In a recent call-out to mediamakers and academics alike, Film and Television professor John Hookham from Queensland University in Australia is asking for support in his efforts to review a PhD candidate's controversial thesis television project entitled, "Laughing at the disabled: Creating comedy that confronts, offends and entertains". The uproar started at Queensland last April when PhD candidate Michael Noonan presented his work to date for the compulsory twelve month review by a PhD committee and others.
The audience was treated to twenty minutes of clips from a reality show that Noonan has developed and hopes to sell to Australian television broadcasters. The show features two mentally handicapped men who are filmed in what sounds like compromising scenarios. While it is hard to say without seeing the footage for myself, descriptions of an audience laughing at a man with Aspergers twitching uncontrollably and unable to answer a question about dating women sounds, well, exploitative...
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Posted by Ezra Winton on May 4, 2007 in
This article first appeared in the print issue of Canada's indispensable POV Magazine, Issue 65, Spring 2007. To order a subscription of POV, visit the Documentary Organisation of Canada's (DOC) site.
In Alanis Obomsawin’s deceptively simple first film, 1971’s Christmas at Moose Factory, children’s drawings of the holidays are explained and given context by the disembodied voices of the artists themselves, whose faces fade in at the conclusion. In the most recent offering from her now 35-year career with the NFB, the heartfelt tribute and cautionary tale Waban-aki: People From Where the Sun Rises, Obomsawin devotes a great deal of screen time to modern-day basket makers, artists, and canoe builders, who explain the history and tradition of their craft as they practice it. If one wishes to locate a “deeper” stratum of meaning below Obomsawin’s forthright and impassioned sense of social commitment and social justice, it might well reside in this emphasis on the tangibility of Canada’s Native peoples, the material traces of their past and the material immediacy of their present—both of which, as Obomsawin so unforgettably depicts, the Canadian government has worked hard (and expensively) to efface...
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Posted by on March 17, 2007 in
Aladdin. Back to the Future. True Lies. It isn’t everyday that you hear these three movies mentioned in the same breath, but for Dr. Jack Shaheen the link is clear. For thirty years, Shaheen, professor emeritus of mass communication at Southern Illinois University, has been studying the misrepresentation of Arabs and Muslims in film, particularly movies coming out of Hollywood. His conclusion: that Arabs and Muslims are the single most maligned and attacked group in the history of film. “If the case went before a jury, they’ll be out for 30 seconds and they will agree,” he says over the phone from his home in Illinois. Over the next few months, viewers can be will be the jury themselves as Shaheen tours North America with Reel Bad Arabs, the 2006 documentary based on his 2001 book of the same name.
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Posted by Tim McSorley on March 9, 2007 in
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