Tattoed Under Fired: Fort Hood Inked For War

...Much will be written in the days to come of the mind-set of the alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a psychiatrist who counseled military personnel and was reportedly distressed over his own imminent deployment. Though Schiesari's film predates the horrifying violence at the fort yesterday, it reveals a military culture rarely seen. By following both returning and deployment-bound young soldiers and the stories told on their bodies, she gets under their skin...

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Mary Elizabeth Williams
Salon.com

...As Tattooed Under Fire gets past the skin of these soldiers and into their heads, and their raw and psychologically wounded inner recesses, the film concludes by drifting out along the roads around Fort Hood, the largest military base in the world. Where more soldiers die in drunk driving crashes than in war zones, and wreaths where these lives ended stateside line the highways. And as one emotionally damaged survivor bitterly remarks of the vehicular fatalities, 'Just because you didn't shoot yourself or jump off a bridge, doesn't mean it wasn't suicide'...

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Prairie Miller

Woody Harrelson Worries About The World

The Messenger: Woody Harrelson and director Oren Moverman talk horrors of war, raw and unfiltered. And, Woody on broadcasting the end of the world, in 2012. Plus, Screening Room soundbites, and movie review haiku.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO WOODY HARRELSON AND OREN MOVERMAN INTERVIEWS

Daughters On Dads, Disturbing The Universe

...Do you blend into the crowd and lead an unexceptional life, or dare consider DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE: The life and times of William Kunstler, a documentary. And a conversation with the filmmakers, Emily and Sarah Kunstler.

CLICK TO LISTEN TO EMILY AND SARAH KUNSTLER INTERVIEWS HERE

Conversation with Jane McAdam Freud: Relevancy of Analytic Concepts in Art and Politics

Author’s note: This is Part II of an article about conceptual artist Jane McAdam Freud, which was published on the Huffington Post.
Here is the link to PART ONE.


“A tie is not just a tie.”

Ties and authority: A cigar may be just a cigar, but, in your work, a tie is not just a tie. Can you elaborate on this sculpture? Was it a single piece or a series? How might it relate to politics?

The ties began with a self portrait where the clay dried and the head severed from the body. Left with the collar I added a tie and recognized the visual similarity with the phallus. I thought about Freud’s ideas about objects standing in for the phallus and about the idea of male authority and the ego, about tall phallic looking authoritative buildings –the phallus as a symbol of power.

Later I did an online residency with the department of Ancient Egypt at the British Museum where I studied the Shabti figures and their connection to Osiris. Osiris with his staff and flail is the Egyptian symbol of authority. The Shabti figures are based on Osiris and are in the shape of a sarcophagus. The neck tie is remarkably similar to the shapes of these ancient Shabti figures. We never give anything up we just change its form as established by Helmholtz in his conservation of energy equation where he conceives that energy cannot be destroyed. Osiris is indeed living on and stares back at us from each other’s chests!


McAdam Freud’s “Sisyphus,” in which her looser style is reminiscent of the exposed, vulnerable, and sometimes angst-ridden figures in the work of father Lucian. Rafey adds that the artist is “successful in conveying weight and mass to the boulder as well as strength and perseverance to Sisyphus.”.......

--Penelope Andrew

WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE/AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS IN CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK

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The Good Fight: Noel Buchner, Mary Dore, Sam Sills

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War(1984)

Over twenty five years ago the documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade ws aired for public consumption. This is the she story of young coming of age men and women, black and white fighting together, not in the U. S. but in Spain to hold back the advancement of the Italian and German Nazi armies that threatened the freedom and survival of millions.

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the response of world people(s) who recognized the evil of Fascism as it threatened to consume Europe and beyond. In this period before the official WWII decree President Roosevelt seemed hell bent on maintaining an isolationist posture while the American companies of Texaco, GM and Ford sent ammunition and fuel to support the invading Nazi effort.

One wonders if it was the economic depression in America or the sound of outraged Americans who demanded American participation in The War that informed President Roosevelt to change his isolationists posture.

But the focus of this documentary is not Roosevelt or the saluting of a commander of a Brigade. It is a story of people who understood the meaning of life, who embraced the idea that to die for a cause one believes in is to live a good, the only life worth living.

The technological detail of the documentary might need a little twitting but the wealth, the richness of the characters who spoke in the film, their furor, their essence came through so strongly that no change need be made to make this twenty five year old documentary as important, as potent today as it was when it was first aired.

It is the crime of our educational system that it focuses more on test taking than on the history of our country. So few Americans know of this group of thousands of courageous Americans. It is an on-going crime of deliberate omission because today with the onslought of technologically driven Fascism right here in this country we need to know those who came before us, their thoughts, their strengths, and the fight that they didn't win at the outset but won in our hearts and our memory once they returned home.

The United States Government did all it could to silence these courageous people. They haunted them as Communists, that then bad word but in reality they knew and we know the F.B.I. labeled "Communists" of the past are the heroes of our world today.

To see this documentary, The Good Fight, is to believe that a good fight against the everyday infringement on our rights; our quality of life, our possible survival in an era of decline in our financial, political, environment life is The fight, the only fight worth fighting.

Available on DVD from FirstRunFeatures.com


Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective