is in its material and its stylization as a spy-thriller becomes somewhat a distraction. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic and important documentary. Here is the preview of the film:



We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks
This is all the more relevant because of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden and the recently concluded trial of Bradley Manning - the source behind the Wikileaks documents. Directed by Alex Gibney, the documentary focuses on the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning. While Assange comes off as a quirky anarchist (my favorite scene is with Assange talking in the phone while casually jumping on a trampoline at an estate outside of London), it is the story of Manning that is at the heart of the film. And what a story! Manning was not really meant for the military and never got adjusted to it. He also wanted to be a woman and was planning on a sex change operation in the future. And amidst all of that, he was anguished by the actions of the US government, and inspired by Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, he provided Wikileaks with top secret documents, starting with a video that showed the killing of a Reuters journalist in Iraq by a US gunship, and followed it up with US diplomatic cables. It is absolutely heartbreaking (and outrageous) to know that after his arrest, Manning was placed in a solitary confinement for almost a year and treated in a sub-human way.

Like Dirty Wars, this is also an important documentary for this time. Here is the preview of the film:



Fruitvale Station: 
This is not a documentary, but it is based on a tragic shooting of a 22-year old African-american by the police at a Bart station in San Francisco. The film traces the last day of the life of Oscar, and it does so in a delicate and nuanced way, without emotionally exploiting the subject. Race and class issues in the US, obviously, are at the heart of the film. This is a superb film with fantastic performances. Here is a preview for the film:




Just a great film from this summer:
Mud:
This is the best movie I have seen this summer. It is directed by Jeff Nichols, who also directed the superb 2011 film, Take Shelter (check out our Film Autopsy here). Set in Arkansas on the banks of the Mississippi river, this is one of the best coming-of-age films. But it also has abstract shades of religion, superstition, and mythology - and that combines to make this a powerful film. The director is only 35 years old. He has written and directed three films. I have not yet seen Shotgun Stories, but I absolutely loved Take Shelter and Mud. Perhaps more excitingly, Jeff's next project is a sci-fi film and I can't wait to see it.

In any case, here is the preview for Mud:

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by Salman Hameed

I'm certainly entertained by the idea of a burqa (or burka) as a superhero cape. This was bound to happen. Already in Pakistan, I had heard of the "ninja-burqa". So here comes this new animated series in Urdu, Burka Avenger. I think it is a fantastic idea and, in it, there is an interesting secularizing of the burqa: the teacher doesn't take the burqa for religious reasons, but rather to beat-up the bad guys (not to mention that he bad guys seem to have at least similarities with the Taliban and their position regarding female education). Oh well, here is a trailer in English (the series is in Urdu):


Burka Avenger Trailer from Aaron Haroon Rashid on Vimeo.

Of course, there is also a precedence of Muslim superheroes in the series The 99 (see earlier post, Sharia-compliant superheroes). But Burka Avenger comes with its own Pakistani flavor. Here is a brief description of the key plot lines and a good sense of humor in the show:

The series is set in Halwapur, a fictional town nestled in the soaring mountains and verdant valleys of northern Pakistan. The Burka Avenger's true identity is Jiya, whose adopted father, Kabbadi Jan, taught her the karate moves she uses to defeat her enemies. When not garbed as her alter ego, Jiya does not wear a burka, or even a less conservative headscarf over her hair. 

The main bad guys are Vadero Pajero, a balding, corrupt politician who wears a dollar sign-shaped gold medallion around his neck, and Baba Bandook, an evil magician with a bushy black beard and mustache who is meant to resemble a Taliban commander. 

Caught in the middle are the show's main child characters: Ashu and her twin brother Immu and their best friend Mooli, who loves nothing more than munching on radishes in the company of his pet goat, Golu. 

In the first episode, Pajero wants to shut down the girls' school in Halwapur so he can pocket the money that a charity gave him to run it. He finds a willing accomplice in Bandook, whose beliefs echo those of the Taliban and many other men in conservative, Islamic Pakistan. 

"What business do women have with education?" says Bandook. "They should stay at home, washing, scrubbing and cleaning, toiling in the kitchen."
Bandook padlocks the gate of the school and orders the crowd of young girls outside to leave. Ashu steps forward to resist and delivers a defiant speech about the importance of girls' education – perhaps marking her as a future activist. 

"The girls of today are the mothers of tomorrow," says Ashu. "If the mothers are not educated, then future generations will also remain illiterate." 

Bandook is unmoved, but the Burka Avenger appears and fights off the magician's henchmen with martial arts moves reminiscent of the movie The Matrix. Using his magical powers, Bandook disappears in a puff of smoke. The Burka Avenger hurls a flying pen that breaks open the padlock on the school's gate as the children cheer. 

The show, which is slickly animated using high-powered computer graphics, does a good job of mixing scenes that will entertain children with those that even adults will find laugh-out-loud funny. 

In one episode, Bandook builds a robot to take over the world's major cities, including London, New York and Paris. As he outlines his dastardly plan with a deep, evil laugh, one of his minions butts in and says, "But how will we get visas to go to all those places?" – a reference to how difficult it can be for Pakistanis to travel, given their country's reputation.

And while we are on the subject of mixing religious garbs with entertainment, here is a highly entertaining tutorial video of how to make a Princess Leia Hijab:

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by Salman Hameed

NASA has just released a spectacular image of the Earth - from Saturn (yes, yes, it is the dot below the rings). The photograph is taken by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft that is currently orbiting Saturn, about 900 million miles away (our Sun is only 93 million miles from the Earth!). More below - but first I want you to just enjoy this stunning image:

The Saturn in this picture is blocking the Sun, and therefore allowing the spacecraft to take the picture of our home world. In addition, Saturn's rings are beautifully lit here. This is part of a larger mosaic image that includes most of Saturn and it will be released at a later date. This image, of course, is a reminder of the photograph taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, made particularly famous by Sagan's reflection on The Pale Blue Dot.

But while we are on the subject of our humbling experiences, I want to point out that Bradley Manning, the source behind the Wikileaks documents, is now going through his court martial. That he leaked the documents is not in doubt, and he has already pleaded to offenses that can place him in jail for 20 years. However, the judge refused to drop the highly dubious charge of aiding and abetting the enemy, and that is a shame.

Why do I bring up Bradley Manning in a post about this image? I recently watched a fantastic documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks directed by Alex Gibney. One half of the film focuses on Julian Assange. But the more interesting part of the film talks about Bradley Manning, his background and why he leaked the documents. And guess what? One of his inspirations was Sagan's reflections on the Pale Blue Dot. He did not like what the US government was doing in Iraq (and in other parts of the world) and he wanted to make public some of the horrendous actions of the government (for example, the first leaked video showed a US operation in Iraq in 2008 that killed a Reuters journalist)  in the hopes of  making this a better planet.

Once you have appreciated the above image, do check out We Steal Secrets and follow the ongoing trial of Bradley Manning. His is a heartbreaking story, and it is unconscionable that he was placed in a solitary confinement and forced to sleep naked in a small cell for almost a year - a treatment that the UN special rapporteur on torture found "cruel, inhuman and degrading".

I will leave you with Sagan's voice more directly:


The Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan from David Beaver on Vimeo.

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by Salman Hameed

Here is a nice sci-fi short film (6 minutes long) for your Saturday:

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by Salman Hameed

I still have not seen the new Star Trek yet. I was disappointed and sad by the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek franchise last time, as it kicked aside the optimism and curiosity in exchange for brainless action sequences and problematic politics. It seems that the Into Darkness is a slightly better film but it goes even further in militarizing Star Trek. Compare this to the fact that  Gene Roddenberry created the series to challenge and bypass established norms of the 60's America. After all, it was Star Trek that featured the controversial interracial kiss (between Captain Kirk and Uhura). Here is a wonderful segment from a documentary Pioneers of Television: Science Fiction that presents the context for Star Trek (it also talks about the story behind the episode with the interracial kiss):



At the same time, yes, I also found the original Star Trek to be cheesy. But, I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation (of course). With episodes like All Good Things...,The Best of Both Worlds, Yesterday's Enterprise, The Measure of a Man, and Ship in a Bottle, it could compete with the best of science fiction literature. I did watch the Deep Space 9 and then Star Trek Voyager. However, I never really got into Voyager. Part of the reason was that the series was set 70,000 light years from the Earth and all the familiar villain alien races were missing. However, here is a fantastic article that provides a different context for Voyager and argues that it is the Trekiest of all Treks - and I think he has a point (though it has only a few memorable episodes). It is a feminist Star Trek and it shows the horrors of war. So while we fret over the mutilation of Gene Roddenberry's vision at the hands of JJ Abrams, here are some excerpts from this article about Voyager:

As we mourn Abrams’ macho Trek obliteration, it’s a good time to revisit Voyager, at once the most Star Trek-ian of accomplishments and the most despised object of fanboy loathing in the franchise's nearly 50-year history. From 1995-2001, it offered American audiences something never seen before or since: a series whose lead female characters’ agency and authority were the show. It was a rare heavy-hardware science fiction fantasy not built around a strong man, and more audaciously, it didn't seem to trouble itself over how fans would receive this. On Voyager, female authority was assumed and unquestioned; women conveyed sexual power without shame and anger without guilt. Even more so than Buffy, which debuted two years later, it was the most feminist show in American TV history.  

Voyager wasn’t some grrl power screed in Starfleet regalia. The ideas and emotions it explored were very much in the Star Trek wheelhouse; it just came at them from a fresh--and to some viewers, off-putting--angle. Led by Kathryn Janeway (Obie-Award-winner Kate Mulgrew), the first female Trek captain to carry a series, Voyager brought us some of the most convulsively inventive humanist science fiction this side of early Stephen Moffat-era Doctor Who.  

Set in the 2370s, Voyager episodes ping-ponged wonderfully between genres and modes. We got a revolution fought in the safety of dreams (“Unimatrix Zero”) and a metaphor-rich engagement with childhood violence and memory (“The Raven”). Some episodes spotlighted the kinds of spiritual engagements that frequent Voyager scripter Ronald D. Moore would import whole-hog to his post-9/11 remake of Battlestar Galactica.
And yet to this day, Voyager is often despised in the most grotesque terms, as a Star Trek apostate.

Here is the bit about the choice of lead characters and how it played with the expectations:

As the critic Alan Sepinwall reminds us, a great show teaches us how to watch it. With Voyager, the fanboys would have to learn how to live without a default male lead to identify with, a hero in Kirk/Picard/Riker mode. They would have to learn to identify beyond gender, and the challenge didn't end at the captain's chair. Along with Mulgrew's fascinating, maddening Captain Janeway—bullheaded; childless by choice; at once doctrinaire and impulsive---the showrunners gave us a prickly/brilliant Chief Engineer named B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) struggling with her biracial half-human Hispanic, half-Klingon identity. By season four, ship botanist Kes (Jennifer Lien) left Voyager; her screentime was filled with a 103-episode-long redemption tale about a bemused, tragic and insanely svelte de-assimilated Borg called Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan).  

The show also expected viewers to spend time with an Asian Operations Officer (Garrett Wang), a half-black, half-Vulcan tactical officer (Tim Russ), and a Native American First Officer (Robert Beltran) before finally meeting the crew's significant male Caucasians, none of whom fit the traditional Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon/Luke Skywalker/James Kirk descriptors. One was the hilariously arch medical hologram played by Robert Picardo. The other was helmsman Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill).  

In the context we're exploring here, Paris is particularly fascinating. In theory, he was there carry the flag for straight male heroic signifiers, but there were clues that he was actually there to tweak people's expectation that science fiction adventures had to put a straight white guy at center-stage. The character spent his off-time saving helpless women in his virtual reality simulation of ‘30s SF serials, Captain Proton -- a sweet spoof of the brand of outer-space swashbuckling that  Roddenberry embraced on the original Star Trek, and that continued, in a more intellectualized way, on The Next Generation. 

Here is the about its depiction of war:

This series wasn't built around officers that could project military force, which is itself essentially masculine, whenever they needed to, and expect to be backed by the full faith and credit of Starfleet, even when they'd done something wrong or stupid. They were isolated, deprived of the usual political-military support network that made all other Trek adventures, including Deep Space Nine, so comforting to fans. 

The story began when the USS Voyager was hurled by an energy wave 70,000 light-years, to the butt end of the universe. After that, her mission was simplified: aim Earthwards for a 75-year journey home that the crew was unlikely to survive. 

And that was it. No Starfleet hijinks, no strutting around the galaxy, just 150 or so people stuck together for life. Voyager often feels less like a continuation of Trek as we know it than a challenge in the form of a question: "So you think you know what Star Trek is?" The series is an anti-action, existential feminist family drama, shot through with a persistent melancholy that reflects the crew’s desperation. 

Yes, it's still Star Trek, but the sheer unfamiliarity of the crew's predicament was disorienting. This far end of space is haunted by the violence of war. Mass violence carries more weight here, arguably, than in any other incarnation of Star Trek, and it's no stretch to suggest that the show's tragic attitude toward war comes out of its female-centered perspective. 

Here, military violence is portrayed not as a stereotypical male general might see it, but as it might be viewed by the equivalent of a diplomat, or a representative of the Red Cross, or the United Nations. It's a catastrophic event that engulfs whole civilizations, displaces whole species. It causes wounds that don't heal for generations, or starts new conflagrations. Voyager constantly meets races and species that are starting a war or recovering from one, and keeps stumbling upon the ghostly remnants of obliterated civilizations. This strain of sadness is so persistent that the show often feels like gentle critique of the military-macho strain that ran through the original series, the films based on it, as well as many episodes of the more self-aware The Next Generation.

Read the full article here. 

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by Salman Hameed

The situation in Syria is has been awful for the past two years and there is an ever present danger of the conflict spreading into the neighboring countries. Israel attacked a shipment of missiles that it believed were meant for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Just a few hours ago, there were four large explosions near Damascus, and there is a possibility that it is the second strike by Israel inside Syria in two days. From the New York Times:

Four explosions just west of Damascus shook the ground across the Syrian capital early on Sunday, sending fiery mushroom-shaped clouds towering over the landmark Mount Qasioun and brightening the night sky in a demonstration of firepower more potent than anything the residents of the city, a government stronghold, have witnessed during more than two years of war.  

 The Syrian government immediately blamed Israel for the explosions, whose power appeared to far outstrip that of any weapons in the rebels’ arsenals. Israeli officials refused to confirm that Israeli forces had carried out the strikes, which the Syrian deputy foreign minister, speaking on CNN, called “an act of war.”

With much still unexplained about the effects and motivations of the attack, it rattled the region, which has lived in fear that the Syrian war will lead to a wider conflict. It was unclear whether Israel, if it carried out the strikes, sought to intervene in Syria’s civil war or was simply expanding its campaign to prevent the Syrian government from transferring weapons to Hezbollah, the militant Shiite organization in Lebanon that is Syria’s ally and one of Israel’s most dangerous enemies. 

The attacks could end up providing psychological and perhaps military assistance to the Syrian rebels, who over the last several weeks have faced losses in a series of government offensives around Damascus and the city of Homs to the north. For the rebels, any damage to crucial military structures from the attacks — said by opposition activists to have hit bases of elite troops as well as weapons stores — would be offset by political complications if the explosions are linked to Israel.        

In this context, I wanted to point to a new documentary out, The Gatekeepers, that interviews six surviving former heads of Israeli security agency, Shin Bet. Most of the focus there is on Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nevertheless, it is a sobering film on the nature of conflict. You will find plenty of things to agree and disagree in this film. Here is our Film Autopsy of The Gatekeepers (see here for other Film Autopsies):



While we are on the subject, I also wanted to highlight a fantastic movie about the Lebanese civil war as well. Incendies is set in a country that looks a lot like Lebanon in the 1970s and it exposes the absurdity and the futility of the factional war that engulfed Lebanon for several years. This is an intense film. If you haven't seen, you should definitely check it out. Here is our Film Autopsy of Incendies:

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by Salman Hameed

I hope you were able to avoid the sequels, but the original Matrix was quite spectacular. Here is an hour long video on Philosophy and the Matrix. From Open Culture:

Apotheosis of cyberpunk culture, 1999’s The Matrix and its less-successful sequels introduced a generation of fanboys and girls to the most stylish expression of some age-old idealist thought experiments: the Hindu concept of Maya, Plato’s cave, Descartes’ evil demon, Hilary Putnam’s Brain in a Vat—all notions about the nature of reality that ask whether what we experience isn’t instead an elaborate illusion, concealing a “real” world outside of our perceptual grasp. In some versions—such as those of certain Buddhists and Christian Gnostics, whose ideas The Matrix directors borrowed liberally—one can awaken from the dream. In others, such as Kant’s or Jacques Lacan’s, that prospect is unlikely, if impossible. These questions about the nature of reality versus appearance are mainstays of intro philosophy courses and stereotypical stoner sessions. But they’re also perennially relevant to philosophers and neuroscientists, which is why such academic luminaries as Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers continue to address them in their work on the nature and problem of consciousness. 

Dennett, Chalmers, the always captivating scholar/theologian/activist Cornel West, and a host of other academic thinkers, appear in the documentary above, Philosophy and the Matrix: Return to the Source. Part of the sprawling box-set The Ultimate Matrix Collection, the film comments on how The Matrix does much more than dramatize an undergraduate thesis; it takes on questions about religious revelation and authority, parapsychology, free will and determinism, and the nature of personal identity in ways that no dry philosophical text or arcane mystical system has before, thanks to its hip veneer and pioneering use of CGI. 

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by Salman Hameed

We just finished watching the first season of the Showtime series Homeland. While it has garnered critical appraise as well as awards at both the Emmy's and the Golden Globes, there are serious problems with the way it depicts Islam and violence. (A spoiler alert in the next sentence) Yes - it does try to make things more complicated by having American marines as potential terrorists - but they are still being controlled by an evil Middle Easterner. This might have been okay too - but there have been too many times where Muslim prayers were juxtaposed with violence or violent intentions. But the problem is that this kind of imagery is totally okay in the mainstream - even amongst the liberals here.

This brings me to Argo, which has been winning award after award, and is the front-runner for the best picture Oscar tonight. Just like Homeland, it tries to present a more nuanced picture of Iran - but instead reinforces all the stereotypes. In fact, there are no sympathetic Iranian characters in the film other than in the role of a loyal servant. This would have been okay if the movie was directed by Michael Bay and starred Chuck Norris. The problem is that it is coming from the more progressive crowd in the Hollywood (George Clooney is one of the Executive Producers) and most people that this is a nuanced portrait of Iran.

Kevin Anderson and I had a discussion about Argo and we talked about some of these issues. Here is our Film Autopsy:



Also, this point has also been made about Argo in Jingoism as History (tip from Vijay Prashad). In fact, it brings up another fascinating piece of history ignored in the film:

On November 4, 1979, radical Iranian protesters breached the walls of the United States Embassy in Tehran and took the U.S. diplomats working there hostage. They demanded that the U.S. send the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then receiving treatment in a New York hospital for terminal cancer, to Iran to stand trial in exchange for the release of the hostages. 

On November 6, 1979, The New York Times reported that the civilian government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and his 20-member Cabinet had resigned “after the Ayatollah’s advisers supported the student occupation of the U.S. Embassy despite assurances by the government that it would end the seizure and obtain the release of the hostages”. 

In resigning, The New York Times reported, Bazargan was “conceding power to the Islamic authority of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini”. The resignation of the civilian government in protest over the embassy takeover, which came after months of internal struggle between the revolutionary factions that had overthrown the Shah, was a watershed moment in Iranian history. It gave the Khomeinists unchecked power at a critical time, shaping the contours of Iran’s government for decades to come. 

Ben Affleck’s hit movie Argo carefully details the takeover of the embassy. But it leaves that critical part of the story out even though it is documented well by mainstream American news outlets. In Affleck’s film, Iranians are, for the most part, dangerous and anti-American. Only one character, a meek maid, seems to have some sympathy for the hostages; she ultimately risks her life to cover up their hiding place from the Revolutionary Guards. 

It is a lost opportunity for an allegedly progressive Hollywood film-maker to tell that part of the history as well. The embassy takeover was, in the view of many Iranians like myself, a most ignominious episode, a clear violation of international law and an abrogation of accepted norms of decency. Argo introduces an entire new generation of U.S. moviegoers to the Hostage Crisis. In the end, it introduces a new chapter in the larger story without fundamentally changing the narrative.
...
As of the first week of January 2013, Argo grossed over $166 million in worldwide distribution. During the Oscar season, it is bound to garner even more viewers. Those who go to see Argo may leave the theatre thinking they have just learned some history. But, really, at the end of the day, they have seen a heart-wrenching historical episode giving way to a political thriller complete with bad sideburns, car chases, and a watered-down version of history. As a reviewer in the Chicago Reader wrote, “...making an anti-Iranian action flick in Hollywood isn’t exactly a daring act”. Ultimately, whatever the film-maker’s intentions, Argo comes across as liberal jingoism.

Read the full article here.

Also - here Kevin Anderson and I express our views on best picture nominations and how to fix some of the mistakes of the Academy for our Film Autopsy on Switchboard Magazine:



And while we are on the subject of controversial and problematic films, here is our film autopsy of Zero Dark Thirty:

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by Salman Hameed

You can say a lot even in less than 8 minutes. Here is a fascinating short film, Grounded, about an astronaut landing on an extrasolar planet. What do you think is going on in here?

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by Salman Hameed

I have just returned from spending couple of days at the Science Online conference (more on that later). Ironically, because I was there, I didn't get time to post here on Irtiqa. But things will resume back here to start with Saturday Video. BBC recently did a fantastic 3-part series to celebrate 60 years of David Attenborough's explorations of nature  and natural life. It looks back at how what we know and how we know has changed over the past decade. I could not find the first episode to embed, but the last minutes of that were about filming snow leopards in the northern areas of Pakistan. However, here is the fantastic second episode on "Understanding the Natural World". Enjoy!

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by Salman Hameed

Today would have been Abdus Salam's 87th birthday. I was going to lament the way his name has been shunned in Pakistan - all because he was an Ahmadi Muslim. But instead, I want to highlight the efforts of some dogged, stubborn, and insane Pakistani filmmakers, who against all odds, have been pursuing their dream of making a documentary about Abdus Salam. In fact, I would love to see a documentary about the making of this documentary (where is Werner Herzog?). I first mentioned this project here in 2008 and then provided another update in 2010. I know one of the Executive Producers, Zakir Thaver, quite well - and it has been an absolute delight to see the project move along.

So two things: First, please see a seven minute clip of the film below. It will not only give you an idea of Salam's life, but also of the efforts of the filmmakers. The film has been shot on multiple locations in Pakistan (including the village where Salam was born) as well as in Italy (picture right, at the Salam-founded International Centre for Theoretical Physics), England, and the US.

Second, if you can, please make a contribution for the completion of this project (mostly post-production). Their target is to raise $150,000 - which is quite small for a project of this scale. But every dollar counts. Even if you contribute $10 - that will be of great help. You can make donations here.

In the mean time, congratulations to Zakir, Omar and others involved in the project. This is a superb effort!

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by Salman Hameed

This week's NOVA episode focused on drone technology. It is an interesting episode, but does not really address some of the more complicated legal and ethical issues of this new form of warfare. I think one of the interesting comments in here is that the use of drones in the warfare at present is where the use of biplanes was right after World War I. That seems like an accurate and frightening statement. Also, what's up with the lighting? Most of the interviewees are shot in ominous light and a low camera angle. It is especially funny with one guy, who says that I would love to show you my new technology, but it is classified.. (ooo aa aah ha ha!).

Here is the NOVA episode, but check out some links to previous posts on the topic, as well as an excerpt from a recent article from Dissent:

Watch Rise of the Drones on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Here is a Pew opinion plot on How the Muslim World sees American science and the Drones:

Also read this piece from this week's The Atlantic responding to some questionable claims about drones by a fewUS experts on Pakistan: Yes, Pakistanis really do hate America's killer drones.

On ethics and legal front, see this earlier post, Ethics, Morality and Legality of Robotic Wars. In addition here is a thoughtful piece on these issues by Michael Walzar from Dissent Magazine: Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare:

Now, does it make any difference if the actual killing is the work of a drone, operated by a technician sitting in an office 3,000 miles away? Surely the same criteria apply to the drone as to any more closely manned machine. Why should we think it different from the sniper’s rifle? The difference is that killing-by-drone is so much easier than other forms of targeted killing. The easiness should make us uneasy. This is a dangerously tempting technology. It makes our enemies more vulnerable than ever before, and we can get at them without any risk to our own soldiers. Of course, intelligence gathering may still be risky, but the drones “see” so much more than any soldier or agent in the field that they make fieldwork seem less important. They combine the capacity for surveillance with the capacity for precise attack. At least, that is the idea, and assuming now that we are rightly in the business of killing, that there are people out there who deserve to be killed, what could be better? 

But here is the difficulty: the technology is so good that the criteria for using it are likely to be steadily relaxed. That’s what seems to have happened with the U.S. Army or with the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen. The overuse of drones and the costs they impose upon the civilian population have been carefully and persuasively documented in the Stanford/NYU Clinics’ report, Living Under Drones. I will focus on only one striking example of how the moral criteria have been relaxed in order to justify the overuse and the costs. According to an article in the New York Times by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, President Obama has adopted “a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” that makes it much easier to call drone attacks “proportionate.” In effect, it “counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants.” If the targeted insurgent or terrorist leader is surrounded by, or simply in the vicinity of, a group of men who are, say, between the ages of fifteen and sixty (and even drone surveillance can’t be precise about that), an attack is permitted, and everyone who is killed is counted as a legitimate target. But this isn’t targeted killing. 

There are ancient precedents for this sort of thing. According to Thucydides, when the Athenians captured the rebellious city of Melos, they “slew all the men of military age.” And according to the biblical book of Deuteronomy, when the Israelites besieged a city and “God delivers it into your hands…you shall put all its males to the sword.” Since the Deuteronomist goes on to exclude children, the two policies are identical. The new American doctrine isn’t the same. We are not aiming to kill all the men of military age, but we have made them all liable to be killed. We have turned them into combatants, without knowing anything more about them than their (approximate) age. That wasn’t right in ancient Greece or Israel, and it isn‘t right today. 

Drone warfare could take the form of targeted killing, and it could be justified under tough constraints. But the United States now seems to be using drones in a different way, as the instrument of a more general and less focused warfare. Drones make it possible to get at enemies who hide in countries whose governments are probably unwilling and possibly unable to repress or restrain them. This is a war without a front, where the use of ground troops, even commandos, is difficult, sometimes impossible—so drones have been called “the only game in town.” But we should think very carefully before relaxing the targeting rules and turning drones into a weapon like all the others. Their moral and political advantage is their precision, which depends on using them only against individuals whose critical importance we have established and about whom we have learned a great deal. Using them like an advanced form of artillery or like “smart” bombs isn’t morally right or politically wise. 

This last point can be driven home very simply: imagine a world, which we will soon be living in, where everybody has drones.

Yes - the last sentence is worth pondering about. Unfortunately, we will be encountering that world in the very near future. Read the full article here.

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by Salman Hameed

This is a movie that will definitely lead you to have a long conversation afterwards. Of course, coming from Pakistan, it adds an additional layer to the watching of the film. But even without that, there are many ways to talk about Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the hunt and the killing of Osama bin Laden. But what message you take from the film will definitely depend on your own viewpoints. The film-makers more or less leave that up to you. Does it work? UMass film professor, Kevin Anderson, and I sit down to discuss and review the new Oscar nominated film, Zero Dark Thirty:


You can find all our other reviews at our Film Autopsy site.

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by Salman Hameed

Here is the first episode of the BBC documentary, The Incredible Human Journey : Out of Africa. Enjoy! (tip from Khurram Nasser)

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by Salman Hameed

One of our goals this break is to watch most of major Kubrick films again on Blu Ray. We started with 2001: A Space Odyssey - and I watched the film in entirety after almost 20 years. And I had forgotten how spectacular and breathtaking the film is. Every shot of film is perfect!

Every set - and there many many futuristic sets - is done meticulously. And the choice of music, of course, is amazing. But one thing that really stuck out for me was the use of sound. If the perspective is from space, there is no sound. I think Kubrick is very consistent about that. But he would sometimes have the perspective of an astronaut from inside the helmet, and then you hear breathing as well as the hissing sound of oxygen. Well - many times he uses the variation in breathing to create suspense, tension, and even sometimes a sense wonder and/or bewilderment. This is just brilliant! I had also forgotten about the details of the chilling scene of Dave - in his pod holding a dead astronaut - staring down HAL in the ship bound for Jupiter. Here is a picture - but the picture doesn't do justice to the way the scene unfolds in the film.

In any case, the question of God is part of the film. Kubrick did believe that some notion of God is at the heart of the film. But then his (and Arthur C Clarke's) version God veered more in the direction of super-intelligent extraterrestrials, i.e. intelligent civilizations will be indistinguishable to us from gods. There are a lot of Extras in the Blu Ray edition of 2001, and I was struck by a fantastic quote from Kubrick about the universe. Here it is:

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent. 

But if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning.  

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Very cool. Now if you have a chance, see 2001 again - and please see it in its entirety and on the biggest screen available to you (not on a computer or an iPad).

We are scheduled for one of Kubrick's most beautiful, but very underrated film, Barry Lyndon on Sunday.

In the mean time, here is the original trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey:

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