Pacific Journalism Review (Pacific Media Centre, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology)
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REVIEW: Pacific insights into the Rainbow Warrior legacy
No full textSergel, Michael. (2015). Pacific insights into the Rainbow Warrior legacy. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 189-191. Review of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie. [30th Anniversary Ed.] Auckland: Little Island Press, 2015, 194 pp. ISBN 978-1-877484-28-5The 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior is often remembered as the deadly consequence of a small Pacific nation taking a defiant stance against nuclear testing by major powers. Thirty years on, the updated edition of David Robie’s Eyes of Fire moves beyond the David and Goliath narrative that puts New Zealand at the centre of the story. Prime Minister David Lange called the bombing a ‘sordid act of international statebacked terrorism’ and an ‘unprecedented affront to sovereignty’ (p. 128). Months earlier, he had defended New Zealand’s anti-nuclear position at the Oxford Union. Years later, he said the lack of international support had only strenthened the country’s resolve (Young, 2005). But Robie reminds us the bombing was far more than a key date on New Zealand’s political timeline. The former British fishing trawler had been part of missions to stop whalers, sealers and nuclear warships in Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, the United States and Peru. It had even been at the centre of a diplomatic Cold War clash during a visit to Siberia.Eyes Of Fire: 30 Years On Little Island Press microsite about the boo
PHILIPPINES: Cybercrime, criminal libel and the media: From ‘e-martial law’ to the Magna Carta in the Philippines
Get PDFPresident Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines on 21 September 1972. Issuing the declaration under Proclamation 1081 which suspended civil rights, gagged the news media and imposed military authority in the country, Marcos defended this draconian move under the Philippines Constitution in response to a series of bombings allegedly caused by communist rebels. The emergency rule at the height of the Cold War was also planned to quell rebellion and drive national development. Four decades later, on 12 September 2012, President Benigno Aquino III signed Republic Act No. (RA) 10175, or the Cybercrime Prevention Act, into law. This legislation was immediately widely condemned as a threat to freedom of expression on the internet, the media and online privacy and has been likened by human rights groups, media freedom advocates, ‘netizens’ and opposition Congress members as comparable to the Marcos Martial Law era. Kabataan Representative Raymond Palatino branded the legislation ‘e-Martial Law’, comparing it to repressive Marcos-era decrees censoring and harassing the media. Fifteen Supreme Court appeal petitions were lodged against the Cybercrime Law but the subsequent ruling found the law constitutional in February 2014. This article examines the law, challenges since the constitutional ruling, and demands for repealing the law and replacing it with a so-called ‘Magna Carta’ of internet media freedom.Pictured: Figure 1: Protests against the Cybercrime Law have been widespread in the Philippines. Image: Interaksyo
Erewhon: Filming nowhere
Get PDFPhotographer Gavin Hipkins’ first feature film draws upon Samuel Butler’s anonymously published utopian satire Erewhon: Or, Over the Range (1872). It pairs a stream of evocative images with a voiceover narration from Butler’s text. In particular, it is in his exploration of Butler’s critique of the coming dominance of the machine in a post-industrial society that Hipkins’ film speaks to postcolonial New Zealand. Paradoxically, however, Hipkins employs the words of Butler’s text to free himself from the tyranny of narration and produce a film of continual interruptions, juxtapositions and breaks in perspective and mood. One moment we are asked to respond to the sublime grandeur of the New Zealand bush or mountainscape, the next to the banality of a rusted dripping pipe or a collection of car carcasses. Hipkins’ images acquire their power not because of their inherent qualities, but because they prove themselves to be transformable, that is, because they can enter into relations of composition with other images. Through its montage, Hipkins’ ‘cinema of thinking’ successfully combines the documentary nature of film—its recording—with its symbolic, evocative, ruminative capabilities, thus exemplifying Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum that all good fictions are documentaries and all good documentaries are fictions
Journalism Plus? The resurgence of creative documentary
Get PDFOver the past two decades, opportunities for ‘creative documentary’ on television may have diminished, but other distribution options for innovative and engaged films have opened up. A resurgence of cinematic documentary is attracting substantial numbers of viewers who, bored or disillusioned by television’s shift to reality programming, are prepared to pay for theatre tickets, while online subscription services such as Netflix and Amazon now stream and fund high-quality documentary. Increasing numbers of filmmakers are self-distributing their works online. A significant percentage of these films, freed from the constraints of broadcast television, take up political challenges because, as Michael Chanan says, documentary has ‘politics in its genes’ (2008, p. 16). In fact, as mainstream news and current affairs becomes increasingly tabloid, it could be argued that documentary is assuming the role of investigative journalism or, to use Laura Poitras’ description, documentary functions as ‘Journalism Plus’. This article, at times drawing on my own film practice, attempts to explore these shifts and developments, locating documentary at a time of institutional transformation.Image: He Toki Huna: SAS Quick Reaction Force in Kabul post a suicide bombing in February 2010. Photo by Lionel de Coninc
REVIEW: Harrowing story of prejudice and religious blackmail
No full textCraddock, Pat (2015). Harrowing story of prejudice and religious blackmail. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 208-210. Review of Murder That Wasn’t. The Case of George Gwaze, by Felicity Goodyear-Smith. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. 180pp. ISBN 978-1-877578-99-1This harrowing book is about George Gwaze, an African migrant to New Zealand who was tried twice for the alleged rape and murder of his 10-year-old niece. It is also about prejudice, HIV/AIDS and our legal and medical processes when trauma is being investigated. One Saturday morning in January 2007, Charlene, the 10-year-old niece of George Gwaze was found in her bed gasping for breath, lying in a pool of diarrhoea and was rushed to hospital. Charlene was diagnosed with aggressive acute sepsis believed to be the result of violent assault and suffocation. She was also HIV positive. Next morning Charlene was dead. The police began their inquiries
EDITORIAL: A complicated post-documentary era
Get PDFSINCE early in the first decade of this century, the concept of documentary—never beyond contestation—has entered into a state of generic uncertainty. Reflecting on these developments, John Corner, in an influential article, dubbed the current context of production as ‘Post-documentary’ (Corner, 2002). In his view, the documentary tradition has always encompassed a range of approaches: 1. Documentary as social commentary seeking to inform audiences as citizens rather than consumers. 2. Documentary as Investigative Reporting, once the most extensive use of documentary methods on television. 3. Documentary as Radical Interrogation and Agit-Prop as found in the practices of independent cinema. 4. Documentary as popular ‘factual’ entertainment driven by ratings and box office
The Act of Killing: Investigative strategies for a ‘Post-Political’ Age
Get PDFUnusually for a political documentary, The Act of Killing provides its audiences with little information, no overarching argument, nor a call-to-action. Instead, director Joshua Oppenheimer uses two unconventional investigative strategies—reenactment and an examination of media affect—to uncover the 1965 Indonesian genocide and the shadow it casts over present-day Indonesia. Although these techniques have been used previously in documentary cinema, Oppenheimer employs them in innovative ways to dig under Indonesia’s social unconscious and expose the artifice of the ‘official’ history of the genocide. This article provides a close analyses of The Act of Killing’s use of these strategies. It argues that they are not only integral to the documentary’s political success in the Indonesian context, but can also be used by political documentarists and committed journalists to mobilise otherwise disengaged audiences in our ‘non-ideological’ and ‘post-political’ age
Being both: Gender and indigeneity in two Pacific documentary films
Get PDFTransgender is a term originating from a particularly Western discourse of restrictive gender identity that struggles to account for diverse gender identities. Several non-Western cultures, however, especially indigenous cultures, have quite different and varied understandings of gender. Diverse approaches to gender have been framed through dominant Euro-Christian discourses as deviant, immoral and inferior—part of the dangerous alternative knowledge of indigenous cultures that colonialism worked so hard and so violently to eradicate. It is only recently that non-dominant gender discourses have begun visibly and vocally to re-assert themselves as viable and valuable alternatives to the orthodox narratives of pathology and deviance dominating Western gender discussions. The development of an alternative and more celebratory approach to gender diversity can be perceived through two notable documentary films from the Pacific: Georgie Girl (Goldson & Wells, 2002) and Kumu Hina (Hamer & Wilson, 2014). Rather than starting from a position that sees gender variance as a depressing problem, these stories offer the possibility of re-appropriating transgender as not only normal, but precious
Launching Loading Docs: A reflection on the first year of a documentary innovation experiment from a producer/researcher perspective
Get PDFLoading Docs is a New Zealand documentary initiative that supports the development, production and distribution of three-minute documentary films. Loading Docs is also a development and innovation initiative, building the capabilities of local filmmakers to fund, promote and distribute their work and increase their presence online. More broadly, Loading Docs aims to create a supportive community of filmmakers, increase opportunities for feature documentary development, and cultivate audience awareness of and appetite for New Zealand documentaries. This paper presents an account of the development of Loading Docs from the author’s perspective as co-founder, co-executive producer and practice-led researcher. Reflecting on the experience of acting as both researcher and producer in the capacity of an experimental initiative, this article argues that research/practice partnerships create beneficial opportunities for knowledge-transfer and innovation
INTERVIEW: Noho Rewa: The wrongful occupation of Hawai’i
Get PDFThe colonisation of the Hawai’ian people is a story shared with Māori and other Polynesian peoples. It is a story of shame, desecration, loss of land and loss of life. The commonality of the historical Pacific experience, however, can too easily mask the variety of outcomes of the decolonisation process, and for Māori and Pakeha New Zealanders, the present-day lived experience of the Hawai’ian people can come as a shock to those who have never ventured beyond the hotels of Waikiki. In this interview with filmmaker and Auckland University of Technology lecturer Christina Milligan, indigenous Hawai’ian filmmaker and activist Anne Keala Kelly discusses her 2010 documentary Noho Rewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i. For Kelly, the making of the film was not only a lonely and tough five years, It was also an emotional struggle to document the pain suffered on a daily basis by those of her community who evidence the ongoing struggle of a people who remain tenants in their own land