TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
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| Spears reveals body fears Britney Spears will never be happy with her body. breakingnews.ie |
Mawkish, maybe. But Avatar is a profound, insightful, important film Cameron's blockbuster offers a chilling metaphor for European butchery of the Americas. No wonder the US right hates itAvatar, James ÂCameron's blockbusting 3D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It's Âprofound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It's profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native ÂAmericans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in Âterror as it is hunted to extinction.But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard Âdocuments the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced. In 1492, some 100 million native people lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease, but the mass extinction was also engineered.When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different to their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peaceable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives' extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the Âamazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them destroying everything and everyone they encountered.The butchery began with ÂColumbus. He slaughtered the native people of ÂHispaniola (now Haiti and the ÂDominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on Âliving children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. ÂColumbus ordered all the native people to deliver a Âcertain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native Âpopulation of Hispaniola had fallen from eight Âmillion to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly due to murder, overwork and starvation.The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women's breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted them with dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work the native Americans to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, about 95% of the population of South and Central America were dead.In California during the 18th century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called JunĂpero Serra set up a series of "missions": in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. JunĂpero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint.While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation's wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe "is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi". During the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed Âpeople gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their Âvictims' genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. ÂTheodore Roosevelt called this event "as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier".The butchery hasn't yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that ÂBrazilian ranchers in the western ÂAmazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe. Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a "revisionist western" in which "the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys". He says it asks the audience "to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency". Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as "just an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable".But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly. It reveals, he says, "a well-known Âprinciple of totalitarianism and genocide – that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see". But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important – and more dangerous – than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.PortugalSpainJames Cameron3DSigourney WeaverScience fiction and fantasyGeorge Monbiotguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Ivanova in last-ditch attempt to avoid eviction Celebrity Big Brother's Katia Ivanova appeared to make a last-ditch attempt to win viewers' votes by rekindling her romance with Jonas Altberg. breakingnews.ie |
Andrea Arnold takes on Wuthering Heights Red Road and Fish Tank director steps in to replace Peter Webber on new film of Emily BrontĂ«'s gothic romanceAndrea Arnold, the Oscar-winning British film-maker behind Red Road and Fish Tank, is stepping in to direct the new film adaptation of Emily BrontĂ«'s Wuthering Heights, Variety reports.Arnold will direct from Olivia Hetreed's adaptation of the novel – a first for the director, who wrote the hard-hitting scripts for both her acclaimed feature films.Explaining the hiring yesterday, producer Robert Bernstein said: "Andrea has previously said that the only book she would ever direct would be Wuthering Heights, because of the passionate, impossible love story at its centre and its elements of class divide," he said. "It's a very lucky coincidence for us that we've found each other."Arnold, who won an Academy Award for best live-action short for her film Wasp in 2005, takes over from Peter Webber, director of Girl With a Pearl Earring. He left the project in December, having stepped in to replace The Edge of Love's John Maybury, who dropped out of the project last summer. Natalie Portman, Abbie Cornish and Gemma Arterton have all been linked to the part of BrontĂ«'s heroine, Cathy Earnshaw.Speaking to the Guardian last year, Bernstein acknowledged that the film success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga – itself heavily indebted to BrontĂ«'s enduring story – had played a part in the project getting off the ground. "The Twilight factor is extremely helpful to Wuthering Heights," he said. "It's clearly in the zeitgeist. Why is anybody's guess, but people are absolutely obsessed with this doomed, romantic love that can only be achieved beyond death, or in the case of Twilight, by becoming a vampire."Andrea ArnoldFilm adaptationsEmily BrontĂ«Stephenie MeyerBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Avatar top grossing blockbuster in famous UK cinema Avatar has become the highest grossing film yet at one of Britain’s most famous cinemas. breakingnews.ie |