Women's Views on News |
| Posted: 18 Jul 2016 02:15 PM PDT
One of the first feature films written and directed by a black woman and a groundbreaking romance exploring women's sexuality, modern marriage, and the life of artists and scholars is being shown at a new international archive film event on 28 July. The film, ‘Losing Ground‘ by black female American director the late Kathleen Collins, was hardly screened at all in cinemas when it was released; but now, digitally restored through the efforts of Collins’ daughter Nina, the film is seen as a masterpiece of African American and of women’s cinema. Funny, insightful, and powerfully personal, it is a portrait of the marriage between philosophy professor Sara, played by Seret Scott, and painter Victor, played by Bill Gunn. Retreating with her husband to a country house, Sara finds her would-be summer idyll complicated by both her own research – an intellectual quest to understand “ecstasy” – and Victor’s involvement with a young model. The film follows its characters as they battle for ideals – artistic, political, racial – while unable to fully escape the everyday. Born in 1942 in Jersey City, USA, in 1963, after receiving a BA in philosophy and religion, Collins became an active part of the African-American civil rights movement, joining the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and organising voter registration drives in the Jim Crow south. In 1966, the year following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Collins travelled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne for an MA in French literature and cinema, focusing on films that had been adapted from novels. She joined the faculty of City College at the City University of New York and became a professor of film history and screenwriting, where cinematographer Ronald Gray encouraged her to go ahead with a screenplay she had adapted from a Henry Roth short story. That film became ‘The Cruz Brothers and Mrs Malloy’, about three Puerto Rican orphan brothers hired by a mysterious, geriatric Irish lady to renovate her crumbling mansion in Upstate New York, and eventually won First Prize at the Sinking Creek Film Festival. This was followed in 1982 by Losing Ground, which won First Prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal, along with much international acclaim. Both films were shot in Rockland County, New York, and are currently being distributed by Milestone Films. Collins wrote many other plays and screenplays, but her two most well-known theatrical plays are ‘In the Midnight Hour’ (1981) and ‘The Brothers’ (1982). Themes frequently explored in her work are issues of marital malaise, male dominance and impotence, freedom of expression and intellectual pursuit, and her protagonists are cited as “typically self-reflective women who move from a state of subjugation to empowerment”. Had Kathleen Collins not died at the age of forty-six in 1988, it's easy to imagine her playing a major role in the growing black independent scene of the era; Losing Ground seems to be in direct dialogue with Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, for example. Inspired by Eric Rohmer – particularly The Green Ray – Losing Ground is both an exhilarating and light-on-its-feet study of the way that art and life are in continuous dialogue and conflict and a story of black lives of a sensitivity rarely seen even today. Losing Ground is being shown at Cinema Rediscovered, a brand new international archive film event that celebrates great films back on the big screen, giving audiences an opportunity to discover – or indeed re-discover – new digital restorations, film print rarities of early cinema, and contemporary classics. ‘Cinema Rediscovered: Great films back on big screens’ runs from 28 July – 31 July 2016 at the Watershed, Bristol. For further information and tickets, click here.  |
| Chelsea Manning honoured at London Pride Posted: 18 Jul 2016 02:08 PM PDT
Chelsea Manning's attorneys Chase Strangio, Vincent Ward and Nancy Hollander released the following statement jointly after recent reports of Manning's attempted suicide were released to the world but the attorneys were not allowed to contact her: "After not connecting with Chelsea for over a week, we were relieved to speak with her this morning. "Though she would have preferred to keep her private medical information private, and instead focus on her recovery, the government's gross breach of confidentiality in disclosing her personal health information to the media has created the very real concern that they may continue their unauthorized release of information about her publicly without warning. "Due to these circumstances, Chelsea Manning requested that we communicate with the media and her friends and supporters on her behalf. "Last week, Chelsea made a decision to end her life. Her attempt to take her own life was unsuccessful. "She knows that people have questions about how she is doing and she wants everyone to know that she remains under close observation by the prison and expects to remain on this status for the next several weeks. "For us, hearing Chelsea's voice after learning that she had attempted to take her life last week was incredibly emotional. "She is someone who has fought so hard for so many issues we care about and we are honored to fight for her freedom and medical care." On 4 April 2010, whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks published a classified video of a United States Apache helicopter firing on civilians in New Baghdad in 2007. The video, which can be seen here, showed Americans shooting at and killing 11 individuals who do not at any point return fire. Two of those killed were employees of Reuters news agency, 22 year-old photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, 40 year-old Saeed Chmagh. The video includes an audio recording of the internal commentary by the American soldiers before, during and after the shooting. The soldiers repeatedly request and are granted permission to open fire, encourage one another to fire and joke about the dead and dying civilians. The full transcript is available here. A total of 11 adults were killed. Two children, passengers in a van that arrived on the scene after the first bout of gunfire had ceased, were seriously injured when the Apache helicopter opened fire on the van. In 2007, Reuters called for an investigation into the attack. In response, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad said: "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force." Click here to read the Army's report on the deaths of the two Reuters employees and the wounding of the two children. There was no investigation into the nine other deaths. No charges have been filed against the American soldiers in the Apache helicopter who shot and killed the civilians in the video. The video, perceived as classified information, was released by Chelsea Manning, a US Army intelligence specialist at that time known as Bradley Manning, to WikiLeaks, an organisation that Manning understood would release portions of the information to news organisations and ultimately to the public. Some key facts that Manning helped reveal to the public are: there is an official policy to ignore torture in Iraq; US officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan; Guantanamo prison has held mostly innocent people and low-level operatives; there is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan; US Military officials withheld information about the indiscriminate killing of Reuters journalists and innocent Iraqi civilians; known Egyptian torturers received training from the FBI in Quantico, Virginia; the Japanese and US Governments had been warned about the seismic threat at Fukushima; and the Obama Administration allowed Yemen's President to cover up a secret US drone bombing campaign. On 21 August 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. In July 2013 seventeen Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) wrote a letter calling on US President Barack Obama and US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel to free Manning. The MEPs lauded Manning for exposing "evidence of human rights abuses and apparent war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan" in accordance with international law. And this year a great number of individuals in the UK have held vigils and protests in solidarity with Chelsea Manning. People gathered round Queer + Friends of Chelsea Manning, Queer Strike, Payday Mens Network, and Wise Up Information Network, and contributed to the Manning Family Fund as ways to express their support and solidarity. On 25 June, a beautiful banner featuring her was taken to the London Pride march, reminding an enthusiastic crowd of someone who dared to live by their values and made their conscience the force that moved their hand, changing the world at great personal sacrifice. This year great turmoil surrounded many of the Pride events, and tragedy loomed over the entire queer and trans community after the shootings in Orlando. But Chelsea Manning had a messsage for all of us: ‘We must grieve and mourn and support each other, but in our grief and outrage we must resist any temptations to let this attack – or any attack – trigger anti-Muslim foreign policy, attacks on our civil liberties or as an excuse to descend into xenophobia and Islamophobia’. You can write to Chelsea Manning with your messages of support. Any mail must be addressed as follows: Chelsea E. Manning 89289, 1300 North Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304 USA.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Women's Views on News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |