P-CON Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University



P-CON Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University

Film Series Spring 2006

February 6/Hamilton Theater/7:00pm

Occupation: Dreamland Directed by Ian Olds and Garret Scott, 78 minutes, 2005

In the crumbling Iraqi city of Falluja during the winter of 2004, filmmakers Scott and Olds accompany U.S. Army 82nd Airborne regiment, stationed in a quarter whose name translates as “dreamland.” Occupation: Dreamland documents dramatic aspects of 21st century low intensity warfare and soldiers’ ways of coping with the constant perils of such war. Soldiers struggle to make sense of schizophrenic mandates such as scrutinizing every corner for Iraqi rebels while fraternizing with the locals. Meanwhile, bitter thoughts come to the viewer on the costs of some forms of college education.

"Occupation: Dreamland presents a compelling study of composure and decency in the midst of overwhelming pointlessness." Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

Crisis in Sapville Directed by John Knecht, 5 minutes, 2003 

Crisis in Sapville is a delirious space somewhere between nightmare and pure hallucination, or: a day in the life during wartime and spin. Crisis...was selected for screening on the same program with Operation Dreamland at the 2005 Viennale, the International Film Festival in Vienna Austria.

February 13//Hamilton Theater/7:00pm

Profits of Punishment Directed by Catherine Scott, 52 minutes, 2001

With one of the toughest criminal systems and highest imprisonment rates in the world, the U.S. pioneers the shift of prison management to transnational corporations. Private prisons have become a profitable industry as prisoners are turned into a cheap labor force. Multi-award winning Profits of Punishment examines the world of incarceration under the sign of business and its bonds with the government. A visit to a private prison in Texas and to a convention of prison entrepreneurs starkly contrast with the stories of those whose lives have been captured by the system. How do these technological workhouses speak of the justice system in present-day America and inspire similar privatizing drives elsewhere?

"This film gives the viewer an interesting and disturbing insight into prison privatization, and other profit making enterprises in the American penal system.” Thomas J. Beck, University of Colorado at Denver, MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship

February 20/Hamilton Theater/7:00pm

Fuse (Gori Vatra) Directed by Pjer Žalica, 105 minutes, 2003

After making a dozen documentaries on the horror of the war in Bosnia, Pjer Žalica confesses to have learned that “peace could be worse than war” and that it is only with humor and a tragicomic sense of life that humans can recover “from awful war and bitter peace.” Fuse introduces us to Tešanj, a small community in Bosnia two years after the end of the war, where making a living involves everyday excursions beyond the law. The announcement of a visit by U.S. President Clinton suddenly alters life in the village. Clinton has agreed to become the patron of the town, and the villagers have only seven days to polish their civic and honorable face while eliminating, or at least concealing, their intolerance, petty crimes, corruption, and prostitution. Fuse has received awards in Locarno, Sarajevo, Marrakech, and Zagreb.

March 20/Hamilton Theater/7:00pm

The Big Lebowski Directed by Joel Coen, 117 minutes, 1998

The Coen brothers and their agreeable cast make more fun than sense with this scattered farce about a pothead bowler who is mistaken for a deadbeat philanthropist and drawn into a cluster of kidnapers, nihilists, porn mobsters and Busby Berkeley beauties.” This is how the original promo for ‘The Big Lebowski’ surreptitiously conveyed the film’s subversive message of hope and peace. Looking back on its debut, it is hard to believe that people who first viewed Lebowski’s grotesque reflections on the rational irrationality of international capital and the military industrial complex actually... laughed. It is reported that the first members of the public to view the greatest anti-war film ever made were unable to distinguish anguish from irony. Misunderstandings still persist. However, despite all this, we believe that a responsible pedagogy of peace and conflict should be able to encompass the pacifist philosophy of dudeness. We think you can handle this; don’t let us down.

(In Observance of the Colgate Genocide Awareness Month)

March 27/Hamilton Theater/7:00pm

Valentina’s Nightmare PBS "Frontline," 60 minutes, 1997

In this Frontline report, Fergal Keane reconstructs the horror of murders at Rwanda’s church of Nyarubuye—a 4-day slaughter in April 1994 amidst the genocide that took 800,000 lives. Three years later, Valentina Iribagiza, who miraculously survived in Nyarubuye and periodically returns to the church to pray, tells her story and the stories of her relatives and neighbors.

In Rwanda We Say... The family that does not speak dies Directed by Anne Aghion, 54 minutes, 2004

After her film Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda? (2002) Anne Aghion explores the possibilities of speech and dialogue for rebuilding community after the genocide. This 13 award-winning documentary traces the reinsertion of participants in mass murder into their original communities after serving their sentences. Learning to articulate conflicts may help people prevent a new round of violence and create new common identities.

"Aghion has taken her camera deep into Rwandan life, to chronicle how the country's survivors and perpetrators are trying to live together anew." Lynne Duke, Washington Post

(In Observance of Genocide Awareness Month) 

April 3/Hamilton Theater/7:00pm

Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) Directed by Alain Resnais, 32 min, 1955

Night and Fog was a Hitler’s decree of 1941 to destroy all resistance to his regime through detentions and secret deaths. Night and Fog is also Alain Resnais’ poetic documentary shot in Auschwitz ten years after the end of the war. Helped by the narration of a survivor, Michel Bouquet, Resnais alternates still images and black and white footage with strategic incursions of color to produce an at once filmographic and philosophical interrogation of the character of Western culture seen from its darkest corner. The trains that took millions to death, the bucolic surroundings of the camp, and the reconstruction of the culture and routines of the camp set the climate of this masterpiece that forces us to confront the pervasiveness of horror and the fragility of memory.

The Holocaust Experience Directed by Oeke Hoogendijk, 50 minutes, 2002

In The Holocaust Experience, Oeke Hoogendijk explores contrasting politics of memory in Poland and the United States. The obsessive effort by the Polish to restore Auschwitz-Birkenau to the finest detail challenges them to define what must be preserved and discern the exact territorial boundaries of the concentration camp. While the Polish confront the limits of realism, the American treatment of objects taken from Nazi concentration camps resembles theme park display and pushes the ethical limits of the virtual.

April 10/Hamilton Theater/7:00pm

Darwin's Nightmare Directed by Hubert Sauper, 2004, 107 min.

If Adam Smith taught us to see trade as the main source of progress and a better life, Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare explores what occurs when labor, trade, and profit conjugate in a spiral of death. Next to Lake Victoria, in Mwanza, Tanzania, the fishery of the Nile perch, a specimen transplanted to the lake back in the 1960s, takes tons of processed fish to Europe in planes that come back loaded with weapons. Through interviews and images, Sauper captures in Mwanza’s necroeconomics some of the cruelest paradoxes of our globalized economy. Sauper’s film corrodes the most cherished dreams of globalization, which is perhaps why “Darwin’s Nightmare” has received as many awards as controversial reviews.

“There are images here that have the terrifying sublimity of a painting by El Greco or Hieronymus Bosch” A. O. Scott, The New York Times.

For more information please contact:

P-Con, the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Colgate University (315) 228-7806 or peace@mail.colgate.edu

115 Alumni Hall, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York 13346

 

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