A Single Woman

A Single Woman is the story of first US Congresswoman and lifelong pacifist, Jeannette Rankin (Jeanmarie Simpson). Her humble beginnings in Montana during the era of the Indian Wars awakened her deeply pacifist nature.

She ran for Congress in 1916 and won, against all odds. The subject of her first vote (against President Wilson’s WWI war resolution) set the stage for her destiny. Most of the Suffragists who supported her campaign turned against her, believing that her anti-war vote made women look weak and hurt the movement.

In 1920, Jeannette was founding vice-president of the American Civil Liberties Union who, in 1933, tried to persuade President Roosevelt to revise immigration laws and allow Jewish refugees into the United States.

Twenty-two years later, in 1940, Jeannette was re-elected as Congresswoman from Montana on a peace platform and once again voted against a world war, this time as the lone anti-war voice in the American Legislature. She was mobbed and vilified and spent the rest of her life traveling to India and studying the teachings and methods of Mohandas Gandhi and the effects of colonialism on peoples all over the world.

During the Vietnam era, she enjoyed a renaissance when the anti-war culture of the day celebrated her perseverance as a dedicated pacifist and human rights advocate. She died in 1973.

The film begins in 1972, when Jeannette Rankin is 92 years old and vigorously engaged in Second Wave Feminism as well as the anti-war movement. As the film moves backward in time through her years working as the first US Congresswoman, peace lobbyist, suffragist and labor advocate, a tale of an encounter between settlers and American Indians moves forward concurrently.

This pivotal story from Jeannette's childhood is told through a series of exquisite hand-drawn illustrations of the American frontier in the late nineteenth century and voiced by prominent actor/activists.

Cutting-edge filmmaking techniques coupled with the contributions of virtuoso artists such as Joni Mitchell, Patricia Arquette, Karen Black, Peter Coyote, Mimi Kennedy, Margot Kidder, Elizabeth Peña and Cindy Sheehan, elevates A Single Woman to transcend traditional biography.

Who won what at the Venice film festival

U.S. film "The Wrestler", directed by Darren Aronofsky, won the top prize at the Venice film festival on Saturday.

GOLDEN LION FOR BEST FILM:

"The Wrestler" (U.S.) by Darren Aronofsky

SILVER LION FOR BEST DIRECTOR:

Alexei German Jr. (Russia) for "Paper Soldier"

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE:

"Teza" by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima

SPECIAL LION FOR BODY OF WORK:

German director Werner Schroeter

BEST ACTOR:

Italian actor Silvio Orlando for "Il papa' di Giovanna" (Giovanna's Father)

BEST ACTRESS:

French actress Dominique Blanc for "L'autre" (The Other One)

BEST EMERGING ACTRESS:

U.S. actress Jennifer Lawrence for "The Burning Plain"

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Ethiopian director Haile Gerima for "Teza"

BEST FIRST FILM:

"Pranzo di Ferragosto" (Ferragosto's Lunch) by Italian director Gianni Di Gregorio.

The making of a film by consensus...

I am tracing a 2006 documentary directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr entitled, Ten Canoes. It was filmed entirely in an Indigenous Aboriginal language on location in the Northern Territory of Australia's remote Arafura Swamp. But, most incredibly it was created by Rolf de Heer and the people of Ramingining, working in consensus.

Click for a 22-page background PDF, well-worth reading. There is a YouTube short, non-embeddable, that provides a glimpse of the humor and authenticity of the production. Ten Canoes evolved out of another award-winning Australian film, The Tracker, produced in 2002, which starred Indigenous performer (dance, film, theatre), David Gulpilil.

"The Thompson Times," refer to the memories of the past, retained by the Yolngu people through a set of photos taken by Dr. Donald Thomson, an anthropologist who worked in central and north-eastern Arnhem Land in the mid-1930. The photos, including one of a group of ten canoeists on an egg-hunting expedition, became the means of creating the film's plot.

The backgrounder explains, "Nowadays life is very different for the people of Ramingining. There is a supermarket and a takeaway shop. People live in houses with plumbing and television, and do their banking over the Internet," but they remember and celebrate the Thompson times. Ten Canoes revives those memories, enabling a people to revive and reanimate their past through storytelling.

Both The Tracker and Ten Canoes are available from Amazon.

Dr. Horrible is Wonderful!

Episode 1 of 3 went live yesterday and hmmmm, crashed the servers. That's a good thing, right? It means the world is watching Dr. Horrible, or at least trying to watch. It also marks the successful unfolding of a new marketing model - one that might otherwise be remembered as the Revenge of the Hollywood Writers. Following his Tweets...

drhorrible We love you for crashing the site, we really do. In the meantime, you can go to itunes. Or just wait a few hours, we'll be back up. about 20 hours ago from web

Josh Whedon's mini, super-hero, evil genius, opera is a winner. Dr. Horrible, brought to life by Neil Patrick Harris is irresistibly endearing, in search of love while and on a quest for recognition as an evil superstar - one that reads his e-mail responses from readers on his blog. But where have I seen that face? OMG it's Doogie Howser, MD. Now I am tempted to track down some of his less-memorable work, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and its sequel Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

Web Scout at the LA Times says, Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success:

“Dr. Horrible,” you see, has the Internet cooked into its DNA. Rather than being a top-down, studio controlled production, it began earlier this year as a kind of dinner table brainstorm between Whedon, his brothers Zack and Jed, and Jed’s fiancée Maurissa Tancharoen.

Felicia Day as Penny, the object of Dr. Horrible's affection, captures my heart as well, but I'm easy, especially when it comes to women on a mission for social justice. Day is also the star, script writer and producer of the YouTube based web series The Guild, which won the 2008 "Greenlight Award for Best Original Digital Series Production" at the South by Southwest Festival.

I had no problem seeing Episode 1 and can't wait 'til midnight tonight to logon for Episode 2... with that added server capacity.

Website:	http://www.drhorrible.com/
Starring:	Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny
Screenplay By:	Joss Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Zack Whedon
Directed By:	Joss Whedon
Produced By:	David Burns, Michael Boretz, and Joss Whedon
Plot Outline:	The story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to. Music by: Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon Lyrics by: Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen Score and Orchestration by: Jed Whedon

Changing the face of Show Business as we know it...

Joss Whedon creator and head writer of the well-known television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly is about to exact his writer's strike revenge on traditional media with the release of a 3-part streaming Web opera. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog will be released for free on July 15, July 17 and July 19. Then, all three parts will vanish at midnight on July 20, only to reappear as a 42-minute feature for sale as a download and eventually published on DVD.

Whedon explains his theory, "The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the Internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way."

New TeeVee's Lisa Gannes provides the details...
Whedon to Pioneer New Distribution Model

Journalism students, "Create your own jobs..."

"I think they should think about one thing in particular, the possibility, maybe likelihood that they may have to invent their own jobs... in a world where business models for traditional media are in trouble," says Dan Gillmor in this vblog interview by Howard Rheingold.

Dan Gillmor runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, a new project of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Apocolypse Road Movies...

According to director Wim Wender's Web site, Until The End of the World is, "an odyssey for the modern age. As with Homer's Odyssey, the purpose of the journey is to restore sight - a spiritual reconciliation between an obsessed father and a deserted son. Dr. Farber, in trying to find a cure for his wife's blindness, has created a device that allows the user to send images directly to the brain, enabling the blind to see."

Wender, the son of a surgeon, was born in Germany in 1945. In the 60s he turned from following in his father's footsteps in studying medicine, to a pursuit of painting and moved to Paris. There he discovered the Cinemathèque Francaise, where he immersed himself in a study of film. His rise to fame includes working with Francis Ford Coppola and Sam Shepherd - in the 80's cult film hit, Paris, Texas.

Like Ridley Scott's battle over the first release of Bladerunner, Wender was forced to accept a forshortened version of Until the End of the World and like Scott he continued to edit his own director's cut - a 5-hour epic (which I hope to find.)

His latest films include The End of Violence, the award-winning music documentary Buena Vista Social Club and The Million Dollar Hotel which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2000. He collaborated on Ten Minutes Older together with fellow directors Jim Jarmush, Spike Lee, Chen Kaige, Werner Herzog, Aki Kaurismaki and Victor Erice.

I must thank my Borg friend Kevin Lim, (another "social cyborg" who tweets his interest in the works of Wim Wenders) for pointing out the film and an essay on Until the End of the World by Toni Perrine that suggests we are suffering from a Disease of Images - a love-hate relationship with technology - where story-telling becomes the salvation.

"The 'disease of images' experienced by Claire and Sam (principal characters in the film) suggests the power and potential danger of mediated visual communication in western culture," he explains. "It seems inevitable that Claire be afflicted by the disease of images since it is her vision that structures much of the narrative. She is frequently shown recording her surroundings with a hand-sized video camera, in effect, experiencing the physical world second-hand through electronic mediation."

Timothy Leary was fascinated with the transformational changes brought about in human consciousness by the capacity to record and repeat sound and images... segments of time. He and David Byrne engaged in a dialogue in which Leary explains, "quantum mechanics, quantum physics: it's all movie; it's cast is changing, it's re-forming, it comes in clusters, it's not linear. And you don't study anything - you set up a situation and you record it." David Byrne, "And you follow the pattern."

David Byrne: "It seems that post-WW2 with television and movies and records being disseminated all over the globe, you have instant access to anything anywhere almost. But you have it out of context, free-floating. And , people in other parts of the world - India, South America, Russia - they have access to whatever we're doing. And they can take what they need and leave the rest. They can play around with it, they can misinterpret it or re- interpret it. And we're free to do the same thing. It seems to be a part of the age we live in, that that's a unique thing about this period, that there is that kind of communication, even though it's not always direct communication with people in different places - it can lead to direct communication if you follow through."

Wim Wenders currently lives in Los Angeles and Berlin. Read his complete biography...
Kevin Lim is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in Communication at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and blogs at theory.isthereason.com.