Television documentary,history and memory. An analysis of Sergio Zavoli's The Gardens of Abel

This article examines a celebrated documentary made for Italian state TV in 1968 and transmitted in 1969 to an audience of millions. The programme – The Gardens of Abel – looked at changes introduced by the radical psychiatrist Franco Basaglia in an asylum in the north-east of Italy (Gorizia). The article examines the content of this programme for the first time, questions some of the claims that have been made for it, and outlines the sources used by the director, Sergio Zavoli. The article argues that the film was as much an expression of Zavoli's vision and ideas as it was linked to those of Franco Basaglia himself. Finally, the article highlights the way that this programme has become part of historical discourse and popular memory.     

Memory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese American Internment During World War II

This article addresses the little-known history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII. Classified as ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘enemy aliens’, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were stripped of citizenship from their home countries, denied rights in the United States, and ultimately deprived reconciliation due to their undocumented status. Using the traces of this history as a case study, I explore the strategic memories Japanese Latin Americans create about non-place – spaces of statelessness or states of exception – that allow them to make claims about state violence committed against them under these conditions, and, second, argue that demands for justice against political violence entail not only bringing light to erased histories but also developing engaged acts of reception that account for survivors’ claims to the memories of non-place. Visual testimonies, such as the Denshō Digital Archive and the short documentary Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story (2004), affectively connect a viewer/listener to the memory of trauma, to an inexpressible haunting, and thus are critical platforms for creating a collective memory between survivors and the digital generation of postmemory.     

Thinking Transition ‘From the Outside’: An Analysis of the Film De L’argentine by Werner Schroeter

The present article concentrates on the analysis of the film De l’Argentine/De la Argentina/For example Argentina (Werner Schroeter, France/Argentina, 1983–1985) as a way of access to a number of specific problems concerning the process of Argentinean democratic consolidation. It is a film that was only screened in Argentina for the first time in 2013, after a copy was found at the French Cinémathèque. Like other films produced in the context of dictatorship and democratic transition, Schroeter’s film has tended to think Argentina ‘from the outside’, that is, with a view marked by strangeness. These are documentaries which reflect upon physical and temporal distances, but, not the least, through cultural and ideological remoteness. On the basis of an analysis framed within Documentary Theory and the Sociology of Culture, this article seeks to make a contribution by way of an original perspective on a political film which, as far as we know, has not been addressed yet by Film Studies.     

Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony

The author argues that in the burgeoning new literature about social memory anthropologists have not yet contributed all that they might. In particular, little has been written from an anthropological point of view about memory and film. The article seeks to examine the possible roles of documentary film in memory transmission. During the twentieth century, film and video became increasingly important vehicles of memory, while the digital revolution has made video such a pervasive medium in the new century that it will become more and more vital as a source of historical evidence and reflection. While the evidence presented by visually recorded interviews certainly requires critical evaluation, there is no reason to suppose that recorded interviews are any less reliable than texts; they may in fact offer clues that a text cannot. Some of the most interesting films of memory are the work of independent filmmakers engaged in a courageous personal quest to break officially imposed silences. The article examines the potential of film to preserve memories as trace—that is, as a form of historical evidence; as event—testifying itself being a performative act which generates its own meanings and demands a dialogical engagement with/by an audience; and as trajectory—for individual memories must be transmitted in order to become social. As they are launched into the flow of collective memory, they have a chance to endure over time, multiplying available perspectives on the past. Films of memory are thus part of the struggle against the forgetting of past injustices, and ultimately have the potential to contribute to shifts in our interpretations of history.     

Heather moorland in the Scottish Highlands: the history of a cultural landscape, 1600–1880

The heather moorland of the Scottish Highlands represents a highly symbolic habitat for the region. Significantly, recent work by ecologists and palaeobotanists has stressed the strong anthropogenic role in its development. Indeed, so vital is the role played by human interference, heather moorland is now seen as a cultural landscape. Yet despite being seen as a cultural landscape, there has hitherto been no attempt to use available documentary evidence to understand how this human interference may have affected its development over recent centuries. This paper examines such evidence, paying particular attention to how human activity contributed to its expansion over the early modern period and to its decline from ca. 1800 onwards, exploring such themes as moor burning, the harvesting of young tree growth, and grazing levels and practices, both before and after the clearances. Particular attention is paid to how the spread of sheep after the clearances contributed to the decline of heather moor and the role that heavy sheep grazing may have played in the deterioration in the quality of Highlands pastures during the mid-nineteenth century.     

Vices Are Not What They Used To Be: The Archaeological Importance of the Term “Vices” in Argentinean Historical Military Documents of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

This article characterizes the sense and use of the word vicios (vices) in historical documents in nineteenth-century Argentina. The term was frequently used among soldiers, indigenous people, and criollos who occupied the border. The “vices” consisted of a range of highly appreciated edible goods (including tobacco, yerba mate [Ilex paraguariensis], and sugar). Documentary sources do not agree what products fall under the term vicios. We propose some archaeological expectations with regard to each of these products.     

Through the Sea Snow: The Central Role of Videography in the Deep Gulf Wrecks Mission

The media team on the 2004 Deep Gulf Wrecks mission fulfilled three video-related functions: documentation, preservation, and outreach. Instead of looking at the media team as witnesses to the scientific events or as video tourists, the mission leadership integrated the video, backup, and Internet work into the scientific process carried out in the Gulf of Mexico. While not the first time this kind of cooperation has occurred in deep sea exploration work, the extent of media-scientific collaboration was exceptional in an age of soundbites and formulaic scientific filmmaking. The key strategic and technical lessons learned from the mission are summarized.     

Moving pictures: from ethnographic to autoethnographic documentary in the internationalization of the geography curriculum

Documentary films have often taken a pivotal role in strategies to internationalize (geography) curricula and classrooms, being used as a method of bringing the world to the classroom. These documentaries overwhelmingly take ethnographic form. Problematically, the documentary gaze is characteristically that of an outside film crew and narrator mediating relationships between the “subjects” of the documentary and the ways they are heard and seen. Yet other forms of documentary also exist, including those offering autoethnographic perspectives to viewers. Autoethnographic documentaries offer a highly promising resource for internationalization of the geography curriculum, providing careful, analytic, theoretically-informed understandings of documentarians’ own worlds – which may be in the next neighbourhood or on the other side of the planet. This paper reviews documentaries as curriculum-internationalizing learning-and-teaching resources before going on to examine the flaws of “traditional” ethnographic documentary in this endeavour. It makes the case for greater – though not necessarily exclusive – use of autoethnographic films in our work to educate global citizens and provides some preliminary resources for locating and evaluating this form of film. As such it contributes not only to critical pedagogy surrounding internationalization of the geography curriculum but also to filmic geography.     

Natron as a flux in the early vitreous materials industry: sources,beginnings and reasons for decline

Natron deposits, the best known of which being those at Wadi Natrun in Egypt, have been used as the flux in the production of vitreous materials from the early 4th millennium BC onwards. In the present paper, the history of the use of natron as a flux is traced from its beginnings in the glaze of Badarian steatite beads, through its use in glass production starting in the 1st millennium BC, until its apparent shortage during the 7th to 9th centuries AD, and its subsequent replacement by plant ash during the 9th century AD. Documentary evidence for possible natron sources in Egypt, including the Wadi Natrun, and around the eastern Mediterranean is summarised, and the results of recent fieldwork at the Wadi Natrun and at al-Barnuj in the Western Nile Delta are presented. The possible reasons for the apparent shortage of natron from 7th to 9th centuries AD and its subsequent replacement by plant ash as the flux used in glass production during the 9th century AD are then considered. These include the possibility that, because of the massive scale of glass production, the demand for natron exceeded its supply; the possible effect of climatic changes; and the potentially disruptive role of political events in the Wadi Natrun–Delta region.     

中国远征军上校团长沈开元印缅抗日纪实

沈开元,贵州平坝县人,1935年考入黄埔成都军校第十六期,历任税警总团排长、连长,缉私总队营长,中国远征军第38师112团长等职,后任军事教员。