film review

On Friday June 3rd 2016, the Simplicity Institute screened its newly produced film 'A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity'. The film is essentially a documentary of the Institute's attempts to create a simple living community along permaculture lines. Following a public invitation to participate a group of mostly fairly young people participated in this experimental community on a rural property in Gippsland. The project involved them growing and preparing their own food, and building the necessary infrastructure which included: houses for each other; a communal living area and kitchen in a large shed; vegetable patches; composting toilet systems, etc.

Obviously such a life requires possesion or development of a range of skills and a breadth of skills that individuals in 'developed' economies typically do not possess. The specialisation of work in such 'developed' societies tends to result in people having rather specific skills, and also perhaps excludes some basic skills that are quite important within an intentionally self-sufficient community. Nevertheless, it seems they managed fairly well in relation to sharing and developing skills in carpentry, vegetable growing, etc. But the experiment seems to have revealed one fundamental, essential skill that these people sometimes lacked, and which it seems is perhaps one that is extremely difficult to develop. That skill is the skill of living together. The skill of getting on, dealing with disagreements and making decisions in a way that does not lead to some people opting out of the experiment altogether. If we are to transition to any type of more humane economy then this is perhaps the key skill we need. The ability to live as a community in integrated, caring and selfless ways may turn out to be the most damaged part of our society as a result of the collective experiment in recent centuries with free-market ideals and the search for happiness through material wealth aided by technological development. And I would suggest that of all the changes necessary in our society, this is going to be the hardest - shaking off our perceptions of ourselves and our perceived entitlements.

Let us consider the difficulties that this small group encountered, and keep in mind that this group consisted of young, fairly fit adults; mostly single and childless. There was only one pre-school age child in the group. But real societies are not like this. Real societies have people who are sick, or invalid. They have many children - and with many children running around in a community which is effectively a combination of construction zone and working farm with sharp tools, and various other hazards then additional precautions need to taken. Things are not so easy, extra work is required - including cordoning off areas, being careful where tools etc are placed, keeping an eye out for children doing dangerous things or moving in dangerous areas. Effort levels and frustration levels are likely to rise. Blame for not keeping children under control, or blame for causes of any - ultimately inevitable - accidents will also introduce new elements of conflict.

And how caring and self-sacrificing are people prepared to be? What if some people are seen as 'not contributing'? Will some in our community look at nursing mothers, invalids, etc through the lens of Malcolm Turnbull's 'lifters and leaners'? Are we to continue to assess people's worth based on their economic contribution? Are we to continue to feel that we should all benefit 'fairly' (i.e according to immediate economic contribution) from the fruits of our collective labours? Because if so, such communities are going to encounter significant, and quite possibly fatal, difficulties. In fact, parenthood and children add incredible amounts of complexity to any community. Who is going to educate them? How? Often parents are very particular, and commonly somewhat inflexible, regarding what ideas and concepts their children should be exposed to and when. There are few other issues as emotionally charged as raising and educating children.

What if some members ask themselves questions along the lines of: why should I be supporting someone else's child? How can I get my own way (on one issue or another)? Now you may think that such thoughts would not arise, or at least not be serious enough to threaten the community. But we must remember that the system of inequalities and elites that we currently have did not arise out of nowhere - it arose in and out of human communities, and quite likely hidden behind this rise were thoughts similar to the above - maybe explicitly expressed, maybe not. What is to stop history repeating itself? If not immediately, almost certainly over time in the absence of express precautions.

It seems that anyone serious about living in such an intentional community - one with all the complexities of a real community - will need to not just re-learn traditional skills of simple production but seriously re-invent themselves. Such a re-invention will no doubt require a complete revision, and some discarding, of notions and ideologies as well as patterns of behaviour and thought. I would suggest that any such re-invention should include a new perception of ourselves - a perception that moves away from notions of selfish pleasure seeking; that moves away from short-term notions of 'fairness' in relation to the sharing of economic outputs, and more towards seeing ourselves as existing not to satisfy our own sefish desires, but as existing for the purpose of serving others. Such a 'service' self-perspective leads thoughts away from our own entitlements and expections of others and towards what more we can do to help others achieve their aims, how we can understand their expectations, and how we can help achieve those.

Watch the film on YouTube: A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

We are all here for a limited time, but when we have to work harder and harder to stay in one place, that is not really living. Who is stealing our time? Were it not for the cost of housing, Australians would need to work only half the hours they have to and manufacturers would halve their costs! We have only to consider how, in two generations, Australians have gone from needing one income to purchase a house to a situation where both spouses must work and pay for others to bring up any children they may find a brief instant to produce. The writer reviews two works on time-poverty: one a heavyweight and the other a lightweight and remarks that time is money. Time is life. See the film or watch the trailer; feel the truth: spot the enemy.

Pocock et al Time Bomb book disappointingly shallow

I rushed out and bought Barbara Pocock, Natalie Skinner and Philiippa Williams' book, Time Bomb, NewSouth, NSWU Press, 2012, because it seemed like such a great title and subject. I should have been warned off by the fact that it was recommended by Geraldine Doogue, a great apologist for growth and economic neo-liberalism.

Disappointingly, Pocock et al's book fails to make some blindingly obvious points. It phaffs around the edges. I wonder if the authors simply did not see beyond the superficial or they thought that the publishing market could not take the heat. Are they somehow placed in the eye of the storm where all is quiet whilst the damage rages all around them. The book is published by the University of New South Wales, which makes me wonder again why universities these days turn out such dross. Is polite comment and a few boring graphs a prerequisite for a doctoral thesis these days? What's the market? The anguished New Class?

Could be.

What really got to me was the fact that the authors don't ever link the ridiculously rising cost of living to the time-poorness of Australians. They don't even mention the cost of housing, which is easily the greatest thief of time. Okay, they give two pages (pp. 130-131) to the idea that 'for a minority of young people, housing is a significant issue.'

Housing is the Number One issue! Were it not for the cost of housing, Australians would need to work only half the hours they have to and manufacturers would halve their costs! We have only to consider how, in two generations, Australians have gone from needing one income to purchase a house to a situation where both spouses must work and pay for others to bring up any children they may find a brief instant to produce. And then there are the other Australians, who live on the streets, sell drugs and beg on trains to survive.

Why do people publish this kind of much ado about nothing? Are they just marketing titles at airports which people buy, read the first chapter of, and bin on their way out of the arrivals door?

In Time - the movie - very deep, very true, very intelligent

In contrast, the movie In Time was a (for lack of a new word) brilliant dramatization of how the parasitic rich are thieves of time and that life is measured out in money. In Time is about a world just like ours where the poor die young and spend their precious lives hanging around begging for work or for credit from a rarer class of landlords by any other name that owns the means of production and all the assets.

"Four minutes for a cup of coffee? Yesterday it was only three!" a customer exclaims in a down-market take away shop.

Time is money. Money is time. Time is life.

People might recognise the metaphor more easily if the short-lived class were from the traditional poor and overcrowded countries but the poor in this film are mostly unremarkable by their colour or their accent. They could be Americans, Australians, Canadians, British. The wealthy live almost indefinitely in this film, while the poor must pay by the hour for their lives after the age of 21. Most people accept an ideology called the Demographic Transition where peoples of 'undeveloped countries' are supposed to normally not live past 35 or so, until 'we' bring development to them. So if the film had been made on the edges of the Ganges River, perhaps no-one would have been startled. But this was a film about the future that many candobetter readers would recognise as Now. In Australia.

This is a short article because I don't have much time - frankly. Maybe readers can add to this with their experiences and their responses to In Time.

Retitled on 4 November 2011 to highlight the megafauna focus

In 1994 three French speliologists (cave explorers) found the Chauvet Pont d'Arc cave, which turned out to be an extensive underground neolithic art gallery and a kind of visual Noahs Ark of lost species of the last great ice-age around 34,000 year ago. By comparison, the famous cave art of Lascaux[1] is about half as old. Werner Herzog's film of this great ecological time machine is a once-ever.

Click on picture for trailer

Locked time-vault

Soon after it was found, the government resealed the Chauvet cave with a massive armored door so that, from the outside, it looks like the entrance to a bank vault mysteriously set within a wall of rock, overlooking vinyards in Ardeche. In a kind of electronic open-Sesame, entry is gained via a code typed on a keypad.

The French Ministry of Culture gave veteran film-director, Werner Herzog,[2] special permission to enter the cave and make the documentary. His permitted time was limited to hours at a time over a few days, I believe, and he was only allowed to bring in three other people. The crew was might only use battery powered flat lights and they had to keep to a narrow raised pathway. Internauts can follow the same path in a virtual interactive page. (If you don't understand French just be aware that hovering your cursor or clicking on a highlighted square will bring up further detail.)

Ice-age Man and Megafauna

Herzog has made a wonderful film about what humans living over a period of thousands of years in the time of a great ice-age left behind them. The art and informed scientific commentary give an empathic audience the material to bridge with their imaginations a gap of more than 34,000 years and to walk between towering glaciers with ancestors who hunted megafauna. The film brings to life (in 3D) a time when seas were 300 feet lower (91.44 meters) and people and other animals could walk from Germany to Britain. I have always valued the idea of the space and freedom and self-sufficiency of the neolithic and would have liked to have lived at that time. The cave paintings were superbly lively and evoked an era when humans identified as part of the local ecology which included huge cave bears, cave lions, wooly mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses in Europe, all of which are depicted in the cave.

In the film, scientific specialists interpret the paintings and the times. One of them went into the weaponry used for hunting, demonstrating the importance of spear throwers. These neolithic people were tall and amazingly fit and strong to be able to live in the extreme cold and to hunt and live among the huge creatures of the time. The paintings depict the non-humans as real personalities. An approach through naturalistic art, which everyone can understand, makes this a meaningful diorama of neolithic culture.

Cave floors strewn with many ancient bones

None of the many bones on the floor were human. It is thought that this cave was lived in by various animals over centuries and that humans used it for ceremonies, but no-one is sure, of course. There is a wolf paw-print besides an eight year old boy's footprint in the earth in one of the cave areas, but the two could have walked here 5000 years apart or side by side on the same day. No-one can say.

Call for awareness of similar modern hunter-gatherer cultures

It saddens me that if Australia continues to "develop" the territory and society of her aboriginal peoples, inevitably no Australian will any longer have a choice of that other lifestyle, which still carries valuable information about a wonderfully healthy way of relating to nature and to each other. Changing their remaining land from shared territory to individual titles, as begun by John Howard, will effectively break up these peoples too, reducing them simply to a part of the flotsam of broken tribe remnants arriving as 'settlers since 1788 - the poor from industrial Britain, the Continent, Asia and Africa. Europeans may understand the tragedy of reducing everything to industrial life-style even less than Australians. I remember giving a lecture to contemporary French history students at the University of Dijon where students expressed shock that Australian aborigines wore no clothes in indigenous territory in the north of Australia. For them this was a sign of poverty. Living 'outdoors' was a sign of 'backwardness'. Would those same students have felt the same way seeing Herzog's film of Chauvet Pont d'Arc?

The Australian Aborigines are thought to have crossed over when sea-levels were very low between 60 and 40,000 years ago, more or less direct from Africa. The oldest neolithic art in Cave of Forgotten Dreams was dated round 34,000 year ago. Until British settlement in Australia the populations there were all still practising neolithic lifestyles and showed no immediate interest in beads and baubles; they seemed to have too much self-respect and to be self-sufficient without notions of individual wealth. This culture is still alive, hanging by a sinew. It depends on the retention of land and a social envelope that does not impose growth in population and material production ...

Interspecies fluidity

Also fascinating in Herzog's film was the introduction of the concept of 'fluidity' between humans and other animals which some of the cave painting and other neolithic art seems to demonstrate, where it was supposed that humans believed that combinations could easily occur between themselves and other species. So there exist figurines of lion-headed humans etc. Of course the ancient Egyptians had a panoply of animal-headed gods and Greek myth contains half-human monsters. Statuettes like the Venus of Willendorf seems to have been very common items in the Neolithic. What was the basis of these statuettes, I wonder? Fertility figures? They look like old women with diabetes to me, or, disturbingly, obese women held captive and fattened for some awful purpose. "How," asked a female friend, "Could women of the neolithic period get that fat?" Was there enough cereal? Did they survive winter on huge amounts of fat sitting immobile in caves? The mind boggles...

In the meantime, my mind retains those wonderful pictures of megafauna and of a time more fabulous than that of any comic superhero.

NOTES

[1] For the cave art of Lascaux, visit this wonderful interactive site where you can move around within the caves at a touch of your mouse
[2]Werner Herzog as a director was better known to me as the German maker of Nosferatu (1979), a poetically filmed interpretation of the lonely vampire myth and the plague in Europe.

Title was: "We all have a stake in Hollywood telling the truth about US wars", 14 Jan 11

Many, who believe themselves to be progressive, against war, for the environment and for international peace, display an unreasonable prejudice against almost all things American, in particular the American film industry. That prejudice, in fact, makes the struggle for peace and justice harder, even if it can justifiably be said that by far the greatest of threats to world peace come from within the United States of America.

Why?

As great as the terrible harm that America has inflicted upon the world since at least the end of the Second World War -- the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the recent and ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen etc., covert interference to overthrow governments, including popular, democratically elected governments, who were seen as a threat to vested American interests by the CIA -- the harm inflicted upon the world is nowhere near as great as it could have been had the US Military industrial complex been given a free hand to do as it wished.

So, what stops the military industrial complex doing as it pleases?

What stops them is vast numbers of decent Americans of good will, who are prepared to stand up against evil, even at the risk of their own lives. In fact many have given their lives. More well known figures who have died to prevent war include: President John F Kennedy in 1963, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, Martin Luther King in 1968 and Malcolm X in 1964.

From 1961 until 1963, when he was murdered, President John F Kennedy stopped the US military not once, but three times, from launching a nuclear war. As has been written elsewhere, humankind's debt to the late JFK is vast and unrepayable.

In the 1980's President Reagan planned to launch a pre-emptive nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. We know this, because of the testimony of retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert (Bob) Bowman, Robert Bowman gave 6,000 speeches against Reagan's plans for nuclear mass murder succeeded in stopping Reagan. The debt of gratitude owed by the US public and the world to Robert Bowman, who is still using his voice to speak out against war, is comparable to that owed to JFK.

What makes it possible for such people to have prevailed to the extent they have so far, is public opinion. The fight to win US public opinion is a fight in which all of us, whether we live in the US or not, have a vital stake.

A most important part of the fight for US public opinion occurs in Hollywood. Much of what comes out of Hollywood serves to reinforce the lies used to justify past and present US behaviour on the world scene. The Vietnam war is a case in point with many movies and television series portraying the American military intervention as one of good intentions by the United States and its soldiers towards the people of Vietnam.

On occasions, films which, instead, tell the truth about the Vietnam War are produced in Hollywood.

One such film was Brian de Palma's "Casualties of War" made in 1989. It starred Michael J Fox and Sean Penn. Penn has more recently starred with Naomi Watts in Game [1] of 2010 which told the truth about the US government's Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Big Lie used as the justification to invade Iraq in 2003. (site previoulsy linked to at )

"Casualties of War" was of an incident which occurred during the Vietnam War in 1966 in which four US soldiers abducted, raped and then murdered a Vietnamese women. A fifth soldier, Private First Class (PFC) Eriksson, played by Michael Fox, refused to participate in the rape, and tried to talk the others out of committing rape. He was not able to stop the rape, but did try, unsuccessfully, to free the woman and save her life afterwards.

Afterwards, he reported the incident to his commanding officer. After his commanding officer refused to prosecute, he took his complaint higher and higher until, eventually the Army was left with no choice but to conduct the trial. All four, who participated in the rape were found guilty and sentenced to hard labour prison terms.

The courage of Eriksson is hard to exaggerate. By refusing to participate in the rape and by subsequently attempting to have the rapists charged, he put his own life at risk. His narrow escape from a grenade explosion in the toilet block before the trial showed the peril he faced to be very real.

That peril would have remained after the rapists had served their sentences and were released.

The production of "Casualties of War" can only make Eriksson's murder less likely and will make it more likely that others, placed in the circumstances similar to those in which PFC Eriksson found himself, stand up for what is right, rather than allow themselves to participate in crimes.

It is difficult to exaggerate the good done by those who produce such films as "Casualties of War" and "Fair Game".

Footnotes

[1] Site previously linked to at http://www.fairgame-movie.com/ no longer exists. - Ed, 5 Mar 2012

Avatar is a remarkable movie, about a fabulous world and an old story with some great new twists and perspectives. This is an exciting and skilled 3D graphics state of the art creation which puts the viewer on a new planet in the skin of an alien tribe. We discuss this experience and the political message of the movie.

Avatar is a remarkable movie.
It is remarkable for its art and special effects and its ability to make the audience feel a part of the movie and identify viscerally with an alien population of hunters and gatherers. It is remarkable for its creation of a beautiful planet with no machines and a strangely sculpted pastel menagerie.

Most remarkable, perhaps, is how a 20th Century Fox blockbuster exposes the colonial ideology that all undeveloped peoples are crying out to have their environments transformed by 'progress and development' and the capitalist brand of 'democracy'. It tells the truth about deforestation and why it occurs.

Forest warriors, take heart!

Colonisation - the theme

The Masai, the Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, the South American Indians, the Maori, the Zulus, the Fijians, the Hawaiians, the Irish, the Irian Jayans - all these tribal people resisted being 'civilised' by colonials who wanted to expand their empires. Was there ever a people that still had land which was happy to hand it over to the historical waves of expansion by Romans, Normans, Muslims, Hispanic, French, German, British, Indonesian, American, Chinese, Indian colonists?

And yet, to this day, we of the 'developed world' are told that we are paying for the expansion of capitalism to bring 'democracy' to the 'undeveloped' or 'unfree' world. And when everywhere is 'developed', the story goes, there won't be any overpopulation or poverty or injustice ... Unfortunately this isn't true. Development is what starts problems in steady state economies and populations. You wonder why more foreign aid people don't wake up to this.[1] Perhaps many stay in the business to try to make the process less awful or simply because, like most of us, they have no land and therefore need their jobs, however awful.

In this film the indigenous are humanoid and their appearance and rituals are perhaps most reminiscent of Africa - a land of immense abundance and variety with fantastically varied peoples, economies and fauna - attacked mercilessly by colonial processes from the industrial revolution of the 1750s. (Viewers might be interested to know that currently, on Earth, Africa is being subjected - along with other lands - including, possibly, Australia - to yet new waves of colonisation - by Chinese and Indian agricultural corporations this time - which are taking over remaining tribal land and 'remanaging' it. We hear so little of this.) [2]

Resettlement of the indigenous in special areas, where they were put to work, was practised by the Romans and the approach is the same today. Move the indigenous, get rid of their leaders, disorganise them, and make them work in the new economy. The business excuse (typically used against the Arabs by the British who displaced them for the Zionist diaspora) is that the people being displaced don't use the land efficiently, because they don't mine it or farm it. Or, if they do mine and farm it, they don't do it efficiently enough. Or if they do it efficiently, they aren't putting their goods on the international open market, and they have to be made to do so. Mess up a country badly enough and soon you can go in and save the starving and place a military presence there to protect your international charities. Coincidentally the country next door usually turns out to have oil or rare minerals or presents a corridor to oil and rare minerals (Somalia).

Avatar is a story about this process in the future, reaching out now into outer space.

In 3D it is absolutely rivetting, and I found myself ducking when missiles came towards me.

The story

The third world has now extended beyond our solar system as the US mercantile spacefleet tries to keep shareholders happy. This involves negotiating the rape of an incredibly beautiful planet with indigenous people who, like most indigenous people, have everything they want and need and don't want colonisation.

"We don't have anything to offer them," says the hero.
"Just go in and negotiate," he is told.

One author in candobetter pages was struck by the plausible ruthlessness of the conquerers in discussing moving the blue native people on. They agreed with one another in such a "civilised" way. To them - the blue people were just an obstacle to the main game...and one instantly saw that this is how forest people and forest animals are regarded by invaders on Earth- something to be brushed aside or bulldozed.

Another candobetter writer said, "This seems to be what they are doing in Queensland to the ordinary Australians in order to go ahead mining coal in agricultural country."

The armed conflict in the pursuit of greed motif in the film is also reminiscent of the US war on Iraq.

This is a planet filled with fabulous rainforest, not really much different from real old rainforest in Australia, but a bit bigger. The creatures in it are huge, of triceratops size, and the flying animals are reminiscent of pterodactyls. The muscle and organ structure of the animals makes it obvious that they are of a different world.

Every species in this world is connected, as indeed are we on this world, but the phenomenon is more obvious here because different species can physically connect to communicate. The ecology of the world is explained using mystical and religious icons, which stand in quite well for a kind of biological ecology.

It was a psychologically clever thing to make the indigenous people so much taller than the humans. Usually the indigenous people, however patronised in movies, are the same size as us or smaller. To get the superiority of these peoples' ability to live within a naturally integrated environment, instead of one like ours, which is disconnected, you need something to convince the audience immediately. Big is usually read as better and these are very large, therefore superior people, with enormous eyes, which convey intelligence. Whilst incredibly gracile, like the Hereros of Namibia, with somewhat similar hairstyles without the red mud, these people are immensely strong and agile. They use the huge tree trunks as paths for running. They are open to the signs of the environment around them and the expression of all the other living things. This is obviously how hunter-gatherers used to live. The way they would have enjoyed life and the knowledge they would have had in the best of societies and environments is well-conveyed here.

And surely the obese children, teenagers and their parents, who go to see this film will wonder at the strength and fitness of the forest people and want to be more like them.

Technology has solved no social or ecological problems

Although set well into the future, we see that more technology has solved nothing fundamental.
Neither has growth economics and globalism.
The US system still has unaffordable health-care and the crippled marine hero in Avatar cannot afford the medical treatment he needs, even though the technology to make him walk again is available. He also needs a job and is expected to perform as well and work as hard as a person with no handicap.
Presumably the population has continued to grow on earth because there are so many marines available to go to outerspace, who need jobs, and are willing to risk their lives.

Instead of sharing the wealth we find that money is still being spent to keep some shareholders happy. And industry must find new minerals to invest in to keep on growing that bottom line.

The machines look as if they are still being powered by petroleum, so the fossil fuel problem must have been solved, although this is not discussed. In fact humans are never going to go to outer space en masse unless they find something completely new to power their vehicles. (This isn't discussed either, obviously.)

War

It looks like a high-tech oil-war like the one in Iraq is still going, but it has moved into outer space, seeking to expand its influence in the pursuit of materials and energy. Although we only hear what goes on in the colony, one assumes that the folk back on earth are told that this is all to bring democracy and wealth to the undeveloped worlds out there.

The audience

I was interested to observe the faces of the people who live in Melbourne where I saw this film. A lot looked shocked, unused to questioning the whole notion of progress, yet almost certainly emerging from close to three hours of intense identification with a hunter-gatherer tribe, hoping that Earth's progress would be halted.

I hoped that the many people who see this film will actually retain something useful to help them resist the media and government propaganda that are used to destroy forests and people and to grind the rest of us exceedingly small in a vast commercial con-job.

Of course, with every new exploitation, we are always told, "Now we are modern, it will be different."

Great film!

NOTES

[1] On foreign aid, Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1997 ; Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, Atlantic Press, 1989
[2] Recolonisation of Africa by China and India: See, for instance: "China and India Battle for Influence in Africa: Part 4" (although this one lets India off lightly); Exploiting Africa [history]. You can also find multiple business and foreign aid articles saying how great it is that foreigners are renting vast terrains in Africa and employing the villagers who once managed them. You have to look quite long and hard to find out that most of the Africans initially resist this loss of power over their own territory. If Africa is to feed China and India, it will be sucked totally dry, but, hey! there will be a few jobs along the line.